There Can Be No Right To Do What Is Wrong But Our Liberal Democracy Says There Is

THE ASSERTION THAT there was a "right to lie" which I noticed was being talked about by even liberal lawyers late last year has been a key that I believe unlocks one of the origins of what has put democracy in such danger.  In the case of the form of so-called democracy that most people fret about when they bemoan the collapse of democracy in the past decade or so, it is the inferior "liberal democracy" which has such nonsense as a "right to lie" embedded in it.  Such a "democracy" in which there are all kinds of misnamed privileges, for certain people, mostly those with money, well-off families, resources and, so, under such "liberal democracy," power to do bad things are called "rights" corruption accumulates, as under our so-called democracy and, when those surpass a limit under which civil government might prevail over corruption, we get a Trump or a government such as has had control of Britain for the past few decades or which has had control of the Israeli government for, now, most of that state's existence.  Various, so-called "liberal democracies" have various timelines of such corruption but I believe all of them have inherent corruptions that will always decay their institutions, laws and societies.

In each case the problem lies in legal and constitutional orders which, likely on purpose, confuse meanings so as to make evils into ersatz virtues, a right to speak which doesn't state that such a right doesn't include a right to lie and slander, to con and cheat is the first one.  The virtue that comes from being able to say whatever you want to say is when what is said is true.  The first time I ever got into this someone brought up the hypothetical of lying to Nazis about hidden Jews in which things are so degraded by lies that it turns lying to Nazis into a virtue.  But it was lies freely by Nazis and their allies that brought things to that state.  The fact is that that hypothetical doesn't do what those who want to protect "a right to lie" wants it to because it was those lies freely told that put the Jews in danger to start with, it only serves to prove the danger of allowing such lies.  Our First Amendment is stupidly written to not make that distinction a part of our laws, no doubt such protected lies under "free speech" served the purposes of our indigenous fascists well, the white supremacists when they lied about Native Americans and Black People.  It served the allied branch of that in 19th century WASP "nativism" when they lied about other minority groups, it served their later developed form, the eugenicists when they lied about Jews and other would-be immigrants fleeing Nazism and it served those who heard the lies of Lou Dobbs regarding Latinos, something that did so much to bring us to Trumpian fascist ascendancy and the danger we face right now.

Yet our First Amendment, set in stone by the First Congress under the reluctant fatherhood of James Madison, and the idiotic idolatry of it prevents any kind of remedy to make such lies even punishable by civil law.  Republican-fascists, overt white supremacists AND THE CIVIL LIBERTIES ESTABLISHMENT OFTEN STUPIDLY DEPUTED TO BE "LIBERAL" really hate hate-speech laws and fascists on courts will prevent any disruption of the tsunami of hate speech which has swept over the country in the freest of free media in history.  


But the inadequacies of the First Amendment don't stop there.  A right to assemble doesn't include a right to form a lynch mob or an insurrection against the winner of the presidential election.  A right to freedom of religious belief and, worst of all, for the "freedom of the press" that assigns "rights" to corporate entities which cannot have rights because those only inhere to living beings.  In the case of the United States with its horrifically badly written Bill or Rights, the Second Amendment only being the most obvious of those dangerous and badly written abbreviations, those have given corrupt and merely short-sighted Supreme Courts to bend the meaning of the Constitution into weapons to use against rights and freedoms.

One of the worst things about the United States Constitution is that it does not specifically define rights as being held equally by all People living in the country and require that Courts apply the laws on an equal basis.  Under the lie of "equal justice under law" those with the most money to hire corrupt lawyers will always have a disadvantage under the rules constructed by courts.  Unless that inequality is leveled out of practice, the rich and powerful will always get away with crimes such as Trump still does.  Judges and "justices" are not only in the habit of deferring to the rich, the white, the male, the powerful, etc. their culture considers that a virtue in most cases.  All of this was rather obviously done on purpose because such People as Native Americans, Black People held in slavery, Women, white men without property were intended by the framers of the Constitution to be excluded from what would have been real equality.  The history of the United States, everything from the Jeffersonian Revolution of 1800, the "Jackson revolution" (which served to empower white men to the exclusion of others), the great abolitionist movement, the movement for Women's suffrage, the struggle for the rights of workers, various other movements demanding equality and fairness for other minority groups and those held in wage and debt slavery is a history of struggle AGAINST THE CONSTITUTION AND THE LEGAL AND CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER AS THAT WAS ORIGINALLY DESIGNED.   That is why today's Republican-fascists on the Corrupt Court, in lower courts, in congresses and legislatures, holding executive positions on the federal and state levels are so hot for the "originalist" or "textualist" assertions about that document, because it is a dangerously anti-egalitarian thing as it was originally written.  One of the things that has become obvious during the corruptions of the Rehnquist and, even more so, the Roberts Court is that as long as that thing has the same language in it as it does now, the thing is a danger to whatever progress all those groups listed above and anyone else seeking equality and fairness have bought with their struggle, bloodshed and lives.  

The "originalist-testualist" reading of the Constitution has been an ongoing insurrection conducted by the well manicured, black-robed product of elite law schools for the past several decades.  The insurectionary act of the Rehnquist Court in Bush v Gore led directly to the Court today which has enabled Republican-fascist vote suppression and gerrymandering and rigging in order to overturn those rights previously gained and to thwart every future attempt to turn our corrupt system into a real democracy, an egalitarian democracy.  

I strongly suspect that any democracy will only be one AND REMAIN ONE for the extent to which real equality WITHOUT PRIVILEGES FOR THE RICH, THE WHITE, THE MALE, THE STRAIGHT, ETC. and their families is the real law of the land.  Those descriptions will need to be amended for the particular circumstances in other places and countries.

One of the problems for achieving real democracy, egalitarian democracy is that one thing embedded into our and most modern Constitutions is incompatible with egalitarian democracy, the amorality of modern legalese and academic babblage.  REAL DEMOCRACY IS A PRODUCT OF MORALITY OF A SPECIFIC KIND.*  It is a product of fulfilled responsibilities of individuals and groups of individuals to other people, to other living beings, to the environment.  Any "liberty" any freedom that is exercised under a democracy has to be limited by the rights of others, at all times.  While those items of moral action may be inconveniently large to fit into a constitution, that's the truth of the matter.  If the slave-holding framers had been serious in their claims of what they were constructing, they'd have had to give up holding People in slavery.  The land speculator-genocidalists among them would have had to give up murdering, expelling and stealing the land of Native Americans.  Those who made money off of the labor of others would have had to treat their workers not only "fairly" but well, cutting into their profits.  Men would have had to treat Women as equals.   Education would have had to be made universal and of equal quality, etc.  

That short essay "What Is Liberty" from Thomas Merton posted here the other day begins rather starkly by setting "the lowest limit of freedom, and the only thing that is free about it is the fact that we can still choose good."

He said, "To the extent that you are free to choose evil, you are not free.  An evil choice destroys freedom."  

Merton was concentrating on what freedom and liberty meant to an individual who might choose good or evil, but there is one thing that is certain, someone privileged and permitted to choose evil will seriously damage, not only the liberty or freedom of others, but considerably more than that.  There is no such a thing as a permitted choice to do evil which does not injure or destroy others.  Yet our legal system under the Constitution lets those with money, many lawyers, and privileges do that every single day.  Donald Trump's history of cheating and stealing, conning and duping, even before he started into politics is a history of courts and judges and "justices" allowing him to do that and his fully licensed lawyers held it to be their job to make sure that he not only got away with it, they instructed him in the ways to manipulate the courts into doing what he wanted to do, to cheat, steal, etc.  It's no wonder that he said what he did on the infamous Access Hollywood tape, he had every reason to believe he could get away with sexual assault because the got away with everything.   And it wasn't only the legal profession and the courts who let him get away with it, the "free press" was in on that act too, enhancing his con game thousands of times more than the best door-to-door or street corner con man ever could have.  The free press in the wake of his disastrous regime AND HIS INSURRECTION AND ELECTION STEALING ATTEMPT IS HELPING HIM EVERY WAY INTO GETTING ANOTHER CHANCE TO DO IT AGAIN.

The United States Constitution, the most worshiped and idolized part of it, the Bill of Rights has failed because it has been the vehicle for doing far worse than the words in it specify through Supreme Court rulings and other rulings and the legal and cultural code and lore and culture surrounding it and the results are that not only is liberal democracy in (entirely predicable) trouble, but the very claims of what they were doing when they framed the document is being overturned.  This is not a "more perfect union" it does not produce any of the "blessings" that they claimed their Constitutional order would produce, in the fullness of time it produced the Confederacy, the Civil War, the Jim Crow period of terror enforced de facto slavery, it produced the bodily subjugation of Women, it produced a Supreme Court that stole an election for a member of the party of a simple majority of its members* in 2000 and was packed with lawyers who worked on that election stealing scheme,  it produced Donald Trump.  Remember that the next time you hear someone talking about how the founders or framers would be appalled if they knew that the country would ever get a president like Donald Trump.  One wonders the extent to which, if they could have foreseen that, what items of that privilege embedded into the Constitution they'd have given up to prevent that.

I think it's well past time for us to care about, never mind speculate as to what those long, long, long dead men would have thought about any of it.  They're dead, the dead don't have rights here and now, the living do.  We have to make a choice to change things if there's to be anything like even a "liberal democracy" in the future.  I'd be all in favor of making that attempt to come up with a constitution that takes into account the entire range of experience in the centuries of life under that thing, that is I'd be in favor of it if the results were an egalitarian democracy.  One of the great lessons of this particular hour is that mere liberal democracy doesn't cut it, it's not safe, it's too liable to ratfucking and undermining and sabotaging and insurrection BECAUSE IT IS NOT BASED IN THE BASIC MORALITY THAT IS THE VERY SUBSTANCE OF EQUALITY.   It is not based in moral obligations as a condition to the exercising of liberty, the possession of freedom.  Liberty to do what?  Freedom to do what?  Those can't exist as free-floating abstractions like Euclidean figures that can be moved anywhere, they are embedded in real life and pretending they aren't is one of the main stupidities in our law and our legal system.  

*  That the five Republicans who were in the majority in Bush v Gore put the son of a powerful, rich, aristocratic white family into the presidency which his father had held, on the basis of political ratfucking of the Florida election under Jeb Bush, overturning the decision of the Florida Supreme Court to count all of the ballots cast was the successful Republican-fascist insurrection against the Constitution.  And the "free press" went along with it.  That the Trump insurrection twenty years later happened is directly a result of what had been building in Republican politics and actions and Supreme Court rulings for years.   I have absolutely no doubt that the Republicans on that Court, in their gun rulings, had just such a possibility of a Republican-fascist insurrection if not a civil war, this time the white supremacists winning it, in mind.  With the talk by Republican-fascist politicians of "Second Amendment remedies" for them losing elections is them just saying the quiet part out loud.   The oligarchs who met at Trump's golf bordello a while back shows the big money is all in for overt fascism in the United States.  Don't expect the courts and the lawyers to save us from it, they'll be all in, too.

* While I think the lauded and fabled Athenian "democracy" was the original inadequate and bad kind of oligarchic "democracy,"  I think the attack on religious symbols that was the first stage of the putsch of the aristocrats against it may be related to the fact that morality is the foundation of any real democracy.  You can't get the ideas and thoughts and feelings necessary for democracy from abstract rationality or math or science, it is certainly not something that is found in any notions of biological science as that stands now - Darwinism is, as Haeckel claimed with Darwin's assent, aristocratic, not democratic.  Clearly not even all Christianity will maintain the ideas of equality and charity and justice to maintain democracy as can be seen in the popularity of fascism among the "white evangelicals" and "traditional Catholics" as well as indifferent and nominal "Christians" not under those.  Such "Christianity" has no use for the Gospel and only for some of the most dubious parts of The Law.  Thus you get "Christian nationalists" who, copying those in Germany who wanted Christianity to be compatible with Nazism, reject Jesus, Paul, etc. as they are in Scripture.  I am fully convinced that modern democracy, certainly in its egalitarian aspirations, is directly attributable to the Jewish-Christian Law and Gospel.  Certainly in the Americas and Europe that's the case.  Though I think it's possible to derive them from other religious traditions, that hasn't been the case in any instance I've seen.

Rich Man Gets Away With Murder And Sun Rose Without Incident - Someone Wanted To Get Into OJ With Me

 I have no interest in giving O.J. Simpson another second of my thinking life.   Well, other than to say that Judge Ito was a real prelude to the problems with the American judiciary and legal system and the various lawyers being a good introduction to the corruption and incompetence in the lawyering profession in which you make the most money by serving the interests of those with the most money.  

When Ito delayed announcing the verdict overnight, all I could think is that he a. wanted to get more attention by ramping up the drama and, b. wanted to drive the world crazy one last time after he let the trial turn into a long playing circus.  

The theory that O.J. Simpson got away with it because the corrupt LA police tried to frame a guilty man made the most sense to me at the time.

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Eugene O'Neill - The Emperor Jones and Where The Cross Is Made

Emperor Jones - Where The Cross Is Made 

 

The Theatre Guild On The Air
ABC - November 11, 1945

I assume this adaptation was made with O'Neill's permission maybe with his participation, he was at the height of his abilities as a writer when it was made, his best work came last.   These aren't the only O'Neill plays presented on the radio by The Theater Guild Of The Air. 

Where The Cross Is Made is one of those one-acts that I said would make a good focus for audio theater adaptations.  Apparently someone else had that idea a long time before I did.  I knew nothing about the play before finding this video.   It's clear that when it was first presented O'Neill was very involved with the production.

Here's an interesting account of the first production from the Province Town Playhouse. 

The adaptation of The Emperor Jones removed the original use of the "N" word, which was an issue with the various actors who played the title role from the first production.    I haven't studied the background of the play to see the extent to which O'Neill confirmed the claims that it was conceived as a criticism of imperialism in the tragic history of Haiti or if the flight through the rain forest was really inspired by O'Neill's experience in Central America.   I'd prefer to have posted the other play without this one with all it's problems.  Though the adaptation is more effective than the movie they made of it in the 1930s, the only production of it I ever saw. 

Considering the place that madness and delusions play in both plays it's rather natural that they'd have been produced together.  

Perhaps the most stunning feature of the recording is the message from the United States Steel Corporation president in which he boasts about the companies good labor relations.  That as well as them broadcasting O'Neill shows that it was a much different world.   I can't imagine a corporation doing anything like this now. 

Given All The Atheists Snarking About The Higgs Boson

with the announced death of Peter Higgs,  I think it's time to take a look at how the actual man was far less of a a bigoted atheist fundamentalist than the sci-rangers of the comment threads:

As public disagreements go, few can have boasted such heavy-hitting antagonists.

On one side is Richard Dawkins, the celebrated biologist who has made a second career demonstrating his epic disdain for religion. On the other is the theoretical physicist Peter Higgs, who this year became a shoo-in for a future Nobel prize after scientists at Cern in Geneva showed that his theory about how fundamental particles get their mass was correct.

Their argument is over nothing less than the coexistence of religion and science.

Higgs has chosen to cap his remarkable 2012 with another bang by criticising the "fundamentalist" approach taken by Dawkins in dealing with religious believers.

"What Dawkins does too often is to concentrate his attack on fundamentalists. But there are many believers who are just not fundamentalists," Higgs said in an interview with the Spanish newspaper El Mundo. "Fundamentalism is another problem. I mean, Dawkins in a way is almost a fundamentalist himself, of another kind."

He agreed with some of Dawkins' thoughts on the unfortunate consequences that have resulted from religious belief, but he was unhappy with the evolutionary biologist's approach to dealing with believers and said he agreed with those who found Dawkins' approach "embarrassing".

While I'd bet that Higgs didn't have the most nuanced view of unfortunate consequences from religious belief (you'd need an itemized list to judge the validity of that) he was hardly the jerk that those posing as his fan boys and gals can be. 

In the El Mundo interview, Higgs argued that although he was not a believer, he thought science and religion were not incompatible. "The growth of our understanding of the world through science weakens some of the motivation which makes people believers. But that's not the same thing as saying they're incompatible. It's just that I think some of the traditional reasons for belief, going back thousands of years, are rather undermined.

"But that doesn't end the whole thing. Anybody who is a convinced but not a dogmatic believer can continue to hold his belief. It means I think you have to be rather more careful about the whole debate between science and religion than some people have been in the past."

He said a lot of scientists in his field were religious believers. "I don't happen to be one myself, but maybe that's just more a matter of my family background than that there's any fundamental difficulty about reconciling the two."

Didn't Hear This Until

after I wrote some of my recent criticism of current academia.   I've got some disagreements with Sabine Hossenfelder about some things outside of her topic, but I have great respect for her.   What she says about the racket of academia could be said in many fields other than high-end physics, these days.

I'm Old Enough To Remember When People Wanted To Get Out Of 7th Grade

An article by Robert Ellesberg on the late Bishop Thomas Gumbleton reminds me of the now long lost time when the majority of the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops weren't dominated by JPII and Benedict XVI careerist right-wing hacks.

I first met Bishop Gumbleton in the late 1970s. I was the managing editor of the Catholic Worker and Bishop Gumbleton had invited me to Detroit to speak at a conference on peace. My assigned topic was "Youth and the Arms Race." For the first and last time in my life, I found myself the designated voice of my generation.

I don't remember what I said — I'm sure it was not very memorable. But what I remember was Bishop Gumbleton's humility and kindness, his deep commitment to peace, and his evidently genuine interest in listening to what this "youth" had to say.

I was not raised in the Catholic Church. My introduction to Catholicism at that point was largely by way of Dorothy Day and Daniel Berrigan. And, so, I assumed that Bishop Gumbleton was a pretty typical bishop! I had a lot to learn.

My confidence in Bishop Gumbleton and his fellow U.S. bishops was soon confirmed by their work on "The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response," the historic 1983 pastoral letter on nuclear war, which for a short time encouraged speculation that the Catholic Church was on its way to being a "peace church." But, before long, that high-water mark of Catholic social teaching in this country was relegated to the past. The arms race continued unimpeded; the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists continued to tick closer to midnight.

Some of you knew my father, Daniel Ellsberg, who died in June 2023. He was greatly inspired by the peace pastoral, which he studied carefully — acknowledging its limitations, yet encouraged by hope that this would mark a start rather than an endpoint of the discussion.

Just a few years ago he asked me, "What are the odds that the bishops today could once again take up the question of nuclear war?" I said: zero. But that's a long story. 

The story of the long anti-pastoral papacies of those two most unfortunate Popes since the Second World War.  and what Richard McBrien used to regret as their generally mediocre appointments.  We still live with that

This passage gives me a lot to think about.

Yesterday, I was giving a talk about Dorothy Day and someone asked if I agreed with all her positions, all her choices. I said probably not. But I said the striking thing about Dorothy was not that she was necessarily correct in every choice or decision — she was not endowed with infallibility! But with every decision she examined her conscience, and she was guided by what she thought was right, what she believed was the way of Jesus, and there was no daylight between what she said, what she believed, and the way she lived. I believe the same is true of Bishop Gumbleton.

That is not to say he has always been right. If that were true, it would mean he was incapable of growth or conversion, and what is clear is that Bishop Gumbleton's whole life has been a long story of conversion, of always striving to go deeper in the call to be faithful.

The idea that you have to agree with everything someone says, that they have to always be right is one of the stupidest things proving that somewhere along the way adulthood in the modern world turned to jr. high.   Where it is still stuck.  

The Snobbery Of Credentialed Ignorance

HAVING BEEN TROLLED several times recently on the allegation that I've failed to write in "vernacular English" and -as you no doubt have guessed -  Simps having not taken up my advice to look up the actual meaning of the word, I figured I'd have a little fun with that feature of current vernacular English among the college-credentialed and consider why that particular phrase is so generally misused and why its misuse is a good example of what the problem with vernacular English can be if something like accuracy is your goal.

The dictionary use of the word as an adjective, according to Merriam Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, the 1977 edition that I have on hand defines it

1 vernacular 1a: using a language or dialect native to a region or country rather than a literary, cultured or foreign language b: of, relating to, or being a nonstandard or substandard language or dialect of a place, region, or country c: of, relating to, or being the normal spoken form of a language.
2: applied to a plant or animal in the common native speech as distinguished from the Latin nomenclature of scientific classification 3: of, relating to, or characteristic of a period, place or group; esp. of, relating to or being the common building style of a period or place.

My guess would be that easily nine out of ten times you'll hear the phrase "vernacular English" the adjective doesn't mean any of those meanings.  It's commonly used among the ignorant as a general signifier of virtue in the way that someone talks or writes when that's not the meaning of the word at all.  As I said to the Simp who acts as my tireless meter maid of language (he's got a rather sick fantasy life), there's no law that says you have to write in the vernacular and that there's no virtue in it unless you're trying to imitate vernacular speech.  I do, at times, do that but it's not the way I typically write seeing no virtue in it when vernacular English doesn't fit the topic or what I need to say about it.  

What's really funny about the current misuse of the term is that it copies the kind of language snobbery that I've got a feeling the phrase "vernacular English" would have expressed c. 1914 when used by the kind of People who knew what the adjective meant.  Only it wasn't considered a compliment to vernacular English users. 

What's so funny about using the vernacular as if it is some kind of sign of virtue in language use is that, as the way "vernacular English" is generally used, what it proves is that the user hasn't got more than a vague notion of what the adjective means.  It's a sign of what the 18th-19th century British radical William Cobbett said about giving out educational credentials to those who aren't really educated, it produces little more than snobbery, that is when it doesn't produce a snob who's too proud and vain to do anything that's actually productive.  There was a lot of that in the boom times for colleges in the early post-WWII period when they put too many people unprepared for college through it to get the money from they paying customers and didn't ask much of them.  I don't see much evidence that things are any better now when the price of a college education, or, in too many cases, credentialing is absurdly high.  It's come with an insane level of demanding college-credentials for way too many jobs that a. don't need that and b. the pay for which doesn't justify the expense and life-long debt of getting a rag with your name on it.  Among the most obvious of those is the idiotic "press" these days, filled with pretentious idiots and liars and dolts.  The kind of dolts who will hear someone say "that's hardly 'vernacular English'" and only take that it's a put down so "vernacular English" must be better than whatever's being put down.  There's nothing wrong with vernacular English at times but there's nothing wrong with other modes of speaking and writing English at other times.  It depends on what you're saying and what's a more effective way to say it.   And how you friggin' want to say it. 

Since those in control of the U. S. media are just such over-credentialed dolts who don't do much reading apart from fiction and gossipy scandal - and most of them only really watched the movie or show - an idiot can get away with that level of misuse of the language for an entire career without anyone much noticing.  Eventually that distorted use might become standard and find its way into a good dictionary but that's not what the word means now.  Alas, then we'll need a word to mean what it does now if you want that meaning to be clear.

I'm Sure Trump Can Get

 as fair a trial in NYC as the Central Park Five did, only he was in favor of railroading and killing them in the city he incited to find them guilty.   Have any ads calling for that appeared in the New York Times?  You know, like the one he paid for to be printed in that stinking rag.

An Evil Choice Destroys Freedom

AMERICANS TALK A HELL OF A LOT about freedom and liberty but so little thought goes into what they mean by those words that they have come to mean absolutely nothing most of the time they are mouthed or typed. When an American fascist, a white supremacist or their ilk use those words it's clear that the entire notion of them has reached the absolute nadir of decadent corruption.  The lousy cause of preserving slavery in the United States was dishonestly, immorally and irrationally presented in terms of freedom for the white enslavers even as it insisted on the totalitarian oppression and violent control of Black People.  That was the motive for the corrupt Taney Court in lying that the Constitution as written excluded Black People from those held to have rights and freedom under it in order for that corrupt slave owner and his fellow slave-holding "justices" to maintain the source of their personal wealth.  In doing that they joined a long line of such "justices" including, as I will never stop pointing out, the most august of them all, the corrupt John Marshall.  Courts and police and the culture right up to now considers that men should be free to practice a full range of harms against Women, LGBTQ+ People, the Corrupt (Roberts) Court is all-in on destroying any slight steps, an tendencies that the Congress or others have made to restrict that obscene kind of "freedom" which constitutes the most traditional holders of that kind of freedom, straight,white, males, especially those with wealth.  The most depraved members of that court, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, clearly have that as their goal.  

On the other hand, the scientistic-academic babble about it, often as not, declares that the idea free-will is nonsense because that has become so absolutely wedded to the monism that everything that is real is a result of material causation, the movements of objects and molecules, atoms and subatomic particles under the operation of randomness.  That is even though there has been absolutely no demonstration that their ideological framing of reality is, actually, real.  I have posed the problem for that assertion a number of times that if there is such a thing as free will or, so ironic in the context of the argument, free thought that it couldn't be under that ideologically asserted restriction because it would be something apart from their scheme of material causation and have qualities that physical objects are not known to have.  

So, it's clear that the old notions of freedom and liberty are in deep trouble.  I think one of the greatest defects in how Americans, and so many others around the world, think about freedom is that they consider it both an absurdly abstract entity, having no relation to the fullness of real life, or something so particular that is applies to any desired and ephemeral aspect of what the user wants at any given time.  That is the spoiled brat of a kid concept of freedom and liberty, such as reaches decaying senectitude in Donald Trump and as can be seen in comment treads, tweets, etc. online.  

I think it's essential to rethink, really think for the first time in most cases, exactly what freedom, what liberty means and why, when it is asserted to exist only as the right of a few or a large minority against Black People, Native Americans, Women, LGBTQ+ the industrialist and investor class against workers, etc. AS THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION DID AS THE FRAMERS WROTE IT AND AS IT HAS EXISTED FOR MOST OF ITS EXISTENCE, a situation that certainly isn't unique in so-called democracies and certainly of all of the overt gangster governments in the world today, such "freedom" and the liberties that actually exist under those conditions are held to be a good instead of the very source of evils.

I hold that equality, not "liberty" or even "freedom" is the actual bedrock value of any real democracy as that word denotes something to be sought and desired, the only really legitimate government being such an egalitarian democracy.  All other kinds of government, from "liberal democracy" to the worst regimes in history, under Hitler or Stalin or Mao or Pol Pot or the Kim clique are degrees of government by gangster law.  I hold that the liberal democracy of the United States is one such government that, to the extent it is not equal and equally free it is not legitimate.  Legitimate government exists as a goal to be constantly sought and constantly struggled for and, against the irrational stupidity of the First Amendment, protected from all anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic ideologies, forces, parties and movements.  It is the hugest of stupidities in the U.S. Constitution that it is not laid out as the fundamental principal right of Americans to live securely under an egalitarian democracy and that the government, FOREMOST OF ALL THE COURTS, HAVE AN OBLIGATION TO PROTECT EQUALITY AND DEMOCRACY and that to the extent they do not do that they have forfeited any claim to legitimacy that they may wish to assert.  The Supreme Court, the Corrupt Court, has been the least interested in protecting equality of all the branches, as bad as many presidents and Congresses have been, the Courts are the worst.  Which isn't a surprise because as constituted by the acts organizing the courts, they have been made the most remote from the reality of the actual lives of Americans, staffed by a profession which is best paid when it is working to protect the privileges and corruptly asserted "rights" of the wealthiest and most powerful.  

I have decided to type out and post the entire short essay by Thomas Merton from New Seeds of Contemplation on this topic, not because I am entirely comfortable with everything he says in it - the section that starts "You fool!" is a little too pre-Vatican II for my taste, though it sounds better if you read that "You dope!" and I'm sure there will be lots in it that many will object to on the basis of religion.  But I think it forces the question of exactly what's good about People having the "liberty" to do evil and damaging and harmful things to other People and animals and the land and to the entire biosphere?   It's certainly possible to have legitimate freedoms or "liberty," if you insist that is consistent with the equal good of all on the principle that "freedom and liberty" that harms others is not legitimate freedom.  Though the Framers of the U.S. Constitution knew very well they had no such intentions because they intended to have slaves, to murder Native Americans and steal their land, to hoard political power to their class against the interests of those who were unpropertied and they certainly had no intention of allowing Women to have equality, and so they wrote the Constitution against any possibility of anything like egalitarian democracy.  The fake reverence for that document, including the extremely dangerous and flawed First and Second Amendments is a major impediment to changing it and achieving even the possibility of egalitarian democracy on the basis of legitimate and equal representation in the government.  The matter of cleaning up the courts would require a total reworking of the court organization acts but it might, actually, be easier to do a lot towards cleaning up that cesspool.  Consider this a first strike in that effort.

Let me know if there are any typos, I had to rush this one. I have bolded a few lines that I think are especially worth considering. [Update: what I did to bold the bolded sections worked on one browser but not on another.  I've underlined those.]


What Is Liberty?

The mere ability to choose between good and evil is the lowest limit of freedom, and the only thing that is free about that is the fact that we can still choose good.

To the extent that you are free to choose evil, you are not free.  An evil choice destroys freedom.

We can never choose evil as evil; only as an apparent good.  But when we decide to do something that seems to us to be good when it is not really so, we are doing something that we do not really want to do, and therefore we are not really free.

Perfect spiritual freedom is a total inability to make any evil choice.  When everything you desire is truly good and every choice not only aspires to that good but attains it, then you are free because you do everything that you want, every act of your will ends in perfect fulfillment.

Freedom therefore does not consist in an equal balance between good and evil choices but in the perfect love and acceptance of what is really good and the perfect hatred and rejection of what is evil, so that everything you do is good and makes you happy, and you refuse and deny and ignore every possibility that might lead to unhappiness and self-deception and grief.  Only the man who has rejected all evil so completely that he is unable to desire it at all, is truly free.  

God, in Whom there is absolutely no shadow or possibility of evil or of sin, is infinitely free.  In fact, He is Freedom.

Only the will of God is indefectible.  Every other freedom can fail and defeat itself by a false choice.  All true freedom comes as a supernatural gift of God, as a participation in His own essential Freedom by the Love He infuses into our souls, uniting them with Him first in perfect consent, then in a transforming union of wills. 

I will break in here and point out that every scheme of freedom that human beings come up with will be defective so that any law "granting liberty" is bound to be flawed, especially under the scheming and manipulation of lawyers and judges and, worst of all "justices."   Encoding those humanly imperfect schemes in permanent form are only safe in so far as those can effectively be changed under the influence of honest appraisal and good will.  Good will is absent in American politics to a serious extent.

The other freedom, the so-called freedom of our nature, which is indifference with respect to good and evil choices, is nothing more than a capacity, a potentiality waiting to be fulfilled by the grace, the will and the supernatural love of God.

All good, all perfection, all happiness, are found in the infinitely good and perfect and blessed will of God.  Since true freedom means the ability to desire and choose, always, without error, without defection, what is really good, then freedom can only be found in perfect union and submission to the will of God.  If our will travels with His, it will reach the same end, rest in the same peace, and be filled with the same infinite happiness that is HIs.

Therefore, the simplest definition of freedom is this; it means the ability to do the will of God.  To be able to resist His will is not to be free.  In sin there is no true freedom.

Surrounding sin there is certain goods - in sins of the flesh there are, for instance, pleasure of the flesh.  But it is not these pleasures that are evil.  They are good, and they are willed by God and even when someone takes those pleasures in a way that is not God's will, God still wills that those pleasures should be felt.  But though the pleasures in themselves are good, the direction of the will to them under circumstances that are against the will of God, become evil.  And because that direction of the will is evil it cannot reach the mark which the will intends.  Therefore it defeats itself.  And therefore there is ultimately no happiness in any act of sin.

You fool!  You have really done what you did not want to do!  God has left you with the pleasure, because the pleasure also was His will;  but you have neglected the happiness He wanted to give you along with the pleasure, or perhaps the greater happiness He intended for you without the pleasure and beyond it and above it!  You have eaten the rind and thrown away the orange.  You have kept the paper that was nothing but a wrapping and you have thrown away the case and the ring and the diamond.

And now that the pleasure - which has to end - is finished, you have nothing of the happiness that would have enriched you forever.  If you had taken (or forsaken) the pleasure in the way God willed for the sake of your happiness, you would still possess the pleasure in your happiness, and it would be with you always and follow you everywhere in God's will.  For it is impossible for the sane man to seriously regret an act that was consciously performed in union with God's will.

Liberty, then, is a talent given us by God, an instrument to work with.  It is the tool with which we build our own lives, our own happiness.  Our true liberty is something we must never sacrifice, for if we sacrifice it we renounce God Himself.  Only the false spontaneity of caprice, the pseudo liberty of sin is to be sacrificed.  Our true liberty is something we must never sacrifice, for if we sacrifice it we renounce God Himself.  Only the false spontaneity of caprice, the pseudo liberty of sin is to be sacrificed.  Our true liberty must be defended with life itself for it's the most precious element in our being.  It is our liberty that makes us Persons, constituted in the divine image.  The supernatural society of the Church has, as one of its chief functions, the preservation of our spiritual liberty as sons of God.  How few people realize this!  

As I said, it's pre-Vatican II (1961) the later Merton probably wouldn't have said some of the same things the same way but it's the ideas that are important.

Don't Get Around Much Anymore - Eugene O'Neill - Abortion

 

 

The Eugene O'Neill Foundation, Tao House, presents a videotaped script-in-hand performance of "Abortion" by Eugene O'Neill. This production was recorded in the Old Barn at Tao House (Eugene O'Neill National Historic Site), in Danville, CA in August 2020.

I'd known that Eugene O'Neill had written a number of one act plays but the only one I ever saw a production of or read was the wonderful play Hughie.  I happened on this semi-staged production of the 1914 play "Abortion" which is about the son of a wealthy family having borrowed money from his father to pay for an abortion when his townie girlfriend became pregnant.  I'd expect that O'Neill realized that one of the unmentioned issues of the play was that the consequences are presented from the point of view of three men, the working class girl he impregnated and who had an abortion isn't much considered at all.  

The text of the play sounds kind of odd because few contractions are used,  it sounds like the kind of English that we were taught to use in grammar school sixty or more years ago.  If they took the liberty of updating that kind of thing it would sound a lot easier to modern ears without doing any damage to the intentions of O'Neill.  I was surprised at how good it was, considering it is part of an apparent project to do productions of the "forgotten" plays of O'Neill.  The more I become familiar with his work the more impressed I am with how good he was.   I'd like to see a really updated play on the theme that presented it from the point of view of Women.  

I think I'll try to post more of these, they'd be a good project for an audio theater group to do, they're pretty much all in public domain, now.  Apart from Hughie which is said to have been O'Neill's attempt to present a more upbeat play after the hauntingly gloomy The Iceman Cometh.  

Thoughts On First Monday After Easter Week

WHEN I BECAME aware of Luke Timothy Johnson's famous critique of the historical-critical method of studying Scriptures I had an unfavorable idea of him.  That may have been because his work was used by conservatives to knock the work of someone I was still very impressed with, John Dominic Crossan.  Then I read the book, The Real Jesus and I saw that he was a far deeper, far more honest scholar and thinker than Crossan or his colleagues in the Jesus Seminar.  As I mentioned, I had already become somewhat more disinclined to trust their work than I had been on first looking into it because I saw some discrepancies on my own, such as Crossan's entirely unevidenced, radically after-the-fact claims about what happened to the body of Jesus after his death.  He violated his own claimed standards of judging the reliability of the Scriptures, which had been written far closer to both the witness of the life and ministry of Jesus and his death or within the lifetime of those who had, and by those who had a cultural affinity more like that of Jesus than any late 20th century academic could possibly reproduce in their imagined reconstructions of that.

It's not that I think all of what the historical-critical oriented scholars have produced is bad or worthless, much of the background evidence that someone like Crossan constructs an imagination of life in the milieu in which Jesus lived is informative and, in some ways, convincing.  But a lot of even that seems to forget that most of the evidence they produce came from a very atypical population of the human beings living then, people who could read and, especially, write.  To say they tended to be outside of the class that Jesus was born into and grew up in would be to say very little about it.  Anything much that we find out from the class of the writing class of that time would be an outsider view of things.  For someone like Crossan to reconstruct a "typical" Jewish peasant from Galilee from the material he has available is likely to produce someone very unlike any particular such Jewish peasant, not to mention one whose life and person generated the greatest world-wide religious tradition that has lasted for about two thousand years at this point.  Whatever else can be said about Jesus, he was not "typical" of any type you could try to shoehorn him into.   You could point out that the canonical Gospels are written by those who aren't likely members of the class Jesus and his earliest followers were in, which is fair to point out.  But they weren't writing a history or a modern biography,  they were writing about a single person.  They weren't trying to make him seem plausible due to him being "typical" of the type, they were talking about someone experienced as and taken as extraordinary.   If they weren't writing a modern biography or a complete history, they were certainly not engaged in the modern pseudo-sciences of anthropology or sociology. 

But this is about the matter of cognition and, as I said, what I think is the inescapable conclusion that any being which is capable of cognition must be considered to be conscious.  No one has yet taken up my request to explain how the two can be separated.  It happens that when an objection was made to what I said, I remembered something that Luke Johnson said in regard to that and how much it angers opponents when you bring that topic into what they'd like to keep it out of.  Even when it is an inescapable, even vitally important issue under discussion.

Epistemology - the critical analysis of cognition - can become in irritant when it demands attention.  This is because human knowing seems to work best when the subject is something other than itself.  Aesthetic knowledge is better at discerning the beautiful in great art than it is in defining the nature of beauty and how the mind grasps it.  In the same way, historical knowing works best when it is puttering around with evidence  from the past, but becomes progressively fuzzier when asked about the nature of historical knowledge.  Fair enough.  Excessive epistemology becomes cognitive cannibalism.  But a little bit of it is important as a hedge against easy assumptions and the arrogant certainties in any branch of knowledge.  

Which is wiser than just about anything I've ever read or heard related to that topic than anything I ever heard from a "cognitive scientist" or a "neuroscientist," or from just about anyone in the sciences apart from James Shapiro or Arthur Stanley Eddington or a few others I could name.  In many instances, perhaps, discussing matters of cognition or consciousness might be put off even for a very long time, but if you're going to pretend to be doing science, as physicists discovered in the early 20th century, you're going to have to address it eventually, if your goal is that level of confidence in what you're discussing.   The seeming efficiency of ignoring it is, ultimately, illusory.   I will add, just to annoy those who will be annoyed by it, that the science that has most carefully and habitually accounted for such matters is the scientific study of parapsychology, the one rigorous scientific endeavor which has been the subject of a full and concerted effort by those in and outside of science to end any scientific study of it, denying the extremely close following of the rules of science, the rigorous efforts to address their critics methodological criticisms - still coming up with results that are more robustly positive than that found in much other conventional science - and following the most careful and rigorous of quantitative measurements of their findings.

And that's far from the only nugget of perceptive brilliance you get from a close and careful reading of LTJ's work.  He goes on to say after that paragraph:

The best practitioners of critical historiography, therefore, are careful to make clear the character of their craft as a limited mode of knowledge, dependent on the frailties of the records of memory and the proclivities of self interest.  No serious historian, for example, would claim to render the "real" event or person, whether the event was Pearl Harbor or the person of Douglas MacArthur.  The "real" event in all its complex particularity happened only once and cannot be recovered by any means.  The serious historian recognizes that a "History of the Attack on Pearl Harbor" is a reconstruction by the historian out of the available pieces.

The "historical Jesus" is a figment of the imaginations of those who a. don't get that the available record which is most likely to give them something to go on is not something you can make an honest history out of.  Never mind a biography.  That record is the canonical Gospels, the letters of Paul, James (who may well have been the brother of the man, himself) the author of the Letter to the Hebrews, the other Epistles, and some few references in the ambient Jewish and pagan literature.  It  doesn't present a biography or something like a magazine article about someone living now or in the past who left enormous amounts of primary evidence.  Even in that case, as Johnson points out, there is nothing like a reproduction of the life of the person or events contained in the best history of the most recent subjects.  In the case of Jesus, or, indeed, anyone for whom that is the only record, no such historical-critical treatment can honestly be constructed, so the motives and assumptions and intentions of those doing it become ever more important in making our own critical judgements of their claims.  

And the results they come up with are a Jesus too bland and too safe to account for his execution or why anyone should have remembered him at all.  I think I remember coming to that conclusion reading what Crossan claimed his ministry was,  "open commensality" and an "unbrokered kingdom" that doesn't seem to have been much of a "kingdom" at all, considering Crossan doesn't seem to think God had much to do with any of it.  I think Walter Brueggemann was right that those who practice the "historical-critical" method end up with a Jesus which is much like themselves and much to their liking as late 20th century members of secular "enlightenment" addled academia instead of anything that is helpful to anyone.  In the end it was seeing nothing that would support any practical means of feeding the hungry, clothing and housing those without, visiting the sick and the prisoner in any of it.  It was a Jesus that was only a little better than the one that the worst of late 18th and early 19th century "enlightenment" Christianity came up with.  It wasn't even up to the later 19th century standards of the evangelical Social Gospel movement or Christian Socialists did.  There would be no reason for anyone to have bothered to keep up the memory of the Jesus of historical-critical invention or, for that matter, much. though not all, of what arose in the wake of the  age of scientism, the enlightenment.  

The temptation is to keep quoting from Johnson's book because it's all so good and I'd like you all to read it and consider it and to compare it to not only the claims of the members of the Jesus Seminar, from the top quality such as Crossan's work to the quickly arrived at bottom, such as that of Karen King (the one who fell for the forged "Jesus's wife" "scripture" a few years back) or the "fellow" the media huckster Paul Verhoeven,  But remembering the claims that get passed of as vastly oversold "historiography" or the incredibly inadequate thinking about cognition and consciousness that gets regularly passed off as science, these days.  His observation stands against "easy assumptions and the arrogant certainties of any branch of knowledge".  

I have said that I am impressed with the intellectual rigor of modern theology and the kind of scholarship that someone like Luke Timothy Johnson practices than I am in the regular quality of academic and even much of scientific scribblage, these days.  Even someone who wrote on a popular level, such as the late Richard McBrien did, is far more impressive in that way than most of the secular academicians and far more than those who prevent a conventional secular-popular level of it.  I am not nearly as impressed with those who trade in the historical-critical racket.  I wonder if Luke Timothy Johnson was ever on the Terri Gross show which is where I first heard of John Dominic Crossan, I somehow expect not.

I should come out and say, right off, that I'm ever more skeptical about the hypothetical "Q", or that if there was a "Q" it was probably not an independent Gospel but a common source of testimony, probably oral.   I certainly don't believe in the entirely unevidenced "Q" community of the early Jesus movement that some other members of that Seminar have made their bread and butter in inventing as a foil for the "establishment" responsible for the canonical Gospels.  There's entirely less to base such creations on than there is the Jesus of faith or even the "Jesus" of the historical-critical method.  If there's something I really loathe, it's the invention of such stuff as "communities" on the basis of no actual evidence of their existence, at all.  But such stuff can get you a PhD these days.  I am also entirely unconvinced that the "Secret Gospel of Mark" ever existed, I think it's likely either an ancient rumor or an early modern hoax based on what is purportedly an 18th century copy of an earlier manuscript which doesn't seem to have survived or ever been noticed by anyone else.  In modern translation it fits into about two paragraphs.  But not a little of the "historical Jesus" stuff cites it as if it's more credible than the Gospel of John for which a closely verbatim fragment survives as the so-far earliest manuscript of a Gospel.  

I'd written down a quote from an Anglican Priest of the 1940s who said that it was a wonder and mystery why anyone would have gone to the bother of crucifying the Jesus Christ of liberal Protestantism, though I've lost the slip of paper I made the note in.   It's a good question.  It's an even better question of why anyone would have remembered the Jesus of modern reconstruction through the historical-critical process.   I certainly can't believe in the Gospel of such a Jesus.

Just Found Out Archbishop Thomas Gumbleton Has Died

He was one of the most Christlike members of the Catholic hierarchy of the United States during my lifetime, sidelined from promotions because he insisted on living the Gospel.  This article in National Catholic Reporter gives you some idea, if you're not familiar with him.

Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, the Detroit prelate who for many American Catholics defined faith-based social justice activism in the post-Vatican II church, died April 4. He was 94.

Described sometimes as the pastor of the Catholic peace and justice movement, Gumbleton lived in Detroit nearly his entire life, yet his influence was felt in far-flung places such as El Salvador, Haiti, Vietnam, Iran and Iraq.

He was a founding member of both Pax Christi USA, the national arm of the international Catholic peace movement, and Bread for the World, an advocacy organization seeking to end world hunger.

"To put it most succinctly, Tom lived out the peace of Christ in his complete being," said Johnny Zokovitch, Pax Christi USA's executive director, shortly after the bishop's death. "Everything that our movement strives to be was evident in Tom and how Tom lived."

Immaculate Heart of Mary Sr. Irene Therese Gumbleton, the last living of nine Gumbleton siblings, said her brother passed away at a hospital in Dearborn, Michigan, following physical decline over the past week. "It means a lot to us that we've lost him," she told NCR by phone. "I think the church is really going to miss him."

A lot of us are going to miss him. 

An Ideology That Lives By Cartoonish Simplification Must Surely Be Damaged When That Simplicity Is Debunked - Hate Mail

ALL ANY OF US who believe that there is most likely a "first organism" from which all subsequent organisms evolved has is an imagination of it.  There is no physical evidence of what organisms even many presumed generations of life on Earth were like, not for what is assumed would be many millions of generations after when that original organism would have had to flourish.  There is no evidence that such a first organism is how life came to first exist on Earth, there is no evidence of what it is like.  The only thing we can possibly know for certain is if that imagined organism came about from non-living matter is that it would have to be unique in the entire line of life because every subsequent organism would have had to have come about out of living organisms.  

Before going on, to lay out the groundwork of this post I do hold as a tentative belief that there likely was one "first organism" though the more I read about the discoveries of current biology I admit that belief is merely on the basis of seeming (as opposed to knowable) probability considering the extreme problems of it happening even once based on what is believed, today, to imagine up that original organism, its physiology and its life and, most improbable seeming of all, its successful reproduction of itself.  If some materialist-atheist wants to argue about that, I'll be forced to bring up the problem of the containing membrane in which molecules from outside of that organism would have had to be contained to reach a concentration so as to ignite metabolic activity and, most problematic, reproduction.  If they propose something like a virus, I think, considering what those are and how they are reproduced, that viruses probably evolved after organisms they could parasitize had already evolved.  So I doubt they preceded cellular life.  Same thing with prions, as one online atheist proposed as a means of getting over the insurmountable mountain of problems for life just having happened by random chance.  Neither viruses nor prions are sufficiently "simple" nor known to be able to exist on their own no matter how "simple" they are imagined to be if you ignore their complexity.   Viruses are not as simple as they need to be to fit into that claim.

Back to the argument.  One of the assumptions of what that "first organism" we imagine is like is that it was "simple," that its physical body was simple, though we have no actual information as to what that "simplicity" would have been like.  We can't imagine life, metabolism, change, reproduction (change would have to have happened for both of those) physical anatomy, etc. apart from the life which can be seen and studied now, certainly many, many, many billions of years, of presumable evolutionary change and development and divergent pathways and presumably enormous difference from that first organism or its first descendants (keeping in mind what my dear old biology teacher said about the impossibility of differentiating among cells that divide as to which one was the "original" of the resulting cells).  

Every one of the proposals for how molecules would have just happened to have assembled themselves into that first organism by chance imagines something that is far, far from "simple" because those have no alternative but to be based in what we know about life now.  The various proposals for how DNA or RNA is supposed to have assembled out of random chance events in the conditions on the early Earth, more than three billion years ago, out of the random chance scenario that is a prerequisite for that entire game of abiogenesis, are, themselves, extremely improbable.  I would guess that is one of the reasons why one of the most famous proponents of coming up with a materialistic, atheistic, scientistic explanation of that, Francis Crick (Crick and Orgel 1973), resorted to some kind of extra-terrestrial seeding of the early Earth, probably as some extremely long-term experiment by intelligent beings from elsewhere in the galaxy or universe, as a way of skirting the problem of that sciency imaginary scenario.  Which, in his philosophical incompetence, merely would relocate the problems of where that intelligent life started out its existence under similar difficulties to those which an Earth based scheme of random-chance assembly of that non-Earth life would have had to happen.  Not to mention wondering who was supposed to live for enough billions of years or at least hundreds of millions of years to have made such an experiment worth expending wealth and energy on.  Of all the proposals of how it "just happened" that is probably the stupidest of them all.  But I think anyone who got suckered into believing that the Miller-Urey experiment explained it all, as I heard in my youth (AND IT MOST CERTAINLY DIDN'T) and which I still hear from the sci-rangers on-line, has such a naive view of the problems involved that they need to be ridiculed out of the discussion if we're ever going to get anywhere in it.  

For a start the Miller-Urey experiment in no way reproduced the conditions of the early-Earth, and after that their experiment was inseparable from the very same obstacle that Francis Crick's imaginary, unevidenced, ET origin of life on Earth was, THE INTELLIGENT DESIGNS AND INTENTIONS OF THOSE WHO WOULD HAVE CARRIED ON THOSE EXPERIMENTS.  The product of an intentionally carried out experiment cannot possibly be known to represent something that would happen "in nature" without the intelligent design or the manipulation of materials by the scientists who are doing that experiment.  It is the greatest irony of abiogenesis, a "science" born out of materialist-atheist-scientism and continuing in that quest to refute a theory of intelligence in life arising on Earth, that everything they do by way of experiments or of analysis of any observations they make merely reinforces the theory that intelligent design was needed to get the results they did.  There is no way to filter out or remove what the scientists did to get the results they did, though their analysis of that can pretend it does that's mere dishonesty or that ubiquitous philosophical incompetence which is rife among those in the sciences, today.  And Miller And Urey merely came up with a novel way to manufacture some few amino acids, they in now way got much if any closer to figuring out how those assembled by random chance into a first organism.

My ideas on this, today, developed from my response to the ridiculous claims that scientists who had made artificial "DNA" and "got it to replicate itself" had put the final nail in the coffin of the idea that God was necessary to the creation of life.  The first thing I thought was that their "DNA" hadn't assembled itself and it had hardly "replicated itself" because it was the various manipulations of molecules under the specific ambient conditions they did their experiment in (hardly likely to have anything like approximated conditions anywhere on the early Earth) are what got the results.  So the "DNA" hadn't replicated itself, the scientists who did the experiment did that.*  Just as we know that DNA in living organisms doesn't replicate itself, the enormously complex cellular physiology and chemistry of enormously complex molecules (which are hadly likely to have have existed in that first organisms) replicates any DNA in it, in those eukaryotic cells such as comprise our bodies, far more than one DNA molecule has to do that in exquisitely complex coordination within and without the cell with other DNA in the organelles of the cell through other enormously complex operations in the cell.  I doubt that DNA or RNA existed on Earth until those evolved many millions of generations of life after that first event, though that is, as well, an enormous speculative leap based on what I imagine.  I'd say that if any DNA or RNA managed to assemble by random chance events on the early Earth, evaded immediate destruction in what was unlikely to have been favorable conditions and, somehow, assembled, the first organism it would have been no less miraculous than any miracle asserted by any tradition of religion or folklore.  The dependence on random chance and other such speculative aids in any materialist, atheist, scientistic scheme of explaining how life so improbably arose on the early Earth arrives at greater improbabilities if you think even not terribly hard about it,  YOU'D HAVE TO HAVE A STRONG EMOTIONAL ATTACHMENT TO MATERIALISM, ATHEISM AND SCIENTISM TO SUSTAIN THAT NAIVE FAITH IN THAT god OF MODERN ATHEISM, RANDOM CHANCE, TO BE ABLE TO OVERCOME THE INCREDIBLE ODDS AGAINST IT HAVING HAPPENED IN FACT.  And the culture of the college-credentialed materialist-atheist devotee of scientism has as strong an emotional attachment to their ideology as the most fevered fundamentalist or the most mendacious Trumpzi.  They might be less stupid than a Trumpzi has to be but their stubborn refusal to see the problems with their faith and what it forces them to pretend they know things that aren't and couldn't be true is the same.

One of the interesting things that James Shapiro pointed out in that lecture was that with the discovery of a third kind of cell the archaea, apart from the eukaryotic cells and the prokaryotic cells, the line of cells among species of methane producing bacteria, is that there may well have been many, even many thousands of different kinds of cells on the early Earth which didn't survive up into the organisms that left resolvable images of their bodies.  He honestly points out that we can't know that because we don't have the evidence.  Which is another complication of the lore of the alleged science that makes all kinds of claims about that earliest life about which science cannot now be honestly done.  Which does nothing, whatsoever, to keep those employed in that scientific folklore and materialist-atheist scholastic speculation from coming clean and admitting that what they are doing is far more akin to the cartoon of medieval theology they probably mock.  That they do so out of an allegiance to the faith of materialism and atheism doesn't change the character of what they are doing.  I think that the rise of science and modern history has had a very strong impact for the better in much of modern theology which, in supreme irony, has not influenced the culture of science and the sciency nearly as much.  I doubt that any credible modern theologian would be as unaware of the problems with their procedures, I doubt many of the earlier ones would.  Gregory of Nyssa, for example, strikes me as being more honest about what he was doing than many a highly placed scientist today does.  

The point of my last post which is complained about so angrily, was that if materialist-atheist devotees of scientism can pretend to find a reason for dismissing a belief in God the Creator out of their entirely unrealistic claims of the simplicity of how life originated and evolved - claims of simplicity that, the more that is reliably discovered by physiology and molecular biology, are false - then it is certainly justified by someone like me to point out that the more that is discovered about how life, now, sustains itself supports the need of conscious intelligence to point that out.  I don't think it's at all unfair of us to say that in order for that to have gotten started, at all, is reasonably concluded to require that intelligent intent was part of it.  Another of the hoary old arguments of atheism was that life in the physical universe would seem to be sparse (though that's another assumption that isn't susceptible to confirmation with science) and so there is no intent behind its existence, therefore, no God.  I know, my dear old Latin teacher tried that one on me, as well.  Such an argument merely makes the existence of life on Earth to be even more improbable, leaving the atheist with the problem of how it could have plausibly happened even once (remember what I said about the cosmologist who, on that basis, doubts that there is life anywhere else in the universe.  I think the more plausible belief INFORMED BY WHAT SCIENCE HAS SHOWN is that God created life and sustains it as well as the planet and universe in which we know one thing with as good reason as anything we believe we know, that we are here.  

If the tantalizingly suggestive observations of the ancient Hebrew traditions point to scientific reasons to believe they had an inkling of what was real about such things as the origin of the universe, we have a right to notice that.  Though it's not a scientific conclusion because science isn't supposed to claim to answer questions it can't, though, as can be seen from looking at the attempts of scientists to put that elusive last nail in the coffin of God with science, that isn't kept out of it.  Atheism is a flourishing and dishonest industry within the literature and teaching of science and, especially, in "the popular understanding of science"  whereas theology isn't and shouldn't be there as the rules now stand.  But neither should atheism.  I certainly reject both attempts to do that, though there is nothing at all wrong with it as long as it is explicitly understood that it isn't science because science can't be allowed to go there and maintain its integrity.  Of the two, atheist ideology has been successfully inserted into even the formal literature of science.  It is rampant in some fields as even someone like Stephen Hawking has noted of his own field and such stuff as abiogenis was invented with that intent.  Of the two atheism, which inevitably will come to a condition of amorality, is the more dangerous.

* God only knows what disastrous consequences scientists assembling artificial "DNA" could bring if even segments of that "DNA" manages to get into the real DNA of living beings as we know real DNA can do.  The ignorance of what biological effect such artificial polymers could bring leads me to think it's probably one of the greater dangers that have arisen from science. And with the plastics industry and its consequences, as James Shaprio also noted, that dangerous experiment is already underway.  It makes you realize absurdly unrealistic the old fashioned view of DNA is in light of the discoveries of how enormously changeable DNA is, now entire regions of it can migrate to other parts of DNA and become biologically active both within one organism and among different organisms.  That knowledge start starting with Barbara McClintok more than a generation ago should have long ago destroyed the old imaginary models of DNA as well as the mid-20th century dogma of neo-Darwinism.  The absurd assertions that DNA was in command and reigning over the physiology and life actions of the organisms it exists within, vulnerable only to the materialist god of random chance.  I will repeat that I think it was a notion of how disconfirming of the ruling ideology of materialist-atheist-scientism in the wake of the neo-Darwinian synthesis the new discoveries were that led to McClintok being discouraged from continuing her work, if not just out of the ruling inertia of professional interest - which was hardly separable from the dominant ideology of the scientists discouraging or opposing her.

D Derbes,

Did you actually read what I wrote or are you just relying on the characterization of it by the noted illiterate and liar you agreed with?   That's a real question because I doubt you did  because that's not what I said.  I assume you read well enough to know that.   If I'm wrong, I'd like to know it.

yours truly, 

TC

Just Got Our Electricy Back AGAIN!

We used to get outages like this once in a few years, back when they had to climb poles to fix things.  Now it seems we have at least a couple every year.   I'd guess it's a combination of global warming and foreign ownership of the electric company here.  Maybe a few more years of this and the referendum for the state to take control of it will pass.   Don't blame me, I voted for that. 

What Matrialists Do Justifies The Conclusion That More Than Mere Physical Causation Is Necessary For It To Happen

I DON'T REMEMBER if I had transcribed this part of the Q and A from James Shapiro's Linus Pauling Lecture (2012) before and used it some time in the past but I'm doing that now.

Question: About half-way through your lecture where you use the term "cells know."

James Shapiro: Well, I was quoting Barbara McClintok but . . .

Questioner: OK. But just the term . . . um. . . you know, I guess I have trouble with the idea of a cell being so self-directed that it would - fundamentally it's all bio-chemistry - that they would know .  . . in a cognitive sort of way.  Cause that's sort of how I understand the word . . .

James Shapiro: "Cognitive" is the word I like to use and cells are always sensing what's going on inside of them and outside of them. And responding to that sensory information.  And they do it pretty well.

Cell division is a pretty complicated process, more complex than any human manufacturing enterprise.  Hundreds of millions, maybe billions of different events have to be coordinated, sometimes very quickly. E coli replicate its DNA two thousand base-pairs a second and make less than one in a billion mistakes because it has sequential proof-reading mechanisms which are based on monitoring the DNA and picking up those errors and correcting them.

So this is a form of cognitive behavior and I know we're taught not to anthropomorphize though I do it all the time, It's the only way I can understand what my bacteria are experiencing.(*)  And I think what McClintok is trying to tell us is we have to realize both that the cell is a sensory, sentient entity and it's using that sentience for its own needs and requirements and functions and sometimes that involves changing its genetics, changing its DNA.  But there's a whole school of study one of the pioneers of it is at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, Lee Hartwell who got the Nobel Prize, I think about seven or eight years ago for studying the control of how the cell cycle progresses. And you may know about that. And the cell cycle, the eukaryotic cell cycle  involves lots of different things that have to happen and they all have to happen in a coordinated way.  And the cell is monitoring how all of those things are happening.

Here the recording has a drastically degraded audio quality,** making it too difficult to try for a close to verbatim transcription.  But, from what you can hear, James Shapiro went into how much more complex the division of a eukaryotic cell is. Before hearing that, though, with all of the biology courses I took in college when a lot of that information was known, I never before had anyone present just how complex the divison of any cell is but, especially, eukariotic cells, such as human beings and many other creatures from Algae up to dinosaurs and sperm whales bodies are composed of is.  It's long, long ago been known that those cells have obvious complexities that have to be reproduced as the entire cell replicates itself - which, as my first biology teacher in high school pointed out to me leads to the problem of saying which of the resulting cells is "the original cell" as both of them are, then, a product of the original one splitting.  The way we talk about things and think about things on that basic a level fail to consider such things.  Which should have always been a warning against over-simplifying the situation and using that over-simplification ideologically as well as scientifically.

All of those separate DNA containing entities within them would have to have their contents replicated, including DNA but, also, the enormously complex cellular structures and chemistry containing and comprising, as well as the nuclear DNA and the supporting very complex cellular structures and their supporting molecules would have to be EVERY TIME THAT THOSE CELLS DIVIDED.  In the case of single cell organisms, that is done to produce a functioning, viable organism, and in multi-cell organisms, to create the billions of times more complex bodies of multicellular creatures made of interacting cells, organs, organ systems etc. And those would have to almost, in every single case, have to do it to effective perfection almost every time.  The idea that random chance or non-directed, non-teleological "bio-chemistry" as presented in the simplistic modeling of that questioner,  which is so inadequate it barely deserves to be called a "cartoon-presentation" of what happens is at least as absurd as "young-earth creationism."  Yet that is the foundation of the most widespread of scientific ideologies dealing with such questions, certainly on the popular level but, also, at the level on which the likes of Richard Dawkins have sustained eminent careers in science at some of the major universities in the world.

The way that just cellular replication alone is generally presented is like that famous cartoon of some professor writing an enormously long equation on a black board and in the middle of it it says "then a miracle occurs."  Though that's supposed to mock religion, that is really how the imagination of cells dividing in most Peoples' minds is, including many professional biologists, because they skate over how enormously complicated all aspects of that are.  Even picking out different aspects of it as if those are separable from the whole life of the cell, such as my formerly favorite one of how a cellular membrane splits and repairs itself so as to enclose two cells instead of one, is grotesquely simplistic because that wouldn't happen without the entire range of happenings within, first the first cell, then in both of them, for that to happen.  It can't be isolated from the entire act of cellular reproduction with all of its myriad of complex events happening successfully.  Starting with the cell obtaining enough of the exactly necessary molecules to produce two cells from one. Which inevitably involves the enormously complex matter of the cellular activity in taking in molecules from outside of it, and so the "environment" in which the cell lives.  

I remember the vicious attacks on James Shapiro from his colleague at the University of Chicago, the new atheist fanatic, Jerry Coyne about the same time he gave that lecture, one joined in by a lot of the science bloggers run by university faculty and their commentators who were stalwarts of the then fashionable new atheism.  A lot of that was centered in the insistence that there were huge parts of the then recently mapped DNA that were nothing but "junk" something which Shaprio mentioned pained him during that lecture because scientists like him had already shown that it was anything but superflous but was vitally important, literally, life depending on its functions and on the matter of evolution which has such incredibly outsized importance to materialist-atheist-scientistic ideology.  I was certain that the "junk DNA" arguments were entirely made in service, not to science, but to atheist ideology.  One of the things I heard Shaprio point out is how little of our DNA is dedicated to that thing which you'll generally hear is "the only thing it does," make proteins - presumably why those with a simplistic naive view of micro-biology would imagine the rest of it as mere "junk."

I thought then and I think now that insistence on a simplistic cartoonish view is maintained from the motive of supporting an ideology most often accepted by the lay public on the basis of ignorance.  Or, more typically in the uncommitted agnostics, just out of a lack of teaching and learning time and the condescending idea that most high school and even college students taking basic biology are too stupid to understand how complex it is.  I have a strong feeling that a lot of it is science teachers and even working scientists being too reliant on long ago surpassed ideological science which they were too lazy to realize had been surpassed.   No doubt if they did understand more of what is known about those complexities, today, that would raise all kinds of questions that those acculturated into materialism-atheism and scientism would be afraid of.  I think that realization that such complexity as was being revealed even back into the 1930s and certainly by the 1950s when Barbara McClintok was warned by her colleagues that the kinds of discoveries she was publishing would hurt her career would harm the materialist-atheist-scientistic view of reality was the dominant reason for that.  I think that professional harm to the progress of science came because a lot of them realized or vaguely intuited that the discovery of that level of complexity in the "simplest" units of life would obliterate the traditional ideological use of biology that really got going in a big way with the invention and promotion of natural selection with its random-chance changes and gradual development that, it was imagined, could happen without anything but random-chance as its basis.  That is why I think the ideologues have suppressed such knowledge in science and it's clearly not got little behind it but that non-scientific ideology.  

I think that as much as such ideological materialist-atheist-scientistic partisans would use their assumptions of extreme simplicity about these matters to reject the idea that intelligence was needed to guide the "bio-chemistry" to originate and continue life, their practice of doing that certainly, in light of the utter inadequacy of their foundational assumptions about that "simplicity," that the seeming necessity of "cognitive" behavior for cells to do what they do and to get that right as often as they do justifies someone coming to the conclusion that more than mere random chance within physical causation is necessary for it to happen.  That is, they are justified as long as they do what the materialists never have admitted, that their conclusion on the basis of scientific demonstration, isn't, itself, a scientific conclusion.  That doesn't mean that it is any less valid than many of the conclusions that might fit into the very specific specifications of what should be allowed to be considered science.  

The more I learn what recent science has found about the enormous complexity of knowable life on Earth, the more vanishingly improbable it seems to me that even the sustaining of life now can be on the basis of the old, tired and inadequate formulas of materialist-atheist-scientism, not to mention the gargantuan improbabilities of life arising spontaneously AND SUCCESSFULLY on the early Earth.   I haven't looked it up for this post but I recently read one cosmologist who said on the basis of the improbability of life arising anywhere in our life-permitting universe, he doubts that there is any extra-terrestrial life anywhere else in our universe.  I have no idea if that's true but I am increasingly doubtful that life arises anywhere without there being some kind of cognitive intent being involved in it.  

James Shapiro's admission that he thinks of that in terms he can understand, what would be described as "anthropomorphically" is far more honest than what you generally get from scientists who would reject that even as they so obviously do it themselves.  I don't think huge areas of science, especially in life science, can possibly avoid doing that even as they deny they do it. I think it would be far safer for them to admit that's what they do instead of denying it.  Every single thing about the alleged science of the observation of behavior is saturated with anthropomorphism because there is no other way to do that.  Scientists couldn't possibly reason themselves into a model of things that can't be observed, small molecules, atoms, subatomic particles, etc. without human imagination being involved.  The dismissal of "imagination" in modernism, allegedly a scientific ideology, is one of the stupidest things about it, made, quite often by those quite ignorant of science, out of inconsideration of reality or profound ignorance.  

I will try to get around to seeing if I can process the sound from the rest of the recording to see if I can make an accurate transcription of it because what he says beyond what I transcribed above is extremely interesting and important.  The last question on the recording deals with the implications that cells are not only capable of demonstrating cognitive behavior but are conscious.  The brief answer that James Shapiro gives doesn't deny that but it does say that there would have to be a lot more known about the relationship of cognition to consciousness (I'd like someone to explain how you could have one without the other) but most interesting in his answer is that it would cause a firestorm of objection, no doubt among his ideological colleagues, to even raise that issue.   Given the attack on consciousness and freedom of thought in mammals, birds, etc. in science and pseudo-science and, for Pete's sake, philosophy, that hesitation is understandable.  That attack on consciousness is entirely in the service of materilaist-atheist ideology, though, as I've said before, such an ideological assertion entirely impeaches the validity of the science which such scientists make their claims from.  If consciousness is an illusion, if free thought is an illusion on the basis of physical causation then every single thought every human being, including scientists have is as illusory.  You can't claim that human beings are nothing but involuntary automatons without science, mathematics, the entire curriculum of academia and human culture being impeached,  It is a sign of the decadence of academia in our time that you can hold a faculty position within some of our most reputable of universities while denying that human beings are conscious and that the credentialed graduates of those universities feel that they need to promote that anti-intellectual, ultimately anti-democratic holding of materialist-atheist-scientism.  The social, legal and political results of such a belief have murdered scores if not hundreds of millions and have oppressed and enslaved billions of human beings, not to mention the even greater totals of those tortured and killed among our fellow sentient creatures.  Materialism inevitably leads to treating human beings and other living creatures as objects for use and disposal.  It is a more depraved ideology in effect than many of the worst human and animal-sacrificing religions were in that regard, they do it casually and daily to millions.  

I have come to appreciate just how dangerous the philosophical incompetence that characterizes current science is.  I'd include within philosophy though most people don't take that nearly as seriously.   It is dangerous because of the incredibly outsized reliance of competence and honesty is whenever something is published under the guise of it being the product of honestly applied scientific method, which is alleged to produce disinterested information.  A lot of that comes from the absurdity of much of what is deputed to be "science" when it doesn't follow anything like scientific methods.  The unthinking, uncritical assumption that because a scientist says something that that comprises reliable information.  If that is less or more dangerous than the reliance on the American judicial system, the judgements of judges, up to and including the Corrupt Court, I don't know but I know it is plenty dangerous for it to become an issue.   

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

But there is one area in which materilist-atheist-devotees of scientism constantly and consistently and insistently anthropomorphize and that's when they are thinking about God and God's motives or how God thinks.  If it is considered inappropriate to call such complex cellular behavior and its controlling, unseeable motivation "cognition" or "knowing" because it is "anthropomorphic" then it is even more absurd to then believe that the infinitely (effectively) more complex control of physical reality and more on Earth, in life, in the universe could happen through some form of cognition which any human being could imagine to refute its "necessity."  Such claims of non-necessity as if that is refutation is not based on any kind of hard evidenced analysis but is merely an appeal to seeming probability.  Though, since it's not really possible to know if any of it is possible without intelligent intention or content, there is no real or valid means of determining if the alternatives that we imagine in some scheme of improbability is, in fact, possible. In the case of the existence of life on Earth, in the universe, the kind of life we know of and which science has learned some little about, its existence without intelligent behavior doesn't seem to be possible.  The idea that a purely mechanical model of the "simplest" of life is even adequate is entirely unevidenced.  

Those old materialist-atheist-scientistic models of reality were based on two things, human technological processes and products and human imaginings of how objects move and interact, frequently based on ideas derived from human manipulations of materials.  As James Shapiro notes, every viable, changing, living and reproducing cell outstrips even our most modern of technological operations and organization every second they are alive.  Clearly the old line materialist models and imaginings of such things are grotesquely inadequate to account for even what has been observed.  Materialism should be a dead ideology on that basis, alone.  Atheism based in materialism should be as dead and scientism, an ideology that can't be true unless it is false, should never have gotten off the ground.  But it not only has but is sustained by the philosophical and rational decadence of modern life and modern academia.  The journalistic and show-biz promotion of that by an especially degraded establishment is done entirely on the basis of sheer non-intelligence.  
 
* The necessity of "anthropomorphizing" as even the possibility of coming to an understanding of other organisms is probably inescapable and the sooner scientists are honest about that the sooner they'll be being honest about what they're doing.  No statement has ever been made about the behavior, even the observed behavior, of a non-human organisms which isn't saturated with "anthropomorpizing."  If that's the case with the observable actions of cells, it's many, many times more true of behaving multi-cellular organisms, the behaviors of which are far more complex because they are the product of far more complex multi-cellular actions.  The worst of those dishonestly claimed "objective" presentations of that, such as ethology, are far more junk than any part of DNA would seem to be.  

** If there is one thing I really hate it's listening to an interesting scientific or technical lecture that shows that the sciency-tech guys who organize and arrange such things are so much less apt to produce an audio recording of it competently than the religious lecture organizers I listen to do.  The talks of such evangelicals as William Lane Craig, on the high end, and those who are far more of the Trumpzi variety tend to be entirely audible and understandable and easily transcribed.   I haven't found a lecture by James Shapiro online that doesn't have major problems, and those are hardly the only ones given by even such eminent scientists that can be said about.  In none of those was he at fault for that lack of clarity, his content proves that he more than did his part in that regard.   You'd think that they'd go to the bother of having such important lectures be understandable to the largest numbers of those who would like or need to listen to them THOSE WHO WILL BE LISTENING TO THEM ON RECORDINGS DAYS OR YEARS AFTER THEY WERE GIVEN.  It's really amazing how sloppy and slipshod some even well funded, eminent lectureships in the sciences are.   You'd think, if anything, they'd be the ones that did a great job with the technology.