I'm Not Going To Allow Agreement Or Disagreement On Other Points Keep Me From Seeing Who Makes The Better Arguments - I'd Rather Stop Talking About This

The arguments I've read that support the contention that the Thomas Gospel is a 2nd century text convince me more than the assertion that it or, rather, a "core" of it is contemporary with if not earlier than Mark's Gospel. That the person I read who convinced me on that point is a more conservative Christian who I disagree with about much while the arguments asserting that the "core" of it is earlier is made by John Dominic Crossan, who I agree with about much, but not everything, doesn't figure into my finding the arguments credible.

I think it's pretty clear that the Coptic text translated, what most people mean when they talk about The Gospel of Thomas, was largely drawn from the early Diatesseron of Tatin or some other attempt to harmonize the four canonical Gospels and further distorted. That it managed to quote more of the Gospel canon than even the most scholarly of the earliest writers in the literature is, I think, a pretty convincing argument that it would have had to have had access to the canonical Gospels in some form that was not available to even the most important of the earliest Christian writers. Those were not likely to have been available until the mid to later 2nd or early 3rd century.

Considering the manuscript and textual problems of "The Gospel of Thomas" are even worse than those for the canonical Gospels, I'd think depending on it too hard for any argument is risky. I certainly don't find those sayings in it that the fan gals and guys for "Gnosticism" (which is a modern category, and not a very coherent one at that) like are at all convincing as religion. The one about a man eating lion and lion eating man is just stupid. The last one about women needing to be "spiritually made male" before they can enter the Kingdom of God is certainly more sexist than anything Jesus said in the authentic Gospels or Paul in his letters. The Gospel of John is the one I have the most trouble with but it's a lot more convincing than the Thomas Gospel.

From what I read the "Thomasine community" using the Thomas Gospel that Pagels and others theorize is most likely a figment of their imagination, probably never having existed. Considering the requirements of evidence regularly demanded of orthodox Christianity its opponents should be held to the same standards of evidence. Though the thing being riddled with ideological and polemical motives, that never bodes well for intellectual honesty or integrity. 

I don't think the Thomas mentioned as an apostle in Gospels had anything to do with the "Gospel of Thomas".  I think it's relatively much in the news for the same reason that bogus "Jesus married Mary Magdalene" fragment of papyrus was a few years ago - before even the scholar who promoted it had to admit it was bogus - it's an attack on Christianity.  The real Gospel is attacked because it asserts the most radically egalitarian economics ever articulated in human history.  Even the orthodox churches have obscured that glaring reality of it.   That's the real motive behind the attacks on it.  I don't find the "Thomas Gospel" to be authentic on that ground.  Saying 14, by itself, was enough to put me off of it.   Never trust someone who wants to transcend the moral requirement to give to the poorest.  Never trust them or their religion.

For Anyone Feeling Good About The Supreme Court As They Chickened Out This Time - They're William Barr's Willing Accomplises In State Murder

Trump's worst Attorney General in the history of that office, William Barr, a racist, oligarchic, fascist thug is considered a Catholic, his likely pedophile abusing prep-headmaster father - the one who gave Jeffry Epstein a job teaching math and science when the young pimp didn't even have a bachelors degree - was one of the fascist converts to Catholicism, converted by Rev. C. John McCloskey 3d, an Opus Dei cult priest who was fired from a media job because he sexually abused a woman - which ended up costing the fascist cult more than $900,000, I understand.  McCloskey was reported to be in the late stages of senility the last time I checked.

Opus Dei is a fascist cult, one of a number within Catholicism - when you have more than a billion nominal members in a organization you're going to have pretty much all areas of life, good and bad, contained in it.   There are lots and lots of Catholics who detest Opus Dei, who detest the kind of oligarchic, fascist, cultic  Catholicism, what I call "catholicism without Christianity" that William Barr uses as a cover for his role as a gangster lawyer thug.  He does that even as his father used his position to likely satisfy his predilections, as exposed, I'm told, in his crappy sci-fi scribblage.   I wouldn't be surprised if the history of Jeffrey Epstein and the end he allegedly came to was intimately tied to his procuring young women for people like Donald Barr and the host of other rich, powerful men and, likely, their knowledge that he could blackmail them.   Anyone who believes the suicide story without condition is an idiot, in my perhaps not all that humble opinion.

I write that preface to recommend a piece in the National Catholic Reporter which decries the tsunami of federal executions that William Barr is overseeing, with the aid of the right-wing Catholics on the Supreme Court, all of whom are certainly violating the teachings of the past three, at least, Popes, even the two reactionaries, John Paul II and Benedict XVI.  It is a terrible article that shows how evil William Barr and the majority on the Supreme Court are, how untrustworthy their "Catholicism" and certainly their Christianity is. 

I think the extent to which nominal Christians are comfortable or approving of the state murder of people is an accurate measurement of the phoniness of their religious profession and by that standard, alone, William Barr, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Brett Kvanaugh, and the two apostate "catholics" on the Court Gorsuch and Thomas are complete and total phonies. And the newest Catholic on the Court, Amy Coney Barrett is all in on the court greasing the skids to the execution chamber, even as lower courts had stayed executions the Roberts court is enthusiastically all in on speeding up the use of state murder.  All of those people are essentially gangster lawyers, it's just that the gangsters they serve are even bigger criminals than the old-fashioned gangsters that you see in the movies.  And they're more likely to have WASP identities.

You have to really wonder why they are doing this, even in the waning days of the Trump regime, as they know that the second and I would say obviously more sincere of Catholic presidents is about to take office.  There is certainly no practical reason for it, there is no enhancement of public protection, there is nothing in it but the gratification of William Barr and others like him who probably get a thrill out of the exercise of power to cause the death of people.  Probably psychologically akin to the thrill of an adult man sexually using a helpless child.  I have no problem imagining that figures into it. 

The only practical use of state murder, the ability to legally put someone to death is to use the fear of that to exercise power.   The congratulatory praise of the Supreme Court being too afraid to do what it's quite believable most of the would like to do, install Trump for another four years - DOES ANYONE BELIEVE ANY OF THE FASCISTS ON THE COURT VOTED FOR BIDEN? - shouldn't allow these thugs in black robes and misnamed "justice" to gull people into believing they are not part of the kind of plan that the Opus Dei priest, McCloskey had articulated as his motivation of converting the rich and oligarchic and powerful.  McCloskey called his planned takeover of power a "bloodless civil war" well, that was one of the things, when the like of William F. Buckley were pushing for reinstatement of the engine of state murder, they favored lethal injection because there was less icky blood and burning flesh involved.  Though that didn't bother another of McCloskey's buddies, Antonin Scalia, who opined that there was nothing wrong with execution being painful, he joked about it on the bench.  Some of his fellow "justices" reportedly chuckled about it.

So Hilarious That Michele Bachmann Is Using The Mayflower Compact To Tar Biden As Satan's Secret Agent

Well, what do you expect, Michele Bachmann is a lunatic, a graduate of Oral Roberts' U Law School influenced by one of its more lunatic liar-lawyer faculty members who is a neo-confederate racist? 

I wonder if the dumb bunny would want to live according to the law of the Plymouth Colony, rather ironically given the stupid dope is a Trumpian FOXer, THE FRIGGIN' PILGRIMS WERE PROBABLY THE FIRST PEOPLE ON WHAT WOULD BECOME THE UNITED STATES TO FRIGGIN' OUTLAW CHRISTMAS AND EASTER. 

Her making that claim at the Salem Baptist Church in Georgia is especially hilarious when you consider the Plymouth and Puritan colony of Massachusetts were the ones the first Baptists on North America had to separate from because those Calvinists really hated the Baptists.   If Oral friggin' Roberts appeared there they'd probably have hanged him as fast as they would Quakers or Catholics.  I doubt her cult would be tolerated, she would be shut up really fast.

I hope you'll forgive me if I note that as well as being a total nutjob and an habitual liar, Michele Bachmann is a hateful bitch.

Contra Celsum Ad Infinitum

Like 99.9999% of the people who talk about the "Gnostic gospels" or "The Gospel of Thomas" I do not read ancient Coptic though I am still working, slowly, on learning to read the New Testament in Greek.   I have, though, unlike those whose knowledge of such stuff relies more on Dan Brown and low-brow to low-middle-brow atheist and anti-Christian polemics, read translations of the "Thomas" gospel as well as translations of a number of the other so-called "Gnostic" gospels.  

The fad for "Gnosticism" which I find about as reliably authentic as most of the stuff peddled as authentic witchcraft, is ironic because the Gnostics were the genuine haters of the body and all its aspects, haters of the natural world, the stuff that the very same atheists who try to argue from the stuff that Elaine Pagels peddles accuse Christianity of.  I'd never deny that there is a lot of, especially, medieval Christianity that indulged in something of the sort and that the damage done is prevalent today - it takes more than a few centuries to get that kind of damage out of a human culture - it's either not authentic to the Gospel of Jesus, who was remarkably nonjudgmental about sex in the Gospels or it's based in a sentence or phrase obsessed about and not infrequently distorted to suit a preexisting obsession of the one doing it.  I suspect Pagels' like Bart Ehrman's apostasy is more a reflection of their unsurprising dissatisfaction with the strain of degenerate American evangelical distortion they adopted as young people than it is a stain on what Jesus, Paul, etc. actually said.  I get the feeling they're sort of anti-proof-texting to find stuff to attack what they don't like, a bad habit they may well have picked up from the evangelicals.  

I don't think we're going to get out of the damage that American and other English language Christianity has had done to it by Catholic integralism (which goes beyond one language community) and Protestants who can go under the label of "evangelical" without a long, protracted religious brawl.  

In looking into the history of scoffing at the Virgin Birth narrative I read at the beginning of Origen's book opposing an early example of that,  Countering Celsus, was something he had to be convinced to write since the habit of the early Christians was to not answer their critics as Jesus had not answered his accusers.  I don't think we in the 21st century are going to find it possible to let the "christians" get away with their distortions which are more damaging than the recycled, classical era scoffing of the atheists.   Looking at his book, considered by scholars to be the most accurate and reliable representation of what Celsus wrote (Origen, unlike so many of today's secular academics really believed it was a sin to bear false witness) it's remarkable how just about everything you'll read in online atheist invective was already current back then. 

Doubting Thomas and Elaine - Hate Mail

Elaine Pagels, what little I've read of her and about her, I am not impressed except, for the most part, in the negative. The same goes with what are generally called "the Gnostic gospels" which I don't think are all accurately called "Gnostic" nor do I think that the most famous of the so-called ones, the Gospel of Thomas, is either the work of one person or of one group, [See John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus, Apendix A]. Until now I'd only read it in the Esperanto translation made by Gerrit Breveling and I thought it was a real mess then.  The English translation I just went through online doesn't seem much better.  

 

A lot of it was definitely copied from either the canonical Gospels or from a source common with them, some quite close in meaning, some twisted, a few twisted to a hardly better end.  I doubt it's a closer witness to what Jesus taught than what Paul learned from the Jerusalem community, many of whom knew Jesus as well as anyone and what they, certainly, passed on to those who wrote the canonical Gospels.  I don't believe John's was written in opposition to Thomas because of the Thomas Gospel which I doubt the author of John was even aware of.   As someone I just saw online pointed out,  Thomas becomes fully a believer in the Resurrection, not someone who was opposed to the possibility.  He hardly comes off badly, in the end.  Peter's betrayal in John's Gospel is far, far worse than Thomas's brief doubt.  

I won't comment on the academic sin she was accused of, fabricating one or more quotes from Irenaeus to distort what he said about one sect of Gnosticists (he apparently noted that even that sect wasn't accepted by other Gnostics) but if it's true it should have assured her fall from at least academic acceptance.  Though I know academics are only punished for that if it contradicts the common received  AND ENFORCED, required POV.   I think any academic who approved of Dan Brown has earned disrespect, at least.  And she did.  I think she is rather typical of academics who got a taste of popular fame and had it go to their heads.

Thursday After The Second Sunday of Advent

IT might be regrettable that one of the worst of the gangster financed legal outfits around today is named after the lawyer and one time Lord High Chancellor under the young Henry VIII  Thomas More, the guy  whose head Henry had chopped off after he wouldn't agree to approve of his divorce and remarriage and, also Henry making himself the head of the Church in England.  Though it might be fitting, in a perverse way.   It was inevitable that More would be a cannon saint of Roman Catholicism (I suspect he isn't one in the Anglican church) because he is considered a martyr to the hierarchical organization of the Roman Catholic Church in the time of the Reformation.   Henry had, as well, been such a bulwark to the hierarchy before he decided he wanted to dump his wife and marry his mistress, that's how the Brit monarchs got the title "Defender of the Faith" for themselves, I believe, ironically, a title conferred by the Pope before Henry let his genitals rule him.

It is, in a way, fitting that a legal outfit supported by millionaires and billionaires and dedicated to protecting and enhancing their oligarchic governance of the United States is named after Thomas More because, as can be seen as his position before Henry cut his head off, he was in thick as thieves with the gangsters who ran England at the time.  The Tudors were among the most blood thristy, violent and greedy of European monarchs of that time and among the worst in the history of England and, as More was also the author of one of the most exigent of critiques of that, Utopia, he fully knew what he was a part of, even if he was less corrupt than most of those who held that royal office.*  Once, before Henry was set on cutting his head off, when he still had royal favor, someone flattered More by saying how much the king loved him.  He prophetically quipped that if his head would get Henry a castle in France his head would have to go, so he understood just how things stood.

More was part of the very system of violence that, even during his time in office, was beginning a period of bloody violence which was characteristic of the rule of the Tudors. You don't hold worldy power in any system other than, possibly, egalitarian democracy, without being a party to some level of gangsterism.  That goes for when Popes acted as worldly kings, too.  (Look at some members of the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops who support Trump if you want contemporary examples of that.) He was a part of it.  So it's no wonder that an allegedly Catholic legal outfit who are engaged in a similar effort on behalf of the gangsters and thugs who are bent on ruling against equality, against democracy and for their own ever grasping enrichment would take his name to name their club of gangster lawyers. The man who never lost an opportunity to use the saint making industry to get himself camera time,  John Paul II, heaven help us, unable to make him a saint again made him the patron of politicians and statesmen.   He'd already been considered the patron of lawyers, not that I've noticed that had an enhancement to the morality of that profession.

Thomas More's intellectual significance is founded largely on his Utopia but on his other writings.  He was an important figure in the humanist movement, the revival of classical learning based in Greeks and Romans of the classical period,  In one of his sermons, given during a service, I believe for the Second Sunday in Advent at Duke University,  Walter Bureggemann aptly and poetically contrasted the Greek-Latin contribution of logical orderliness, academia as a temple of that and also in the language and form of memos and legalism which govern our public affairs with the alternative of poetic thought with the goal of justice and common good and common wealth that is the great contribution of the Jewish Scriptures.  

I haven't relistened to it so I don't remember if he noted that the Greek-Latin system was all about the manipulation of resources to optimize their exploitation - people being as easily considered a resource to such thinking without violating any of its forms or practices or schedules - not to mention animals and other living beings- or if that's what came to me as I listened to him.  Whereas the passage from Isaiah he talks about, the one borrowed by Christians to talk about the utopia on God's Holy Mountain where all the dangerous carnivores are vegans, all the snakes have no venom (I'd guess they are vegans then, also) and a little child would lead them.  He did contrast that vision of leadership by a child with the serious adult stuff deriving from Plato and Aristotle and as modified, extended and detailed by the subsequent history of Western thought, into science and onward, all expressed in the language of briefs and memos and not in poetry.  The business of eat or be eaten in the present world making a virtue of violence and ruthless pursuit of more for us and less or nothing for others, eat or be eaten being pointless in the innocent sufficiency contained in Isaiah's vision of the peaceable kingdom. 

I'm sure he didn't note that the ideology of natural selection was, in fact, the exact opposite aspiration to that of Isaiah's apocalypse instead of Hobbsian all against all.  I'm sure it is considered the adult thing to do to manfully (and wouldn't you just know, the ones coming up with it that sex roles would enter into it) face the reality that takes no chance on being wrong about that regime of violence instead of taking a chance that Isaiah's vision is the goal of the universe. 

That such a view of life also favors those with more strength, more power, more wealth (and so more strength and power,  I doubt Sheldon Adelson in his prime could take even me in hand to hand combat) should suprise no one.  And, also, the greedy cowards that serve them, in politics, in the law, in academic scribblage and babblage, and even worse in "journalism," that more than merely accounts for its enforcement as the required ideological view of life. 

But I don't care if you do consider me a childish, foolish idiot for preferring the Jewish Scriptures  and the Christian ones over the pagan line of thought.   If I'm wrong, I'd rather perish than persist in that hell.   If they're wrong,they merely prolong the period in which human beings and life on Earth persists in the evil system they favor.   Am I supposed to let them calling me a fool and a child bother me?  That's what appears to be the great, inhibiting fear of those who are stuck in a cowardly posture of servile acquiescence to gangster rule at the hands of soft-handed lawyers who could probably never cope in the most peaceful agrarian paradise. 

I have pointed out that when he read Thomas Malthus, well before Darwin invented natural selection, that the English radical William Cobbett, mocking the Anglican Parson Malthus's desire that the poor of England being left to starve like animals according to what he imagined to be the "law of nature" that if the poor were really left to "the law of nature" they'd strip the rich of their wealth within a day.   Such academic servants of that system seldom really think hard about the consequences of what they wish for.

*So says the old movie which I'd guess is the sum total of what most of those who think they know anything about Thomas More really "know" about him, certainly the members of that club of gangster lawyers who use his name.

Here's My Answer To Why This Matters - Walter Brueggemann's Interpretation of Advent

 

Geezer Wants To Know

 Am I the only one who didn't realize break dancing was still a thing?   I wonder if anyone under 30 ever heard of it.  

I kind of feel the same way I did when I heard about biathlon or synchronized swimming.   Though the last one I wasn't surprised that it was during the Salt Lake Olympics I first heard of it.  I mean, what a Mormon thing that is.

Also, I don't think I'll ever be able to use the word affidavit again without feeling stupid.  It's been said by so many of the stupidest liars in our history this month.

Wednesday After Advent 2 - Going Through the Motions In A Mindless Way Is A Durable Temptation

God of summoning words, in your presence we are yet again aware of your calling that we be different in the word.  Grant us enough resolve to resist being narcotized by our society of indifference.  In his name.  Amen.

Psalm 38

Amos 8:1-14

Revelation 1:17-27

Matthew 23:1-12

Going through the motions in a mindless way is a durable temptation.  In a society of too many consumer goods, too many TV options, too much wearisome news, and the needless pursuit of commodities it is easy to give up on intentionality and simply go through the motions of what is expected at home, at work, in church.  In the oracle of Amos, the merchants, busy at exloitation, wait impatiently through the motions of Sabbath keeping.  In the Gospel reading, the opponents of Jesus are indicted for going through the motions of religious performance.  And in the address to the church as Ephesus in Revelation, the cooling of "first love" perhaps causes church life to be less than zealously engaged.

In each case the readings warn against such indifferent living.  Amos raises hard questions about economic exploitation.  Jesus calls is followers away from empty performance to serious, attentive obedience that takes the form of servanthood.  And Ephesus is called to "repent, and do the works you did at first."

Commercial Christmas is much going through the demanding motions of office parties, shopping, decorating, sending and receiving cards, wrapping gifts . . . enough to create deep fatigue.  Advent is a wake-up call away from such careless participation in the restless "festival of stuff."  An awakened "season of giving" may be marked by a new passion for economic justice, for sustained servanthood grounded in humbleness, and for listening to what the Spirit is saying to the churches. 

Walter Brueggemann:  Gift and Task

Giving Up Is Doing The Fascists' Work For Them

Looking at my first blog posts yesterday, here's one from my first weeks doing this, written in the depths of the Bush II - Electoral College - Rehnquist Court imposed presidency.   I think it's still valid as we hear people telling Democrats to "move on" and forget the Trump crime spree which is at fever pitch.  If Putin isn't running this non-transition, I'll eat a MAGA hat.   I hadn't started titling my posts yet, which strikes me as a missed opportunity for making a bad pun.

Oh, oh..... you just know it's a' coming, ..... can't win...... always the way it is. They always get away with it..... Oh, they're...... they're coming up right behind..... 's nothing we can do..... OooooOhhhhh!

Heard enough? Tired of the hand wringing and moaning about how Karl Rove is going to turn everything we do against us and win? Every single opportunity fate sends us, every Republican scandal, every Republican disaster, every split in the Republican ranks is accompanied by the bleated warnings that if Democrats so much as allude to their crimes and screw-ups the omnipotent Karl Rove is going to use his magic mirror of Republican refraction and send it back at us, an intensified death ray. If it had happened as often as the sirens of doom had sounded we'd have been pools of ash a decade ago.

This attitude could be one of two things, professional Democratic doomsters getting into a swivet on cue or Republicans getting the Democratic doomsters worked up. On cue.

It's time to tell our Cassandras to dry up. That part of the routine doesn't depend on what we do. We don't have to do a thing. If we don't do anything the Republicans just make up a story and snivel and moan about that. "Travelgate", "transition vandalism" Oreo peltings"? If we sat quietly with our hands folded and smiled pleasantly while they drove a tank over us it wouldn't matter. Republicans and their media whores would say that we were being nice to them in the meanest possible way. You'd hear Chris Matthews say it. Anyone know if he has yet?

The most absurd form of this is when Democratic pundits council strategic losing of entire elections. Claiming we can gain advantage by losing. As if that's been such a success. If you could lose your way to political victory the Democratic Party would be set for a run of fifty good years. Here's a bit of news for them, winning an election is not an optional preference. It's essential. If we give up before we get to the track the effect is exactly the same as it would be if we made the worst series of political blunders in history and lost it all. The Republicans have made the worst series of blunders in history. Do you hear their pundits advising them to give it up? Maybe it's not the blunders, its the dunderheads who council capitulation.

If we're going to pay a political price for doing nothing why don't we try doing some damage to them in the process? Are our nervous nellies afraid that we'll get into trouble for giving the Republicans a bloody nose? Are they afraid of the terrible consequences of winning a fight? Any Democratic pundit who tells us to win by losing might have made their cabloid career but that's no reason for us to listen to them. Traitors or idiots, the results are the same. Put them out, never let them get away with having a "D" under their name on the screen again. Throw them out of the party.

Rarely there might be reasons for Democrats to lay low, the certainly of setting off the Republican lies-o-matic isn't one of them. Never is Republican victory so certain as when the Democratic worry trolls wrap it up and hand it to them with a bow and a bow.

Tuesday After The Second Sunday In Advent

This week's liturgy in the Catholic church contains the story of the birth of Jesus, as I mentioned the other day two of the Gospels leave it out entirely, only Luke and Matthew have accounts of it.  Any surprise in that isn't that they include it, it's that they didn't leave it out.   Even if they did believe that Jesus was born of an unmarried woman other than her fiance, then husband, the authors of those Gospels certainly knew the scoffing and derision that the story would evoke from the start.  And as told in Luke, all anyone would have had to go on was the word of a girl, probably in her early to middle teens that the angel Gabriel came to her and told her that the baby she was carrying was the Son of God.  Something that even in the telling she found hard to believe.

But Mary said to the angel,“How can this be,
since I have no relations with a man?”
And the angel said to her in reply,
“The Holy Spirit will come upon you,
and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.
Therefore the child to be born
will be called holy, the Son of God.

I think it's significant that they're asking an audience which would certainly have been culturally unprepared to accept the word of a, maybe, fourteen or fifteen year old girl of the lowest classes, especially difficult considering Luke was writing in an educated Greek idiom, very likely to a population who would have been more likely to look askance at Mary on the basis of her ethnicity as well as her sex and her age. Being asked to believe such a thing happened to that girl of no status as opposed to pretending that Augustus was the product of his mother falling asleep at some shrine in the milieu of the Roman imperial regime must have been an easier sell.  Especially as the consequences of believing in the divine incarnation of Augustus carried no special significance for his entirely earthly, thuggish, gangster rule. 

It's one of those instances when I think the unlikelihood of the story being believed by the first hearers, that the claims were obvious fodder for the mockers, scoffers and wits and dirty joke tellers around them might make a persuasive argument that they really did believe it.  And they did, from the start scoff and mock and satirize the story, they still do, idiots all over the place online will every year.  

We don't know how the men who came to write those two Gospels would have come to believe it, what their pre-indisposition to believe what isn't that easy a story to believe might have been.  Maybe it was a belief adopted after they had experienced something like what converted Paul or something they saw.  The available documents don't provide us with an answer.

It would have been a lot less trouble for the early Jesus movement if they were in the business of inventing Jesus to have left that part of the story out.   The Mark Gospel more or less has the story of the approval or, perhaps, commissioning of Jesus happening when he is baptized by John and John's Gospel has a metaphysical assertion of the eternal nature of the Christ whose involvement with humans and human affairs somewhat asserted as a fact, somewhat in line with other observed phenomena not immediately apparent.  

I think they included the claim of the Virgin Birth  because they believed it was true, they would have had to take the word of a young girl of low birth and probably no education and whose word probably few would have believed to start with.  Maybe that counts as something of a miracle.

Looking into the matter in response to Richard Dawkins' attention getting claims of the possibility of science dealing with the matter was one of the earliest things I posted about the atheist fad of the 00s online.   I see from looking up that link that the old huckster is taking that out again, using something the atheists' favorite Bible Scholar Bart Ehrman said about Matthew mistranslating Isaiah's passage about a "young woman" to "virgin."  If that is, in fact, a mistranslation of the idea or not I'm not competent in either Hebrew or Greek or in what Isaiah understood his prophesy to mean to pretend to know.  From what I understand that's one of the passages in Matthew for which it is widely believed he, as an educated writer of Greek, probably relied on the Greek translation contained in the Septuagint.  There was an interesting conflict about just that passage that goes back to the early second century when the Septuagint was cited by the early Christians as proof that the word in the original was "virgin" and not "young woman."   There were even accusations that the Hebrew text had been adulterated to "young woman," not only by non-Christians who wanted to do with the passage what Dawkins and Ehrman want to do with it, but by some Christians such as the Ebionites who denied that Jesus was in any way a part of God. Given how Dawkins depends on Ehrman and Ehrman's claim to something like fame is noting discrepancies in the earliest manuscripts we've got of things, I'd say that matter is no more discernible now than it was around 130 AD.  I wonder exactly what the percentage of variation there is in the earliest available texts of any of those Scriptures are, how reliably "authentic" they are, the inconvenient discrepancies in them, Greek and Hebrew,  the stuff that Ehrman has used to get that drug to most academics, popular attention by making himself useful to the more titillating of pop-atheist polemics.

I can't claim that I believe the story of the incarnation as given in the Gospels, they are two quite different stories with different themes involved and with quite different intended meanings. Nor does whether or not Mary was a virgin matter much to my belief which is founded on the teachings of Jesus and in the account of the Resurrection.  But I prefer Luke's because it has the shepherds and has Jesus being born in a dirty old barn among animals and manure and bugs, God among us and in our experience in the most concrete of ways.  and, as I note most years, it inspired one of my favorite pieces of Christmas music, which you'll have to wait for the day to hear.  

That story cuts through the prettied up images, the renaissance paintings, the baroque ones, the even worse neo-baroque ones, the most awful of all, those images of conventional Catholic and, increasingly, Protestant commercial piety and fiction that don't include the dirt, the manure, the flatus, the flies, the filth.  The fear, the heighted fear of the not terribly hygienic Shepherds, not to mention the working-poor parents, the rather disgusting mess that any birth inevitably involves.  My problem with the story isn't as it's written, it's as it's falsified by making it unreal and inhuman.   

The only part of it I imagine was not that would have been the angel and angels are not what those falsifiers present them as.   Rilke presents it as I'd imagine a young girl would have experienced an unexpected angel visitation.

 Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'
hierarchies? and even if one of them suddenly
pressed me against his heart, I would perish
in the embrace of his stronger existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror
which we are barely able to endure and are awed
because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Each single angel is terrifying.
And so I force myself, swallow and hold back
the surging call of my dark sobbing.
Oh, to whom can we turn for help?
Not angels, not humans;
and even the knowing animals are aware that we feel
little secure and at home in our interpreted world.

Translation by Albert Earnest Flemming

I don't come to the same conclusion, exactly, that he did but the first of the Duino Elegies had a profound effect on my understanding of the parts of the Bible that talk about angels. 

Patrick Cornelius - Christmas Gift

 

Christmas Gift by Patrick Cornelius. Live at the Jazz Gallery 2011, featuring Miles Okazaki, Aaron Goldberg, Peter Slavov, Obed Calvaire. CD Release concert for "Maybe Steps" on Posi-Tone Records.

Exodus Like Cecil B. Demille Never Imagined It And Wouldn't Have Wanted You To Either

You might have noticed I have recently started slamming the entire enterprise of inventing, developing, promoting, converting people to and enforcing adherence to those wildly popular and wildly contradicting secular, academic, "theoretical" substitution for religion, ideologies.   I had, long ago, before I started using my name online called myself "olvlzl no-ist no-ism" but I really hadn't developed my understanding of "-ists" and "-isms" to the point that I realized it was central to my increasing skepticism of modernism in general and secularism in particular.  "olvlzl" meant nothing, it was just a series of random characters that showed up in a captur verification that I liked the looks of, something I grew tired of explaining when asked.

I was doing the dishes, listening to a sermon given by Walter Brueggemann in which, talking about the story of Moses and Aaron trying to force Pharaoh to let the Children of Israel go by bringing plagues to the Egyptians, after pointing out that the plague of gnats was one that Pharaoh's scientific establishment was not able to duplicate with their magician's technology,  pointing out with that failure that the power structure of Egypt had thus been exposed as incapable of . . .  Well, he said it better than I can:

And what the Bible is all about is the endless discovery that the dominant political, economic, technological system cannot deliver security and cannot deliver happiness. 

And, I don't now, that's what we're discovering now.   We're discovering that the political economy in which all of us have been invested cannot make us safe and cannot make us happy.  

So the Gospel question is to whom shall we go.  And Yahweh is a candidate. 

And so what I mean to suggest is that the this liturgy, this contest [of who can make the plagues happen] is endlessly being replayed in the world.  And we are, all of us, tempted to imagine that the centers of power and wealth and wisdom will make us happier and safer and every time we're disappointed. 

And a more radical statement I have not encountered since I finished reading Good Pope Francis' Fratelli Tutti.  Here's Walter Brueggemann's entire sermon. 

You will notice that those things that will inevitably disappoint us are the products of "wisdom" of what the smart guys around us dream up that is supposed to explain everything and bring us to an optimal situation, what most of the popular ideologies does. Though some of them are too individual for that, those mostly make those who adopt them feel happy through cynicism or pessimism or solipsism, either a solipsism of existence or what solipsists don't admit to, of restricting the scope of their tender concern to themselves.  There's a lot of that going round, whether they know the word or, more likely, don't have a clue. We are ruled by one of those.

The Liar Next Time

RMJ has been doing some excellent Advent postings, he's doing a lot better at it than I've done two years running.  I don't have the energy for series right now, though I will continue.

He pointed out something that has increasingly annoyed me as the ocean of lies has flooded the United States and the world, perhaps the most potent effect of the internet other than the STDs of porn and hate-talk.

When did it become necessary to discern the indiscernible state of mind of a pathological liar as they told lies?  When did it become a requirement that we prove that the liar knows that what they're saying is a lie before calling the lie a lie and the liar a liar?   When did it become necessary to prove that the liar did not believe the lie as they lied it? 

I think the answer is that it isn't any logical or moral necessity, it is a cowardly pose invented by the media so they would not have to point out that Republican-fascists, the politicians, the lawyers, the media figures, the academicians, the alleged journalists,etc. lie constantly, often in contradiction of things they have also said on the record.  That this disaster of Trumpism as the disaster of Bush II-Cheney (the invasion of Iraq?  Ring a bell?  I can assure you there are millions in the middle-east who remember) as those of the Reagan-Bush I years (Central America is still a hell hole due to what America did in those years, and millions there know that) were all a product of liars on TV, on hate-talk radio, on respectable radio and TV (NPR-PBS-C-Span) and, as it was more used, the internet. 

Nothing is going to get better till that cowardly pose of self-preserving, self-serving, pseudo-journalistic scrupulosity is junked as certainly as the declaration that the first person to say fascist loses the calling of "political correctness" and other such pop-cultural aids of depravity. 

The damage done to us is primarily a product of the rejection of even the most obvious and basic standards of morality, that it's wrong to lie, it's a consequential sin that is not acceptable and which should be punished in proportion to the consequences possible from the lie.  The idea that human beings in numbers for safety are automatically equipped to discern the difference between a frequently repeated lie, one shaped and formed to be an easy sell, often told for pay by a TV or movie star, is clearly wrong.  Trump's entire career as a politician is exactly based in that being an all too easy thing to peddle through the mass media,  Reagan's career certainly started with his Hollywood celebrity status.  I have no doubt that Republican billionaires are looking for the next show biz personality they can groom to install in the same way. 

The courts enabling lies through such idiotic requirements for calling liars liars and punishing the telling of lies in the mass media is to blame for a lot of this.  I don't know if those pudding headed "justices" bought into some bull-shit psychological or philosophical line on that or if they knowingly decided to enable the oligarchs through their corruption of the nation through mass media lies, as most of their history otherwise does, but democracy cannot stand in a nation in which such a dangerously large percentage of the population is so corrupted that it has fallen for the act of a totally transparent con-man crook as Donald Trump.   And that is entirely a product of the mass media, proving that the "entertainment" division is as capable of producing that as the alleged "news" division is. Even the alleged news promoted Donald Trump saying the darndest and most outrageous things, often as a diversionary "feature" to attract an audience.  He was given enormous amounts of free air time on "news" shows on TV.  

The dangers of all of this are either going to have to be effectively addressed to cleanse the airwaves, the cable channels, the internet of lies or you can kiss democracy good-bye and with it anything like equality, a decent life, a sustainable life. 

All of that program of mid-20th century modernist, libertarian "freedom" freedom from morality, freedom from responsibility, freedom from even the acknowledgement that there are things which are true and which are false, things which are real and things which are not real, things which are safe and things which are dangerous and that all of the latter items in those categories cannot be tolerated within a egalitarian democracy because they destroy the possibility of equality and democracy was always a lie, an obvious lie, a lie which, maybe from a perch in the artificial environments of tenured university life, a life in the sausage factory of mendacity, the legal racket, life on the publicly funded Olympus of the Supreme court could be pretended to be safely tolerated and even allowed.   But that was wrong, history has proven it wrong, it's our choice to learn the lesson or we will be kept behind for even harsher lessons. 

Under The Radar Goes Out Of The Box

Callie Crossley who works at WGBH in Boston is my favorite radio person.   Her Under the Radar is always worth listening to.   This weeks show about independent book stores who are holding on against the imperialism of the mega-stores  is an inspiration.  I wonder if she'd had this to listen to if the wonderful Alison Bechdel would have had a more optimistic story line and taken her comic strip of of hiatus. 

Saving Bookstores: How Independent Shops Cope Against COVID And E-Commerce Giants

 

More Quick Answers To Dumb Hate Mail

It's not true that I uniformly hate pop culcha, just almost all of it.  In the coming year I'm planning on reading  what more of the Dave Branstetter mysteries by Joseph Hansen that I haven't already read, even though I suspect anyone who writes that many books must have churned a few of them out.  It reminds me of the period.  Good and bad.  It's not great art but he was a good writer.

I'm A Little Tired Of Answering This But Figure Once Every Few Months Won't Kill Me - A Quick After The Power Went Back On Post

 Are you serious when you blame everything on the "secular left"?

I certainly don't blame everything on the secular left, I blame what they're responsible for on them. The theme of my blogging from the start was to concentrate on what the American left did that led it from the heights of its achievements during the Lyndon Johnson years, the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, Title Nine, the rest of the Great Society programs to the continual quagmire it has been stuck in ever since, an experience which the secular left never, ever learns a friggin' thing from, they're starting in on tearing down Biden and Harris just as they have torn down every other Democrat who has managed to win the presidency as the heroes of the secular left never have, not even on those few times they have gotten the nomination. Or, rather, the one time it did, the great George McGovern who was smart enough to recognize that his candidacy was a total disaster.

Easily most of what has happened in this country is a result of corporate fascists, oligarchs, getting power and destroying American democracy using its old and most effective tools, racism, lies, envy, ignorance, greed, fear and paranoia, taking advantage of the regional, class, ethnic and religious variations on that through the mass media and Hollywood. And the secular left has been its bitch the entire time, favoring legal interpretations and rulings and practices that have enabled, not inhibited that program of bringing us to where we are now. The secular left has never produced a goddamned thing except division, distraction and defeat. Just about everything that has been accomplished by way of making progress over the abysmal 18th century atrocity that controls this country has been done through the religious left, whether that be abolition of slavery, the expansion of the electorate, Women's suffrage, workers' rights, etc. has been motivated by faith and not by intellectual ideology. The extent to which anti-religious and secular alleged members of the left gained the upper hand within the left, they have been a millstone around the neck of it, an inhibition to progress, they are more apt to make ideological claims that are counter to the effort than they are an aid to egalitarian democracy, a decent life for everyone and a sustainable environment. 

 

Look up the ACLU in my archive to see what I say about them.  

Most of the secular lefty stuff is lifestyle junk which is an expression of assumptions of class and regional and, to a minor extent ethnic superiority, everything from the dreary polemicist button down Marxists of my youth to the barroom anarchist-atheist-folkie poseurs (so many of them having grown up in affluence and the prep-Ivy equivalent system) and those who would like to join on with them. Or the lore of the show-folk (how many friggin' movies about the goddamned Hollywood 10 etc. can they peddle?) etc.

And now it's the online lefty "media" the YouTubers and Patreon lefties, the dregs of the hapless Air America flop, the ones who constantly have to ramp it up to keep their audience, the purity poseurs who helped get us Trump, the ones who, constantly, during the 2020 campaign sandbagged even Elizabeth Warren as not pure enough for them and their tiny little audience, the same ones who are already tearing at Biden and Harris. It was my big lesson of the year that I, as a die-hard Warren Supporter, one who was realistic enough to know that whoever got the nomination would be the one I ended up supporting, my big lesson was one I should have realized, that the Black Women Voters of South Carolina had more political savvy than I did, they knew that it was not the time for an Elizabeth Warren, that it was going to be harder to defeat Trump than it appeared here in the "blue" North East and who got the nomination for the candidate who Trump and the Republicans feared the most BECAUSE HE WAS ALWAYS THE ONE WHO COULD WIN. I have never not been critical of Joe Biden but in winning the election and getting Trump out he has done more than the entire history of the "real left" in the United States. For all his baggage he has earned his place as a hero in history for doing that. I strongly suspect it will turn out that his choice of Harris will turn out to be inspired, too. I'm just even more certain that the Majority Report Crew, the other online lefties will attack them constantly, not because it makes the slightest bit of political sense but because it's how the lefty media gets and keeps an audience. That has been one of the other lessons of this year, realizing the extent to which the lefty media, the lefty scribblers and babblers are really just in the business of show biz, peddling their act like tired old Vaudevillians, going through the same old routine that the secular left has gone through since the youth of Eugene O'Neill and earlier. It's never going to be more than that because they lack the moral exigency of believing that those things that constitute the real agenda of traditional American liberalism are made right because God calls us to strive to make them real, in our own lives, in our society, in the world. 

 

That answer really doesn't change, now let me ask you why you guys on the secular left never notice that your tantrums don't get us anywhere except in reverse?