Part 3 of Cheryl Johnson's Talk - This Is The Most Important Kind Of Theology, The Theology of Lived Life

Well, I had seen the mythical norm apply in Biblical interpretation,  I had seen it apply in my work in HIV and then there was the 2016 presidential election.  And I don't need to remind you of the overwhelming support that white evangelicals gave to the current president. About 81% of white evangelicals voted for him.  And what we tend to not recognize, As Darren said, I'm United Methodist so I'm a mainline Protestant, but even in mainline Protestant circles 50 to 60% of white mainline church members voted for him as well and nearly 60% of Roman Catholics so it really is predominantly associated with race more than anything else.

So, how did everybody else vote?  Right?  So if you're looking at the mythical norm, what about the groups on the other side.  And keep that 81% benchmark in mind as I give you these other statistics. And also notice how they track again those who are "other."  Only 42% of all Women, only 42 so that the other group you're talking about at least 50 to 60% up to 80.  So it's only 42% of all Women.  Only about 20, I'd say 19% to 30% of all Hispanic voters only 26% of Hispanic Roman Catholics compared to about 60% for white Roman Catholics.  Only 18% of LGBTQ+ vote, and only 12% of Black Protestants including those who identify as evangelicals, so it's not all evangelicals, it's primariliy white evangelicals who voted [for Trump].

I especially like this slide because it shows all of the other Americans who exist.

But my favorite, favorite statistic in all of this is the one for African American Women.   where it's only 6%.  This [slide] is from the Women's March the day after the inauguration and my favorite one is the Black holding up a placard that says, "Black Women tried to save y'all."


And we also know that it wasn't an issue of the economy or the working poor supporting the present [Trump] administration either, that it really was racial resentment and fear of cultural diversity that really cut across all economic lines.

Again, Cheryl Johnson expands ideas I had about the statistical claims made about who was to blame for voting for Trump.  At the time I was arguing against anti-religious atheist invective and I concentrated on the People Democrats would have to appeal to to do the super-win of an election that our corrupt political and legal framing forces Democrats to have to get to win.  Since I was arguing against the recreational Christian bashing of the secularist, I pointed out that given their numbers, the "white evangelicals" who voted for Hillary Clinton and against Trump were more numerous than the atheists were.  When you added in those not included in "evangelicals" the Catholics who voted for Hillary Clinton, even groups that are presented as uniformly Republican-fascist, Southern Baptists, Mormons, various other Protestant groups had not inconsiderable numbers who voted either for Hillary Clinton or against Trump by voting for her were not an inconsiderable number of voters.  If Democrats had been able to attract even a few percentages more of those then Trump would never have been elected.

I think when you make this kind of analysis, though, something far more influential than even those churches who get large percentages of their official membership to go to church every week, even among them is what they consume for media.  Hillary Clinton like Ted Kennedy before her were the focus of a concerted hate campaign by the media for decades.  Even by the general standards of vilification that the corporate and other media mount against Democrats who win office, such as the lower key one that Biden has had focused on him, the one mounted against Hillary Clinton was pervasive and was certainly not limited to those who claim an official religious identity, was decades in the making, from everything from the New York Times down to the most disreputable of Murdoch level gutter media and alleged comedy.  To focus on religion as a major factor putting the fascist-pagan self-worshiping Trump in the presidency might show you something but if you focus only on what gets said in Church while ignoring everyone from Maureen Dowd, alleged NYT reporters publishing demonstrable lies about her in the run-up to the election down to the overtly Republican fascist bottom feeders and the official, clearly not religiously but partisanly motivated sandbag job of James B. Comey as the head of the FBI right before the election is to present an incomplete picture.

But as an example of what's wrong with all of the institutions involved, in regard to the mythical norm of white, straight, affluent males and what a majority of them know will benefit them against all of those "others" is certainly a far larger part of why things are so seriously going wrong.  In terms of religion and Bible interpretation it's important to understand that this is probably the most pervasive general force in human culture over millennia that directly impacts on Christian and other readings of their religious scriptures.  It's certainly how most of the readings of the Jewish Bible, the Qur'an, the scriptures of Hinduism and Buddhism, etc. are imagined and presented, especially to the extent that those can be said to have an official interpretation that is influential or enforced on the general population.  But it's certainly nothing that has not, as well, driven science, allegedly the quintessentially "objective" entity which is the focus of cult devotion, even among those who understand next to nothing of it.  I think that's true of any of the sciences that focus theory on those things which cannot actually be observed and measured.  I used to think that was mostly true of the social-sciences, somewhat less true of the life sciences and least in physics.  But I now think it's pretty much true of all of them.  Including physics.  Perhaps most of all in cosmology which seems as driven by ideology as claims about evolution or psychology.  It's certainly true of anything to do with money and the law.
 

Continuing With Reading The Bible At The Margins Stragegies for Inclusive Biblican Interpretation

So yes, I'm questioning these traditions, I'm challenging these traditions because they simply aren't representative of all of humanity.

So, think of the groups that get constructed as "other."

White  leaves out Racial/ethnic
Heterosexual  "   LGBTQ+
Male          "   Female
Affluent      "   Poor

These are the groups that are on the other side.  So those who are racial/ethnic, those who are LGBTQ+/ those who are female, those who are poor.  And that is what I realized again with that teenager. It's interesting how my second book starts with that story of that teenager. I was so traumatized by her statement that I had to write a whole book to explain why.  Sometime I feel like I should track her down so I could say, "You need to read my book."  Because, you know, you really can bring who you are to your reading of the Bible.

And so my work involves reading the Bible in the context of HIV and AIDS and low and behold the same mythical norm appeared.  Because groups who are more disproportionately impacted by HIV are racial/ethnic groups, in this country they tend to be the African American population  and the LatinX population, LGBTQ+ persons, female - for instance globally there are more female, say in Sub-Saharan Africa, there are more females who are impacted than males - and they tend to be poor in the sense that they don't tend to have access to the various important drugs that medical care could, in fact, offer.  

But it gets more complicated than that because there are Christians who have been serving in the area of HIV but the policies that apply for prevention such as ABC, abstain, be faithful and, if all else fails, use a condom really haven't been very successful.  And it struck me that really it is a different kind of problem, again it's a systemic problem but it's one where the Christian approach represents the mythical norm.  So it makes sense that if it's sexually transmitted just abstain, I mean that's very logical, but it's not very practical.  That's basically what I'm saying.

So instead what really needs to happen is we need to take a more systemic approach and it means looking at these systemic issues that actually make People vulnerable to the HIV virus, itself.

I did not come up with this, it was posted on social media and I tried to track down who might have posted it in my feed and I couldn't but this gives you a sense of how you need to view HIV systemically.

If you fight racism, you fight HIV.
If you fight homophobia, you fight HIV.
If you fight sexism, you fight HIV.
If you fight poverty, you fight HIV.

Notice those mythical norm factors  track exactly.

But the problem is that the Christian approach very often doesn't take this kind of information into account because it's geared to the mythical norm.  The tradition is geared to the mythical norm but the People who are disproportionately impacted are not the ones who were developing   the Christian perspective.  And so we are caught in a very difficult situation and as a result there are 40,000 People in the United States each year who are still being infected and we need to be able to bridge that.

This is a perfect practical example of how something I first noticed almost twenty years ago happens, it was one of the topics of one of my first posts, online,* that the morality of any moral declaration and policy cannot honesty or morally be separated from the consequences of that moral policy.  That became apparent to me during the Bush II regime as his pretense of being a Christian became real and the policies around HIV-AIDS and that which the Republicans in his regime and in the Congress - and some on the Court were guaranteed to do nothing to decrease the numbers of those infected every year.  

There is nothing Christian about the consequences of that, as Cheryl Anderson points out so well, it is going to be those who pay for those policies so prissily and preeningly imposed and not the ones making the policy who will be infected, made ill, be left untreated and die.  A similar point could be made about the policy of the unmarried, presumably, mostly, non-sexually active (though we know and they know not all of them are) Catholic hierarchy who make some of the most immoral policies on this and who are a big part of why governments in many countries, including the United States, not taking the kind of effective measures that she indicates in her talk.  Taking the real life lives of those at greatest risk certainly is part of that but they are exactly the ones who have no say in developing any approach to the problem.  

That is especially true for Women who, though practicing fidelity, are infected by their unfaithful husbands or boyfriends, who are the victims of rape, prostitution, etc.  They have certainly not had a voice in the moral declarations of any of the Popes up to now, Francis may well be the first one who has ever taken what Women have to say about their lives as seriously as what unmarried men say about them.

I like how she notes that the same refusal to pay attention to those othered groups is a bigger thing than how the Bible has been read and traditionally interpreted.  I would also note, how it has been translated and the consequences of that.  Important though I think theology and Biblical studies are, those are not the thing that is pushing the band wagon of culture.  It is the cultural foundation of privilege that is in control of all of it.  The Reagan and Bush I administrations and the Bush II and Trump regimes** never took the Gospels or Epistles seriously about anything in anything they did, their invocation of religion, especially Christianity started and finished in political calculation just as the KGB man Putin plays the corrupt Patriarch of Moscow.  

* Incorporating The Outcome from olvlzl May 19, 2006
 

On first hearing that the "christian" right had come up with chastity rings, fingers weren't the first appendages to come to mind. Know what I mean? Then I heard about their even weirder sister. Ceremonies in which very little girls, indeed, symbolically give their reproductive organs to their daddy for safe keeping. He then is to hand them over to the groom at her wedding. I might not be the most financially savvy guy but this is sufficiently brazen as to glow like the sun. Electra becomes money. Keepin' it is a growth industry.

For those who might find this neo-folkway just too strange or the overhead too high there is the alternative of abstinence "education" carried out by private contractors at public expense. In this alternative, misinformation and all too temporary fear take the place of custom jewelry. The short history of this quaint idea is complete with evidence that it doesn't work very well. It also seems to have the unintended effect of leading young people who just can't keep it to engage in more dangerous activities than protected sex.

This evidence doesn't seem to bother proponents one little bit. They deny the evidence but I suspect that even if they did accept it they wouldn't mind much. If the recent stories about sexual moralists' opposition to the most recent vaccine which will prevent potentially fatal venereal disease is any indication it would seem that they might see it as another mark... ah, teaching opportunity. Making certain that the wages of sin are death would seem to be their goal.

Much as I'd like to turn this into a piece about the statistical evidence of their depravity, that will have to wait. My purpose is to investigate the morality of traditional sexual taboo from a different angle. Incorporating the outcome.

The traditional moralist holds that it is essential to issue a flat ban on prohibited activities, end of question. A flat ban with no exceptions. No alternative consideration is necessary for morality to be satisfied. In fact, to consider anything else would weaken the flat ban and thus be wicked in itself. That experience has shown throughout recorded history that the ban will not be followed doesn't matter. That enormous suffering and even death result from to impossibility of many, if not most people keepin' it within the confines of monogamous, heterosexual marriage is not a downside to the traditional sexual moralist. They just ignore it. Deaths of women who bear their eleventh child before they reach the age of thirty, venereal disease, children who can't be cared for, grinding poverty, ... all taken in stride by the traditional sexual moralist. Even those who don't find this suffering good in the sight of the Lord find it insufficiently awful to reconsider a single word of the flat ban.

Well, here's a thought. Any moral proclamation that causes suffering, disease and death is evil. Any moral teaching that willfully ignores the pain it causes is phony morality and should be junked. For those who think the left has no moral absolutes, there is one for you. Replacing scientifically based sex education with this kind of exercise in sadistic pseudo-morality is evil. No matter how longstanding, it is superstitious and evil and destructive of the public good. It should be prohibited for public money to go to this pseudo-religious clap trap. And a clap trap it is.

This kind of stuff isn't confined to sex education. Ending needle exchange programs is another clear example. Drug addicts exchanging HIV and hepatitis is a direct result of needle exchanges being made impossible by the War on Drugs industry and their moralist camp followers. We have ample evidence that needle exchange programs work to lessen the horrors of disease among drug addicts. Addictive drugs, and some which aren't addictive, are allegedly banned because they cause suffering and in the case of addictive drugs that is true. To assert that you are banning them to prevent suffering and then to ignore HIV transmission is to be the direct cause of suffering more awful than the addiction. Treating addiction as a moral failing punishable by death instead of a treatable disease has led us into the obscenity of the war on drugs we find ourselves in today.

Many children being born with HIV are a direct result of the lies of the chastity industry and the drug moralists. Their suffering is taken with remarkable equanimity by these protectors of public morals. Any feeling person with an intact brain can see that their suffering is morally unacceptable. Any person of good will can see the calm acceptance of children and adults dying of entirely preventable AIDS is absolute proof of the moral decay of traditional sexual moralists. These facts definitively impeach the moral pretensions of religious conservatives and it would be entirely immoral for the left to let them get away with it another minute without a fight.

How about this for some real sexual morality. Ignoring preventable suffering resulting from the inability of people to go without sex is evil. People who ignore suffering and so help more of it into the world are evil. Ignorance is a leading cause of suffering. So is discouraging the use of condoms.

** No presidency which is not the result of a majority vote by the voters should ever be considered and administration, it is an illegitimate regime.  

Scripture Is Authoritative But It Cannot Always Be Normative For The Decisions We Have To Take As To How We Live

I HAVE BEEN INTENDING to transcribe at least some of that talk by Cheryl Anderson I posted the Youtube of last weekend like I have other talks by other people.  That is because it is so full of ideas important to real, practical life and politics and Christianity as it will have to be to continue in service to The Living God acting through us.  For the Gospel of Jesus to survive even Christianity.  I also had been thinking of transcribing a talk that Luke Timothy Johnson gave in 2011 centering on six assumptions he made when dealing with Scripture which intersects with what Cheryl Anderson said on a number of points.  Both of them addressing LGBTQ+ life within the Church.

Over the past week, for some reason, I seem to be stumbling across exhortations about trusting in The Living God From Cheryl Anderson back to George MacDonald and even farther back into the New Testament.   The living God makes God's mind known to us not only in Scripture, the revelation of the Living God in the experience of People thousands of years ago, but in our own lived experience in our time.  I'm starting to wonder if someone's trying to tell me something.

Luke Timothy Johnson makes two points near the start of his talk, that if that idea of depending on our own experience instead of "Scripture alone" makes us nervous we should understand that we, as everyone else always has, does that. Especially Christians should already have fits of nerves because a. no one who read the Scriptures available to the earliest followers of Jesus, the Jewish Scriptures, would have expected the Messiah to be an executed criminal of the first century raised from the dead. b. he makes the point repeatedly that there was nothing less "Biblical" for the earliest followers of Jesus who were uniformly Jews to include gentiles in the community that started to become Christianity, especially gentiles who did not follow The Law of Moses.  That is something which almost certainly came before any of the books of the New Testament were written because in the earliest of those written by Paul and James comes after he and his colleagues started evangelizing gentiles and whatever is based on even earlier traditions that were written as the Gospels comments on the novelty of the idea that Jesus seems to have occasionally included or commented on the worthiness of non-Jews who believed him and in him.  I do have to wonder if that idea might be a bigger problem for Protestants with that "Scripture alone" normative standard standing over so many of them.

I have decided to start with Cheryl Anderson because she speaks more directly to my own experience and it's harder to find her books or other writing than those who I have already used in these posts.  I will probably dip into Johnson's talk where he commented on similar points as that occurs to me.

It all started when I was teaching a Bible Study class with high school students who were going to be seniors that fall. I was told to teach them what I teach at the seminary level, not to baby it down for them but to actually give them the kind of questions that seminary students have to grapple with.

So I was saying that there are problematic texts in the Bible.  For instance, the 10 Commandments that we love so much accept slavery, Judges 19 basically says it's better to rape a woman than a man.  And there was this one African American teenager sitting in that class who did not like the direction of the conversation. So she started to hum to kind of drown me out.  It's one of the reasons I never work with youth groups. You know. It's one of these things, I'm used to seminary students where the "Dr."' kind of makes them, you know, have some respect. For teenagers it's like, "Naw!"  So this teenager started to hum and I kept talking, you know, over her hum.  And finally she had just had enough and she said, "This is the Word of God.  If it says slavery is okay, slavery is okay.  If it says rape is okay, rape is okay."

I was shocked because I had always assumed that if you're African American you would question the Biblical support for slavery, I had assumed that if you're a female or a decent human being you would question the acceptance of rape.  I just assumed that would happen.

And then I realized that I had read Audrey Lorde in seminary, The Sister Outsider which I strongly recommend and her work has already been referred to here.   And she talks about the mythical norm. And it's the normative human experience and she argues that normative human experience doesn't really cover all human beings.  It basically covers white heterosexual males who are also privileged or affluent. There are other aspects to it but for my purposes I limit it to those four because those four really help me to put my own work into context.

Now, let me say at the outset that if you are a white heterosexual male and affluent, I ain't talking about you, specifically. I'm talking about systemically, historically, institutionally.  So that these things, these traditions stay in place whether or not there are even human beings involved because they become the ethos of a tradition or an approach.

And so what I realized from that young teenager is that she had been taught to read the Bible from a particular perspective. And it happened to be this perspective that sort of grounds this particular so-called normative experience.  

Now I say "so-called normative" because my question is, yes, it may be the church tradition to interpret texts in this way but I always ask how many  people were there when they were developing this tradition or this particular interpretation who look like me. And not only that but who were woke Black Women. Because that's not the same thing either.  So, yes, I'm challenging these traditions, I'm challenging these interpretations because they simply aren't representative of all of humanity.

I am more and more impressed with Cheryl Anderson's thinking and scholarship the more I listen and read. 

Years ago, I think it was when I wrote for Echidne of the Snakes, that I noticed that white males, middle-class or above were universally considered the "default" of human beings, males in general a world-cultural default,  and that any even notice of or regard or respect paid to anyone else was likely to be understood as some kind of privilege unfairly being granted to those others who were tacitly assumed to not deserve that.  More generally, that happens whenever someone with an expectation of privilege sees soemone else getting what they figure is theirs by default, what is generally miscalled "by right."  Women, of course, Black People and People of Color, of course, other minorities are held to be given respect or anything, really, unfairly.

Sometimes I included LGBTQ+ as falling outside that default, though I always admitted that many, probably most gay men who were white and had money could enjoy many of the privileges of that default, though not usually if they insisted on living honestly and authentically.  If Lindsay Graham suddenly admitted he was and always had been an active homosexual it would be interesting to see the extent to which he was allowed to retain the level of privilege he has been giving by queer-bashers.  Though affluence even for out of the closet white gay men can go a long way in the preservation of privilege.  I agree with Cheryl Anderson that there are many other factors involved in how that plays out in individual lives. Rich white women, rich Black People and other members not included in that default of privilege can, if they choose to or don't actively reject that, enjoy it to some extent.  Poor, marginalized members of subjugated and oppressed minority groups are certainly the least likely to escape the meaner aspects of that hierarchy.

She, of course, speaking to an admirably inclusive and conscious LGBTQ+ group which seems to largely be Christian Evangelical in its membership, focuses on the consequences of maintaining the authority of that "normative" reading AND I'LL INCLUDE WRITING of Scripture and in the Christian tradition which is still so influential in churches and in our thinking about these things. But it is no less true in any other aspect of our cultures, that of politics, academics, science, especially the life sciences and the pseudo-social sciences, and all aspects of popular culture, including journalism.  I think her thinking is extremely useful in understanding a lot about that, as well as about some of the most destructive things still present in Christianity.  

The statement by Luke Timothy Johnson I paraphrase in the title came from that talk he gave dealing with sex, the Bible and Christianity. He said in it.

So, Scripture is everywhere authoritative for me as a theologian.  I am liberal in the name of Scripture rather than liberal over/against Scripture. I take it as the plainest reading of the meaning of Scripture to hold positions that are liberative in our lives. But Scripture, although always authoritative, that is to say always speaking as the inspired Word of God and challenging us in our perceptions of the world is not always normative for what we do here and now. To pretend otherwise is simply to have false consciousness. It is to lie either to ourselves or to others.  

That was said before he noted that if the earliest Christians had not allowed their own experience of The Living God to override the letter of Scripture as they and probably all of the Hebrew traditional understanding of Scripture thought of it, they could never have held that Jesus rose from the dead and was Lord, they could never have felt moved to include gentiles as is so controversially presented in Acts - another of the coincidences mentioned above is that even as I randomly clicked on those two talks last weekend, that passage was in the lectionary read at Catholic masses over several days.  

I will interject that Jesus notably said he was not going to overturn a letter of The Law, that is the Mosaic Law AS HE, HIMSELF PRESENTED IT IN THE GOLDEN RULE, something that Hillel seems to have agreed with him on.  He certainly overturned a good deal of the previous interpretation and even the letter of Scripture, including things like the permission in The Law, allowing husbands to divorce their wives, the stoning of Women who committed adultery, violating the Sabbath to do good works, etc.  

Another of the things I started reading this week was George MacDonald's Unspoken Sermons.  I'd like to go into those as they relate to the overriding and authoritative experience of the Living God to but not until this project is complete.  It's going to take a while.  I seem to do a lot better when I'm doing a series these days, so that's what I'm sticking to.  Hate mail responses will have to wait, maybe indefinitely.

An Answer To An Angry Marxist At Another Place - equality is the only secure basis for the practice of freedom

SOME PEOPLE I TALK TO have become startled at the development in my thinking as I've  become extremely skeptical of the post-WWII notions of libertarian liberty as a general misconception of freedom in democratic society and law and government.  They seem to have an irrational belief that apostasy from the traditional American secular left means you've joined the right when the truth is I had to quit it to go farther left.   It is only superficially counter-intuitive that libertarianism is, in reality, a destroyer of freedom, when you think about it and observe it in reality instead of abstract modeling, it is not only sensible, it makes perfect sense. Rights are only just when they are limited by the rights of others on an equal basis. If that's not the limit of them they are not rights but privileges.  That's something I think I started learning when I went to college and had to live with upper middle class and more well off people who were accustomed to that kind of privilege.  In my experience, that's a lot of what the so-called "counter-culture" of the later 1960s was shot through with.  It is certainly what Marxism in reality instead of academic play-time make-believe turned out to be. Look at the dictators of Nicaragua, North Korea and other places where Marxism has reached its real-life conclusion in gangsterism and Victorian era capitalism on steroids.  Inequality is a guarantee of gangster government as equality is the absolute bedrock requirement of democracy.  

But a similar critique is also true of old-fashioned capitalism and earlier economic schemes.  The liberty of slave-owners to enslave and wealthy people to oppress the poor is the basis of "liberal democracy" as it has come to exist as that replaced feudalism. That is the basis of the 18th century European notion of "liberalism" as grew under such things as the Brit class system, other traditional, habitual habits of practicing and tolerating injustice.  That was among the most obvious motives of the United States Constitutional Convention and the results of that are still the foremost means of thwarting real democracy, egalitarian democracy in this, the self-promoted "birthplace" of modern democracy, in the popular misunderstanding of things.  It is the tragic history of the American left that it got detoured into Marxism and other academic theories that, in practice, turned into even more efficient and ruthless forms of gangsterism.

Any practice of what we foolishly consider to be the virtue of "liberty" which is not in every way conditioned by the moral responsibility to the truth and to the morally binding requirements of mutual reciprocity as expressed in the "Golden Rule" is false liberty, something which cannot generate freedom as it hoards privilege for a small number of People.  

I have repeatedly thrown the spectacle of that up against the mythology of the self-promoted birthplace of such idiotic notions of libertarian liberty, the United States.  

That in decadent, eutrophic Trump era America the biggest fattest promoters of "freedom of speech," "freedom of press," "The First Amendment" are, in fact, neo-fascists, neo-Nazis, Republican-fascists, the Republican-fascists on the Supreme Court, the native form of American fascism, white supremacists and other assorted passive promoters of casual to grindingly oppressive and violent would-be murderous "patriotism."  I throw that fact in the face of those who object to my critique of their mistaken notion of such things as genuine democracy.  It is certainly not an accident that it is among younger People of Color, Women, LGBTQ+ and others who are the targets of such libertarian liberty have been among the first to notice the discrepancy in the promise of the ACLU style libertarianism and what it produces. It is no surprise that it is among those who benefit from that discrepancy among alleged liberals who are the blindest to what their heroes have wrought in the lives of we who are targets of that libertarian liberty.

Today, when the slogans of the 1960s "civil liberties" industry mistaken as a manifestation of traditional American liberalism are most frequently on the lips of idiot-fascists such as Matt Gaetz, Marjory Taylor Green, other Republican-fascist icons, Proud-Boys [Why hasn't Gavin McInnes been deported yet?], incel losers, neo-Nazis, etc. should cause even the more meat-headed civil libertarians who disdain them to question their notions so useful to such complete rotters.  

Those who champion their "right" to SO SUCCESSFULLY lie and promote murderous, grinding inequality are their willing dupes who demonstrate that they really don't much care about the rights and freedom and lives of Black People, Native Americans, Women, LGBTQ+, etc.  They should look in the mirror because the typically white, straight male privileged face they see is who they are really in favor of privileging.  That's especially true of those who work in "journalism" and the legal and academic rackets.   As a gay, white, male, working-class traditional American liberal who has witnessed Republican-fascism rise and flourish under libertarian First Amendment absolutism, I don't trust it's promoters and passive supporters anymore.  

As with the secular left who championed the equivalent of the native American supporters of Nazism, in American Stalinists and Trotskyites and Maoists (despite what such "leftists" tacitly obviously believe, their mountains of murdered People, their enslaved People are no less dead and enslaved than those under Nazism), the "civil libertarians" of the secular and even religious left in the United States, are the saps and dupes of the enemies of real freedom, egalitarian freedom, equality being the only secure basis for the practice of freedoms.

Personal freedom is self-limited on the basis of not violating the rights and freedoms of others and not denying the truth or it is an engine of the tyranny of those with real or artificial power and strength over many others. That's as true if it's on the basis of some idiotically proclaimed scientific ideology as it is when enslaving, oppressing and murdering for personal profit is the motive.   

The United States, certainly under the Constitution and, perhaps especially, the badly written Bill of Rights gamed by corrupt Supreme Courts has always been just such a tyranny of the wealthy, the white, the male over Native Americans, Black People, Women, most of all those lower on the economic scale.  The wealthy and powerful have flourished at the expense of those consciously excluded in the Constitution from the beginning, that is the actual and real history of the United States, the reaction of those various groups in the still unfulfilled struggle AGAINST THE CONSTITUTION AND THE LEGAL ESTABLISHMENT is the actual best thing about us.  I have pointed out before that it is one of the greatest virtues of the Jewish Bible that it repeatedly admits the sins of the Children of Israel, especially the corrupt government and the generally corrupt Temple establishment.  The quasi-official "history" of the United States as is taught in schools - including the universities - and, even more so, promoted in the default school of post-literate times which is responsible for the miseducation of America, TV, the movies, hagiographic and falsely heroic ahistorical historical fiction and pop culture coercion, has little to none of that virtuous moral reflection and honesty, it is more like the stuff of the industrial producer of lies, advertising and public relations who have been among its worst promoters.  That was true even before the advent of movies, Broadway musicals are among the earliest venues of such lies.

I used to think that there was some alternative to that in "radical" criticism of the United States but even that falls far short.  Most of that is wedded to an alternative mythology that is based in a romantic reading of the Constitution and an idiotic elevation of such things as "the free press,"  "The First Amendment" when a real and unromantic reading of the results of that hagiography shows them to be a very mixed blessing and not infrequently, a deadly curse in effect.  The idiotic idea that those whose profession is supposed to be in judging differences, judges, are powerless to tell the difference is one of the foundations of that idiocy.  Judges who can make the most precisian of distinctions when it's a question of money and who it "rightly" belongs to play totally stupid when it comes to something typically of blinding obviousness.

Of course, most of that comes from affluent, or relatively affluent, safe, white men who write for establishment organs such as the New York Times, the networks, work at elite institutions fully wedded to the system of inequality, such as the elite universities or otherwise benefit or hope to benefit from the system, ever patient as it grinds up and destroys those mentioned above.  I picked up Anthony Lewis' "Gideon's Trumpet" a couple of years ago and re-read it in light of the Post Warren Burger Court rotting into the corruption of the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts and, for all my rose colored  view of it in my younger days, it read like a cheap and phony lie as to how things really are under the Constitution.  I think in almost no other way, the standard Warren Court era romantic liberal view of the Supreme Court and the Bill of Rights has to stand as among the most putrid and false propaganda during my lifetime.  Earl Warren is long dead, lots of his Court's landmarks have been turned round into tools of the privilege of wealth, white-supremacy and other gangsters.  Look what they did to the 14th Amendment to see that the Court can do that to anything.

I go back to one time listening to the silver-tongued racist, fascist William F. Buckley condemning equality as a violation of his right to enjoy his privilege as a wealthy, white male, which he explicitly called his "liberty."  That is something I remember as perhaps the beginning of my skepticism about such libertarian notions.  That was one of the unintended early steps in the direction I've taken even before I'd realized it.  Another was reading the truly idiotic book "In Defense of Anarchism," by Robert Wolfe which, when I discussed it with a teacher of language in college, she made me think by pointing out essentially it was an argument to jettison any kind of progress and go back to a lack of protection for the weak against the strong.  That was another step in my understanding of reality.  

I have to say again reading Emma Goldman's writing in full online instead of the typical cherry picked misrepresentation of her and finding that for anything appealing about her there was far more that was truly awful, and not just her political writing.  Reading about how, late in her life, seeing the rise of actual fascism and Nazism as well as the Soviet style of oppression that she early recognized during the Lenin years, she pathetically asked her friends if she and her colleagues had wasted their lives on anarchism.  The anwer to that was so obvious that she probably should have faced the fact and admitted it instead of asking the question. Reading her adoration of Nietzsche was another land mark of the final journey into my  disillusionment with that strain of American pseudo-radicalism.  And as I've said, when a far fuller record of primary documentation of the American secular left became available to me online, and those I could read in other languages, at every turn there was more than enough to persuade me that the whole thing is and was as phony and false as it could be.  I won't go into it right now but it was more intimately tied in with the primary documentation of both natural selection and the developments of fascism and Nazism than a good little college-credentialed liberal or leftist, or moderate or conservative of my pre-online generation would ever have suspected. Reading the primary record and noticing what was being said in it can be a real eye-opener.  I distrust Marxists and anarchists as much as I distrust capitalists, all along the way.

The Hollywood 10 were Stalinists, objectively, they were the moral equivalent of those who promoted fascism and doing business with Hitler.  I have mentioned a number of times here the brief period when American Communists were under order from Stalin to push that Republican-farm state-businessman line during the brief period of the Hitler Stalin pact.  And such heroes of us 60s era lefties as Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie and the other Almanac Singers followed that order from as accomplished a mass murderer and enslaver and imperialist as Hitler was.  

It is one of the great idiocies in the wake of their persecution and prosecution by American fascists in the anti-communist post-WWII period, the infamous HUAC hearings, the show hearings and trials, the degradation ceremonies, that the victims of that may have been victims but they were never anything like heroes.  Despite what Hollywood and copy-cat scribblers of novels and shows claim.  With few exceptions those in the role of inquisitor and those in the role of accused were merely two somewhat different kinds of villains.  Whatever habits of sympathy extended to those without power in those dramas is more than made up by the reality of what their heroes, the ideological system they wanted to reproduce in the United States did in the Soviet Union, those countries occupied by them after WWII, later among the Maoists of the 1960s and 1970s.  Marxism was in every way more oppressive and murderous than even the United States during the Truman and Eisenhower years.  That is unless you were a Black Person or other member of a subjugated race in the states under American Apartheid or lived in a country subject to a client fascist dictatorship.  Those were quite similar to the occupied countries under the control of Communist dictators.

I will bet you there was not a single sworn Communist who fell under the judgement or process or torture-execution without trial under communism, no Soviet or East German or Hungarian or Chinese Person tortured, imprisoned or murdered under their idea of a paradise on Earth who wouldn't have traded places with the Hollywood 10 or those who escaped prosecution but were blacklisted in the "free press" of Hollywood studios or other "free press" media, lied about under "freedom of speech" or otherwise victimized under the red scare here without any hesitation.   

No claims of rights by American Communists or their allies in that period should ever be allowed to pass without pointing out, for example, that a dissident writer or scribbler or speaker under the system they championed would likely have gotten out of it without a bullet in the head, mostly likely after torture into a false confession or a sentence at slave labor, perhaps worked to death in a way not at all different from what happened under Nazism just a few years earlier or under American apartheid.  Anyone murdered by a communist dictator is equal to anyone murdered by Hitler or under Mussolini or under Imperial Japan.  Or in the Jim Crow states or anywhere under American fascism such as flourished in many of the several states all along.  There's something truly sickening in hearing the "First Amendment" whining of American Stalinists in the era when his genocides and oppression had been accurately reported in the West and was known to all. It is even more revolting to hear a fascist mean girl like Marjorie Taylor Greene spew the same ACLU-Hollywood Blacklist drama style "First Amendment" "free speech"  bullshit to whine about the fascist Tucker Carlson being fired by his fascist employers, the third cabloid network that had hired the liar to lie his fat face of to start with.  From what I see the only thing that's going to silence him is the dirt Murdoch has to hold over him.

Marxism is, indeed, as fully discredited as fascism and Nazism, it had been by the 1930s.  You had to be a willing idiot or as morally depraved as a Nazi to deny that.  All those popular heroes of the period who were Marxists of that kind are and should be jettisoned by any real and genuine egalitarian left today.  The younger generation of American leftists and liberals should face that folly of my and previous generations, condemn the hypocrisy of it and go on with better heroes or, best of all, none who aren't subjected to a rigorous and honest and realistic inspection on the basis of an equality that faces that those murdered and oppressed under Marxism are as much victims as those under any fascism.  I have a short list of former Marxists from the past, who did reject the sins of Marxim and the folly of their earlier lives, maybe someday I'll go into it. And I certainly don't mean by that the Trotsyites who exchanged that so cynically for neo-consevatism or other forms of profitable American corporate fascism.  I especially distrust the Marxists who took that tiny baby step from Marxism to fascism.  

No one who doesn't start out with and stick with egalitarian democracy as their ultimate goal, one in which any liberties are tied to moral responsibility to all others no matter how unpretentious or favored, is to be trusted.  You're far more likely to find such People among the religious than the secular in my experience.

I've found a lot more of those who stand up to rigorous criticism on the religious left than the secular ones.  There are even rare ones who can make an honest and critical use of some of Marx's ideas.  You should always keep in mind while reading Marx or, more likely under the typical post-literacy, hear some crank professor or instructor claiming to represent his thinking, that he, himself, declared that he wasn't a Marxist.  Anyone who is tempted to become one should remember Marx, himself, rejected it.

Anyone who holds with Marxism in 2023 when its mountain range of murders has been exposed is the moral equivalent of a neo-Nazi or neo-fascist or, their native American form, white supremacists or male supremacists.*  Their presence on university faculties are as absurd as flat-earthers teaching geography or "young Earth creationists" teaching on science faculties or catho-fascist Integralists on elite law faculties.  They are lying cranks, young people gulled by them are idiots who need to learn some real history. I suspect everything they know about history is from the movies or TV or some other lie filled fiction.  A lot of that is called "history". The "free press" and "freedom of speech" that refuses to distinguish between the right to tell the truth and that there is no right to lie has cost us too much to stop making that distinction effective in reality instead of hair-brained theory.

* It should never be forgotten that world-wide Women have been and still are subjected to a terror campaign, including daily lynchings, that on top of any racial or class or other forms of oppression, that it is almost always worse for Women whose subjugation and oppression often cuts through even the most obvious substrate of privilege.

Make-up Saturday Night Radio Drama - Ceara Carney - Fizzy Lizzy

 Fizzy Lizzy 

Frizzy Lizzy is the story of a young woman's search for her mother. We follow Lizzy as she deceives her controlling father to journey to London. She traces the clues of her mother's London life with all the charm of a teenage detective, in a play that uses magical realism to convey the depth of love in the mother-daughter relationship. The play was recommended by the jury of the 2022 PJ O 'Connor Awards.

Kitty O'Sullivan (Lizzy)
Helen Norton (Mam)
Stephen Hogan (Dad/Gallery Receptionist/Dave)
Imogen Allen (Alana/Barista/Hostel Woman)
Lucy Miller (Karen/Woman in the Park/Hostel Woman)
Scott Smith (Child asking questions)
Ellie Brosnan Corkery (Young Lizzy)
Sam Buckett (Chris)
Extra Recordings by Emma Brosnan.
Sound Design & Supervision: Ciarán Dunne & Ruth Kennington
Three Little Birds performed by Ciarán Dunne
Dramaturg: Jessica Dromgoole
Director: Jessica Dromgoole
Producer for RTÉ: Kevin Brew

Sorry I didn't post this earlier.  It's been a weird weekend. 

Dr. Cheryl Anderson - Reading The Bible At The Margins: Strategies For Inclusive Biblical Interpretation

I'm having trouble with Blogger today so I'll put this here instead of on the bottom where I usually would.    I just found out about  Cheryl Anderson yesterday, there is so much here that adds to some of the things I've written about since December  and so much more.  More to come about what she says.

Dame Edna Interviews K.D. Lang with Ivana on the couch

 

Includes one of the most brilliant set ups of a joke I've ever heard, a couple of others almost as good.

How Very OO's - "I believe in science, not your sky fairy"

WELL, I CERTAINLY ACCEPT THAT evolution is the current best explanation of how the diversity of life arose on Earth and I certainly accept the current estimate that life began about 3.5 billion years ago. I said something to that effect in the pieces you slam so, not a careful reader, are you.  I certainly go along with the current theory of Big Bang cosmology, though I am certainly curious about whether or not that will last through the latest telescopic discoveries at the edge of the known universe.  If there is a revival of steady state  cosmology, I have to wonder why things haven't devolved into entropy infinitely long ago in the past but I have to wonder if even some of those holdings of classical physics will turn out to not have been complete at best or in some other way less than fully effective.  

Having been extremely critical of Genesis 2 around the end of last year and into January, I have to say that Genesis 1, when you aren't stupid enough to believe it's either a historical or scientific account of the creation of the universe instead of a philosophical experiment into explaining to People how their world and the heavens (as much of the universe as they could know about) and life on Earth arose to produce their life and what they experienced isn't bad considering what they knew.  

The idea that it began all at once by the will of God is certainly analogous to the Big Bang, that was obvious enough that many scientists rejected it on that basis alone,  the ideological bigot in charge of Nature,  John Maddox raging against it as late as the 1990s. Only Genesis has an explanation of where it came from whereas materialism can't come up with one.  And that a choice of order over chaos was necessary for the creation of the world, of the heavenly bodies that those People so long ago were so sophisticated in observing and noting their regular patterns, the separation of water and land, necessary for the rising of different kinds of life, including themselves.  Probably as impressive as any of it was the repeated observation that it was good, not some dreary and oppressive system tied up with human beings being tortured puppets of the all-too human gods that were common at the same time among other groups of People coming up with their own ideas about such things.  The pagan gods tended to be real assholes and existence under them, a nightmare.

It is one of the unremarked things about the Jewish Bible that until the rise of the Kings of Israel and, then Judah, they didn't have kings to lord it over them.  I've noted before that when they were demanding Samuel anoint a king for them God had him tell them how awful it would be to have one, how they'd lose their freedom, their rights, even their children to one.  That, to me, is one of the most impressive passages in the Jewish Bible, I think in those things the best about the modern period is anticipated even as modernism as an ideology has been far more destructive than it has been a blessing. Modernism, indeed, is a failed project on balance.  If human beings survive it that might be a miracle of the Biblical type.  In fact, I already suspect it will take one of those for us to survive.

If the Jewish monotheistic tradition, which includes Christianity and Islam, has to answer for the sins of those who claim to follow it, even as they don't, "science" in your adulation of it should have to answer for nuclear weapons, other modern weaponry, automatic rifles,  biological weapons, chemical weapons, global warming, etc. Science doesn't happen without scientists making it happen. Very few of the perils we face do not have their fingerprints all over it.  Few if any of those would have come about without credentialed scientists knowingly producing them or credentialed hirelings by things like the fossil fuel industry to pooh-pooh scientists to propagandize against environmental science.  As I recently pointed out, they have a lot more in common with the profession of lawyering which doesn't kick out people for being mercenary, self-seeking scum. I wouldn't be surprised if such science as well as such lawyering didn't account for the actual majority of those who go into those professions.  There is nothing like moral content in science and little of it in the secular law to discourage that kind of lying and destroying life and creation for the profit of scientists and those who hire them.  Yet modernistic, materialistic, atheistic sci-guys never seem to notice any of that. 

It's kind of funny,  someone so much older than you leaving a 20 year old fad behind while you want to keep it going.   Atheism strikes me as kind of like an intellectual leisure suit worn at the turn of the millennium.

Blaming The Corruption On The Court On Catholicism Is Worse Than Wrong It Is Counterproductive

THOUGH I HAVEN'T SEEN much written about it yet, not even by the Francis haters, I'm sure his statement that young people trying to hook up using Tinder is "natural" is bound to get him slammed by trad-Catho-fascists and others.  His statement made on the same occasion that Catholic theology around sex is still "in diapers" is certainly true.  But what else can be expected of the thinking of almost exclusively unmarried, probably for the most part allegedly officially caste men?  I do believe most Catholic priests have kept their vow to refrain from having sex with other people, though they know and we all know, a lot of them haven't.  

I am not especially in favor of using social media to hook up with other people, especially for the purposes of finding romance, or, really, sex. It's more likely to lead to a social disease than a romance.  But I think Francis's approach will probably be a more effective as a pastoral practice than that of the right-wing clergy and hierarchy and laity of mere condemnation. Francis's idea could hardly be worse than that.  It's not been effective.  

I don't think there's much of any of that in the Gospels or even in Paul or James.  Though, as I've found as I read Paul more carefully, sometimes when you think he's going in that direction it takes quite a number of sentences and paragraphs to find out he was setting up an argument that goes in another direction than the typically careless reading of him has had it most of the time for two thousand years.

The typical reading of Paul cuts up the argument and focuses on exactly the part of it he was ultimately refuting and some of the worst of Christian theology is based on exactly what he wasn't getting at. I think most of the worst of Western Christianity would never have happened if Augustine and some others had been able to read Greek better, if Jerome had translated it better.

I started writing an answer to someone who slammed the Catholic Church for the Supreme Court ruling on abortion, but it got so long I've shortened it.  

One of the most notable things about the Catholics on the Supreme Court is that none of them consistently follows Catholic teaching as set by the Vatican and bishops.  The retreaded, stale anti-Catholic argument that Catholics in high office take orders from the Vatican, inherited from the crudest bigotry of WASP anti-Catholics. is certainly disproved by the behavior of Catholics in high office.  Jack Kennedy, no more than Bobby or Ted ever seemed to much follow its teachings on faithfulness to marriage vows or otherwise in regard to heterosexual sex. They had something in common with Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh in that regard.  Others have been and are in violation of far more serious moral instruction from the Church and Scripture but, then, so have been a lot of bishops and cardinals. If they're so influenced by the Vatican, there's little to show it in their personal lives.  The public acts of those on the Courts is even more evidence of that lapse.

The majority of Catholics in high office, especially those most adored by the small, astro-turf, billionaire-millionaire financed cult of "traditional Catholicism" violate the teachings of the Catholic Church in every other area except, perhaps, on abortion.  If you took it issue by issue, the Supreme Court "justice" most in line with Catholic teaching on the Court is probably Sonia Sotomayor.  The ones, beyond any doubt, most out of line, Alito, Thomas, Roberts, Gorsuch and catching up with them, Kavanaugh and Barrett.  It is the Republican-fascists on the Court who follow the teachings of the Catholic hierarchy far fewer times than even the non-Catholics on the Court.

One of the most obvious aspects of Catholic and, for the most part, traditional Christian sexual teaching and so including reproductive health, is that it is elevated out of all proportion to distract everyone from the substance of the teachings of Jesus.  He hardly had a word to say about sex and pregnancy except in regard to remarriage after a divorce.  He refused to judge the woman taken in adultery (I still wonder if the guy got off as a matter of course).  Jesus never mentioned abortion or LGBTQ+ sex.  The only examples used by Augustinian Christians, including Lutherans and Calvinists of the traditional kind, to argue for an eternal hell have nothing to do with sex, they are all about economic justice to the poor, the vulnerable, the sick, those in prison, none of whom are the concern of conservative politics, in fact conservatives would seem to all be in danger of going to hell like the rich man in the parable, like the goats in Matthew 25, according to that reading of the Gospel. The current Republican-fascists seem to all be in a contest to see who can violate those and screw the poor the most.  

There is no conservative member of Congress, the Senate or on the Court, and few legislators or governors who wouldn't fall into the category of the rich man who let Lazarus die at his doorstep while he lived in luxury or those who do nothing for the hungry, the ill clothed and housed, the sick and those in prison. Wealth, in the Gospels and in Paul and James, is the most certain human vice that leads to hell.  

Jesus constantly talked about alleviating the evil of poverty, of neglect, of discrimination, of injustice.  The only people who he said were in danger of going to hell were the rich, the affluent, those who did nothing for the least among us. He certainly was understood by the earliest Christians to teach that they were to have nothing to do with killing.  Every death sentence the Supreme Court Catholics approve, and I believe all but Sotomayor has, they are in serious violation of the teachings of Jesus and the official teaching of the Catholic Church.  As someone pointed out, Clarence Thomas said a possibly innocent man could be put to death because his incompetent lawyer didn't file some papers on time, even as he insists on "amending" his filings from decades ago to get his corrupt ass off the hook for his grift. They constantly violate Catholic teachings on economic justice and on a myriad of other official teachings of the church - "trad-catholics" don't have any use for any kind of official Catholic teaching except in regard to what OTHER PEOPLE do with their own bodies and the goddamned Latin liturgy.

And, as it always is with with such creatures, when it comes to what they do in regard to sex is always an exception to their "eternal truths."  It has been a topic of speculation how many abortions the anti-choice politicians were responsible for, I think it's worth wondering if any of the anti-choice members of that court have been.  I would bet that if Kavanaugh had knocked up a girl in his youth, he'd have wanted her to have an abortion. And I'll bet the same is true for others of them.  They'd certainly want any Girl or Woman  they didn't want to breed with to be using contraception when they had sex with them.

It should always be asked why, if Christianity or even Catholicism is the problem in regard to the separation of church and state, why the strongest and most repeated teachings of the Gospel,the Epistles are the ones that such "Christians" and "Catholics" never seem to take at all seriously or follow.  Jesus said you'd go to hell if you neglected the homeless and hungry, the sick AND THOSE IN PRISON, he never said you'd go to hell for having an abortion or choosing to live in a gender role you were more comfortable as.

I think it's a real measure of genuine religious faith, how much do you follow it when it is something you don't like FOR YOURSELF.  I've never encountered a religious conservative who could measure up in that, especially if they had money and or status and, so, power. If there is one thing that Christianity as a social and political and, so often, an intellectual manifestation deserves to be slammed for it is that it far too seldom is Christian.  The "trad-catholic" cult isn't even particularly Catholic.  

American "tradtional Catholicism" is a fascist cult, especially that aware enough of itself to use the word "integralism" for it.  It's not alone in that as the late Benedict XVI was forced to face when he stupidly accepted some of the irregularly consecrated, heretical Piux X cult bishops only to find that at least one of them was a flagrant Holocaust denier. For the first German Pope in centuries to have overlooked that was astounding or, worse, telling.  But that is typical of the cult of integralism.   At least some of the Republican-fascist members of the court are part of it, Thomas and Alito are. Barrett probably qualifies as well, she belonged to a particularly nutty cult out there in Indiana. You can contrast her with the former mayor, Pete Buttigieg on that count. He strikes me as far more Catholic than she is, he's certainly far more Christian.  Though some of them are merely fascists who happen to be Catholics.

In some of its most elite propagandists, up to and including Ivy level law-school faculty, integralism is an overtly fascist cult.  Neo-integralism is certainly something that should be suppressed by the Vatican, though it certianly has some support among JPII and Benedict XVI era bishops and priests.  There was a time when a much much less influential cult of fanatics, such as that around the putrid Fr. Feeney had in the middle of the last century could get you excommunicated.  It was even, eventually, possible for the Vatican and American bishops to suppress the really dangerous Fr. Coughlin so much in American commentary this week.  The current catho-fascist cult has power at the top of the American government that even Coughlin never had no matter what Rachel Maddow implied by focusing on him the other night merely in the context of media figures.  Though as an actual cult among American Catholics, it's relatively tiny it's got big bucks behind it and fanatical followers who will fill up comment threads with it. A better comparison for Coughlin would be the putrid EWTN founded by that "Nazi nun" as I used to call her.  Which was, perhaps, a bit unfair but alliterative.  Her media empire has certainly been influential in the rise of current catho-fascism.

But to think that Catholicism is the root of the problem with the Supreme Court is a counter-productive expression of ignorance and bigotry.

The real problem for us is Alito and Thomas, Barrett and others on the Supreme Court being capable of exercising dictatorial power over us all.  THEY HAVEN'T REJECTED THE RULING OF THAT TEXAS JUDGE REVOKING FDA APPROVAL OF THAT DRUG AND THEY WELL MIGHT NOT.  My guess it they are biding their time for after the next election when they hope to not ruin another election for their party, the Republican-fascists as they must suspect the Dobbs decision did the last one.  

The bigger foundational problem is that any Supreme Court could exercise such power and the Executive and Legislative branches will just go along with it, which makes any such cult on the court far more dangerous than it should ever have been allowed to be.   It could as easily be a secular cult though the most dangerous to us all is that the members of the court are, overwhelmingly, servants to and partakers of affluence.  The United States Supreme Court, far more years than not, has been dominated by those, the cult worship of Mammon. Those on the court now, those who are identified as Catholics, are, in truth, except Justice Sotomayor, the slavish servants of Mammon no matter what that nutter Barrett made an oath to be a slave to.  She did swear to tell the truth at her confirmation  hearing, as she, as well as all the others in the court majority lied their asses off.

That they have dictatorial power is the fault of the lame-brained idea of giving them life tenure on the court and the power grab of John Marshall in Marbury v. Madison, along with the acquiescence of Jefferson and Madison and others as the early republic quickly rotted into the corruption of the antebellum period reaching its full malignancy in the expansion of that illegitimate power under Taney in Dred Scott decision and enduring up to and including today.  Taney was only one Catholic thug on the Supreme Court at the time, he was joined by seven others who were definitely not Catholics.  The Supreme Court has been the most potent force for producing depravity in our history, the few rulings held up as a banner proclaiming that the system works are a smokescreen covering the actual history of it. They have done it through the installation of fictions such as "corporate person-hood" and under guises of "judicial philosophy."   For anyone worried about a rogue Congress and/or executive acting with no check from the Court, what part of the line of rulings from Dred Scott to the gutting of the Voting Rights Act to Dobbs don't they get as the Supreme Court being such a rogue element which will never have to face the voters on continual display?

AND IT'S CENTRAL TO THE CORRUPTION THAT WE CAN'T GET RID OF THE CORRUPT "justices" BY VOTING THEM OUT OF OFFICE. Impeachment of Supreme Court members as a means of getting rid of even criminals, the most corrupt such as Thomas and Barrett and Alito and Kavanaugh, is as much as a myth as impeaching the worst criminals in the presidency, Trump, Bush II, Bush I (remember those pardons Barr signed off on), Reagan, Nixon.  

No, the problem might include right-wing catho-fascism, but the worst part of it has nothing to do with that, it has to do with the usurped powers of the Supreme Court and the rigged and gamed Constitution and the corruptions that the slave-holders and money men who wrote the thing put in it from the start.  Blaming Catholicism as if it was even a major part of the problem is worse than foolish, it is the opposite of an effective way to fix what's wrong.  

That such corrupt people and, especially, those trained in the law would find and exploit every defect in the Constitution is no great surprise, it's what can be expected.  The legal and judicial professions are allowed to game and rig the imperfections of human made law. That we can't fix it is due to the absurdity of making it next to impossible to amend the Constitution to get rid of those venues of corruption.  The alleged dangers of unwise amendment of the thing is more than matched by the consciously inserted corruption in it and the unconsciously gamed words that have allowed the Court to corrupt the best of intentions by blatant and impune dishonesty.  

The usurped powers of the Supreme Court, objectively on average the most corrupt part of the United States government since FDR, make those far worse.  And it has been corrupt ever since John Marshall's time when he and his colleagues repeatedly ruled in favor of their own slave holding and others in ways that enriched them.*  Clarence Thomas is just a more flagrantly confident rotter of the same kind and who knows what the others never reported on, it's not as if we have any reason to be confident of their integrity.  He knows he's untouchable unless, by some miracle, Democrats get the house and a super-majority in the Senate.  I wouldn't wait up nights.  Americans are delusional about the Constitution and, especially, the badly written Bill of Rights. They're taught to be by Hollywood and pulp fiction and Broadway productions and popular kulcha.  It's all lies.

* If you haven't yet, you should listen to that interview with Paul Finkelman, noticing how the Court and his legal education led even the formerly ardent anti-slavery "justice" Joseph Story to issue what Finkelman notes would be the most infamous pro-slavery ruling if Dred Scott hadn't been issued. I have written posts about it in which Louis Boudin attributed it to Story's adoration of citing medieval English law as precedent, something Alito did so recently and so infamously to write his Dobbs decision as Senator Whitehouse pointed out the other day.  I would wonder if a rigorous study of Supreme Court "justices" might not show that time on that court had an average effect of making them more corrupt and out of touch, often on the basis of legal theory and "judicial philosophy."  Senator Whitehouse is right about that bullshit, "judicial philosophy."  It's a method of covering their asses when they issue a corrupt decision. It's like Nazi doctors excusing their evil by calling it "science."  Judges and lawyers excuse their murderous immorality and depravity on the job in the same way, believing it removes responsibility for what they do from their own soft, immaculately clean hands. I think they should all be required to visit the next mass shooting in the DC area before the bodies are removed.  They should have to see with their own eyes what they have enabled.

It's Way Past Time For The Materialist-Atheist-Sci-Guys To Back Up Their Claims - Hate Mail

I WONDER IF the atheism fad of the 00's and the resistance to it may not have led to a shattering of confidence in it among those who think more than a little. Reading the popular understanding of atheists starting about 2000 when I started reading online writing has led me to conclude they don't think very much more than other people do. They just like to think that they do. They certainly get pissed off when people don't think like they do. They're like a jr. high clique in that and as much suckers as any other group for professional propagandists who share similar inclinations to the ones they start out with.

I know that developing those apparently unanswerable questions I revived last week - you did not, no atheist I've encountered has honestly answered them yet - they may not have occurred to me until I was forced to think about the claims of "brain-only" materialists.  I tested materialism on its own terms and concluded it cannot account for the most basic human experience of awareness or thought.  Those questions were developed within the framing of materialists in which those are, I assert, unanswerable with anything but the typical, never-to-be redeemed promissory notes of materialism.  Given the history of the cliche, it's remarkable how much pie in some far off future they promise and never deliver on.   Those have been being issued by materialists all along and I don't think one of them has really been backed with secure and evidenced support.  Certainly that's true when it's a matter of materialism being made to confront the most basic reality of human life, our own consciousness.  If it can't account for that then its central claim that the material universe is the only thing that actually exists can't make sense of our own existence.  

One previously most annoying "public scientist" Carl Sagan put it in his famous intro to his PBS series "The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be that only the cosmos exists and it's all that ever did,"   certainly a materialist-atheist credo which by defining "the cosmos" in the limits of his ideology tacitly claimed "the cosmos" for atheists. That's something they are wont to do.  But their ownership of it is certainly contestable since far earlier and far more inclusive schools and ways of thought claimed it was never human beings' property but God's, however they conceived of God. Considering we all know that the cosmos existed without atheists and certainly without scientists to claim, "We own it!" their claim is as presumptuous as it is silly.    As I've said, Sagan talking on his field of expertise, the first thing I did hear him talk about could be very interesting, when he got much afield of that things went downhill.   Today's contenders generally are worse.

The modern resort of atheists, since well back into the 19th century and earlier, to demote human consciousness to an epiphenomon of physics and chemistry, is a desperate attempt to deny the most obvious thing that can't fall into their ideological materialist monist scheme of things, the very thing they use to dream up their illusory ideological systems and ideological denials, consciousness.  The most decadent forms of that that reign in large parts of academia and is widely promoted in philosophically inept schools of science that I mentioned, Dawkinsian evo-psy, many working in semi-sciences such as cog and neuro-sci, the pseudo-social-sciences and the rump of idiocy in philosophical departments where such idiocy as eliminative positivism is pushed, may be the dying gasps of an ideology that any thinking person realizes is never going to back those promissory notes and the rational conclusion is that they never can because they are issued on a dishonest basis.  

Contrary to your claim, I have a lot of respect for the methods of science, when those methods of science are rigorously tied to legitimate confirmation through honest observation, measurement and analysis AND REPEATED EXPERIMENTATION OR OBSERVATIONS within what those methods can validly be applied to.  I have noted that especially in areas surrounding the pseudo-scientific study of minds that those methods are violated from the start and from there the methods of psychology, sociology, anthropology, etc. have infected even what should be the most rigorous of all sciences.  I think it is notably revelatory that the current reigning ideology of evolutionary psychology entered into biology through the unfortunately ambitious scientific interpretation of what is largely unobservable, evolution, filling in the interplanetary space of the tacit fossil record and that which can never be recovered due to its traces being entirely gone forever, not only in the physical record but the actual, lived lives of the trillions and trillions of lives which would constitute the actual life which evolved, filling it in with story-telling which can never be verified due to that lost information.  When science abandons the requirement of observation and measurement, the resultant "analysis" will mimic the worst pre-scientific practices of making stuff up which may at first seem plausible but will be built on in the most ideologically vulnerable ways.  In that we can see in the modern period that science has allowed in the most blatantly subjective input imaginable.

I probably should have noted the start of that slide into degeneracy with economics since one of the worst of those is founded on the pseudo-science of Thomas Malthus, the economic class and racism-based ideology of natural selection.  In all of those poisonous limpets and barnacles on science, the claim to be able to observe what cannot be observed is one of the most basic aspects of the con job.  

You cannot honestly observe economic activity objectively, the attempt when made will inevitably spring from the personal, family, class interests - including wealth protection and enhancement - of the ones making the attempt.   Thomas Malthus's approach, pretending the British class system, a creation of human made laws and corruption and theft, was a natural entity and its results something of a constant power was never scientific, that it is the basis of the reigning ideology of biology has done nothing to make the results any more scientific.  You cannot possibly come up with an honest model of economic activity because it is too big and too varied and too unobservable even though it goes on right now.  Whatever assertions are adopted by those with the power to enforce their adoption will be fraught with unarticulated assumptions, presumptions and wishful thinking.  I would like to be able to know enough about the biographies of the eminent economists and their academic assertions because I doubt if you look hard at it you will find much of any of them who don't assert something they favor as what is and what should be and seldom to never assert that which is not in their favor or to their liking.   In that their view of economies is exactly like Carl Sagan's view of "the cosmos" or Antonin Scalia's "originalist" reading of the United States Constitution or Amy Coney Barrett's "textualist" reading of it.  It's like Darwin's and Galton's conception of evolution, it's like Richard Dawkin's view of life, it's like that meat-head hanger-on, Douglass Adam's tedious and cynical view of reality.  

And that's assuming that what those figures in academia really believe what they are asserting and not that they're just telling the powers that be what they want to hear so as best to make a nice living for themselves.  Though I really believe that that motive in academic and judicial and scientific fudging and lying is never to be discounted.  That is if you want to be coldly realistic about it.  A look at Retraction Watch in those kinds of cases when there was clearly conscious fraud and not just wishful thinking at the root of things in science is certainly instructive in that instance. Often the powers that be are the wealthy and, so, powerful, many times it's just those currently dominant in their academic or professional field, sometimes it's no more sophisticated than what I remember a cyincal music major telling me, "You find out what the teacher thinks and write that in your tests and papers."  Works if you want to get ahead on the job, too.

I certainly have more respect for scientific method than the typical atheists who believe themselves to be "skeptics" because reading the controlled research into some aspects classified as "psychic phenomena" I had to admit that, by the rules of science, they have demonstrated the reality of a number of those.  I think the studies into what Dean Radin calls "presentiment" are especially persuasive, though it's clear that certainly as far back as Rhine's telepathy experiments, it was validly demonstrated at a stupendously higher than chance level in repeated experiments, answering their critics over methodology. "Skeptics" -many of whom would have been more honestly called "liars" - have had to continually lie about the experimental methodologies employed and every other aspect of it because their ideology can't be made to square with it.  They have certainly and repeatedly lied about the honor of the scientists who have conducted that work, relying on a con-man like James Randi and his tactics to do so.*

So, the answer to your claims is where is your answer to those questions?  I pointed out that the atheist gods of "DNA," "natural selection," and "it's like a computer program" don't work and you didn't even tell me how one of those would.  I didn't mention the other currently favored atheist creator gods of "probability" and "random chance" certainly don't work, not on the time frame of human experience and certainly not with the efficacy of our thinking to keep us alive.  If we had to depend on those two mathematical entities, human beings and even life on Earth would have probably ended within the first few generations of life if not immediately.  We can't know if animal consciousness was present on Earth at that time, I strongly suspect that life on Earth could never have even begun unless there was some consciousness behind it.  Though that's a reasonable conclusion, not science.  Most of what we can rely on in life is not the product of science, a lot which modern people stupidly rely on, including those credentialed in the degree mills - make that especially them -  unfortunately, gets passed off as science.  Science can't study earliest life on Earth or consciousness, it can't be observed or measured, anyone is within their rights to come to their own reasoned and modestly held ideas of it. Given the impossibility of us ever doing much of anything about the creation of life more than three billion years ago as we imperil life on Earth now, that scientists are allowed to waste time and resources on it is the height of the typical decadence of materialist, atheist, scientistic modernism.  That nonsense started as a means of scientists wanting to nail the coffin of God shut and it continues in that, the practice having gotten professional status and, with that and nothing like scientific validity, is unthinkingly called "science" and treated as something important, when it hardly is.

* It's hilarious that the "My Pillow" Republican-fascist crackpot got caught up in his version of Randi's bogus wager.  Though I doubt he will anymore than Randi ever would have come clean about it and put his money where his mouth was recorded as being.  Anyone with any pretenses of having any respect for science who didn't condemn Randi's "million dollar" wager as a method of verification of experimental science should have their educational credentials pulled.  Mike Lindell and James Randi were pretty much two of a kind, and there are many more like them in popular atheist propaganda, many of them public scientists.  

Paul Finkelman On Slavery And The Supreme Court

 

 

This excellent interview with the fine American historian and law scholar Paul Finkelman is part of the 1619 project.   It is full of information about how bad the Supreme Court has been from near the start and containing much about how bad the slave-power enhancing features of the Constitution have been from the beginning.   I hadn't realized that the 1800 election that brought the slave owner Jefferson to power was the first one decided by the Electoral College, for example. 

Much of what he said was known to me before in general but not in the level of detail and analysis that Paul Finkelman brings.  It's worth the seventy minutes to listen to it once and I'm listening over and over again to absorb the information.

Saturday Night Radio Drama - James W. Nichol - Peggy Delaney

 Peggy Delaney

Peggy Delaney was a series of radio dramas from the CBC, part of the late lamented and generally superior radio drama department of the once great national radio service.   It was part of the Mystery Project.  The CBC is still pretty good, it's just not as great as it used to be.

The link will get you to all of the series posted at Archive dot org.  They are also posted as Youtubes if that's more convenient. 

A partial list of credits for the series includes:

Score composed and conducted by Milan Kymlicka.
Starring Kyra Harper as PEGGY DELANEY
Also starring John Stocker as Bernie Sniderman
J. W. Carroll as Nick Bauer
and Caterina Scorsone as Amber
Guest stars: Nicholas Campbell , Janet Laine-Green, Thomas Hauff, Jason Burke, Joanne Vannicola, David Storch, Marcia Bennett, Randy Hughson, Daniel DeSanto, Simon Reynolds, Jack Newman, Peggy Mahon, David Hughes, Dawn Greenhalgh, Amos Crawley, Kathryn Long, D. Garnet Harding, David Ferry, Arlene Mazerolle, Dom Fiore, Joyce Campion, Gerard Parkes, Judy Sinclair

Andrew Hill - Black Fire

 

 

Andrew Hill — piano

Joe Henderson — saxophone

Richard Davis — bass

Roy Haynes — drums

Sheldon Whitehouse On The Corruption On The Court

 

Expanding Again On Those Unanswerable Questions

IF OUR MINDS are merely the product of brain chemistry, our ideas merely a side-effect of chemical and physiological structures physically present in our brains then that means the brain must build those structures to produce our every conscious thought. That is the essence of the "brain-only" materialist model of the mind in all of its epic naivety.  The old saying that the unexamined life isn't worth living is certainly manifested in the unexamined assumptions of the materialist ideology and in no area is it worth less than in the materialist-atheist-scientistic ideological assertion of what minds and consciousness must be in order to fit into the confines of their belief that there is nothing but the material universe. That's as true of quaint 18th and 19th century atheist-materialist ideology as it is the superficially updated version of that in "physicalism." Or as some MAS true-believers would have it, "naturalism."

As I pointed out in response to Jeffrey Kaplan's praise for the letter of Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia's supposed knee capping of Descarte's perhaps naive dualistic theory that separates mind and body, her widely accepted and praised question carries with it the question begging of insisting that the mind would have to somehow move the body, the brain and nervous system and the entire body in exactly the way the physical objects physically move other objects.  It insists that the mind would have to be limited to having exactly and only the same qualities and capabilities that physical objects do.  It insists, from the start that the proposed non-physical mind would have to be exactly the same thing as a physical object is as it is studied by physics or, perhaps, as science developed, chemistry or electromagnetism and, for the love of Mike, those humanly invented imitators of what they are then turned around and proposed to be a model for, computers.  Holding the inability of those who hold with a non-material mind to physically describe how it could move the body over the assertion as if that inability to explain something was proof of the falseness of the idea.  If that's true then it's pretty much a capitulation which will invalidate science, mathematics and even logic.

But materialism is notably incapable of producing a purely physical model of the mind that has much of any power of explanation or any durability as a uniformly recognized entity.  It cannot account for even more basic aspects of the experience of consciousness, thinking, perceiving or even the mental modeling that is the most basic act of science and of materialist, atheist, scientism.  Materialists are far more apt to create the most absurd theories that they push within psychology, evo-psy, sociology, anthropology, cog and neuro-sci and in the popular so-called understanding of science culminating in the epic absurdity of eliminative positivism which claims that consciousness doesn't exist, that it is a delusion, that we merely think we're thinking. It's not really any intellectual advance on the way cults work.   I knew an old lady who in her late eighties was brought to an EST (remember EST?) seminar by her well meaning but cult influenced granddaughter.  She was asked what she thought of it by the one conducting the seminar, as an unusually old person to get attracted to the cult, she must have stood out.  She said she didn't understand the purpose of it.  "To find real happiness," she was told.  She said she felt perfectly happy as it was.  The answer to that was "You only think you're happy."  To which she asked what was the difference between feeling you were happy and being happy.  Her granddaughter didn't stay with it for much longer after that.

Several years ago, while I was wasting too much time brawling with the rump of the new atheist fad of the 00's I got into a fight over these issues. I have written several times about coming to something of a breakthrough moment on a secular, anti-Christian, anti-religious "anti-woo" blog when one of the ol' hard livin' hard-drinkin' barroom style atheists declared one afternoon that "science proves that free will is bunk." That was something I realized I'd heard in such venues before.  Which I then immediately saw as a problem for virtually every political assertion made on even the degraded "left" of secularism, secular liberal democracy, and was certainly fatal to any assertions that any claim of freedom or even rights such as which were the alleged purpose of the blog and, really, the entire American and Western "left".  Once you're convinced you're a "lumbering robot" as their then darling, Richard Dawkins so infamously put it, then what's the difference if you're controlled by a dictator or your selfish genes?  Materialism is almost a guarantee of the eventual demise of democracy, it's no shock that you could remain respectable on the American secular left while being, in order, OK with Lenin, Stalin, Mao, etc. and briefly (on the command of Stalin, even switched to wanting to do business with Hitler).  And so many of those who weren't fanboys and gals of Stalin were huge fans of the equally putrid Trotsky.  The Trots were infamous for, after Stalinists gave him the ice axe and he couldn't gain power,  making the switch to capitalist fascism.  That other darlin' of the new atheists of the 00's Christopher Hitchens maybe the last actual known Trot to take that profitable baby-step of shame before his boozing likely caught up with him.  

I think that happened about 2004. I know I was writing about having had that experience in 2006.  It was one of the key moments that set off my rapidly developing apostasy from the secular left and the ideologies of secularism and had the far from typically expected effect of driving me into something far more radical than I started off that decade with. That's what happens when you base your thinking on the Gospel, The Epistles, The Law and the Prophets instead of materialism.  

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

When I was still interacting with that bunch here, I posed some questions about the "brain-only" brainles

sness by asking about the origin of a new idea which an individual "brain" had never contained before.  I asked:

How would a brain know it needed to make a new structure to be the physical basis of that specific, new idea?  If that structure were not already present in the brain then there would be no possible representation, under their ideology, of the idea for the brain to be informed by.

How would a brain know what it needed to make to be the physical structure of that specific idea without that idea being present in the brain so as to inform it of what it needed to make?

How would it know how to make that specific structure before that idea could possibly, under the materialist "brain-only" ideology, be present in the epiphenominal mind because such a structure was not present in the brain to produce it?

How would the brain know that it had produced the correct structure to lead to the right idea since it would only have with it produced there which could only possibly be the "right" idea on a vanishingly unlikely chance basis?  Brains, under that model, produce all kinds of ideas, those held to be "right" and those held to be "wrong." Once a wrong idea had a physical substrate in the brain whereas THE right one wouldn't, how would it be able to discern that the "wrong" idea was wrong?  

I noted that such an apparatus to be at all credible it would have to specifically answer those questions and it would have to happen fast enough to account for the incredibly rapid and incredibly accurate huge number of novel thoughts we have in even our day-to-day life, probably dozens if not hundreds of them before we've been awake for even one hour, that would allow people to navigate their bodies, their vehicles, etc. in the world without us dying rather fast.  I noted that "trial and error" would have to be so fast that it couldn't possibly be involved in most of the most consequential novel ideas - a car coming at you which you didn't notice before as you walk to work, for example - before the consequences killed you.

The few materialists who took up the challenge came up with exactly what I figured they would and in the process I learned that while claiming to reject God atheists elevated any number of quite mundane things to have exactly the same role of God or gods or spirits which they despise with their entire being.

One of the stupidest of the college-credentialed materialists' explanation was "DNA" which was said as if by rote with no explanation.  Which I pointed out only produces proteins and it doesn't really produce proteins but is merely part of an elaborate and time consuming process of protein production within cells. Protein folding into a biologically active form, only one of the things that would take up too many minutes to account for the experience of consciousness.  I could ask how, if that was their answer, "DNA" could surmount those questions any better than their "brain-only" brains could.  They'd merely dodged the question by elevating DNA into a creator god, as a substitute for the material brain.

They resorted to another of the gods of materialist, atheist, scientism, "natural selection" which was even more inept.  Natural selection, along with DNA would have to be omniscient in order to create physical structures to act as a proposed substrate which would produce the myriads of novel ideas humans continually have.  Some of our ideas are certainly unprecedented in the history of life on Earth.  How did "natural selection" which is proposed to have such a limited area of activity come up with those things and how does it act to produce those novel physical structures in brains?  At one point I listed a large number of such ideas, both those with rather obvious factual substance and those of absolutely no evidenced reality, which natural selection would have to miraculously produce when all it's alleged to be is an undefined and mysterious mechanism that selects out novel biological features so as to allow others to produce more offspring.

I learned from that that the ideologically required dogma of natural selection is held onto like a chicken-wire and terry-cloth surrogate mommy by materialists when someone's posing of "the hard question" gets too hard for them. Since then I've come to believe it is one of the worst ideas anyone has ever come up with which gained such universal acceptance, even many of the creationists who totally reject evolution, nevertheless, hold with some vulgar or more vulgarly developed form of natural selection.  It is the economic ideology of the Republican-fascist right.

Then there were those who favored a computer as the model of how the brain worked.  Which was perhaps even stupider since all a computer is is a humanly made model which is supposed to imitate -albeit far more rapidly- some of the more basic activities of human minds. That to mistake a metaphor - which computing is- for the thing it imitated was especially naive and incompetent.   It's only slightly less naive than a very young child believing their teddy bear was conscious.    I was also able to point out that in order for computers to do anything at all human beings had to have the ideas to make them do it in the first place and that they were notably prone to breaking down in ways that human minds didn't often do.  Unless, peehaps wedded too strongly to an ideology as inept as materialist, atheist, scientism.

Those questions I posed are not frivolous if you want to get into the business of creating a materialistic model of minds.  If you can't answer them with your proposed mechanism, it simply doesn't work and is only considered credible by chumps and true-believers who believed it or its motivating ideology to start with.  I think elminative positivism is a product of the true believers in materialism such as Dennett and that weird Churchland couple who can't give it up when it becomes obvious that even a modestly functioning mind such as theirs can't be made to account by its few and simple ideological claims for reducing reality (only knowable as it can be to our minds) to their material ground of being.  That such nonsense has reigned in academia for so long is proof that we have been brought by materialism into a period far more decadent than almost any that preceded the modern period.

As I've mentioned before, the 1976 statement of the Sociobiology Study Group, which included many a secular materialist, got it right when they noted that Sociobiology and Evolutionary Psychology would lead to a resurgence of the crudest and most dangerous forms of biological determinism and eugenics, the subsequent forty-seven years have proved they got at least that right. Though eugenics was certainly not entirely dependent on those two theoretical scaffolds, it had been resurgent in Neo-Darwinist biology, among prominent scientists, all along.  

It is matched in quotidian secularism by the resurgence of biological racism, eugenics, assertions of inequality and supremacy, fascist political activities, and a whole host of other fungi of decay that feeds on the rotting body of brain-dead brain-only materialism.  If its putrescence merely matches that of religion which is wedded to worldly power it will as certainly have discredited materialist, atheist, scientism as it does that kind of religiosity.  I think in things like eliminative positivism and the claim that "science proves free will is bunk," it has surpassed even some of the most corrupt predestinarian cults in modern period "Christianity" and some of the worst sects of Eastern religions. I think whenever you include even the academic stratification of worth in defiance of a moral obligation to consider all of us as equal, you can even count on the putative virtue of education to reinforce those, no matter what else they may teach.  Look at what the Ivies, the may-as-well-be ivies and the other factories of DeSantises, Cruzes, Hawlies, etc. turn out.  I've come to consider academia as being pretty much all-in on the decadence as any other institution, these days.

It is certainly far worse than believing we are morally obligated to do to others as we want done to us and "by their fruits you will know them."  I think that last one is an especially effective means of knowing the truth, the truth alone being what will make us free, that is if we include the other rule of life just mentioned.