Saturday, December 24, 2022

Karrin Allyson - Coventry Carol

 

 

The Coventry Carol is the opposite of Silent Night in that it is all about the first account of danger to Jesus from worldly power when he was a baby.   I heard this on the radio last night and it made me think of it. 


Lully, lullay, thou little tiny child,
Bye bye, lully, lullay.
Thou little tiny child,
Bye bye, lully, lullay.

O sisters too, how may we do
For to preserve this day
This poor youngling for whom we sing,
“Bye bye, lully, lullay?”

Herod the king, in his raging,
Chargèd he hath this day
His men of might in his own sight
All young children to slay.

That woe is me, poor child, for thee
And ever mourn and may
For thy parting neither say nor sing,
“Bye bye, lully, lullay.”

Thursday, December 22, 2022

Must Listen To Callie Crossley and Mike Wilkins Annual Show Of Christmas Music, Old, New, Bad, Funny and Fun

 

Mike's Merry Mix 

A Callow Atheist Offline Pulled Out An Old Chestnut To Get Roasted

Note:  I have been preparing a different post but they say we're going to get sixty MPH winds and rain and I'll bet my electricity goes out for more than a day.  I hope to finish what I was working on.  This is a fun Christmas post two days before Creation should be celebrated.  At least it's my idea of fun.
 

IT'S BEEN A WHILE since some atheist punk tried the old "can God make a rock so big that God can't pick it up" line on me, as one did last month.  I'm a little surprised that one as young as this one could know about such a classic of old fashioned barroom atheism but it's no smarter than before.  I'm already in the kind of good Christmas spirit that giving up the cargo-cult style for a religious style brings so I'll play with it a bit.

Before when it was trotted out, it was generally a challenge by someone who might claim they were a "skeptic" which they are not.  That use of the word means "atheist" not that they practice skepticism.  Atheists generally are not skeptical about anything, they know that they know THE TRUTH as much as any 6 Day Creation Fundamentalist does. And, wouldn't you know, just like with "originalism" in the Supreme Court, reality turns out to be just what they wanted it to be!

It's funny that someone so dedicated to the practice of declaring things impossible would think that what is impossible is in any way an indictment of the power of the Creator, God who, by definition, is held by believers to have created all things visible and invisible, that is, which means all that is possible within GOD'S creation and that all that really is is contained in God's creation.  

In what God has made is the full gamut of actual  possibility and outside of that lies only what is impossible, which has no real existence.  Nothing, in fact.

Someday maybe I'll go into how that idea impinges on the assumptions of probability, especially those which imagine other things than what we know lies in the actual universe into their equations on the basis of what they can assign a variable to to fit them into an equation.  Probability having been adopted as one of the creator gods of modern atheism.  But not today.

That God may have created us to have the ability to imagine what isn't possible is, possibly, an aspect of us being created in God's image.  Clearly if we can imagine the impossible, God must be able to.  But God gets to choose among what would be possible and what won't be. Because, unlike us, God is the origin and definition of what is, it is possible BECAUSE God makes it possible.

The footnote in the excellent Jewish Study Bible for Exodus 3:14, in which God answers Moses' question as to which god he's to tell the Children of Israel told him to free them from slavery, says:

God's proper name, disclosed in the next verse, is YHVH (spelled "yod-heh-vav-heh" in Heb;  in ancient times "vav" was pronounced "w"). But here God first tells Moses its meaning Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh, probably best translated as "I Will Be What I Will Be," meaning "My nature will become evident from My actions."  (Compare God's frequent declarations below, that from His future acts Israel and Egypt "shall know that I am the LORD (YHVH)," As in 7.5; 10.2;etc.  Then he answers Moses' question about what to say to the people:  "Tell them:  "Ehyeh" ["I Will Be," a shorter form of the explanation] sent me."  This explanation derives God's name from the verb "h-v-h," a variant form of "h-y-h," "to be."  Because God is the speaker, He uses the first person form of the verb.  

There is nothing of comparable and sufficient differentness and radical potency in a conception of divinity in any other religious tradition I know of.  Nor any other that would answer the question about a rock too big for God to lift it.  God's revelation of God's self is to be found in God's actions, not in our imaginations, not in our imagination of what God has to be like and must be able to do in order to get us to give him the job of being our god.

It's this kind of thing that convinced me I'd made the right decision to choose the Hebrew religious tradition over Buddhism, though it was an argument over the reality of justice that first forced me to choose.  A rabbi saying "reality is real" in regard to American style pop-"buddhism" also figured into it.

Considering how many things atheists like to tell us are impossible by THEIR fiat, it's kind of funny that they will insist this one merely seeming possibility is possible when it is ruled out by its blatant illogicality.  That is unlike many of those things they declare impossible by fiat .  There is no such refutation of logic in an entire range of things that it are  forbidden by their Index of Forbidden Thoughts.  Indeed, some of those forbidden thoughts have rather rigorous scientific demonstration of their existence, often in ways that many of those things such "skeptics" insist are real do not have.  Including natural selection,  multiverses, a whole host of different mutually exclusive schemes of string-theory, that is if the fading fad of string theory is not already off the list.  

I know they wouldn't give up multiverses (the multi-multi-verses) since those were invented to kill off God and are still overtly maintained for that reason by probably a large percentage of professional cosmologists, today.  It's remarkable how much of their "science" has such a blatantly unscientific motivation and end and how they still get paid to be "scientists" doing ideological non-science.   Though the impossibility of treating those theories with science wouldn't be enough to get it off of their list.  It's remarkable how little the biggest, fattest fan-boys of science care about the actual requirement that science be susceptible to the methods of science.  Especially the "skeptics."  The atheist cosmologists, indeed, are insisting - such scientific practice being impossible for their imaginary god-killers -  that the requirements of actual observation of reality be suspended for their ideologically cherished theories.  They have to burn down science to save science, it would seem.

Wednesday, December 21, 2022

O Great Mystery: A First Christmas Post 2022

I SHOULD INDEX my archive, maybe I wouldn't get asked to go over things I've written about more than once before.

"Do you believe Jesus Christ was the son of God,"
 

I am angrily asked by someone who doesn't care for what I said about Sodom and Gomorrah.

Enough so I'd have capitalized "Son".  What you're asking is do I believe the account of his conception and birth as told in Luke and Matthew (not that they're that consistent with each other) and as is implied in the preface to the Gospel of John (thank you Bishop Gene Robinson), I can report that I don't disbelieve it. I have defended the belief in it against, for example,  Richard Dawkins. I believe I linked to that early piece from my first blog not that long ago.  

I can say of the two overt accounts of Jesus's Birth, I prefer Luke's with low-life shepherds being told by frightening angels where to find him and, in the first acts of Christian faith by anyone other than Mary, leaving their flocks to find that God has chosen to burst into the material universe in a Barn.  I like that one more than wise men bringing expensive presents.  

As it is presented in two Gospels and implied in a third one, there is no possibility of science refuting it as a fact or as a possibility.  I don't think it's one of the essential beliefs to believe in the divinity of Jesus - there is a different theory of that, that it was when he was baptized by John that he became the adopted Son of God but it was never anything like a widespread theory of Christology. I have absolutely no problem with the idea that God chose to incarnate himself into God's physical Creation, to bond his created creatures and the entire cosmos to God's self through being born in the flesh to human beings who could articulate that. I'd guess it was a part of the fulfillment of Creation to do that. As I mentioned, I've been reading Rahner, again.

I am comfortable with saying I don't really believe or disbelieve in the Virgin Birth as such. I don't think it was necessary for Mary to have been a virgin for God to have asked her to bear his Son.  I don't share the patriarchal superstition that a Woman having had sex makes her a defiled person. The Bible doesn't claim Joseph was a virgin, none of the patriarchs and, certainly, none of the kings were. It says in the Gospel that God could have raised Sons of Abraham from the stones, he could certainly bring his Son into the cosmos through the agreement of a girl who had had sex before.  

Though I have also recently defended the idea that Isaiah, in the original words of his prophesy, as come down to us in the Greek edition of the Old Testament may have predicted the Messiah would be born to a virgin instead of the Masoretic edition possibly meaning she would just be "a young woman."  I don't think the text that calls the birth of the one who would be called Emmanuel a "sign" makes much sense as a sign unless there was something very unusual about his mother.  A virgin giving birth to a son - which, humans being mammals, would rule out the stupid sciency snark about "parthenogenesis" - would certainly not be something you see every day and so would be a perfectly amazing sign. If it was to be understood as "a young woman" you could well ask which of the many thousands, tens or hundreds of thousand young women who gave birth would that be. Wouldn't be much of a sign, in that case.  

I also don't think that prophesy, which, by definition, is inspired by God, is necessarily bound by the expectations and limited imagination of the one it is given to and who expresses it in words. If God can make use of individual humans to give People prophesy, God can make more use of them than the prophet, her or himself will fully understand.  If you believe that prophesy is from God, through but not entirely from the prophet, a modern "enlightenment" scheme of things can't contain that.

The current academic practice of trying to imagine what might be considered a "typical" mind of a person living at the time of this or that Biblical figure was like so as to limit the meaning of their prophesy to what would be expected of that imagined, typical prophet, strikes me as making little sense.  The Prophets, just about all of them controversial, rejected, outlandish and mostly murdered, were certainly not like modern academics who don't want to break outside of the boundaries of their ambient culture.   They didn't prophesy with an eye on getting into reviewed academic journals.  I think that's one of the reasons that modern academic treatments of these things fork no lightening.   They weren't even like modern song writers who want to chart and so who stay in some bounds because it's their job.  The Gospels note that lynch mobs tried to kill Jesus on a few occasions when they didn't like what he said.  And he went to Jerusalem with the full expectation that he would be rejected for his outlandish, atypical words and that he would die a prophet's murder. The chilling prophesy of Simeon said to Mary that Jesus would "stand as a sign of contradiction and that a sword would pierce your soul."  Those words as much as the Magnificat strike me to the bone.

I think if the Birth of Jesus was as enormous an event in the history of Creation as the Gospels and Epistles present it as being, and which I believe, that disruption in the normal course of history might have given rise to prophesy bigger than a prophet's imagination or expectation.  Prophesy is bigger than just political science, it is more than reporting, it is more than mere human reasoning.  As I said the other day, I've got no use for religion that isn't supernatural and think it's a mistake for anyone to insist that religion stick with our naive 19th century concept of naturalism.  Even modern physics doesn't do that.

I do think the Resurrection is more evidenced.  Some like William Lane Craig put a lot of stock in the empty tomb accounts and the unexpected nature of the kind of Resurrection that was claimed in the Gospels, Acts and the Epistles.  Some like Karl Rahner put more in the reports of those who encountered the Resurrected Jesus - including, by the way Paul though he doesn't claim to have seen Jesus from before his death and Resurrection. I think the reported extra-natural nature of the Resurrected Jesus in those descriptions is especially interesting.  He is certainly described as being more than merely the resuscitated corpse atheist snark centers on.  I can say I more believe in the Resurrection of Jesus than I do the Virgin Birth narratives and I think it's more essential to a belief in the ultimate significance of Jesus.  I don't think it can be considered apart from his teachings if those teachings have the transcendent significance I believe in.  I think it's continuous with those teachings.  I mentioned I am reading Rahner again - and he is not easy to get - and some of his theories about Jesus in regard to his concept of the spiritual nature of material existence are very interesting to think about.  Especially since I've railed against the vulgar, naive conception of materialism that is rampant among both non-believers and among believers (cargo-cult Christmas, is a definite "sign" of that).  Though I don't suppose we're really going to know in this life, hoping to know more about that in the life to come.

In the coming days I intend to read Luke and maybe Matthew on the Birth of Jesus, I am listening to the O Antiphons with their use of Hebrew Prophesy, which may be spot on or may not but which are, in that case, not seriously dangerous.  I will rejoice in the coming of Jesus, who I fully believe is a God sent Man at the very least. I don't believe anyone can really understand the final significance of the idea of God being incarnated.  I will be listening to many different settings of the Magnificat, the Canticle of Mary, even with its mention of Abraham, knowing what a dodgy figure he and his wife are presented as being, his son (who also pimped his wife, if they were a back-woods family here, people would figure that would figure), his equally disreputable grand-kids who are credited as the foundations of the religious tradition I have chosen to believe in and follow. I don't think the origins of our shared Jewish monotheism in those flawed vessels is any less credible than the divine incarnation of Jesus through the consent of Mary.  

I am more curious to know what it means that Moses prophesied the coming of Jesus as the Gospels say (Luke 24:27, for example) no doubt that includes the entire Torah, Deuteronomy, especially though I haven't gotten into that.  I wish they'd expanded on some of those details in the texts but I'm guessing they were relying on people familiar with the Bible as it existed then, the Jewish Bible, would be able to figure some of that out in ways we, today, might need side column references for.

I will listen to O Magnum Mysterium that talks about the great Sacrament that the Birth of Jesus was witnessed by animals in a barn, having grown up on a farm knowing that would have meant God was born a human among manure, soaked bedding, stench, flies, filth, not the prettied-up pretty manger scenes as erected on public property so as to give the Roberts Court a chance to obliterate the work of earlier courts and keeping ACLU lawyers busy.  If they put up something more like what is described in Luke, as probably most of those earliest readers and hearers of that account would have known it was, with manure and urine soaked bedding and flies and stench, the Bible thumpers would be the first ones to object.  Too real for them and their devalued devotion.

I will not be giving presents, since giving that up I've come to enjoy Christmas so much more than I did when I did the present giving thing. I hate American cargo-cult Christmas, it turns what should be a sacrament into mammonist sacrilege. If I were close enough to a church, I'd go to midnight mass again.  I haven't done that in too many decades.  Preferably one with a Roman Catholic Woman Priest though a defrocked male one who is in a faithful, loving Gay marriage might do, too.

Tuesday, December 20, 2022

Sermon from Bishop Gene Robinson - The Third Sunday of Advent

 


Now He's Advising The Gay-Away Scam

I DON'T REMEMBER where I picked up that spelling of "Lott" maybe it was in the first translation I read the story in, probably some old  print of the Douay-Rheims translation of the Vulgate, maybe printed in France or somewhere when I was a kid.  Though I wouldn't have that printing anymore. If I could find the old Catholic family Bible in my boxes of books I'd check it but they're in a cold attic and I don't want to go up there.  I should unpack those and put them back on the shelf.   I typed it without even thinking of the spelling. 

You'd really be annoyed if I'd kept the spelling "Noe" which I used well into adulthood instead of the more typically Protestant "Noah."

As to what I said that also pissed you off about straight-marriage being entwined with oppressive gender roles.  

Though most of those I observe don't seem to even think of trying, it's possible for a straight married couple to consciously reject the evil of patriarchy but it would be a lot harder than for two Gay Men to do that because straight gender roles in relation to each other are so entwined with the culture and tradition of patriarchy.  

It's hard as hell to change your habits of thinking to try to do to others what you'd like them to do to you, especially if you've been taught that inequality isn't inequality but "natural gender roles" and that it's desirable. It's one of the most certain venues of evil into sexual activity that inequality is presented as sexy.  That, along with irresponsibility is how sex becomes sin.  It's one of the more repugnant things about traditional gender roles to me, something that makes it possible for me to report that I never, not once, ever wished I were straight.  You guys really have no clue when you figure that's what Gay Men and Lesbians want.  If the choice were chastity or being traditionally straight, I'd always opt for chastity. You can shove your "gay repair" up your own ass.

It's certainly worth trying to get rid of that patriarchal evil just as it's certainly worth it for Gay Men to get rid of the habits and baggage of self-hatred and self-destruction that afflict us from the same source, in many of the most sinful aspects of same-sex-sex, ironically enough, what most of the evil in gay porn comes from, the inequality of prescribed straight sex roles is directly imported into those. Lots and lots of Gay Men I know and see and read are as wedded to those as straight couples are wedded to the evils on their end of patriarchy.  But I've known Gay Men who reject them, consciously and diligently AND SUCCESSFULLY.

There's a lot of work to do and if we're going to fight over some of the most sick and depraved passages in Genesis we're never going to get rid of that shit that buries us.  I think the good of Scripture is too good to let the worst of it deprive us of what we can get from it to do the good.  That's the only worthwhile reason for any of this, doing good and not doing evil.  

I know from life-long, first hand experience the evil of violence and oppression and discrimination against LGBTQ+ People as well as to Women and the least among us and I know the role that those passages of Scripture that present that as the will of God has played in that evil. I'm not going to lie about the role that some of the most evil use of Scripture in history and today plays in our oppression.  I'd love to go into, for example, what the Womanist theologians have to say about Abraham and Sarah's treatment of Hagar and Ishmael, if you want to know why I'm feeling so bold as to tell the truth about the shadier sides of their legend I've been reading Womanist theology.  

As well as the bad in Scripture which is bad, I know the good that is founded on  passages of Scripture that are good.

I use the summation of The Law and the Prophets on the authority of Jesus,  The Golden Rule as my absolute measure of that.  There is nothing in Scripture which isn't in accord with that that I accept as inspired, anything that violates it is false prophesy and false law. I don't think it's any accident that the Golden Rule sets up a strictly egalitarian code of conduct and that it makes what we want for ourselves the very thing that determines what we are obligated to do to others. There would be no inequality if that summation of The Law were universally followed, there would be no inequality, no oppression, there would be no slavery, chattel or wage slavery. Egalitarian democracy is a far too slow to develop good that came directly from the Jewish tradition of justice and the Christian Commandment of universal love, neither of which are obtainable from secularism or materialism.   Real life is the proof of that. 

I find the articulation of that go at least as far back as Gregory of Nyssa and his sister Macrina and, really, back to Paul, directly from his deeply conflicted and brilliant mind. I'd no more think of accepting the bad from Paul than I would rejecting the good of him. Luke Timothy Johnson's observation that Paul had a deep reluctance to criticize or challenge the ambient Roman patriarchal familial roles is an indispensable key to understanding the worst of his thinking.  As revolutionary as he was from his inspiration from Jesus, he never got entirely free of his past anymore than lots of Gay Men do today. Paul was, in the end, just another of us sinners dependent on God's mercy and grace.

And about materialism.  Though I've been attempting a little of Karl Rahner again and his theology of materialism is kind of mind blowing and fun to think about. I can't say that I find Karl Rahner entirely convincing in much of what he says - if I understand it and that's not easy to figure out -  it is thought provoking.  I like my thinking to be provoked, it beats watching TV.

Monday, December 19, 2022

 I Take The Bible Seriously Enough To Admit What's Wrong In It - More Hate Mail From A White Washed Tomb

I'm not going to debate you, I'm tired of debating hypocrites on this, I'm going to tell you.

ANYONE WHO PULLS Sodom and Gomorrah out at me to bash LGBTQ+ People will have to answer for just how fucked up the incestuous straight sex in the story is, the "righteous" straight guy offering up his little girls to be gang raped. Raping them himself and fathering children with them (blaming it on them, as rapist Dads of today still do)*, as he is still to be considered "righteous".  Not to mention that that piece of shit presented as righteous isn't the one who gets turned to salt for doing those things while his wife does for doing what any human being of any intelligence would do, look to see their home town burning down.

I'll put it in your face every time you try that.

As I said, I don't believe any of it ever happened, it's got every aspect of folk legend to it.  And folk legend in a deeply wicked and evil culture and social context.  I'd as soon believe Hollywood on antebellum slavery or the ol' way'est.   

Either you believe the subjugation of Women, the sexual sacrifice of Girls is against the eternal law of God or you don't, I do believe that.  Clearly too few of those who were experts in Scripture and religion - no doubt all male and mostly straight men - haven't so far. I think what Lott did was evil then and it's evil now and he was a piece of shit just as some father who peddled his daughters in porn and raped them himself would be. Scripture that calls someone like that "righteous" is not credible.  Any tradition that claims that is the case now needs to be monitored for pedophile rape.   That the story doesn't acknowledge that makes it not only useless as moral instruction, it impeaches its credibility as such.

That a bunch of early scribes and priests decided to put it in that fascinating mess of a book, Genesis, without noticing that the "righteous" Lott both offered his little girls to be raped and that he was still not struck by lightning or turned to a pillar of shit for getting drunk and incestuously raping his daughters - no doubt he was the one who claimed they got him drunk and made him do it, sounds just like a rapist-father on trial now - that the scribes and priests who kept that piece of tripe in Scripture didn't see fit to point out he was a sex criminal only indicts their moral judgement and character.

I think the failure of the many centuries of those who comment on the story to point out the moral depravity of it and that it has no credibility as moral authority must take Scripture less seriously than I do because I can't believe they haven't condemned it out of consideration as authoritative thousands of years ago.

Maybe in the centuries that have passed when that story was read and cited and commented on in which those things didn't definitively discredit the claims in the story and those made about it in regard to gay sex, they weren't much bothered by what he did to his daughters.  Which shows just how depraved that patriarchal habit of thought is and how pernicious it is, even today.  Lott would have fit right in with the very worst of sex criminals today. I'd give him life without possibility of parole.

That the same religious hypocrites who cite that today to condemn gay men who have sex only with competently consenting men today, especially men who are in faithful marriages means that they are straight sex degenerates who can't make those distinctions.

My comments on Paul are true.  I read him and his history,

- how he atypically didn't marry in a society in which just about all men married, in a society that put such complete stock in fathering children, especially sons,

- that he agonized publicly over wanting to do what he deeply felt he shouldn't do

- even as he said that straight guys should marry if they can't be chaste, as, indeed, almost no straight guys seem to be able to be,

- that his concept of same-sex sex is wedded to the most evil of sex crimes - crimes such as those which Lott is guilty of proposing that the men of Sodom commit against his little girls,

- and that he can't imagine what any person reading the truth in their hearts would admit is nothing like that, faithful, committed, self-sacrificing love of two men for each other,

yeah, I think Paul was a deeply troubled, self-hating gay man as well as a rather amazing commentator on the Gospel of Jesus (who seems to not have shared Paul's sexual obsessions)  I would bet that almost every gay man of my generation, if they had this pointed out to him would recognize the type.  There are a number of Republicans of the type sitting in Congress and on the Supreme Court right now if you want examples, only, unlike Paul, they have no redeeming character traits at all.  That straight guys and Women might not recognize it doesn't surprise me much.  I'm kind of surprised it wasn't a major feature of Pauline study in the past because I think it's glaringly obvious.

I have not made it a secret that I admit that Scripture is a product of human minds, I say that even as I think much of it is inspired, though there are long passages of it which I think are not only not inspired by God but some of them are dross and some of them, like the story of Lott, like the stories of Abraham pimping his wife and getting wealth from it, like his raping his wife's slave and sending her and his own son to die in the wilderness, and so many others are morally depraved.  They stand out as a product of the worst sins rampant in human societies then and now.

In every part of Scripture there are dangers. Since it is a product of human consciousness, it all shares in the limits, the faults and follies of human consciousness.  I've admitted the same about the sciences, it is absurd to not admit it about that other product of human imagination, Scripture.  

IF THERE IS SOMETHING THAT IS MADE OBVIOUS IN EVEN A LITERAL READING OF THE OLD TESTAMENT IT IS THAT GOD IS PRESENTED AS CHOOSING TO ACT IN SOME OF THE OBVIOUSLY IMMORAL  FIGURES IN THE STORY.  Brothers and mothers who cheat their brothers, sons and husbands and fathers, deceiving blind old fools who want to bestow their blessings on their favorites, older sons, because they like the food they cook,  many of whom are pretty much as much sleeveens as their younger brothers,  people who are presented as incredibly unjust and unfair, people who do terrible things.  Even in the institution that God, God's-self warned about the evils of, the Kingship of Israel and the sinners who were anointed to that evil institution.  That God does not act through the purest of People is evident in the evils of the Hebrew historical accounts, a self-critical narrative - along with the Prophets - that makes the Scriptures more credible than pagan mythology.   The people who wrote those down mistake the flawed vessels - which we all are - as "righteous" is something I am certain is a misreading of the true Word of God.

I think one of the major dangers of Scripture being a product of human consciousness is that it is inevitably bound to get things wrong, often no more than hinting in the right direction.  Making "the word of God" (which none of the written words are) an ultimate moral authority is bound to lead to bad things as well as possibly leading in a better direction.  I think any attempt to use "scripture" to make civil law which doesn't take these limits of Scripture into account is bound to lead to disaster as, in fact, such use of it has frequently been a moral catastrophe.  The modernist reaction to that in secularism may have started as a moral corrective but it, as much a human solution, is extremely problematic in many details.

I think the Hebrew Prophetic insight that the real Word of God is not written on scrolls but is written on the heart is among the most profound truths of all of Scripture.  When we really hear and act according to that real Word of God instead of our own limits and sinfulness, it is what enlightens our lives.  It is the only thing that enlightens even our understanding of Scriptures, when we don't read Scripture in light of that, it makes it a tool of our worst parts.  If Fundamentalists want a real text that is literally true, it's a text that will never be literal in any sense because it is not written in letters.  The idea that an accurate text is essential to pin down just what we are to believe in is not only folly, it forces the professor of religion to pretend that the Scripture is a perfect oracle when it most certainly is not.  

The books of Scripture are not only not uniform in their character, many parts of it I'd say especially Genesis and such as the book of Joshua are depraved and apt to lead to gross sin and evil, every passage that has ever been used to subjugate Women, the poor, slaves, LGBTQ people, foreigners, to wage wars of conquest and genocide is indicted by those results.  "By their fruits you will know them" is as true as the written Scriptures  ever get. You can legitimately judge that use of Scripture by what results from the  would-be religious figures who make use of them.  

I will confess that I take what Jesus is said to have said extremely seriously when it is an obvious and clear reflection of that summation of The Law he made, do to others, especially the least among us, what you would have them do to you.  I take him with entire seriousness when he tells us that the Great Commandments are part of what will save us, Love God and Love Others. I say that even as I think the recorded accounts of some of his sayings and parables are extremely difficult to make conform to those.  I think in a lot of those he was commenting on the world as it is, not on the Kingdom of God as it should be. I think some of it got seriously muddled in the writing down. I take the Gospels so seriously that I admit what I think are the problems of some passages of it.

Other parts of Scripture are a glorious and clear reflection of the real Scripture which I talked about earlier. AND I SAY THAT YOU CANNOT TAKE THOSE SERIOUSLY WHILE PRETENDING ALL OF WHAT IS CONTAINED IN SCRIPTURE HAS THAT CHARACTER because a lot of it is absolutely incompatible with those passages.   That some will make mistakes in understanding that really inspired Scripture, that which reflects what is correctly written on the heart is certainly true.  God has not seen fit to give us a direct and complete understanding of God's Law though we can experience something of God's Love.  God works in the medium of human imperfection and even in human weakness and sin.  But that's certainly as true of the written Scripture, the history of the use of Scripture is full of its depraved and dishonest use.  Listen to the Republican-fascists on the "Bible" if you need a refresher course in that stinking "religion."   If it is "inspired" what the hell do we think that inspiration consisted of except human beings interpreting their inspiration and, they being fully human, getting it wrong in lots of cases.

I strongly suspect that the great Prophet of the Law, Moses, whoever he was, probably spent a long period in very deep contemplative prayer and that he got The Law in that period.  Whether it was on a named Mountain or not, I think that the heart of The Law seems like an individual inspiration.  

I think he probably told or wrote down the law. Maybe on tablets, though I'd doubt they would be chiseled on stone. I think he must have been disappointed in its reception and he probably and frequently blew his top over that.  I think that the falling back into polytheistic materialist religion is the reality behind that the golden calf yarn.   Moses, great Prophet he was, was merely human, himself.  I think the words of the account of him being given The Law in that far better book, Exodus, are probably not literally how it happened. I say that even as I doubt large passages of The Law as are set out in the Books of Moses are a correct reading of the Law, of the Scripture written on the heart. I think some of it stinks of later, self-interestedly, priestly insertion, I think some of those priests hated LGBTQ types as found among them then, I don't think it was all just they were afraid of pagan temple prostitution corrupting the Children of Israel.  They were capable of more discernment than that. 

I think the entire Hebrew monotheistic tradition WHICH I CHOOSE TO BE PART OF is nothing more or less than a very rich and more accurate reading of the true Law of God written truly on the heart but which is so badly read so often.  I think that is not unrelated to Jesus telling his followers that they had to become like little children, innocent of the cultural and religious distortions of that discernment.

I think Moses had a deeper discernment of that than most of the figures of the early Prophetic tradition, I think that's why the later Prophets so frequently cite his Law which resonates with the Law they find in their own hearts. Sometimes I find the articulation by the later Prophets more convincing. Especially when it comes to justice for the least among us, none of them as credible as I find Jesus. I think Jesus is a singular figure in the Hebrew Tradition, I find in him a totally different level of inspirational credibility.  And he had some interesting things to say about this.  I think that's what Jesus meant when he talked about not one letter of the law not being erased even as he erased so many of those letters as written on parchment.  Letters he knew and expertly commented on.

I know that what is being talked about in the Bible when it talks about same-sex sex acts has nothing to do with faithful sexual love between two Gay Men or two Women in a faithful, committed, loving relationship. The worst uses of same-sex sex now have nothing to do with that, probably even less than the worst uses of straight sex have with such straight marriages.  I know it because I won't let words on a page distort what I can read in my own heart and see with my own eyes.  

I take the written Scripture seriously enough to admit what's wrong with it when it's clearly wrong - the story of Sodom and Gomorrah that flagship of LGBTQ hatred is seriously fucked up and those who use it without acknowledging it is are totally dishonest.  

I think if Christianity has any hope of a future, and I hope it does since I think it is the foremost source of nourishment for egalitarian democracy, Christians had better start paying more attention to the signs of the times and admit that such passages of the Bible are morally depraved as well as the entirety of later theology and dogma and doctrine that pretended they were anything but depraved and wrong.  The patriarchal assumptions found in the Bible and which exist everywhere, most dramatically today in the Islamic areas in which Women are so evilly subjugated now, serially married and thrown off in divorce, girls married to old men, and in the sex-industry that flourishes under secular liberal-democracy (it wouldn't under a true egalitarian democracy) have to be destroyed.

The role that the written Scriptures of monotheism or secular governance plays in maintaining them is among the greatest evils of our time.  The foremost supporters of that pretty much uniformly hate LGBTQ People and oppress us even as they violate their claimed moral codes.  Look at Putin's use of that issue and how he manipulates the Russian Orthodox Patriarchy with it.  By their fruits you will know them. All of them, even the ones in clerical costume and thumping on Bibles and in the Republican-fascist caucus of the Congress.

* As that pedo piece of shit Gore Vidal did when the Catholic priest-pedophile scandal hit the news.  He blamed the victims. I don't see any difference between him and those ancient scribes and priests who wrote down and still write down the story of Lott do.

Sunday, December 18, 2022

Imagine How Tired I Am Of The Straight Stuff, No Really - Someone's pissed off that I dissed Bogey

IT IS SO FUNNY that you say you're sick and tired of all the gay stuff, imagine how sick LGBTQ+ people are of the 99.9999% of everything that is straight, except for the tiny percentage of viciously negative stereotyping of LGBTQ+ that is brought up.  Like the bad guys in the friggin' old Maltese Falcon.    Dashiell Hammett was a  gay hating bigot as well as a total asshole.  He is vastly over-rated as a writer.

I won't take it back, Chad Allen was a better actor than Bogart was, better looking, smarter, smart enough to get out of the business and good enough to  go into a helping profession.  And I liked the stories better than anything Hammett or Chandler (or, rather, their screen writers, since this is about the movies) made up.  In the Donald Strachey movies I mentioned,  Sebastian Spence is better looking than any of Bogart's co-stars and a better actor than most of them. It occurred to me that a gay man watching those movies with them as a monogamous married couple would have a problem that few if any of those who watched straight gum shoe movies would have, not being able to decide which of them they wanted to be and which of them they wanted to be married to. I never once thought I'd want to have an affair with Bogart in any movie he was in so that was never a problem for me, either way.  

I am grateful to my friend for lending me the Donald Strachey movies because it made me figure out one of the reasons I went off of the movies about forty years ago.  I'm a gay man, I got tired of seeing stories about straight men and that's what movies mostly are.   They're not even about straight women.  I don't like the roles that movies made up for straight men, I don't like privileged people.  I am amazed that even straight women aren't sick to death of that shit.  It's one of the things I'd concluded about most of fiction about the last time I decided that whatever part of Updike's stupid Rabbit series back in the 1970s. I gave up on him over that and with him most of fiction, I just lost interest in all of it for a while.  I'd rather read non-fiction any day.

And that was even earlier than I watched things like The Onion Field and Murder By Death and decided never to pay to see another movie again.  A vow I only broke once when I went to the dollar show at the end of the first run of Hairspray, the original one.  I am entirely over John Waters, too.  If I'm tired of straight men I'm even more tired of adolescent gay ones, too. Camp is about the most stupid thing there is as "gay culture."  It's gay minstrelsy.  I hate it. It's an expression of internalized self-hate. That was the last time I ever went to a movie theater and I really haven't missed it.

I read Chad Allen Lazzari's dissertation and while I am skeptical of psychology as a science, it was interesting and in some ways courageous.  I might possibly look into some of what he cited out of curiosity because I've come to respect him from the interviews I've read and watched.  I strongly suspect he might actually do his clients some good because his head seems to be screwed on the right way to do that.   I've always said that psychological counseling could be good at times under some circumstances but that it probably had more to do with the personality and moral character of the counselor than anything to do with the alleged science of psychology. 

I might, might try another movie about LGBTQ characters but I would bet that few to none have such positive portrayals of gay characters.  I'm not interested in negative portrayals of us because Hollywood has done quite enough of that already. I was tempted to say, you know, none of this is important, it's light entertainment but that's not true.  I think that there are probably lots of gay boys and men for whom seeing a positive portrayal of heroic, morally responsible, intelligent gay men is so unaccustomed that seeing those movies could have a very positive effect on their lives.   I doubt anyone was the better for seeing Sam Spade and certainly not Philip Marlowe,  surely not in the novels where neither of them are admirable characters. 

It's funny, this week I said scandalous things about classic movies and about Scripture and it's over slamming Bogart that I get the hate mail.  Off hand, I can't think of a "classic film" that I care to see again. Especially those from the 30s-50s.  I think I'll just read a book by an LGBTQ writer, instead.