What's Really "Different" Is Morality Based On Equal Justice And The Discernment Of The Differences In That - Answer To Hate Mail From Some "christian"

IN MY RECENT CRITICISM of some of the old patriarchs in regard to their enjoyment of sex, I'm told that "that's different". At least in and around the great flagship of gay-bashing, Sodom and Gomorrah.

In that very story story Lott offered to let the men of Sodom gang-rape his virgin daughters to spare two men (angels) who could presumably avoid being gang raped, if, indeed, that was the implied sin of the men of Sodom.  Later Prophets said it was injustice.   From what I read about the customs of that time and place, I would guess they might have been 12 or younger.  Little girls who, no doubt, were seen of little value to their fathers except in so far as he could marry them off for his profit.  Yet Lott is unambiguously presented as a man good enough to save from the destruction of the cities on the plane while his wife got turned into a pillar of salt for being curious enough to look and see what they were running from.  

I should say that I don't believe any of that actually happened, I can tell a tall tale when I see one.

And, according to the fable, after they got away he got drunk, had sex with his virgin daughters and bore children with them - wouldn't you know, the story puts the blame on them, probably in their early puberty, still, he an old goat.

While I'm sure there are Bible professing men today who would act that exactly that way, no doubt some of them prominent ministers of religion,  no one with an ounce of moral discernment would hold that such acts are now or ever were within a course of moral conduct. Anyone of any moral discernment would say such men should be locked up and the key thrown away, and they'd be right.  But the same people would say that sexual morality is unchanging from the time of Lott when it most certainly is when it suits them.  

And then there is his more famous uncle.  In the same section of Genesis we're  told that when Abraham, himself, had Sarah his wife pass herself off as his sister to be taken as a concubine of Pharaoh - an adulteress who was to become the grand mother of Israel - and, if you bring up that inconvenient fact about the text, today's moral absolutists will tell you that that was different, too.  

Also when Abraham had sex with Hagar, his wife's slave at Sarah's suggestion and had a son with him, later, at Sarah's insistence driving her and his own son out to die in the desert - the wealthy Abraham giving them the scantest of supplies - when she became jealous of them.  That was different than if some total scumbags did those things today or in the intervening centuries.  We are told that was different by the same people who tell us that God's moral law is eternal and unchanging.

Well, you can't have it both ways.   Did morality change or didn't it because one or the other would have to be true if there is any such a thing as sexual morality and I think there clearly is.

We're told that it's different because they hadn't been given The Law that made such things immoral, even as they tell us that God's moral law never changes.  It was, they say, set from the beginning with Adam and Eve, though before the fable of Sodom and Gomorrah, there is no record of what they're accused of being set down as evil. Why wasn't their ignorance of unchanging morality as much of an excuse for them as it was for Lott and Abraham and, lest it be forgotten, Sarah?

Not that long into the fables of Genesis we are told that when Abraham's grandson, Judah approached the unknown prostitute (his veiled and much wronged daughter in law, Tamar) and had sex with her with a promise of payment to be made, impregnating her with twins.  If you believe Genesis you have to believe that that was different, too. Though I will admit, when he had the fact that he'd fathered the twins with her thrown into his face by Tamar, he admitted he was the one more in the wrong - he'd called for her to be brutally killed for doing what he, as a john, had participated in. The guys always get off when it comes to having sex, though they'd better not pull out (Onan).  Though I doubt any but the most depraved of those today who would make the same excuse of "it was different" for Judah would fail to see a father-in-law doing something like that, today, as being an immoral scumbag. Kind of like Elon's daddy.

We are told today that "God's law doesn't change" by the very same people who hold that those instances of sexual indulgence which no decent person today would say was anything but deeply sinful but who will make excuses for what the Scripture claims "it was different."  

That line is used to maintain an impossible pretense that that unchangable morality was not presented in Genesis as acts by  difinitively righteous people.  If God was ready to overlook or forgive those creeps and bless them, founding the entire tradition of monotheism on them, then I don't find the use of them and their stories to condemn entirely more moral men who would never have any kind of sex with anyone but other fully consenting and competent adults of later times as credible.  

You can't have it both ways, not anymore.

I could point to a number of other instances of totally screwy and unambiguously unjust, unfair, and wicked instances of sex enjoyed by those presented in Scripture as good and just men who enjoyed God's favor in which, if you question it today, you will be told "that was different" because times and sexual mores were different. And that's not mentioning other kinds of immorality presented as moral in Scripture in one place only to have the same thing condemned elsewhere.

If times changed in the centuries when the Scriptures were being written, well, times continued to change. Today is different from then, though in so far as it comes to men of privilege and power using and abusing others for their own sexual pleasure and profit (Abraham is presented as having greatly profited from pimping his wife in Egypt, twice) I have no problem with acknowledging many active same-sex couples entirely surpass them in the "by their fruits you will know them" test for judging moral conduct than many of the most illustrious of the patriarchs or their spouses.  Or many of the most prominent gay-basher sex-hypocrites of now.

Jesus, in one of his most famous and best parables presents Abraham in a paradisaical state, though I'm sure he must have noticed the deep moral ambiguity of his sex life and conduct.  Jesus, though, perhaps uniquely of all of the figures of Scripture, seems to have been remarkably unobsessed with sexual morality except when it came to the faithful fulfillment of vows of marital fidelity.  And there I think his motive was to forbid the abandonment of unwanted wives and children by men who had all the power in a divorce.   The extent to which that injustice is a part of divorce now, it is as relevant to judging its morality as it was when he forbade it.  He certainly wouldn't have condemned Tamar to death like Judah was ready to, at least according to one of the most famous stories in the Gospel of John.  He would have had a thing or two to say about the use of his innocent daughters that he proposed to his fellow Sodomites (who would have seemed not to have been gay, at all, according to the story).

I have come to have absolutely no patience with those who slam even the most morally responsible LGBTQ people but who are entirely good with the most blatant of sexual injustice and harm when it's hetero-sexual in nature.  And that is the history of such double-speak on sex, from the start of it.

Times are different now than they were even a century ago. For better and for worse, and I'll take the better of our times over what is presented as sexual morality then and for the entirety of recorded human history.  In fact, in just about every case I would take today's best understanding of sexual morality over the legal and official moral teachings on it from then.   If they were different for hetro-sexual sex then when such treatment of women and girls by men presented as virtuous is to be accepted, now we know better today/  It's time to admit that the times to changed in the human understanding of same-sex sex.  I'd say, if anything, the problem with sex is that the times haven't changed nearly enough from the times of inequality and injustice, even when it comes to gay sex.  It's certainly too much like it was in the time of Lott and Abraham and Jacob when it comes to hetero-sexuality.

Reading Genesis more closely than I ever have before, really paying attention to what it says, it is a deeply ambiguous, deeply muddled and pasted together book and, as a foundation for moral discernment in many matters, it will not produce the best of the Jewish monotheistic tradition.   I don't think the understanding of morality even in the Jewish tradition of previous centuries was anywhere near as developed or discerning as the best of that of now.  Creation continues for a reason, if it were to have stayed in the same state it was when Abraham was around, it would have ended then.

That better moral discernment is all about justice and equal treatment for the least among us.  In keeping earlier legends and fables as Scripture, they made a huge mistake.  Many of those older stories are nothing less than an indictment of the moral character of God, no doubt such stories would not be seen that way in a time and place when patriarchy, familial tribalism and the ownership of other people by such male strong-men produced a morality more closely allied to an American crime-family than they would that grew out of the Prophets.  There is a deep and impossible to travel gulf between the best and the worst of the First Testament, you can't choose both without doing deep harm to the best of it.  I think it's the same choice as the choice of serving God or serving Mammon, or serving those with power and those without it, in the most obvious facts of human life, patriarchal power as opposed to justice for Women is at the heart of that impossible to heal breach.  You have to choose one or the other because if you try to choose both, you can't get the better choice.

You cannot coherently hold that all of the Bible is true unless you say God's morality is not unchanging over time or unless you admit that human understanding of that is always inadequate and that all of Scripture which is the product of human thought shares in the defects and limitations of our understanding.  

I have also been reading what are considered the genuine Pauline letters and have come to believe that Paul was a deeply troubled and self-hating gay man, part of the reason for him being so troubled was because his culture and religious tradition gave him no possibility of understanding his own sexual desires in any but a damaging, obsessive, you might say hysterical way.  I read his letters - full of some of the most incredible insights into the meaning of Jesus - and find that whenever he had to deal with sexual issues he has a deep fear and disgust of it.  Though in his case he did have the moral insight that it is better to marry than to "burn" in so far as straight sex was concerned. It is unfortunate that Catholicism didn't take that seriously as having an unmarried clergy (and so power-structure) has been responsible for some of the worst aspects of that huge tradition even now.  As an insight into the morality of sex, Paul has several steps over Genesis and even The Law, though he had no ability to imagine a good, faithful, equal, same-sex marriage. He seems to have not had an ability to imagine gay sex outside of the rape of those kept as pagan temple prostitutes or other such victims of the same slavery-based patriarchy which forms the same twisted sexual morality of Genesis.  He imagining all gay sex as sharing the evils that most take for granted in hetero-sexual sex, even today,  without any moral qualms, at all.

The Hebrew tradition changed its sexual morality drastically in the course of Scripture, I think what changes with further moral discernment in the human species is that there is a possibility of some progress in appreciating the real moral law of God in which equality, equal justice, and the end of such privilege as patriarchy is based in.  I think in the last century several enormous steps toward the real morality of God have been taken by many people, though there are those who are no closer to that than those who called those patriarchs good.  

I base my conclusion firmly on Scripture, judging that by the results of those steps as taken by those who have tried the hardest to be honest and equally and faithfully married to another man or another woman. Putting their voluntarily made moral commitments above even that god of modernism, their own changing desires.  There is nothing ambiguous about the results of that just as the evils committed by Lott and Abraham and Judah and David and Solomon etc. are obvious.  That is despite what the Temple establishment scribes and priests wrote about that.  I'm with the Prophets on the moral authority of the Temple scribes and priests.   I'm not going to deny what's right there in front of me, no more than I would the sins and crimes of those who do what those ancient patriarchs are said to have done in Scripture and other enormous injustices to the least among us.

In so far as the various churches and individuals refuse to see what is right there before them because of their insistence that Genesis and other Scripture is set in stone, as, in fact, it never was, those are a hindrance of the progress of human beings in living according to the real Law, which is written on the heart not on paper, or so Scripture tells us. I think maybe in the current turn away from the churches, we are seeing a necessary abandonment of that use of scripture, necessary to admit what's bad in it and to stop allowing it to destroy progress towards equal justice under the Law of God.  If that's the case, then let the churches change with the times or die.  The real Law, the real Gospel will survive it as will those who follow those.

Given the choice between the injustice, the patriarchy, the inequality, the abusive use of other people, especially women (remember Tamar), especially children (remember Lott's daughters) especially those held in slavery (remember Hagar) or those who were not in the favored family or nation (remember Ishmael), I choose to judge the morality of sexuality on the different ideas of now, at least those ideas of now which hold all People are equal, have equal rights, and no one has a right to hurt, harm, abuse and enslave them.  Compared to the "different times" and the sexual morality of the Bible I'll take the current development of that which takes such equality seriously and which elevates loving relationships over ancient legalisms. I'll take the examples that more moral gay men than Paul could imagine as my instructors in sexual morality even as I take the examples of those who use sex to harm, to hurt, to oppress, to enslave and to destroy as the real measure of sexual immorality, even when it is civilly legal (the goddamned First Amendment) or excused by corrupt religionists.

May God help us all to discern the truth and to live by it.

Not Something You'll See Everyday: The Thought Criminal Recommends Gum Shoe Movies. Made for TV ones

A FRIEND OF MINE lent me the four Don Strachey detective movies as a distraction while I was ill, I didn't get round to watching them till this week.  

Movies mostly make me wish I hadn't watched them and made for TV movies more than most but I'm glad to say that I liked them very much. All four of them.  

Chad Allen who I'd never seen before and who, I read, has retired from acting to become a clinical psychologist was very good.  He was entirely more convincing as Don Strachey than I ever found Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe, or, for that matter, most of the other actors who became well known for playing such roles as well. I don't find Hollywood acting of that vintage interesting to watch, anymore.  Even more so hearing the writing. Especially the gratuitous anti-gay stereotyping of Hammett and, more ironically, Chandler. And of their copiers. I am sick to death of it.

In the movies, Sebastian Spence as his husband Tim Callahan was really good, too.  I've seen him in other things and always liked his acting which is quite varied according to character.  I like that the movies give them a sex life that is believable while not centering either of their lives entirely around that.  The best thing about that is that they are faithful to each other.

The relationship between them in the movies left me wishing I was 40 again.

Various other Canadian actors such as Daryl Shuttleworth whose work I'm familiar with from TV shows etc. were good in it too. It was fun to try to remember who had played in what and trying to remember what their names are. I generally like Canadian actors better than either Brits or Americans.   

The writing was good, based on the books by Richard Stevenson, the directing was good and, for once, the music was good and added to instead of distracted from the experience. I didn't wish they'd fired the composer once in all four movies.   That's rare.

It's natural to wish they'd made more of them but maybe stopping at four avoided running down the quality, something that generally happens when they do too many in a series.  It's hard to keep up high quality over a long run.  It's rare enough to make a single movie that isn't shit.  

I've only read one of the novels the characters come from, I might try to get hold of the rest of them to read.  I really do like the idea of having a detective series in an underused town like Albany New York and having a well done series about gay men in a faithful marriage is especially welcomed. If I thought I had the ability maybe I'd write a detective and his husband who were faithful and didn't drink, trying hard not to copy what's been done better, already.    Though the drinking in the movies was believable, not like the absurd quantities that would kill anyone in Raymond Chandler's junk.  A totally sober detective.  Now, wouldn't that be a novelty.   I loathe Chandler's writing.

The only extensive experience I'd had before with gay detective fiction are reading some of the Dave Brandstetter series by the late, under-rated writer Joseph Hansen whose centenary is next year.  Which is kind of shocking though not if you consider the first of those came out more than fifty years ago and the difficulty he had getting gay fiction published before then.  I might read more of those, maybe it's time to try the genre again.  I have to say that I enjoy reading about LGBTQ characters in ways I don't generally get in books about straight people any more.  Considering easily 499 out of 500 fiction works I've read have no LGBTQ characters in them or if they do presenting us in negative stereotypes, maybe I'm just tired of stories made up about straight,white, men.  I suspect that's one of the reasons I'm not especially interested in fiction right now.  Maybe I should read more LGBTQ fiction and see if it interests me.

Going To Put This Down Till After The New Year - Follow Up

THE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN article of snappy refutations for sci-guys to pull out when creationists bring up embarrassing questions that I linked to had this to say about the observation that no one has seen the evolution of a species.  With a few comments:

12. Nobody has ever seen a new species evolve.

Speciation is probably fairly rare and in many cases might take centuries. Furthermore, recognizing a new species during a formative stage can be difficult because biologists sometimes disagree about how best to define a species. 

"During a formative stage" is doing a lot of work here.  I wonder exactly how you define  the "formative stage" of the evolution of a new species.  Just what does it mean? 

I wonder exactly what is meant by "speciation is probably fairly rare" in that, as I readily pointed out, every single known species alive today and those of the past almost certainly evolved from previous species.  That's a hell of a lot of speciation.  If it means that it doesn't reliably happen within the lifetime of anyone who's watching for it,  I said that.   

If "recognizing a new species during a formative stage can be difficult because biologists sometimes disagree about how best to define a species," then that certainly is a good excuse for anyone skeptical of such a claim to doubt it. That is unless it is clear, unambiguous and widely acknowledged as being that. 

The most widely used definition, Mayr's Biological Species Concept, recognizes a species as a distinct community of reproductively isolated populations—sets of organisms that normally do not or cannot breed outside their community. In practice, this standard can be difficult to apply to organisms isolated by distance or terrain or to plants (and, of course, fossils do not breed). Biologists therefore usually use organisms' physical and behavioral traits as clues to their species membership.

I would certainly accept that an inability to interbreed with its close biological relatives is a pretty good part of what would define a new species,  though in many cases animals recognized as of different species can interbreed and some of the hybrid animals of that mating can parent offspring.  Lions and tigers, horses and donkeys, etc.   So the definition isn't exactly definitive.  I really have to wonder how wide the range of variation among the enormous numbers of different species that this definition is known to be true for.   If the definition of what a species is is that inspecific, it only points to part of that enormous complexity of life which I mentioned but which evolutionary biologists like to figure they can figure out by making up stories about animals, plants, etc. in the lost past which they will never be able to study.   The idea that Darwin figured it all out in 1859 with the information he had at his fingertips based on the political-economic theory of Malthus becomes more absurd than less absurd.

Nevertheless, the scientific literature does contain reports of apparent speciation events in plants, insects and worms. In most of these experiments, researchers subjected organisms to various types of selection—for anatomical differences, mating behaviors, habitat preferences and other traits—and found that they had created populations of organisms that did not breed with outsiders. For example, William R. Rice of the University of New Mexico and George W. Salt of the University of California, Davis, demonstrated that if they sorted a group of fruit flies by their preference for certain environments and bred those flies separately over 35 generations, the resulting flies would refuse to breed with those from a very different environment.

"Apparent" does a lot of work in that paragraph.  

I wonder a number of things about that, not having read the literature on that experiment.  One question I'd have to ask since what I'm interested in is NATURAL selection is whether or not their "new species" could survive as a distinct species in the wild, if all members of the "new species" refused to mate with all members of different populations (species?) and that's just the beginning.  I would also wonder how universally their colleagues agree with the idea that they have created new species.  I'd also wonder how long this "new species" persists as an isolated population if it doesn't breed with other fruit flies.   How many individuals was it?  Did that difference persist if the two populations were kept together for 35 generations?

Note that this is exactly what I pointed out about the claim that scientists could "create new species" as a means of supporting "NATURAL SELECTION" and as a refutation of intelligent design.  I would admit that the design of such an experiment would involve the intelligence of the scientist doing it, though I'd wonder about the wisdom of trying to invent artificial species which, if they could breed in the wild, might be a catastrophe.  I don't trust biology labs to keep their created creatures isolated because I know what screw-ups grad students, lab assistants and college profs are.   As someone who is having a lot of trouble with an introduced Asian fruit fly in my fall fruit crops, we don't need a lab created one too.

But as an example of why science cannot be used to "disprove intelligent design" as a force in nature, it works pretty well.  That so many professional scientists would seem to not be able to navigate the pretty straight forward impossibility of what they try to do is a pretty good indication that a lot of them aren't the most intelligent of thinkers when it's a matter of their pet ideologies.

Stupidly Grasping On To Intelligent Design To Abolish Intelligent Design - Stupid Darwinist Hate Mail

IT IS A FACT that the actual evolution of a new species has never been observed, not in the wild, certainly, and not in a lab under artificial conditions.  Even in the most obvious apologetic and polemical claims about that, such claims have to be couched in special definitions and blatantly conditional statements.  And that's when those who make such statements are trying to be responsible.   Darwin's theory of natural selection carries within it claims that make that evolution in nature impossible to observe but I'll get to that after pointing out a problem with your accusation against me of "intelligent design" with fantastic claims about what "science has done" even as you witlessly grasp onto intelligent design to "prove natural selection" and "disprove intelligent design".

I will start by pointing out about your claim of scientists working in a lab could actually  produce a new species, claiming that that was evidence for the reality of natural selection has the insurmountable obstacle that the new species would not have been produced by nature but by the intelligent design of the scientists. You cannot filter out the design of that experiment from the results that you got from it.

They would not "prove" nature did something without intelligent design, they would have proven that they did it with their intelligent design.  They'd certainly want that to be the conclusion of anyone who read the paper they'd proudly publish with the intelligent review of their most likely "intelligent design" disdaining colleagues. Though that inconvenient fact about the whole operation would probably be discretely not mentioned.

The idea that any scientist or any group of scientists or even the whole world wide body of scientists could experimentally "prove that intelligent design is unnecessary" for whatever aspect of nature they want to claim is demonstrated by the results they got is a logical impossibility.

While a claim that "intelligent design" is proven in nature from that is problematic, intelligent design having produced the result, it's far less problematic than claiming that what is known to be the crucial component in experimental science is not there and not a crucial consideration in what is known about it.  

To reinforce the point, it is possible that, as in human science, intelligent design is present in nature, it is impossible to claim that it is absent from what scientists produce through their designed experiments and from the extension of those into claims of what happens in nature.

As to its presence in evolution, that's almost certainly not a claim that is testable by science, though I have come to the conclusion there is nothing unrespectable about that conclusion as a product of the logical consideration of the complexity of life especially thinking about how complex even the most primitive theorized "first organism" in the line of life on earth would have had to be, the stupendously seeming improbability if it, its survival, probably most of all its entirely unprecedented act of reproduction and the survival of more than one organism in the act so as to increase the number of living organisms on Earth. But that is not a scientific conclusion though many of the conclusions put directly into the professional substance of science by materialists and atheists are not, either, so used are they to getting away with inserting their ideology into science that they don't even notice when they do it.  

It is probably as unwise to try to use human science to introduce intelligent design into science as it is unwise to try to dispel it from nature by the same means and for exactly the same reasons. That the culture of Western science has made that folly repeatedly over the past several centuries in a number of ways is something to marvel at but nothing to pretend is an honest practice.

To my point made in a previous paragraph about the impossibility of observing the rise of a new species, a theoretical lab created "new species" produced in a few months or years could no more be reliable evidence of what would happen over many thousands of years in nature than the production of new varieties of cattle or show dogs by human design - in many cases rather cruel and stupid design - under entirely artificial conditions.* I doubt there will ever be a scientific project, with funding, with a reliable line of conduct and reporting as to last as long as that. The longest lines of human culture, such as Hebrew monotheism, pottery making aren't long enough to match it.

That is, by the way, such an obvious flaw in Darwin's presented "evidence" of natural selection in On the Origin of Species, that no new species were produced by animal husbandry and animal husbandry is not natural but intentional human choice that it is a major scandal that he and his disciples got away and still get away with pretending it "proves" to do what it doesn't do at all. What they were observing was the manipulation of existing lines of genetics WITHIN A SPECIES but they either didn't know or didn't take Mendel seriously so they never corrected themselves even after his paper was published. Not that the geneticist Darwinists of the next generations seemed to care to correct it, either.

Darwin's own theory and the geological evidence of how long it takes for species to arise out of parent species makes it obvious that science can never see it happen except, perhaps, in very rapidly reproducing things like viruses which I doubt could have the same mechanisms of evolution that large multi-cellular species of plants and animals can be said to have. That it could happen rapidly enough for scientists to observe it would make the claim that it happened by the same mechanism that requires many thousands or more years in even single-celled species entirely far fetched.

The reproduction of viruses within the cells of other species is certainly not like the reproduction in entire kingdoms of life with entirely different means of reproduction. To believe the same, single mechanistic theory could explain both of those seems to me to require pretending things that are entirely and obviously unlike are like each other.  I don't think anyone is required to believe that without conclusive evidence which will never be had.

I have the greatest objection to something which is claimed to take many, many times longer than the longest recorded human lifetime, certainly longer than the history of science and the existence of human culture being claimed to be "observable."  Especially if it is claimed that it can be done with the observational rigor and measurement that is required to produce valid science and its reliable knowledge.  The means with which the aftereffects of long ago events in physics can be observed and reliable conjectures about those being made - with observable predictions in many cases - would certainly not work in the study of life because living organisms are far, far more complex and far, far more variable than generalizable aspects of non-living objects. But that's a side-track.

To repeat, the many examples of variations within a species grasped onto by scientists as an example demonstrating Darwin's theory of natural selection or, in fact, any other scheme of the origin of species in nature has the added and rather profoundly stupid problem that such new varieties are not new species but merely variants of existing species.  I think that in many if not virtually all cases that might be true for every single generation within the evolution of new species. New species don't evolve from long ago parent species, they evolve in the many generations of life which don't remain static but change in every generation, no generation of an existing line can be held to be "unfit" for the time and place they lived and reproduced.

The theory of gradual change over time, and even the already old updated version of that in punctuated equilibrium both of which are theorized to produce new species merely support my contention that scientists and, in fact, human beings have never witnessed the evolution of new species in nature, never mind studied even one incident of natural speciation to be able to reliably describe it from the observation and measurement required to identify things so subtle as mechanisms that work themselves out over tens of thousands of years.

Though I think it's quite probable that what we imagine as a "mechanism" to do that may be nothing like a mechanism at all.  To repeat a point just made, the most typical presentation of that as a new species arising and its parent species "going extinct" is likely wrong because what probably happens in many if not most cases is an entire branch of a species changes over many generations, the changes incorporated into that branch of the species every step of the way. No one "trait" defines a new species, even as they might be a stunningly noticeable feature of later fossils as compared to far older ones. Organisms come as a complete package, and in living organisms, especially those that behave, that package is stupendously complex. And evolutionary scientist have a decided tendency to grasp onto one "trait" and ignore the rest of the organisms and their varied lives. If they consider those at all, they make up a cartoonish story about them most often with absolutely no evidence at all.

You might as well say that the ancient ancestors of a continuing family line all go extinct even as their progeny successfully continue into the future.  To claim they lost in a "struggle for life" is only true in the sense that everyone eventually loses that struggle as we all die.  That claim made from fossils of what seem to be closely related species separated by thousands of years makes as little sense. That is assuming the younger fossils are of the same line as those of an the older species which I wonder how you can tell in most cases, so many intervening generations being lost, probably none of the later examples being from direct descents of the far earlier ones they are compared to.  You might be able to make claims in a far more general sense in lines of genetic inheritance among closely or even enormously remotely related species but that doesn't do much of anything to tell you how those changes happened.

As it is usually presented, both in the vulgar understanding and the alleged valid ones,  we are to imagine the unchanged "parent" species existing at the same time as the new species and it losing in what got the rather whimpish hypochondriac, Malthusian Brit aristocrat Darwin all hot, imagined stories of them dying in a violent "struggle for life" when by the time the new species is called a new species, probably most if not all of the descendants of the parent species have changed in one or many branches into other species. Most of the individuals of any generation and many entire generations leaving no fossil evidence of their existence including their reproductive success or failure.

If there were identifiable members of the parent species around at the time the new species had changed, the individuals of that species could certainly not be held to be less fit for the environment they were in, I'd guess they probably interbred with the branch of the "new species" all along as we have discovered some of our "extinct cousin" humanoids have with branches of modern humans.  I don't get how Neanderthals which have living human descendants can be said to have "gone extinct" anymore than the homo sapiens they had children with can be held to have.  If they survived under changed conditions that allegedly caused the rise of the "new species" they must have adapted to such new conditions, their great grand kids may have not looked much like their fossil remains lead us to think they looked but the same is true within modern human families with no neanderthal genes.  

I doubt there is any such thing as natural selection except in the human imagination as much as I doubt there is or ever will be any one sufficient explanation of how and why species changed over time.  There are apparent and well evidenced events that wiped out many species, such as the impact of a large meteorite that is the current best idea of what led to the end of the big dinosaurs and, certainly, many other species but that has nothing to do with Darwinism.  Darwin's imagined Hobbsian (perhaps typically British) mechanism had nothing to do with that. The relationship of that catastrophe and the gradual change of the surviving lines of life are in no way "explained" by the fact of that mass extinction event.  I don't understand why you mentioned it.   

I think there are probably a myriad of causes in how species change and even how they die out rapidly. The rise of a new strain of viruses, especially in gregarious species such as humans have become, is probably much more to do with it in many cases than Darwin's titillating "struggle for existence" the stuff that fuels the imagination of so many pasty, soft-handed male aristocrats and milquetoast academics and, no doubt, motivates their fantasies and which leads more ambitious Darwinists of action they inspire to commit genocide.

I think a lot of what is interpreted from the geological record of old species "dying out" is actually just entire species evolving over time and changing the general appearance of the scanty fossils of organisms within that continuing line of life. I think the old habits of reading the fossil evidence and telling ripping yarns about it has become one of the most obvious unscientific habits of scientists.  One engaged in even by scientists who criticize the telling of "Just-so stories".  

It has occurred to me that the habit of story-telling out of our lived human experience or even our imaginations of the several thousand years of highly biased and selective and self-contradicting articulated human history carries a huge danger when it comes to making up stuff about far longer epochs of time, especially those extending into tens, thousands and billions of years, especially in other, especially quite unrelated species.  Telling stories, making up scenarios from lived human experience or reading recorded human history as if the ill-understood aspects of that can be made to extend throughout hundreds of thousands of years is certainly an unreliable means of understanding what happened on that far longer scale of time.

Almost a century ago A. S. Eddington rather stunningly suggested there may be realms of physical law that entirely escape human comprehension and which we will never understand (and may well never even notice). I think it's possible there are aspects of long stretches of the history of life on Earth that are, as well, beyond our comprehension.  If any of those aspects impinged on speciation, we would never be able to put those into our Just-so stories.  The stories might seem plausible because we judge them on the basis of our experience but that resort to familiar human experience could be, I'd say could probably be what makes them unreliable.  Or at least of questionable reliability without rigorously tested evidence of which very little to none is available in either the fossil or genetic records. There are things which we could never understand even if the evidence was looking us right in the face. If some hegemonic ideology stood between us and that evidence, as it does in evolutionary biology, I'd say we probably wouldn't be able to see it.

I think if we have a future, the hundred and sixty years and more of Darwinist hegemony of science and the imagination of western culture will probably be looked on as more of a quaint or more honestly called disastrous ancient folly than classical cosmology and such things as alchemy are considered today. Though none of those classical and medieval theories come down to us with such a huge mountain of murders motivated by them so fast. Those kinds of things ruled the culture and intellectual class of their times as much as Darwinism has in its period of hegemonic domination.  I think it's long shown signs of being problematic and, really, is just not a very good theory - a theory of science which is not capable of being observed in nature has no more than a fadingly, improbably narrow chance of being the right one - and I think now it is ever less credible as the one and only explanation of what it claims to explain.  

That there is no other universally accepted explanatory theory that has taken its place may well be due to the fact that there is no one way in which species arise and, if any are proposed, they also have the problem of not being observable in nature for the reasons I've mentioned above.

I hold that the ideological hold that natural selection has on science makes the requirements placed on any proposed rival or superseding theory entirely higher than natural selection was ever subjected to.

The domination of Darwinist storytelling, as mentioned, will limit the imaginations of most people, the coercive bullying not to criticize natural selection probably even more so. I don't think there will ever be a real, secure, validly scientifically identified mechanism of speciation in nature because the needed evidence is forever lost in the millennia and epochs of the irretrievable past.  That one or more will never finally tip the bust of Darwin into the embarrassing boneyard of discontinued science, however; is not anything like certain, even at that.

Biologists might not like that because they use natural selection as if it explained things that it can't be demonstrated to explain and things which, other than by claims of "natural selection," they may not be able to present any evidence for at all. They can pretend they understand a lot of things which they really don't. That habit expanded from story-telling of merely seeming plausibility to fill in the enormous voids in the study of evolution through natural selection's imaginary universal explanatory power into a whole host of rank pseudo-sciences, starting with eugenics and modern scientific racism and the allied pseudo-scientific field of psychology. As mentioned, Darwinism has reaped a body-count already numbering in the millions.  It's deeply embedded in the culture and the professional interest of scientists but so were those antique mechanisms of cosmology and chemistry mentioned above.

I have no doubt that all known existing species evolved from earlier species of life, I am certain that the general theory of evolution is true but the longer I look into and think about scientific claims about that other than the most general ones, the dodgier those generally are. I don't think there is any one dodgier than natural selection nor any one which is more stupidly held to be a required article of scientific faith or respectability in the college-credentialed world. And few such follies, other than things like the denial of human-made climate change, are more dangerously maintained.

* Reading through this, I think it's not a surprise that Darwin's use of human breeding to get results human beings wanted from the plants and animals they breed led him to believe that evolution weeded out the "unfit" so the survivors would be "the fittest" even though the resulting varieties of plants and animals human breeding produced very often were quite to entirely unsuited for life in the wild. Making his use of that to make claims about what happened in nature, even more logically inept.   No incident of human breeding can ever be reliably claimed to represent what happens over far longer periods in nature, especially if it is claimed that that natural progression happened without the intelligent intent the human act is saturated with.

The folly of mistaking what was held to be economically more beneficial or merely desired from a human standpoint to be a demonstration of "fitness" in terms of the natural world is not surprising as the theory of natural selection starts with Malthus's absurd notion that the entirely artificial  consequences of intentionally and interestedly invented English and then British law, which is largely centered around the construction and support of a brutal and unjust economic and social caste system and even more brutally gangsterish imperialism, was a model of how "the law of nature" he proposed leaving the British poor to worked.  

That was such a stupid aristocratic idea of nature that not long before Darwin started the production of his theory the British radical William Cobbett correctly noted that if the British poor were left to "the law of nature" as Malthus called for, the poor would quickly strip the rich of what they'd stolen and hoarded from them as nature knows no legal rights to property of the kind Malthus, Darwin and virtually every one of their supporters had as the foundation of their thoughts.

If there is one thing that is obvious in the study of evolution it is the substitution of narrative fiction for actual observation and quantification due to the fact that

a. all but a vanishingly small and almost certainly non-representative sample of evidence of past life is now and forever lost and that evidence tells us little to nothing about the actual lives of the fossilized organisms and their reproductive success or failure,

b. the time scale of the evolution of species is so long that scientific observation of it is impossible in the resolution that would make the identification of the mechanism(s) of evolution nothing but guess work,

c. the actual complexity of organisms, their lives, their reproduction individually and of a species makes any claims as to that absurd,

means that every and all of the stories told by humans about evolution will be intrinsically wrapped up in such cultural and ideological and habitual artifacts of human imagination. There is every reason to believe those stories tell us a lot more about the minds of the tellers of such tales than they do about nature. Other than some very general conclusions based on fossil records and the inheritance of genes, virtually all of the lore of evolutionary science is of unknowable reliability but each item of that lore is of very highly improbable reliability. The shelf-life of claims about evolution as compared to those of experimentally verified physics and chemistry is not impressive.  The more elaborate and so attractive the claim is, the quicker it rots. That is especially true of the violent and self-interested theory of natural selection, I doubt much of any of its true believers believes themselves to be an example of a degenerate biological type worthy of weeding out of the future such as they readily consider those they don't like to be.

I think biologists should spend the time they waste on telling Just-so stories that are frequently pretty dangerous on studying aspects of biology that can actually be seen and measured. Those are dauntingly complex enough to be getting on with and may well be extremely important, little to nothing said about evolution matters in the same way. That is assuming the Just-so story tellers had the chops to do important science of that kind. A number of the most famous ones, I doubt could.  They should leave telling lies about cavemen to pop-novelists and trashy made-for-TV pseudo-scientific with nauseating-background-music, nauseating video-game-zoomily edited "documentaries."  They shouldn't appear on those.  Appearing often on TV is a contra-indication of good scholarship or science.  TV is intellectually dysgenic.

I hate TV. It makes people stupider.

Note: Still having consequences of Covid, still feel like crap, I'm feeling ranty.

Only Words - The Needed Fights We Can't Afford Not To Have

CHRISTIANITY NEEDS to have a real knock-down,drag out fight with the Republican-fascist Mammonists who the mass media refer to, I'd guess well over three quarters of the time, as if they represent Christianity. The media goes along with those fascists claiming the mantle of "Christianity" for themselves even more often,  never seeming to have on people to refute their self-anointing.

They are not Christians. By their fruits you will know them, their fruits are not Christianity - there is absolutely nothing ambiguous about that. An abundance of what has been called "Christian" in the history of Christianity is obviously opposed to the Gospel of Jesus.  

I think to a large extent anti-Christian and anti-religious people in the media are happy to have the fascists and neo-Nazis, the Republican-fascists, the gaudy TV style preachers, the cargo-cult prosperity "gospel" circus be what is "Christianity" for the media addled masses.  They are happy because they want Christianity to be discredited and diminished in numbers by it becoming unfashionable. Fashion is the primary god of so many of us under materialism, especially of the college-credentialed class which stupidly provides us with most of those who comprise "the media".  That is what they want even risking the already obvious dangers that giving the Mammonists the upper hand and corrupting our society and our politics as they have successfully done.

To a large extent, even those in the media who don't have strong feelings hostile to Christianity or religion in general have adopted the practice, probably in most cases as unthinkingly as some has-been Hollywood actor turned talk-show-host recites the expected lines they know they're supposed to. The practice of thinking most of what's said in the media has all the intellectual substance and sincerity of an ad is probably the beginning of wisdom about it. I think most of "the press" and media are that unthinkingly automatic in promoting attitudes not even ideas.  As I believe I've mentioned recently, I think that kind of casual desire to be part of the in-crowd for professional benefit is behind much if not most of the academic anti-Christianity that is more than typical of that milieu.  And the media doesn't even have the degraded professional requirements of our pathetic excuse for academics, these days.

On the second of December RMJ reminded us of the four martyrs murdered by the US trained and supported fascist military in El Salvador, Ita Ford, Maura Clark, Jean Donovan and Dorothy Kazel, four voluntary servants of the poorest people in Central America, four martyrs who were murdered by a military at war with the poor.  Martyrs who were subsequently slandered under oath by Al Haig and Jean Kirkpatrick, on behalf of the Reagan administration. The Reagan administration conducted a vicious terrorist campaign in a number of countries, against the law of the United States. I will point out that Reagan, certainly one of the most active terrorist leaders of his time, is automatically lauded by the American free-press whose freedom has seldom led to widespread telling of inconvenient truth. Even the liberals mouth those empty pieties regarding one of our worst presidents.

I have to wonder just why it is that those who might believe in the Gospel of Jesus are so shy about defending it against the false prophets warned about in it.  It could be the habits of mistaking the essential administrative secularism in government for some idiotically assumed requirement that restricts us from defending Christianity from pseudo-christians, hallelujah peddlers, white supremacists, etc. An inhibition I'll note none of those white supremacy sepulchers feel restricted by at all. Or it could be that a watered-down notion of Christianity is superseded by the old rule of etiquette that you don't talk about politics or religion among those who put superficial niceness, the best to go along to get along, over all else. I seem to recall Miss Manners once yearning to hear such fights at a dinner party, so false is that namby-pamby niceness rule. If there is one thing that niceness liberalism of that kind proves to be, it is totally impotent when it comes to fighting against fascists (white supremacy being our indigenous form of that), neo-Nazis, Republican-fascists, etc.  Such "christianity" is certainly useless to the effort expressed in "thy Kingdom come, they will be done," such as, no doubt, many of them might occasionally pray for.  The idea that such a thing might come to humans without human agency in doing the will of God is absurd.  It is certainly useless to the least among us such as those who the four martyred church women gave thier lives for.  

Jesus told the truth and it got him killed in the sadistically brutal Roman Imperial way, so with so many of those who followed him. Reagan's agents in Central America practiced the same kind of terror murder.  Jesus said he came not to bring peace but strife that would divide people.  He used the most violent of metaphors to tell his followers that it wasn't all going to be church socials, prayer breakfasts and faculty luncheons, that they were going to get killed for spreading the Gospel. I will note that the earliest martyr generations of Christianity were pacifists, they weren't reticent or especially nice when it came to asserting the Gospel.  The willingness to at the very least be shunned and looked askance at, being considered uncouth or not invited to go on a chat show for saying the unfashionable is the very least that should be expected from someone who really believes in the Gospel of Jesus, the Epistles, the testimony of the martyrs, etc.   I think calling anyone who isn't willing to do that a Christian is probably false labeling.  Though maybe like the words "socialism," "democracy," and "republic" the word "Christian" has come to mean nothing, so distorted in use has it become. From the mouths of M.T. Greene, Nick Fuentes, Kanye, Donald Trump, etc. the word means not only less than nothing, it means Mammon worship of the worst kind.

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"Right's" Too

I think along with the brawl advocated above, we need a real knock-down, drag-out over just why, against all experience, we are to revere the "right" of "freedom of the press" when they use that freedom to peddle so many lies on behalf of billionaires, millionaires and other evil guys who hate equality and democracy.

Jefferson's idiotic 1780s slogan about preferring newspapers to governments - you wonder why Jefferson spent his life in government instead of starting a newspaper if he really believed that - is certainly a lesson in the folly of that kind of idolatry of the free press.   With that idolatry you get things like the Reagans and George W. Bush's they peddle as idols and with them terrorist campaigns in Central America and the illegal invasion of Iraq, the consequences of which we are still paying for.  

Not so publicized in the media is the more mature quote from Jefferson in 1807 when his experience of "the free press" led him to say, " "nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle."  Which demonstrates the stupidity of his earlier, unconditioned proclamation.

Since there is no requirement to serve the truth to be considered and to peddle yourself as a journalist, a requirement that the alleged profession of journalism would be universally hostile to because "the First Amendment", it is the height of absurdity to hold journalism as if it lived by that professional requirement.   As things are, they are more likely to profit from lying.  The Warren Court stupidly, no doubt thinking of the slogan of Jefferson just slammed by me, made that situation far, far worse by allowing journalists to lie about, as it turned out, Democratic politicians. For which journalists ever since have praised that emancipation from the requirement to serve the truth a carte blanche to tell some of the most consequential of lies.  

If journalism doesn't choose the side of telling the truth, it has to be required to serve the truth. As it demonstrates, it has to be required to serve its only legitimate function. They should have the privileges stupidly denominated as "rights" in the First Amendment taken from them except to be used to tell the truth. As I've said before, only natural born creatures have rights endowed by their Creator, human invented entities don't have rights.  But such man-made things might be granted what are honestly called "privileges"  but doing so without requirements is too stupid for any responsible democracy to do.  There is no right of the press, there is a privilege and if the First Congress that wrote the Bill of Rights really was stupid enough to give the press a privilege to lie - as people today are stupid enough to believe - they were even more callow amateurs than I suspect they were. Remarkably, the subsequent congresses and courts, till the Warren Court, didn't see fit to knock down libel and slander laws.

Now that, under "free press" that has come to include the total degeneracy of "social media" - Twitter's popularity among journalists is certainly indicative of that profession's degenerate state - things have gone to hell in ways that the epically myopic Supremes in 1964 could not have imagined. Even more so now that a whimsical and stupid white South African-libertarian-fascist billionaire owns it. I haven't noticed the automatic exodus of professional journalists from it.  I would like to see Elon being deported, by the way.  He is a clear and present danger to American democracy.

Even among natural born humans, there is no such a thing as a right to do what's wrong.  There is no such a thing as a right to lie, especially the most consequential and damaging of lies that fill the most free media in the history of the world such as in the United States. There's a good reason the beneficiaries of lies, Republican-fascists,neo-Nazis,fascists, our indigenous fascists of white supremacy have taken up the mantle of the ACLU which represented so many of them in court.

The Warren Court, encouraged by the ACLU and the media paid lawyers pretended to think the First Congress were that stupid, though the subsequent Rehnquist and Roberts Courts who have taken full advantage of that opportunity given to them to lie fascists into power in perpetuity and to destroy democracy only cited the Warren Court. Anyone who thinks the Republican-fascists, the owners of large media care about the consequences of this for equality and democracy is an idiot.  They couldn't care less about good government or equality or democracy, they are all about the amassing of power by the rich and privileged, it was exactly that which the Warren Court stupidly enabled in their "free speech-press" rulings.  That is proven by the subsequent history of the country under their rulings, real life is the proof of that, the fruits by which you will know the actual nature of things, the actual truth of the matter outting itself.  If the Warren Courts theory of "free speech-press" was valid in an egalitarian democracy the consequences would be greater equality, greater democracy instead of Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, Bush II and Trump, perhaps DeSantis next.  There should have been no prospect of any of them gaining power if the ACLU's theories of "free speech-press" were right.  That has lead to the steady worsening of things, not things getting better.

Republican Fascist Hate Has And Wields Enormous Power When Will Unassociated White People Be Required To Disavow And Condemn It?

WHILE LIGHTING MY STOVE this morning, I came across an almost five year old Boston Globe op-ed by Renee Graham,  Why We Can't Afford Farrakhan, a criticism of a Woman's March activist who had praised the then 84 year old fountain of hate for LGBTQ People, the putrid old cesspool of antisemitism, etc.  I have no problem with criticizing someone who does that, it's the kind of game as has knee-capped the real struggle for justice over and over again but let's make the rule apply when the voices of hate have actual instead of insignificant effect.

It brought back to me the time a couple of decades ago when there was a media ritual whenever a Black Person being interviewed on the radio I listened to or on TV (which I still watched a bit) who would be required to ritually disavow and criticize Louis Farrakhan on the basis of his antisemitism, no matter how unassociated with him they seemed to be. It went from being a little bit silly to being extremely offensive.  I remember considering that the context of white racists who the media could have demanded unassociated white interviewees disassociate themselves from but, of course, that wasn't the common practice.  In preparation of this,  the fascist American media is still playing that game against Democratic politicians who have literally nothing in common with him except skin color and whose careers champion what he hates.

Farrakhan is, thankfully, being taken care of with time and senescence.  I was left wondering if he's still alive, like, from time to time, I used to wonder if Lyndon Larouche was.  But, as the recent loused-supper at Mar-a-Lago proves, new figures of hate have sunk to that same bottom he fed and flourished in. I'm not, of course, in favor of the same degradation ritual being reenacted with Kanye taking his place.  Which he seems to be. But I do have to ask the same question during the "denounce Farrakhan" fad of the 90's if the media will ever feel as virtuous about the far more relevant and justifiable requirement that those who were and are actually associated with Republican-fascism to disavow figures as extreme to far more extreme, those who have had and still do have actual power and violent followers to put their hate, antisemetic, anti-LGBTQ, racist, misogynistic hate into deadly action.

The Nation of Islam is and always was a tin-pot criminal gang compared to the Republican-fascist Party which is, today, the political party of America's native fascism, white supremacy, the very thing that, among other things, led to the congealing of The Nation of Islam and its development as a hate group. Its presence on the Supreme Court is a far more serious danger than Louis Farrakhan with actual power that does disenfranchise, oppress and get us killed RIGHT NOW. And that's only one of the organs of government and actual power where Republican-fascists control things.  You can say that about many police departments who have a license to kill, and we all know who is quite likely to get killed by them.

Without America's native form of fascism it's almost certain that The Nation of Islam would never have existed and LF would likely have been an obscure member of a violin section who taught applied lessons and made the lives of his students miserable. Or, maybe, he would have been a happier person and not gone full little Hitler,  mad with the power his hate got him.

I'm not going to hold my breath to see if I listen to NPR or PBS or some network talk show for every current member of the Republican-fascist Party to be required to disavow the scores and hundreds of Republican-fascists with actual power and influence of the kind that Farrakhan, for all his putrescence, never had. It's different when you're a white supremacist.

I have no hesitancy in calling The Nation of Islam a hate group and a criminal gang, being one of its targeted People.  No more than I do the Republican-fascists and white supremacists.  There might have been a time when I would not have felt as comfortable holding the entire groups responsible for the character of their leadership, but hate groups seem to become ever more like themselves, ever less diverse, ever more honestly characterized. I have no problem or hesitancy in calling both for the hate groups they are.   Anyone who doesn't want to be associated with that has had ample time to quit the things. 

Really. "Angels Dancing On The Head Of A Pin" - Ignorant Hate Mail

I HAVE REPEATED THAT the mid-1990s book "The Historical Jesus" of John Dominic Crossan had the effect of sparking my interest in and taking seriously the Gospels and, from there, the writings of the rest of the Second Testament. And, inevitably from that, the Jewish Bible.  But I've also mentioned that I have become very skeptical about the "historical Jesus" business since then. I freely admit that along the way I have adopted some of that skepticism from such eminent scholars as Walter Brueggemann, Luke Timothy Johnson and Marilynne Robinson.

Recently reading about the theories, modern and quite old, about the various hands that went into the creation of the First Testament, I have found myself far more skeptical about similar claims made about the early Christian texts which have a far shorter history before they became the canon of orthodox Christian Scripture. I think a lot of New Testament Scholars envy the complex richness of First Testament scholarship and they want those kinds of publication generating opportunities for themselves. I have gone from taking the claims of the various, often disagreeing modern pruners and adders to and ideologically interpreting scholars about the Christian scriptures as being no more reliable than those who produced the canonical books of the Second Testament. And, in some ways, for me, quite less so, so removed from the milieu in which Jesus and his earliest followers lived.

As an aside, I have come to ask why the "historical Jesus" industry is allowed to have it both ways, discrediting the canonical Gospels because they were written a few decades after Jesus lived because they were written too late to be credible while allowing the far later ones, even some of them making clearly inauthentic and incredible claims and even some pretty wacky "sayings," more current cred.  Such as the devalued thing that current cred is.  They should get their industrial standards straightened out, like right now.

I think the reason Luke and the others wrote what they did (and with some details, we have a pretty reliable text of what they did) is because they knew people who knew Jesus or who learned from those who did and those things are what they told them. It's not out of the question that some of them may have known or witnessed his named followers or been eye witness to some of it. And they believed they were saying what was said about him was accurate. That is while it's clear none of them believed they were producing a biography, accurate in every detail chronology or even a comprehensive account of what was taught and what happened. I think the author of Mark probably didn't have time or paper or the educational background nearly as much as the author of Luke-Acts did.  

And I think when they said Jesus was talking about life and death, in a time and place when early and often violent death was so common, that's what they were talking about. I think people were probably, day to day, even more anxious about our fate at death than modern people are till they face death full on. When Jesus had Lazarus and the rich man existing in present time versions of what Christianity interpreted as heaven and hell, I think that's what they think he meant.  And I think the obscure passages of Jesus prophesying were presented in quite confusing terms because that's the nature of prophesy, as done by Jesus as it was the seers of Isaiah and Jeremiah. Just what he was referring to is open to interpretation.

As to the use of metaphor by Jesus, given his life and violent death, the testimony about the Resurrection, life and death, the two richest sources of metaphorical potential, it wouldn't be anything but expected that he and his followers would use those terms metaphorically to deal with the pre-decease vicissitudes of human experience and to describe things we cannot experience.  The very act of using terms metaphorically requires there to be common aspects of what is used metaphorically and what those are used to describe.  But sometimes life and death and claims about life after death aren't metaphors but facts and claims about those. If that were not the case the metaphor would be powerless to describe anything.   And, unless you see the risen Jesus, unless you see what was described, when it comes to Resurrection, human beings are stuck with relying on the metaphors. And even if you saw Jesus risen from death, if you wanted to talk about it, that's how you'd probably do it.

Try reading some modern theoretical physics and tell me which is more sensible in human terms.  Oh, you'll need more math than you probably have. Otherwise, like other than a few thousand people in the world, including me, you have to take that on faith. Though, like me, you aren't required to believe it. Which of the conflicting multiverse legends of physics are you to choose?

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I can say that the commentary of The Jewish Study Bible published by The Jewish Publications Society and, right now, the collection of Essays in the back of the book will probably influence me much more than Crossan or the better of his colleagues will.  And the more I look at the scholarship and careers of some of them, I don't hold them to be reliable. In a few cases, even some who got faculty positions at some of the more elite universities out of the fame they got from the "historical Jesus" fad, I don't find them credible.  

Among the things I've gotten from  reading the JSB has been its account of not only commentary after the present texts of Scripture have been determined but the way that all through the production of the texts the insertion and incorporation of commentary on the earliest kernels of the various books has been going on and what we have is a rich and varied and often conflicting compound based in the interpretations of large numbers of unknown rabbis, editors, theologians, priests, etc. based on their understandings, their preferences and, in the way of every human language document ever produced, influenced by often very different experiences and points of view and, so, commentary on scripture is an extremely hard thing  to do but you can't read it without doing that. So it's not any great surprise it's often done badly.  For example,

Finally, some later comments on biblical passages occur within those passages themselves, at least in the text of the Bible has been in use for the past two millennia. Like modern readers, ancient readers penned explanations or reactions to the text they were reading in margins or between the lines. Some of these marginal comments were subsequently inserted into the text itself by scribes who copied the scroll containing the marginal comment. (It is also possible that some of these comments were inserted to begin with by scribes who made them as they were copying a scroll.) For example, 1 Kings 15.5 originally limited itself to a comment praising King David, and one important manuscript of the ancient Greek translation of Kings preserves that original text. A later scribe found the fulsome praise of David inconsistent with the story in 2 Sam. ch 11. That story is exceedingly critical of David for committing adultery with the wife of Uriah the Hittite (one of his own soldiers) and for having Uriah murdered to insure that the adultery was not discovered. Therefore, the scribe added a qualification in 1 Kings 15.5: "except in the matter of Uriah the Hittite."  These words became part of the Masoretic Text, which thus contains both the original author's evaluation of David and a later reader's reaction to that evaluation.  

And, more consequentially, I'd think, that's true of even the most central parts of Scripture, even THE CENTRAL text, Exodus.

Similarly, Exod. 22.24 originally read,  "If you lend money to My "am," do  not act toward them as a creditor; extract no interest from them."  Now,  the Hebrew word "am" usually means "people,"  but it can also mean "the poor" or "common folk, peasantry" (see Isa. 3.15; Ps.72.2; Neh. 5.1).  To make clear that in this case the second of these meanings was to be understood, a later scribe added the words "to the poor among you" immediately after "'am."  Since the meaning of "am" as "people" was more common, the scribe worried that without clarification the verse would be misread.

When I think of how I could be spending my dwindling days instead, teasing out the so abstract as to have no meaning games of modern philosophers, the thinking of "ethicists" whose primary professional activity is writing up lists of who it's Ok to let die of neglect or to actively murder, following the absolute trash of commercial "culture," cinematic "art,"(I was recently subjected to a Hallmark Christmas crap movie) I'd rather be doing this. Modernism turns out to be the ideological focusing on the equivalent of counting angels dancing on the head of a pin, materialist-atheist-scientism requires the demotion and inconsequence of human minds and modern kulcha follows suit, from the basest to the ritziest.

And as to "angels dancing on" which, contrary to the college-credentialed common received wisdom of my and he immediately preceding generations Aquinas doesn't seem to have proposed doing, it was an anti-Catholic early modern era Brit who seems to have made that polemical myth up. I wish I had a ten for every in-the-know university teacher,student or hanger on I heard make an in-the-know disdainful reference to that.  If I had one for every time I got a comment as ignorant as yours, I might not be able to buy a crappy social media company but I could buy a better computer.

Unlike modern philosophy in its most esteemed form, I'll take anything that ends up with it being even slightly more likely the poor will receive the material support they need, enough so that it will contribute to their having a decent life, even if that is some "historical Jesus" text. I'll leave it to the atheist theoretical physicists to argue how many universes are generated when I hit the wrong key or my damned space bar sticks.  I'll certainly take the moral conclusions of Crossan over the death lists of modern "ethics."  

Magnificat J. Michael Thompson

 

 

 

The Schola Cantorum of St. Peter the Apostle, 

 J Michael Thompson Director

 

The setting uses the Orthodox style of interspersing a devotional text between the verses.   

 

Excellent chorus.  

Magnificat in a Minor - Harold Darke

 

Hereford Cathedral Choir 

Roy Massey director

 

On The First Monday of Advent

This book proposes that one fruitful approach to the theology of Mary, historically the mother of Jesus, called in faith the Theotokos or God-bearer, is to envision her as a concrete woman of our history who walked with the Spirit."
Elizabeth A. Johnson from Truly Our Sister

IN AN E-MAIL INTERVIEW of the theologian Elizabeth A. Johnson by Clint A. Schenekloth, a Lutheran pastor, the Magnificat came up. But there's a lot more to come before then.

Clint:  If I am reading you correctly, it is not necessary to understand the virgin birth as parthenogenesis in order to confess the virgin birth of faith.  Rather virginity has to do with the independence for the woman, and is related to Mary's free assent to the work of the Spirit in making her the Theotokos.  Is that correct?

I will break in to note one thing, the common resort to parthenogenesis to describe the conception of Jesus makes a big mistake because parthenogeneis always results in an offspring who is the same gender as the mother in species which have the XY chromosomal form of reproduction.  I believe it has never been observed to.  Whatever the story of the conception of Jesus in Luke and Matthew is, it is not nearly a conventional description of the biological phenomenon of parthenogenesis.    

Elizabeth:  I'm not sure you hit the nail on the head with this one, though what you say does reflect some of the aspects of what I think.  Basically, the virginal conception (which is different from the virgin birth) is a christological truth, not a doctrine about Mary.  In Scripture, as I try to show on pp.  251-254, the Spirit's overshadowing Mary signals that God is doing a new thing here.  God is taking the initiative.  As in Gen. 1 when the Spirit moves over the chaotic waters and in Exodus with the cloud and pillar of fire leading the people and in the transfiguration scene in the gospels, the words used by Luke point to the creative presence and action of God doing a new thing in the world.  The conception of Jesus told in this language means that who Christ is cannot be traced to the efforts of human beings alone.  His origin is in God.  He comes to us as a gift of God, at the Creator Spirit's own initiative.  It's kind of like sola gratia in a different setting.

As you note, women today also read the scene as a marvelous story of how God and a woman can bring about the Messiah, without the help of men, which symbolized both women's spiritual empowerment and also a critique of patriarchal power.  This is a great gain toward understanding the propoer relationships among human beings.

But the heart of the text is theological, saying a truth about Christ.

And here I'll break in to note that what she says about there being no men involved in the birth of Jesus mirrors a point that Sojourner Truth made at a suffrage meeting when they were being harassed by men,

Then that little man in black there, he says women can’t have as much rights as men, ‘cause Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.

If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it. The men better let them.

Clint:  I'd like to hit the nail on the head with this one,  so we'll try a second time (and point taken, the virginial conception is a different issue than the virgin birth).  I'm not quite sure, given the context of its usage, what Carsten Colpe means when he insists that the Holy Spirit overshadowing Mary is "the opposite of human creation" (253). I understand that it is different, by why opposite?  To ask it another way, you emphasize that God is not a sexual partner but a creative power in the beginning of Jesus, but why is God's being a creative power set in opposition to the procreative understanding traditionally ascribed to the Holy Spirit in the virginal conception?  Of we could point out that might be obvious - God is present and "creative" in may situations, and God's Spirit is with us, empowering and protecting in many situations as well.  But humans, at least a vast majority of the time, only experience the procreativeness of God through childbearing when there is sexual intercourse involved (or the technologized versions of the same).  So what about Mary?

Elizabeth:  Regarding the creative action of God and procreation:  As I point out on pp. 227-233, thinkers from the second century on have put forth at least four interpretations namely that the child was conceived by Mary and Joseph having sexual relations, or that an unknown man seduced her, or that she was raped by the Roman soldier Panthera, or that this was a biological miracle.  This last became the teaching of the church.  Even here, however, no mechanism is ever described.  Given that the Holy Spirit is the creative agent and given that there is a tradition of considering the Spirit in feminine imagery,  it is too naive to posit the Spirit as the male sexual partner of Mary.

My fundamental position about the historical root of the virginal conception agrees with the biblical scholar Joseph Fitzmyer:  "What really happened?  We'll never know." Since the popular imagination has slipped into the idea that God acted as the male sexual partner in this conception, I spend a lot of energy deconstructing this notion.  
 

This does not mean that God could not have done so.  There is no opposition between the creative action of God and procreation, in priciple.  My point is, though, that such is not the theological heart of the Christian belief: "Conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary."

I have said that I have no great emotional attachment to the story of The Virgin Birth of Jesus but I have also said that there is no way that we can ever know if the angel Gabriel came and told her that she was going to have a baby by the action of the Holy Ghost even though she was a virgin.  Before I became too wrapped up with the anti-religious babble of Richard Dawkins - I'd been an opponent of his evo-psy since the late 1970s - I answered his claim that the question of the Virgin Birth could be solved with science by pointing out he made essentially the same mistake he did, over and over again, in his claims about evo-psy, that the absolutely necessary evidence to study the question scientifically was not and almost certainly never would be available, the resolvable and identifiable biological remains of Jesus, Mary and whoever his natural father might have been.  If he had a super-natural father, that crucial piece of evidence would never be had so the great champion of science did nothing but prove, again, that he really had very little conception of what the requirements to do science are.  Since then I found out that he seldom bothered to make observations, preferring to do his "science" from his writing table instead of in the field.  Yet he was probably one of the most influential writers on biology for the past forty five or so years.

I have to say I do like the story, especially as someone like Elizabeth Johnson goes over and thinks over it.  I love the Magnificat, probably the best Canticle in the Bible, certainly one which has generated perhaps more really good music than any of the others.  I believe what it says because I choose to believe in its radical, leveling view of reality in terms of equal justice, the kid of justice that secularism and human governments don't bring.   As I've pointed out, that's directly in opposition to the natural selection which is Dawkins' creator god substitute.

CLINT: Proclamation and preaching are important and integral loci of the Lutheran tradition. When I read your book [Truly Our Sister:  A theology of Mary in the Communion of Saints] and then note the placement of the Magnificat the beginning of Luke, it is my sense that Mary is one of the first preachers in the gospels, and certainly the first female preacher. Can you say more about what this means for the ecclesiology of the church as it relates to gender?

ELIZABETH A Johnson: The implications of the Magnificat for women in the church are many (271–274) [referring to the pages in her book, it's an e-mail interview]. Fundamentally, these words signal that the lowly will be lifted up.

In so far as women have not functioned or been treated equally in the churches, either in theory or practice, they count among the lowly (though thankfully that is beginning to change). The Magnificat urges even greater efforts in this regard, in light of God’s design revealed in this song.

CLINT: From an interpretive/theological perspective, is there a difference between preaching (say the preaching that goes on in Acts, for example) and prophetic singing (the songs sung by Hannah, Mary, etc.)? How does this relate to the ordination practices of our churches?

ELIZABETH: Obviously, there are differences among the churches here. I also draw attention to the feminist critique I made of Luke-Acts on pp. 213–216 and 301–302, in view of which Luke is not a reliable historical guide to what women did and how they preached in the early decades of the church. Luke had a different agenda. But women did preach in an apostolic way, even though he did not see fit to record this. So in truth, I do not see any direct connection to the ordination practices of the churches.

CLINT: My question here has more to do with the fact that Mary speaks/sings the Magnificat than it does with the actual content of what she speaks forth (as important as that content is). If we look at the text from a rhetorical perspective, it is a song and sermon placed very early in the Gospel of Luke, and placed on the lips of Mary. If we take Luther’s observation to heart, that “she sang it not for herself alone but for all of us, to sing it after her,” should we not say, and encourage the church to practice, the continued singing of this song not by a solo female voice with male priestly accompaniment, but rather with the full voice of the choir summoned forth by God to preach the gospel?

ELIZABETH: I agree—the Magnificat is a song for the whole church to sing.

I will speak up for Luke who was certainly not close to a feminist but who, for example, showed the Women of Jerusalem as faithfully and sorrowfully accompanying Jesus as he was going to his death instead of running away like the men did.  And he did give Mary more lines, not to mention Elizabeth, than in the other Gospels.  I think her critique is probably more relevant to Acts, which the author of Luke probably wrote as well.

I have always had a bit of unease with the idea of the trinity though I've read quite a lot about that theological idea and am more comfortable with it now than I used to be.  Part of what makes me more comfortable with it is exactly what Elizabeth Johnson says about the virginal conception of Jesus, "We'll never know."  I like the idea that God acts decisively in the midst of our physical reality, our lives in such a radical way as to be incarnated in the person of a human being, Jesus, who is also more than merely human as he is fully human.  I especially like the idea that with him all of physical reality is transformed - or, perhaps, that with his life and resurrection human beings can conceive of that transformation - and that we are all on our way to be more than merely physical beings in a physical world, while being that, as well.  I especially like the idea that these things surpass our ability to understand them.  I think that's in no small part because the human act of understanding is tied up so intimately with our experience of material existence and human thinking about mathematical objects so it would be absurd to think we could use understanding to become fully familiar with something partially, perhaps mostly outside of both our experience of physical reality or the manipulation of numbers and abstract lines and planes and points on those. These questions are a bit more complex than the axioms of math or our observations of the movements and combinations of objects.

As to who actually sings The Song of Mary, you have to take into account the practice of only allowing males, men and boys, to sing it in church for so many centuries.  While it is certainly a song that has meaning for everyone, I'd like there to be a whole slew of good to great settings for Women's voices, Women and girls as well as those which would have been composed with the idea that it was men or men and boys or, as in one of my favorite English settings by George Dyson, for boys, mostly younger than Mary would have been.  And I'd like a lot of those settings to be composed by Women as well as men.

I'm going to be dipping into some of the text of the series I did a number of years back where I posted one or more musical settings of the Magnificat during let almost every day of Advent.  I still am offline at home so it might be hit or miss and I will be concentrating most but not exclusively on living vernacular translations of it - I WILL NOT BE POSTING THE APPALLING ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF BACH'S SETTING OF THE LATIN TEXT BECAUSE IT IS A MUSICAL AND TEXTUAL ABOMINATION.  I will probably not post some of the pop style versions.  While those might mean something to some people, the show-biz style and format is something I can't imagine will lead anyone to the meaning of those.  I don't think they have the musical integrity of the songs of some of the more sincere blues or country musicians.  I wonder what someone like Dolly Parton might have done for a setting of it.  I'll bet it would be worth hearing.  Having had that thought, I can think of a whole list of Women I'll bet could do a good job of that.

More On The Tales of Genesis That Atheists Love To Embarrass Literalists With But Not Me - Hate Mail

THE JEWISH STUDY BIBLE says this about the similarities found in Genesis with some articles of Mesopotamian literature that so many like to claim the Jews stole from those poor, put upon pagans who repeatedly overran Israel and Judea.

Largely because of its focus on creation, the primeval history exhibits a number of contacts with Mesopotamian mythology.  The account of creation with which Genesis opens (1.1-2.3), for example, has affinities with Enuma elish, a Babylonian epic, which tells how one god, Marduk, attained supremacy over the others and created the world by splitting his aquatic enemy in half.  The story of Adam and Eve's sin in the garden of Eden (2.25-3.24) displays similarities with Gilgamesh, an epic poem that tells how its hero lost the opportunity for immortality and came to terms with his humanity.  And the story of Noah (6.5-9.17) Has close connections with Atrahasis, a Mesopotamian story in which the gods send a flood to wipe out the human race with the exception of one man from whom mankind begins afresh (the story was eventually incorporated into Gilgamesh as well).  In each case, the biblical narrator has adapted the Mesopotamian forerunner to Israelite theology.  The primeval history thus evidences both the deep continuities and the striking points of discontinuity of biblical Israel with its Mesopotamian antecedents and contemporaries.

I have no problem accepting this because I would have no problem with them using local folklore to make theological points or to assert the Hebrew ideas of morality.  Vatican II had what I think is a very honest teaching that the Scriptures contain what is needed for salvation, they are not history books or science books or even accurate in terms of those intellectual categories.   I can accept it on those terms and might be prepared to believe those were borrowings if we had a solid basis to make that assumption on, so far as I can see, we don't have that.

I do wonder why it never seems to occur to people that as with the variant texts of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, the Masoretic text, those of the Samaritans, etc. it is impossible to know what version is "original," assuming we have "the original," when they set the text of Genesis against the recovered texts of these related stories.  

The physical objects, encoded in clay might be older than the surviving fragments of the Hebrew Bible but that, in itself, doesn't guarantee that the non-Hebrew texts have a prior, independent existence from what we have now.  It never seems to be asked if the earlier versions of what appears in the Hebrew Bible may not have been copied by the source we have Gilgamesh, etc, from.  I think that the "older" versions of the story might seem to us older because the clay tablets used to write them down were more durable than either oral transmission or a language commonly written on far less durable paper or parchment.  I wonder if the reason there is so much cuneiform around is because it was a lot cheaper than paper or parchment would have been, its material substrate is literally as common as dirt and, given a pure enough source, is far easier to produce. And it never seems to be asked what the Gilgamesh, etc. came from, how the telling of it might have differed from an "original" form, altered to fit the local culture, heavily influenced by their theology and, almost certainly, their politics.  I wonder how much textual criticism of those has been done.

Or it is possible that the different versions grew from an earlier oral tradition that both of them knew and adapted but which we don't know.  The fact is, we simply don't know and likely never will know.  We know which tradition persisted, even with that less durable, more easily lost medium of its preservation which forces a reliance on the human choice to take it seriously enough to preserve it.  And that is the tradition that had such a radical, egalitarian content, a moral foundation of universal justice to it to make it worth preserving even in the more ephemeral, difficult to produce medium of writing on paper or parchment.

The fact is, like with my critique of much of, perhaps most of the alleged science done about biological evolution, the evidence to make any kind of reliable conclusions about that is not available.  Though it is possible that, unlike with so much of the stuff of evolution which covers millions and billions instead of thousands of years, is certainly lost for all time and comes with the inconvenience of not being as articulate or safely interpreted as written text.  There might be a better chance of something earlier coming up in this much narrower area of research, though I doubt it will be written on paper or parchment. It is unfortunate that the earliest Hebrew tradition that we know doesn't seem to have often used a more durable medium for writing, though it must have been a lot easier to lug around some scrolls than a bunch of heavy clay tablets, Genesis and Exodus show them to have been people on the go.  The fact is, unless we have readable texts that we can understand, earlier human culture is nothing but a product of rank conjecture and story telling, the modern versions of that lacking the basis in knowledge that those who produced the earliest available texts may have had access to.  In the modern pop version of that, the stuff of internet babble and "journalism" and in a good deal of the modern academic babble about it, there is an obvious anti-religious, anti-Jewish and, so, anti-Christian bias assumed from the start.  Even many Christians and Jews, wanting to be good and, more so, respectable academics go along uncritically to get along with that.  I think a lot of them give up too much way too easily when a MORE CRITICAL look at the evidence would not necessarily lead to the modern debunking of the texts.

Even if you make the stupendous mistake of mistaking Genesis for history as written by modern scholars, what makes Fundamentalism, in spite of itself a product of modernism, the fact is that the literary and editorial practice of including two versions of the same story in the text makes that far less credible than, as Brueggmann advocates, taking it seriously but "holding it loosely."  Following that advice, I take it seriously but never hold on to any ideas I might have about this or that passage of most of it as being certain knowledge.  That is especially true of the Gospels and the Prophets which contain passages that surpass that kind of knowing.

Of course I don't believe in the literal truth of the creation of the human species in Genesis (which one of the two accounts?).  While I respect his brilliance, his responsibility in formal intellectual discourse and his incredible work ethic which makes him such an effective debater with scientistic atheists, I think William Lane Craig's attempt to locate a biological Adam and Eve isn't his best work.  His evangelical orientation leads him to hold onto some things too hard, a criticism I can make of another current and very effective apologist, the Oxford mathematician, John Lennox.  If there's one thing we know about the literary cultures  that gave us Genesis and the other Books of the Bible (and there was considerable cultural change all during the period when those were written), they used exaggeration as a method of giving emphasis and to make things more noticeable.  I would guess that a Sarah might have been in her late 40s or early 50s, that a Moses would have had a considerably narrower number of years in which to do what is attributed to him. But that's my conjecture.  The record in Scripture is the only record we've got.  

Of course I don't believe that the flood in the story of Noah was a weather report on the most catastrophic rain storm in history - though the 1990s or so conjecture that it might have been a vaguely remembered cultural report on the flooding of the Black Sea basin thousands of years earlier had some appeal for me.  If I'd lived through it I might wonder what we'd done to make God do that to us.  And stories about it may well have persisted in oral literary culture for a very long time.   Though the scientific basis for such an origin is certainly in hot dispute with some evidence that it was horse feathers.

I think the Tower of Babel might have been a satirical (though not necessarily unreliable) report on a Trumpian building project that collapsed in arrogance, rich-guy insistence on their builders doing the impossible.  I predict "Neom" will turn out be one going on right now.  Maybe their architects were as incompetent about materials and physics as so many modern celebrity ones are in our "enlightened" culture.*  

Or through  misplaced confidence in unproved building technology.  And then there is the injustice that allowed the ruling class to waste resources on self-aggrandizement which could have gone to improve the conditions of the least among them.  I'll bet the poor people of knew they were getting the shaft so they could build the thing, like some realize that when the grifting Mayor and Council try to build a new football stadium or they put in a bid with the gangsters of the International Olympics Committee. Slave labor would almost certainly have been involved at some level.

In that there is certainly a parallel in the Pharaonic regime and its pyramids and other useless self-aggrandizing extravagances.  I'm more convinced that the cultural memory of that kind of thing might have something to do with the reluctance of the Jewish tradition to mention the afterlife except only very occasionally and generally somewhat askance. I'll bet that's part of what they thought of when they remembered that they were slaves in Egypt.

* And, or so my carpenter brother told me, even many non-celeb architects who run up huge costs doing the same.  He's worked on two hospitals that wasted enormous amounts on cost-overruns for totally useless architectural ornamentation such as an ornamental tower that didn't even contain a radio antenna, even more so on a very large indoor waterfall that carried such an obvious danger of becoming infectious that you have to wonder at the absolute stupidity of having such things IN A FRIGGIN' HOSPITAL approved by idiots who should never have been in a position to do that. I don't know if they still have it going but when I went in there the lobby stank of chlorine, so much so I had a hard time standing it for a few minutes.  Our hospitals are run by idiots and gangsters, the medical industry in the United States is a moral cesspool.  Obamacare was a huge advance over what was but it doesn't come close to fixing the basic problem of for-profit medicine, which should never have been allowed to become for-profit.