The Folly Of Trying To Come Up With A Rationalistic Framing To Reliably Produce Decency - Why I A Still A Christian Post 2

If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself
and take up his cross daily and follow me.
For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it,
but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.
What profit is there for one to gain the whole world
yet lose or forfeit himself?  Luke 9: 23-25

Perhaps what is good is simply whatever is to my advantage, to the advantage of my group, party, class, race, or even to the advantage of my business or trade union.  It is not a question of individual or collective selfishness?  Some biologists and etnologists do in fact try to persuade us that for human beings, as for animals, any sort of altruism or love is merely the supreme form of biologically inherited self-interest.  And, after all, philosophers have continually asked where we are to find the criteria to judge the interests lying behind all knowledge -how we are to distinguish between what is true and what is illusory, what is objective and what is subjective, what is acceptable and what is reprehensible.

So the question remains:  How are we to lay down priorities and preferences on a purely rational basis?  Purely philosophical arguments to establish essential values have not come up with anything conclusive.  They have never got beyond problematical generalizations, which all tend to break down precisely in those exceptional circumstances where people do act in a way that is by no means to their own advantage or for their own personal happiness, but in a way which may involve a sacrifice: even, in an extreme case, the sacrifice of life itself.

I might have included this with the portion from Kung's Why I Am Still A Christian last time but I wanted to use it to illustrate the validity of the point that secularism, science, aka "natural philosophy" even generalized secular and quasi-religious philosophy cannot come up with what "we can rely on" to produce a decent society and world, what we can really, fully hold on to as durable, absolute moral positions that we can use in exactly those cases when we really don't want to act against our perceived self-interest for the benefit of others, or even the lives of others or, in the case of our controlling elite, the preservation of life on Earth itself.  Or in deciding when it is valid to legally force people to not just do what they figure is in their own best interest, individually or extended into their family or other wider grouping.  

Although Hans Kung didn't say it, one of the biggest problems with any quest to use rational philosophy to come up with such moral absolutes as revealed religion finds it no problem to assert is that their framing is ill chosen to find them.  That revealed religion has problems in that regard often founders on their failure to admit the inevitable imperfection of our view of revelation and insisting on that imperfect assertion of it no matter what evils come from it.  That is especially an issue in regard to institutional religion, but the rationalistic attempt to use reason, logic, most stupidly of all, some of our more imprecise branches of physical science, shows that as an intellectual holding, the attempt to use the worst tools instead of those that are just imperfect is sheer foolishness.

In regard to the incapacity of secular philosophy to do that, I've pointed out before, I. F. Stone observed when commenting on Socrates in Plato's set-up job ran circles around a shoe-maker, that the shoe maker could make a pair of shoes while the entire 2400 year tradition of Socratic philosophy had never come up with even one universal truth.  Adding scientific method to that has not seemed to improve their odds of getting to one. And morals are hardly the easiest aspect of philosophical inquiry to find them in.  

I will also point out that the various modern attempts to replace revealed religion with formal philosophy, the various and uniformly idiotic schemes of utilitarianism, the modern field of ethics which seems to have turned back to the eugenicist and Nazi projects of drawing up lists of those it is desirable to kill, something which you can do and not only keep but flourish in a modern, university based philosophy department almost eighty years after the largest of the modern scientifically conducted genocides was revealed to the world, only one of a myriad of the 20th centuries modern genocides that outdo past ones.

Yet science is to be considered sacrosanct even though it is among those fields which, by mutual agreement from the start, excludes any considerations of moral consequences in real life.  Similar points could be made about other areas of life which have, by mutual agreement, been freed from moral consequences but which do not suffer nearly as much as religion does when the not only predictable but permitted evils that come from them create catastrophes with huge pain and many dead.  Commerce, business, the law (where contracts, almighty and explicitly written or, as the judicial practice has it, by "implied consent" favors the liars and crooks and, in the fullness of time, those who get people killed in large numbers for their profit, something that allowed "justice" Gorsuch to say that a trucker owed it to his company to freeze to death on the job and then, with that on the Senate hearing record, to be elevated to the Supreme Court.

The critics of moral outrage are mighty peculiar when it comes to which institutions they declare worthy of death and those they have no problem with, especially those critics of moral outrage who have been credentialed by universities and colleges and have a financial stake in such science, such commerce, such business and such law. It is among the rarest things for an economist to note that truth which was made apparent to Paul that love of money is the root of all evil, something which the most devoted of all to his sayings about sex, women in churches, etc. never seem to much pay any mind to.  The love of money is certainly not discouraged by secularism any more than the most corrupt of ecclesiastical institutions, that secularism has no such sayings and its not only accommodation to professional amorality but its institution of all of those bastions banning moral consideration and its full and complete maintenance of them - the Churches, from the early modern era when it overcame the many Biblical condemnations of usury accommodated themselves to the secular world - the foremost forces of amorality never get the condemnation of academia or the scribblers, directors, producers of show-biz (our actual educators) even as the condemnation of organized religion - like shooting ducks in a gallery - is about as guaranteed a movie evergreen as the Blacklist.

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Back at perhaps was just past the high-water mark of the new atheist fad of the OO's one of the major scientific celebrities of that, Sean Carroll got some of the other brite lites of the new atheism together to, among other things, once and for all provide a rational, naturalistic basis for something like morality.  A number of those involved were exactly from that effort to come up with a biological, Darwinian explanation of what "morality" was and why we, you know, really should do to others at least what we might, kinda want them to do to us, if they were in a position to screw us or, maybe, others. I won't go far into the several philosophers present except that Dennett made a real ass of himself when he said they should just call things what they really weren't and figure that was good enough to fool the rubes.   He fell far after early in his career when he had the attention of someone like Jospeh Weizenbaum. The others, especially one author who, I guess, was let in on the philosophy ticket,  just mouthed the nonsense of evo-psy, weren't much more impressive.

The science Kung was talking about was that threadbare attempt to pretend the doctrine of natural selection didn't mean what the eugenicists and scientific racists and, yes, the Nazis said it meant, to kill the other so the killer survivors benefit from erasing them from society, from the Volk, from the future of the species. In the post-WWII era that is denied to be the case despite Darwin, himself, supporting such ideas within his scientific work and those ideas permeating the scientific as well as popular literature of natural selection.  Kung almost certainly meant the daffy idea of Hamiltonian "altruism" that attempted to dispose of the problem of extreme self-disadvantageous self-sacrifice which turned personal sacrifice for someone else into an act of genetic selfishness on behalf of genes.  

The claim was that the behavior was based in genes, there for the perpetuation and expansion of a specific gene or genes in the population.  Though if that's true you have to wonder why it is so rare in behavior, almost absent from view instead of being among the most typical behavior patterns in all species.  All species, this many billions of years into the evolution of current life having the same chance to exhibit such behavior instead of its most notable novelty even among human beings and our far more morals exhibiting fellow vertebrates. The idea is little more than a PR cover-job at the start and an attempt to rescue natural selection from anything that might indicate it doesn't really exist - true believers can't tolerate disconfirming evidence. If it is intellectually necessary to ameliorate the epic repudiation of the Golden Rule that Darwinism is, as an explanation of disconfirming observed behavior then, certainly, it must be more generally necessary to explain why we haven't all, all sentient, behaving creatures, not killed ourselves off in the Hobbesian war of all against all that Marx correctly noted was the intellectual foundation of natural selection, something you can imagine making Brit-imperialist aristocrats such as Darwin's primary audience somewhat tumescent.

And the biological effort at the atheist hootenanny turned out to be an easily defeated futility.  As the biologists at Camp Carroll fumbled and generally demonstrated their philosophical incompetence, Sean Carroll's fellow physicist, probably the most illustrious scientist present, Mr. "Bad Religion" himself, Steve Weinberg, using the atheist's own favorite tools tore their arguments to shreds saying that he could see no higher basis for morality than what he concluded was in the best interest of his family and his university department, that what he though was best for them (and so himself) was what he though determined his best course of action.  Of course HE didn't see any trouble with that, especially that late in his career, at the top of his professional life, he like your typical tenured university contented head of cattle, he had his and he was good with that. The others couldn't lay a glove on him over that.  Their framing had nothing in it that could overcome that most typical of all atheist lines, "why should I believe it?"  It isn't only religon that that line works on, it works with any proposals that atheists, even those alleged to be reliable science, come up with as well.  Indeed, as you get farther away from the directly observable of simplest of physical entities in science, what led Weinberg to quip "If you've seen one electron, you've seen them all," the more you'll find even what are to be taken as rigorously held scientific articles of faith are vulnerable to that refusal to believe if they don't want to.  That it was the "bad religion" guy who said it, a man who has worked all his life in a science which has produced nuclear weapons but who figures he knows from "bad" and his fellow rationalists had no answer for it reminds me of who Lucifer said he was in Paradise Lost, the one who says no.

There is absolutely no important or lesser aspect of moral behavior which is not entirely too complex to treat in that way.  It is the pretense of Western philosophy and the science of which it is merely a specialized method of, that we can arrive at ideas which will automatically and of necessity be universally adopted or at least which one with sufficient preparation must, of necessity automatically adopt. That is simply an illusory notion, there is nothing automatic about it, it relies on the most basic act of human will. You have to just say yes to something.

Even the most basic and universal of mathematical and, from there, even the most everyday of common occurrences, the act of believing them rests on choices made very early, most of the most crucial of those made so remotely in childhood we don't remember making the choice to believe our experience and the conclusions we drew from them. All further mathematical learning is built on that choice to believe the primitive ideas of numbers and measurement and which are accepted as true by necessity because they are in accord with what we have already accepted.  The farther we get in the lines of inferences from those, the less reliable our conclusions tend to get and the more vulnerable to non-acceptance by others. Mathematics has the most rigorous human methods of testing new claims made within it but those logical masterworks deal with the most abstract AND NON PYSICAL of all entities which knowably reside only in our minds.  The best methods of science mimic that but, dealing with far more complex realities, far more complex objects as even the simplest of physical objects are, they cannot match mathematics in that regard.  

It is an irony of the materialist-atheist faith of scientism that the most complete logical certainty is available only for non-physical, unobservable objects of no provable objective existence. Science merely buys us a little bit of safety in SOME of what scientists claim to have discovered EXCLUSIVELY ABOUT THE NATURAL WORLD, most reliably on the simplest and most observable of phenomena with rapidly decreasing certainty as the complexity of its treated phenomena increases.  And they do that in no small part by excluding many aspects of experienced phenomena and, infinitely more so, experienced life.  Most crucial to this argument, they exclude all moral considerations from their method and, especially, what you need to arrive at reliable moral absolutes, especially when those are going to be found hard or unwelcomed and so denied. Those are available no where except from a supernatural source.  And on them rest any hope for decent social interactions, decent communities, decent countries and a decent life for all of us or, as our science and technology increases our powers to do evil in a most imminent of truths, all of us.

I mentioned last time that I've specialized in skepticism over the secular notion of absolute speech and, especially, press freedom but I've also specialized in attacking the doctrine of natural selection. One of my more enjoyably written posts in that tearing Richard Dawkin's faux ethological presentation of Hamiltonian altruism to shreds, as well.  I've never had anyone, from blog rats, alleged science PhD's to professional biologists to neo-atheist mathematicians refute a single point in my attack. Yet it is probably the most famous of all such lines of bilge, I'm sure still taught as science in universities, the peppered-moth of the mid-1970s.  And I've also attacked its expression among others, Hamilton, himself, E.O. Wilson who, very late in his professional life repudiated the idea when his most public fame was based on his own extension of it, others in the evo-psy that was novel when Kung wrote his book but which has already passed the stage of putrescence that is entirely predictable when you try to mix the dodgy at best science of evolution with the even worse pseudo-science of psychology.

Perhaps what Kung lays out in his point about the epic indecisiveness of Western (and other) philosophies in morality can stand-in for the choice many have seen in whether or not you ultimately support a "Greek," that is Platonic Socratic procedure in thinking about things or if you admit what might be a more Hebrew religious conclusion that you are not going to get there out of reasoning, logic, even by formal empircal observation especially as that is hemmed in by the scientific restriction of what can be measured accurately and which must leave out such ideas as God and morality.

In the end what you end up believing you are to do and so have more of a chance of doing it is a choice to believe that you have to rise above your own self-interest.  Conventionally, in the typical academically taught crouch of ass covering, I'd usually say perhaps but I don't see any other choice in how you can frame the issues that can get you to that end on anything like a reliable basis.  

As seen above, even the secular, scientific ersatz and phony stand-in for absolute morality has to deform "altruism," so notably unselfish under an unbiased observation of the act, into "selfishness" it begs the Darwinian question that is at the basis of natural selection, from the start of the inquiry, that all is a matter of self-interest, if not on the part of organisms than in a just-so story about selfish-genes being behind it all. I am so disgusted with the pseudo-scientific attempt to replace revealed morality that I don't even particularly like the word "altruism" given its Comtean implications.  If modernism is a failed project, the entire effort to replace revealed morality with some ersatz, would be sociological-sciency-Millsian substitute is an even bigger flop.

And if having social, political, legal good instead of evil is the goal, it is all an intellectual fairy-tale.  All of that is at something taken as an intellectually elite level, hardly the level that your typical person with dangerously thuggish tendencies is likely to even try to start navigating.  Would the minor Ivy League product Trump do it?  Would his fellow major Ivy League product Peter Navarro?  To have an important impact within human societies, human politics and so law, the conduct of us as nations and as a world-wide species, a reliable basis from a far simpler framing is the only thing that will work.  Get that wrong, as, in fact, the secular U.S.Constitution did from the start, it won't produce what it needs to.  And that isn't merely the fault of the uneducated, the plebs, the "great unwashed" the "masses."  As the eugenicists, the scientific racists, the elite of fascist, Nazi and Communist criminal regimes and their pale shadows in the faltering liberal democracies prove, the educational and intellectual patina that such talk comprises masks only what is, at its basic level, the same thugishness.  

If Sean Carroll's weekend elite university-faculty, atheist camperee couldn't come up with something better, the skin-heads, MAGA's, those vulnerable to "Christian nationalism," etc. all around the world won't use anything that complex in coming up with a reason as to why they shouldn't do to others exactly what they don't want done to them, anyway.

They have to believe that they are to do to others as they would have done to them because God says so. If that isn't the predominant belief among People, if show-biz or hate-talk media (on behalf of their amoral sponsors) or the decadent ersatz-intellectuals, atheists who choose not to believe talk them out of that, then not only is egalitarian democracy doomed, so is even its shoddy imitation of liberal democracy.  Media liberals won't tell you that, academic liberals won't, would be "civil society" backer George Soros won't tell you that, but I just did.

What can we still rely on today?

From Why I Am Still A Christian by Hans Kung

What can we still rely on today?  What can we hold on to?  I am not a pessimist, but we scarcely need reminding that we are now in a "crisis" of values as profound as it is far-reaching. Ever since the youth and student revolts of the late 1960s,* there are no longer any institutions or guardians of values which are not in crisis or have not been radically challenged.  Where today is there any undisputed authority?  We used to be told: the pope, the bishop, the church says;  or the prime minister, the government, the party says; or the teacher, the professor, "your father" says.  Where nowadays could we even settle  discussion -let alone pacify a demonstration- with an appeal to such authorities? No; the state, church, courts, army, school, family -all seem to be insecure. They are no longer accepted without question -least of all by young people- as guardians of values.

With this critical questioning of accepted authorities, traditions and ways of life, the values associated with them seem to be called into question as well.  Liberalization** was necessary but often went further than had been foreseen or planned.  Elaborate processes designed to get rid of taboos frequently turned out to be more destructive than creative, with the result that for many people today, morality as a whole seems to have become relative.  The effects of all these developments have been anything but liberating.  The ground has been cut from under the feet of some people - especially the young - who now feel their lives have no meaning and turn to delinquency, or extreme religious sects, or to political fanaticism, even terrorism.

The large-scale crisis of values has thrown modern society into conflicts which have not yet by any means been resolved.  Indeed their full significance has probably not even been grasped.  For our grandfathers and grandmothers, religion, or Christianity, was still a matter of personal conviction.  For our fathers and mothers it was still at least a matter of tradition and "the done thing."  For their emancipated sons and daughters, however, it is becoming increasingly a thing of the past which is no longer binding, passed by and obsolete. And there are parents today who observe with perplexity that morality in general has vanished, along with religion, as Nietzsche predicted.  For -as is becoming increasingly clear- it is not so easy to justify any moral values purely rationally, by reason alone, as Sigmund Freud would have liked to do; to prove by reason alone why under any circumstances freedom is supposed to be better than oppression, justice better than self-interest, non-violence better than violence, love better than hate, peace better than war. Or, to put it more forcefully:  why, if it is to our advantage and our personal happiness, we should not just as well lie, steal, commit adultery and murder;  indeed, why should we be humane or even "fair"?


In response to a challenge about a statement about the impossibility of there being any kind of moral absolute based on a rationalistic-materialistic framing of reality, I had a vague recollection of this statement by the late ecumenical theologian Hans Kung in his book, titled in the authorized English translation, to tweak the nose of Bertrand Russell's fans (my guess), is "Why I Am Still A Christian."  The title of the original was Woran Man Sich Halten Kann, which is more or less the meaning of the first sentence in the text.  In the  preface to the book Kung specifically said he was attempting to summarize the most important points in his three large and fine books of rigorous testing of the bases of Christian faith, Does God Exist, On Being A Christian and Eternal Life?  I went back to the book and have decided to go through it during Lent as I once went through Walter Brueggemann's The Bible Makes Sense, a project that started one Advent and lasted pretty much through the extended Christmas season.  

Given Hans Kung's active and hard work on ecumenical union, not only with Christians but with colleagues from the other major monotheistic religions and with others from other traditions, quite universally,

- given his and his co-workers at his Global Ethics Institute, striving to promote the moral and humane conduct among adherents to all traditions

- and, given, the rigorous devil's advocacy he makes in those three mentioned books (he makes atheists' case better than any atheist I've ever read, and made a better one for belief)

I think you can be confident that if he could have found a convincing, rigorous, durable purely rationalistic origin for absolutes of moral conduct he would not only have admitted it, he'd have promoted it knowing that the atheist, the morally unreliable, we will always have with us.  At least in the present dispensation.

For a book not yet forty years old, his citation of "youth" and older generations might seem a little odd to those who can't remember the grandparents and parents he was talking about. The secularization he focuses on here is far more advanced as a general world trend. Certainly by the time of his death he realized that it was so general a trend that in many cases, such as the English speaking world, the churches were in many cases as fully secularized, in full pursuit of the kind of amorality, in some notable cases, as those without any pretenses of holding religious ideas or associating themselves with any identity. I think, it may be the case that the believed decline in "mainline Christianity" may be due more to their adherence to something more in line with the Gospel of Jesus than their concessions to secularism.  The "white evangelicals" the TV-night club "Christians" have made the most extreme of all concessions to a-Christian secularism and they have flourished in the secularized, media-saturated milieu.

The consequences of the loss of acceptance of any authority -the typically secularist, play-lefty American wet-dream of absolute freedom- is certainly represented as opposed to morality in his list of alternatives:

. . . why under any circumstances freedom is supposed to be better than oppression, justice better than self-interest, non-violence better than violence, love better than hate, peace better than war. Or, to put it more forcefully:  why, if it is to our advantage and our personal happiness, we should not just as well lie, steal, commit adultery and murder;  indeed, why should we be humane or even "fair"?

rejecting the alternatives of morality, the list of self-centered, selfishness left is an honest description of the morality of easily the large majority of "white evangelicals," "traditional Catholics" and the largest part of, really, what most of us do when we come up with a choice between the moral alternative and what we really want.  It has been that way through all of our history, though the chance to choose the selfish part was more restricted to those with wealth and power, the richer and more powerful the more obvious.  Whether the Tudor or Stuart kings, the various royal houses of Europe and beyond, the various scheming and amoral families that had control of the papacy for large stretches of early modernism, the Czars of Russia, their reproduction under would-be Marxism, the continuation of that under Putin, the Emperors of China, both those of feudalism and currently under Communism, etc.

The "freedom" that he opposes to "oppression" is freedom for the other, for the neighbor as well as to yourself.  No one I've ever met is against being free to do what they want to, human oppression is always in operation along with the oppressors being free to do what they want to do.  That is, certainly, an aspect of freedom with few if any secular-political-philosophical declarations of freedom that is seldom considered and is taken as a given only by those too stupid to have the slightest concept of such abstracted ideals as put into effect in real human societies and under real human governance.  The secular American left of my generation could, under that heading of "freedom" overlook Mao and Brezhnev and even Pol Pot (for a time) and the American right can with overlooking America's client fascists and their millions, even billions enslaved and millions murdered, the reason the Republican-fascists slob all over Putin and Orban and whoever else Murdoch or Trump,etc. want to do business with.

I think a lot of the crisis of faith in authorities is due to the growth of the middle-class allowing them to aspire to have, as Huey Long the would-be Trump well before Trump had it, "every man a king," a promotion of a fantasy to those with only a little relative power and at lower budget levels to maintain that as a delusion.  

I think also that Hans Kung may not have realized that with what may, sometimes, sometimes even rarely, legitimate authorities from those institutions he listed as now discredited, the most dangerously unregulated entities, media figures (such as on FOX or worse), show-biz figures (such as Reagan and Trump), billionaires with even a slight sense of how to mount phony PR (such as Elon Musk and Steve Jobs), Youtube and pod-cast hate-talk bigmouths (take your pick) etc. will fill in the gaps left by the discrediting of traditional authority.  Eating up so much of the conscious attention of most people with anything from a radio to the most sophisticated online connection, the modern media, the internet, the very ratfuckable algorithms (if there is artificial intelligence, it's got to be the stupidest intelligence, ever), has produced a nightmare version of authority.  

And it is almost always an authority which shares this with Satan, it will always be strongest when it is appealing to the worst things in us.  I think that every world danger we have, Putin in Russia, Republican-fascists in the United States, various smaller and very dangerous figures in Europe and North America, many of the dictatorships in the third world, the international gangster organizations, the extraction industries, the international cartels, etc. have their power or maintain it against the world and public good due to the power and secular amorality of the mass media.

That's as true of the remaining influential ink on paper New York Times as it is of FOX or Facebook or Youtube.  The part that the NYT played in putting Trump in power through its thirty years of lies about Hillary Clinton deserves to destroy its credibility as much as the priest-pedophile scandal has to destroy the credibility of the all-unmarried-male Catholic hierarchy.

The revelation of discredit and corruption that comes with the the pulling back of the curtain to expose the phony PR is hardly confined to traditional traditional or quasi-religious academic authority, it is as true of secular authority as well as religious, it extends well into what is taken to be secular virtue, as well. I have rather specialized in my skepticism of the most sacrosanct of those as is encapsulated in the American First Amendment.  

The most basic pseudo-moral absolute that imperils us today, one which is granted the most enormous privilege ever given to such dangerous immorality in the guise of virtue, the privilege for the mass media to intentionally lie to its highest profitability (as can be read in the internal e-mails from FOX during the attempted putsch) in the American "First Amendment."  When your profitability model relies on harnessing the power of mass-immorality and gullibility, as you immorally plan on using immorality to make you rich, your own sense of truth and reason will consciously, admittedly be thrown aside on behalf of making money.  That's as true of the New York Times in a little way, of NPR in a "non-profit" scheme, as it is of the most corrupt pod caster or Youtube channel schmuck.

Still, I think that Hans Kung's approach to the problem works very well on an individual and even a societal scale. And the importance of that can in no way be taken as inconsiderable.  The choice to choose what is right over what is wrong is not done on a corporate or even a club basis, it is an individual choice, it is, in the most true sense of it, a choice to believe something.  It is a choice to really, effectively believe:
 
freedom is better than oppression, justice is better than self-interest, non-violence is better than violence, love is better than hate, peace is better than war, we MUST be just,w MUST tell the truth, NOT steal, NOT commit adultery and Not murder WE MUST BE FAIR.

Kung almost gives in to the sin of relativizing even within his listing of absolutely essential moral absolutes when he says:

Or, to put it more forcefully:  why, if it is to our advantage and our personal happiness,

because the very trouble is that WE MUST HOLD THOSE MORAL VALUES AS SELF EVIDENT EVEN WHEN DOING THE OPPOSITE WILL GET US WHAT WE, generally stupidly, BELIEVE WE WANT. What we want for ourselves is the origin of all of the evil we are capable of when we don't take the moral alternative as being absolutely required of us.  Secularism, modernism, "enlightenment rationality" has nothing in it that will make that choice reliably taken by a majority of People in any society or in most places in the world without accepting a supernatural origin of that requirement.

That is what cannot be done on a purely rationalistic basis because it is always possible to rationalize doing what we want to no matter what the cost to others, other People, other living, sentient beings, the local and even world environment, etc. is.  

With modern technology, the products of amoral, secular science and technology (especially global warming), the extraction industries, the weapons industries (physicists and technologists evil gift of nuclear weapons), the organization of secular-clerical efficiency and now computerized technology, even down to the horrific use of Western provided facial recognition to make a place like China into a sci-fi dystopian dictatorship, we can't afford any widespread rejection of morality because the consequences of it are too high.  

Putin, the KGB man and so ultimate company man, the man who followed the Chinese Communists' business model of scrapping pretenses of socialism while keeping the political monopoly of Communism and outdoing the worst of the capitalists at their own game, is pulling out of the Nuclear Arms Treaty as a game of chicken with the West for opposing his imperial annexation of Ukraine.  America's Republican-fascists are in his pocket.  So is a considerable part of the American media and the tin pot "American left" the Greens, and dear old Noam Chomsky.  If I live long enough I think Chomsky, who I once regarded as a kind of intellectual, atheist, secular saint, turning out to be a latter day mid-20th century American Stalinist hack might become something of a milestone in my complete rejection of secularism.  Of course I'm not in favor of the establishment of religion, agreeing with Madison in one thing, that establishment of a state religion is a guarantee of its corruption, but a secularized society in which what you watch on the screen is what you mistake as true is even more dangerous and more bound to corruption.

I don't dream of retreating into a "Christian summer" of the kind that Karl Rahner imagined as he nostalgically declared that we are in a "winter season of Christianity " in which the full flower of Christian cultural, societal and political influence is felt.  The history of Christianity mixed with political power and institutional strength was, for the most part, a hot house profusion of unreliable and gaudy blossoms, more typically a hideous fake polyester stage set of phoniness. What admitted good it was over classical and European paganism was not enough to avoid scandalous corruption.  That is how it was so easily discredited as, in fact, the similar Wizard of Oz facade of liberal democracy and academic credibility has now fallen, too. The typical stereotype of ugly Americanism in the post-WWII period, now turning in on itself under the likes of Marjory T. Green and other MAGA fascists, is a similar thing.  

I think that one of the lesser discussed items of Christian faith, the idea that we are to pray for God's kingdom on Earth through God's will being done must mean the best days of Christianity must lie in that as of yet unrealized hope.  Rationally, I shouldn't believe that little evidenced possibility will come about, though the prophesy of Jesus that the meek will inherit the Earth leads me to start to think the idea has more credibility in it than the arrogance of modern secularism, the very thing that has provided us with the means to make the alternative impossible.  If those meek are the remnant of a nuclear apocalypse with seriously reduced life-span and a very high level of birth defects - we only have ourselves to blame for it and I hope any surviving of us will never forget that.

I will be going though at least more of Hans Kung's book if not the entire text.  I think it has as much potential for productively thinking about things as the excellent work of Brueggemann.  
 
* Finding out more about the personality of the late Benedict XVI, having known that after Kung got him, then Karl Ratzinger, a job teaching in the University of Tubingen, when the student revolts of 1968 happened and offended his sense of faculty status, his right to the respect of the students, he went to a more conservative university and took a sharp turn right when he'd become prominent as  a progressive during the Vatican II years, has given me more insight into why Benedict XVI was so uninterested in the pastoral welfare of lay Catholics.  

One of the stories I recently read was when one of his former grad students led a delegation in a visit to him, then the Pope, he made the mistake of saying he was his friend.  Benedict coldly corrected him that he was his student, not his friend. That Pope could be a real prick. I can't imagine Francis doing anything remotely as unfriendly or unkind.  It's especially remarkable as Jesus is recorded as calling his followers his friends. It is doubtful that Ratzinger, or Benedict, had many friends nor do I get the sense that he much missed them.  He was a disaster as Pope and as the chief enforcer of John Paul II, the second least pastoral Pope of the previous hundred sixty years, so far as I can discern.  

** Here, as so often when reading literate Europeans, it's necessary to point out that "liberalization" here is in line with the secularist, amoral meaning of the word popularized in France and England in the 18th century, meaning mostly freeing investors and businessmen, landowners, etc. to maximize profitability for the rising middle class and untitled wealthy, more to do with breaking down the remnants of feudalism than with much of anything else.

Such "freedoms" as promoted in the English revolution, the French Revolution" and the American revolution, with their various and never unalloyed benefits were secondary, such as freedoms for some and when those wouldn't endanger wealth accumulation, never in practice for all, certainly in their effects if not their promotion were incidental to the larger purpose.  A lot of that was more a matter of style, as can be seen in Jefferson's turn from "All men are created equal" to his mathematical analysis on the profitability TO HIM of slavery and Madison's late in life bitter skepticism about freedom.  There is nothing more telling than a 60s anti-war activist turned Republican-fascist once they were out of danger of being drafted(David Stockman to  Peter Navarro), an apostate Marxist (Horowitz is merely one of literally hundreds I could name), a cynical business monster ex-hippy (too many to choose a typical example of one), to show just how phony pseudo-morality under secularism really can get.

Remember You Are Dust . . . Or Reject It?

RMJ has posted an excellent Ash Wednesday liturgy, which is better than what I was thinking of posting. 

It might seem morbid to some but I always feel something's  when Lent starts late in the civil calendar.  There seems to be something more suited to late winter in Lent, a season for sober thoughts and experimenting with leaving excess in the past.   Though I've always detested carnival,  the disgusting celebration of excess, mostly among those who have no intention of conducting the experiment with simplicity and non-consuming.  Of course, given what I said a week and more back about America's imperial religious holiday and its commercially encouraged excess, you don't have to wait for Fat Tuesday for that.

The problem with using symbols as sacramentals is that they can be so easily emptied of their meaning as they become a thing in themselves.   Wearing the ashes after Mass as a show is directly contrary to the Gospel for the day - see RMJ's excellent post.

I always thought that the use of the "Remember you are dust. . . " line from Genesis 3 was scandalous because the Gospel of Jesus certainly sees us as far more than dust.  I think it's like the nasty old procedure of Last Rites, designed to scare someone, a form of psychological torture.  Guilt for real wrongdoing, a healthy sense of shame is something I'm all for,  needless morbidity and torture, not so much.   Even as a little kid getting palm ashes rubbed on my forehead that it seemed like a refutation of eternal life and perhaps that was the meaning of whoever put it in that glorious mess of a book.  As someone recently said to me, if there's no afterlife, why would anyone thing anything mattered?   As someone else has pointed out,  if you figure you can eat, drink and be merry, or rule as a totalitarian and murderous dictator and you'll end up in the same oblivion as the most self-denying saint then there's nothing to trouble you as you do what you want to.  

Whatever residual unbelief I may suffer from the generally overwhelming human urge to get away with as much as you figure you can get away with without feeling any consequences is something I not only believe, completely, but know empirically.  It is the history of human depravity expressed aphoristically.  But I'm going to get long if I keep this up.

I'll keep working on what I was working on, maybe it will come more together.  

Hate Mail - I Can Always Count On It When I Diss The ACLU

THE PREVALENT SUPERSTITION that there is some virtue in the idea that because the 100% of propertied white males,  from many states exclusively Protestant propertied white males who elected and comprised the First Congress, the legislatures of the various states and who were the only people of "We The People" who wrote, adopted and passed the First Amendment were too stupid to stipulate that there was a difference between malicious lies which have no right to be told and the straight forward truth which PEOPLE have a right to hear, so WE THE PEOPLE in perpetuity are NEVER EVER to learn the most harsh lessons of history,  slavery, genocide, insurrections, lynch-law,  the perpetual war against Women (3-4 women are routinely lynched every single day to little to no notice),  eco-cide, etc. and that those who want to perpetrate those are always, for eternity to have a second chance to impose those on the country and the world is probably the stupidest idea common among college-credentialed Americans, certainly among liberals.

I will never, ever say that white supremacy, male supremacy, anti-LGBTQ bigotry, other and assorted forms of bigotry,  . . . lies about man made global warming and other universal evils have any right to be promoted, to be foisted on gullible and ignorant people, that we must! must! allow those lies to be spread because "the First Amendment" is worded so stupidly.  It is exactly as stupid to hold that because those amateurs who drafted the "Bill of Rights" were too stupid to be explicit in the rational limits of speech and press freedom as the fascists outside of and on the goddamned Supreme Court use the 2nd Amendment those numbskulls wrote is similarly and vaguely dangerous. 

Nazis have no right to lie that I am obliged to recognize or which it is safe to allow the law to grant them, they abandoned even a presumption of a right to unlimited speech by the lesson of history about what they are able to do when they find enough stupid, vulnerable people to gain power.   Their intentions of depriving others of every right, up to and including the right to live annul that as a right and transforms it into an insanely granted privilege to lie with impunity no matter how dangerous that is.  The idea that once they have the power to take power by force then we then can stop them is one of the stupidest refusals to learn from observed history that is ubiquitous among the allegedly educated elite.

White supremacists have no right to lie, male supremacists have none (remember that FBI estimate of 3-4 women EVERY DAY! WHO ARE MURDERED BECAUSE THEY ARE WOMEN). 

The oil, coal and gas industries have no right to lie us into ecocide because the assinine Supreme Court says that they are "people" and so have the same rights that they stupidly allow Nazis, white supremacists, other malignant people. 

Anyone who claims  Nazis, etc. have those rights are saying they are to be allowed, forever, a chance to turn "Never Again" into X number of times again.   Anyone who belongs to any beleagured group who holds that First Amendementy nonsense is a complete chump.

The excuse that if we don't allow Nazis, etc. that chance then "someone may take away our right to tell the truth and promote equality and universal respect for all" is an idiot because it's exactly those they empower who will guarantee that happens.  It is worse than paradoxical, it is totally stupid! 

This Was Going To Be "Friday Fun" But I Was Late

 

Someone recently didn't care for me pointing out that even mathematics so the science that it was dependent on isn't absolutely grounded in objective reasoning, Jeffrey Kaplan does a pretty good job of showing why the belief that is possible is truly naive and a denial of the best evidence.   If math cannot be entirely enclosed within logic then the idea that physics can ever be finally settled in a theory of everything is absurdly fraudulent. 

That is something that even as arrogant and insistent a materialist absolutist as Sean Carroll can be forced to admit, sort of, but it is like pulling hen's teeth to get him to do that.  

Taking A Chance On Taking A Chance On God And How This Matters

IT IS THANKS TO looking again into the late James Cone's theology that I went back to a book I bought years ago, stared reading, put down for what seemed like good reasons and picked up again last weekend,  the late John J. McNeill's 1988 book Taking a Chance On God, one of his books in LGBTQ+ theology.  The date of publications at the height of the AIDS crisis is important to the contents of the book and his thinking in it so I've noted it. I have to say right up front that there are some things he concluded from his experience that I don't agree with but that's the nature of reading LGBTQ+ literature and of reading theology.  One example that I feel compelled to point out is that the consequences of anonymous sex make it a rather obvious sin to engage in it.  McNeill was more of the idea that it might be the only experience of love available to some men and that influenced his judgement of it.  I don't think that's anything like a sufficient mitigation for the enormous potential for harm that is an inescapable consequence of it generally being engaged in. Anyone who engages in more than one sexual encounter with more than one person who engages in any kind of promiscuity opens not only himself but any other sexual partner to serious even deadly consequences by their behavior.  Though there are certainly worse sins, such as preventing the legalization and normalization of committed, faithful, loving sexual relationships, marriage equality, which is the larger sin which leads, inevitably to someone feeling the compulsion to engage in anonymous sex.  When he was writing and talking that was certainly a more serious sin that was ubiquitous among legal, political, religious, etc. figures.  Most of the habits of dangerous sexual encounters among LGBTQ+ people are a bad habit of the often violent discrimination against us.  Discrimination which has the blessing of the ironically hypocritical Roberts Court, the same court which narrowly and likely temporarily ended legal discrimination against us so very recently. Earlier courts nearly uniformly upheld that discrimination against us.

Getting back to McNeill.  I had put the book down due to my distaste for psychology and, especially, Freud's theories.  After he was pretty much kicked out of the Jesuits by JPII and his chief enforcer, Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) for his ministry to Gay Men and Lesbians, McNeill went into the practice of psychotherapy, probably as a professional extension of his helping people in pastoral counseling. Now, I've especially got issues with Freudian psychotherapy so his use of Freudian terminology put me off and I closed the book a number of years back.  Though I should have finished the book because his use of it is atypically harmless and a good opening into his thinking , though not as good for me as his use of Scripture and earlier theological texts. And he was decisively critical in at least one of the basic issues of Freudian dogma.*

It's kind of funny in my life of the past few months that from reading Chad Allen Lizzari's dissertation to reading Claude Piron's linguistic studies (he became a psychotherapist after working as a UN translator) and now McNeill, I'm being influenced by those who are and were much influenced by psychology and who all worked using psychotherapy to try to help people.  Perhaps it's only as a science that my distaste for psychology is valid and as a therapeutic art it can, sometimes, be practiced by People of discernment and good will as a good thing. Sort of like religion, in that.  I doubt that much of even effective physical medical treatment can be rigorously considered to be based in the best science because our organisms are far too complex and far too many illnesses are based on things we can't really study scientifically.

That is even more the case for mental problems which are entirely invisible to direct observation and tying down to an actual physical cause is probably not only impossible but conceptually mistaken. In the past and today one of the shadier things that psychologists and, perhaps even more psycholgists do is invent mental disorders to drum up business.  For a large part of my life being LGBTQ was labeled diseased, though the resistance of a financially interested "therapists" who specialized in "treating" mostly gay men and lesbians was overcome and those official "diagnoses" were officially dropped.

I think any helpful help for mental disorders has to be more a product of art and wisdom for all the dangers that vaguery brings. I really don't think there is any helping that. The same dangers are present when quackery or bad-faith in the guise of science is allowed to be done as it certainly has been. In fact, when they believe what they think has the reliability of gen-u-ine science, they're less likely to question what they do.  Especially when the legal and judicial systems collaborate with "experts" and two institutions of massive self-assured arrogance determine the outcome.  And more than a little of McNeill's theology is informed by his thousands of hours of talking to and trying to help LGBTQ+ clients and his attentive listening and consideration of their reported experience. The wisdom of that is found in his conclusions though I will confess, the experience of being gay in much of it is foreign to my experience.  Still, any acknowledgement of its potential to do good won't affect my rejection of psychology, even more so psychotherapy as science.

Despite having said that I don't find much of Queer Theology compelling, I have to say that I do find John J. McNeill's theology some of the most compelling I have read recently and it isn't just because so much of it compels me as a specifically Gay Christian. His explanation of the doctrine of the Trinity is the first one I have found really compelling, and I've read some pretty well regarded theologians on the topic.  I'll give you a big chunk of it.

A primary task of gay religious groups as they seek to foster the spiritual growth of their members is to teach us how to become self-centered in a healthy way, so that we are able to take responsibility before God and our fellow humans for our own choices and our own lives.  We must learn that we cannot live our lives simply to meet the expectations of others,  whether those others are parents or church officials.

Certainly that isn't something that is peculiar to LGBTQ+ People, the struggle with our inevitable focus of our attention on ourselves and the strong tendency to become self-fixated is nearly universal.

As lesbian women and gay men, we must prayerfully undertake a personal reevaluation of what we have inherited, because much of what has come down to us from the church has been contaminated by the evil of homophobia.  We must ask ourselves which of the church's values we continue to want, respect, and love;  in other words, which values are compatible with who we are and are not destructive of our dignity as persons.  As I mentioned earlier, whatever is psychologically destructive must be bad theology.  Thus our identification of the destructive elements will be a service to the church, helping it separate purely human traditions from the authentic word of God.

The self-centering and maturing process has been a basis in God's revelation in Scripture. Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit, was the last in a series of epiphanies or revelations of God that had been going on for millennia.  When the followers of Moses began to worship God in the image of a golden calf - a worship that necessarily involved a dehumanization and depersonalization of the self, and a regression back into the subhuman,  God revealed him/herself as a person.  The central message of that revelation of God is a person and that we give God true worship primarily through the development of our specifically human capacities for work, joy, play and love.

The progressive revelation of God's self as Father, Son and Holy Spirit represents a progressive identification with and interiorization of the divine presence in our lives.  In the first stage God appears as a parent figure, one who establishes laws and demands obedience, and yet a parent who is also faithful,  compassionate, and forgiving.  In the second stage of this self-revelation,  God becomes present to us as a fellow human being in the figure of Jesus, our brother and fellow human being. At this stage God is still outside us, but is more accessible to us in the form of Jesus.  In the last stage God appears as the Holy Spirit of love who now dwells in us.  As the prophet Jeremiah stated, the old covenant of God was based on the law and the external authority of God: "I had to show them who was the master"(Jr. 31:32).  However the new covenant is essentially different.  In the new covenant, Jeremiah predicts, God will write the law deep within us, on our hearts.  As a result every human being, from the least to the greatest, will be able to find the will of God within him-or herself and his or her experience.

This is the covenant I will make with the House of Israel when those days arrive - it is YHWH who speaks.  Deep within them I will plant my Law, writing it on their hearts.  Then I will be their God and they shall be my people. There will be no further need for neighbor to try to teach neighbor, or brother to say to brother, "Learn to know YHWH!"  No, they will all know me, the least no less than the greatest - it is YHWH who speaks- since I will forgive their iniquity and never call their sin to mind. (Jr 31:33-34)

At one point in his discourse at the Last Supper,  Jesus said to his disciples:  "It is for your own good that I am going, because unless I go, the Advocate will not come to you."(Jn 16:7). Why did Jesus have to disappear from our own midst that the Spirit of the new covenant could become present? As long as Jesus remained present among the apostles, they had their center of authority and guide outside themselves.  They were trying to meet the expectations of someone else. As long as they remained under the personal authority of Jesus, they were still children.  They had not yet become fully creative and responsible adults.

With the death and resurrection of Jesus and the coming of the Holy Spirit, however, the apostles received a challenge as well as an opportunity to mature. . .

Chapter 4: Spiritual Maturity: A Challenge for Lesbian and Gay Christians

Despite whatever risk of the typically Christian sin of presuming supersessionism is contained in McNeill's explanation of it - and he bases not a little of it on the words of Jeremiah, elsewhere noting that Jesus, himself said he had not come to overturn The Law but to fulfill it - that is an explanation of the Trinity I can see whereas all others I'd read had seemed off, to me.  The sin of supersessionism, the claim that the New Covenant overturns the Old one is, perhaps ironically, knowable from exactly the same thing that McNeill condemns much of the anti-LGBTQ+ baggage of the Christian churches with in this passage, the oppressive violence, even murder that resulted from it, the bad fruit of that theology.  Whatever else we know, that kind of fruit, that kind of result has to condemn any particular traditional holding of Christianity no matter what its provenance or its establishment in age because of the guarantee of Jesus that we could rely on that standard of judgement of such claims.  If that is not to be taken as a reliable standard of judgement then it calls into question everything else attributed to him or, rather, any particular denominational or theological interpretation of it, that is if rational consistency is important in theological considerations.

There is a lot for an outsider of any focused theological school to think about in reading its literature.  All theologies are an expression of the experiences and conclusions of particular groups of People, even individuals within those groups.  In metaphysical academic theology it's not, perhaps primarily the life experience of those which is expressed but their educational and professional orientation and which particular flavor of that kind of theological bias they have chosen to be associated with. Often it is a denominational bias as a more overall determination of what is concluded.  The difference in the Liberation theologies, Black Liberation, the various Latin American ones, the feminist, womanist, mujerista, LGBTQ+ ones, is that the lives of actual People outside of the academic elite are the actual testing ground of what those theologies propose.  

It is one of the most irritating things about huge swaths of Roman Catholic theology, especially that which deals with marriage, married life, sex, that it has mostly, in the past, come from an elite of unmarried, educated men who were supposed to not have normal committed, honestly conducted sexual relationships and, in some cases, nuns who had gotten academic credentials in academic, Catholic theology.  That isn't an annoying kind of thing that is restricted to this peculiarly Catholic case.  It is a fact that as James Cone said, most of the history of theology has been made by some narrow band of elite intellectuals and academics who have produced almost all of theology, in the case of Western theology, almost exclusively white and almost exclusively male and almost exclusively privileged economically or within some institution that sustained them in something like privilege.  Is it any wonder that so much of the resultant theology doesn't do anything for the large majority of People whose lives and experience are not considered at all.  Or, when those are the focus of it, such as in the official Catholic line on the use of contraception and what marriage is for, the mostly priests and bishops and popes and the academic theologians who know that if they don't please the hierarchy their work won't have any impact - and under such regressive papacies as those of JPII and Benedict XVI it might get them fired - the official teaching will not work at all for the majority of Catholics and so they will ignore and disobey that official teaching where they can access contraception.  It is more than a bit absurd that the Vatican, fifty-six years after Paul VI's upholding, against the conclusion of the large majority of the expert panel his predecessor and he called to study the issue, kept the absurd policy against the use of effective contraception in place for everyone but the celibate clergy to follow.  In no small part that is the reason that Republican-fascists in the United States Congress and Catholics on the damned Supreme Court are floating the idea of ending legal access to contraception.  What you can say about the arrogant and clueless isolation from and indifferenc to real lives of real People you can probably say even more for the vile secular hierarchy of the Supreme Court, the legal scholars who are traditionally more like those isolated traditional theologians than they'd like to have anyone pointed out and the Republican-fascist hacks who know their congressional districts are drawn to gather in suckers who will vote for any criminal or creep with an "R" after their name.  Which, do in no small part to the Roberts Court, is why it is in the control of such criminals and creeps today.

That kind of elite legalistic, academic analogy to my criticism of elite theology isn't restricted to the right, however, it is also the basis of my rejection of the ACLU-"civil liberties" line of lawyering that has played the American left for such suckers on the basis of their own Constitutional and First Amendementy purity. It's why their lawyers can be proud of themselves for enabling America's indigenous fascists, the white supremacists, the foreign imports of neo-Nazis, and others who can be counted on to attack, terrorize and kill mostly people under the lawyer's economic class and outside of their professional, social and family circles, people NOT like them, in other words.  An education in elite law is probably any number of times more dangerous than one in elite theology because under a secular, liberal democracy, they really do have the power to make their ideas have real power.

Being of the same mind toward one another, not loftily minded, but instead associating with the lowly

So you can imagine a catalog like Roman's 12 being a parallel to the 10 Commandments.  These are all formulations for a counter-obedience of which I mention only three items.  First of all that Paul enjoins the church to practice hospitality. We all know that. But imagine hospitality in Pharaoh's world. It's precluded by definition. Second Paul enjoins generosity, imagine generosity in Pharaoh's world.  And thirdly, Paul says you cannot practice vengeance. Now all of us knows that those three summons of hospitality, generosity and no vengeance are as radical as you can get in Pharaoh's world or in Cesar's world.

So my thought is that these are secrets that have been kept silent in the church in order that the church should not upset anybody.  But there is - you know this - there is a huge hunger in the church because People are asking is there any alternative way.  And the wonderful thing about Hospitality and Generosity and No vengeance - and Sabbath and No Coveting - is that it's not liberal and it's not conservative. Everybody can do it. We don't have to all do it the same way. Everybody can do it. These are marks of a unified church that no longer needs to argue about secondary issues. And if we did these primary marks of the church there's a fair chance that most of the secondary issues would evaporate. Because we wouldn't have any energy for them.

A Youtube of a clip of Walter Brueggemann saying this came up on my sidebar yesterday so I listened to it and I went back to Romans, which, as you can see below, I differed with slightly in a big way last time and I will point out that the masterpiece that Romans is can't really be seen in excerpting a couple of sentences from it.  I think Romans is like a massive psycho-spiritual therapeutic experience that, if taken to heart, brings anyone from points where they judge others for their presumed or alleged or obviously real sins and, if it is read honestly and with self-reflection and a healthy, informed conscience, they will find that the sinner they judge will turn out to be themselves is just as much called out by Paul in it. It's like one big meditation on Jesus's comparison of someone who criticizes someone with a speck of dirt in their eye while they have a log in theirs, at least in part.

The typical use of Scripture is to pick out the secondary aspects of it to focus on, especially those to do with that most sexy of obsessions, sex, and miss the entire point of it. That use of sex is certainly one of the things that has been most useful to those who want to turn Christianity into a sexual obsession instead of what the Gospels, almost all of Paul and most of the rest of the New Testament says about justice and economic justice and that most inconvenient obsession of Jesus, universal love.  I'll give you more of chapter 12:

1Therefore I implore you, brothers, by God’s mercies, to present your bodies as a living, holy, acceptable sacrifice to God, your rational worship; 2And do not be configured to this age, but be transformed by renewal of the intellect, so you may test the will of God, which is good and acceptable and perfect. 3For, by the grace given me, I say to everyone among you not to be more haughtily minded than your thinking ought to be, but rather let your thinking conduce to sober-mindedness, as God has apportioned a measure of faithfulness to each. 4For, just as we have many members in one body, yet the members do not all have the same function, 5So we who are many constitute one body in the Anointed, and are members each one of one another; 6And having different gracious gifts, according to the grace given us: if prophecy, according to the proportion of faithfulness; 7If service, in serving; if a teacher, in teaching; 8If one who exhorts, in exhortation; one who distributes, in liberality; one who directs, in diligence; one who engages in acts of mercy, in joyousness. 9Love is without dissemblance. Abhorring wickedness, clinging to the good, 10Devoted to one another in brotherly love, giving preference of honor to one another, 11Not slothful in zeal, fervent in spirit, slaving for the Lord, 12Rejoicing in hope, enduring in affliction, persevering in prayer, 13Providing for the needs of the holy ones, pursuing hospitality—14Bless those who persecute, bless and do not curse—15To rejoice with those rejoicing, to weep with those weeping—16Being of the same mind toward one another, not loftily minded, but instead associating with the lowly—do not fancy yourselves sages—17Repaying no one evil for evil, providing things in good countenance with all human beings. 18If possible for you, be at peace with all human beings. 19Do not exact justice for yourselves, beloved, but yield place before anger; for it has been written, “‘The exacting of justice is mine, I will requite,’ says the Lord.” 20But rather, “If your enemy hungers, feed him; if he thirsts, give him drink; for in doing this you will heap coals of fire on his head.” 21Do not be vanquished by evil, but vanquish the evil with the good.

David Bentley Hart translation

One of the good things about going back to a more Orthodox understanding of Scripture, assuming it is the universalist understanding of it, is that such startling ideas like heaping coals of fire on your hungry enemy's head by feeding them can make sense with the rest of the text.  It only makes sense if you assume the fire is there to cleanse instead of torture for eternity.  It makes no sense of you believe in eternal damnation, especially if you deny the concept of purgatorial suffering in favor of the more Western notion that God creates enormous numbers of human beings who he intends to torture into eternity.  Without that universalism, which I agree with Origen and Gregory of Nyssa and St. Macrina the Younger, is there lying as another "secret" in the text.  Augustine's and Calvin's and so many others' imposition of eternal damnation on the Gospel and the Epistles turns God and Paul and those who follow Paul into sadistic hypocrites and the act of charity to your enemies into an evil thing. a lot more evil than even the most irresponsible of adult consensual sex, never mind the most responsible.

I have a lot more respect for Paul and infinitely more for God than that.



 

A Man Who Acts As His Own Editor Has A Blogger For A Client

those who don't even do that comment or tweet.

THIS TURNED OUT TO BE A FLOOD OF IMPIETY on the foremost of Imperial American religious holidays even as it started as an answer to someone who doesn't like my writing.

I am pretty immune to being shamed as to the flaws in my posts. Certainly those I can prove are not flaws but, also, those that are a product of a combination of rapid typing and inadequate editing.  One that I had to go back to see if I was remembering correctly was when I typed "seven plagues" instead of the ten that are narrated in Exodus.  I've got no explanation for that one and it has stood uncorrected for weeks till I sort of remembered typing that as I've been reading another translation of Exodus.  Maybe I should be a little ashamed of that but I can't notice I am feeling it.

I am not a theologian. I am not a writer.  I am certainly not a very good editor.  Being so much offline as I wait to get reconnected, I can say that especially the fact checking I used to try to keep up on has suffered.  I, like most people of my age cohort who grew up fact-checking by ink on paper with its myriad of inconveniences and slowness have gotten rather lazy at the ease with which that can often be done online. It's so easy online that you wonder why as that ease came about its practice has almost disappeared.

Not that it's as important as getting facts right but I have long announced my indifference to standard English spelling and am almost as indifferent to the many and hardly uniform rules of punctuation. I'd guess that my use of commas is often more by ear as a rhythmic device than it is the memory and application of the many rules as to the real, right way to use them. My professional training and a lot of my education was in music, after all.  Sometimes the stray word or comma is a result of an incomplete edit that I don't catch.

As to the modern a-grammatical nonsense that came in with the stupid little book of Strunk and White that is so stupidly and incompetently promoted by college-credentialed idiots who are so ignorant of English grammar as to fall for those two frauds, as much so in the absurdly distilled and insisted on idiocy of those who once skimmed it and imperfectly recalled a few of their stupider rules, after a fashion, or, more likely heard some other mid-brow who skimmed it and pontificated from their memory of it. If I were going to write by rules those would come from something like the much thicker and so less amenable to the TV trained-mind Warriner's English Grammar and Composition, not that piece of shit.  I do have some standards and the first one is that Strunk-White is crap that I won't see cited without pointing that out.

I don't think it was any accident that it was just as TV was really beginning to make Americans really stupid that E. B. White wrote his stupid praise of his Cornell prof's self-published little book and his revision of it was successfully marketed to pretentious mid-brows.  And the lazy teachers who figured teaching a legitimate book on composition and style was too much like work. Though given how much mind-time TV took from their students, it would probably have been hopeless.  That book being picked up by a publisher whose motives were, first and foremost, making money and its widespread promotion  and the rise of the idiot-box making Americans stupid for profit happening at the same time is not a coincidence.  One more or less goes along with the other.  

It also gave rise to the bullshit of such as William Safire, Edwin Newman and other incompetent language cops who could rely on such for-profit corporations as the NYT and the publishers to never fact-check their ignorant and often baseless pontifications on the subject.  Any publication that figured the Nixon-hack William Safire could be trusted to fact-check himself shows that their professional standards weren't really any higher than those of your less-than average blogger.  And these days they aren't even much using copy-editors to check if they're doing anything more important than whether their hacks are following their own "book of style."

I'd meant to forego the temptation to impiously work in the concurrent rise of the American gladiatorial spectacle on its high holy day, perhaps I've said about all I've got to say on that moral atrocity. American football is the proof that America is a Christian nation with generally little use for the Gospel of Jesus. Sports are not compatible with the Golden Rule, the Golden-Rule is all about not having winners and losers and, especially, not trying to be winners. And it isn't about merely mouthing it as a rote saying, it's about doing that.  That is especially true of a sport in which fatal and permanently maiming violence is not incidental and outside the rules but the whole point of the thing.  A  sport invented by the indolent college-attending rich-boys of the late 19th century and which the morality of conventional, institutional Christianity has not much seen it fit to critisize.  Far from it, some of the earliest and most degenerate yet mawkishly pious manifestations of the degeneracy are with the sponsorship of Catholic priests and bishops and other clergies of other denominations. If the game were not bad enough, the cloying, amber-tinted, fuzzy-hallowed commercial-sanctimony of its cinematic and media presentation and publicity should be enough to make a real adult puke. That more don't is probably revelatory of the scarcity of real adulthood in a late-stage imperial culture.

The Christian colleges and universities are as in on it as the most -secular ones, getting money is their motive,  which is an indictment of their Christianity as well as their educational function.  That they would credential people with such a twisted view of an educational institution is proof that they are just handing out degrees to a lot of them.  I think it's entirely legitimate to judge churches' theological validity by its presence in their educational institutions and so many of them are castles built on sand in that regard.   American football is proof of a morally degenerate culture.  It can't be made anything else just as the Roman gladiatorial industry wasn't able to be anything else.  Its presence in the "Republican" period of Rome was a good indication that it would eventually turn into something far worse, which it did in Imperial Rome. It should be no great shock that football rises as America's imperfect democracy falls to Republican-fascism.  The extent to which institutional "Christianity" maintains schools with extensive football programs, Notre Dame, Boston College, etc. myriads of Protestant schools, too, they prove that they have transformed the Gospel of Jesus into something far more like the Roman paganism which was, for Jesus and his followers, what Pharonic Egypt was to Moses and the Children of Israel.  I would guess that easily 4/5ths of the time the words "Christian" "Christianity" are used in the media, even religious media, that it is to that imperial pagan "Christianity" that they are referring.

OK, so I didn't exactly forego it. I was trying to think of the most anti-Superbowl thing I could do today.  Maybe I'll dig out the old Warriner's and do a few exercises from it.  Though, as I recall, even its authors gave in and figure football is part of the American educational experience.

I know from my past criticisms of football that some college-credentialed dolt is going to say, "Sports is good exercise," to which the best answer is for exercising nothing beats intelligently  planned exercises.  Though that might be a novel thought for the seldom to never-exercising, chicken-wing guzzling couch-potatoes who watch them, even jocks know that.  Maybe I'll do my usual morning exercises again, maybe I'll take a long walk away from media.  Perhaps exercising is the most anti-football thing there is, it's the opposite of what the NFL promotes for its viewers to do, sitting there watching commercials and eating junk.

3 James Cone's Theology As A (Not "The") Way Forward

and How Our Understanding Of Morality Changes In The Details As We Must Confront Newer Facts And Newer Depravities

God is present in People struggling for life and not in the abstract metaphysical world of reason which is only inhabited by philosophers, theologians and other privileged intellectuals.  The Christian God is not the god of Plato, Kant and Hegel, but rather the God of the Exodus and the Prophets and of Jesus.  If God is in the world where People are abused and exploited, what, then, is God doing?  That was my question.

James Cone:  Black Blood Crying Out And The Rise of Black Liberation Theology

I'M GOING TO KEEP risking giving the enemies of Christianity and religion stuff to work with in their quest to discredit Christianity and religion among People who are shallow thinkers. Shallow thinkers with a predisposition to deny the morality of the Law, the Prophets and the Gospel and their moral responsibility to the least among us don't need my help in doing what they want to do anyway.  And a lot of them, especially these days, call themselves "Christians."  Since God told Moses from the burning bush that People will know who God is by what God will do, as James Cone confirmed in the quote above, I don't think anyone can be faulted for thinking that "Christians" are as "Christians" do not what they claim to believe.  

My critique of a few lines from Paul are hardly news, though if you've never read Paul and depend on only the few sour cherries picked from the cake for the purpose of discrediting Christianity or to turn it into a religion of hate and violence, it probably is new for you.  We know that Paul was far from entirely accepted among even those who knew Jesus in the flesh.  He and Peter had some major areas of disagreement, probably James as well, the leaders of the original Church in Jerusalem.  Part of that was due to those who the two sides felt called to minister to, who was included and who was excluded from their imagination of what the Christian assembly was.  Our knowledge of how those disagreements played out comes pretty much from Paul and what is generally considered a pro-Paul source, Acts.  Some of the issues we know about, whether or not gentile converts to the Jesus movement had to convert to Judaism including such major and painful issues as circumcision was certainly an important difference among them. Whether or not to eat with gentiles, whether or not you could eat things they ate but which were forbidden to eat under the Mosaic Law.* Paul's reasoning in why such legal issues were of secondary importance or of no real importance won out, though those who had known Jesus and who Paul almost certainly got the Gospel from had priority and being actual witnesses to the ministry of Jesus to add weight to their view points. None of that is news. Reportedly, in Acts, Peter came to some of the same conclusions about commensality and what a follower of Jesus was allowed to eat but I am skeptical of the authenticity of that story in Acts as I am the legend of the couple who withheld the proceeds of the sale of their property.  But am prepared to be wrong in my skepticism.  

I will point out that from Paul's infamous instruction that Women were to be silent in church assemblies, Elizabeth A. Johnson concludes that we can be fairly confident that Women in the Church in Corinth were speaking in church and that the reaction of the Women in Corinth to Paul's instruction is not recorded in history or Scripture. Before Paul's letters became Scripture, they were just letters.  We do know that Paul's attitude towards Women is otherwise remarkably "liberal" for the time because he noted some were his valued co-ministers and even the leaders of churches.  You get the feeling that Paul wasn't entirely consistent on issues like that and he is the person in the New Testament other than Jesus who is presented in enough detail to get something like a feeling for who he was.

I've been thinking of transcribing James Cone's lecture as given at Yale in 2017 though I'd expect he must have published the text as he would have liked it to be read, I just don't have it.  I have been transcribing passages I found especially fruitful for consideration.

Transcribing from videos, listening, stopping, remembering and writing down, phrase by phrase, sentence by sentence, going over it again with the recording for accuracy is one of the best ways I know of really listening to a lecture or sermon or interview. I've come to value listening to a recording of those more than in-person listening because you can do that, going back to listen again, almost as easily as you can review a written text. That's one of the reasons I post so many lectures, sermons, interviews, etc.   Though useful, typing out a written text is too easy to get you into something as deeply as transcribing the spoken word will force you to get. I might continue that for a while, it's something I can do off-line and once you get used to the irregular rhythm of it, it's quite enjoyable.  

In her book,  Quest for the Living God, the theologian Elizabeth A. Johnson, already mentioned, devotes separate chapters to short explorations of different current, emerging schools of Christian theology, Feminist, Womanist, Mujerista, liberation theologies, etc.  I can't find my copy of the book this morning so I can't give you a full list. Of course there will be major and minor differences in theology as seen from the points of view that those different theologies arose from. Those differences don't come just between different theologies but within those, as well.  Which is not disconfirming of anything except the silly idea that human beings can be expected to be uniform in their lives and experiences and that any of us can singly or collectively know the entire Truth about God and God's Creation.

God is too big to fit into one human mind or in all of human minds put together. We imagine such a thing which, of course, cannot exist, you only have in mind what's in your mind, that's as much reality as anyone can have while in the flesh. It's a simple fact of thinking about God that different People will have different ideas because our lives are different.   That's been as true of theology as it is any other branch of study, whether philosophical, historical, scientific, pseudo-scientific (especially that since it's so reliant on untethered imagination), etc. So that absence of a consensus is nothing that anyone who knows the first thing about human fields of endeavor needs to be bothered by.  It's who we are. I doubt that even some species we are accustomed to imagining as if they were mindless automata such as ants or bees, if they did theology would fail to achieve that kind of diversity.

If you forget the necessity of that diversity it can be jarring to hear someone such as James Cone insisting on the validity of his own basis of reading Scripture and doing theology, the video of him giving the same lecture at Union Seminary has a white member of the audience complaining rudely and bitterly about the focus of Cone's Black Liberation Theology coming from and being primarily devoted to the conditions of Black People.  But one of Cone's points is that such a focus and such addressing your theology to a specific human group is entirely legitimate, it's defined the practice of theology from and addressed to white people or, rather, specific groups of white people even excluding subsets of white people, entirely ignoring Black People, other People of Color, Women in all of their diversity, LGBTQ+ in all of our diversity, etc.  

As to the experience of listening to that diversity being jarring, being jarred out of our present thinking is good.  Consider the reports of the Prophets as to their experiences of hearing the voice of God, being jarred out of customary thinking is necessary. Comfortable thinking should be suspect.

In that way the insistence on the different established denominations that there be a uniform standard of belief, a claim of the exclusive truth of one set of beliefs is a guarantee of inadequacy. I was raised a Catholic probably the denomination with the largest and most extensive baggage of such standard beliefs, believe me, I've seen that. And some of that, some of what could be accused of being post-Scriptural thinking, is certainly not bad though a lot of it is.

There are certainly some things that you cannot include in something taken as Christianity if the Gospel of Jesus is to be the actual basis of it. Which has never stopped Christians from including some of those, especially when those issues center on wealth, power and the violent enforcement of uniformity of professed belief.  I think the Two Great Commandments, Love God and love others, the condensation of The Law and Prophets,Do to others what you would have them do to you, the stated requirement to enter into the Kingdom of God, to do to the least among you what you would do to God, The New Commandment, Love one another as I've loved you, are non-negotiable foundations,though, of course, even many established churches and individuals even while  claiming to accept those violate them continually and even on an official basis. We are all sinners as Paul's extensive list of human evils says.  About the only things that Jesus warned would get you a term in hell were being rich, not doing good for the least among you, corrupting innocents, and one that the Churches specialize in so often, blaspheming the Holy Spirit, the more ready the Church to damn People to hell, the more likely they seem to be to violate that last one.  Jesus didn't mention engaging in a consensual, adult, loving, faithful and mutually caring same sex marriage based in equality in that category and Paul didn't claim that he did.  

I guess, as accused,  I've been doing LGBTQ+ theology here, what some call Queer Theology, though I'm not fond of that term. Oddly, as a Gay Christian, I haven't come across a Queer Theologian whose writing really grabs me, though some of it is interesting and much of it is a restatement of rather common liberal Protestant theology which I accept. I do find Black Liberation Theology compelling as I do the Liberation Theology that came and comes out of Latin America in ways I don't find a lot of more traditional and official theology compelling. I think recently trying Karl Rahner may be the last time I dip into elite white theology though Hans Kung's dissident Catholic theology is well worth reading again.

I might find the ideas of God from philosophers interesting, at times, but I never find they are especially compelling or useful or, in the end, as convincing as God described as James Cone described God, above.  Like I admitted I've never taken classes in this stuff but, then, none of the Apostles or named disciples graduated from a school of theology.  I doubt any of them except, perhaps, Paul could have gotten accepted in one (I assume he was literate though a lot of modern scholars doubt that). A number of those who wrote the books of the New Testament probably would have failed Greek composition according to what the Greek scholars I've read on those topics think.  Reading David Bentley Hart's translation in which he consciously followed such things as the verb tenses the writers wrote, much of it is remarkably and gratifyingly like "sub-standard" English.  And that's not surprising or, in terms of the Words of Jesus, disqualifying. One of the groups Jesus said to watch out for over and again were the scribes. None of them would have been ordained by any main-stream or many "evangelical" denominations in the United States which have far more stringent requirements of academic respectability than they do lives of demonstrable love, nor hope or, really, faith. Lots of them are just mean bastards. Though I wouldn't necessarily say the sects that seem to ordain just anyone seem to have a leg up in credibility or integrity. A lot of those are more like franchise businesses than churches and some of their clergy, Protestant though they may be, rival the most corrupt of the high Renaissance Popes that got Luther pissed off.* James Cone in giving his lecture points out that Jesus didn't say "Blessed are the intelligent."  He certainly didn't say "Blessed are the credentialed."

* Vegan Theology

An article I read from the Chief Rabbi of Dublin a few years back convinced me that far from Paul and Peter's decision that you could eat pigs, etc., today, now, the changed circumstances of life with so many billions of human meat eaters, apart from the inescapable cruelty of eating animals that the Earth could not sustain carnivorism meant that only a vegan diet could be considered as moral. I'd been a vegetarian for half a century at that point.  I have to say since I gave up eating dairy products and eggs (after my last hens died and my supply of knowably cruelty free eggs ended) my health had been better.  I got compliments on my looks for the first time in my life, now that they're of little use to me. Then I got the meat-industry generated disease of Covid-19.

The incredible cruelty of animal husbandry as a given - the number of cute day-old male chicks thrown live into grinders every hour of every day is stunning, they should choke on that as they guzzle their American-Imperial religious Super-Bowl communion of chicken wings - it is the consequences of concentration death camps for billions of animals in generating pandemic viruses which will compel those issues to be addressed in ways that challenge what Paul wrote on the topic and the account of Peter's permissive dream in Acts.  

The knowledge of the morality of human actions and choices changes with changed circumstances, even on that level of moral consideration.  I hold that even much of the recorded moral code in Scripture is an imperfect record of the human understanding of morality, both in what is prohibited and what is permitted.  But the foundation of The Law and the Prophets in egalitarian treatment of others doesn't change.

The rise of artificially grown meat derived from cells taken from living animals may be an entirely different, possibly morally neutral issue. The morality of it will depend on what harms come of it or not.

I did have one disturbing idea about that come to me one night as I lay awake tossing and turning. The possibility of an industry in such meat derived from human cells "cruelty free cannibalism" becoming a thing, and if it could be turned into a profitable fad, you can count on it happening.  I would guess that there are real, though I'll bet suppressed issues of the generation and passing on of novel viruses or even pathological protein diseases could very well arise from it. You can count on the monumentally stupid and defective, profit protecting United States Constitution won't do a thing about that even well after it becomes a known human health catastrophe.  It can't even deal with the epidemic of gun-industry, Hollywood psychopath encouraged gun murder in a way to protect the children of the country, despite what it claims the purpose of that document is.

The Supreme Court said in 1857 in the land mark Dred Scott Decision that Black People had no rights that white people were bound to respect.  There are large segments of the American People who  still believe that. And much of the criminal justice system operates on that assumption. The glorfication of one race and the consequent debasement of another has always been a recipe for murder.
James Cone

 
And it should never be forgotten that the motive of writing a Constitution that would give Roger Taney and his colleagues the chance to make that the law of the land was the profit of the slavers of the various states in the Constitutional Convention.  Slavery was always in service to the wealth of the wealthy, their harnessing of racism to sucker poor whites was an afterthought to that.

The issue that wealth is so frequently that it perhaps should always be considered as an occasion of sin and death has never really had the place in Christian religion that the Gospel of Jesus, the Epistles of Paul and James require it be given before anything like authentic following of Jesus can be done.

Considering most of the oppression that he discusses has little to nothing to do with the practice of religion - violent mobs aren't generally notable for their piety - James Cone specifically is hardest on theologians in his lecture and the focus of his theology but, as him giving his lecture so critical of so many eminent white theologians at some of the major theological seminaries shows, theologians are more open to that kind of self-reflective, perhaps reformative criticism.   

I would bet you can't find much of anything like that in most other academic fields, it's true that you won't find a lot of it in many conservative schools of theology. I'd bet you'd have to search long and hard for such eminent law schools to invite comparably disruptive lecturers to speak to such large audiences.  
 

Note: After Good Pope Francis, watch out for the next Pope who opts to live in the papal apartment in the Vatican instead of a modest place in some hotel or rooming house or who comes out in the fancy duds that Francis rejected as soon as he was elected. That will not be a good sign.  I hope and pray he has more good years now that he doesn't have the dead hand of Benedict XVI and his henchmen inhibiting him. Another Benedict or JPII would probably destroy the Church because it would mean the billionaire gangsters won.