Just Found Out Archbishop Thomas Gumbleton Has Died

He was one of the most Christlike members of the Catholic hierarchy of the United States during my lifetime, sidelined from promotions because he insisted on living the Gospel.  This article in National Catholic Reporter gives you some idea, if you're not familiar with him.

Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, the Detroit prelate who for many American Catholics defined faith-based social justice activism in the post-Vatican II church, died April 4. He was 94.

Described sometimes as the pastor of the Catholic peace and justice movement, Gumbleton lived in Detroit nearly his entire life, yet his influence was felt in far-flung places such as El Salvador, Haiti, Vietnam, Iran and Iraq.

He was a founding member of both Pax Christi USA, the national arm of the international Catholic peace movement, and Bread for the World, an advocacy organization seeking to end world hunger.

"To put it most succinctly, Tom lived out the peace of Christ in his complete being," said Johnny Zokovitch, Pax Christi USA's executive director, shortly after the bishop's death. "Everything that our movement strives to be was evident in Tom and how Tom lived."

Immaculate Heart of Mary Sr. Irene Therese Gumbleton, the last living of nine Gumbleton siblings, said her brother passed away at a hospital in Dearborn, Michigan, following physical decline over the past week. "It means a lot to us that we've lost him," she told NCR by phone. "I think the church is really going to miss him."

A lot of us are going to miss him. 

An Ideology That Lives By Cartoonish Simplification Must Surely Be Damaged When That Simplicity Is Debunked - Hate Mail

ALL ANY OF US who believe that there is most likely a "first organism" from which all subsequent organisms evolved has is an imagination of it.  There is no physical evidence of what organisms even many presumed generations of life on Earth were like, not for what is assumed would be many millions of generations after when that original organism would have had to flourish.  There is no evidence that such a first organism is how life came to first exist on Earth, there is no evidence of what it is like.  The only thing we can possibly know for certain is if that imagined organism came about from non-living matter is that it would have to be unique in the entire line of life because every subsequent organism would have had to have come about out of living organisms.  

Before going on, to lay out the groundwork of this post I do hold as a tentative belief that there likely was one "first organism" though the more I read about the discoveries of current biology I admit that belief is merely on the basis of seeming (as opposed to knowable) probability considering the extreme problems of it happening even once based on what is believed, today, to imagine up that original organism, its physiology and its life and, most improbable seeming of all, its successful reproduction of itself.  If some materialist-atheist wants to argue about that, I'll be forced to bring up the problem of the containing membrane in which molecules from outside of that organism would have had to be contained to reach a concentration so as to ignite metabolic activity and, most problematic, reproduction.  If they propose something like a virus, I think, considering what those are and how they are reproduced, that viruses probably evolved after organisms they could parasitize had already evolved.  So I doubt they preceded cellular life.  Same thing with prions, as one online atheist proposed as a means of getting over the insurmountable mountain of problems for life just having happened by random chance.  Neither viruses nor prions are sufficiently "simple" nor known to be able to exist on their own no matter how "simple" they are imagined to be if you ignore their complexity.   Viruses are not as simple as they need to be to fit into that claim.

Back to the argument.  One of the assumptions of what that "first organism" we imagine is like is that it was "simple," that its physical body was simple, though we have no actual information as to what that "simplicity" would have been like.  We can't imagine life, metabolism, change, reproduction (change would have to have happened for both of those) physical anatomy, etc. apart from the life which can be seen and studied now, certainly many, many, many billions of years, of presumable evolutionary change and development and divergent pathways and presumably enormous difference from that first organism or its first descendants (keeping in mind what my dear old biology teacher said about the impossibility of differentiating among cells that divide as to which one was the "original" of the resulting cells).  

Every one of the proposals for how molecules would have just happened to have assembled themselves into that first organism by chance imagines something that is far, far from "simple" because those have no alternative but to be based in what we know about life now.  The various proposals for how DNA or RNA is supposed to have assembled out of random chance events in the conditions on the early Earth, more than three billion years ago, out of the random chance scenario that is a prerequisite for that entire game of abiogenesis, are, themselves, extremely improbable.  I would guess that is one of the reasons why one of the most famous proponents of coming up with a materialistic, atheistic, scientistic explanation of that, Francis Crick (Crick and Orgel 1973), resorted to some kind of extra-terrestrial seeding of the early Earth, probably as some extremely long-term experiment by intelligent beings from elsewhere in the galaxy or universe, as a way of skirting the problem of that sciency imaginary scenario.  Which, in his philosophical incompetence, merely would relocate the problems of where that intelligent life started out its existence under similar difficulties to those which an Earth based scheme of random-chance assembly of that non-Earth life would have had to happen.  Not to mention wondering who was supposed to live for enough billions of years or at least hundreds of millions of years to have made such an experiment worth expending wealth and energy on.  Of all the proposals of how it "just happened" that is probably the stupidest of them all.  But I think anyone who got suckered into believing that the Miller-Urey experiment explained it all, as I heard in my youth (AND IT MOST CERTAINLY DIDN'T) and which I still hear from the sci-rangers on-line, has such a naive view of the problems involved that they need to be ridiculed out of the discussion if we're ever going to get anywhere in it.  

For a start the Miller-Urey experiment in no way reproduced the conditions of the early-Earth, and after that their experiment was inseparable from the very same obstacle that Francis Crick's imaginary, unevidenced, ET origin of life on Earth was, THE INTELLIGENT DESIGNS AND INTENTIONS OF THOSE WHO WOULD HAVE CARRIED ON THOSE EXPERIMENTS.  The product of an intentionally carried out experiment cannot possibly be known to represent something that would happen "in nature" without the intelligent design or the manipulation of materials by the scientists who are doing that experiment.  It is the greatest irony of abiogenesis, a "science" born out of materialist-atheist-scientism and continuing in that quest to refute a theory of intelligence in life arising on Earth, that everything they do by way of experiments or of analysis of any observations they make merely reinforces the theory that intelligent design was needed to get the results they did.  There is no way to filter out or remove what the scientists did to get the results they did, though their analysis of that can pretend it does that's mere dishonesty or that ubiquitous philosophical incompetence which is rife among those in the sciences, today.  And Miller And Urey merely came up with a novel way to manufacture some few amino acids, they in now way got much if any closer to figuring out how those assembled by random chance into a first organism.

My ideas on this, today, developed from my response to the ridiculous claims that scientists who had made artificial "DNA" and "got it to replicate itself" had put the final nail in the coffin of the idea that God was necessary to the creation of life.  The first thing I thought was that their "DNA" hadn't assembled itself and it had hardly "replicated itself" because it was the various manipulations of molecules under the specific ambient conditions they did their experiment in (hardly likely to have anything like approximated conditions anywhere on the early Earth) are what got the results.  So the "DNA" hadn't replicated itself, the scientists who did the experiment did that.*  Just as we know that DNA in living organisms doesn't replicate itself, the enormously complex cellular physiology and chemistry of enormously complex molecules (which are hadly likely to have have existed in that first organisms) replicates any DNA in it, in those eukaryotic cells such as comprise our bodies, far more than one DNA molecule has to do that in exquisitely complex coordination within and without the cell with other DNA in the organelles of the cell through other enormously complex operations in the cell.  I doubt that DNA or RNA existed on Earth until those evolved many millions of generations of life after that first event, though that is, as well, an enormous speculative leap based on what I imagine.  I'd say that if any DNA or RNA managed to assemble by random chance events on the early Earth, evaded immediate destruction in what was unlikely to have been favorable conditions and, somehow, assembled, the first organism it would have been no less miraculous than any miracle asserted by any tradition of religion or folklore.  The dependence on random chance and other such speculative aids in any materialist, atheist, scientistic scheme of explaining how life so improbably arose on the early Earth arrives at greater improbabilities if you think even not terribly hard about it,  YOU'D HAVE TO HAVE A STRONG EMOTIONAL ATTACHMENT TO MATERIALISM, ATHEISM AND SCIENTISM TO SUSTAIN THAT NAIVE FAITH IN THAT god OF MODERN ATHEISM, RANDOM CHANCE, TO BE ABLE TO OVERCOME THE INCREDIBLE ODDS AGAINST IT HAVING HAPPENED IN FACT.  And the culture of the college-credentialed materialist-atheist devotee of scientism has as strong an emotional attachment to their ideology as the most fevered fundamentalist or the most mendacious Trumpzi.  They might be less stupid than a Trumpzi has to be but their stubborn refusal to see the problems with their faith and what it forces them to pretend they know things that aren't and couldn't be true is the same.

One of the interesting things that James Shapiro pointed out in that lecture was that with the discovery of a third kind of cell the archaea, apart from the eukaryotic cells and the prokaryotic cells, the line of cells among species of methane producing bacteria, is that there may well have been many, even many thousands of different kinds of cells on the early Earth which didn't survive up into the organisms that left resolvable images of their bodies.  He honestly points out that we can't know that because we don't have the evidence.  Which is another complication of the lore of the alleged science that makes all kinds of claims about that earliest life about which science cannot now be honestly done.  Which does nothing, whatsoever, to keep those employed in that scientific folklore and materialist-atheist scholastic speculation from coming clean and admitting that what they are doing is far more akin to the cartoon of medieval theology they probably mock.  That they do so out of an allegiance to the faith of materialism and atheism doesn't change the character of what they are doing.  I think that the rise of science and modern history has had a very strong impact for the better in much of modern theology which, in supreme irony, has not influenced the culture of science and the sciency nearly as much.  I doubt that any credible modern theologian would be as unaware of the problems with their procedures, I doubt many of the earlier ones would.  Gregory of Nyssa, for example, strikes me as being more honest about what he was doing than many a highly placed scientist today does.  

The point of my last post which is complained about so angrily, was that if materialist-atheist devotees of scientism can pretend to find a reason for dismissing a belief in God the Creator out of their entirely unrealistic claims of the simplicity of how life originated and evolved - claims of simplicity that, the more that is reliably discovered by physiology and molecular biology, are false - then it is certainly justified by someone like me to point out that the more that is discovered about how life, now, sustains itself supports the need of conscious intelligence to point that out.  I don't think it's at all unfair of us to say that in order for that to have gotten started, at all, is reasonably concluded to require that intelligent intent was part of it.  Another of the hoary old arguments of atheism was that life in the physical universe would seem to be sparse (though that's another assumption that isn't susceptible to confirmation with science) and so there is no intent behind its existence, therefore, no God.  I know, my dear old Latin teacher tried that one on me, as well.  Such an argument merely makes the existence of life on Earth to be even more improbable, leaving the atheist with the problem of how it could have plausibly happened even once (remember what I said about the cosmologist who, on that basis, doubts that there is life anywhere else in the universe.  I think the more plausible belief INFORMED BY WHAT SCIENCE HAS SHOWN is that God created life and sustains it as well as the planet and universe in which we know one thing with as good reason as anything we believe we know, that we are here.  

If the tantalizingly suggestive observations of the ancient Hebrew traditions point to scientific reasons to believe they had an inkling of what was real about such things as the origin of the universe, we have a right to notice that.  Though it's not a scientific conclusion because science isn't supposed to claim to answer questions it can't, though, as can be seen from looking at the attempts of scientists to put that elusive last nail in the coffin of God with science, that isn't kept out of it.  Atheism is a flourishing and dishonest industry within the literature and teaching of science and, especially, in "the popular understanding of science"  whereas theology isn't and shouldn't be there as the rules now stand.  But neither should atheism.  I certainly reject both attempts to do that, though there is nothing at all wrong with it as long as it is explicitly understood that it isn't science because science can't be allowed to go there and maintain its integrity.  Of the two, atheist ideology has been successfully inserted into even the formal literature of science.  It is rampant in some fields as even someone like Stephen Hawking has noted of his own field and such stuff as abiogenis was invented with that intent.  Of the two atheism, which inevitably will come to a condition of amorality, is the more dangerous.

* God only knows what disastrous consequences scientists assembling artificial "DNA" could bring if even segments of that "DNA" manages to get into the real DNA of living beings as we know real DNA can do.  The ignorance of what biological effect such artificial polymers could bring leads me to think it's probably one of the greater dangers that have arisen from science. And with the plastics industry and its consequences, as James Shaprio also noted, that dangerous experiment is already underway.  It makes you realize absurdly unrealistic the old fashioned view of DNA is in light of the discoveries of how enormously changeable DNA is, now entire regions of it can migrate to other parts of DNA and become biologically active both within one organism and among different organisms.  That knowledge start starting with Barbara McClintok more than a generation ago should have long ago destroyed the old imaginary models of DNA as well as the mid-20th century dogma of neo-Darwinism.  The absurd assertions that DNA was in command and reigning over the physiology and life actions of the organisms it exists within, vulnerable only to the materialist god of random chance.  I will repeat that I think it was a notion of how disconfirming of the ruling ideology of materialist-atheist-scientism in the wake of the neo-Darwinian synthesis the new discoveries were that led to McClintok being discouraged from continuing her work, if not just out of the ruling inertia of professional interest - which was hardly separable from the dominant ideology of the scientists discouraging or opposing her.

D Derbes,

Did you actually read what I wrote or are you just relying on the characterization of it by the noted illiterate and liar you agreed with?   That's a real question because I doubt you did  because that's not what I said.  I assume you read well enough to know that.   If I'm wrong, I'd like to know it.

yours truly, 

TC

Just Got Our Electricy Back AGAIN!

We used to get outages like this once in a few years, back when they had to climb poles to fix things.  Now it seems we have at least a couple every year.   I'd guess it's a combination of global warming and foreign ownership of the electric company here.  Maybe a few more years of this and the referendum for the state to take control of it will pass.   Don't blame me, I voted for that. 

What Matrialists Do Justifies The Conclusion That More Than Mere Physical Causation Is Necessary For It To Happen

I DON'T REMEMBER if I had transcribed this part of the Q and A from James Shapiro's Linus Pauling Lecture (2012) before and used it some time in the past but I'm doing that now.

Question: About half-way through your lecture where you use the term "cells know."

James Shapiro: Well, I was quoting Barbara McClintok but . . .

Questioner: OK. But just the term . . . um. . . you know, I guess I have trouble with the idea of a cell being so self-directed that it would - fundamentally it's all bio-chemistry - that they would know .  . . in a cognitive sort of way.  Cause that's sort of how I understand the word . . .

James Shapiro: "Cognitive" is the word I like to use and cells are always sensing what's going on inside of them and outside of them. And responding to that sensory information.  And they do it pretty well.

Cell division is a pretty complicated process, more complex than any human manufacturing enterprise.  Hundreds of millions, maybe billions of different events have to be coordinated, sometimes very quickly. E coli replicate its DNA two thousand base-pairs a second and make less than one in a billion mistakes because it has sequential proof-reading mechanisms which are based on monitoring the DNA and picking up those errors and correcting them.

So this is a form of cognitive behavior and I know we're taught not to anthropomorphize though I do it all the time, It's the only way I can understand what my bacteria are experiencing.(*)  And I think what McClintok is trying to tell us is we have to realize both that the cell is a sensory, sentient entity and it's using that sentience for its own needs and requirements and functions and sometimes that involves changing its genetics, changing its DNA.  But there's a whole school of study one of the pioneers of it is at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, Lee Hartwell who got the Nobel Prize, I think about seven or eight years ago for studying the control of how the cell cycle progresses. And you may know about that. And the cell cycle, the eukaryotic cell cycle  involves lots of different things that have to happen and they all have to happen in a coordinated way.  And the cell is monitoring how all of those things are happening.

Here the recording has a drastically degraded audio quality,** making it too difficult to try for a close to verbatim transcription.  But, from what you can hear, James Shapiro went into how much more complex the division of a eukaryotic cell is. Before hearing that, though, with all of the biology courses I took in college when a lot of that information was known, I never before had anyone present just how complex the divison of any cell is but, especially, eukariotic cells, such as human beings and many other creatures from Algae up to dinosaurs and sperm whales bodies are composed of is.  It's long, long ago been known that those cells have obvious complexities that have to be reproduced as the entire cell replicates itself - which, as my first biology teacher in high school pointed out to me leads to the problem of saying which of the resulting cells is "the original cell" as both of them are, then, a product of the original one splitting.  The way we talk about things and think about things on that basic a level fail to consider such things.  Which should have always been a warning against over-simplifying the situation and using that over-simplification ideologically as well as scientifically.

All of those separate DNA containing entities within them would have to have their contents replicated, including DNA but, also, the enormously complex cellular structures and chemistry containing and comprising, as well as the nuclear DNA and the supporting very complex cellular structures and their supporting molecules would have to be EVERY TIME THAT THOSE CELLS DIVIDED.  In the case of single cell organisms, that is done to produce a functioning, viable organism, and in multi-cell organisms, to create the billions of times more complex bodies of multicellular creatures made of interacting cells, organs, organ systems etc. And those would have to almost, in every single case, have to do it to effective perfection almost every time.  The idea that random chance or non-directed, non-teleological "bio-chemistry" as presented in the simplistic modeling of that questioner,  which is so inadequate it barely deserves to be called a "cartoon-presentation" of what happens is at least as absurd as "young-earth creationism."  Yet that is the foundation of the most widespread of scientific ideologies dealing with such questions, certainly on the popular level but, also, at the level on which the likes of Richard Dawkins have sustained eminent careers in science at some of the major universities in the world.

The way that just cellular replication alone is generally presented is like that famous cartoon of some professor writing an enormously long equation on a black board and in the middle of it it says "then a miracle occurs."  Though that's supposed to mock religion, that is really how the imagination of cells dividing in most Peoples' minds is, including many professional biologists, because they skate over how enormously complicated all aspects of that are.  Even picking out different aspects of it as if those are separable from the whole life of the cell, such as my formerly favorite one of how a cellular membrane splits and repairs itself so as to enclose two cells instead of one, is grotesquely simplistic because that wouldn't happen without the entire range of happenings within, first the first cell, then in both of them, for that to happen.  It can't be isolated from the entire act of cellular reproduction with all of its myriad of complex events happening successfully.  Starting with the cell obtaining enough of the exactly necessary molecules to produce two cells from one. Which inevitably involves the enormously complex matter of the cellular activity in taking in molecules from outside of it, and so the "environment" in which the cell lives.  

I remember the vicious attacks on James Shapiro from his colleague at the University of Chicago, the new atheist fanatic, Jerry Coyne about the same time he gave that lecture, one joined in by a lot of the science bloggers run by university faculty and their commentators who were stalwarts of the then fashionable new atheism.  A lot of that was centered in the insistence that there were huge parts of the then recently mapped DNA that were nothing but "junk" something which Shaprio mentioned pained him during that lecture because scientists like him had already shown that it was anything but superflous but was vitally important, literally, life depending on its functions and on the matter of evolution which has such incredibly outsized importance to materialist-atheist-scientistic ideology.  I was certain that the "junk DNA" arguments were entirely made in service, not to science, but to atheist ideology.  One of the things I heard Shaprio point out is how little of our DNA is dedicated to that thing which you'll generally hear is "the only thing it does," make proteins - presumably why those with a simplistic naive view of micro-biology would imagine the rest of it as mere "junk."

I thought then and I think now that insistence on a simplistic cartoonish view is maintained from the motive of supporting an ideology most often accepted by the lay public on the basis of ignorance.  Or, more typically in the uncommitted agnostics, just out of a lack of teaching and learning time and the condescending idea that most high school and even college students taking basic biology are too stupid to understand how complex it is.  I have a strong feeling that a lot of it is science teachers and even working scientists being too reliant on long ago surpassed ideological science which they were too lazy to realize had been surpassed.   No doubt if they did understand more of what is known about those complexities, today, that would raise all kinds of questions that those acculturated into materialism-atheism and scientism would be afraid of.  I think that realization that such complexity as was being revealed even back into the 1930s and certainly by the 1950s when Barbara McClintok was warned by her colleagues that the kinds of discoveries she was publishing would hurt her career would harm the materialist-atheist-scientistic view of reality was the dominant reason for that.  I think that professional harm to the progress of science came because a lot of them realized or vaguely intuited that the discovery of that level of complexity in the "simplest" units of life would obliterate the traditional ideological use of biology that really got going in a big way with the invention and promotion of natural selection with its random-chance changes and gradual development that, it was imagined, could happen without anything but random-chance as its basis.  That is why I think the ideologues have suppressed such knowledge in science and it's clearly not got little behind it but that non-scientific ideology.  

I think that as much as such ideological materialist-atheist-scientistic partisans would use their assumptions of extreme simplicity about these matters to reject the idea that intelligence was needed to guide the "bio-chemistry" to originate and continue life, their practice of doing that certainly, in light of the utter inadequacy of their foundational assumptions about that "simplicity," that the seeming necessity of "cognitive" behavior for cells to do what they do and to get that right as often as they do justifies someone coming to the conclusion that more than mere random chance within physical causation is necessary for it to happen.  That is, they are justified as long as they do what the materialists never have admitted, that their conclusion on the basis of scientific demonstration, isn't, itself, a scientific conclusion.  That doesn't mean that it is any less valid than many of the conclusions that might fit into the very specific specifications of what should be allowed to be considered science.  

The more I learn what recent science has found about the enormous complexity of knowable life on Earth, the more vanishingly improbable it seems to me that even the sustaining of life now can be on the basis of the old, tired and inadequate formulas of materialist-atheist-scientism, not to mention the gargantuan improbabilities of life arising spontaneously AND SUCCESSFULLY on the early Earth.   I haven't looked it up for this post but I recently read one cosmologist who said on the basis of the improbability of life arising anywhere in our life-permitting universe, he doubts that there is any extra-terrestrial life anywhere else in our universe.  I have no idea if that's true but I am increasingly doubtful that life arises anywhere without there being some kind of cognitive intent being involved in it.  

James Shapiro's admission that he thinks of that in terms he can understand, what would be described as "anthropomorphically" is far more honest than what you generally get from scientists who would reject that even as they so obviously do it themselves.  I don't think huge areas of science, especially in life science, can possibly avoid doing that even as they deny they do it. I think it would be far safer for them to admit that's what they do instead of denying it.  Every single thing about the alleged science of the observation of behavior is saturated with anthropomorphism because there is no other way to do that.  Scientists couldn't possibly reason themselves into a model of things that can't be observed, small molecules, atoms, subatomic particles, etc. without human imagination being involved.  The dismissal of "imagination" in modernism, allegedly a scientific ideology, is one of the stupidest things about it, made, quite often by those quite ignorant of science, out of inconsideration of reality or profound ignorance.  

I will try to get around to seeing if I can process the sound from the rest of the recording to see if I can make an accurate transcription of it because what he says beyond what I transcribed above is extremely interesting and important.  The last question on the recording deals with the implications that cells are not only capable of demonstrating cognitive behavior but are conscious.  The brief answer that James Shapiro gives doesn't deny that but it does say that there would have to be a lot more known about the relationship of cognition to consciousness (I'd like someone to explain how you could have one without the other) but most interesting in his answer is that it would cause a firestorm of objection, no doubt among his ideological colleagues, to even raise that issue.   Given the attack on consciousness and freedom of thought in mammals, birds, etc. in science and pseudo-science and, for Pete's sake, philosophy, that hesitation is understandable.  That attack on consciousness is entirely in the service of materilaist-atheist ideology, though, as I've said before, such an ideological assertion entirely impeaches the validity of the science which such scientists make their claims from.  If consciousness is an illusion, if free thought is an illusion on the basis of physical causation then every single thought every human being, including scientists have is as illusory.  You can't claim that human beings are nothing but involuntary automatons without science, mathematics, the entire curriculum of academia and human culture being impeached,  It is a sign of the decadence of academia in our time that you can hold a faculty position within some of our most reputable of universities while denying that human beings are conscious and that the credentialed graduates of those universities feel that they need to promote that anti-intellectual, ultimately anti-democratic holding of materialist-atheist-scientism.  The social, legal and political results of such a belief have murdered scores if not hundreds of millions and have oppressed and enslaved billions of human beings, not to mention the even greater totals of those tortured and killed among our fellow sentient creatures.  Materialism inevitably leads to treating human beings and other living creatures as objects for use and disposal.  It is a more depraved ideology in effect than many of the worst human and animal-sacrificing religions were in that regard, they do it casually and daily to millions.  

I have come to appreciate just how dangerous the philosophical incompetence that characterizes current science is.  I'd include within philosophy though most people don't take that nearly as seriously.   It is dangerous because of the incredibly outsized reliance of competence and honesty is whenever something is published under the guise of it being the product of honestly applied scientific method, which is alleged to produce disinterested information.  A lot of that comes from the absurdity of much of what is deputed to be "science" when it doesn't follow anything like scientific methods.  The unthinking, uncritical assumption that because a scientist says something that that comprises reliable information.  If that is less or more dangerous than the reliance on the American judicial system, the judgements of judges, up to and including the Corrupt Court, I don't know but I know it is plenty dangerous for it to become an issue.   

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

But there is one area in which materilist-atheist-devotees of scientism constantly and consistently and insistently anthropomorphize and that's when they are thinking about God and God's motives or how God thinks.  If it is considered inappropriate to call such complex cellular behavior and its controlling, unseeable motivation "cognition" or "knowing" because it is "anthropomorphic" then it is even more absurd to then believe that the infinitely (effectively) more complex control of physical reality and more on Earth, in life, in the universe could happen through some form of cognition which any human being could imagine to refute its "necessity."  Such claims of non-necessity as if that is refutation is not based on any kind of hard evidenced analysis but is merely an appeal to seeming probability.  Though, since it's not really possible to know if any of it is possible without intelligent intention or content, there is no real or valid means of determining if the alternatives that we imagine in some scheme of improbability is, in fact, possible. In the case of the existence of life on Earth, in the universe, the kind of life we know of and which science has learned some little about, its existence without intelligent behavior doesn't seem to be possible.  The idea that a purely mechanical model of the "simplest" of life is even adequate is entirely unevidenced.  

Those old materialist-atheist-scientistic models of reality were based on two things, human technological processes and products and human imaginings of how objects move and interact, frequently based on ideas derived from human manipulations of materials.  As James Shapiro notes, every viable, changing, living and reproducing cell outstrips even our most modern of technological operations and organization every second they are alive.  Clearly the old line materialist models and imaginings of such things are grotesquely inadequate to account for even what has been observed.  Materialism should be a dead ideology on that basis, alone.  Atheism based in materialism should be as dead and scientism, an ideology that can't be true unless it is false, should never have gotten off the ground.  But it not only has but is sustained by the philosophical and rational decadence of modern life and modern academia.  The journalistic and show-biz promotion of that by an especially degraded establishment is done entirely on the basis of sheer non-intelligence.  
 
* The necessity of "anthropomorphizing" as even the possibility of coming to an understanding of other organisms is probably inescapable and the sooner scientists are honest about that the sooner they'll be being honest about what they're doing.  No statement has ever been made about the behavior, even the observed behavior, of a non-human organisms which isn't saturated with "anthropomorpizing."  If that's the case with the observable actions of cells, it's many, many times more true of behaving multi-cellular organisms, the behaviors of which are far more complex because they are the product of far more complex multi-cellular actions.  The worst of those dishonestly claimed "objective" presentations of that, such as ethology, are far more junk than any part of DNA would seem to be.  

** If there is one thing I really hate it's listening to an interesting scientific or technical lecture that shows that the sciency-tech guys who organize and arrange such things are so much less apt to produce an audio recording of it competently than the religious lecture organizers I listen to do.  The talks of such evangelicals as William Lane Craig, on the high end, and those who are far more of the Trumpzi variety tend to be entirely audible and understandable and easily transcribed.   I haven't found a lecture by James Shapiro online that doesn't have major problems, and those are hardly the only ones given by even such eminent scientists that can be said about.  In none of those was he at fault for that lack of clarity, his content proves that he more than did his part in that regard.   You'd think that they'd go to the bother of having such important lectures be understandable to the largest numbers of those who would like or need to listen to them THOSE WHO WILL BE LISTENING TO THEM ON RECORDINGS DAYS OR YEARS AFTER THEY WERE GIVEN.  It's really amazing how sloppy and slipshod some even well funded, eminent lectureships in the sciences are.   You'd think, if anything, they'd be the ones that did a great job with the technology.  

More About The Historical Jesus Business

IN HIS CRITICISM of the critical-historical method of slicing and dicing and discarding of the Scriptures, Walter Brueggemann says that he thinks the people who do that have a basic misunderstanding of the kind of literature that the Gospels, and, in fact, all of the Scriptures are.  They aren't histories so the "critical-historical" method treats them as if they were a kind of literature which they are not.  I think one of the best descriptions of what the Gospels are and what that aren't was written by the late Fr. Richard McBrien in his enormous textbook on Catholic Theology, "Catholicism."  After a brief discussion of the non-Christian sources during the period in question, he says:

The most important source for the life of Jesus, therefore, remains the New Testament itself, and the four Gospels in particular.  But when one dips into the Gospels, one finds that they do not present history as we generally understand that word today.  In other words, they would not stand up alongside a lengthy obituary essay in the New York Times as a work of objective reporting and interpretation. [I'll interject that I think McBrien was giving the Times too much credit.]  They provide us instead with a testimony of faith.  The purpose is not to reconstruct the life of Jesus in every chronologically accurate detail, but to illustrate the eternal significance of Jesus through selected examples of his preaching, his activities, and impact of both upon his contemporaries.

The Gospels were written by men of faith for women and men of faith.  They are the product of subsequent reflection on the life of Jesus - a process that required anywhere from thirty-five to sixty years.  They are complex documents because of their peculiar purpose,  because of the diversity of their origin and the audiences to which they were initially addressed, and because of the various stages of development they passed through before reaching the form in which we have them.

That thirty-five to sixty years after the death of Jesus dating of the Gospels is not a firm fact, it is speculative and hardly a product of complete agreement even among experts of good will instead of ulterior motivation.  And there is plenty of ulterior motivation on both sides when it comes to that, may Historical Jesus guys like John Dominic Crossan are rather blatantly self-serving in their preferred dating, late for the canonical books, early for those much later gospels he prefers.  Right now, under the influence of Professor Israel Knoll and a Protestant commentator, whose name escapes me right now, I'm inclined to suspect that the Gospel of Mark may have originally been composed during the period in which Caiaphas was still the high-priest of the Temple since, unlike presumably later Gospels, he is only mentioned by title and not name.  I also would say that if the "Q" hypothesis that explains the common material contained in Matthew and Luke is valid, then it's quite probable that there were other texts concerning Jesus and his teachings that were earlier than that time-frame, as well.  Though, as McBrien and Brueggemann say, those weren't attempts at writing histories.  Arguably Luke's Gospel, with its preface addressed to "Theophilus" might lead someone to suspect that he had something like a primitive historical method in mind when he gathered information (no doubt judging among things as to their dependability) but the product isn't a modern history.  I would also point out that much of modern history, deemed to be that, is hardly all-inclusive or without thematic or ideological or even partisan being absent from what is produced.  There is no way to present the life of a single person with enormous and good documentation in even a multi-volume autobiography or history.  That is nothing that is peculiar to the Gospels, it's the character of any such text.

While all of what Richard McBrien said on the topic is interesting in itself, the known and assumed aspects of the production of the texts as we have them gets really interesting, for me at least, a couple of pages on.

Different Cultures

Furthermore, there are different cultures at work in the production of the New Testament, and these, in turn, generate distinctive theological viewpoints regarding the meaning of Jesus.  These are the cultures of the Palestinian communities of Aramaic/Hebrew-speaking Jewish Christians, of the Syrian communities of Greek-speaking Jewish Christians, of the communities of Asia Minor and Greece with their communities influenced by major individual Christians like Paul and John.  One might also classify these cultures more broadly as Palestinian, Jewish-Hellenistic, and Hellinstic-Gentile.

Only in the past century has biblical scholarship acquired the linguistic and historical data necessary for even recognizing such theological and cultural diversity within New Testament Christianity.  Previous scholarship, for example, had known Aramaic, the language which Jesus apparently spoke.  But the only forms of Aramaic which it had at its disposal came from several centuries before Jesus (Imperial Aramaic) or from several centuries after Jesus (Syriac and Talmudic Aramaic).  "To reconstruct the language of Jesus from such evidence," Catholic biblical scholar Raymond Brown rites, "was not unlike trying to reconstruct Shakespearean English from Chaucer and the New York Times" (Horizons, vol. 1, 1974, p 43).  The situation improved over the past one hundred years through such discoveries as the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947. (For a thorough summary of their contents and significance, see John J. Collins, "Dead Sea Scrolls" The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol 3, New York: Doubleday, 1992 pp 85-101.  See also Joseph Fitzmyer's Responses to 101 Questions on the Dead Sea Scrolls, New York: Paulist Press, 1992.)  

Sayings of Jesus

In spite of the plurality of stages, layers, forms, and so forth, biblical scholars have reached a consensus regarding criteria for establishing authentic sayings of the historical Jesus: (1) Sayings which contain Aramaicisms characteristic of the Palestine of Jesus' day are more likely to have their origin in Jesus.  (2) The shorter or shortest of two or three different accounts of the same incident is probably the one closer or closest to the source, since authors tend to expand and explain. (3) Sayings or principles attributed to Jesus which are contrary to the developing traditions of the early Church, and which would even have been a source of embarrassment for it, are usually more authentic than those which clearly give support to current attitudes. (4) The same is true of elements in the message of Jesus which make a break with the accepted traditions and customs of Judaism (although this criterion must be used with caution since we are ill-informed about popular Jewish-Aramaic religious practices and vocabulary in early first-century Galilee).  (5) Words and deeds which are attested to by many different sources probably have a strong historical basis. (6) Negatively, sayings which reflect the faith, practices, and situation of the post-resurrection Church cannot be taken always at face value.  All of these criteria must be taken together and used in a mutually self-correcting way.

I've got some problem with some of these. I question if there is enough knowledge of the Aramaic of Jesus's time and place to know what would be "characteristic" in any given word or short phrase.  I'm a little more comfortable with the assumption 2, about shortness perhaps being more credible than a longer version of it.  Not enough is known about where the writer got the account from, people are as apt to elide as they are to elaborate, in my experience.  Especially in an oral transmission of something.   Other than that the "faith, practice and situation of the post-resurrection Church" could be a product of the text as they received and understood it determining that "faith, practice and situation."   I don't think there's any way to know that in the absence of more information than is available.  

In his The Real Jesus, Luke Timothy Johnson makes in interesting point that this whole enterprise of "historical Jesus" stuff makes an odd assumption that the oldest understanding of something is necessarily the best understanding of it.  While that is true for an historical report on an event or person WHEN THERE IS SUFFICIENT PRIMARY DOCUMENTATION AVAILABLE TO COME TO SOME CONCLUSION ABOUT THAT, as a matter of understanding of the phenomenon and teachings and life, death and Resurrection of Jesus, there is no reason to assume that a later understanding of that might well be superior as is the assumption in so many other areas of thinking, writing and research.  As McBrien notes, the information available only in the second half of the 20th century gave scholars a far better base on which to make judgments on the question of the Aramaic language that Jesus almost certainly spoke than would have been available to, say, most Greek speaking and writing members of the early Church.  The Gospels, themselves, note that the closest followers of Jesus didn't understand much of what they heard from him until after his death and Resurrection.  

It's especially odd for the Christian Church to make such an assumption because the entire basis of Christianity is the belief in the Living Jesus, the Living God who is alive and at work in the vastly complex and changing history of human beings, the Earth and the entire Cosmos. Somewhere in "Catholicism" in regard to questions about Women's ordination and the assumption that the Catholic Church in the period of JPII and Benedict XVI was some kind of final stage of its life, it's pointed out that if the Church is still around after 20,000 then the year 2000 will be seen as the "early church."  Right now it's know that there were Women deacons in the Early Church and it's proposed by a number of scholars, on good reasoning, that such "deacons" may well have functioned sacramentally as priests do now.  Such long entrenched policies as a supposedly celibate priesthood were certainly not known in the Apostolic era, Peter was certainly married as, presumably, others who were documented as insiders in Jesus's inner circle of followers.   And Peter is considered to be the first pope, now, though it would be a number of centuries before any of those on that list would know they were popes.  As I've said, I'm quite sure Peter thought of himself as a Jew as one of the earliest Popes was said to have been.

I might type out more of Richard McBrien's discussion of this in coming days.  

Happy Transgender Day of Visibility

GLAAD says it all here, so I'll just copy some of what they said. 

International TDOV was created in 2010 by trans advocate Rachel Crandall. Crandall, the head of Transgender Michigan, created TDOV in response to the overwhelming majority of media stories about transgender people being focused on violence. She hoped to create a day where people could celebrate the lives of transgender people, while still acknowledging that due to discrimination, not every trans person can or wants to be visible.

Given that a minority of Americans say they personally know someone who’s transgender, the vast majority of the public learns about trans people from the media. This is a problem because, as shown in the Netflix documentary Disclosure, the media has misrepresented, mischaracterized, and stereotyped trans people since the invention of film. These false depictions have indisputably shaped the cultural understanding of who trans people are and have modeled, often for the worse, how the average cisgender person should react to and treat trans people in their own lives.

Evident in 2024 is intensifying backlash toward trans people, be it through legislative measures which, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, includes 479 anti-LGBTQ bills introduced across state legislatures this year alone, to direct physical violence, declared an epidemic by the American Medical Association since 2019, which disproportionately affects Black trans women with a majority being young people of color. This year, Nex Benedict, a 16-year-old Indigenous and 2STGNC+ (Two Spirit, transgender and gender nonconforming+) sophomore, was killed in Oklahoma, underscoring the severe and significant impact of bullying and discrimination.

That’s why it’s still necessary for trans people to be seen through authentic, diverse, and accurate stories which reflect the actual lived experiences of trans people; both for themselves and for the people who believe they’ve never met a trans person.

This includes in news media, where too often trans people’s voices are missing from coverage of anti-trans laws and policies affecting their lives. This is true even at The New York Times where Media Matters recorded that the paper excluded the perspectives of trans people from two-thirds (60%) of its stories about anti-trans legislation in the year following public criticism for its handling of the topic.

Without trans people, including experts who are trans weighing in, and without trans representation in newsrooms to help guide coverage, anti-trans discrimination is often misrepresented in the news as a “culture clash” and “just asking questions” rather than as willful misinformation and targeted hate.

While backlash is a reality that trans people and allies are experiencing, new GLAAD polling data indicates that the vast majority of voting groups oppose candidates who campaign against transgender people’s access to healthcare and youth sports participation, and acceptance continues to rise with personal familiarity and exposure to trans stories in media.

Do You Really Believe Jesus Rose From The Dead? - Hate Mail

 Yes.    

Not only that, he not only rose, Jesus IS risen.

Let's Dump The "E" Word In Favor Of "Peaske"

HAVING WRITTEN about the college-credentialed-brain-deficient. ahistorical nonsense about those mean Christians stealing Easter from those poor-put-upon-pagans, at length, I'm just going to link to the last in depth post I did on it. 

My Easter Evergreen - Eostre, My Ass

My friend, RMJ has written on it numerous times, as well, and very well, indeed. 

One supposes that in the fact-checking deficient practice of those with college-credentials, now, ours is the fool's golden age of post-truth,  those posts will still be timely well after we've gone to our judgement day.  

If nothing else, changing the name to something more in line with the Hebrew would piss off the anti-christians. 

God's Ultimate Fidelity To Living Creatures - The Greatest Scandals In The Gospel

THE THEORY that the scandalous content of the Gospels gives them credibility because no one who would be making up things about a man who is asserted to be the Son of God that made belief in them harder has always made the most sense to me.    The Virgin Birth is the first of those scandals and the last and most glaring of those surround the crucifixion and the Resurrection.   The greatest of those scandalous sayings come out of the mouth of Jesus, himself. 

One of the most scandalous things in the entirety of Christianity are the doubts and fears that Jesus expressed as he knowingly approached his crucifixion are things I remember being troubled to while listening to the Passion on Palm Sunday and on Good Friday.   His begging his Father to spare him the horrible pains of crucifixion even while saying, in effect, Your will be done, not mine, his crying out the doubt that the Father was with him as he died, from the 22nd Psalm,  how could someone who was God incarnate, knowing of his own immortal Spirit, knowing he would rise from death say those things? 

One of the biggest problems I have with the modern fashion of "critical historical" analysis of the Gospels and other books of the Bible is that it refuses to admit that such things will never be subject to historical analysis or textual analysis or even theological reasoning because nothing gives us enough knowledge of what happened or how it was transmitted or recorded.   I think Luke Timothy Johnson is right when he says that, like it or not, what we have are the texts as they are and those are what any useful or important thinking about such things will have to depend on.   No amount of slicing, dicing and discarding and latter day analysis of those will ever produce something that is superior to those imperfect texts as we have them.

There is an example of that relevant to today.   As influenced by him as I was in the early 1990s, as important as his "Historical Jesus" book was to my eventual conversion,  one of the biggest problems I had with John Dominic Crossan's speculations was that, apart from the multiply attested burial of the body of Jesus, he said that the Roman soldiers would have thrown it into a shallow pit where, even if it were buried, would have been dug up by dogs and eaten by them.   I found it especially hypocritical for him to hold that because of his announced method of depending on such things as multiple attestation, testing of texts on the basis of their temporal proximity to the witnesses of the events, etc.   If something written forty or fifty years after the death of Jesus is to be held to be unreliable, even with multiple attestations, some of those admitted to be independent of each other, the speculations of a late 20th century bible scholar on the basis of stereotypes, a reconstructed "typical" anthropological, sociological cartoon of what happened - often based on far less contemporary testimony or even physical evidence - can't be any more credible than the original claims in the Gospels, in the letters of Paul, James, etc.  

Maybe it's due to my Catholic upbringing but I'm a lot more comfortable with admitting that there is a lot which is most honestly categorized as "mystery" that will always remain mystery than I am with modern reconstruction based on the pseudo-social sciences.   In terms of today's memorial,  I find the Gospel accounts to be far more credible than any deviating claims of even the most respectable of academic scribblers and babblers.   I don't think we'll ever know but I will speculate on the basis of the claim of Paul that Jesus was like us in all things except for sin.  Jesus, as the Son of God was fully human and, so, would have had to experience a real human death, a death of the worst kind, tortured intentionally, mocked and humiliated, stripped naked and put up as an icon of terror by an evil empire to frighten and control any who would oppose them. 

I think of the fear and doubt of Jesus to be the fullest measure of God's fidelity to living beings,  God expressing the understanding and experience of us at our most extreme, at our most vulnerable, at our least confident, fearing our own non-existence.   Knowing he was going to die, fearing that ultimate extinction that we all must fear in death, was the ultimate sign of God's fidelity to life, to sentient creatures, to human kind.   Seen that way, it seems to me that the Death and Resurrection of Jesus is the ultimate vindication of the entire tradition going back to the first time God is said to have found God's Creation good. 

The Trial of Jesus - An Alternative Timeline by Prof. Israel Knohl

 

On this episode,  one of most brilliant Biblical scholars of our time, Prof. Israel Knohl, grounded in meticulous research on the messianism debates in the Bible and during the Second Temple period,  argues that Jesus’s trial was in reality a dramatic clash between two Jewish groups holding opposing ideologies of messianism and anti-messianism, with both ideologies running through the Bible. The Pharisees (forefathers of the rabbinic sages) and most of the Jewish people had a conception of a Messiah similar to Jesus: like the prophets and most psalmists, they expected the arrival of a godlike Messiah. However, the judges who sentenced Jesus to death were Sadducees, who were fighting with the Pharisees largely because they repudiated the Messiah idea. Thus, the trial of Jesus was not a clash between Jewish and what would become Christian doctrines but a confrontation between two internal Jewish positions—expecting a Messiah or rejecting the Messiah idea—in which Jesus and the Pharisees were actually on the same side.

Knohl contends that had the assigned judges been Pharisees rather than Sadducees, Jesus would not have been convicted and crucified. The Pharisees’ disagreement with Jesus was solely over whether Jesus was the Messiah—but historically, for Jews, arguing about who was or wasn’t the Messiah was not uncommon.

Prof. Israel Knohl  is an Israeli Bible scholar and historian. He is the Yehezkel Kaufmann Professor of Biblical studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a Senior Fellow at Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. His books deal with the integration of scientific and archaeological discoveries with the biblical account, early Israelite beliefs, a survey of Israelite cult, and how and where the Israelites originated.

This is one of the most interesting things I've heard about the trial and execution of Jesus because it shows how the account in the Gospel of Mark shows how intimately the author understood the internal politics of the leadership in the Temple (Sadducees) and the Pharisees was exploited to guarantee a death sentence to Jesus.   It is one of the most informative things I've ever heard or read on the topic.   And it's definitely not from a Christian apologetic point of view.

Just Got Our Electricity Back

 the ice storms that used to be so rare when we had real winter are coming more and more often, it seems.   Someone was saying they didn't expect we'd get it back till Wednesday so I guess I shouldn't complain.   Though everyone does when they say they shouldn't.

Replaying An Oldie For St. Patrick's Day

Thursday, March 17, 2016

St. Patrick Day

Some passages from Thomas Cahill's book How the Irish Saved Civilization

Patrick's gift to the Irish was his Christianity - the first de-Romanized Christianity in human history, a Christianity without the sociopolitical baggage of the Greco-Roman world, a Christianity that completely inculturated itself into the Irish scene.  Through the Edict of Milan, which had legalized the new religion in 313 and made it the new emperor's pet,  Christianity had been received into Rome, not Rome into Christianity!  Roman culture was little altered by the exchange, and it is arguable that Christianity lost much of its distinctiveness.  But in the Patrician exchange, Ireland, lacking the power and implacable tradition of Rome, had been received into Chirstianity, which transformed Ireland into Something New, something never seen before - a Christian culture, where slavery and human sacrifice became unthinkable, and warfare, tough impossible for humans to eradicate, diminished markedly.  The Irish, in any case, loved physical combat too much for intertribal warfare to disappear entirely.  But new laws, influenced by Gospel norms, inhibited such conflicts severely by requiring that arms be taken up only for a weighty cause.  Ireland would not again see a battle on the scale of the Tain till Brian Boru would rout the Vikings in the eleventh century.

The ending of human sacrifice was common wherever Christianity was introduced, which must have been a blessed relief to those who were at greatest risk of being selected for incredibly brutal, pagan, ritual murder.  I can only imagine it was through the force of personality and authenticity that Patrick was able to overturn that practice.  He seems to have had an enormous amount of courage in facing the brutality of the pagans in Ireland which, I would imagine, impressed them.

The ending of slavery in Ireland, the first place in Europe which I'm aware of it having ended, was, till the time of Patrick, unique.  There had been Chritians who called for the end of slavery,  St. Macrina the Younger and her brother St. Gregory of Nyssa had almost a century before Patrick but he got the powers in Christian Ireland to give it up until it was reintroduced by the English after they invaded and colonized Ireland.  You have to remember that Patrick was an escaped slave, himself, he knew what slavery was in only the way that a slave can know it.

Ireland is unique in religious history for being the only land into which Christianity was introduced without bloodshed.  There were no Irih martyrs (at least not till Elizabeth began to create them eleven centuries after Patrick).  And this lack of martyrdom troubled the Irish, to whom a glorious death by violence presented such an exciting finale.  If all Ireland had received Christianity without a fight, the Irish would have to think up some new form of martyrdom - something even more intereting than the wonderfully grisly store they had begun to learn in the simple continental collections, called "martyrologies," from which Patrick and his successors taught them to read.

Thomas Cahill gets to the subject of his book after that, first the establishment of monaisticism in Ireland and then the rapid transformation of a nearly totally illiterate nation into the scribal publishing powerhouse on the outer edge of Western Europe that, literally, preserved huge parts of classical and even pagan culture, as illiteracy ruled in the rest of Western Europe.  He notes how it was from Ireland that not only Christianity but literacy and the texts of classical and other texts were introduced into Scotland, England, Wales, France and elsewhere in Europe as the medieval period proceeded.  I might go into the ironies, given the popularity of the English "enlightenment" myth, pretty much invented by Edward Gibbon,  that Christians burned the Great Library at Alexandria  among atheists and online Pagans, that it was those poor, put upon pagans who ended the great period of Irish scholarship and intellectual missionary efforts when the Vikings pillaged and destroyed the Irish monasteries in Ireland and elsewhere.

As to how paganism in Ireland fared under Christianity,  Cahill says:

As these transformed warrior children of Patrick's heart lay down the swords of battle, flung away the knives of sacrifice and cast aside the chains of slavery,  they very much remained Irishmen and Irishwomen.  Indeed, the survival of an Irish psychological identity is one of the marvels of the Irish story.  Unlike the continental church fathers, the Irish never troubled themselves overmuch about eradicating pagan influences, which the tended to wink at and enjoy. The pagan festivals continued to be celebrated, which is why we today can still celebrate the Irish feasts of May Day and Hallowe'en.  To this day there is a town in Kerry that holds a fertility festival each August, where a magnificent he-goat presides like Cernunnos for three days and nights, and bacchanalian drinking, wild dancing and varieties of sexual indiscretion are the principal entertainments.  It is this characteristically Irish melange of pagan and Christian that forms the theme of Brian Friel's magnificent play "Dancing at Lughnasa" - Lughnasa being the harvest feast of the god Lug, still celebrated on August 1 in parts of Ulster.   Irish marriage customs remained most un-Roman.  As late as the twelfth century - seven centuries after the conversion of the Irish to the Gospel - a husband or wife could call it quits and walk out for good on February 1, the feast of Imbolc, which meant that Irish marriages were renewable yearly, like magazine subscriptions or insurance policies.  As lat as the last century naked men (and, for all we know, women) races horses bareback along Clare's beaches thorough the surf at high tide, looking for all the world like their prehistoric warrior ancestors.  But after Patrick the eviler gods shrank in stature and became much less troublesome, became in fact the comical gargoyles of medieval imagination, peering fearfully from undignified nooks, and the belief grew strong that the one thing the devil cannot bear is laughter.

I'd like to make a distinction between that and how the commercial, brewing industry inspired American style desecration of St. Patrick Day, though the distinction would be subtle.  I'm not exactly sure I agree with him about Hallowe'en, but I will agree with him, completely, about Brian Friel who was a wonderful playwright.

Edmund Campion, the Elizabethan Jesuit who was martyred at Tyburn in 1581 left us a description of the Irish that rings true to this day:

"The people are thus inclined:  religious, franke amorous, irefull, sufferable of paines infinte, very glorious, many sorcerers, excellent horsemen, delighted with warres, great almes-givers, [sur]passing in hospitalitie...  They are sharpe-witted, lovers of learning, capable of any studie whereunto they bend themselves, constant in travaile, adventurous, intractable, kinde-hearted, secret in displeasure."

We can make out in this Elizabethan group portrait not only the Irish of our own day but the lively ghosts of Irishmen long past - Ailil, Medb, Cuchulainn. Derdriu. and, after a fashion, Patrick himself.  Whether or not Freud was right when he muttered in exasperation that the Irish were the only people who could not be helped by psychoanalysis, there can be no doubt of one thing:  the Irish will never change. 

I have often wished my grandparents had lived long enough so I could ask them what they thought about Freudian theories when they first heard of them, their lives included the period when those were translated into English and popularized.   I strongly suspect they'd have thought they were as ridiculous as, in fact, they are and that the many people who fell for that nonsense were ridiculous.  If that's a national trait of the Irish, I don't know.  I am at a loss for how anyone, anywhere, could have been so credulous as to believe in them, but, then, I'm at a loss to understand how much so much of the total nonsense that constitutes the equipment of an allegedly educated English speaker, much of it junk invented in the 18th century, is required to pass as respectable.

 

It Wasn't Only That One god Of Modernism That Failed

ALL OF THE gods OF SECULARISM have failed in the United States, just as the god of communism did.  The Constitution has failed.  If it had been what it was alleged to be, if it was the sacred document that our, to use the putrid phrasing of the corrupt Sandra Day O'Connor, "civic religion" requires be presented as infallible and holy writ, the Constitution, Donald Trump would never have been president.  Instead it was exactly the Constitution, in the forms of the Electoral College and the inanity of the lie-permitting First Amendment which produced exactly what those were supposed to protect us from, a despotic government voted into office by a minority who believed the lies spread by the entirely libertine "free press" as manipulated by billionaires, domestic and foreign to the edification of the corporate owners of the "press."   

Democracy requires that an effective majority of People know the truth that will make us free, pretending it's safe to allow lies is probably the most anti-democratic legal claim there could possibly be.  Yet the golden calf of our idolatry, the First Amendment does just that.

The courts, especially the Supreme Court, from hereon in honestly named the Corrupt Court, have repeatedly enabled Trump and the Republican-fascists during his criminal reign as they did during the previous record-holder of presidential criminality, Ronald Reagan, only far more boldly and blatantly than it did four decades ago.  Their latest move to hear a case that should never have been a question that it needed to be heard, that an American President has a carte blance to commit any crime he decides to, is a blatant attempt for him to run out the clock on his prosecutions to help him in the election this year.  That is so obvious that calling it a "ruse" is to essentially miss the meaning of what a ruse is, it's blatant Republican-fascist Corrupt Court partisan corruption to try to help install the idiot baby-man who will usher in blatant fascist rule in the United States.  There has not been anything as bald an attempt to do something that disgustingly immoral since the Taney Court's attempt to extend slavery throughout the country on the basis of "property rights."  

If you think that comparison of Roberts et al to Taney et al, ia over the top,  remember, the Roberts-Republican-fascists have enabled him to escape responsibility for the most blatant and serious attempt at an insurrection since the one Taney et al moved on in Dred Scott, the Corrupt Court decision that led to the Civil War.  At the same time the Roberts Court has made sure that their potential invisible army, the Court clique clan, will be armed with automatic weapons with which to impose Republican-fascist rule on the country, no doubt with willing and enthusiastic mass murderers to put down any resistance.  I don't think even Taney would have done that, though he and subsequent courts did his best to do so when it would have been Black People and Native Americans who would have been the target for terror killings and de facto enslavement.  

That anyone would have nurtured any reverent faith that the Corrupt Court would save us from oligarchic dictatorship could only do so from a total and complete ignorance of the history of that corrupt organ of government. But our "civic religion" is nothing if not in the business of promoting pious lies and ignorance of things like that.

Lower courts have a more mixed record, though in far too many cases they have dallied and delayed even when their results FINALLY turned out to be sound.  That a "judge" like Aileen Cannon is still allowed to blatantly enable Trump to get away with what is probably the most serious give-away of U.S. national security secrets to whoever he figures will get him something OR TO A RANDOM AUSTRAILIAN BILLIONAIRE THE MAKE-BELIEVE BILLIONAIRE WANTS TO IMPRESS is absolute proof of the utter corruption of the judiciary.  No doubt even the good judges who believe in democracy and, some of them, maybe, even egalitarian government will trim their actions because of fear of being overturned by the more elite levels of that hierarchy.  The Corrupt Court is probably the ultimate source of most of the bad habits that persist in lower courts and on down throughout the lawyering racket though many of those practices have been endemic to the profession of lawyering back to the dawn of that more damnable of oldest professions.

That more of Trumps crooked, often law breaking lawyers haven't been kicked out of that cartel is just more of the same corruption,  I think, since most of the worst of the upper levels of the judiciary come from them, the Ivy League and Ivy equivalent level law schools, those have to share in the blame for producing what they produce.  Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Georgetown, etc, credentials from those schools should carry a suspicion of being highly trained in how to lie for the deepest pockets and, if not that, then in training to come up with dishonest reasons to do awful things.  If they can get a "justice" Jackson to nullify a key provision of the 14th Amendment that would have saved us from Trump, through her Harvard Law training, it is rightly suspected of being the source of that corruption.   Though, the often vaunted credential that someone is an expert in the secular-theological "Constitutional scholarship" is largely based on studying what the Corrupt Court and lower courts of jurisdiction have held about that document.  The lies and distortions of that very amendment, alone, would comprise a huge index of folly so as to put the worst of scholastic theology in a better light.

I will point out that the Roberts Court nullification of that provision in the Constitution proves that the Marbury v Madison usurped power for the Corrupt Court to overturn duly adopted federal law has clearly now been expanded by that court to include the power to, without any Constitutional process, amend and nullify the Constitution, itself.  With that our expectations of a government of laws and not of men is made a meta-lie as whopping big as the one that Corrupt Court has over its doorway, "equal justice under law."  

The media which the relatively young Thomas Jefferson believed would provide  insurance against despotism has been, if anything, even more corrupt than the legal racket and the Corrupt Court. That media mounted god of secularism was a fraud from the start.  The more experienced Jefferson was far less naive about the corruption that the press, freed to lie with impunity embodied.  The media, including the most profitable, and so most powerful, part of it, entertainment, has enabled the corruption of the United States to an extent that puts the corrupt judiciary in the place of "also ran" us into fascism.  The freer they have been to lie, to lie about politicians, the more they have promoted the worst choices, starting with Nixon in 1968, Reagan in 1980, and the series of Republicans who have taken that party into its present fascism.  NBC, the parent of the ever less "liberal" MSNBC, is taking that same road that every other major network has.   Anyone who had a brain in their head in 1964 when the Warren Court took the greatest steps toward our lying media would have known it would be anyone who promoted equality and democracy that they would go after and not the enemies of equality and democracy.  Our media has always been, on balance, a bulwark of the oligarchs, millionaires, billionaires and our native tendencies towards facism.  That has certainly been the predictable result as the Republicans took in the native American fascists of white supremacy so as to get a majority for the billionaires and millionaires to fleece the country more than they had been used to doing so. America has never been without a dangerously large and ignorant and vicious wedge of People for whom hatred, envy and fear win out over any better angels that attend them.  And I'm not only talking about those on the so-called "right."

The American left, especially that part of it that are faithful to the "civic religion" of secularism, the de facto faith of the college credentialed crowd, have been total and complete suckers for this progress into fascism on the basis of "The First Amendment" and other such slogans.  As the fascists gulled ever more Americans they bought the ACLU line of "more speech" even though that "more speech" was never enough to protect equality and democracy from the reign of lies that were amplified through the billions of times "more speech" which the Supreme Court gave to the billionaires and millionaires when they declared that money was speech in Buckley v Valeo, another of the obvious outcomes of another daffy ruling in which a number of the "liberal" "justices" joined in on out of "principle."  The fifty plus years of descent from the high point of liberal politics in the early LBJ administration has proven that free speech absolutism hasn't done much of anything to protect us from the most criminal administrations and regimes* in our history.

The religion of secularism has failed on every count, that secularism, in its immoral "moral neutrality"  has no firm foundation on which to make moral judgements  and so always is in a neutral wash that enables the worst immorality.  So it's no great surprise that in the crisis we are in it is so impotent to protect egalitarian democracy.  The comedians who like to pat themselves on the back for in their opposition to Trump show that their highest value isn't egalitarian democracy, it's to get the laugh.  Even someone like Steve Colbert has contributed to the general attack on the last hope of even liberal democracy, Joe Biden, on the basis of his age.  That Joe Biden has been the most vigorous Democratic President, combining the moral centeredness of Jimmy Carter with the skill of Lyndon Johnson, while pulling us out of a hopeless quagmire instead of getting us farther into one, has not counted as much to them as the cheap laugh.  I strongly suspect that if Joe Biden got a second term with a really Democratic Congress, he could be the greatest president we have had.  And if he gets it, it won't be because Colbert and some other comedians support him, it will be because there are enough serious people in the country to out-vote the dupes and fascists.   

When we're this close to fascism, none of it's funny.  Comedy in the 1920s did nothing to slow down the Nazis and fascists.  

I am convinced that the reason that American democracy has failed isn't just because education has failed in the hopeless struggle for it to win out over TV and screen based entertainment, it has failed because the moral basis of democracy has been supplanted by Mammonism, the worship of money, which saturates  American life, human life, really.  The churches have certainly been effected by that, especially the ones you might think of first, the Southern Baptists and the Catholic Church.  The Southern Baptists, a denomination founded in support of first slavery then segregation and with some pretty dodgy theological ideas, is only one of a number of Protestant denominations that could be named.  Catholics, the denomination I'm most familiar with, is undergoing a billionaire-millionaire financed take-over attempt aided and abetted by the JPII-Benedict XVI era majority in the U. S. Catholic Conference of Bishops.  But going into details on that would get me into the moral disaster that the JPII papacy led to, a topic in itself.

But even with all of that, the fact that the ultimate source of Christian religion has to rest on the Gospel of Jesus, which is both radically egalitarian and economically leveling, will always leave sincere believers with a far firmer foundation on which to build egalitarian democracy than the mushy swamp of secularism.  

Secularism should never have been an excuse to refuse to name and state moral absolutes, even though ADMINISTRATIVE secularism is an essential practice of a government in an egalitarian democracy.  But it has been used to refuse the most basic of moral foundations of egalitarian democracy as an absolute list of things agreed on by anyone who is allowed to participate in it.

1. That all People have inalienable rights, to material sustenance sufficient to have a decent life.

2. That they have an obligation to accept and act out and promote the basic level of equality to everyone, whatever their ethnicity, race, religion, gender, sex, level of intelligence, etc.  That does not include those who hold an ideology, religious or other belief in their superiority over others which allows them to negate or violate the basic rights of everyone.

3. One person, one vote in determining who governs the country, the state, the locality.  The right of every person to cast a vote and to have that vote count EQUALLY.  I will point out that the Constitution violates that on the most basic level in the Electoral College (if it is not abolished it will destroy democracy) and the anti-democratic constitution of the Senate in which the People of Wyoming, the Dakotas, Vermont, my home state, Maine, etc. have far more representation than the People of California, New York, etc.  

4. That anything that violates equal rights, any ideology OR RELIGION that denies or rejects that can be allowed to propagate through the media or through organized efforts.  WE ALL HAVE A RIGHT TO THE PROTECTION OF EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY THAT OVERRIDES THE 'RIGHT" TO PROMOTE FASCISM OR MARXISM OR ANY OTHER ANTI-EGALITARIAN DEMOCRATIC IDEOLOGY.

The idea that American democracy had an obligation to allow anti-egalitarian, and so anti-democratic ideology to have a chance to destroy egalitarian democracy would have, certainly, been against the anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic financial interests in the framers of the corrupt Constitution, which leads me to the fifth point:

5. WE, LIVING TODAY, HAVE A RIGHT TO EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY THAT THE "FOUNDERS" OR "FRAMERS" CANNOT BE ALLOWED TO PREVENT OR THWART.  Nothing that they said or did which goes against equality and democracy has any moral standing which succeeds our right to egalitarian democracy from here on out.  They weren't all-wise, they weren't even particularly honest, though they may have been marginally more honest than the amoral slime that rules us under the Constitutional order.  The virtue of history honestly considered is it gives us a basis for trying something better than would have occurred to those aristocratic white men who wrote the Declaration of Independence (the founders) and those who wrote the Constitution and its amendments (the framers) who were obviously corrupted by their practice of slavery and their activities as sharp businessmen, land speculators.  That they came from a particularly bad time as the amoral pseudo-scientific "enlightenment" was the fashion didn't help much in them feeling a need to sacrifice their personal wealth and the sleazy sources of it in favor of equality and democracy.  That the sleazy practice of our Corrupt Court is based in their pretenses of "originalism" and "textualism" should be the final nail in the coffin of that particular god of American secularism.   

I may share Charlie Pierce's and others' fear of a new constitutional convention, considering how billionaire-millionaire money corrupts everything now.  But the fact is that it is already corrupting it, not only against BUT THROUGH the Constitution we have now.  I think it will become ever clearer that we have no choice but to largely renovate it if not tear it up and start over.  In that case all of the well-esteemed Constitutional Scholars may lose their specialty's relevance.  I'm not sure I'd trust a lot of them to be in on writing a new one, certainly none that have a history of speaking out against equality and democracy and, most of all, asserting that lies must be protected by the Constitution.  All the evil we have is based in lies told through the media and the worship of that most dangerous of all secular gods, money.   Unless we have a. "First Amendment" that a. makes it clear that lies don't enjoy any legitimate protection and, b. that  organizations, "the press," "religions," corporations cannot possess rights and, so, don't have rights under the Constitution, we may as well not try because that's the major source of the corruption we have now.   Trump, like Reagan before him, were creations of the media, the free press.  They, as politicians instead of just media created false fronts, were a product of the First Amendment, Corrupt Court permission to lie with impunity.  

* Only a presidency which gets a majority of the vote should be given the name of "administration."  Those which are produced by the anti-democratic Electoral College without a majority vote or by the Corrupt Court working on concert with a corrupt family run state government, such as Bush v Gore, are regimes like any other banana republican regime.  

The Difference Between Purity And Political Reality - On The Use Of "Illegals"

NO DOUBT IF he were alive and running for the presidency in 2024, Abraham Lincoln would have been effectively shut out for what he said during those iconic Lincoln-Douglas debates during his campaign to get a Senate seat, one which Douglas won in the end.  You know, the ones that are often named but almost never read or studied.  The debates that were real debates about the most important issues of a campaign, not the stupid show in which media talking heads lob gotcha questions at the Democrat and puffs of eiderdown to the most fascist of Republicans.  

Lincoln would certainly have been shut out during the first one, held in Ottawa, Illinois in which he used the "N" word as he ridiculed the fear tactic that Douglas employed, like a Lou Dobbs or Donald Trump holding out the fear of Illinois being swamped with free Black People if Lincoln's proposals for the promises of the Declaration of Independence were to become law.  

Admittedly, it is jarring to read Lincoln using that word and also denying that he held that Black People were the complete equals of white People, no doubt knowing that even a good number of those who might agree with him that slavery was evil would, nonetheless, be highly offended if someone pointed out that Black People were their equal if not their superiors in some regard. I'd guess a lot of them would have been as offended if someone said that the Irish or other groups of white People were their equals, certainly if Native Americans were, though that didn't come into the debates.

It's one of the truths of American history that the two presidents before Lyndon Johnson who did the most to further equality in reality instead of theory, Lincoln and Harry Truman, are on record as having uttered that very detestable word and probably others.  Today the idiotic political discourse would concentrate on that use of a word and not on the substance of what they did.  Thurgood Marshall once said that Harry Truman integrating the military was, up to that point, the most radical single action a president had ever undertaken in the move towards equal rights, I would guess he meant since Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.  I don't know if he said that before or after the Voting Rights and Civil Rights acts were passed, which I think are even more important.  If Lyndon Johnson is on record as having uttered that word, I don't know but it wouldn't surprise me if he had, being of his time and place and provenance.  Real American democracy starts with the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts, before that it was a everything from a total to growing less than the sham it started out being.  Which is why the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts have been dismantling them, especially the all-important Voting Rights Act.  

I've been looking hard at what Lincoln said in his political speeches and am struck, repeatedly at how often he was playing the crowd while he was leading them beyond where they likely were.  I found his use of the Declaration of Independence, the language of Thomas Jefferson that convicts him of hypocrisy in his increasing dependence on and enthusiasm for holding Black People in slavery (including his own children) after the Revolution was won and the government set up.  The following passage from the first debate held in Ottawa, Illinois is especially interesting in that regard.   Answering an hour and a half of political slamming from Stephen Douglas, he said:

I will say here, while upon this subject, that I have no purpose, either directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so. 

I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the black races. There is a physical difference between the two, which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality; and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position. 

I have never said anything to the contrary, but I hold that, notwithstanding all this, there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence-the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects-certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.

To a real abolitionist, certainly to all Black abolitionists (who history still wants to ignore to focus on White abolitionists), Lincoln's statements in that political debate would be highly and deeply offensive even if his argument for freedom couldn't help but be welcomed. His argument that the Declaration of Independence claimed sufficiently equal rights for everyone, Black People and anyone who anyone claimed wasn't as smart as they were, to enjoy freedom and the right to the fruits of their labor were more radical than the Constitution was and where things were in 1858. I would point out that there were certainly many white People who were not held to be the intellectual equals of others, Women, for example, many of the immigrant population, others in the various regions of the country.  Certainly some of them, hearing or reading those arguments would have understood they applied to their condition, as well.  Though that was certainly not the law of the land.  

I recall reading somewhere that Lincoln was faulted by the most ardent abolitionists of his day as being behind their thinking and slower to act to issue the proclamation banning slavery in the Confederate States than they would have liked, some probably slammed him for not banning it in the states that just barely stayed in the union during the Civil War, Maryland being one of those.  

But it is impossible to not note that whatever the Garrisons and Phillips  did to push on abolitionism, they never held office to make it happen.  They didn't deal in the raw materials to make that happen, persuading voters to vote them into office and to keep them in office long enough to make it happen.  They were able to  remain pure, or purer than a politician can if they have any hope of getting a House or Senate seat or doing what's hardest of all, winning the presidency with the national vote and the engine of corruption baked into that, the Electoral College.  

In a public speech, be it in a debate or a State of the Union or any other, it's very easy to make a gaff or public statement that will offend a part of the audience you are counting on to vote for you and contribute to your margin of victory.  Live performance of something as generally unrehearsed as a speech, especially one containing improvisation, is very hard to pull off with total success.  

The American left, the one that most often gets called "the left" has never been in a position to make the most radical change that can be made, it has never controlled anything much more than a few city councils back in the days of the old Socialist Party - the one the "real radicals" destroyed in 1919 - they don't have much of any ability to do anything but talk and rage.  They don't engage in reality, they don't choose to do the hardest work of all to make real change, get elected in numbers large enough to even make themselves essential to the political success of those who can move things in the right direction.  There's a reason that such a "left" finds its greatest appeal among teenagers and young adults, they are the most callow and those who imagine that there is some distant horizon towards which they can insist things be pushed to RIGHT NOW!  That they have, repeatedly during my lifetime, done exactly the opposite by getting Nixon, Reagan, Bush II and Trump elected, not to mention the House Senate and State offices they've played spoiler in, and so they are not the progressive force they advertise themselves as being but are, in fact, useful idiots, useful tools for the worst among us.   That's such a useful tool for them that they are rather openly aiding the brain-dead candidacy of RFK jr. and have repeatedly financed Green Party politics.  What they don't get from them directly in terms of electoral spoiler candidacies, they reap in highlighting the ballot box poison that is provided by play-lefties with mouths bigger than their intellect playing the game of "most lefty in the room."  

The play-left has been a lot more useful to Republican-fascism than it ever has been the effective and so real left, the ones who get and hold offices, gain real power and can make real laws.  So they buy themselves not being taken seriously by real leftist politicians who know at best they'll have to try to cajole them along but who know, full well, they will turn on a dime and enable fascism.