Stephen Drury, piano; Jessi Rosinski, flute
I posted this several years ago saying it was the finest performance of this piece I've heard live or on recording and I still say that.
I figure it's high time to start fulfilling my resolution to post more music again this year.
I Said I Wouldn't Address Any More Hate Mail On This Till The New Year, Well, It's January 4th.
TRYING TO GET some grip on the subtle and detailed theology of Karl Rahner, sometimes it's clearer, or at least easier, to read what other theologians have written about it. This passage from a paper, Karl Rahner and the Immortality of the Soul by Mark F. Fischer, has this interesting passage relevant to a bit of the hate mail that came in last month bridging what I said about religion and what I said about biology. The unadmitted similarity between the two is interesting to consider and fun to bring up.
The Immediate Creation of the Soul. This brings us to our second “catechetical” theme about the soul as created immediately by God, not produced by a child’s parents. This doctrine was taught in 1950 by Pope Pius XII but has a long history. Scholastic theology held that God created each individual soul at the moment of its unification with the body, and rejected competing theories from antiquity, such as the teaching that the soul pre-existed, or emanated from the divine substance, or was generated by the child’s parents by means of “semen spirituale.” The affirmation by Pius XII about the immediate creation of the soul took place in response to the polygenic theory of human evolution, that there were more than two “first parents.” Pius XII stated that faithful Catholics cannot accept the opinion that some human beings exist who did not trace their parentage back to Adam, or that the Biblical Adam merely represented a number of first parents. Rahner proposed refinements to certain aspects of this teaching, and it is worthwhile to trace his thought.
The problem with polygenism is that it appears to undercut the doctrine of original sin. The Council of Trent taught that Adam’s first sin lost for him and his descendents both holiness and justice. If there had been more than one first parent, then original sin would not have been transmitted to all, and human beings would exist who are untainted by Adam’s sin. To Pius XII, such speculation about polygenism seemed to erode the Church’s teaching.
I will point out that if Pius XII and, I'm guessing, the conservative German Jesuits who, it is reported, he regularly relied on to do his thinking for him had not considered that all human beings from shortly after speciation occurred (and there's really no good determination of when and what that would have been like) would almost certainly have been related to every other one of the new species. The population to mate with would have been very small and all of them would be interrelated to each other, before such a theorized speciation "event" and in the resulting new species. That is certainly not something that is unknown as it's often asked by scoffers and believers alike where Cain's wife came from if she wasn't his sister. Not to mention Seth's. I sometimes wonder if that question being asked very early in the editing of the folk tales of Genesis might have led to the absurdly long life-spans claimed in the stories, to give the boys of later generations some cousins to marry instead of sisters. Though it doesn't really work for that, either. I will admit there are still fundamentalists and even "evangelicals" who choose to believe those life-spans are accurate reportage. No honest believer believes that.
This problem flowing from a misunderstanding that any of us is a result of a single line of inheritance might disappear if the idea of speciation wasn't so problematic, to start with. If you wanted there to have been a single human couple who were first ensouled by God, it couldn't have been more than a generation or several before the small number of their nephews and nieces mating with their children would have ensured that every subsequent human being would have such an Adam and Eve as ancestors.
That it may well have been German Jesuits educated in a naive 19th century conception of evolution who imagined up this problem wouldn't surprise me. The same naive conception of evolution born of British aristocratic snobbery was ubiquitous, it was the basis of eugenics and the Nazi's "racial hygiene" that had led to mass murder not five years before Pius laid down that doctrine. That is a concept that didn't die even in science in the wake of the revelation of the Nazi genocides, it still is ubiquitous among college-credentialed people. I think it's probably something that is a given in the hegemony of the theory of natural selection. It is rather stunning how shallow the thinking of the self-consciously truest of true believers can be about the very thing they will stake their respectability on.
It used to surprise me that that kind of cartoonish conception of evolution is ubiquitous among college credentialed folk, not only among some theologians but, also, many deputed scientists, some of them in topics in allegedly scientific evolutionary science. What I have come to understand from my study of Dawinism is that it is not surprising if you look at how science really happens among actual, behaving human beings instead of the cartoonish idealized depiction of it which may, at times, be somewhat true in physics and chemistry when they deal strictly with what can be observed and measured. As soon as you get far from that, the idealized description of what science is becomes rapidly ever less true.
I suspect those scientists who consistently take that fact of interrelatedness as a basis of their thinking is a minority because it quickly becomes too complex to wrap your head around. It certainly fogs the idea of speciation which is legitimately plenty foggy to start with. They certainly let that crude cartoonishness get taken as science without challenging it. No doubt they'd save their derisive dismissal of the very same idea when it is part of theological speculation.
Theologically, I reject the problem because I reject the idea that only human beings have souls. Jesus says that God is mindful of the lives and deaths of sparrows, even those hapless enough to fall into human's cruel hands and God is responsible for the splendor of wild flowers. And what is in God's mind can be expected to be eternal. Jesus said that that is where human immortality lies, as well. Human theologians might not believe that non-humans are significant enough to notice to start with but apparently Jesus thought they were, though he knew human beings weren't going to understand that. There are Old Testament citations that could be made as well. And I absolutely reject the theory of inherited sin, which I'll get to in a while. But first some more from the article:
Rahner never rejected monogenism in favor of polygenism. But in his earliest article on the topic, published in 1954, he argued that monogenism is a metaphysical question. The concept of the “first man,” he wrote, “must not only be thought of as just temporally and numerically the first,” but must be understood metaphysically as “the transcendent humanity instituted by God.” When the Church teaches that all human beings descended from Adam, it is not primarily making a natural-scientific argument. Rather, the claim pertains to metaphysics. Adamic descent means that the Biblical account of our first parents affirms the primacy of God as creator. The emergence of humanity was ultimately a divine act.
Twenty-seven years after his article of 1954, [and about sixteen years after the Second Vatican Council started the freeing of Catholic theology] Rahner returned to the doctrine of the “immediate” creation of the soul. He knew that Pius XII had insisted upon the soul’s immediate creation. The soul did not gradually evolve as primitive hominids became more human. No, said the pope, it was established in an immediate way, without the medium of human parents. This doctrine, Rahner suggested, is not meant to deny that human parents produce a human being. On the contrary, the doctrine must be understood metaphysically. God established a world, not in a one-time act of creation, but in a constant process of divine causality, that is, in a relationship that is being “continuously constituted” by God. The divine causality, Rahner concluded, “can be identified with the ‘creation of the soul’ in the way in which Pius XII teaches.” Rahner affirmed the teaching, showing that its deepest truth is not empirical but metaphysical.
I think Karl Rahner, who was always, self-consiciously, a CATHOLIC theologian, was struggling to make a papally set down doctrine cohere with what he knew as scientific knowledge and in the process he came to a useful distinction between things that can be understood on the basis of empirical, observed, knowledge and those things which can only be understood in a metaphysical manner, on the basis of thought, but which frequently lack the possibility of observational confirmation.
That is, of course, entirely related to my inconvenient observation about the fact that only the tiniest physical evidence of what and how evolution happened and what caused the myriads of later species to evolve will never, ever be available to inform our theories of it.
If you consider that "original sin," is a theory of human nature based on the fable of the forbidden fruit in Genesis 2 and given as an explanation of the Crucifixion of Jesus, it is a Just-so story told to explain human sinfulness and is taken as an explanation about the life and supposed fate of all of us, it's not that difficult to see that it's not only religious theologians who make the same mistake that Pius XII and his collaborators made, insisting on the nature of physical reality on the basis of an ideological theory, but, in fact, those deputed to be scientists in good standing make the same mistake. But they call it "science." And, having been ordained as scientists instead of ministers of religion, they get away with it.
That's more true now than it ever was due to the Just-so storytelling of, first, Darwinism and today's Darwinian fundamentalists (Stephen J. Gould's term)* currently among Sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists who explain a myriad of allegedly typical human and animal behaviors based on fictional connections between us, through the vast and forever unknowable lines of common and divergent descent between us and radically remote species. By "fictional" I don't mean known to be non-existent, I mean they are unevidenced except in the imaginations of those scientists and those who buy what they're selling. It is not unreasonable to theorize descent from a common ancestor for remote species on the basis of commonly held bits of our genomes, it is entirely unreasonable to believe that the expression of those does more than make certain proteins that have a far more complex expression in very different species which have little in common. It's even more unreasonable to pretend that you can link those to such things as behavior which cannot be shown to have a genetic basis. If you realize that "sin" is, in any human conception of it, just such a "behavior" the theory of "original sin" being inherited is not any different from what Richard Dawkins made his allegedly scientific career on, coming up with something not that dissimilar from what Pius XII did. And with about as much physical evidence to base that in.
I think there's a lot more in common between the theologians wanting to uphold the theology of the Council of Trent and the Darwinisms of those who believe in natural selection as an all encompassing explanatory doctrine of biology.
To start with a popular pseudo-scientific assertion growing out of the popular (mis)understanding of science in evo-psy winch I've dealt with here before.
If you start with the realization that the theory of original sin is a biological theory of human evil doing, a propensity to act in certain ways inherited from our theorized first parents and an explanation of, other things, why we develop, live and die as we do, the similarity to materialist-atheist-scientistic theories allegedly finding the same kinds of things from the unobservable and undocumented past of our species (in evolutionary biology, that is extended far more ambitiously than in traditional theology, asserting far more tenuously and unfounded causes for that) becomes interestingly obvious.
In the past I've used the example of the emeritus professor of Psychology at the well-respected University of Toronto and latter day YouTube boy-cult quack Jordan Peterson, when he validated his sexist assumptions about the real right way that human males and females should act on the basis of how lobsters mate.
I got into several online brawls on that where I was able to point out that if you wanted to look for such pseudo-evolutionary models for how human females were supposed to act, as well as human males, the common ancestor we share with lobsters we also share with preying mantises among whom it's not uncommon to observe females pull the heads off of males wanting to mate with them, which they will eat as the soon to be dead males' bodies copulate with them. No doubt a sociobiologist or evo-psych would notice such a dim witted male would not be selected out of the breeding population, no doubt they would say he was propagating his stupid genes which would have to be called "smart genes." Or would they be selfish-genes? In one of those brawls I also pointed out that that same common ancestor is shared with black widows in which females similarly kill males of the same species. I could have mentioned such species as spiders in which the offspring devour their mothers. I don't think most female biologists of my acquaintance would ever want to have the boys think that was a feature of sociobiology that should be followed, though I can imagine some of the boys being OK with that.
I will point out, to clarify, that I choose to believe there is such a common ancestor of us and our lobster cousins, I not only deny but am absolutely certain that we can't know anything more than that about them than that they may well have existed. I am, in fact, more certain that we cannot actually know those details about that ancestor and what they may or may not have passed down on the divergent lines of their offspring than I am of its existence because we can know that there is no real evidence of those ancestors. For all any of us knows, if some future tit bits of remote evolutionary time are discovered, they may lead to a future scenario that we can't imagine based on what we do have available.
I am certain that Jordan Peterson's idiotic conception of the implications of common ancestry is ubiquitous among those in the pseudo-sciences but also among a lot of more genuine scientists who concentrate on the academic study of evolution than should make us feel comfortable. Especially when it's a question of behavior and a naively materialistic conception of what behavior has to come from. I doubt that behavior is merely an epiphenomenon of our genes. I'd like to say real scientists are much better than the idiot psych profs but, really, when it comes to making up stories about what we can't see, they are his equal if not quite so stupid about it. E. O. Wilson, a far closer to legitimate scientist wasn't really much more sophisticated when he asserted similarities among other species, including human beings, and the ants he studied. That absurd extended, attenuated line of speculation became hegemonically influential since the rise of "evolutionary psychology" in the 1970s, growing out of some equally absurd theories of the 1960s. It became influential because it provided an alleged scientific explanation of many things for which there is absolutely no evidence at all. It is based on seeming plausibility, not real physical evidence. Plausibility is not the same thing as knowledge, horse feathers can seem plausible and still be entirely imaginary. I'd guess there were those who really believed in Pegasus or in other flying horses of other pagan mythologies.
One of the things those all have in common, something they share with a literalist or fundamentalist reading of Genesis is that they rely on telling stories about an unobservable past and make up stories out of it so as to explain human behavior and human life now and to make assertions about that based on not only the unknown but the unknowable. I will say this for the Catholic practice that Pius XII was engaged in, he didn't pretend what he was doing was science and even if he did, the likes of Karl Rahner quickly distinguished between what a Pope said on the basis of theological orthodoxy and science. That is a correction which I have yet to see become influential in biological science.
In mocking the eminently mockable Jordan Peterson and his idiot boy-cultists, I pointed out that there is a general estimate that the ancestor we share with lobsters lived about a half-billion years ago. If I'd had my wits more about me I'd have put it into the question of how many generations of our direct ancestors that would have been. It would certainly be in the tens or hundreds of millions. It would be a certainty that no matter what imagined species each member of that line every one of the belonged to, every one of them would have reached reproductive age and successfully reproduced. My computer calculator, dividing 500 million by the 33.3 years definition of a human generation leads me to believe that that number of generations at that ridiculously long definition of an average generation length in this problem would be 15,015,015 generations. If you consider that it is quite likely most of those generations for most of those species would be quite a bit smaller the numbers of those generations is far higher. If the average length of those generations was three years (I'm guessing that's still very long as such an abstracted "average"), that would be 166,666,666+- generations between us and our common ancestor with the lobsters.
Among other things, I think the commonly held belief that "natural selection" was the one thing responsible for and the ultimate explanatory framing for understanding the successful sustained lives and reproduction of all those spectacularly varied species, sub-species, smaller groupings and individuals of those spectacularly different variations is absurd. I don't think, even as a thought experiment, you could possibly maintain a believe that there was any one "thing" like natural selection that was the knowable "force" or "mechanism" that explains that success AND THE FAILURE AS WELL because it is implausible based on the certain stupendous variability of the reality of those lives, instead of the scientific cartoon simplification of the problem. I think it is as grandiose a claim of science as even the most outlandish claims of some of the dodgier of fundamentalist religion.
That is, of course, a number of generations that even the best of science cannot validly guesstimate, at least I can't find that anyone has made such a guess at it. Since those generations would have included a myriad of members of different species with very different numbers of years or months or weeks of life expectancy and reproductive maturity, most of which have certainly not left a single resolvable fossil for scientists to make up stories about, we have absolutely no basis for judging how like or unlike that entirely unknown shared ancestor the bodies of those ancestors of all of us were like or, as much or ever more so, how they behaved, how they lived, their habits, their success or failure to succeed, how many "by the skin of their teeth (or mandibles)" narrow escapes our line of life must have had, now many innumerable random chance events in which their survival or reproductive success had absolutely nothing to do with biological inheritance in why their line of life continued past them as individuals.
And, it's worth pointing out that whichever enormous number of generations that would get us back to that common ancestor would be, there is another unknowable and almost certainly far different number of generations that produced on the other branch that produced modern lobsters, mantidae, etc. I think it can be confidently said that the two numbers of generations wouldn't be nearly the same but they would certainly be large numbers of entirely unknowable species and individuals. I think it's very reasonable to expect that the number would be far more than twice the number of generations in the line that includes us.
That such a relatively reliably estimated biological trait as the number of months or years to reproductive maturity is so drastically different among those species is strong evidence that something so unreliable as reported or, really, imagined "behaviors" and grotesquely unevidenced and entirely not obvious speculations of how those were inherited as vaguely but confidently asserted "genetic traits" should be about the biggest warning sign in science. The idea that science could possibly discern such a thing as a "common behavior" within that maze is far more absurd than the most absurd assertion made by Pope Pius XII in 1950, his metaphysical speculation being dealt with by a young theologian four years later and now of little to no influence in Catholicism. I never heard of it in well over sixty years when I might have heard about or seen evidence of it. I doubt many Catholic theologians ever heard of it, either unless they read that part of Rahner's enormous oeuvre.
* Certainly it's an indication of the impossibility for an informed scientist to be a strict Darwinist by the time Gould flourished. It's certainly true that many, perhaps most Darwinists have been of the fundamentalist type, certainly within the popular understanding of science, that's the case. It's perhaps appropriate that as a representative of the naive, fundamentalist Darwinism that Dawkins was given that seat of atheist atheology at Oxford funded by a cyber jillionaire, to promote just such a naive "public understanding of science." I suspect the theory of natural selection will, eventually, if we live long enough as a species, be scrapped and the past hundred sixty years will be seen as a quaint and dangerous folly. Though many findings of biology not dependent on the unseeable, unknowable, forever lost past will stand far longer. It's regrettable how atheist ideology has forced what should have been a minor interest area in biology into such a waste of time and effort.
IT WOULD BE ridiculous to be going over Sodom and Gomorrah and Judges 19 repeatedly except that S&G is being brought up repeatedly to attack marriage equality. I get the feeling they weren't aware of Judges 19 till I mentioned it. The funny thing is that as soon as I bring up what Jesus had to say about remarriage after divorce being adultery, they don't want to take that passage to mean what it says. It's always different when you're in the majority and can get theologians to revise those kinds of issues away. Even the Catholic hierarchy does it without admitting it does it.
Maybe I should do a series going through every one of the Scriptural passages used to condemn LGBTQ equality and note what else the books that contain them condemn because over and over again those things were changed to suit the straight, or wealthy or powerful as they insisted that the anti-LGBTQ passages were set in stone forever. Of course that's been done before but it might be handy to have the list available to throw at the hypocrites.
It might help if I formally state as the only hermenutical position I am going to tolerate is one that takes the Golden Rule and the "by their fruits you will know them," methods of evaluation of the meaning of passages as the supreme means of judging Scripture from now on. I take those as being absolute and eternal truths and they were as true during the period of Genesis as they are today and forever. And I've got no reason, at all, to pretend I can't see when things in Scripture violate those absolute reference points because it's obvious that enormous parts of Scripture does. No one in the entire period after the Scriptures were put into a fixed form and became canonical has not ignored parts of it on that basis of internal contradiction. I have no reason to pretend it is all true.
Neither am I going to give up the good because it's considered impolite or scandalous to read Scripture as if it really is important enough to read critically and skeptically.
For now, this is as far as I want to go with this because I'm hoping to get back to regular posting this month.
What is really funny is that I'm in favor of all marriages being equal to the best of marriages, faithful, mutually supportive, enduring and based in love. AND ANY CHILDREN BORN OF THEM TO BE FULLY AND RESPONSIBLY SUPPORTED AND RAISED. I want Lesbian and gay marriages to be the best kind, something which straight people don't seem to much aspire to, these days. I get flack for being old fashioned on that count. Though there's nothing old fashioned about that, it never gets old.
Still getting flack from those Sodom and Gomorrah posts
LOT HAD NO RIGHT to offer his two little girls to be gang-raped as an alternative to the two angels who were visiting him and who were about to rain fire and brimstone down on the town where Lot lived. Lot had a right to offer himself to be gang raped, if he had any right to offer up victims to the mob of men at all. You'll notice that neither he nor the unnamed Levite in the clear recycling of the folk-tale to give an excuse for a bloody civil war in Judges 19-20 are ever questioned as to why they saved their own asses by offering girls up to mobs of male rapists. The Levite in Judges is even a bigger asshole than Lot because the crowd not only raped his concubine to death, when he woke up in the morning and saw her dead body lying on the door step, he ordered her to get up because he was ready to go on his way. Perhaps he'd enjoyed the hospitality he was offered so much to have it trouble his mind. According to Scripture, he slept away the night as his concubine was being raped to death outside. No doubt the implication made at the start of the tale, that she had not been faithful to the Levite, is seen as her having deserved it. If you didn't figure this story is told from a typical straight-guy POV.
I'll point out that when Lot offered up his little girls to suffer a similar fate the two angels don't point out to him that he's doing something wrong. If nothing else in the story tells you there's something entirely screwy about using the tale as a guide to what "God's unchanging moral law is" for the purpose of forbidding the faithful marriage of two fully competent, consenting adult men or Women to marry, it is that the alleged agents of God's moral retribution fail to tell Lot that he shouldn't be offering his little girls to be raped to death, nor do they warn him that he shouldn't get plastered and rape them, himself, not many verses along in the story. Some angels, huh?
I'll also note that in the Sodom and Gomorrah stories, though it was gangs of men who committed the crimes, women and children were obliterated as a consequence, no doubt, if they thought about women and children at all, the scribes and editors and commentators would certainly have figured even children too young to have moral discernment or even language would have been obliterated as, in fact, Lot's wife was when she didn't offer anyone up to be raped and wouldn't share in her husbands crimes after her death. From now on no hermeneutic that doesn't ask what happened to the Women and Girls who the men don't mention in the text should be considered to be legitimate.
Those two pieces of Scripture (and I only use the capital as a courtesy, not because I think those passages reveal the mind of God) are and always have been too immoral, themselves, to guide a Christian's moral judgement. It is a serious indictment of the process and character of "Scripture" that those questions have not figured decisively in the understanding of those stores.
One of the greatest things that Christianity accomplished was the elevation of children, especially female children to the status of persons instead of chattels of their fathers. The ubiquitous practices of infanticide, of child rape, of children being prostituted, etc. that characterize the pagan cultures of the Mediterranean regions and elsewhere being somewhat destroyed by Christianity is one of the most convincing arguments that can be made in favor of the truth of Christianity.
Either it is a father's absolute moral duty to protect his children from, among other things, gang rape, now, in the future and in the past, or it is not moral duty today and no father has such an obligation. Either it is and always has been wrong for a father to have sex with their daughters or it is not. And if you entertain the idea that it wasn't then, you should not have access to children without court supervision by responsible adults. And that's just a tiny bit of what's wrong with that use of Sodom and Gomorrah and Judges 19 in any argument about morals for anyone. especially faithfully committed, consenting, adult gay men.
That the idolatry of Scripture has not allowed such questioning of those passages, and similar ones, and their clear identification as morally depraved and of no use to determining how we should live now shows how with just how little seriousness the truth of the Law and the Prophets, do to others what you would have them do to you, is taken. I think Jesus was speaking with divine authority when he said that, I think that a similar conclusion is attributed to the great exponent of Jewish law, Hillel, should lead to the conclusion that any part of Scripture that contradicts that is false.* Either the Golden Rule is true for all time as the will of God, as I believe it is, or those parts of Scripture which don't promote that are a refutation of it as eternal Law.
You put that together with "by their fruits you will know them," as the absolute standard of moral discernment in light of The Law and the Prophets and the entire case against faithful, committed, free and competently entered into gay and Lesbian marriage is demolished. Even identifying those with the depravity of all-male rape mobs who don't appear to have been gay in Genesis and who were obviously not in Judges with faithful same-sex marriage is bearing false witness, another breach of a very serious Commandment.
I don't think that Scripture can retain that status without that critique AND WITHOUT THOSE CHOICES EXPLICITLY BEING MADE FROM NOW ON.
I think we are going to have to choose on the basis of those Commandments which passages that were inserted into Scripture by the many, many hands that wrote down and edited and commented and assembled those written Scriptures that come down to us because without making those choices, the truth in them are going to be discredited by not only the presence of those but the evil results of them in history. The Scriptural arguments for the subjugation and harm of Women, the Scriptures used to oppress, discriminate against and murder LGBTQ+ People, those which were used to establish chattel slavery even in its most evil forms,should be used to identify the false passages of Scripture which should be made infamous for their falseness. That must be done no matter what the vintage and pedigree of those are because they clearly contradict the real Law and real Prophesy and the real Gospel.
Clearly no one needs to take any argument that sets up what Lot and the unnamed Levite did as having anything to do with today's marriage equality seriously. The asshole isn't even presented as having been married to the woman he threw to the wolves to save his own ass, he kept her as a concubine. I wish those who have argued for marriage equality had gone through those to see just how morally corrupt they are. Especially Lot and the unnamed Levite who seems to have been a totally asshole as well as a self-indulgent idiot. I'll bet the reason his concubine fled to her father's house was because the asshole beat her. Though, of course, that wouldn't have made it into the story.
* In preparing this, I tried to find out how reliable the provenance of what Hillel is said to have said is and am left wondering why the same standards that are used in terms of Christian manuscripts aren't used to question the sources for him and the others recorded in the Pirkei Avot .
I wonder if anyone has ever wondered if the attribution of the negative statement of the Golden Rule to Hillel was due to it having been said earlier in the Christian Gospels. I wouldn't be surprised if a great Rabbi had come to that conclusion, I'm not questioning its authenticity but I have read it claimed that the Gospel writers were cribbing Hillel in that attribution of the positive statement of The Golden Rule to Jesus, on those grounds. I think fairness demands that the rules that are habitually applied to Christian sources as a means of debunking those must be applied to all other texts with a similar and, sometimes, even less well documented provenance. That includes those which are pagan and secular (just how anachronistic is that category for that time?) as well as those which are religious.
I think the mess that Scripture and its commentary are leaves us with no alternative but to choose what we believe is authoritative and what we are forced to reject on the basis of what we believe to be the Truth of God. I think that's how Scripture has always been used in practice, no matter what lip-service is paid to the daffy notion that it is a consistent and entirely true whole.
RMJ has written a very fine post on this.
AN INTELLECTUAL RUCKUS IS MADE every year about the birth narratives of Jesus in Luke and Matthew being so different and pointing out that none of what is said in them can be confirmed to have happened. The census, the slaughter of the children, etc. Though it's become so rote a ruckus that it should be considered untellectual by now.
Even those who are supposed to be academics don't much fact check themselves on the neo-pseudo-pagan anti-Christian liturgies these days. It's not as if there's any professional price to pay if they get that wrong. I will mention in passing that most of the history of that period, earlier and later is similarly undocumented but no one will seriously question it.
While it might be reasonable to figure that something so profitable to rulers as a census for purposes of taxation as in Luke's narrative might have left evidence which survived, anyone who thinks something as routine as the Matthew Gospel's ordered massacre of a bunch of babies of poor people would survive in historical records has an extremely naive view of how power is still routinely wielded by the rich and so powerful and what they figure is worth keeping records of. Routine murder of poor children is still too routine to matter much. The recording of history and what gets paid attention to is a question of what those in a position to do that really value and it's still mostly money. The United States can't even manage to change the damned Constitution to prevent even the murder of middle-class children in their schools and it's become so routine as to have no effect, whatsoever. And we're supposed to be a republic.
I think, though, the assertion that the slaughter of the innocents is undocumented so is merely a myth gets it wrong in what is the most important way. I think that of all of the birth narratives, the slaughter of the innocents and the family fleeing into Egypt, the El Norte of that time and place, is absolutely documented and it isn't because we can be any more certain that the actual family of Jesus experienced it. But, I will speak up for an even standard in academic proclamations and note that even the single attestation in the Gospel of Matthew lends weight to something like that having happened even if you don't believe in astrology or significant, prophetic dreaming. There is certainly nothing unbelievable in the general outline of the story. A known to be murderous king coming to believe an unspecified new born baby in a specific town is a danger to his rule and his dynasty ordering his thugs to kill all the babies in that district, a parent finding out the danger and fleeing with their children. The modern fashion in historical speculation says that the actual number of such babies in such a town wouldn't be the numbers imagined by renaissance and baroque painters, more like what the peasants of 1970s Nicaragua discussed in The Gospel At Solentiame, as they could understand the Gospel on this better than almost any American or Brit academic expert could.*
Despite the vulgar significance at the heart of that academically trivial and pointless responsible, modern obsession, that exercise in scholarly responsibility doesn't get near the heart of the two birth narratives. As that sermon by Bishop Gene Robinson noted, not everything has to have happened for it to be true, that is if by "truth" you mean having a coherent and important true meaning instead of being an objective report on something that had happened in pedestrian, abstract clerical reporting.
As I've said last week, my preferences tend to be with Luke's interpretation with frightening angels telling very low status shepherds about the most significant event in human history, the birth of the Son of God, of God choosing to become incarnated as a human being - no one understands the Incarnation - and them having the faith to go look for him in an animals shed, sleeping in the feed trough. I contrasted that to the wise men with their three Christmas presents, though Matthew doesn't specify that the child was a baby and may well have been more of a toddler by the time they caught up with what their astrology told them was going on with the Jews. Too bad their astrology didn't tell them Herod was a complete rotter.
But there is an aspect of Matthew's account we can be certain was absolutely true in the Gene Robinson way, the attempt of Herod to kill him, showing that from the start the baby who was to have the future of Jesus would be a danger to earthly power and would be the object of their murderous violence as soon as they found out about him. He could well have been the victim of their uninformed, routine violence, anyway. The Crucifixion of Jesus under the Romans is the final proof of the truth of Matthew's perhaps symbolic nativity story of the three astrologers and their symbolically portentous gifts. The accounts in Matthew are true in the most important way. Certainly it's more important for human experience. That event has been repeatedly reenacted and expanded on. How much truth would there have been in an accurate live-birth record as found all round the United State these days as compared to the perennial truth of Matthew's scary Christmas stories? How much would the record of a live birth be an important truth as opposed to the life of the child that followed that birth? Just what is truth supposed to be good for, in the end?
Herod is Trump putting babies in concentration camps to keep his power through appealing to racism and hate and his media and the Republican-fascist party supporting him, many of them those "evangelicals" and "traditional Catholics." He is Trump denying Covid-19, advocating Darwinist "herd immunity" sacrificing so many more babies and children than Herod had available to murder. Herod is the entire Republican-fascist caucus of the Congress and the majority on the Supreme Court. And that's just here in one country. Herod has led most of the world for most of history, including the so-called Christian world. Imagine how different things would have been if people had taken him more seriously. The secular world hankers for a time when even fewer people will take him seriously. Even the alleged left.
That other story in Matthew 25 in which Jesus, himself, identifies the least among us as being enough of a of God so that what we do for them we do to God and what we neglect to do, we neglect to do for God. Poor children aren't in that list as given in Matthew 25 but they would certainly have been the least of the least as they are now and for every age in the past and will be into the future as it looks now. Children are marked out for murder by oppressive worldly power, they are certainly marked out for the violence of poverty, for neglect, they are the targets of official and unofficial violence, for both the violence of the state and the other worldly powers of organized crime, some of that organized crime conducted by other children. And just as the parents of Jesus, Mary and Joseph are so terrified for the life of their child, they were forced to leave their homeland to save his life, just as so many are fleeing from the Herods of Central America and Eastern Africa and the Middle East and Ukraine and in so many places that none of us could come up with an adequate list.
All of those "white evangelicals" (we aren't supposed to notice the ones who aren't fascists) and in many cases their fellow "traditional Catholics" who participated in Trump's and earlier Republican-fascists use of those fleeing violence in Central America were reenacting Herod's side of the story, they still do and for exactly the same reasons.
The blasphemy of those who mouth "Jesus Christ" or "The Bible" as they worship Mammon and take on the mark of the antichrist is unremarked in the nice, polite Christianity of the mainline churches and Catholicism, indeed, the majority of those incumbent in the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops are fully in on the act as are those billionaires and millionaires who fund the "trad-catholic" corruption that is engaged in a hostile take-over of the Catholic Church.
And that doesn't get to the foremost murderers of Children, killers of their souls, their lives if they achieve adulthood, the specters terrorizing their parents, their physical and spiritual welfare, murderous, self-satisfied neglect, addiction, sex trafficking. Poverty is its basis.
That truth is one that you won't read or hear any snark about but it is a far more important truth than whether or not Matthew would have gotten an A in a properly conducted history class while a critique of the historicity of the most pedestrian facts of his Gospel would get the top grade. We know it's accurate history of THIS child because what this child said about the Least among us and that what we do and neglect to do for it we do to God and the consequences of that action or inaction would be the gravest alternatives we will ever provoke in our lives. But that is held to be less important than getting his hometown right and date of birth accurate. The real truth is Jesus was born last week in the Congo, in North Korea, in El Salvador, in Ukraine, in Somalia.
If she were close enough, her or his single-mother will have to make the flight into America's Pharaonic regime maybe as soon as they can travel, maybe the baby's father will go with them but quite likely not. Mary was lucky she had a husband who stuck by them and who could. The Supreme Court and the Republican-fascists in Congress, FOX with its mythical war on Christmas are Herod. So are the gangs they'll be fleeing. So is every member of the Republican-fascist party. And what you can say about that incarnation of The Lord, you can also tell in stories of so many places it will make you weep. And you can even weep more for the children, infants, toddlers, older children and least among us adults who are the victims of the ever reincarnated Herod power among us. It doesn't get any truer than the most significant of real history, a narrative that is continually re-happening right before our eyes and which is the only history that matters because we have some power to do something about it.
* I will point out how acceptable "ethics" talk about killing babies after birth is and generally has been since the second half of the 19th century. I am unaware of any "ethics" professor, any biologist, any medical guy ever being fired for advocating the killing of babies. In the ever widening game of "I can take an even more extreme stand," which is as much a part of competitive academics as it is in degenerate politics, there are perfectly respectable and respected "ethicists" who have toyed with the assertion that parents should get to have their children killed if they don't measure up to their standards. I'm not aware of anyone ever getting canned for that. I'll bet someone who asserted the accuracy of Matthew's accounts would be looked more askance at than even the most infanticidal "ethics" faculty would. If I were online as much as I used to be I'd make up a faculty identity so I could access academic publications to see what the status of that issue is in academic scribblage is these days.
In ghetto settings, Jewish children died from starvation, disease, and a lack of adequate clothing and shelter. The German authorities were indifferent to the high death rates. They considered most of the younger ghetto children to be unproductive and hence “useless eaters.” Because children were generally too young to be used for forced labor, German authorities often selected them, the elderly, ill, and disabled, for the first deportations to killing centers, or as the first victims led to mass graves to be shot.
I am, of course, obliged to point out that I'm talking about post-partum murder of children, not access to abortion which is an entirely different matter which I've dealt with, favoring legal, accessible, medically safe abortion and universal education and availability of effective, scientific contraception. That and education in how to avoid STDs belongs in every school from earlier than kids are going to be screwing around. Anyone who claims to be against abortion who isn't for that is a liar.
Fats Navarro, trumpet; Don Lanphere, tenor sax;
Linton Garner, piano; Jimmy Johnson, bass; Max Roach, drums.
My resolution for the new year is to post more music.
Noel à Notre-Dame de Paris
Maîtrise Notre-Dame de Paris
Henri Chalet Chef de Choeur
Yves Castagnet Orgue de Choeur
Olivier Latry Improvisation Grand-Orgue
It is not historical criticism, searching for the essential message, which has emptied the Christmas message and the Christmas feast of meaning, but on the one hand the trivialization of these things, reducing them to a romantic idyll, a cosy private affair, and on the other hand the superficial secularization and ruthless commercialization. As if the "holy infant so tender and mild" - not indeed in Luke and Matthew, but in the holy pictures - were always smiling and never cried in his very human misery (which is indicated, without any social-critical protest, by the crib and the swaddling clothes). As if the Savior of the needy, born in a stable, had not clearly revealed a partisanship for the nameless ones (shepherds) against the great ones who are named (Augustus, Quirinius). As if the Magnificat of the grace-endowed maid, about the humiliation of the mighty and the exaltation of the humble, about satisfying the hungry and sending away the rich, were not a militant announcement of a revision of priorities. As if the lovely night of the newborn child meant that we could ignore his work and his fate three decades later and as if the child in the crib did not already bear on his brow the mark of the cross. As if already in the announcement scenes (the center of the Christmas story) before Mary and the Shepherds - as later in the process before the Jewish tribunal, the complete profession of faith of the community were not given expression by bringing together a number of the majestic titles (Son of God, Savior, Messiah, King, Lord) and by ascribing these titles to this child instead of the Roman emperor here named. As if here instead of the illusory Pax Romana, brought by increased taxes, escalation of armaments, pressure on minorities and the pessimism of prosperity, the true peace of Christ were not announced with "great joy," founded on a new order of interpersonal relationships in the spirit of God's friendship for man and the brotherhood of men.
It is in fact obvious that the apparently idyllic Christmas story has had real social-critical (and, in the broadest sense, political) implications and consequences. This is a peace opposed to the political savior and the political theology of the Imperium Romanum which provided ideological support for the imperial peace policy, it is a true peace which cannot be expected where divine honors are paid to a human being and an aristocrat, but only where God is glorified in the highest and he is well-pleased with man. We need only to compare Luke's Christmas Gospel with the Gospel already mentioned of Augustus at Priene to see how the roles here are exchanged. The end of wars, worthwhile life, common happiness, in a word complete well-being, man's "salvation" and the world's - are expected no longer from the over-powerful Roman Caesars but from the powerless, harmless child.
Within the scope of the present work, these few references must suffice to confirm the fact that these infancy stories correctly understood are anything but innocuous, edifying accounts of the child Jesus, based on profound theological reflection, to be used in a carefully planned proclamation, seeking to portray artistically, vividly and in a highly critical light the true significance of Jesus as Messiah for the salvation of all the nations of the world: as Son of David, and the new Moses, as the commentator on the Old Covenant and the initiator of the New, as Savior of the poor and as true Son of God. Here then is obviously not the first phase of a biography of Jesus or a precious family history. It has much more the character of a Gospel; a message of invitation, according to which the Old Testament promises are fulfilled in Jesus, the chosen one of God, who did not provide any detailed political prescriptions and programs, but in his very existence, in his speech, action and suffering, set up an absolutely concrete standard at which man in his individual and social action can confidently aim.
Hans Kung: On Being Christian p 452-453
The Coventry Carol is the opposite of Silent Night in that it is all about the first account of danger to Jesus from worldly power when he was a baby. I heard this on the radio last night and it made me think of it.
Lully, lullay, thou little tiny child,
Bye bye, lully, lullay.
Thou little tiny child,
Bye bye, lully, lullay.
O sisters too, how may we do
For to preserve this day
This poor youngling for whom we sing,
“Bye bye, lully, lullay?”
Herod the king, in his raging,
Chargèd he hath this day
His men of might in his own sight
All young children to slay.
That woe is me, poor child, for thee
And ever mourn and may
For thy parting neither say nor sing,
“Bye bye, lully, lullay.”
Note: I have been preparing a different post but they say we're going to get sixty MPH winds and rain and I'll bet my electricity goes out for more than a day. I hope to finish what I was working on. This is a fun Christmas post two days before Creation should be celebrated. At least it's my idea of fun.
IT'S BEEN A WHILE since some atheist punk tried the old "can God make a rock so big that God can't pick it up" line on me, as one did last month. I'm a little surprised that one as young as this one could know about such a classic of old fashioned barroom atheism but it's no smarter than before. I'm already in the kind of good Christmas spirit that giving up the cargo-cult style for a religious style brings so I'll play with it a bit.
Before when it was trotted out, it was generally a challenge by someone who might claim they were a "skeptic" which they are not. That use of the word means "atheist" not that they practice skepticism. Atheists generally are not skeptical about anything, they know that they know THE TRUTH as much as any 6 Day Creation Fundamentalist does. And, wouldn't you know, just like with "originalism" in the Supreme Court, reality turns out to be just what they wanted it to be!
It's funny that someone so dedicated to the practice of declaring things impossible would think that what is impossible is in any way an indictment of the power of the Creator, God who, by definition, is held by believers to have created all things visible and invisible, that is, which means all that is possible within GOD'S creation and that all that really is is contained in God's creation.
In what God has made is the full gamut of actual possibility and outside of that lies only what is impossible, which has no real existence. Nothing, in fact.
Someday maybe I'll go into how that idea impinges on the assumptions of probability, especially those which imagine other things than what we know lies in the actual universe into their equations on the basis of what they can assign a variable to to fit them into an equation. Probability having been adopted as one of the creator gods of modern atheism. But not today.
That God may have created us to have the ability to imagine what isn't possible is, possibly, an aspect of us being created in God's image. Clearly if we can imagine the impossible, God must be able to. But God gets to choose among what would be possible and what won't be. Because, unlike us, God is the origin and definition of what is, it is possible BECAUSE God makes it possible.
The footnote in the excellent Jewish Study Bible for Exodus 3:14, in which God answers Moses' question as to which god he's to tell the Children of Israel told him to free them from slavery, says:
God's proper name, disclosed in the next verse, is YHVH (spelled "yod-heh-vav-heh" in Heb; in ancient times "vav" was pronounced "w"). But here God first tells Moses its meaning Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh, probably best translated as "I Will Be What I Will Be," meaning "My nature will become evident from My actions." (Compare God's frequent declarations below, that from His future acts Israel and Egypt "shall know that I am the LORD (YHVH)," As in 7.5; 10.2;etc. Then he answers Moses' question about what to say to the people: "Tell them: "Ehyeh" ["I Will Be," a shorter form of the explanation] sent me." This explanation derives God's name from the verb "h-v-h," a variant form of "h-y-h," "to be." Because God is the speaker, He uses the first person form of the verb.
There is nothing of comparable and sufficient differentness and radical potency in a conception of divinity in any other religious tradition I know of. Nor any other that would answer the question about a rock too big for God to lift it. God's revelation of God's self is to be found in God's actions, not in our imaginations, not in our imagination of what God has to be like and must be able to do in order to get us to give him the job of being our god.
It's this kind of thing that convinced me I'd made the right decision to choose the Hebrew religious tradition over Buddhism, though it was an argument over the reality of justice that first forced me to choose. A rabbi saying "reality is real" in regard to American style pop-"buddhism" also figured into it.
Considering how many things atheists like to tell us are impossible by THEIR fiat, it's kind of funny that they will insist this one merely seeming possibility is possible when it is ruled out by its blatant illogicality. That is unlike many of those things they declare impossible by fiat . There is no such refutation of logic in an entire range of things that it are forbidden by their Index of Forbidden Thoughts. Indeed, some of those forbidden thoughts have rather rigorous scientific demonstration of their existence, often in ways that many of those things such "skeptics" insist are real do not have. Including natural selection, multiverses, a whole host of different mutually exclusive schemes of string-theory, that is if the fading fad of string theory is not already off the list.
I know they wouldn't give up multiverses (the multi-multi-verses) since those were invented to kill off God and are still overtly maintained for that reason by probably a large percentage of professional cosmologists, today. It's remarkable how much of their "science" has such a blatantly unscientific motivation and end and how they still get paid to be "scientists" doing ideological non-science. Though the impossibility of treating those theories with science wouldn't be enough to get it off of their list. It's remarkable how little the biggest, fattest fan-boys of science care about the actual requirement that science be susceptible to the methods of science. Especially the "skeptics." The atheist cosmologists, indeed, are insisting - such scientific practice being impossible for their imaginary god-killers - that the requirements of actual observation of reality be suspended for their ideologically cherished theories. They have to burn down science to save science, it would seem.
I SHOULD INDEX my archive, maybe I wouldn't get asked to go over things I've written about more than once before.
"Do you believe Jesus Christ was the son of God,"
I am angrily asked by someone who doesn't care for what I said about Sodom and Gomorrah.
Enough so I'd have capitalized "Son". What you're asking is do I believe the account of his conception and birth as told in Luke and Matthew (not that they're that consistent with each other) and as is implied in the preface to the Gospel of John (thank you Bishop Gene Robinson), I can report that I don't disbelieve it. I have defended the belief in it against, for example, Richard Dawkins. I believe I linked to that early piece from my first blog not that long ago.
I can say of the two overt accounts of Jesus's Birth, I prefer Luke's with low-life shepherds being told by frightening angels where to find him and, in the first acts of Christian faith by anyone other than Mary, leaving their flocks to find that God has chosen to burst into the material universe in a Barn. I like that one more than wise men bringing expensive presents.
As it is presented in two Gospels and implied in a third one, there is no possibility of science refuting it as a fact or as a possibility. I don't think it's one of the essential beliefs to believe in the divinity of Jesus - there is a different theory of that, that it was when he was baptized by John that he became the adopted Son of God but it was never anything like a widespread theory of Christology. I have absolutely no problem with the idea that God chose to incarnate himself into God's physical Creation, to bond his created creatures and the entire cosmos to God's self through being born in the flesh to human beings who could articulate that. I'd guess it was a part of the fulfillment of Creation to do that. As I mentioned, I've been reading Rahner, again.
I am comfortable with saying I don't really believe or disbelieve in the Virgin Birth as such. I don't think it was necessary for Mary to have been a virgin for God to have asked her to bear his Son. I don't share the patriarchal superstition that a Woman having had sex makes her a defiled person. The Bible doesn't claim Joseph was a virgin, none of the patriarchs and, certainly, none of the kings were. It says in the Gospel that God could have raised Sons of Abraham from the stones, he could certainly bring his Son into the cosmos through the agreement of a girl who had had sex before.
Though I have also recently defended the idea that Isaiah, in the original words of his prophesy, as come down to us in the Greek edition of the Old Testament may have predicted the Messiah would be born to a virgin instead of the Masoretic edition possibly meaning she would just be "a young woman." I don't think the text that calls the birth of the one who would be called Emmanuel a "sign" makes much sense as a sign unless there was something very unusual about his mother. A virgin giving birth to a son - which, humans being mammals, would rule out the stupid sciency snark about "parthenogenesis" - would certainly not be something you see every day and so would be a perfectly amazing sign. If it was to be understood as "a young woman" you could well ask which of the many thousands, tens or hundreds of thousand young women who gave birth would that be. Wouldn't be much of a sign, in that case.
I also don't think that prophesy, which, by definition, is inspired by God, is necessarily bound by the expectations and limited imagination of the one it is given to and who expresses it in words. If God can make use of individual humans to give People prophesy, God can make more use of them than the prophet, her or himself will fully understand. If you believe that prophesy is from God, through but not entirely from the prophet, a modern "enlightenment" scheme of things can't contain that.
The current academic practice of trying to imagine what might be considered a "typical" mind of a person living at the time of this or that Biblical figure was like so as to limit the meaning of their prophesy to what would be expected of that imagined, typical prophet, strikes me as making little sense. The Prophets, just about all of them controversial, rejected, outlandish and mostly murdered, were certainly not like modern academics who don't want to break outside of the boundaries of their ambient culture. They didn't prophesy with an eye on getting into reviewed academic journals. I think that's one of the reasons that modern academic treatments of these things fork no lightening. They weren't even like modern song writers who want to chart and so who stay in some bounds because it's their job. The Gospels note that lynch mobs tried to kill Jesus on a few occasions when they didn't like what he said. And he went to Jerusalem with the full expectation that he would be rejected for his outlandish, atypical words and that he would die a prophet's murder. The chilling prophesy of Simeon said to Mary that Jesus would "stand as a sign of contradiction and that a sword would pierce your soul." Those words as much as the Magnificat strike me to the bone.
I think if the Birth of Jesus was as enormous an event in the history of Creation as the Gospels and Epistles present it as being, and which I believe, that disruption in the normal course of history might have given rise to prophesy bigger than a prophet's imagination or expectation. Prophesy is bigger than just political science, it is more than reporting, it is more than mere human reasoning. As I said the other day, I've got no use for religion that isn't supernatural and think it's a mistake for anyone to insist that religion stick with our naive 19th century concept of naturalism. Even modern physics doesn't do that.
I do think the Resurrection is more evidenced. Some like William Lane Craig put a lot of stock in the empty tomb accounts and the unexpected nature of the kind of Resurrection that was claimed in the Gospels, Acts and the Epistles. Some like Karl Rahner put more in the reports of those who encountered the Resurrected Jesus - including, by the way Paul though he doesn't claim to have seen Jesus from before his death and Resurrection. I think the reported extra-natural nature of the Resurrected Jesus in those descriptions is especially interesting. He is certainly described as being more than merely the resuscitated corpse atheist snark centers on. I can say I more believe in the Resurrection of Jesus than I do the Virgin Birth narratives and I think it's more essential to a belief in the ultimate significance of Jesus. I don't think it can be considered apart from his teachings if those teachings have the transcendent significance I believe in. I think it's continuous with those teachings. I mentioned I am reading Rahner again - and he is not easy to get - and some of his theories about Jesus in regard to his concept of the spiritual nature of material existence are very interesting to think about. Especially since I've railed against the vulgar, naive conception of materialism that is rampant among both non-believers and among believers (cargo-cult Christmas, is a definite "sign" of that). Though I don't suppose we're really going to know in this life, hoping to know more about that in the life to come.
In the coming days I intend to read Luke and maybe Matthew on the Birth of Jesus, I am listening to the O Antiphons with their use of Hebrew Prophesy, which may be spot on or may not but which are, in that case, not seriously dangerous. I will rejoice in the coming of Jesus, who I fully believe is a God sent Man at the very least. I don't believe anyone can really understand the final significance of the idea of God being incarnated. I will be listening to many different settings of the Magnificat, the Canticle of Mary, even with its mention of Abraham, knowing what a dodgy figure he and his wife are presented as being, his son (who also pimped his wife, if they were a back-woods family here, people would figure that would figure), his equally disreputable grand-kids who are credited as the foundations of the religious tradition I have chosen to believe in and follow. I don't think the origins of our shared Jewish monotheism in those flawed vessels is any less credible than the divine incarnation of Jesus through the consent of Mary.
I am more curious to know what it means that Moses prophesied the coming of Jesus as the Gospels say (Luke 24:27, for example) no doubt that includes the entire Torah, Deuteronomy, especially though I haven't gotten into that. I wish they'd expanded on some of those details in the texts but I'm guessing they were relying on people familiar with the Bible as it existed then, the Jewish Bible, would be able to figure some of that out in ways we, today, might need side column references for.
I will listen to O Magnum Mysterium that talks about the great Sacrament that the Birth of Jesus was witnessed by animals in a barn, having grown up on a farm knowing that would have meant God was born a human among manure, soaked bedding, stench, flies, filth, not the prettied-up pretty manger scenes as erected on public property so as to give the Roberts Court a chance to obliterate the work of earlier courts and keeping ACLU lawyers busy. If they put up something more like what is described in Luke, as probably most of those earliest readers and hearers of that account would have known it was, with manure and urine soaked bedding and flies and stench, the Bible thumpers would be the first ones to object. Too real for them and their devalued devotion.
I will not be giving presents, since giving that up I've come to enjoy Christmas so much more than I did when I did the present giving thing. I hate American cargo-cult Christmas, it turns what should be a sacrament into mammonist sacrilege. If I were close enough to a church, I'd go to midnight mass again. I haven't done that in too many decades. Preferably one with a Roman Catholic Woman Priest though a defrocked male one who is in a faithful, loving Gay marriage might do, too.
I DON'T REMEMBER where I picked up that spelling of "Lott" maybe it was in the first translation I read the story in, probably some old print of the Douay-Rheims translation of the Vulgate, maybe printed in France or somewhere when I was a kid. Though I wouldn't have that printing anymore. If I could find the old Catholic family Bible in my boxes of books I'd check it but they're in a cold attic and I don't want to go up there. I should unpack those and put them back on the shelf. I typed it without even thinking of the spelling.
You'd really be annoyed if I'd kept the spelling "Noe" which I used well into adulthood instead of the more typically Protestant "Noah."
As to what I said that also pissed you off about straight-marriage being entwined with oppressive gender roles.
Though most of those I observe don't seem to even think of trying, it's possible for a straight married couple to consciously reject the evil of patriarchy but it would be a lot harder than for two Gay Men to do that because straight gender roles in relation to each other are so entwined with the culture and tradition of patriarchy.
It's hard as hell to change your habits of thinking to try to do to others what you'd like them to do to you, especially if you've been taught that inequality isn't inequality but "natural gender roles" and that it's desirable. It's one of the most certain venues of evil into sexual activity that inequality is presented as sexy. That, along with irresponsibility is how sex becomes sin. It's one of the more repugnant things about traditional gender roles to me, something that makes it possible for me to report that I never, not once, ever wished I were straight. You guys really have no clue when you figure that's what Gay Men and Lesbians want. If the choice were chastity or being traditionally straight, I'd always opt for chastity. You can shove your "gay repair" up your own ass.
It's certainly worth trying to get rid of that patriarchal evil just as it's certainly worth it for Gay Men to get rid of the habits and baggage of self-hatred and self-destruction that afflict us from the same source, in many of the most sinful aspects of same-sex-sex, ironically enough, what most of the evil in gay porn comes from, the inequality of prescribed straight sex roles is directly imported into those. Lots and lots of Gay Men I know and see and read are as wedded to those as straight couples are wedded to the evils on their end of patriarchy. But I've known Gay Men who reject them, consciously and diligently AND SUCCESSFULLY.
There's a lot of work to do and if we're going to fight over some of the most sick and depraved passages in Genesis we're never going to get rid of that shit that buries us. I think the good of Scripture is too good to let the worst of it deprive us of what we can get from it to do the good. That's the only worthwhile reason for any of this, doing good and not doing evil.
I know from life-long, first hand experience the evil of violence and oppression and discrimination against LGBTQ+ People as well as to Women and the least among us and I know the role that those passages of Scripture that present that as the will of God has played in that evil. I'm not going to lie about the role that some of the most evil use of Scripture in history and today plays in our oppression. I'd love to go into, for example, what the Womanist theologians have to say about Abraham and Sarah's treatment of Hagar and Ishmael, if you want to know why I'm feeling so bold as to tell the truth about the shadier sides of their legend I've been reading Womanist theology.
As well as the bad in Scripture which is bad, I know the good that is founded on passages of Scripture that are good.
I use the summation of The Law and the Prophets on the authority of Jesus, The Golden Rule as my absolute measure of that. There is nothing in Scripture which isn't in accord with that that I accept as inspired, anything that violates it is false prophesy and false law. I don't think it's any accident that the Golden Rule sets up a strictly egalitarian code of conduct and that it makes what we want for ourselves the very thing that determines what we are obligated to do to others. There would be no inequality if that summation of The Law were universally followed, there would be no inequality, no oppression, there would be no slavery, chattel or wage slavery. Egalitarian democracy is a far too slow to develop good that came directly from the Jewish tradition of justice and the Christian Commandment of universal love, neither of which are obtainable from secularism or materialism. Real life is the proof of that.
I find the articulation of that go at least as far back as Gregory of Nyssa and his sister Macrina and, really, back to Paul, directly from his deeply conflicted and brilliant mind. I'd no more think of accepting the bad from Paul than I would rejecting the good of him. Luke Timothy Johnson's observation that Paul had a deep reluctance to criticize or challenge the ambient Roman patriarchal familial roles is an indispensable key to understanding the worst of his thinking. As revolutionary as he was from his inspiration from Jesus, he never got entirely free of his past anymore than lots of Gay Men do today. Paul was, in the end, just another of us sinners dependent on God's mercy and grace.
And about materialism. Though I've been attempting a little of Karl Rahner again and his theology of materialism is kind of mind blowing and fun to think about. I can't say that I find Karl Rahner entirely convincing in much of what he says - if I understand it and that's not easy to figure out - it is thought provoking. I like my thinking to be provoked, it beats watching TV.
I'm not going to debate you, I'm tired of debating hypocrites on this, I'm going to tell you.
ANYONE WHO PULLS Sodom and Gomorrah out at me to bash LGBTQ+ People will have to answer for just how fucked up the incestuous straight sex in the story is, the "righteous" straight guy offering up his little girls to be gang raped. Raping them himself and fathering children with them (blaming it on them, as rapist Dads of today still do)*, as he is still to be considered "righteous". Not to mention that that piece of shit presented as righteous isn't the one who gets turned to salt for doing those things while his wife does for doing what any human being of any intelligence would do, look to see their home town burning down.
I'll put it in your face every time you try that.
As I said, I don't believe any of it ever happened, it's got every aspect of folk legend to it. And folk legend in a deeply wicked and evil culture and social context. I'd as soon believe Hollywood on antebellum slavery or the ol' way'est.
Either you believe the subjugation of Women, the sexual sacrifice of Girls is against the eternal law of God or you don't, I do believe that. Clearly too few of those who were experts in Scripture and religion - no doubt all male and mostly straight men - haven't so far. I think what Lott did was evil then and it's evil now and he was a piece of shit just as some father who peddled his daughters in porn and raped them himself would be. Scripture that calls someone like that "righteous" is not credible. Any tradition that claims that is the case now needs to be monitored for pedophile rape. That the story doesn't acknowledge that makes it not only useless as moral instruction, it impeaches its credibility as such.
That a bunch of early scribes and priests decided to put it in that fascinating mess of a book, Genesis, without noticing that the "righteous" Lott both offered his little girls to be raped and that he was still not struck by lightning or turned to a pillar of shit for getting drunk and incestuously raping his daughters - no doubt he was the one who claimed they got him drunk and made him do it, sounds just like a rapist-father on trial now - that the scribes and priests who kept that piece of tripe in Scripture didn't see fit to point out he was a sex criminal only indicts their moral judgement and character.
I think the failure of the many centuries of those who comment on the story to point out the moral depravity of it and that it has no credibility as moral authority must take Scripture less seriously than I do because I can't believe they haven't condemned it out of consideration as authoritative thousands of years ago.
Maybe in the centuries that have passed when that story was read and cited and commented on in which those things didn't definitively discredit the claims in the story and those made about it in regard to gay sex, they weren't much bothered by what he did to his daughters. Which shows just how depraved that patriarchal habit of thought is and how pernicious it is, even today. Lott would have fit right in with the very worst of sex criminals today. I'd give him life without possibility of parole.
That the same religious hypocrites who cite that today to condemn gay men who have sex only with competently consenting men today, especially men who are in faithful marriages means that they are straight sex degenerates who can't make those distinctions.
My comments on Paul are true. I read him and his history,
- how he atypically didn't marry in a society in which just about all men married, in a society that put such complete stock in fathering children, especially sons,
- that he agonized publicly over wanting to do what he deeply felt he shouldn't do
- even as he said that straight guys should marry if they can't be chaste, as, indeed, almost no straight guys seem to be able to be,
- that his concept of same-sex sex is wedded to the most evil of sex crimes - crimes such as those which Lott is guilty of proposing that the men of Sodom commit against his little girls,
- and that he can't imagine what any person reading the truth in their hearts would admit is nothing like that, faithful, committed, self-sacrificing love of two men for each other,
yeah, I think Paul was a deeply troubled, self-hating gay man as well as a rather amazing commentator on the Gospel of Jesus (who seems to not have shared Paul's sexual obsessions) I would bet that almost every gay man of my generation, if they had this pointed out to him would recognize the type. There are a number of Republicans of the type sitting in Congress and on the Supreme Court right now if you want examples, only, unlike Paul, they have no redeeming character traits at all. That straight guys and Women might not recognize it doesn't surprise me much. I'm kind of surprised it wasn't a major feature of Pauline study in the past because I think it's glaringly obvious.
I have not made it a secret that I admit that Scripture is a product of human minds, I say that even as I think much of it is inspired, though there are long passages of it which I think are not only not inspired by God but some of them are dross and some of them, like the story of Lott, like the stories of Abraham pimping his wife and getting wealth from it, like his raping his wife's slave and sending her and his own son to die in the wilderness, and so many others are morally depraved. They stand out as a product of the worst sins rampant in human societies then and now.
In every part of Scripture there are dangers. Since it is a product of human consciousness, it all shares in the limits, the faults and follies of human consciousness. I've admitted the same about the sciences, it is absurd to not admit it about that other product of human imagination, Scripture.
IF THERE IS SOMETHING THAT IS MADE OBVIOUS IN EVEN A LITERAL READING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT IT IS THAT GOD IS PRESENTED AS CHOOSING TO ACT IN SOME OF THE OBVIOUSLY IMMORAL FIGURES IN THE STORY. Brothers and mothers who cheat their brothers, sons and husbands and fathers, deceiving blind old fools who want to bestow their blessings on their favorites, older sons, because they like the food they cook, many of whom are pretty much as much sleeveens as their younger brothers, people who are presented as incredibly unjust and unfair, people who do terrible things. Even in the institution that God, God's-self warned about the evils of, the Kingship of Israel and the sinners who were anointed to that evil institution. That God does not act through the purest of People is evident in the evils of the Hebrew historical accounts, a self-critical narrative - along with the Prophets - that makes the Scriptures more credible than pagan mythology. The people who wrote those down mistake the flawed vessels - which we all are - as "righteous" is something I am certain is a misreading of the true Word of God.
I think one of the major dangers of Scripture being a product of human consciousness is that it is inevitably bound to get things wrong, often no more than hinting in the right direction. Making "the word of God" (which none of the written words are) an ultimate moral authority is bound to lead to bad things as well as possibly leading in a better direction. I think any attempt to use "scripture" to make civil law which doesn't take these limits of Scripture into account is bound to lead to disaster as, in fact, such use of it has frequently been a moral catastrophe. The modernist reaction to that in secularism may have started as a moral corrective but it, as much a human solution, is extremely problematic in many details.
I think the Hebrew Prophetic insight that the real Word of God is not written on scrolls but is written on the heart is among the most profound truths of all of Scripture. When we really hear and act according to that real Word of God instead of our own limits and sinfulness, it is what enlightens our lives. It is the only thing that enlightens even our understanding of Scriptures, when we don't read Scripture in light of that, it makes it a tool of our worst parts. If Fundamentalists want a real text that is literally true, it's a text that will never be literal in any sense because it is not written in letters. The idea that an accurate text is essential to pin down just what we are to believe in is not only folly, it forces the professor of religion to pretend that the Scripture is a perfect oracle when it most certainly is not.
The books of Scripture are not only not uniform in their character, many parts of it I'd say especially Genesis and such as the book of Joshua are depraved and apt to lead to gross sin and evil, every passage that has ever been used to subjugate Women, the poor, slaves, LGBTQ people, foreigners, to wage wars of conquest and genocide is indicted by those results. "By their fruits you will know them" is as true as the written Scriptures ever get. You can legitimately judge that use of Scripture by what results from the would-be religious figures who make use of them.
I will confess that I take what Jesus is said to have said extremely seriously when it is an obvious and clear reflection of that summation of The Law he made, do to others, especially the least among us, what you would have them do to you. I take him with entire seriousness when he tells us that the Great Commandments are part of what will save us, Love God and Love Others. I say that even as I think the recorded accounts of some of his sayings and parables are extremely difficult to make conform to those. I think in a lot of those he was commenting on the world as it is, not on the Kingdom of God as it should be. I think some of it got seriously muddled in the writing down. I take the Gospels so seriously that I admit what I think are the problems of some passages of it.
Other parts of Scripture are a glorious and clear reflection of the real Scripture which I talked about earlier. AND I SAY THAT YOU CANNOT TAKE THOSE SERIOUSLY WHILE PRETENDING ALL OF WHAT IS CONTAINED IN SCRIPTURE HAS THAT CHARACTER because a lot of it is absolutely incompatible with those passages. That some will make mistakes in understanding that really inspired Scripture, that which reflects what is correctly written on the heart is certainly true. God has not seen fit to give us a direct and complete understanding of God's Law though we can experience something of God's Love. God works in the medium of human imperfection and even in human weakness and sin. But that's certainly as true of the written Scripture, the history of the use of Scripture is full of its depraved and dishonest use. Listen to the Republican-fascists on the "Bible" if you need a refresher course in that stinking "religion." If it is "inspired" what the hell do we think that inspiration consisted of except human beings interpreting their inspiration and, they being fully human, getting it wrong in lots of cases.
I strongly suspect that the great Prophet of the Law, Moses, whoever he was, probably spent a long period in very deep contemplative prayer and that he got The Law in that period. Whether it was on a named Mountain or not, I think that the heart of The Law seems like an individual inspiration.
I think he probably told or wrote down the law. Maybe on tablets, though I'd doubt they would be chiseled on stone. I think he must have been disappointed in its reception and he probably and frequently blew his top over that. I think that the falling back into polytheistic materialist religion is the reality behind that the golden calf yarn. Moses, great Prophet he was, was merely human, himself. I think the words of the account of him being given The Law in that far better book, Exodus, are probably not literally how it happened. I say that even as I doubt large passages of The Law as are set out in the Books of Moses are a correct reading of the Law, of the Scripture written on the heart. I think some of it stinks of later, self-interestedly, priestly insertion, I think some of those priests hated LGBTQ types as found among them then, I don't think it was all just they were afraid of pagan temple prostitution corrupting the Children of Israel. They were capable of more discernment than that.
I think the entire Hebrew monotheistic tradition WHICH I CHOOSE TO BE PART OF is nothing more or less than a very rich and more accurate reading of the true Law of God written truly on the heart but which is so badly read so often. I think that is not unrelated to Jesus telling his followers that they had to become like little children, innocent of the cultural and religious distortions of that discernment.
I think Moses had a deeper discernment of that than most of the figures of the early Prophetic tradition, I think that's why the later Prophets so frequently cite his Law which resonates with the Law they find in their own hearts. Sometimes I find the articulation by the later Prophets more convincing. Especially when it comes to justice for the least among us, none of them as credible as I find Jesus. I think Jesus is a singular figure in the Hebrew Tradition, I find in him a totally different level of inspirational credibility. And he had some interesting things to say about this. I think that's what Jesus meant when he talked about not one letter of the law not being erased even as he erased so many of those letters as written on parchment. Letters he knew and expertly commented on.
I know that what is being talked about in the Bible when it talks about same-sex sex acts has nothing to do with faithful sexual love between two Gay Men or two Women in a faithful, committed, loving relationship. The worst uses of same-sex sex now have nothing to do with that, probably even less than the worst uses of straight sex have with such straight marriages. I know it because I won't let words on a page distort what I can read in my own heart and see with my own eyes.
I take the written Scripture seriously enough to admit what's wrong with it when it's clearly wrong - the story of Sodom and Gomorrah that flagship of LGBTQ hatred is seriously fucked up and those who use it without acknowledging it is are totally dishonest.
I think if Christianity has any hope of a future, and I hope it does since I think it is the foremost source of nourishment for egalitarian democracy, Christians had better start paying more attention to the signs of the times and admit that such passages of the Bible are morally depraved as well as the entirety of later theology and dogma and doctrine that pretended they were anything but depraved and wrong. The patriarchal assumptions found in the Bible and which exist everywhere, most dramatically today in the Islamic areas in which Women are so evilly subjugated now, serially married and thrown off in divorce, girls married to old men, and in the sex-industry that flourishes under secular liberal-democracy (it wouldn't under a true egalitarian democracy) have to be destroyed.
The role that the written Scriptures of monotheism or secular governance plays in maintaining them is among the greatest evils of our time. The foremost supporters of that pretty much uniformly hate LGBTQ People and oppress us even as they violate their claimed moral codes. Look at Putin's use of that issue and how he manipulates the Russian Orthodox Patriarchy with it. By their fruits you will know them. All of them, even the ones in clerical costume and thumping on Bibles and in the Republican-fascist caucus of the Congress.
* As that pedo piece of shit Gore Vidal did when the Catholic priest-pedophile scandal hit the news. He blamed the victims. I don't see any difference between him and those ancient scribes and priests who wrote down and still write down the story of Lott do.
IT IS SO FUNNY that you say you're sick and tired of all the gay stuff, imagine how sick LGBTQ+ people are of the 99.9999% of everything that is straight, except for the tiny percentage of viciously negative stereotyping of LGBTQ+ that is brought up. Like the bad guys in the friggin' old Maltese Falcon. Dashiell Hammett was a gay hating bigot as well as a total asshole. He is vastly over-rated as a writer.
I won't take it back, Chad Allen was a better actor than Bogart was, better looking, smarter, smart enough to get out of the business and good enough to go into a helping profession. And I liked the stories better than anything Hammett or Chandler (or, rather, their screen writers, since this is about the movies) made up. In the Donald Strachey movies I mentioned, Sebastian Spence is better looking than any of Bogart's co-stars and a better actor than most of them. It occurred to me that a gay man watching those movies with them as a monogamous married couple would have a problem that few if any of those who watched straight gum shoe movies would have, not being able to decide which of them they wanted to be and which of them they wanted to be married to. I never once thought I'd want to have an affair with Bogart in any movie he was in so that was never a problem for me, either way.
I am grateful to my friend for lending me the Donald Strachey movies because it made me figure out one of the reasons I went off of the movies about forty years ago. I'm a gay man, I got tired of seeing stories about straight men and that's what movies mostly are. They're not even about straight women. I don't like the roles that movies made up for straight men, I don't like privileged people. I am amazed that even straight women aren't sick to death of that shit. It's one of the things I'd concluded about most of fiction about the last time I decided that whatever part of Updike's stupid Rabbit series back in the 1970s. I gave up on him over that and with him most of fiction, I just lost interest in all of it for a while. I'd rather read non-fiction any day.
And that was even earlier than I watched things like The Onion Field and Murder By Death and decided never to pay to see another movie again. A vow I only broke once when I went to the dollar show at the end of the first run of Hairspray, the original one. I am entirely over John Waters, too. If I'm tired of straight men I'm even more tired of adolescent gay ones, too. Camp is about the most stupid thing there is as "gay culture." It's gay minstrelsy. I hate it. It's an expression of internalized self-hate. That was the last time I ever went to a movie theater and I really haven't missed it.
I read Chad Allen Lazzari's dissertation and while I am skeptical of psychology as a science, it was interesting and in some ways courageous. I might possibly look into some of what he cited out of curiosity because I've come to respect him from the interviews I've read and watched. I strongly suspect he might actually do his clients some good because his head seems to be screwed on the right way to do that. I've always said that psychological counseling could be good at times under some circumstances but that it probably had more to do with the personality and moral character of the counselor than anything to do with the alleged science of psychology.
I might, might try another movie about LGBTQ characters but I would bet that few to none have such positive portrayals of gay characters. I'm not interested in negative portrayals of us because Hollywood has done quite enough of that already. I was tempted to say, you know, none of this is important, it's light entertainment but that's not true. I think that there are probably lots of gay boys and men for whom seeing a positive portrayal of heroic, morally responsible, intelligent gay men is so unaccustomed that seeing those movies could have a very positive effect on their lives. I doubt anyone was the better for seeing Sam Spade and certainly not Philip Marlowe, surely not in the novels where neither of them are admirable characters.
It's funny, this week I said scandalous things about classic movies and about Scripture and it's over slamming Bogart that I get the hate mail. Off hand, I can't think of a "classic film" that I care to see again. Especially those from the 30s-50s. I think I'll just read a book by an LGBTQ writer, instead.
