"the way God has been thought of for thousands of years is no longer convincing"

". . . not that the old questions which are coeval with the appearance of men on earth have become "meaningless,"  but that they way they were framed and answered has lost plausibility."


I HAVE SAID that from now on I'll judge all interpretations of Scripture  according to the extent to which they agree with that summation of The Law and the Prophets as presented by Jesus and Hillel, Do to others what you would have them do to you.   Not only that of the Jewish and Christian Bible, by the way but all such texts and declarations claiming authority, certainly that includes the form attributed to Hillel, that which is hateful to you do not do to others.  Either you believe that summation of The Law and the Prophets is a Commandment of God or you don't.  If you do it was the Law in the time of Abram and Lot and Judges and for every other time when the Scripture asserts that the heros of the stories did all kinds of things to others, especially Women, things they would never have wanted done to them.  the story of Sodom and Gomorrah fails as a moral lesson under that standard for all the reasons I stated. So does Abraham's alleged behavior in many instances. As I said, I don't believe those legends are likely to have ever really happened, they were inventions likely of far later priests and scribes and fabulists that got written into Genesis and other books of the Bible. I think that Abraham pimped his wife twice in Genesis is probably an editing mistake, though if he did do it once and made out like it says in the story, a real life guy who would use his wife like that might do it again.  I prefer to think it's probably not how the couple who are the origin of the line that became The Children of Israel really were in real life.  Their behavior in regard to Hagar and Ishmael is especially disgusting, as told. Almost as bad as Lot's in regard to his daughters.

That and Great Commandments of Jesus, Love God and Love Others and his New Commandment which you can only try to approximate, Love one another as I have loved you.  None of us is Jesus, I doubt any of us is capable of fulfilling that one but that's no excuse to not try.

But I believe that so strongly that I will not only apply it to interpretations of Scripture but, also, to those parts of Scripture which most certainly do not agree with those Commandments which I take to be always and eternally valid on the authority of those two great experts in Scripture and those who have agreed with them.  I judge those using my other method of evaluation, the rule of thumb given by Jesus for judging the authenticity of would-be religious figures and movements and would-be morality, he using the metaphor of trees in an orchard, "by their fruits you will know them." If that's a valid rule for judging what people claim, especially in religious matters, it's as valid for judging the claims of those who wrote down the Scriptures.  If you don't do that, if you're not to do that, Christianity has a gaping hole in its integrity.

Good acts, good language will not generally bring evil results if those are carefully and responsibly understood and enacted.  It's conceivable that even the best ideas can produce bad results when they are stupidly or merely imperfectly applied.  In any case I can think of, if you follow those Commandments it's fairly obvious that huge swaths of claimed religious Scripture, doctrine, dogma, rules, laws, claims fail and People and other living beings will be hurt by them.  

It should never be forgotten that large parts of the Bible were produced by priests, scribes, etc. who had not only their own ideological point of view, but who often worked for the Temple establishment and the Kings.  Judges is, as one commentator I read said, clearly designed as a warning to those who don't much like the monarchy of what anarchy looks like. It's clear that it went through the hands of some who found same-sex-sex disgusting and even clearer that those who produced it were male supremacists, as most of humanity seems to have been.

The lines of Scripture and later theology and doctrine and dogma which asserts the rightness of the subjugation, oppression and abuse of Women is solid if not absolute proof of the falseness of those lines of Scripture, those stories contained in it. Everything in Scripture which supports patriarchy is false.  And by that I don't mean there is some "true meaning" which, somehow, people have just not happened to notice in the two-thousand years plus that they have been used that way.  Even those who invent that fig leaf to cover the shame of taking those as true and binding on us today don't really believe it. Though those scriptures are important as examples of how even within the written Scripture there are red flags of what to avoid believing and using to chart your course of conduct.

Lines of Scripture, even alleged laws that support slavery, that support wage slavery, that support the cheating of workers, etc. prove the falseness of those passages or the falseness of others twisted to do that.  If everyone followed the rule to not do to others what you would want them to do to you, slavery would be impossible, wage slavery, maltreatment and cheating, etc.  Any verse or story of Scripture, any law that would allow for what we understand, now, as being slavery has to fall by the superior means of defining The Law and the Prophets.

There were seeds of better things in the Scripture even for that, seeds that have germinated and developed into something like trees that bore better fruit, that's true in recent times for abolitionism, Women's equality, etc.  Those in history are inseparable from the People who argued for those using Scripture, not least of which was the Golden Rule, the other egalitarian passage and those which can be read that way.  Much of that goes right back to the opening of Exodus, something which, especially, Black Americans noticed from the start of their opposition to their enslavement, even as slavers used passages of the Bible to supposedly justify their holding people in chattel slavery in perpetuity.  Funny that American Christians who supported slavery in the American way never seem to have read the Commandments in the Mosaic books that said escaped slaves were to be allowed to live as equals in the place they fled to and not returned to slavery. For anyone who believes the Constitution is "based on the Bible." Today, the same ignore the failure of Slave owners and their progeny to pay reparations to slaves that are freed, though that's specifically laid out clearly in Scripture.

I have given three of the passages from the First Testament that are constantly used by those who most certainly want to treat LGBTQ+ People as they would never want to be treated as examples of, in two cases, the clear falseness of what those claim and in the other why it means the opposite of that use of it, I will note the others, in Leviticus and Paul, as those are commonly read, also fail on the Golden Rule rule of hermenutics, they also fail because it's clear those who wrote that had no idea of consensual, equal, loving, faithful, committed marriages of two men or two women.  The modern understanding of egalitarian marriage (I'd say impossible for them to imagine, both at the time of Leviticus or Paul) is an entirely different thing from what those passages imagine.  It's rare enough for straight-marriages, I'd say easily fewer than ten-percent of all marriages seem to be that kind of marriage.  When I speak about marriage equality that's what I mean, as I said in my last post on that topic, I mean that I want the best kind of marriages for all men and women, married to the other sex or the same sex.  I want those for any children who are living in all families, whether with two mothers or fathers or one of each.  Paul certainly couldn't imagine that even for straight married People, that is why his suggestion that Women be submissive to their husbands is so offensive now.  We can imagine a truly moral form of marriage in which no one is submissive but both practice the Golden Rule and work out disagreements and problems on the basis of consideration and love instead of patriarchal dominance.  

On the "by their fruits you will know them" rule you can look at what we know about the marriages and sexual conduct of those who hate marriage equality.  I doubt more than a small percentage of them are engaged in moral, faithful marriages, a number of them, when their sexual conduct is made known, don't have feet of clay, they've got feet of beach sand that washes away when the first wave hits.  I will just mention the current state of the unmarried Catholic clergy and hierarchy and its known history of the period since and before, say, Stonewall to say they generally don't have a leg to stand on in prescribing sexual morality and what constitutes a legitimate marriage.  As we can see from recent news, even full blown Republican-fascists opposed to marriage equality for same-sex partners can same-sex screw around, when you look at those who don't value any truth you won't find integrity.

The lie that Biblical Fundamentalism is based in,that there is or ever was a  "pure" written Scripture of which the currently had Bible is either a reproduction or a near perfect copy of, a Scripture that is literally true, every verse, every, sentence, every letter, is false.  The Bible we have is nothing of the sort.  Some books are rather coherently the product of a single author(with some editing).  Some of the New Testament is, I think, reliably seen as a good survival of the original authors' intent.  Some of the Bible, especially the oldest of the Scriptures is the product of centuries of copying, revision, editing expansion (probably contraction in some cases, not enough for Genesis and Judges, for example). As much as I am skeptical about an "historical-critical" reading of Scripture as producing a more reliable reading of it, what it has discerned about the handling and creation of the "editions" we have of Scripture is useful in discerning what to look for in determining what to believe and what to figure is better considered as allegory or metaphor or ideological imposition (Judges is full of that).  But most of us are not Scripture scholars and no Scripture scholarship is entirely reliable and the last word on the topic. We've got to read it for ourselves and choose what criteria we will use to evaluate it.  Evaluation is inevitably part of the act of understanding.

And no one, not even the looniest of claimed, be exact follower of the most the Scripture, the wackiest of Fundamentalist, really lives by every word of Scripture.  You couldn't possibly believe every word of it literally because there are glaring inconsistencies and contradictions in the collection and even within individual books of it. "Thou shalt not kill, a rather glaring example of that."  Fundamentalism and its Catholic and other equivalents, lie about that.  And as liars, they discredit their claims as reliable, in part or in whole.  Especially those who leave nasty comments on blogs and then whine when I or others won't post them.  You can ask a guy who trolled me for more than a decade,  I can be convinced by evidence and reason, you can't coerce me or shame me to "shut up."  I won't post your invective but I  will use what you provide.  But on my terms, not yours.  

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The objection to my saying that I think to retain the truths of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures that it will be necessary to reject the validity of Scriptures permitting slavery, the subjugation of Women and such stories as the Sodom and Gomorrah tale, the clear riff on that as found in Judges 19, such things as prescribing stoning and other capital punishment rather dangerously and other clear immorality in the Scriptures promoting inequality and what makes inequality real,  because human culture is in the process of leaving those, I hope, in the past.  Which  interestingly jibes with something I happened to read two days back, part of my project of reading more of Hannah Arendt's writing than I had.

To raise such questions as "What is thinking?"  "What is evil?"  has its difficulties.  They belong to philosophy or metaphysics,  terms that designate a field of inquiry which, as we all know, has fallen into disrepute. If this were merely a matter of positivist and neo-positivist assaults, we need perhaps not be concerned. Our difficulty with raising such questions is caused less by those to whom they are "meaningless" anyhow than by those who are under attack.  Just as the crisis in religion reached its climax when theologians, as distinguished from the old crowd of non-believers, began to talk about the "God is dead" propositions,  the crisis in philosophy and metaphysics came into the open when philosophers themselves began to declare the end of philosophy and metaphysics.  Now, this could have its advantage;  I trust it will once it has been understood that these "ends" actually mean not that God has "died"- an obvious absurdity in every respect -  but that the way God has been thought of for thousands of years is no longer convincing and not that the old questions which are coeval with the appearance of men on earth have become "meaningless,"  but that they way they were framed and answered has lost plausibility.

What has come to an end is the basic distinction between the sensual and the supersensual,  together with the notion, at least as old as Parmenides,  that whatever is not given to the senses - God or Being or the First Principles and Causes (archai) or the Ideas - is more real, more truthful, more meaningful than what appears,  that it is not just beyond sense perception but above the world of the sense. What is "dead" is not only the localization of such "eternal truths"  but the distinction itself.  Meanwhile, in increasingly strident voices the few defenders of metaphysics have warned us of the danger of nihilism inherent in this development;  and although they themselves seldom invoke it they have an important argument in their favor:  it is indeed true that once the supersensual realm is discarded, its opposite, the world of appearances as understood for so many centuries is also annihilated.  The sensual, as still understood by the positivists, cannot survive the death of the supersensual.  No one knew this better than Nietzsche who, with his poetic and metaphoric description of the assassination of God in Zarathustra,  has caused so much confusion in these matters.  In a significant passage in The Twilight of Idols,  he clarifies what the word "God" meant in Zarathustra.  It was merely a symbol for the suprasensual realm as understood by metaphysics;  he now uses instead of "God" the word "true world" and says:  "We have abolished the true world.   What has remained?  The apparent one perhaps?  Oh no!  With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one."  

Hannah Arendt:  Thinking and Moral Considerations A Lecture

I will though I can't think right away why it's significant note that she dedicated it to the poet W. A. Auden. I think I need to read more Auden.   Maybe I gave more of it than needed to make my point about the impossibility of us thinking of God as they thought of him in the times of the assembly of Genesis or when Paul was writing from his experience and understanding, so different from our time.

Note that at the start of that passage, she asks about the future of such questions as "What is thinking?"  "What is evil?,"  two things which, as a political blogger arguing against materialist, atheist, scientism on the one hand (elite materialism) and political gangsterism, the Republican-fascist party, (vulgar materialism) those have been very important here.  I think the nihilism that she noted is a problem when you take materialism seriously is not only a product of that but any time people reject morality which comes with a price.  I have repeatedly said that the evil that results from secularism, atheism, materialism, is inevitable when the choice to believe in God and in the reality of Commandments of equality and reciprocity is rejected. Without that equality and democracy are doomed.  And, as the vulgar materialists prove, many of the most fervent Bible Thumpers and Catholics who are more Catholic than the Pope reject that as well.  The phenomenon of Christians without not only Jesus and Paul but The Law (when it applies inconveniently to them but not when they can dole false details of alleged law out unequally on others) is something Arendt might have expanded on, even then.  There were such people around when she wrote, though not that many as shameless as those on cabloid TV and hate talk media such as EWTN and sitting on the Supreme Court and in Congress right now.

Post Script:  I had a straight friend of sorts, a man who was of my parents generation who I phoned more than three times a week, to check on and talk to. I liked him but it was more out of a feeling of duty than of preference. I wasn't out to him, though I'm sure he may well have well suspected I'm gay.  In the course of our three-times a week phone conversations he came to expressing his disapproval of gay sex, by which it was clear, he meant anal sex. I knew the survey figures of how many gay men there were in the population and that a sizable percentage reported they never engaged in anal sex and I'd seen figures of the large percentage of the straight population who engaged in straight anal sex so I was able to estimate, for him, that, by far, most of the "gay sex" by his understanding was done by straight couples.  It's literally true that whatever gay couples do for sex there are more straight couples who do the same thing.  And that, other than a few practices physiologically restricted by the genders, if you're going to condemn all of gay sex on a physical description of what's done by some, you could do the same thing for all of straight sex.

I have yet to hear one of the gay-basher moralists utter a single word of condemnation to the many more straight couples or straight non-coupled who engage in anal sex, oral sex, or other things you mention as your last argument against marriage equality.  Surely, if that's the objection to maintain your integrity you must start a public campaign against that among straight people. Considering the beginning campaign by Republican-fascists to allow states to ban contraception you should start that right away because there will probably be a lot more of that about if they get their way.  And since Alito is running the Court, they probably will.  I wonder if there is some obtainable record of what he and his cry-on-cue wife did in that regard.  

In fact, as I controversially pointed out recently, the evils that can arise from bringing about an unwanted or unwise or unhealthy pregnancy, that straight sex is open to a whole other dimension of potential for doing evil that Lesbian and Gay sex doesn't risk.  

The hypocrisy that is the shadow of those who throw false witness  against LGBTQ+ People is staggering.  I have yet to see them mount a scolding campaign against the straight people who engage in anal sex.  I have, actually, on the basis of morals, something I have repeatedly pointed out is not hygienic or safe for straight people anymore than it is for gay men.  I can report that straight people don't like that pointed out when they  do it, they are really resentful when someone brings up problems with straight sex.   

You Know You Keep Doing The Same Thing And Expecting A Different Result, You know what they say about people who do that, don't you? - Hate Mail

Little children says Holy Mother
Sooth and comfort one another,

Draw the chords of union stronger,
Wind and bind them around each other,
Make them feel your love and blessing.

Shaker Spiritual

I AM NOT A THEOLOGIAN.  At least no more than anyone who thinks about these things for themselves and who tries to come to an understanding of what Scripture and previous believers have said about these things, to reconcile those, where possible, with their own experience as understood through a rigorous application of moral conscience is a theologian.  Maybe everyone who reads scripture (or theology) and thinks about it seriously is a theologian for themselves.

I have no more intention of coming up with a universal theology of sexual relations and marriage than I do of making commenting on Sodom and Gomorrah a major theme of my political blog.  

It is rather ironic that in thinking of your objection to my commentary on Genesis 2, on the fable of the creation of Eve from the rib of Adam and what God said was his motive in doing that, I am more convinced that it supports marriage equality even more strongly than I had thought last week.  It is certainly presented in the fable as an afterthought, the other creation of human beings in Genesis 1 presents the first human beings as created at the same time.  But since it was brought up, again, as a proof-text that marriage equality is forbidden, I'll point out more about it to refute you haters.

1. As I said, in that second and quite different account of the creation of human beings, Adam would seem to have been around alone of his kind for a period of time.  God creates Eve only because "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make him a helper corresponding to him."  God, God's-self says that aloneness, loneliness, a solitary life for a human being, singleness, is not a good thing.  According to anyone who wants to use that story as you want to, that observation of a bad state, arising to an evil that God feels God must end, even before the possibility of sex and sexual morality, loneliness is identified as an evil.  AND THAT IS GIVEN AS HIS SOLE MOTIVE IN CREATING EVE, NOT THE INVENTION OF HETEROSEXUALITY.   Yet the traditional anti-LGBTQ+ line of moralizing (for others) on that requires us to live in just the state of evil that Genesis says is in need of God's intervention.  

2. There is no mention of sex anywhere and not even by implication until after the expulsion from the Garden, due to the disobedience of God's command about the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I think the observation that thrills many a 6-year-old when they first hear the story, that they were "naked but unashamed" is a strong implication that they had no sexuality.  The theological insertion at 2:24 about marriage is later commentary because no such statement is attributed to God in the story, that doesn't come up until the two dopes got tempted and did what God forbade them to do.  It's when they've eaten the fruit and they seem to have, thus, gained a sense of shame about their genitals.  It's interesting that they would seem to be the only two who they would be ashamed to see each other's nakedness,  maybe that means heterosexuality started with the first sin.  But that's not my point, my pint is that all of that  comes well after God made the second person to end the loneliness of the first person. God doesn't mention procreation except in 3:16 as part of his curses on Eve during the expulsion and no mention of a child is mentioned until the birth of Cain.  

It's interesting that the first time Eve is called Adam's wife is at 3:20 and it's Adam who calls Eve "life giver" because she became the mother of all humans, he said that, not God.  That would seem to have been a human designation, Eve as a procreator, not one from God.  Or, at least if you're going to read the story carefully and not in the superficial way you do.

I would wonder at the implications of that, since you want to draw inferences from it not contained in the text.  I wonder how Adam, before the creation of Eve could have really had a gender identity of his own. He had no other human being to relate to sexually, there were animals but it's not even clear that the animals had sexuality or reproduced in The Garden.  I wonder if he had any way to imagine another human being to relate sexually to. Given what I pointed out above, that even after her creation there doesn't seem to have been sex between them - the text doesn't mention it, it's adding to Scripture to assert there was, something you accused me of doing - the creation of Eve doesn't seem to have anything to do with sex and everything to do with companionship and helpfulness.  

As an aside, God created a second human being to be HELPFUL not "useful."  That's a distinction I'm pretty touchy about, I don't think people should be thought of in terms of utility to someone else but in terms of helpfulness.

3. As I said, I don't have any intention of trying to make up a theology of marriage, but if you're going to use that story as  rigid template for valid marriages, then the first reason for marriage in Scripture is to alive loneliness, to provide companionship and love to those who marry.  Sex is a secondary consideration and bearing children, which comes a chapter and a catastrophe after that, might be put third in order of reasons to marry, which, as a sacrament, is a decision of the two People who marry, not a friggin' church or priest or minister or the damned state to decide.  Two Gay Men or Lesbians could always have a valid, loving, faithful a  marriage, by their choice and commitment, though those were bound to be precarious in a hateful society as other kinds of forbidden, valid marriages, those between races, religious groups, rich and poor perhaps the rarest of those.  

Marriage equality isn't about that, the state has no power to bless a marriage,  it's whether or not the state is going to treat those marriages equally in terms of respecting the relationship as a family in the same way it does the most sordid and frivolous and unloving, unsupportive, unequal straight marriages concluded before a mail-order ordination cleric in some drive-through wedding chapel in Las Vegas or some mass-prearranged marriage between couples who never met each other before some CIA created messiah marries them by the scores,elsewhere.  

In the early days after the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court legalized same-sex marriages in Massachusetts (and thereby, if the friggin' Constitution had any integrity, those marriages were valid in all states, then) I said my preference would be for the state to stop being involved in the marriage business altogether and to shift all of the rights and privileges that the law gave to even the most sordid of straight "marriages" to those who entered legally into a civil-union.  I said at that time that I preferred that any two consenting adults be allowed to enter into a civil-union, not on the basis of them having sex with each other but with the stated requirement that they form a household to care for each other and any children that resulted from the union or those who were brought into it.  I noted in many a blog brawl over that that the commonest such civil unions in France seemed to be between widowed or divorced mothers and their adult daughters, without any sex happening at all. I would imagine many couples of various description might enter into such government recognized civil unions, without any intention of having sex or those who intended to have sex.

It is deeply ironic that as I was writing this that Shaker spiritual came into my head, ironic because the Shakers were and the two left are still a celibate order.  They are devoted to that even into their likely imminent extinction.  I have always admired the integrity of the Shakers in maintaining their determination to not have sex, though I disagree with the theology they use to explain that.  I don't believe sex, while fraught with the possibility of evil uses and consequences, is inevitably evil or even, as Paul presents it, a lesser state than celibacy.  I don't question the Shakers' or Paul's conclusion from their experience that they were called to celibacy, I respect their conclusions about that for themselves, I deny anyone has the right to decide that for anyone else who may come to a different conclusion based on their own experience and moral consciousness of their own lives.  It was very interesting to me to have it come into my head as I thought about that story in Genesis because it seems to validate my conclusion that even before sex, marriage is for the purpose of securing the experience of intense human love and the blessing of that loving relationship, something which is beyond state or church but is an integral aspect of being a human being in relation to The Creator who created us needing such relationships with other human beings and who blesses such relationships as within God's Creation.  

I would make a very important distinction between such civil unions and marriages because I think marriage is a sacramental relationship which should only exist as an equal, committed, loving, and faithful covenant, so many "marriages" as blessed by church and state, are obscene parodies of real marriages.   

I don't think the state has any business at all in the matter and the most any church can do is to recognize that such a sacramental relationship exists, no priest, no minister, etc. creates a marriage.  I have read that for about the first thousand years of Christianity, there was no regular rite for matrimony and the whole business of the church "blessing" a marriage is spotty and unsettled.   Marriage without clergy was considered as valid as any back then. 

But the government, not taking such a radical course puts itself in a place that it has no place of being in, of giving what, when given unequally, are privileges to even the most sordid and unholy straight coupling so it is an absolute right for same-sex couples who marry to demand the same things be given to us.   

in short, something so general that distinctions can no longer be made

I AM NOT a student of the firestorm of condemnation that Hannah Arendt received after the publication of her reporting on the trial of Adolph Eichmann but I do know that many of the attacks on her came from those who found some of the issues she dealt with in the book troubling and assumed she  was, by stating questions affirming them.  In some cases I have read enough of the contemporary literature that I know those were questions she certainly found being discussed but would likely not have raised herself.  The often asserted question of "why didn't the Jews rise up against their murderers?" is one I heard raised even many years after that on talk radio, especially the putrid call-ins.  Arendt gave an answer to that, not drawn from the imagination of white, middle-class or affluent Americans but from the real-life crimes of the Nazis, their retribution against not only those who fought back but their use of those who didn't, their use of sadistic, horrific pain and torture before murder of the loved ones who did fight back or resist.   Our imaginations of these things are bound to be different from what those who experienced and witnessed them are bound to be.   Movies, TV shows, fiction, even second or third person reportage has to fall to the testimony of those who witnessed them.   And very few will go to the bother of reading or listening to that, as we get farther from the time, substituting a non-reality formed in their uninformed imagination, that danger will only grow worse.

One that is certainly not escapable is bound to come up among any national entity, one bound to be controversial due to the establishment of the Israeli State that arrested Eichmann in Argentina and transported him to Israel for trial on a new form of law, the same kind of legal procedure that when it was used for the first time in the Nuremberg Trials, trying some of the worst criminals in history on things that were legal in a secular legal sense when those mass murders were committed in the places they were committed.   Eichmann's lawyer raised some of the dangers of that as what of a defense of the indefensible Eichmann he could eek out of what he had to work with.  But those dangers are certainly far less than the dangers of letting such criminals off the hook and standing as an example to others of how much they can get away with and get away with it.

I have inserted breaks in some of Arendt's massive paragraphs for ease of reading and to emphasize some of the important issues that can get lost while reading a large block of text. 
From the epilogue of Eichmann in Jerusalem

All German Jews unanimously have condemned the wave of coordination which passed over the German people in 1933 and from one day to the next turned the Jews into pariahs. Is it conceivable that none of them ever asked himself how many of his own group would have done just the same if only they had been allowed to?  But is their condemnation today any the less correct for that reason?

The reflection that you yourself might have done wrong under the same circumstances may kindle a spirit of forgiveness, but those who today refer to Christian charity seem strangely confused on this issue too. Thus we can read in the postwar statement of the Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland, the Protestant church, as follows: "We aver that before the God of Mercy we share in the guilt for the outrage committed against the Jews by our own people through omission and silence." It seems to me that a Christian is guilty before the God of Mercy if he repays evil with evil, hence that the churches would have sinned against mercy if millions of Jews had been killed as punishment for some evil they committed. But if the churches shared in the guilt for an outrage pure and simple, as they themselves attest, then the matter must still be considered to fall within the purview of the God of Justice. 

I will point out that for someone who believes in the God of the Hebrew tradition,  they may not immediately see that Arendt, taking advantage of the language of the confession,  for the argument, posits two gods, separating the differences between mercy and the act of judgement.  I had to re-read this passage before I got it for that reason.

This slip of the tongue, as it were, is no accident. Justice, but not mercy, is a matter of judgment, and about nothing does public opinion everywhere seem to be in happier agreement than that no one has the right to judge somebody else.

What public opinion permits us to judge and even to condemn are trends, or whole groups of people - the larger the better - in short, something so general that distinctions can no longer be made, names no longer be named.

Needless to add, this taboo applies doubly when the deeds or words of famous people or men in high position are being questioned. This is currently expressed in high-flown assertions that it is "superficial" to insist on details and to mention individuals, whereas it is the sign of sophistication to speak in generalities according to which all cats are gray and we are all equally guilty.

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I will forego the post I have been trying to write dealing with a longer passage from her epilogue that contains that passage to make a more currently topical point.

"this taboo applies doubly when the deeds or words of famous people or men in high position are being questioned,"  that should, of course, today, make you think of Trump, of other right-wing criminals and gangsters and dicatators and would be dictators, it makes me think of the terrorism of Reagan and Bush I and to the crimes of Nixon and Kissinger. But the taboo is not applied by the free press on an even handed basis and the American media has a real talent for never applying it to the worst cases but only to smaller infractions, and always on one side in their "even-handedness".  They favor those who favor wealth and destroy democracy.  The application of the taboo on judging the powerful is certainly not the case for Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi or Democrats, that they are held to the same standards as Republican-fascists.

It is certainly not the case for Hillary Clinton, beyond any doubt the most exonerated Person in American history, that is when tried under a judicial process instead of the more politically potent trial by media.   If you are to consider the Washington DC and NYC and other national press those who emblemize "sophistication" they are engaged in exactly what Arendt said EXCEPT THAT, IN THE END, IT WILL SOMEHOW TURN OUT THAT DEMOCRATS ARE MORE "EQUALLY GUILTY" THAN THE SERVANTS OF MONEY AND POWER AND GANGSTER GOVERNANCE. This is a real life example of Orwell's famous phrase "some are more 'equal' than others" which under America's willfully stupid "free speech-press" the "less equal than others" will  be those who want real equality, especially  economic equality or even a lesser form of economic justice.  Only it turns out in a secular democracy under a bill of rights that it will be the media who settle the case for the most publicly consequential of results, politics.  

That is why the American free press is equating the presence of classified documents found secured in a think tank associated with Joe Biden and his entirely orderly and legal notification and return of documents to the Archive, even his compliance to the independent investigation of the matter with the total and complete illegality of what Trump did with far more classified documents which, it is certain he took and knew of and kept and tried to use and which he refused to give back when they were found.  Those who believe that journalism will save us, the kind of journalism which is typical under the Warren Court version of The First Amendment is, at this point, a willing idiot.  

Journalism or as it has been expanded and even more corrupted, "media" is not a regulated industry or even professional practice.  It has no professional standards to prevent or punish things like lying and bearing false witness that makes its product designed for easy acceptance by its partner industry, advertising, using all of the skills of a conman, unsafe for democracy of any kind.  Under the Supreme Court's orgy of adding to the privileges to its worst end, liars, partisan and corporate liars, the lying servants of billionaires, billionaires and multi-millionaires who have no problem with trying to harness the most dangerous of psychopathic factions, such as gained the Nazis  power in Germany to start with, even billionaires foreign as well as domestic, EVEN BILLIONAIRE GANGSTERS WHO ARE DICTATORS OF OUR ENEMIES, we, again, find ourselves in extreme danger.  

In the American context, it is, of course, tied in with that foremost tool for oligarchs, plutocrats, the rich who are gangsters and the more genteel of  affluent schemers and mere tax resenters, white supremacy.  

The pudding-headed liberal "civil libertarians" who took money from the porn industry, the alcohol, tobacco and other industries who sell addictive and unhealthy products using "the First Amendment," etc. did far more to get us here than they can stand anyone bringing up even as their old guard whine about those lawyers and others who, quite often being in groups targeted by white supremacy learned something from recent history.  But even quite liberal and quite informed journalists will never take a deep and critical look at that.  I once thought out of some misguided principle but I can't help guessing it's a matter of their professional self interest.

One of things you cannot fail to notice from reading Hannah Arendt's incredibly deep and critical look at the Eichmann trial and the evidence produced in the trial is how terribly complex and difficult and dangerous this all is. The naive faith that the First Congress put in some terribly dangerous slogans put into the Bill of Rights has, over and over again, proved to be more dangerous for their inspecificity and stunningly stupid "even handedness,"  EXACTLY  THE FAILURE TO MAKE DISTINCTIONS,  the failure to specify the difference between the absolute right to tell the truth and the fact that there is no such thing as a right to lie, the language of the Amendment thus stupidly and irresponsibly creating a privilege to lie, a privilege which can only be extended to liars.   The Warren Court and subsequent courts only making that already dangerous situation far worse and it being called a crowning virtue by those with a professional interest in being freed from the tedium of fact checking.   The Second Amendment is equally if not actually far more dangerous, both of those will have to be seriously amended to remove the deadly dangers that they contain.  Those dangers are so among us that to regard those and the Constitution itself as sacred objects is objectively morally irresponsible.

In her first chapter which I based my previous post on, She noticed this about her fellow journalists (she was acting as a reporter, so I guess she was one of them):

If the audience at the trial was to be the world and the play the huge panorama of Jewish sufferings, the reality was falling short of expectations and purposes. The journalists remained faithful for not much more than two weeks . . .

I'm surprised their attention even in 1961 lasted that long, no doubt their employers were ready to move on even faster.

Update:  I should, certainly, have pointed out that even more so than for Democrats, it is certainly not the case for poor people, especially for poor people and others who are Black, Latino, LGBTQ, other members of other targeted groups, especially those targeted by  hate-talk media and "comedy" and in that group, it's especially not true for all Women but only certain Women.

Sheldrake - Vernon Dialogue: Objectivity - An Urgently Needed NewApproach

 

I got the Arendt book and it's taking a lot of time to read and think about it.  And then there's the computer problem, too.  This dialogue is one of a series and one of the best of them, the problems that it lays out and discusses are extremely important and very little considered.

Best Headline Of The Year So Far

The morality of migration is easy. It is the politics that is difficult.

The morality of migration is easy. It is the politics that is difficult.

 I'm having computer problems so I'm going to leave you with the link, I might expand on the article later.   Except to point out, it's those who won't accept the morality of the issue who make the politics impossible.