A Post For The Last Day Of The First Month Of The Year

LOOKING BACK AT what I've posted here since the start of December, when things have gone back and forth between falling apart and ineffectively trying to pull it back together while responding to provocative responses, it does make some kind of sense that I didn't realize as it was happening.  I've had a few recurring fevers this past two months so some of that might have had something to do with it, too. I'm not told that it's long-Covid but whatever it is, it gets weird.

Rejecting both the vulgar materialism of Republican-fascism and the would-be elite materialism of the often academic, secular alleged opposition to that, a lot of what I've said about egalitarian democratic politics and why I think that everywhere we have made any kind of an approximate approach to that is intimately bound up with the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures as those are an actual force in Peoples' thinking and political positions has both enraged and confused People.  

Well, a lot of this starts out confusing and some of it People have been trying to figure out for thousands of years. And a lot of it isn't going to be to our liking.  What we like most is usually a big part of the problem to start with.  That's just how these problems are.   

A lot of it is because even most English language college-credentialed people seem to know an ideologically distorted view of the evils of history in which churches are blamed for a lot that they certainly weren't the major forces in producing, some of them are complete fictions but as the movie said, "print the legend."   A college education ain't what it should be in easily 9 out of 10 cases.   More like 10 out of 10 when it's a media figure.

A Rule For Having A More Edifying Life: Listen To Lectures, Not Sit-Com Reruns

One of the great benefits of being online and, especially, having access to many recorded speeches, lectures, interviews, discussions and, don't think I've forgotten, radio-dramas, is that when I'm depressed I can listen to someone like Walter Brueggemann who, thank God, has been much recorded and much posted.  With him, with others such as Marilynne Robinson, Elizabeth Johnson, the late James Cone, those who participate in Catholic Women Preach,  Rupert Sheldrake (I listen to lots of youtubed lectures) I can always find something to listen to that addresses my condition.  And almost inevitably I find something I've listened to is directly, though not always explicitly, relevant to the political issues I've dealt with.  That's not a surprise because from Exodus to Revelations, the Bible is intimately tied up with economics and politics in a far more exigent and demanding and direct manner than secular politics.  My recent detour into the political thought of Hannah Arendt and those associated with and sometimes disagreeing with her reminded me of how, for all of their many virtues, there is always something that falls flat in a the secular-academic approach to those same issues. I love those thinkers, I've spent so many of the hours of my life with them but as they determinedly cut out God from their academic discourse - like good modernist scholars - they can never quite seal the deal in the end, at least for me.  I have come to the conclusion that to get to the promised land, you have to make choices that can't be made within that secular, scientistic, materialistic, atheistic framing.

That came to a head during the question period from a 2011 interview discussion on the nature of evil that Walter Brueggemann participated in at Elmhurst College.  I'd downloaded it and listened to it before, maybe I've transcribed a bit of it before, though I don't remember if I posted it or not. But listening to it to pick myself up - it's a discussion of evil - these two questions and responses jumped out at me. So, with my not exactly verbatim transcription.

Questioner 1:  In was interested in your rejection of the Greek philosophers' definition of God as omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent.  And what I want to ask then is from that I gathered that God is not all powerful.  There's some limit on His power.   And I just wonder if you could say more that's verified in both the Old and the New Testament.

Walter Brueggemann: Well, it says of Jesus in, I think it's Luke 4, "He came to Nazareth" . . . I'm not sure it's in Luke 4, somewhere in the synoptics . . . " He came to Nazareth and he could do no mighty works there because of their disbelief."  And I think there's ample evidence in both Testaments, that God, in some texts, has to deal with the world the way it is, and cannot wish it away.  I think that the power of God was assumed everywhere in the Near East.  But that's not the Biblical question, the Biblical question is is God faithful.  And they struggle a lot with the faithfulness of God.  So, I think that's a more interesting question than the power of God. I think you can point to texts that claim God's power and you can point to texts that doubt God's power but I don't think Israel is preoccupied with that question, I think it's the question of fidelity. So you get, "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?" Which is an accusation to God about God's infidelity. And I think that's everywhere.

I'll jump in to note it's nice for me, who has such a hard time remembering chapter and verse to see that someone as good at this as WB does too.   But more so  because the answer I gave a while back about the barroom atheist chestnut, the challenge to a believer about the paradox of God being all-powerful enough to make a rock that's too big for God to pick up seems to me to go farther (the next questioner kind of gets there too) because the atheist challenge seems to miss several things:

A. We live in the cosmos that God created, in which God set the conditions of possibility and the limits of what is possible.  Everything about us, all of our thinking comes from our experience of that universe with its pre-set conditions, that that imagined scenario is a paradox is a product of our experience of God's choices in making things as they are.  What would seem to be a challenge to God's ultimate powerfulness works even better as a demonstration of God's ultimate power.

That we can imagine that paradox, imagining something that could not be internally true because it pits one imagined ultimate display of ultimate power against an inconsistent imagined ultimate display of ultimate power would, within the idea that God is all powerful and that, as the Bible puts it, we are created in Gods image would certainly mean that God is able to imagine things being different from how they are but for God's own reasons which God doesn't completely share with us, God didn't choose the cosmos to be like that.

I think what's missing from this is human beings imagining that we're equipped to get that, to understand why God doesn't set things up the way we like them. You can choose not to like that and choose to decide there is no God because you don't like it and the fact that all of us are creatures within a cosmos in which we are not the ultimate point of everything, that our material bodies are as much a part of that as a sparrow's or the grasses that dry up in the wind, but the secularists don't even get as far as the hapless Job in understanding why bad things happen to good people.  Which gets us to the thing that really got me excited in my egalitarian predisposition.

Questioner 2: You were talking about . . . this follows up to what you were just saying. This idea of making a choice between the goodness of God verses the power of God as a way of bringing some understanding to when we don't understand why bad things happen to good people. I know I've heard it in the Christian circle that I'm a part of. That when I cannot understand or trace the Hand of God I must trust the Heart of God. Which I think gets back to His goodness. But you raised as an example of that the Book of Job.  When Job is crying out, trying to understand why it seemed the Hand of God had turned against him, God had abandoned him and then God responds to him. And almost dares him, "Where were you [when I laid the foundation of the Earth . . .  ]"  How does the Sovereignty of God fit into this paradigm that you've set up, the Goodness of God verses the Power of God as a way of understanding.  And also the free will of man.  I think that plays into this idea of when Jesus could do no good work there because that element of faith that is needed on our part for God to be able to function and do what He does.  So I'd like your thoughts on the idea of sovereignty and also the free will of man.

Walter Brueggemann: Well, I think that the whirlwind speeches at the end of The Book of Job are deliberately enigmatic. What I know is that God is a terrible pastoral councilor because Job comes with all of these aches and pains and doubts and angers and, you know, God is supposed to say, "How are things going?"  And God says, "Let me tell you about the hippopotamus I just made."  So I think it is probably a tilt at God's Sovereignty but it isn't quite spelled out that way, it says, "I'm not gonna discuss this with you!  I am not interested in your aches and pains so quit talking to me about that!" So, I think God is portrayed there as fairly abrasive . . . is not terribly amenable. . .

It should be remembered that Job is a story that is supposed to represent and teach us something about unearned suffering - I think elsewhere Brueggemann says it is a reaction against the idea that suffereing is earned in parts of The Law.  This is a human explanation of things, inspired, I think, because in so many ways it is honest that God is not going to tell us, at least in this life, about why everything is as it is.  It's a confession of the limits of even revealed religion that religion doesn't have all the answers anymore than physics or chemistry or pure or applied math is ever going to have them.  It's really rather funny how the "theory of everything" atheist ideological cosmologists are just the flip side of the joker card of pretetious religious fundamentalism, in the end.  Both of them have a tendency towards a rigid determinism as a response to the mysteries and exigencies of human experience.  I don't think it's any accident that Republican-fascism is so tied to the antiChrist of vulgar materialism as expressed by the American antichrist of "Christian nationalism,"  and that the would be secular left is so impotent to oppose them.

Getting to the heart of things:

Now I don't know about free will.  I'll tell you a joke from Columbia Seminary where I taught which is very Calvinist.  Long time ago Dr. Geer was lecturing on double-predestination - this is Calvin voodoo - and he saw a student sleeping in class so he went up to him and said, "Define double-predestination!" And the student said,  Oh, Dr. Geer, I did know but I've forgotten. Dr. Geer said, "Holy Jesus, the only person in Western Christendom who understood and he has forgotten!"

I just saw . . . what's it called?  "Adjustment Bureau?" with Matt Damon which is about free will. And the movie sort of says if you love enough you'll have freedom against God's will. Well, I don't find that a very helpful way to talk about it.

I think when you talk about God's Sovereignty and human free will you have to talk about a covenant. You have to talk about a dialogical relationship   in which both parties are free and both parties are bound. And it's like any serious relationship, it's a matter of working that out which never ends in complete sovereignty or in complete freedom but it is the enigma of fidelity. And I think that's the primary set of Biblical faith. And, you see, if we had understood that dialogical fidelity is the defining set I dare to think we wouldn't have gotten into all of the patriarchal abuse of Women, we wouldn't have gotten into the silencing of Gays, we wouldn't have needed to get into enslavement of Blacks because dialogical freedom means that both parties are always at risk and I think in the Bible that's true of our relationship with God in which both parties are free and both parties are bound and it has to do with working it out. Does that make sense? . . . Then I'm lucky.  

This has so much in it for further understanding of both the problems of having a truly egalitarian society, legal and political system and, most problematic of all, economics - as Brueggemann gets in his list of those who are in great need of equality - that I am going to present it as tying the past two months here together.  And Brueggeman, with all of his experience and intellect and honesty, admits that he doesn't have more of a framing to understand it than the author of Job seems to have for the aspects of it that she or he was dealing with.  

I do think he's farther along than anything I've read in the best secular political thinkers I've read. They are often extremely good on narrowly defined issues, Arent on lying, on the Eichmann trial, but I don't find anyting, not a single thing, that will advance us on equality and justice and on farther than that to mutual fidelity and care which is what will give the reluctant, the skeptical and the scared the motive to enter into that kind of dialogical freedom in which you have to give up some of what you want to live in justice with others.  Which is why so many on the secular left have been diverted into some horrific positions such as supporting some of the most evil governments in the history of the world, giving Nazis a chance of making their history repeat itself perpetually (on the idiotic idea that Marxism would, thus, have a chance here),  even more so our indigenous form of fascism, white supremacy,  the evils of the "first amendment rights" of the addiction industries to lie us into things like the opioid addiction epidemic, the porn industry, etc. Secularism has had such bad results that I am ready to say they match the evils of established religion if they don't already out-match that other evil we should never try again.

I tried European, 18th century style secular liberalism and it doesn't do the job. It's worse than ineffective, it has helped get us to the discrediting of the traditional form of American liberalism which arose to struggle against the evils that Brueggemann listed.

Paul Said It Best, Even With The Theoretically Best Texts We See It All As Through A Glass Darkly

WE ALMOST NEVER ADMIT that the act of reading texts written by other people is, inevitably, an act of interpretation.  The plain facts of what the act of writing and reading written and hearing heard words is proves that.  You hear a series of sounds and, if you know the language sufficiently, your mind resolves those into concepts which produce either coherent thoughts or incoherence. If you are learning a language, you can listen to a recording of something, something which, at first, totally goes over your head but which, with repeated hearings, gradually becomes clear. The text hasn't changed, your ability to interpret it has.  And different people will come up with different understandings of it, usually not seriously different, sometimes very consequentially different.  I doubt there's anything to be done about that, it's going to be the same no matter what, though I don't think all interpretations are the same, certainly not those which end up harming People and other living beings.  Do unto others what you would have them do unto you and by their fruits you will know them are the safest rules to follow in judging the validity of all of this and those rules have the most impeccable provenance, no matter what the repute and provenance of the claims are.  That Augustine or Calvin or "St." Pope JPII said so makes no more headway with me than if the good woman at the feed store down the road said it, frequently, less so. I can see who is more likely to do good.  

The same is true for significant marks made on a surface, paper, clay, sand, etc. Only with written texts your mind will translate those into unheard sounds which are then resolved into ideas.  I do not have the experience of language without having the experience of hearing, I would be extremely interested in how someone who learned language while entirely deaf would explain their experiences of that. Though I would only be able to imagine something like what that was like no matter how hard I tried to understand it.  

When the language isn't one you know as thoroughly and familiarly as the mother tongue you learned as a child and have been gaining familiarity with it your entire life and exposure to its literary culture and daily use, the necessity of interpretation should be admitted up front.  A translator who, ideally, is trying to make what those words say make sense to themselves and to those to who they want to pass that message - NOT THEIR OWN - to, owes it to their audience to admit that all of it goes through that filter which is even with the best of intent as capable of producing distortions as well as elucidation.  

Even for versions and dialects of your mother tongue, older modes of expression you are not fully familiar with, things will be imperfectly understood if not maliciously and evilly used by intent.  One infamous passage of English language translated scripture like that is when Jesus is made to say to his followers to let the kids in to see him,  telling those kid-haters (I think they were all patriarchal type males) "Suffer the little children," sometimes even failing to finish the sentence " ...to come unto me  for such is the Kingdom of Heaven. " He was telling them to put up with the kids not to hit them.  Which is sometimes used by sadistic assholes to claim Jesus said beating kids was morally good for them. That one of the examples of that which I heard on TV was an Irish Catholic priest in charge of an elementary school shows how even someone who had to have read that enough to understand the passage twisted and distorted an unfortunate translation for his own hateful ends.  Despite what is often said about the "literary value" of some translations, that shows how dangerous translating more for the sake of literary effect than meaning can be.*  To tie that in with a recent post, that kind of thing is bound to happen when only unmarried men or other exclusive, small cliques, have ultimate power in an institution. Though there have been many married men and women who are as big assholes of that type.

For us when it comes to The Bible, for the entire modern audience, even those who have studied the languages of the Scriptures for many years, all of Scripture, even when read in the original languages, are, in effect, an interpretation, probably as much so as a translation is.  I don't think it would be too much of a stretch to say that the only persons who had access to the full meaning of the original were those who wrote it AND IN MANY CASES THEY WERE INTERPRETING WHAT EYE-WITNESSES HAD TOLD THEM, PROBABLY THAT HAPPENING IN ARAMAIC, the author of Luke's Gospel and Acts explicitly says that's what his writings, a whole third of the New Testament canon was based on. For the bibliolatrous Fundamentalists who might be reading this, not even the writers of Scripture could have had access to that mythical pure, inerrant version of the KJV imagined into Hebrew, Aramaic and genuwine Koine Greek because they, too, relied on what other people had written down.

Even before that, when it's Scripture which is full of many different things but most importantly what is claimed to be divinely authoritative Statements and Commandments, that act of interpretation starts with those who authored the Scriptures, the Prophets, the Gospel Writers, the Epistle Writers, the story-tellers, those who authored other texts that were, then, collected by others and made part of the canon of Scripture, were interpreting their experience of encounters with God or divine inspiration or their commentary, ideas on, enhancements of and, in some cases rather clear ideological bending, of what previous authors produced. As I've said recently, I think some of what they put in it should have been left on the cutting room floor. Some of that Scripture has produced not only bitter and painful fruit but a full measure of evil.  

As it happened, in a project I've been working on for myself, as an exercise, of translating Luke and Acts into what I hope is very clear and simple Piron-style Esperanto.  In addition to several modern "simple English" translations,  I've been consulting the original texts in Greek** to the best of my inadequacy.  I have also been consulting the translations made by the classicist, philosopher and, I guess, theologian David Bentley Hart whose knowledge of the Greek Language is unusually large for someone making such a translation.  His long and essential preface material and post-script material are extremely enlightening on many issues upon which he exposes his own biases and reasons for doing what he did with rather stunning honesty as part of his critique of the efforts of others.  Though what, I'd say,  is more fairly called his orientation instead of "biases" are as someone familiar with the Greek language from the most ancient pagan texts and up through the relevant period of the early centuries of Christianity and as a quite independent member of the Orthodox branch of Christianity.  

I can't claim to anything more than being a self-taught somewhat poor reader of the Koine Greek of the Bible who has become extremely skeptical of, especially, the influence of Augustine and his followers in Western Christianity and who has read, mostly, Gregory of Nyssa and a few of the other Greek theologians in English translations.  Gregory, especially, led me to understand just how much of the most horrific part of Western theology, Roman Catholic as well as Protestant, were based, not on what the texts closest to the witness of Jesus in person say, the Greek Gospels, Paul, James, . . . but on mistranslated and the late-in-life psychological fixations of Augustine and others who either disregarded what the Greek texts say or who could not even read them built on inferior Latin translations and, then built on that sand, instead.  

In his Post Script, he goes into one of the most serious Western distortions of Scripture which has had little but terrible consequences for both the psychology and culture and theology of Western Christianity, things such as God eternally damning to the most horrific pain those who sin even mildly or, in the most pathologically developed aspect of that distortion, those who God merely chooses for eternal damnation before God creates them for that fate. Among the other things I can see that came from that was that kind of atheism which rejected that God and, even more so, the evil cartoon of Jesus that, for example, the minor British poet Stevie Smith slammed Christianity over it:

Is it not interesting to see
How the Christians continually
Try to separate themselves in vain
From the doctrine of eternal pain?

They cannot do it,
They are vowed to it,
The Lord said it,
They must believe it.

So the vulnerable body is stretched without pity
On flames forever. Is this not pretty?

The religion of Christianity
Is mixed of sweetness and cruelty.

Considering Smith's major theme was her pathological fixation with suicide, which she fulfilled, I have to wonder what place the decidedly grim view of Christianity she fashionably took played in that.  I did like the radio play and the movie, which is probably about as much of a reason anyone remembers her apart from her slamming Christianity over those grim and unnecessary  doctrines.

The American Fundamentalist fixation with the devil, fire and brimstone sermons, those Halloween Hell Houses which you have to conclude is a cover for them obsessively and sadistically enjoying the idea of the majority of humanity going to eternal punishment by their god of hell (I don't see how the idea of an eternal hell where Satan under whatever name they give him is in charge doesn't posit him as an all powerful god with different aims). Even when I was a child, I couldn't square that with the claims that such a God who would pointlessly torture souls eternally, without any hope of salvation, could possibly love such creatures he created. Either God is love or God makes creatures for eternal pain, in which case God is hate.  If God does not make us to be able to understand how God could be both at once, that's certainly not our fault. That mainly Western God would be more of the ultimate dyspeptic Al Capp, a nasty son of a bitch.  

And speaking of the devil, Augustine and his ilk are, as well, I think the inspiration of the myriads of modernist decadents and atheists who revel in so much of amorality and evil, while they share in a human weakness that Augustine, and Calvin had.  Certainly a fondness for sadistic hatred, especially for those who are the least among us, was known before Western Christian patriarchs invented that, the precedents in many classical literatures and histories show that. I would go so far as to say that it is the psychological inspiration of every act of human and animal sacrifice, even that authorized by monotheistic religion.

I think it's reasonable to ask how much of Augustine's and others introduction of that into Christianity was a residuum of his previously held paganism.  

Modern atheists would object to me pointing out that their predilections are a cultural result of the most twisted aspects of Western church orthodoxy and, in English speaking countries, probably France, too, one of the most developed aspects of that in the predestinarian parts of Calvinism.  I read the meditations on God eternally roasting even unsinning babies who died without benefit of baptism made by those august fathers of Western Christianity and it is impossible to not conclude that they very much like and enjoy that idea. They seem to positively groove on it.   In the process it is impossible to not conclude that they have issued the most outrageous slanders against Jesus, against God that it is possible to make, one which Stevie Smith rightly rejected though, a good but decidedly minor member of the 20th century Brit smart set, she never seems to have been introduced to the idea that maybe the large majority of Western Christians simply didn't understand what the often complex and often obscure texts say.  David Bentley Hart concludes is discussion of it with this:

But the texts do not actually say any of that, and again, the absence of any hint of  such a notion in the Pauline corpus (or, for that matter, in the fourth Gospel, or the “Catholic Epistles,” or those very early doctrinal and confessional texts the Didache and Apostles’ Creed, or the writings of the Apostolic Fathers . . .)  makes the very concept nearly as historically suspect as it is morally  unintelligible. Moreover, to read back into these texts either the traditional view of dual and in some sense synchronously eternal postmortem destinies  or the developed high mediaeval Roman Catholic view of an absolute distinction between “Hell” and “Purgatory” would be either (in the former case) a dogmatic reflex rather than an exegetical necessity or (in the latter) an act of simple historical illiteracy. But I leave it to readers to reconcile the various eschatological passages of the New Testament with one another, or not, as they choose; the most I can do is offer an observation about two of the greatest and most brilliant Church Fathers of the later fourth and early fifth centuries. The Greek-speaking Gregory of Nyssa, who was a universalist and who simply assumed the purgatorial view of the gehenna, was able to unite all the various biblical images and claims in a fairly seamless synthesis in his writings, omitting nothing known to him as Christian canon. Conversely, the Latin-speaking Augustine, who took very much the contrary view, was far more selective in his use of scripture, was dependent on often grossly misleading translations, and had to expend enormous energy on qualifying, rephrasing, and explaining away a host of passages that did not really conform well to the theological system he imagined he had found in Paul’s writings. This is, if nothing else, instructive.

This rather rambling answer to a horrified reader who doesn't like where I'm going could certainly be better but I'm dealing with some ongoing issues.   I hope to get back to commenting on the insanity of U.S. politics this week, maybe saving this topic for weekends.

* In going through my language exercise, I've come to the conclusion that the  currently raging war between the "dynamic equivalence" and "formal equivalence" theories of biblical translations is rather pointless.  Even the most "formally equivalent" translations is saturated by the same actions as are defined by "dynamic equivalence".  I can compare that with my evolving ideas about singing opera in the languages those are written in as compared to using a good translation into the language the majority of the audience can understand.  If it's a bad translation then it may as well not be understood, if it's a good translation that tells you what's going on, what's being said, while not doing too much violence to the music, that's certainly preferable to not understanding what's being said, what's going on and the whole story behind the thing.  Which reminds me of, when he started setting the decadent poetry of Stefan George in The Book of the Hanging Gardens, Schoenberg remarked that he realized that, though German was his first language, he had never really thought of the meaning of some of the Schubert songs he'd known since his childhood.

Luckily, for us, we don't have to try to make it fit in with a preexisting melody.  I wouldn't think of touching the Psalms to try to make singable texts, though the Magnificat and other Canticles are hard to get into a form that I really like.

Which could get me back to some of the preface material of DBH in which he proclaims his shock at the radicalism of the New Testament which, though he'd long been able to read the Greek texts, he didn't really appreciate till he had to try to figure out how to say it in modern English.  I will say that though he confesses his doctrinal predispositions in what he concluded, I'd trust his to be fairly free of conscious or unconscious twisting of meaning to conform to any church or theological ideology.  I can't claim that I think about these Scriptures in the language of DBH's translation but it has become one that I look at more and more when trying to figure out what the Koine text means. At least he's up front about where he's coming from.

** We don't have 'THE ORIGINAL' Greek texts of either of those, or, in fact, of any part of the New Testament, we have editions which choose words and sentences and passages of the oldest and some later manuscripts which don't always agree in many details and, at times, more serious parts of Scripture.

Dusan Bogdanovic - Sonatina Homage to Haydn

 

 

Daniella Rossi, guitar

An upside down, turn your world around, reigning of justice

 

 

Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Beth Ford McNamee

In today’s readings we are given an invitation to become a part of God’s reigning of justice. An upside down, turn your world around, reigning of justice. Where the lowly are raised up, the blind see, the hungry are fed, and the imprisoned are set free, the psalmist proclaims. Where God chooses the foolish of the world to shame the wise and chooses the weak of the world to shame the strong, Paul tells us. Seek justice, seek humility, the prophet Zephaniah exhorts us. Seek humility that no human being might boast before God. Seek humility, for we are in Christ Jesus, the wisdom of God. Seek humility, the very ground and birth of our being from God's fierce and tender love, a radical love that does justice, a justice that we are called to work for with others, especially learning from those on the margins.  

When I hear Jesus inviting us to see ourselves as part of God’s upside-down reigning of justice, I think about my time as a Jesuit volunteer in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Before arriving, I had read about poverty and oppressive systems, but it’s difficult to describe what happens to your heart when people you’ve only read about are now your friends, neighbors and students. When the people of global statistics are kids showing up at your gate gleefully calling out your new Swahili nickname “Beti! Beti!” ... And your neighbors are inviting you, “Karibu (Welcome),” and gesturing to you to “Kula,” (Eat), Beti, and just like that you’re sharing a meal. When global health and HIV/AIDS are no longer numbers but a teacher whose hand you held as he was dying. When your high school principal years later becomes one of the many Jesuit martyrs, giving his very life for the community he served. When your heart breaks open in tears and joys over and over again.

I hear Jesus saying “blessed” to my Tanzanian friends, neighbors, and students. You are blessed. I love you. I am with you. I’m inviting you to my reign of love and justice. You are blessed when you cook ugali and invite others to your meals over and over again. You are blessed when you carry water from the pump. For your hunger and thirst will be satisfied. You are blessed when you study by kerosene lamp and put your head down on your desk the next morning because there was not enough for breakfast. For your education is ufunguo wa maisha, (the key of life). You are blessed when you prepare the food for the mbsiba (the funeral), where mourning is loud and visceral. You are blessed. I love you. I am with you. You are a part of my reign of love and justice.

When I hear Jesus inviting us to see ourselves as part of God’s upside-down reigning of justice, I think about the university students and the community partners I serve with here in Philadelphia, now twenty years later. I hear Jesus saying “blessed” to my students. Not hashtag blessed. But deeply, authentically blessed. You are blessed when you march for racial justice on campus and in our city. You are blessed when you feel overwhelmed by anxiety and your classes and you find it hard to leave your room. You are blessed when you are changing your major, trying to figure out what you’re doing with “your one wild and precious life” (Mary Oliver, The Summer Day). You are blessed. I love you. I am with you. You are a part of my reign of love and justice.

I hear Jesus saying “blessed” to our community service partners. You are blessed when you mourn with those who have lost loved ones to gun violence. You are blessed when you pour countless hours into trauma informed education, tutoring, and mentoring. You are blessed when you are hungry and when you are able to eat in a loving, dignified space. You are blessed when you show up, marching in the streets and the ballot boxes for a more just society. You are blessed. I love you. I am with you. You are a part of my reign of love and justice.

Consider your calling, Paul says. Can we show up for this upside-down reigning of God? Can we place ourselves in spaces where we are not trying to be first, best, or boasting before God and others? Can we place ourselves instead in marginal spaces, place ourselves in humility before the sacredness of one another, to become people of authentic encounter, kinship, and relationship?

Consider your calling. God is calling us as my Tanzanian neighbors did to me, “Karibu” (Welcome). Welcome to your calling. Welcome to your calling that is blessedness, that is humility, that is fierce and passionate love, that is encounter, kinship, and relationship, that is collaborative and creative restructuring of our societies. So that the oppressed are set free, the lowly are lifted up, the mourning are comforted, and the hungry are not hungry in the first place. So that we may celebrate and join together in the Eucharistic banquet where no one is outside of God’s overflowing, abundant, and compassionate love. For this, let us rejoice and be glad!  

Karen Ross, Ph.D., preaches for the Third Sunday in Ordinary Time

Indian writer and activist Arundahti Roy proclaimed, “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” This Sunday’s first reading from the prophet Isaiah echoes this message by depicting a radical vision for the people of God- a world in which their distress has turned into joy, and the darkness around them has been pierced by a brilliant light. Isaiah announces,

“Anguish has taken wing, dispelled is darkness:
For there is no gloom where but now there was distress.
The people who walked in darkness
Have seen a great light;
Upon those who dwelt in the land of gloom
A light has shone.”

Winter has arrived in the northern hemisphere, and the January sky is often gloomy and cold as we collectively long for the warmth of the light. In the lives of many there is also much darkness, especially for those suffering from mental, physical, and spiritual distress due to loss, illness, or oppression. During the past few years, the global pandemic has exacerbated the physical and mental load already affecting marginalized communities, leaving more and more people vulnerable to the effects of disease, racism, sexism, and economic exploitation. On top of that, the global temperature is on the rise, causing devastating weather events like wildfires, hurricanes, and heat waves, not to mention the decrease in wildlife and the melting of arctic ice. It is easy to hear this prophecy from Isaiah and wonder if this world is even possible, and whether our suffering will ever transform into abundant joy.

The Isrealites in Isaiah’s time were living under Assyrian control, and his prophecy was a political and social revolution against empire as he ushered in a vision of a new world in which justice and peace would prevail. We can imagine what it must have felt like for the subjugated people to hear that the “yoke that burdened them, the pole on their shoulder, and the rod of their taskmaster [God] has smashed.” Could they imagine this new world that was on her way? Could they hear the breath of freedom in the air, even if only for a moment? In our gospel reading, Jesus echoes this prophecy from Isaiah to the Jews living under Roman rule, shortly after his cousin John had been arrested for his radical ministry. Jesus’ vision that light would conquer the darkness and that life would overcome death served as an audacious message of hope and liberation for people who were suffering at the hands of the empire. This vision represents the inbreaking of the kin-dom of God- a state of being where all of creation participates in building a world of love, justice, forgiveness, and peace. Jesus preached that this new world was not only possible, but it is near; the “kin-dom of heaven is at hand.”

In our own time, vulnerable people in our communities are also living and dying under oppression and unjust governance. Whether it be a mother living in poverty who cannot afford to buy her child insulin, a survivor of sexual violence who is not believed, or a child caught in the line of fire due to gun violence, there are many who live in anguish and “walk in darkness” each day. Do you believe that another world is possible? Our Christian faith provides us with the inconceivable hope that there is always light that will pierce the darkness, and that another world is already on her way. We can catch glimpses of this kin-dom that God desires for us each time love conquers fear, and each day that the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice, as the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed was possible. By remembering that God is our light, we can help usher in this new world where there is no longer poverty, hunger, or hate; what King called the beloved community. This God-given light also lives within each human being, and can give us the strength to fight for justice another day, and to work towards a dream that others may find impossible. Since God is an active God working in and through the lives of those who suffer, we can be assured that this new world is not only possible, but that she is already on her way. May we have the grace and bravery not only see this light amidst the darkness, but be that light to guide the way for others. Amen.

NOTE:   Obviously, this was meant to be posted on Sunday but I've been without power for most of the time since Saturday.   Hope everyone's well. 

"the way God has been thought of for thousands of years is no longer convincing"

". . . not that the old questions which are coeval with the appearance of men on earth have become "meaningless,"  but that they way they were framed and answered has lost plausibility."


I HAVE SAID that from now on I'll judge all interpretations of Scripture  according to the extent to which they agree with that summation of The Law and the Prophets as presented by Jesus and Hillel, Do to others what you would have them do to you.   Not only that of the Jewish and Christian Bible, by the way but all such texts and declarations claiming authority, certainly that includes the form attributed to Hillel, that which is hateful to you do not do to others.  Either you believe that summation of The Law and the Prophets is a Commandment of God or you don't.  If you do it was the Law in the time of Abram and Lot and Judges and for every other time when the Scripture asserts that the heros of the stories did all kinds of things to others, especially Women, things they would never have wanted done to them.  the story of Sodom and Gomorrah fails as a moral lesson under that standard for all the reasons I stated. So does Abraham's alleged behavior in many instances. As I said, I don't believe those legends are likely to have ever really happened, they were inventions likely of far later priests and scribes and fabulists that got written into Genesis and other books of the Bible. I think that Abraham pimped his wife twice in Genesis is probably an editing mistake, though if he did do it once and made out like it says in the story, a real life guy who would use his wife like that might do it again.  I prefer to think it's probably not how the couple who are the origin of the line that became The Children of Israel really were in real life.  Their behavior in regard to Hagar and Ishmael is especially disgusting, as told. Almost as bad as Lot's in regard to his daughters.

That and Great Commandments of Jesus, Love God and Love Others and his New Commandment which you can only try to approximate, Love one another as I have loved you.  None of us is Jesus, I doubt any of us is capable of fulfilling that one but that's no excuse to not try.

But I believe that so strongly that I will not only apply it to interpretations of Scripture but, also, to those parts of Scripture which most certainly do not agree with those Commandments which I take to be always and eternally valid on the authority of those two great experts in Scripture and those who have agreed with them.  I judge those using my other method of evaluation, the rule of thumb given by Jesus for judging the authenticity of would-be religious figures and movements and would-be morality, he using the metaphor of trees in an orchard, "by their fruits you will know them." If that's a valid rule for judging what people claim, especially in religious matters, it's as valid for judging the claims of those who wrote down the Scriptures.  If you don't do that, if you're not to do that, Christianity has a gaping hole in its integrity.

Good acts, good language will not generally bring evil results if those are carefully and responsibly understood and enacted.  It's conceivable that even the best ideas can produce bad results when they are stupidly or merely imperfectly applied.  In any case I can think of, if you follow those Commandments it's fairly obvious that huge swaths of claimed religious Scripture, doctrine, dogma, rules, laws, claims fail and People and other living beings will be hurt by them.  

It should never be forgotten that large parts of the Bible were produced by priests, scribes, etc. who had not only their own ideological point of view, but who often worked for the Temple establishment and the Kings.  Judges is, as one commentator I read said, clearly designed as a warning to those who don't much like the monarchy of what anarchy looks like. It's clear that it went through the hands of some who found same-sex-sex disgusting and even clearer that those who produced it were male supremacists, as most of humanity seems to have been.

The lines of Scripture and later theology and doctrine and dogma which asserts the rightness of the subjugation, oppression and abuse of Women is solid if not absolute proof of the falseness of those lines of Scripture, those stories contained in it. Everything in Scripture which supports patriarchy is false.  And by that I don't mean there is some "true meaning" which, somehow, people have just not happened to notice in the two-thousand years plus that they have been used that way.  Even those who invent that fig leaf to cover the shame of taking those as true and binding on us today don't really believe it. Though those scriptures are important as examples of how even within the written Scripture there are red flags of what to avoid believing and using to chart your course of conduct.

Lines of Scripture, even alleged laws that support slavery, that support wage slavery, that support the cheating of workers, etc. prove the falseness of those passages or the falseness of others twisted to do that.  If everyone followed the rule to not do to others what you would want them to do to you, slavery would be impossible, wage slavery, maltreatment and cheating, etc.  Any verse or story of Scripture, any law that would allow for what we understand, now, as being slavery has to fall by the superior means of defining The Law and the Prophets.

There were seeds of better things in the Scripture even for that, seeds that have germinated and developed into something like trees that bore better fruit, that's true in recent times for abolitionism, Women's equality, etc.  Those in history are inseparable from the People who argued for those using Scripture, not least of which was the Golden Rule, the other egalitarian passage and those which can be read that way.  Much of that goes right back to the opening of Exodus, something which, especially, Black Americans noticed from the start of their opposition to their enslavement, even as slavers used passages of the Bible to supposedly justify their holding people in chattel slavery in perpetuity.  Funny that American Christians who supported slavery in the American way never seem to have read the Commandments in the Mosaic books that said escaped slaves were to be allowed to live as equals in the place they fled to and not returned to slavery. For anyone who believes the Constitution is "based on the Bible." Today, the same ignore the failure of Slave owners and their progeny to pay reparations to slaves that are freed, though that's specifically laid out clearly in Scripture.

I have given three of the passages from the First Testament that are constantly used by those who most certainly want to treat LGBTQ+ People as they would never want to be treated as examples of, in two cases, the clear falseness of what those claim and in the other why it means the opposite of that use of it, I will note the others, in Leviticus and Paul, as those are commonly read, also fail on the Golden Rule rule of hermenutics, they also fail because it's clear those who wrote that had no idea of consensual, equal, loving, faithful, committed marriages of two men or two women.  The modern understanding of egalitarian marriage (I'd say impossible for them to imagine, both at the time of Leviticus or Paul) is an entirely different thing from what those passages imagine.  It's rare enough for straight-marriages, I'd say easily fewer than ten-percent of all marriages seem to be that kind of marriage.  When I speak about marriage equality that's what I mean, as I said in my last post on that topic, I mean that I want the best kind of marriages for all men and women, married to the other sex or the same sex.  I want those for any children who are living in all families, whether with two mothers or fathers or one of each.  Paul certainly couldn't imagine that even for straight married People, that is why his suggestion that Women be submissive to their husbands is so offensive now.  We can imagine a truly moral form of marriage in which no one is submissive but both practice the Golden Rule and work out disagreements and problems on the basis of consideration and love instead of patriarchal dominance.  

On the "by their fruits you will know them" rule you can look at what we know about the marriages and sexual conduct of those who hate marriage equality.  I doubt more than a small percentage of them are engaged in moral, faithful marriages, a number of them, when their sexual conduct is made known, don't have feet of clay, they've got feet of beach sand that washes away when the first wave hits.  I will just mention the current state of the unmarried Catholic clergy and hierarchy and its known history of the period since and before, say, Stonewall to say they generally don't have a leg to stand on in prescribing sexual morality and what constitutes a legitimate marriage.  As we can see from recent news, even full blown Republican-fascists opposed to marriage equality for same-sex partners can same-sex screw around, when you look at those who don't value any truth you won't find integrity.

The lie that Biblical Fundamentalism is based in,that there is or ever was a  "pure" written Scripture of which the currently had Bible is either a reproduction or a near perfect copy of, a Scripture that is literally true, every verse, every, sentence, every letter, is false.  The Bible we have is nothing of the sort.  Some books are rather coherently the product of a single author(with some editing).  Some of the New Testament is, I think, reliably seen as a good survival of the original authors' intent.  Some of the Bible, especially the oldest of the Scriptures is the product of centuries of copying, revision, editing expansion (probably contraction in some cases, not enough for Genesis and Judges, for example). As much as I am skeptical about an "historical-critical" reading of Scripture as producing a more reliable reading of it, what it has discerned about the handling and creation of the "editions" we have of Scripture is useful in discerning what to look for in determining what to believe and what to figure is better considered as allegory or metaphor or ideological imposition (Judges is full of that).  But most of us are not Scripture scholars and no Scripture scholarship is entirely reliable and the last word on the topic. We've got to read it for ourselves and choose what criteria we will use to evaluate it.  Evaluation is inevitably part of the act of understanding.

And no one, not even the looniest of claimed, be exact follower of the most the Scripture, the wackiest of Fundamentalist, really lives by every word of Scripture.  You couldn't possibly believe every word of it literally because there are glaring inconsistencies and contradictions in the collection and even within individual books of it. "Thou shalt not kill, a rather glaring example of that."  Fundamentalism and its Catholic and other equivalents, lie about that.  And as liars, they discredit their claims as reliable, in part or in whole.  Especially those who leave nasty comments on blogs and then whine when I or others won't post them.  You can ask a guy who trolled me for more than a decade,  I can be convinced by evidence and reason, you can't coerce me or shame me to "shut up."  I won't post your invective but I  will use what you provide.  But on my terms, not yours.  

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

The objection to my saying that I think to retain the truths of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures that it will be necessary to reject the validity of Scriptures permitting slavery, the subjugation of Women and such stories as the Sodom and Gomorrah tale, the clear riff on that as found in Judges 19, such things as prescribing stoning and other capital punishment rather dangerously and other clear immorality in the Scriptures promoting inequality and what makes inequality real,  because human culture is in the process of leaving those, I hope, in the past.  Which  interestingly jibes with something I happened to read two days back, part of my project of reading more of Hannah Arendt's writing than I had.

To raise such questions as "What is thinking?"  "What is evil?"  has its difficulties.  They belong to philosophy or metaphysics,  terms that designate a field of inquiry which, as we all know, has fallen into disrepute. If this were merely a matter of positivist and neo-positivist assaults, we need perhaps not be concerned. Our difficulty with raising such questions is caused less by those to whom they are "meaningless" anyhow than by those who are under attack.  Just as the crisis in religion reached its climax when theologians, as distinguished from the old crowd of non-believers, began to talk about the "God is dead" propositions,  the crisis in philosophy and metaphysics came into the open when philosophers themselves began to declare the end of philosophy and metaphysics.  Now, this could have its advantage;  I trust it will once it has been understood that these "ends" actually mean not that God has "died"- an obvious absurdity in every respect -  but that the way God has been thought of for thousands of years is no longer convincing and not that the old questions which are coeval with the appearance of men on earth have become "meaningless,"  but that they way they were framed and answered has lost plausibility.

What has come to an end is the basic distinction between the sensual and the supersensual,  together with the notion, at least as old as Parmenides,  that whatever is not given to the senses - God or Being or the First Principles and Causes (archai) or the Ideas - is more real, more truthful, more meaningful than what appears,  that it is not just beyond sense perception but above the world of the sense. What is "dead" is not only the localization of such "eternal truths"  but the distinction itself.  Meanwhile, in increasingly strident voices the few defenders of metaphysics have warned us of the danger of nihilism inherent in this development;  and although they themselves seldom invoke it they have an important argument in their favor:  it is indeed true that once the supersensual realm is discarded, its opposite, the world of appearances as understood for so many centuries is also annihilated.  The sensual, as still understood by the positivists, cannot survive the death of the supersensual.  No one knew this better than Nietzsche who, with his poetic and metaphoric description of the assassination of God in Zarathustra,  has caused so much confusion in these matters.  In a significant passage in The Twilight of Idols,  he clarifies what the word "God" meant in Zarathustra.  It was merely a symbol for the suprasensual realm as understood by metaphysics;  he now uses instead of "God" the word "true world" and says:  "We have abolished the true world.   What has remained?  The apparent one perhaps?  Oh no!  With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one."  

Hannah Arendt:  Thinking and Moral Considerations A Lecture

I will though I can't think right away why it's significant note that she dedicated it to the poet W. A. Auden. I think I need to read more Auden.   Maybe I gave more of it than needed to make my point about the impossibility of us thinking of God as they thought of him in the times of the assembly of Genesis or when Paul was writing from his experience and understanding, so different from our time.

Note that at the start of that passage, she asks about the future of such questions as "What is thinking?"  "What is evil?,"  two things which, as a political blogger arguing against materialist, atheist, scientism on the one hand (elite materialism) and political gangsterism, the Republican-fascist party, (vulgar materialism) those have been very important here.  I think the nihilism that she noted is a problem when you take materialism seriously is not only a product of that but any time people reject morality which comes with a price.  I have repeatedly said that the evil that results from secularism, atheism, materialism, is inevitable when the choice to believe in God and in the reality of Commandments of equality and reciprocity is rejected. Without that equality and democracy are doomed.  And, as the vulgar materialists prove, many of the most fervent Bible Thumpers and Catholics who are more Catholic than the Pope reject that as well.  The phenomenon of Christians without not only Jesus and Paul but The Law (when it applies inconveniently to them but not when they can dole false details of alleged law out unequally on others) is something Arendt might have expanded on, even then.  There were such people around when she wrote, though not that many as shameless as those on cabloid TV and hate talk media such as EWTN and sitting on the Supreme Court and in Congress right now.

Post Script:  I had a straight friend of sorts, a man who was of my parents generation who I phoned more than three times a week, to check on and talk to. I liked him but it was more out of a feeling of duty than of preference. I wasn't out to him, though I'm sure he may well have well suspected I'm gay.  In the course of our three-times a week phone conversations he came to expressing his disapproval of gay sex, by which it was clear, he meant anal sex. I knew the survey figures of how many gay men there were in the population and that a sizable percentage reported they never engaged in anal sex and I'd seen figures of the large percentage of the straight population who engaged in straight anal sex so I was able to estimate, for him, that, by far, most of the "gay sex" by his understanding was done by straight couples.  It's literally true that whatever gay couples do for sex there are more straight couples who do the same thing.  And that, other than a few practices physiologically restricted by the genders, if you're going to condemn all of gay sex on a physical description of what's done by some, you could do the same thing for all of straight sex.

I have yet to hear one of the gay-basher moralists utter a single word of condemnation to the many more straight couples or straight non-coupled who engage in anal sex, oral sex, or other things you mention as your last argument against marriage equality.  Surely, if that's the objection to maintain your integrity you must start a public campaign against that among straight people. Considering the beginning campaign by Republican-fascists to allow states to ban contraception you should start that right away because there will probably be a lot more of that about if they get their way.  And since Alito is running the Court, they probably will.  I wonder if there is some obtainable record of what he and his cry-on-cue wife did in that regard.  

In fact, as I controversially pointed out recently, the evils that can arise from bringing about an unwanted or unwise or unhealthy pregnancy, that straight sex is open to a whole other dimension of potential for doing evil that Lesbian and Gay sex doesn't risk.  

The hypocrisy that is the shadow of those who throw false witness  against LGBTQ+ People is staggering.  I have yet to see them mount a scolding campaign against the straight people who engage in anal sex.  I have, actually, on the basis of morals, something I have repeatedly pointed out is not hygienic or safe for straight people anymore than it is for gay men.  I can report that straight people don't like that pointed out when they  do it, they are really resentful when someone brings up problems with straight sex.   

You Know You Keep Doing The Same Thing And Expecting A Different Result, You know what they say about people who do that, don't you? - Hate Mail

Little children says Holy Mother
Sooth and comfort one another,

Draw the chords of union stronger,
Wind and bind them around each other,
Make them feel your love and blessing.

Shaker Spiritual

I AM NOT A THEOLOGIAN.  At least no more than anyone who thinks about these things for themselves and who tries to come to an understanding of what Scripture and previous believers have said about these things, to reconcile those, where possible, with their own experience as understood through a rigorous application of moral conscience is a theologian.  Maybe everyone who reads scripture (or theology) and thinks about it seriously is a theologian for themselves.

I have no more intention of coming up with a universal theology of sexual relations and marriage than I do of making commenting on Sodom and Gomorrah a major theme of my political blog.  

It is rather ironic that in thinking of your objection to my commentary on Genesis 2, on the fable of the creation of Eve from the rib of Adam and what God said was his motive in doing that, I am more convinced that it supports marriage equality even more strongly than I had thought last week.  It is certainly presented in the fable as an afterthought, the other creation of human beings in Genesis 1 presents the first human beings as created at the same time.  But since it was brought up, again, as a proof-text that marriage equality is forbidden, I'll point out more about it to refute you haters.

1. As I said, in that second and quite different account of the creation of human beings, Adam would seem to have been around alone of his kind for a period of time.  God creates Eve only because "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make him a helper corresponding to him."  God, God's-self says that aloneness, loneliness, a solitary life for a human being, singleness, is not a good thing.  According to anyone who wants to use that story as you want to, that observation of a bad state, arising to an evil that God feels God must end, even before the possibility of sex and sexual morality, loneliness is identified as an evil.  AND THAT IS GIVEN AS HIS SOLE MOTIVE IN CREATING EVE, NOT THE INVENTION OF HETEROSEXUALITY.   Yet the traditional anti-LGBTQ+ line of moralizing (for others) on that requires us to live in just the state of evil that Genesis says is in need of God's intervention.  

2. There is no mention of sex anywhere and not even by implication until after the expulsion from the Garden, due to the disobedience of God's command about the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I think the observation that thrills many a 6-year-old when they first hear the story, that they were "naked but unashamed" is a strong implication that they had no sexuality.  The theological insertion at 2:24 about marriage is later commentary because no such statement is attributed to God in the story, that doesn't come up until the two dopes got tempted and did what God forbade them to do.  It's when they've eaten the fruit and they seem to have, thus, gained a sense of shame about their genitals.  It's interesting that they would seem to be the only two who they would be ashamed to see each other's nakedness,  maybe that means heterosexuality started with the first sin.  But that's not my point, my pint is that all of that  comes well after God made the second person to end the loneliness of the first person. God doesn't mention procreation except in 3:16 as part of his curses on Eve during the expulsion and no mention of a child is mentioned until the birth of Cain.  

It's interesting that the first time Eve is called Adam's wife is at 3:20 and it's Adam who calls Eve "life giver" because she became the mother of all humans, he said that, not God.  That would seem to have been a human designation, Eve as a procreator, not one from God.  Or, at least if you're going to read the story carefully and not in the superficial way you do.

I would wonder at the implications of that, since you want to draw inferences from it not contained in the text.  I wonder how Adam, before the creation of Eve could have really had a gender identity of his own. He had no other human being to relate to sexually, there were animals but it's not even clear that the animals had sexuality or reproduced in The Garden.  I wonder if he had any way to imagine another human being to relate sexually to. Given what I pointed out above, that even after her creation there doesn't seem to have been sex between them - the text doesn't mention it, it's adding to Scripture to assert there was, something you accused me of doing - the creation of Eve doesn't seem to have anything to do with sex and everything to do with companionship and helpfulness.  

As an aside, God created a second human being to be HELPFUL not "useful."  That's a distinction I'm pretty touchy about, I don't think people should be thought of in terms of utility to someone else but in terms of helpfulness.

3. As I said, I don't have any intention of trying to make up a theology of marriage, but if you're going to use that story as  rigid template for valid marriages, then the first reason for marriage in Scripture is to alive loneliness, to provide companionship and love to those who marry.  Sex is a secondary consideration and bearing children, which comes a chapter and a catastrophe after that, might be put third in order of reasons to marry, which, as a sacrament, is a decision of the two People who marry, not a friggin' church or priest or minister or the damned state to decide.  Two Gay Men or Lesbians could always have a valid, loving, faithful a  marriage, by their choice and commitment, though those were bound to be precarious in a hateful society as other kinds of forbidden, valid marriages, those between races, religious groups, rich and poor perhaps the rarest of those.  

Marriage equality isn't about that, the state has no power to bless a marriage,  it's whether or not the state is going to treat those marriages equally in terms of respecting the relationship as a family in the same way it does the most sordid and frivolous and unloving, unsupportive, unequal straight marriages concluded before a mail-order ordination cleric in some drive-through wedding chapel in Las Vegas or some mass-prearranged marriage between couples who never met each other before some CIA created messiah marries them by the scores,elsewhere.  

In the early days after the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court legalized same-sex marriages in Massachusetts (and thereby, if the friggin' Constitution had any integrity, those marriages were valid in all states, then) I said my preference would be for the state to stop being involved in the marriage business altogether and to shift all of the rights and privileges that the law gave to even the most sordid of straight "marriages" to those who entered legally into a civil-union.  I said at that time that I preferred that any two consenting adults be allowed to enter into a civil-union, not on the basis of them having sex with each other but with the stated requirement that they form a household to care for each other and any children that resulted from the union or those who were brought into it.  I noted in many a blog brawl over that that the commonest such civil unions in France seemed to be between widowed or divorced mothers and their adult daughters, without any sex happening at all. I would imagine many couples of various description might enter into such government recognized civil unions, without any intention of having sex or those who intended to have sex.

It is deeply ironic that as I was writing this that Shaker spiritual came into my head, ironic because the Shakers were and the two left are still a celibate order.  They are devoted to that even into their likely imminent extinction.  I have always admired the integrity of the Shakers in maintaining their determination to not have sex, though I disagree with the theology they use to explain that.  I don't believe sex, while fraught with the possibility of evil uses and consequences, is inevitably evil or even, as Paul presents it, a lesser state than celibacy.  I don't question the Shakers' or Paul's conclusion from their experience that they were called to celibacy, I respect their conclusions about that for themselves, I deny anyone has the right to decide that for anyone else who may come to a different conclusion based on their own experience and moral consciousness of their own lives.  It was very interesting to me to have it come into my head as I thought about that story in Genesis because it seems to validate my conclusion that even before sex, marriage is for the purpose of securing the experience of intense human love and the blessing of that loving relationship, something which is beyond state or church but is an integral aspect of being a human being in relation to The Creator who created us needing such relationships with other human beings and who blesses such relationships as within God's Creation.  

I would make a very important distinction between such civil unions and marriages because I think marriage is a sacramental relationship which should only exist as an equal, committed, loving, and faithful covenant, so many "marriages" as blessed by church and state, are obscene parodies of real marriages.   

I don't think the state has any business at all in the matter and the most any church can do is to recognize that such a sacramental relationship exists, no priest, no minister, etc. creates a marriage.  I have read that for about the first thousand years of Christianity, there was no regular rite for matrimony and the whole business of the church "blessing" a marriage is spotty and unsettled.   Marriage without clergy was considered as valid as any back then. 

But the government, not taking such a radical course puts itself in a place that it has no place of being in, of giving what, when given unequally, are privileges to even the most sordid and unholy straight coupling so it is an absolute right for same-sex couples who marry to demand the same things be given to us.   

in short, something so general that distinctions can no longer be made

I AM NOT a student of the firestorm of condemnation that Hannah Arendt received after the publication of her reporting on the trial of Adolph Eichmann but I do know that many of the attacks on her came from those who found some of the issues she dealt with in the book troubling and assumed she  was, by stating questions affirming them.  In some cases I have read enough of the contemporary literature that I know those were questions she certainly found being discussed but would likely not have raised herself.  The often asserted question of "why didn't the Jews rise up against their murderers?" is one I heard raised even many years after that on talk radio, especially the putrid call-ins.  Arendt gave an answer to that, not drawn from the imagination of white, middle-class or affluent Americans but from the real-life crimes of the Nazis, their retribution against not only those who fought back but their use of those who didn't, their use of sadistic, horrific pain and torture before murder of the loved ones who did fight back or resist.   Our imaginations of these things are bound to be different from what those who experienced and witnessed them are bound to be.   Movies, TV shows, fiction, even second or third person reportage has to fall to the testimony of those who witnessed them.   And very few will go to the bother of reading or listening to that, as we get farther from the time, substituting a non-reality formed in their uninformed imagination, that danger will only grow worse.

One that is certainly not escapable is bound to come up among any national entity, one bound to be controversial due to the establishment of the Israeli State that arrested Eichmann in Argentina and transported him to Israel for trial on a new form of law, the same kind of legal procedure that when it was used for the first time in the Nuremberg Trials, trying some of the worst criminals in history on things that were legal in a secular legal sense when those mass murders were committed in the places they were committed.   Eichmann's lawyer raised some of the dangers of that as what of a defense of the indefensible Eichmann he could eek out of what he had to work with.  But those dangers are certainly far less than the dangers of letting such criminals off the hook and standing as an example to others of how much they can get away with and get away with it.

I have inserted breaks in some of Arendt's massive paragraphs for ease of reading and to emphasize some of the important issues that can get lost while reading a large block of text. 
From the epilogue of Eichmann in Jerusalem

All German Jews unanimously have condemned the wave of coordination which passed over the German people in 1933 and from one day to the next turned the Jews into pariahs. Is it conceivable that none of them ever asked himself how many of his own group would have done just the same if only they had been allowed to?  But is their condemnation today any the less correct for that reason?

The reflection that you yourself might have done wrong under the same circumstances may kindle a spirit of forgiveness, but those who today refer to Christian charity seem strangely confused on this issue too. Thus we can read in the postwar statement of the Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland, the Protestant church, as follows: "We aver that before the God of Mercy we share in the guilt for the outrage committed against the Jews by our own people through omission and silence." It seems to me that a Christian is guilty before the God of Mercy if he repays evil with evil, hence that the churches would have sinned against mercy if millions of Jews had been killed as punishment for some evil they committed. But if the churches shared in the guilt for an outrage pure and simple, as they themselves attest, then the matter must still be considered to fall within the purview of the God of Justice. 

I will point out that for someone who believes in the God of the Hebrew tradition,  they may not immediately see that Arendt, taking advantage of the language of the confession,  for the argument, posits two gods, separating the differences between mercy and the act of judgement.  I had to re-read this passage before I got it for that reason.

This slip of the tongue, as it were, is no accident. Justice, but not mercy, is a matter of judgment, and about nothing does public opinion everywhere seem to be in happier agreement than that no one has the right to judge somebody else.

What public opinion permits us to judge and even to condemn are trends, or whole groups of people - the larger the better - in short, something so general that distinctions can no longer be made, names no longer be named.

Needless to add, this taboo applies doubly when the deeds or words of famous people or men in high position are being questioned. This is currently expressed in high-flown assertions that it is "superficial" to insist on details and to mention individuals, whereas it is the sign of sophistication to speak in generalities according to which all cats are gray and we are all equally guilty.

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I will forego the post I have been trying to write dealing with a longer passage from her epilogue that contains that passage to make a more currently topical point.

"this taboo applies doubly when the deeds or words of famous people or men in high position are being questioned,"  that should, of course, today, make you think of Trump, of other right-wing criminals and gangsters and dicatators and would be dictators, it makes me think of the terrorism of Reagan and Bush I and to the crimes of Nixon and Kissinger. But the taboo is not applied by the free press on an even handed basis and the American media has a real talent for never applying it to the worst cases but only to smaller infractions, and always on one side in their "even-handedness".  They favor those who favor wealth and destroy democracy.  The application of the taboo on judging the powerful is certainly not the case for Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi or Democrats, that they are held to the same standards as Republican-fascists.

It is certainly not the case for Hillary Clinton, beyond any doubt the most exonerated Person in American history, that is when tried under a judicial process instead of the more politically potent trial by media.   If you are to consider the Washington DC and NYC and other national press those who emblemize "sophistication" they are engaged in exactly what Arendt said EXCEPT THAT, IN THE END, IT WILL SOMEHOW TURN OUT THAT DEMOCRATS ARE MORE "EQUALLY GUILTY" THAN THE SERVANTS OF MONEY AND POWER AND GANGSTER GOVERNANCE. This is a real life example of Orwell's famous phrase "some are more 'equal' than others" which under America's willfully stupid "free speech-press" the "less equal than others" will  be those who want real equality, especially  economic equality or even a lesser form of economic justice.  Only it turns out in a secular democracy under a bill of rights that it will be the media who settle the case for the most publicly consequential of results, politics.  

That is why the American free press is equating the presence of classified documents found secured in a think tank associated with Joe Biden and his entirely orderly and legal notification and return of documents to the Archive, even his compliance to the independent investigation of the matter with the total and complete illegality of what Trump did with far more classified documents which, it is certain he took and knew of and kept and tried to use and which he refused to give back when they were found.  Those who believe that journalism will save us, the kind of journalism which is typical under the Warren Court version of The First Amendment is, at this point, a willing idiot.  

Journalism or as it has been expanded and even more corrupted, "media" is not a regulated industry or even professional practice.  It has no professional standards to prevent or punish things like lying and bearing false witness that makes its product designed for easy acceptance by its partner industry, advertising, using all of the skills of a conman, unsafe for democracy of any kind.  Under the Supreme Court's orgy of adding to the privileges to its worst end, liars, partisan and corporate liars, the lying servants of billionaires, billionaires and multi-millionaires who have no problem with trying to harness the most dangerous of psychopathic factions, such as gained the Nazis  power in Germany to start with, even billionaires foreign as well as domestic, EVEN BILLIONAIRE GANGSTERS WHO ARE DICTATORS OF OUR ENEMIES, we, again, find ourselves in extreme danger.  

In the American context, it is, of course, tied in with that foremost tool for oligarchs, plutocrats, the rich who are gangsters and the more genteel of  affluent schemers and mere tax resenters, white supremacy.  

The pudding-headed liberal "civil libertarians" who took money from the porn industry, the alcohol, tobacco and other industries who sell addictive and unhealthy products using "the First Amendment," etc. did far more to get us here than they can stand anyone bringing up even as their old guard whine about those lawyers and others who, quite often being in groups targeted by white supremacy learned something from recent history.  But even quite liberal and quite informed journalists will never take a deep and critical look at that.  I once thought out of some misguided principle but I can't help guessing it's a matter of their professional self interest.

One of things you cannot fail to notice from reading Hannah Arendt's incredibly deep and critical look at the Eichmann trial and the evidence produced in the trial is how terribly complex and difficult and dangerous this all is. The naive faith that the First Congress put in some terribly dangerous slogans put into the Bill of Rights has, over and over again, proved to be more dangerous for their inspecificity and stunningly stupid "even handedness,"  EXACTLY  THE FAILURE TO MAKE DISTINCTIONS,  the failure to specify the difference between the absolute right to tell the truth and the fact that there is no such thing as a right to lie, the language of the Amendment thus stupidly and irresponsibly creating a privilege to lie, a privilege which can only be extended to liars.   The Warren Court and subsequent courts only making that already dangerous situation far worse and it being called a crowning virtue by those with a professional interest in being freed from the tedium of fact checking.   The Second Amendment is equally if not actually far more dangerous, both of those will have to be seriously amended to remove the deadly dangers that they contain.  Those dangers are so among us that to regard those and the Constitution itself as sacred objects is objectively morally irresponsible.

In her first chapter which I based my previous post on, She noticed this about her fellow journalists (she was acting as a reporter, so I guess she was one of them):

If the audience at the trial was to be the world and the play the huge panorama of Jewish sufferings, the reality was falling short of expectations and purposes. The journalists remained faithful for not much more than two weeks . . .

I'm surprised their attention even in 1961 lasted that long, no doubt their employers were ready to move on even faster.

Update:  I should, certainly, have pointed out that even more so than for Democrats, it is certainly not the case for poor people, especially for poor people and others who are Black, Latino, LGBTQ, other members of other targeted groups, especially those targeted by  hate-talk media and "comedy" and in that group, it's especially not true for all Women but only certain Women.

Sheldrake - Vernon Dialogue: Objectivity - An Urgently Needed NewApproach

 

I got the Arendt book and it's taking a lot of time to read and think about it.  And then there's the computer problem, too.  This dialogue is one of a series and one of the best of them, the problems that it lays out and discusses are extremely important and very little considered.

Best Headline Of The Year So Far

The morality of migration is easy. It is the politics that is difficult.

The morality of migration is easy. It is the politics that is difficult.

 I'm having computer problems so I'm going to leave you with the link, I might expand on the article later.   Except to point out, it's those who won't accept the morality of the issue who make the politics impossible.

The Banality Of Evil Starts In A Refusal To Choose To Make The Right Choice

It's Almost Always The Case That Those Who Mouth Arendt's Most Famous Phrase Have No Idea Of What She Meant

A COUPLE OF MONTHS ago I was thinking of reading more of Hanna Arendt's writing than I'd managed to read. I had never read all of the horrifying and wrenching Eichmann in Jerusalem, which is a serious defect in my education, unfortunately I don't yet own a copy of the book but I did go look up the original at the New Yorker yesterday, I'll order the book used, most of the articles are behind a pay wall.  Even the complete first section is a formidable piece, I don't think I've ever read such a complex piece of reporting and commentary, with such a depth of insightful observation and commentary and presentation of citation as journalism.  It's good to remember that today, in the degradation that journalism is that there were once such reporters.  And along with that almost every line of it is capable of opening up its own line of consideration and thought. Arendt was a great thinker and the model of what journalism should but almost never is, especially in the wake of All The Presidents Men and the rise of news as infotanement when the profession was filled with air-brushed air-heads without any background, intellectual or, most seriously of all, moral.

But the objection to my noting that the Nazi genocide was from start to finish a product of the theory of natural selection that motivated this post is that "the Holocaust was caused by Christian anti-semitism." That is something that I've dealt with exhaustively so I want to try a different angle from an author who certainly cannot be accused of having that particular axe to grind.  For which I'll present this paragraph from Arendt's article because it is so telling, not merely revealing of the putrid Eichmann but of the entire Nazi ethos.

Eichmann was born on March 19, 1906, in Solingen, in the Rhineland—a German city that is famous for its knives, scissors, and surgical instruments. Fifty-four years later, indulging in what had become his favorite pastime—writing his memoirs—he described this memorable event as follows: “Today, fifteen years and a day after May 7, 1945, I begin to lead my thoughts back to that 19th of March of the year 1906, when at five o’clock in the morning . . . I entered life on earth in the aspect of a human being.” According to his religious beliefs, which had not changed since the Nazi period (in Jerusalem, he declared himself to be a Gottgläubiger—literally, a believer, but the Nazi term for those who had broken with Christianity—and he refused to take his oath on the Bible), this event was to be ascribed to a “Höheren Sinnesträger,” or “Higher Bearer of Meaning,” an entity somehow identical with “the movement of the universe,” to which human life, in itself devoid of “higher meaning,” is subject.

Excuse me for interrupting but, in answer to your objection, this reminds me of nothing so much as some of the neo-Nazi garbage of the professional physicist-atheist author of the American Mein Kampf, The Turner Diaries, William L. Pierce, specifically some of the similar stuff in his tax-haven "religion" Cosmotheism.  Which I've written about in those scores of posts mentioned in the post which you are whining about.  "The movement of the universe," is, of course, an exact description of the material universe as it is conceived of in merely human physics and chemistry and under materialist-atheist-scientism, the de facto religion of a large percentage of English-language and other materialist-atheists no matter what other ideological commitments that leads them to.  So if, for example Himmler thought of a god, it was nothing else but the god of Dawkins and Pinker and Dennett, of Russell and Ayer and Grayling, the material universe.  Keeping in mind the serious ideological boundaries mentioned above which they will consciously or unconsciously hold to in using the word, "nature."  There is nothing in the Nazi non-metaphysics that doesn't fully conform with the famous declaration by Dawkins that I witnessed so many online atheists pledge fidelity to during the atheism fad of the 00s

The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.

Anyone holding such a view of the universe, when presented with even the most obvious moral reality has absolutely no reason to care about its morality or, conversely, the immorality of any act.  That is, I am quite convinced a necessary prerequisite for doing the most clearly evil things.

In that Dawkins parrots quite precisely what Ernst Haeckel said about things in The History of Creation, a book cited by Darwin as being a far superior statement of what he said in his second major book The Descent of Man, positively citing Haeckel on some of his most genocidal statements, advocating things the Nazis put into practice six decades later.

The line about human live being devoid of "higher meaning" is a direct and conscious rejection of Christianity and, in fact, the Jewish tradition of which Christianity must be a part if it is to have any coherent existence.  It is, in fact, the whole point of the monotheistic tradition.  Its negation  is, in short, an unavoidable consequence of believing in materialist-atheist-scientism if you go through what would be internally considered a meaningless logical necessity of following that ideology to its logical conclusion.  It was the in-house ideology of the inner-circle of Darwin, himself,(though typically he demurred when it came to admitting it, ol' Chuck was a moral coward),  his children, Thomas Huxley, Herbert Spencer, Francis Galton, Ernst Haeckel (who probably followed those futile logical conclusions farther than anyone of that generation and on into the Nazism that started within a year of his death. It was held by the next generation in direct intellectual descent from the Darwinians of the first generation who actually and who are documented as collaborating with and providing intellectual and even financial help to the Nazis as they developed their genocidal eugenics, Karl Pearson, Leonard Darwin, Alfred Ploetz, Eugen Fischer, and myriads of other then famous scientists and thinkers.  

Any professing Christian who was part of Nazism was certainly violating the most basic aspects of Christianity. Going over just the most serious part of Nazi ideology that was directly a repudiation and rejection of Christianity, Jesus was a Jew, Paul was a Jew, Peter, John, . . . even Judas Iscariot were Jews, the Romans mocked Jesus as "The King of the Jews" as they tortured him and as they killed him on the cross.  The High Priest and the Sanhedrin identified him as a Jew, Herod identified him as a Jew.  In the infancy narratives, Mary, his mother identifies herself and her son as Jews, the Magi identity him as a Jew, Herod (père) does.  He and his followers are repeatedly identified as Jews in even what is considered the source of "Christian antisemitism" the Gospel of John.  In one of the more misunderstood and disturbing stories in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus specifically tells a foreign woman that his mission is to the Jews, not gentiles (someday I'll go over that story because I think almost no one gets it). Acts presents it implies that Peter and the Apostles are those responsible for converting Jews, Paul is given the responsibility of converting the gentiles.  When Nazi collaborators in the Lutheran Church sought to cut out anything in the New Testament that was Jewish, they chopped about sixty-percent of the New Testament out. You could not be faithful to the Gospel and be a Nazi, you could be an atheist and be a Nazi, in fact much of the higher echelon were either overt atheists or they professed belief in a materialistic cult that was violently opposed to Christianity as Eichmann claimed allegiance to in 1963.  

Arendt's use of Eichmann's profession of belief in a Nazi articulation of that in her evaluation of Eichmann and how he did what he did, using him as an example of what was a very new class of crime and criminal, one for which the theory of law and its practice was and still is unprepared to identify and prevent, is an excellent example of what I started out with, that her thinking is rigorously intellectual, transcendently sharp, precise, unrelentingly honest and refusing to leave aside any detail as unimportant.  

The terminology is quite suggestive. To call God a Höheren Sinnesträger meant, linguistically, to give him some place in the military hierarchy, because the Nazis had changed the military “recipient of orders,” the Befehlsempfänger, into a Befehlsträger, “bearer of orders,” indicating, as in the ancient phrase “bearer of ill tidings,” the importance and the burden of responsibility that were supposedly conferred upon those who had to execute orders. Moreover, Eichmann, like everyone else connected with the Final Solution, was officially a Geheimnisträger, or “bearer of secrets,” as well, which in the way of catering to self-importance was certainly nothing to sneeze at. But Eichmann, not very much interested in metaphysics, remained silent on any more intimate relationship between the Bearer of Meaning and the bearer of orders, and proceeded to a consideration of the other possible source of his existence, his parents: “They would hardly have been so overjoyed at the arrival of their first-born had they been able to watch how in the hour of my birth the Norn of misfortune, to spite the Norn of good fortune, was already spinning threads of grief and sorrow into my life. But a kind, impenetrable veil kept my parents from seeing into the future.”

If you think he meant by that the complete evil his entire existence was to other people, don't worry, he had no such capacity of imagining others as he could himself, he was apparently mostly interested in pitying no one but himself.  Though, I think it was more his idea of literary artistry than of meaning.  

I do find that Arendt is such a complex and exhaustive analyst that even some of the major themes in her writing are more easily given in a condensed form from those who have read her in depth.  One of those is the American philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler.  She's also a serious thinker so a lot of her text has to be cited to quote her responsibly:

Fifty years ago the writer and philosopher Hannah Arendt witnessed the end of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the major figures in the organisation of the Holocaust. Covering the trial Arendt coined the phrase "the banality of evil", a phrase that has since become something of an intellectual cliche. But what did she really mean?

One thing Arendt certainly did not mean was that evil had become ordinary, or that Eichmann and his Nazi cohorts had committed an unexceptional crime. Indeed, she thought the crime was exceptional, if not unprecedented, and that as a result it demanded a new approach to legal judgment itself.

There were at least two challenges to legal judgment that she underscored, and then another to moral philosophy more generally. The first problem is that of legal intention. Did the courts have to prove that Eichmann intended to commit genocide in order to be convicted of the crime? Her argument was that Eichmann may well have lacked "intentions" insofar as he failed to think about the crime he was committing. She did not think he acted without conscious activity, but she insisted that the term "thinking" had to be reserved for a more reflective mode of rationality.

Arendt wondered whether a new kind of historical subject had become possible with national socialism, one in which humans implemented policy, but no longer had "intentions" in any usual sense. To have "intentions" in her view was to think reflectively about one's own action as a political being, whose own life and thinking is bound up with the life and thinking of others. So, in this first instance, she feared that what had become "banal" was non-thinking itself. This fact was not banal at all, but unprecedented, shocking, and wrong.

By writing about Eichmann, Arendt was trying to understand what was unprecedented in the Nazi genocide – not in order to establish the exceptional case for Israel, but in order to understand a crime against humanity, one that would acknowledge the destruction of Jews, Gypsies, gay people, communists, the disabled and the ill. Just as the failure to think was a failure to take into account the necessity and value that makes thinking possible, so the destruction and displacement of whole populations was an attack not only on those specific groups, but on humanity itself. As a result, Arendt objected to a specific nation-state conducting a trial of Eichmann exclusively in the name of its own population.

At this historical juncture, for Arendt, it became necessary to conceptualise and prepare for crimes against humanity, and this implied an obligation to devise new structures of international law. So if a crime against humanity had become in some sense "banal" it was precisely because it was committed in a daily way, systematically, without being adequately named and opposed. In a sense, by calling a crime against humanity "banal", she was trying to point to the way in which the crime had become for the criminals accepted, routinised, and implemented without moral revulsion and political indignation and resistance.

If Arendt thought existing notions of legal intention and national criminal courts were inadequate to the task of grasping and adjudicating Nazi crimes, it was also because she thought that nazism performed an assault against thinking. Her view at once aggrandised the place and role of philosophy in the adjudication of genocide and called for a new mode of political and legal reflection that she believed would safeguard both thinking and the rights of an open-ended plural global population to protection against destruction.

What had become banal – and astonishingly so – was the failure to think. Indeed, at one point the failure to think is precisely the name of the crime that Eichmann commits. We might think at first that this is a scandalous way to describe his horrendous crime, but for Arendt the consequence of non-thinking is genocidal, or certainly can be.

Of course, the first reaction to such an apparently naive claim may be that Arendt overestimated the power of thinking or that she held on to a highly normative account of thinking that does not correspond to the various modes of reflection, self-muttering, and silent chatter that goes by that name.

Indeed, her indictment of Eichmann reached beyond the man to the historical world in which true thinking was vanishing and, as a result, crimes against humanity became increasingly "thinkable". The degradation of thinking worked hand in hand with the systematic destruction of populations.

Although Arendt focuses on Eichmann's failure to think as one way of naming his ultimate crime, it is clear that she thinks the Israeli courts did not think well enough, and sought to offer a set of corrections to their way of proceeding. Although Arendt agreed with the final verdict of the trial, namely, that Eichmann should be condemned to death, she quarreled with the reasoning put forward at the trial and with the spectacle of the trial itself. She thought the trial needed to focus on the acts that he committed, acts which included the making of a genocidal policy.

I would point out one thing that this doesn't state, that thought apart from truth is not functionally different from the kind of non-thinking Arendt attributes Eichmann's genocidalism to.

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If you aren't thinking about the American context today, Trump, Republican-fascism, the media, especially the most potent, electronic media which has trained two generations of Americans to not think, not think deeply, to make non-thinking of the kind that Arendt was disturbed to recognize in Eichmann, she was wasting her time and the terrible experience of reporting on the trial.  If you don't understand that what she saw in Eichmann is ubiquitous today as the "death of truth" that is the primary mode of operation in the Republican-fascist Party, in the Washington Press Corps, in many of our law courts, the Supreme Court, you're wasting your time.

If there is one thing that is important about the truth, the truth and telling it and realizing it being what is most important about thought, its role in human minds and human life is gained by people making, not an intellectual but a moral choice for the truth and for valuing it enough to pursue it through honest, evidenced, rigorous thought.  The very act of such thought relies on a choice that has to come before all of the rest of that, a choice for what is right and a rejection of what is wrong.

I have to break in here and point out that though she is considered as an important philosopher, at least at one point she eschewed that and said she was a political thinker, I think her political thought is some of the most important that I've ever read.  

But that's the problem with her approach. Politics inevitably is a creation of minds that are not and never will be prepared to deal with things at her level of thought. In a democracy, voters will not come to a reliable moral result on the basis of her impressive though impotent thinking.  No matter how great and important her thinking on these things is from a rational and logical point of view, politics will never effectively be conducted at that level of intellectual rigor and, given the disastrous results of most of her colleagues in philosophy, most of which is done far below her level,  when they deal with politics in that manner and those who pretend to (Victor Davis, to name one and only one of dozens I could off the top of my head) I don't really trust it as a general activity.

What that takes is a conscious and habitual choice to choose moral absolutes that are absent from the world of such rationalistic intellection.  

What she saw as the mode of mental activity that facilitated the greatest crimes of the 20th century and any inadequacy of the Israeli Court to appreciate and deal with that is rampant in the modern secular world - in case you wonder what's behind the resurgence of violent, determined fascism just now - AND THE AMERICAN CONSTITUTION, JUDICIAL AND LEGAL SYSTEMS ARE NOT ONLY MORE INADEQUATE THAN THE COURT THAT SENTENCED EICHMANN TO DEATH BUT FAR, FAR MORE INADEQUATE.  I think that is a product of the de-religionizing of thought and life under American secularism being made more than just the formal impartiality of the state but as the de facto requirement of social secularism and intellectualism.   

The consequences of that for logical consistency are important and such rigorous, "impartial" intellection can lead to terrible places. I have pointed out to the horror of a number of secular liberals of my generation that no less a figure in that system than President Kennedy in his 1950s book "Profiles in Courage" praised the repulsive Republican Robert Taft for his opposition to the Nuremberg trials on the same defense that Eichmann would try to, that nothing he did was illegal in Nazi Germany, that Hitler's word was the highest law and that no external force, national or international could try the Nazi genocidalists because there was no legal mechanism for doing that.  To add more evidence to my late adult conclusion that John Kennedy was a lot less admirable than his PR machine sold him as being.  To demonstrate how that works in reality, the same man who praised the depravity of Robert Taft, Hannah Arendt points, out gave a very public thumbs up for the cameras to the Judges in Jerusalem for doing exactly what Robert Taft said was a violation of law, which he believed was laudable as "courage."  Don't get me wrong, I think that Arendt's obviously respectful treatment of the three Judges conduct even among her criticism of the conduct of the trial is a fascinating study in her attempt to be honest even as that conflicted with the official standards of trials. 

I also believe that even as she was thinking of and writing her reports that she knew she was saying things that would be deeply controversial and would land her in a lot of trouble outside and inside of Israel.

It is one of the more remarkable things about such discussion of the rightness or wrongness of putting some of the most obvious and most dangerous criminals in human history through a judicial process, a trial, is the extent to which putting things in a nice order and wrapping them up in a tidy package, as academic intellectualism and, especially the empty formalities of the law demand flies in the face of obvious, informal reality and the exigencies of punishing such criminals as a means of discouraging those who would imitate them.  Of course, that's especially dangerous because there are those with vast wealth and, so, power who like and profit (and with the rich those are one in the same) from what such criminals do and, so, they want to get them off.  And while that is going on the intellectuals and lawyers and, most pudding-headed of all, the journalists want to argue form and formal niceties. Trump, the least intellectual of all our presidents, is an absolute master at tying the courts and the law in knots by exploiting those forms and formalities.  He is a creation of the same entertainment industry that runs "the news."  That he can use both as he does is an indictment of the Constitutional system that is incapable of preventing that use of it.

I read the tortured writing of Arendt on this and I feel her heart being ripped open by the necessities of taking both sides of that, her obvious and near first-hand witness to the crimes of the Nazis, she came very close to being one of the victims of them, she knew many people who were murdered in the industry of death the Nazis mounted. She was, as well, fully capable of fully appreciating the same crimes being done by other regimes, in other places, at other times (such as in Vietnam).  I know that is always what is behind her writing as a highly trained thinker, a highly trained and extremely responsible intellectual, a moral thinker who feels they must uphold the established order of intellectual and legal procedure and who knows that to hold any credibility with such people as would read her writing, she could not violate those norms and procedures without it costing her credibility if she just stated the obvious.  It is obvious that Eichmann was guilty as charged, if anyone deserved the death penalty it was someone like him and that the Judges had a higher law to enact, one which was not written in legal codes and which was not taught in university law schools and, in the 20th century, is even hardly taken that seriously in secular moral philosophy and that degraded topic "ethics."  

I think one of the more telling things is her conflicted thinking about thinking, wondering how any thinking person could consciously think themselves into doing what Eichmann did.  As Judith Butler condenses it:

But more than this, she faults him as well for failing to realise that thinking implicates the subject in a socialit or plurality that cannot be divided or destroyed through genocidal aims. In her view, no thinking being can plot or commit genocide. Of course, they can have such thoughts, formulate and implement genocidal policy, as Eichmann clearly did, but such calculations cannot be called thinking, in her view. How, we might ask, does thinking implicates each thinking "I" as part of a "we" such that to destroy some part of the plurality of human life is to destroy not only one's self, understood as linked essentially to that plurality, but to destroy the very conditions of thinking itself.

Many questions abound: is thinking to be understood as a psychological process or, indeed, something that can be properly described, or is thinking in Arendt's sense always an exercise of judgment of some kind, and so implicated in a normative practice. If the "I" who thinks is part of a "we" and if the "I" who thinks is committed to sustaining that "we", how do we understand the relation between "I" and "we" and what specific implications does thinking imply for the norms that govern politics and, especially, the critical relation to positive law?

I would invite you to contrast that intricate web of logical analysis that seems to come up with nothing but questions and no answers on a topic in which the answers must be arrived at and there is no possible resonsible, moral conclusion as to what the right answer is. Imagine if Franklin Roosevelt went through those mazes before he decided to covertly, perhaps "illegally" go in on the side of those who opposed the Nazis.  In the end, unless you want to surrender to the worset, to  wallow in indecision, unless you want to leave all such questions suspended as the world of action chooses the most easy and depraved of answers, you have to make a deliberate choice and that choice cannot be based in scientific method or mathematically precise reasoning or abstracted logicality.  It has to be a choice made by a person and there is nothing in any of those aids listed in that last sentence that will lead to to the choice to believe The Law, the Prophets, the Gospels and Epistles, to believe that committing murder is wrong because Thou Shalt Not Kill is an absolute law imposed on human beings by God, that as soon as you start with mitigating that with "just war" theory or the one that is imposed on the most legitimate, the most necessary, the most egalitarian and democratic and impartial of police agencies, that they sometimes have to kill criminals to protect others, you are neck deep in trouble.  

But as Arendt's brilliant reporting on the Eichmann trial shows, as Judith Butler's insightful analysis of her reporting shows, unless you make that initial choice to believe you're neck deep in it already.  Darwinism isn't just neck-deep in it, it's way past the top of its head and so is a society in which it is the foremost formal framing of human and other life.  Nazism was a thoroughly Darwinist political ideology, that was the science that Hess meant when he said National Socialism was nothing but applied science.