Monday, August 19, 2019
No Kidding, Dick Tracy
Ben Shapiro? Stupidest? Yeah, maybe, he's certainly mighty stupid. Though between the two of them I'd say it's a dick and dick race.
Thoughts On "Why I Am Still A Christian" - Chapter One - Disorientation and Christian Committment
What can we till rely on today? What can we hold on to? I am not a pessimist, but we scarcely need reminding that we are now in a "crisis" of values as profound as it is far reaching. Ever since the youth and student revolt of the late 1960s, there are no longer any institution or guardians of values which are not in crisis or have not been radically challenged. Were today i there any undisputed authority? We used to be told: the pope, the bishop, the church says; or the prime minister, the government, the party says; or the teacher, the professor, "your father: says. Where nowadays could we even settle a discussion - let alone pacify a demonstration - with an appeal to such authorities? No, the state, church, courts, army, school family - all seem to be insecure. They are no longer accepted without question - least of all by young people - as guardians of values.
With this crucial questioning of accepted authorities, traditions and ways f life, the values associated with them seem to be called into question as well. Liberalization was necessary, but often went further than had been foreen or planned Elaborate processes designated to get rid of taboos frequently turned ut to be more destructive than creative, with the result that for many young people today, morality as a whole seems to have become relative The effects of all these developments have been anything but liberating The ground has been cut from under the feet of some people - especially the young - who now feel their lives have no meaning and turn to delinquency or extreme religious sects, or to political fanaticism, even terrorism.
This large-scale crisis of values has thrown modern society into conflicts which have not yet by any means been resolved Indeed their full significance has probably not even been grasped. For our grandfathers and grandmothers, religion or Christianity, was still a matter of personal conviction. For our fathers and mothers it was still at least a matter of tradition and "the done thing." For their emancipated sons and daughters, however, it is becoming increasingly a thing of the past which is no longer binding; passed by and obsolete. And there are parents today who observe with perplexity that morality in general has also vanished, along with religion as Nietzsche predicted. For - as is becoming increasingly clear - it is not so easy to justify any moral values purely rationally, by reason alone, as Sigmund Freud would have liked to do; to prove by reason alone why under any circumstances freedom is supposed to be better than oppression, justice better than self-interest, non-violence better than violence, love better than hate, peace better than war Or, to put it more forcefully; why, if it is to our advantage and our personal happiness, should we not just as well lie, steal, commit adultery and murder; indeed, why should we be humane or even fair"?
Perhaps what is good is simply whatever is to my advantage, to the advantage of my group, party, class, race, or even to the advantage of my business or trade union. Is it not a question of individual or collective selfishness? Some biologists and ethologists do in fat try to persuade us that for human beings, as for animals, any sort of altruism or love is merely the supreme form of biologically inherited self-interest. And, after all, philosophers have continually asked where we are able to find the criteria to judge the interests lying behind all knowledge - how we are to distinguish between what is true and what is illusory, what is objective and what is subjective, what is acceptable and what is reprehensible.
Those four paragraphs written c. 1986, at the height of the Thatcher - Reagan years, the Kohl years, the, alas too few, Gorbachev years, the height of the John Paul II papacy . . . etc. are a very good and short summary of the crisis of modernism that has, in thirty-three years, produced Trump and Putin, Boris Johnson and the rise of neo-Nazism and neo-fascism and state sponsored elections rigging and all else. If he had put names to intellectual movements, it's clear he's talking about, among others, the biological determinism of Sociobiology-Evolutionary Psychology and other anti-democratic, anti-religious ideologies as science.
He touches on how the absolute freedom of individuals inevitably negates morality which is all about the boundaries of personal freedom in respect of the rights and, as importantly, the needs of others, especially those with less wealth which translates into less power.
While I don't think Hans Kung necessarily would have stated that as his intention, this introduction, filled out, is a good list of the things I've criticized in both the "right" and also in the would-be "left" and the imaginary middle and, in fact, you have to critisize in yourself to lead a moral life no matter where you would put yourself on a graph of political identity or even more generally as a person.
His line of demarcation of the "youth and student revolts" I'd imagine c. 1968 is understandable in a European context, though those had been going on before. I know he has pointed to 1968 as the year that turned his jr. colleague who he had brought to his university department, from a liberal theologian of Vatican II into an arch reactionary who later became Pope Benedict XVI. It's as good a place to start as any but the intellectual tendencies that produced that had been going on for a lot longer, as his citations of Nietzsche and Freud prove.
As to his description of the dissolution of intellectual and moral authority, no one but an ignorant boob would deny that. Whatever "freedom" that comes from that is more than paid for in the ability of people who merely don't like moral restraints or find them inconvenient of unprofitable to deny they are bound by any moral absolutes. Even the moral absolutes that they should not do to others what they would not want those others to do to them. I have found that it is an exceptional secularist who, when pressed, when subjected to the right set of conditions, will not assert that they are not only independent of things agreed to be immoral, they are also independent of any moral restrictions on themselves, even those they otherwise would or had given mouth to in the past. Though that permission of modernism is hardly unknown to those who profess religion, if not on their own behalf than on behalf of despotic figures they like, such as the JPII supporting some terrible fascists and murderers in concert with the Reagan administration*, as Hans Kung was writing those words, as the "evangelicals" and other supposed religious people who support the flagrant corrupt amorality of Donald Trump.
I have decided to go through the whole book unless ordered to stop. I would guess it will take a number of weeks, if I have to do it in paraphrase, it will go a lot slower. If you would like to read the book, consider this a long unpaid ad for it. The book is very short and succinct and very readable. Why I Am Still A Christian by Hans Kung. I don't know the translator. Even if you found the text for free, I would recommend you buy it for the very useful index. It is an excellent introduction to the huge body of scholarly theology that Hans Kung has written in his long and productive life. I had intended to make this the year I read Rahner, I'm glad I went with Kung, instead. I'll probably make next year a year of Kung, as well.
* I am sometimes quite convinced that John Paul II was, if not an actual CIA-Reagan asset, a virtual one. Perhaps by intention, perhaps by manipulation I'm sure they had a full file on his greatest weaknesses and how to appeal to both his vanity and love of the lime light (he had theatrical experience) and his shortsightedness. I, like Kung, am a deep skeptic of the canonization of Karol Wojtyla who may be the most scandalous of modern "saints". As much if not more so than the Pius popes who have been and are in line for that increasingly empty ceremony. I'll remind you that among those JPII favored canonizing are the center of some of the most serious sexual abuse scandals that started coming to light while he was still alive, Legionnaires of Christ, Opus Dei. He had a serious soft spot for some of the worst, many of whom may well have been deep CIA assets. I wish Francis would have slowed or stopped the canonization assembly line that Wojtyla set in motion. Maybe he should consider that after he canonizes St. Oscar Romero, a victim of the JPII papacy and the fascists who had American support.
With this crucial questioning of accepted authorities, traditions and ways f life, the values associated with them seem to be called into question as well. Liberalization was necessary, but often went further than had been foreen or planned Elaborate processes designated to get rid of taboos frequently turned ut to be more destructive than creative, with the result that for many young people today, morality as a whole seems to have become relative The effects of all these developments have been anything but liberating The ground has been cut from under the feet of some people - especially the young - who now feel their lives have no meaning and turn to delinquency or extreme religious sects, or to political fanaticism, even terrorism.
This large-scale crisis of values has thrown modern society into conflicts which have not yet by any means been resolved Indeed their full significance has probably not even been grasped. For our grandfathers and grandmothers, religion or Christianity, was still a matter of personal conviction. For our fathers and mothers it was still at least a matter of tradition and "the done thing." For their emancipated sons and daughters, however, it is becoming increasingly a thing of the past which is no longer binding; passed by and obsolete. And there are parents today who observe with perplexity that morality in general has also vanished, along with religion as Nietzsche predicted. For - as is becoming increasingly clear - it is not so easy to justify any moral values purely rationally, by reason alone, as Sigmund Freud would have liked to do; to prove by reason alone why under any circumstances freedom is supposed to be better than oppression, justice better than self-interest, non-violence better than violence, love better than hate, peace better than war Or, to put it more forcefully; why, if it is to our advantage and our personal happiness, should we not just as well lie, steal, commit adultery and murder; indeed, why should we be humane or even fair"?
Perhaps what is good is simply whatever is to my advantage, to the advantage of my group, party, class, race, or even to the advantage of my business or trade union. Is it not a question of individual or collective selfishness? Some biologists and ethologists do in fat try to persuade us that for human beings, as for animals, any sort of altruism or love is merely the supreme form of biologically inherited self-interest. And, after all, philosophers have continually asked where we are able to find the criteria to judge the interests lying behind all knowledge - how we are to distinguish between what is true and what is illusory, what is objective and what is subjective, what is acceptable and what is reprehensible.
Those four paragraphs written c. 1986, at the height of the Thatcher - Reagan years, the Kohl years, the, alas too few, Gorbachev years, the height of the John Paul II papacy . . . etc. are a very good and short summary of the crisis of modernism that has, in thirty-three years, produced Trump and Putin, Boris Johnson and the rise of neo-Nazism and neo-fascism and state sponsored elections rigging and all else. If he had put names to intellectual movements, it's clear he's talking about, among others, the biological determinism of Sociobiology-Evolutionary Psychology and other anti-democratic, anti-religious ideologies as science.
He touches on how the absolute freedom of individuals inevitably negates morality which is all about the boundaries of personal freedom in respect of the rights and, as importantly, the needs of others, especially those with less wealth which translates into less power.
While I don't think Hans Kung necessarily would have stated that as his intention, this introduction, filled out, is a good list of the things I've criticized in both the "right" and also in the would-be "left" and the imaginary middle and, in fact, you have to critisize in yourself to lead a moral life no matter where you would put yourself on a graph of political identity or even more generally as a person.
His line of demarcation of the "youth and student revolts" I'd imagine c. 1968 is understandable in a European context, though those had been going on before. I know he has pointed to 1968 as the year that turned his jr. colleague who he had brought to his university department, from a liberal theologian of Vatican II into an arch reactionary who later became Pope Benedict XVI. It's as good a place to start as any but the intellectual tendencies that produced that had been going on for a lot longer, as his citations of Nietzsche and Freud prove.
As to his description of the dissolution of intellectual and moral authority, no one but an ignorant boob would deny that. Whatever "freedom" that comes from that is more than paid for in the ability of people who merely don't like moral restraints or find them inconvenient of unprofitable to deny they are bound by any moral absolutes. Even the moral absolutes that they should not do to others what they would not want those others to do to them. I have found that it is an exceptional secularist who, when pressed, when subjected to the right set of conditions, will not assert that they are not only independent of things agreed to be immoral, they are also independent of any moral restrictions on themselves, even those they otherwise would or had given mouth to in the past. Though that permission of modernism is hardly unknown to those who profess religion, if not on their own behalf than on behalf of despotic figures they like, such as the JPII supporting some terrible fascists and murderers in concert with the Reagan administration*, as Hans Kung was writing those words, as the "evangelicals" and other supposed religious people who support the flagrant corrupt amorality of Donald Trump.
I have decided to go through the whole book unless ordered to stop. I would guess it will take a number of weeks, if I have to do it in paraphrase, it will go a lot slower. If you would like to read the book, consider this a long unpaid ad for it. The book is very short and succinct and very readable. Why I Am Still A Christian by Hans Kung. I don't know the translator. Even if you found the text for free, I would recommend you buy it for the very useful index. It is an excellent introduction to the huge body of scholarly theology that Hans Kung has written in his long and productive life. I had intended to make this the year I read Rahner, I'm glad I went with Kung, instead. I'll probably make next year a year of Kung, as well.
* I am sometimes quite convinced that John Paul II was, if not an actual CIA-Reagan asset, a virtual one. Perhaps by intention, perhaps by manipulation I'm sure they had a full file on his greatest weaknesses and how to appeal to both his vanity and love of the lime light (he had theatrical experience) and his shortsightedness. I, like Kung, am a deep skeptic of the canonization of Karol Wojtyla who may be the most scandalous of modern "saints". As much if not more so than the Pius popes who have been and are in line for that increasingly empty ceremony. I'll remind you that among those JPII favored canonizing are the center of some of the most serious sexual abuse scandals that started coming to light while he was still alive, Legionnaires of Christ, Opus Dei. He had a serious soft spot for some of the worst, many of whom may well have been deep CIA assets. I wish Francis would have slowed or stopped the canonization assembly line that Wojtyla set in motion. Maybe he should consider that after he canonizes St. Oscar Romero, a victim of the JPII papacy and the fascists who had American support.
Sunday, August 18, 2019
Stupid Mail - Can Atheists Only Imagine What They Want?
Again stupy blames it on Christianity that people like Epstein do the things they were told by Christianity not to do. Why not blame mathematics when people get the wrong answer? Why not blame people who pass laws against anything you like when people break those laws, refusing to blame the people who opposed passing those laws. It's exactly the same practice but when it's Christianity you can slam that way, it's OK to be that incoherent.
As RMJ pointed out in his commentary on this, attributing anything like power to the ministry is entirely unrealistic. Most ministers are about as disempowered as can be imagined, only atheists can't imagine anything they don't want to imagine. Maybe that inability is a prerequisite for being one.
And, just because I'm tired of that double standard, perhaps he'd like to go over his esteemed Eschatonian host's record on the matter of sexual use of minors. I found these (Creepy being as creepy does) in about a two minute search, as I recall there are more like it in his voluminous archive, I just don't have the time to search it. I believe that these were written both a year before and two years after Acosta came to his plea deal giveaway with Epstein. I looked it up and, as far as I can see, the age of consent in most states at the time was 16 which would mean Duncan was advocating considering an age of consent that Epstein would have found quite congenial to his operations.
As RMJ pointed out in his commentary on this, attributing anything like power to the ministry is entirely unrealistic. Most ministers are about as disempowered as can be imagined, only atheists can't imagine anything they don't want to imagine. Maybe that inability is a prerequisite for being one.
And, just because I'm tired of that double standard, perhaps he'd like to go over his esteemed Eschatonian host's record on the matter of sexual use of minors. I found these (Creepy being as creepy does) in about a two minute search, as I recall there are more like it in his voluminous archive, I just don't have the time to search it. I believe that these were written both a year before and two years after Acosta came to his plea deal giveaway with Epstein. I looked it up and, as far as I can see, the age of consent in most states at the time was 16 which would mean Duncan was advocating considering an age of consent that Epstein would have found quite congenial to his operations.
Someone Asked What I Thought
Someone asked what I thought about this piece by Sarabeth Caplin at the ironically called religion bashing venue, "The Friendly Atheist". I will quote the entire thing so no one can accuse me of leaving anything out.
A year before convicted sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein died of suicide, a writer for the New York Times met him at his cavernous Manhattan mansion to discuss a possible news story involving the car company Tesla.
Reporter James B. Stewart recalls one interesting anecdote that may or may not be true, but sheds some light into both Epstein’s mindset and a serious loophole with religious exemptions in the law.
At one point, after he became “radioactive,” he says a lot of his contacts didn’t want to be publicly associated with him, though they still asked for money and came to his private dinner parties. But Epstein wondered if there was a way to earn their trust once again:
If it ever occurred, it would have been a cruelly smart move on Epstein’s part. Clergy members have a great deal of power and assumed trust. Epstein’s religious title could have lent him unearned trust, led to more people sharing their secrets with him, and even access to more underage girls. As we’ve seen from the recent revelations into his life, many of the people who surrounded him kept their silence in exchange for money or access. You have to wonder how much more serious his crimes could have been if he could use religion as another shield.
He never became a minister. But it says a lot that Epstein, a man who ruined a number of victims’ lives, felt like it was a role he could’ve adopted with ease if he wanted to. It’s not like you have to be a decent person to earn the title.
First, note that Caplin, herself, says that "the anecdote may or may not be true" which is to say the entire premise of her piece might be fictitious, not that that keeps her from plowing ahead as if it is true.
Second, notice that everything she claims he could have gotten by going through the fiction of becoming a minister HE WAS ABLE TO DO AS A RICH WHITE MAN OF PRIVILEGE FOR DECADES AS THE RICH AND POWERFUL AND EVEN THE LAW KNEW HE WAS DOING IT. IF YOU LIKE I'LL GO THROUGH THE LIST OF IDEOLOGICAL, ANTI-RELIGIOUS ATHEISTS, MANY OF THEM EMINENT SCIENTISTS WHO PARTIED AND FED OFF OF HIM AS THAT WAS AN OPEN NON-SECRET, AGAIN.
If, as that was just beginning to mildly sting him on the butt he was thinking of rather stupid ways to get his mojo back it's not surprising that he'd go to the ploy of pretending to be a minister, something that is a direct product of the idiotic insufficiency of the Bill of Rights as written and interpreted which allows such fictions. Jesus gave some very sound and useful methods for identifying false prophets, phony followers of his that are, clearly, beyond the capabilities of secular law to use. The failure of Christians to apply them has always cost them dearly, as, in fact, this post by this semi-pro atheist hater of Christianity is another item in that list. That is a fault of secular law, not of the Bible.
It is remarkable that the semi-pro atheist also fails to note that James B. Stewart in that organ of the "free press" which is the New York Times would seem to have covered up this little bit of information about Epstein as he was interviewing him as part of financial reportage. Forget the typical anti-Catholic exaggerations about the seal of confession being a cover up, the free press regularly covered up for him as did, I'll remind you, a host of celebrity atheists who traveled on the "lolita express" and partied and "conferenced" on Epstein's dime. I wonder if there is a list of clergy who partied with him like that. If there is, bring it out. I have no problem with clergymen having to answer for their sins, or being judged on that basis, as Jesus recommended.
Certainly the rape of young girls is forbidden by Christianity, adultery, fornication, prostitution, etc. the very substance of the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein are absolutely forbidden by Christianity, Jesus, in some of the most explicit things he said about the consequences of sin, would have said Epstein would have been better off to have never been born, to have had a millstone tied round his neck and be drowned in the sea.
It is such secularists who so often get round to calling for the lowering of ages of consent, the decriminalizing of various means by which men exploit women, children, other, less powerful men, by sexual exploitation as a glorious expression of "freedom" who are the natural place to turn to assign blame for someone who was living the libertine lifestyle that so many traditional secularists seemed to hold as some kind of paradise (for elite men and a few elite women).
The world of Jeffrey Epstein and his high livin' high life buddies, his female associates isn't what is held out as good in any religion I know of. I know of many a scribbler, script writer, movie maker, TV director who would want a share of that without violating their profession's standards. The world of pre-second-wave feminism has never not reigned in the media and show, biz and the pro-scribbling industry as we have found from me-too.
I don't know of a single Christian or Jewish clergyman who would NOT be in obvious violation of their professions of faith in participating in it. Jeffrey Epstein was living the dream life of a variety of male secularists, a Hollywood, TV white, rich male wet dream, not much like a figure of religion.
If Epstein floated the idea of becoming a mail order "minister"seriously, in one of the few things I will ever agree with Stephen Pinker on, Jeffrey Epstein wasn't brilliant, he was wily and skilled at taking advantage of other peoples' weakness.
If he wasn't serious, it's clear he was taking such advantage of the weakness of so many New York Times scribbler types and those who go with such stuff.
You want the law to tighten up the regulations so phony "ministers" and clergymen don't get away with it, I'd love to see the proposal to see if that can work because it would be really good for religion and the rest of us to get rid of the phonies. It would be good for Christianity if only those who tried, hard to live up to the teachings they espouse had to to follow them to earn the status of clergy. Only atheists and the enemies of the Gospel benefit when hucksters and frauds can get away with that.
Update: There I think I got rid of most of the HTML problems, the worst ones, anyway. Blogger seem to be generating a lot of those for me these days. I'm not going to touch that one paragraph for fear of screwing up the others.
Sexual Predator Jeffrey Epstein Considered Becoming a Minister to Earn Trust
A year before convicted sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein died of suicide, a writer for the New York Times met him at his cavernous Manhattan mansion to discuss a possible news story involving the car company Tesla.
Reporter James B. Stewart recalls one interesting anecdote that may or may not be true, but sheds some light into both Epstein’s mindset and a serious loophole with religious exemptions in the law.
At one point, after he became “radioactive,” he says a lot of his contacts didn’t want to be publicly associated with him, though they still asked for money and came to his private dinner parties. But Epstein wondered if there was a way to earn their trust once again:
… Mr. Epstein told me without any trace of irony, he was considering becoming a minister so that his acquaintances would be confident that their conversations would be kept confidential.As we’ve talked about on this site before, priests who are told secrets under the veil of religion (like in a confession booth) are not required to report any wrongdoing to law enforcement. Epstein, a man with many secrets, figured that loophole could theoretically allow him to regain trust from colleagues who worried he might one day share what they told him.
If it ever occurred, it would have been a cruelly smart move on Epstein’s part. Clergy members have a great deal of power and assumed trust. Epstein’s religious title could have lent him unearned trust, led to more people sharing their secrets with him, and even access to more underage girls. As we’ve seen from the recent revelations into his life, many of the people who surrounded him kept their silence in exchange for money or access. You have to wonder how much more serious his crimes could have been if he could use religion as another shield.
He never became a minister. But it says a lot that Epstein, a man who ruined a number of victims’ lives, felt like it was a role he could’ve adopted with ease if he wanted to. It’s not like you have to be a decent person to earn the title.
First, note that Caplin, herself, says that "the anecdote may or may not be true" which is to say the entire premise of her piece might be fictitious, not that that keeps her from plowing ahead as if it is true.
Second, notice that everything she claims he could have gotten by going through the fiction of becoming a minister HE WAS ABLE TO DO AS A RICH WHITE MAN OF PRIVILEGE FOR DECADES AS THE RICH AND POWERFUL AND EVEN THE LAW KNEW HE WAS DOING IT. IF YOU LIKE I'LL GO THROUGH THE LIST OF IDEOLOGICAL, ANTI-RELIGIOUS ATHEISTS, MANY OF THEM EMINENT SCIENTISTS WHO PARTIED AND FED OFF OF HIM AS THAT WAS AN OPEN NON-SECRET, AGAIN.
If, as that was just beginning to mildly sting him on the butt he was thinking of rather stupid ways to get his mojo back it's not surprising that he'd go to the ploy of pretending to be a minister, something that is a direct product of the idiotic insufficiency of the Bill of Rights as written and interpreted which allows such fictions. Jesus gave some very sound and useful methods for identifying false prophets, phony followers of his that are, clearly, beyond the capabilities of secular law to use. The failure of Christians to apply them has always cost them dearly, as, in fact, this post by this semi-pro atheist hater of Christianity is another item in that list. That is a fault of secular law, not of the Bible.
It is remarkable that the semi-pro atheist also fails to note that James B. Stewart in that organ of the "free press" which is the New York Times would seem to have covered up this little bit of information about Epstein as he was interviewing him as part of financial reportage. Forget the typical anti-Catholic exaggerations about the seal of confession being a cover up, the free press regularly covered up for him as did, I'll remind you, a host of celebrity atheists who traveled on the "lolita express" and partied and "conferenced" on Epstein's dime. I wonder if there is a list of clergy who partied with him like that. If there is, bring it out. I have no problem with clergymen having to answer for their sins, or being judged on that basis, as Jesus recommended.
Certainly the rape of young girls is forbidden by Christianity, adultery, fornication, prostitution, etc. the very substance of the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein are absolutely forbidden by Christianity, Jesus, in some of the most explicit things he said about the consequences of sin, would have said Epstein would have been better off to have never been born, to have had a millstone tied round his neck and be drowned in the sea.
It is such secularists who so often get round to calling for the lowering of ages of consent, the decriminalizing of various means by which men exploit women, children, other, less powerful men, by sexual exploitation as a glorious expression of "freedom" who are the natural place to turn to assign blame for someone who was living the libertine lifestyle that so many traditional secularists seemed to hold as some kind of paradise (for elite men and a few elite women).
The world of Jeffrey Epstein and his high livin' high life buddies, his female associates isn't what is held out as good in any religion I know of. I know of many a scribbler, script writer, movie maker, TV director who would want a share of that without violating their profession's standards. The world of pre-second-wave feminism has never not reigned in the media and show, biz and the pro-scribbling industry as we have found from me-too.
I don't know of a single Christian or Jewish clergyman who would NOT be in obvious violation of their professions of faith in participating in it. Jeffrey Epstein was living the dream life of a variety of male secularists, a Hollywood, TV white, rich male wet dream, not much like a figure of religion.
If Epstein floated the idea of becoming a mail order "minister"seriously, in one of the few things I will ever agree with Stephen Pinker on, Jeffrey Epstein wasn't brilliant, he was wily and skilled at taking advantage of other peoples' weakness.
If he wasn't serious, it's clear he was taking such advantage of the weakness of so many New York Times scribbler types and those who go with such stuff.
You want the law to tighten up the regulations so phony "ministers" and clergymen don't get away with it, I'd love to see the proposal to see if that can work because it would be really good for religion and the rest of us to get rid of the phonies. It would be good for Christianity if only those who tried, hard to live up to the teachings they espouse had to to follow them to earn the status of clergy. Only atheists and the enemies of the Gospel benefit when hucksters and frauds can get away with that.
Update: There I think I got rid of most of the HTML problems, the worst ones, anyway. Blogger seem to be generating a lot of those for me these days. I'm not going to touch that one paragraph for fear of screwing up the others.
The Eejits of Eschaton Who Live In Furnished Souls Are Unbeautiful And Have Comfortable Minds
People in the Black Churches, in Christian Base Communities, people who faced slavery and found the explanation of why they had a right to freedom, the product of their labor AND REPARATIONS in Exodus, the other books of the Law, in the Prophets, in the Gospel . . .
You know, as an white man living in the United States in which as below even moderate income - the choice of being a musician - still affluent and privileged by comparison to most of them, I'd never dream of suspecting my point of view was at all of value compared to theirs, based in the most exigent of personal experience. That's the difference between me and the eejits of Eschaton who figure they know better what's good for "those people". As a gay, white man I may have some more insight into that than a straight white man* but even then, my affluence and relative privilege require me to give more weight to the experience of "church ladies" and men of the kind I've been talking about. The assorted blog flies at Duncan's are like intoxicated blowhards of the kind taproom atheists always end up being.
As Chesterton summed it up, he felt as if [Clarence] Darrow had been arguing all afternoon with his fundamentalist aunt, sparring with a dummy of his own mental making.**
Only, over at Duncan's, it's the dummies making those dummies. All of them hepped up on Geritol and their meds and their mutual conceit.
* I wish I kept track of the number of times straight people lectured me about the real, right way to be a gay man over there and elsewhere on the blogs. That figure would be somewhat amusing.
** As one of the witnesses of that debate on the future of religion noted about Darrow,
"his argument was conducted on an amazingly low intellectual level," Something I had to discover for myself about 75 years later online, at pseudo-lefty blogs and comment thread and fact checking latter day Darrows like Dawkins and Hitchens, Dennett and Dershowtiz.
Update: "Eejit" is Irish for "idiot". I learned it from reading Brain Friel's plays and liked it so I use it. Especially useful for alliteration in this case.
You know, as an white man living in the United States in which as below even moderate income - the choice of being a musician - still affluent and privileged by comparison to most of them, I'd never dream of suspecting my point of view was at all of value compared to theirs, based in the most exigent of personal experience. That's the difference between me and the eejits of Eschaton who figure they know better what's good for "those people". As a gay, white man I may have some more insight into that than a straight white man* but even then, my affluence and relative privilege require me to give more weight to the experience of "church ladies" and men of the kind I've been talking about. The assorted blog flies at Duncan's are like intoxicated blowhards of the kind taproom atheists always end up being.
As Chesterton summed it up, he felt as if [Clarence] Darrow had been arguing all afternoon with his fundamentalist aunt, sparring with a dummy of his own mental making.**
Only, over at Duncan's, it's the dummies making those dummies. All of them hepped up on Geritol and their meds and their mutual conceit.
* I wish I kept track of the number of times straight people lectured me about the real, right way to be a gay man over there and elsewhere on the blogs. That figure would be somewhat amusing.
** As one of the witnesses of that debate on the future of religion noted about Darrow,
"his argument was conducted on an amazingly low intellectual level," Something I had to discover for myself about 75 years later online, at pseudo-lefty blogs and comment thread and fact checking latter day Darrows like Dawkins and Hitchens, Dennett and Dershowtiz.
Update: "Eejit" is Irish for "idiot". I learned it from reading Brain Friel's plays and liked it so I use it. Especially useful for alliteration in this case.
The Plain Painful, Unwelcomed Truth About The Truth - Hate Mail
As
I've noted several times in explaining why allowing lies is to only add
to the natural advantage they have is that you can make up any old lie
that people like to hear, you have to tell even the most unpleasant and
hard-to-sell truth to tell the truth.
Sorry to quote myself from yesterday (not to mention cleaning up the editing, prepositions and agreement of verbs seem to be the first casualty in revision). But I think that is one of the follies at the center of ACLU style "free speech - free press" absolutism. Lies have the advantage because, as Satan is imagined to be able to in folklore, they can take many a pleasing form that seduces people into believing them. They can be structured for easy sale to any number of different target markets. THAT is exactly the tactic taken from the advertising industry that the Putin ratfucking of our last election largely consisted of.
Putin and his army of geeks merely copied that tactic from American fascists, billioniares who were just doing what comes naturally to American men of business, they were doing what they do all during the commercial breaks on American TV and radio, what they do during the entertainment programming They were selling based on appealing to our strongest weaknesses, with the truth, on the rare occasion that serves their purpose, on half-truth, quarter-truth, outright lies and outrageous lies when that serves their purpose.
That is what the old "civil libertarian" ACLU regime of totally unregulated media, both by criminal law and civil action taken in self-protection of those their patrons in the media harm and destroy with lies has brought us to. When you hear adherents and admirers of that regime of total deregulation of the media, Rachel Maddow, Charles Pierce, all of my favorites in current media sounding the alarm about the lies that Trump, Kellyanne Conway, the whole raft of Republican-fascists and the lies spread IN OUR OWN MEDIA that originated with the foreign despot gangster Putin - working hand in glove with our domestic gangsters - remember that it is all made possible by the "civil liberties" court rulings they hold as sacred - officially due to their enhancement of "freedom" but always with a large cup of professional self-interest as members of the media, thoroughly incorporated.
There is nothing forcing our media to repeat the lies that are introduced into the media stream, sometimes as the most subtle and successful of product placement the science of public relations has come up with. There is nothing that forces them to make that the substitute for "the news" anymore than reporting phony polls is. The media has by choice, by habit, by practice made itself the foremost participant in the corruption of the collective American mind. That figure I cited the other day - since they love polls so much - that the average American spends more than 35 hours a week just on watching TV is more hours than they spend in schools, at church, reading, certainly more than they spend on reading news or other information, that is the major part of how American democracy was killed through an expansion of a "right" to lie and get away with it. In that original sin that has bloomed like an unstoppable oil spill was as much a product of the secular liberal establishment, Joel Gora, the ACLU, the Warren Court, the New York Times and other very secular organs of the media as it was the conservative media that benefited from it and the Republican fascists whose cycle of success started four years after that in 1968 with the election of Richard Nixon and his reelection as the media destroyed one of the most decent men to have ever gotten a major party nomination, George McGovern on behalf of the already known criminal Richard Nixon in 1972.
The secular left in the United States - far more in the Brit-European tradition of liberalism which is totally compatible with inequality and other such things than the American liberal tradition of equality and economic justice, far more open to such obviously anti-democratic ideologies such as Marxism and the total lunacy of anarchism - is what any real left, a left that can win elections and protect democracy has to overcome and, yes, defeat. As can be seen in the folly described above, it is incapable of learning anything that will have the effect of restoring and protecting democracy because those aren't their real goals. They aren't in Britain as can be seen in the totally self-serving idiocy of Jermey Corbyn as he scuttles the last hope of averting total disaster for the British poor in his attempt to become Prime Minister through other than democratic means - something for which a few weeks ago he was slamming Boris Johnson for doing.
The left either has to acknowledge that without the truth people cannot be free and, so, lies deserve no protection in the law, there is no right to lie, lying is poisonous to egalitarian democracy or that left is committing the kind of slow suicide that it started with its "free speech absolutist" campaign on behalf of lies and the liars that lie them. That it also benefitted the porn industry which chews up and spits out women, children, drug addicts, people held in sex slavery - what civil libertarians glory in as unfettered freedom - for the rapists and those who profit off of the destruction of the "actors" is just another line of evidence proving my case. There was never anything liberal in putting "speech" "press" over and above everything else. As I've noted there is a huge faction of the secular, "nothing sacred" left for which those slogans of "The First Amendment" are the only unquestionable objects of reverence and worship. They take what should have been described and delineated at length by the "founding fathers" who were, in most cases, unenthusiastic about the Bill of Rights, and turn them into simplistic slogans without any real thought of their consequences when so interpreted.
Morality, the actual foundations of American liberalism, of egalitarian democracy, is all about making decisions based in the fullest possible consideration of events and conditions. It doesn't happen automatically like the descriptions of objects moving in physics and the combination of elements and molecules in chemistry, it doesn't happen automatically. That is another of the founding follies that have gotten us here. "More speech" doesn't have a friggin' chance to defeat the lies originating in or spread by the mass media, it doesn't stand a chance against the kind of campaign that billionaires, foreign and domestic have waged against the United States and all other liberal democracies. The truth has the advantage of being true, it doesn't have the advantage of being made to mean anything for easy sales in snappy slogans. It needs every help it can get in the form of suppressing lies and punishing the companies and corporations that feed lies into our world, it needs to punish those billionaires, millionaires and others who intentionally attack democracy with them.
We The People have the overriding right to protect equal self-government, that is a right that all the others so mawkishly cherished by "civil libertarians" were supposedly there to serve. That the Bill of Rights was written by slave owners who had every intention of keeping and expanding their slavery, of genocidal killers and thieves intent on wiping out the indigenous People of the Americas to steal their land (look up why George Washington got the title "town burner") is certainly something we must consider in their Bill of Rights and whether, after more than two centuries of living under it we can ignore all of the problems it creates as well as the ones it supposedly solves. I will remind you that slavery, American-apartheid, the genocide against the natives of the United States, the subjugation of women, massive discrimination, murderous imperialism, the ratfucking of our elections, . . . have all coexisted quite nicely with our First Amendment, along with the Second Amendment which has created an informal fascist militia that Trump calls on to keep him in office. I would not be surprised if "civil libertarians" went to court to defend the right of those people to organize more effectively to kill us. I have no reason to expect the Federal courts wouldn't rule in their favor. Even the liberals who have bought that "more speech" slogan.
Sorry to quote myself from yesterday (not to mention cleaning up the editing, prepositions and agreement of verbs seem to be the first casualty in revision). But I think that is one of the follies at the center of ACLU style "free speech - free press" absolutism. Lies have the advantage because, as Satan is imagined to be able to in folklore, they can take many a pleasing form that seduces people into believing them. They can be structured for easy sale to any number of different target markets. THAT is exactly the tactic taken from the advertising industry that the Putin ratfucking of our last election largely consisted of.
Putin and his army of geeks merely copied that tactic from American fascists, billioniares who were just doing what comes naturally to American men of business, they were doing what they do all during the commercial breaks on American TV and radio, what they do during the entertainment programming They were selling based on appealing to our strongest weaknesses, with the truth, on the rare occasion that serves their purpose, on half-truth, quarter-truth, outright lies and outrageous lies when that serves their purpose.
That is what the old "civil libertarian" ACLU regime of totally unregulated media, both by criminal law and civil action taken in self-protection of those their patrons in the media harm and destroy with lies has brought us to. When you hear adherents and admirers of that regime of total deregulation of the media, Rachel Maddow, Charles Pierce, all of my favorites in current media sounding the alarm about the lies that Trump, Kellyanne Conway, the whole raft of Republican-fascists and the lies spread IN OUR OWN MEDIA that originated with the foreign despot gangster Putin - working hand in glove with our domestic gangsters - remember that it is all made possible by the "civil liberties" court rulings they hold as sacred - officially due to their enhancement of "freedom" but always with a large cup of professional self-interest as members of the media, thoroughly incorporated.
There is nothing forcing our media to repeat the lies that are introduced into the media stream, sometimes as the most subtle and successful of product placement the science of public relations has come up with. There is nothing that forces them to make that the substitute for "the news" anymore than reporting phony polls is. The media has by choice, by habit, by practice made itself the foremost participant in the corruption of the collective American mind. That figure I cited the other day - since they love polls so much - that the average American spends more than 35 hours a week just on watching TV is more hours than they spend in schools, at church, reading, certainly more than they spend on reading news or other information, that is the major part of how American democracy was killed through an expansion of a "right" to lie and get away with it. In that original sin that has bloomed like an unstoppable oil spill was as much a product of the secular liberal establishment, Joel Gora, the ACLU, the Warren Court, the New York Times and other very secular organs of the media as it was the conservative media that benefited from it and the Republican fascists whose cycle of success started four years after that in 1968 with the election of Richard Nixon and his reelection as the media destroyed one of the most decent men to have ever gotten a major party nomination, George McGovern on behalf of the already known criminal Richard Nixon in 1972.
The secular left in the United States - far more in the Brit-European tradition of liberalism which is totally compatible with inequality and other such things than the American liberal tradition of equality and economic justice, far more open to such obviously anti-democratic ideologies such as Marxism and the total lunacy of anarchism - is what any real left, a left that can win elections and protect democracy has to overcome and, yes, defeat. As can be seen in the folly described above, it is incapable of learning anything that will have the effect of restoring and protecting democracy because those aren't their real goals. They aren't in Britain as can be seen in the totally self-serving idiocy of Jermey Corbyn as he scuttles the last hope of averting total disaster for the British poor in his attempt to become Prime Minister through other than democratic means - something for which a few weeks ago he was slamming Boris Johnson for doing.
The left either has to acknowledge that without the truth people cannot be free and, so, lies deserve no protection in the law, there is no right to lie, lying is poisonous to egalitarian democracy or that left is committing the kind of slow suicide that it started with its "free speech absolutist" campaign on behalf of lies and the liars that lie them. That it also benefitted the porn industry which chews up and spits out women, children, drug addicts, people held in sex slavery - what civil libertarians glory in as unfettered freedom - for the rapists and those who profit off of the destruction of the "actors" is just another line of evidence proving my case. There was never anything liberal in putting "speech" "press" over and above everything else. As I've noted there is a huge faction of the secular, "nothing sacred" left for which those slogans of "The First Amendment" are the only unquestionable objects of reverence and worship. They take what should have been described and delineated at length by the "founding fathers" who were, in most cases, unenthusiastic about the Bill of Rights, and turn them into simplistic slogans without any real thought of their consequences when so interpreted.
Morality, the actual foundations of American liberalism, of egalitarian democracy, is all about making decisions based in the fullest possible consideration of events and conditions. It doesn't happen automatically like the descriptions of objects moving in physics and the combination of elements and molecules in chemistry, it doesn't happen automatically. That is another of the founding follies that have gotten us here. "More speech" doesn't have a friggin' chance to defeat the lies originating in or spread by the mass media, it doesn't stand a chance against the kind of campaign that billionaires, foreign and domestic have waged against the United States and all other liberal democracies. The truth has the advantage of being true, it doesn't have the advantage of being made to mean anything for easy sales in snappy slogans. It needs every help it can get in the form of suppressing lies and punishing the companies and corporations that feed lies into our world, it needs to punish those billionaires, millionaires and others who intentionally attack democracy with them.
We The People have the overriding right to protect equal self-government, that is a right that all the others so mawkishly cherished by "civil libertarians" were supposedly there to serve. That the Bill of Rights was written by slave owners who had every intention of keeping and expanding their slavery, of genocidal killers and thieves intent on wiping out the indigenous People of the Americas to steal their land (look up why George Washington got the title "town burner") is certainly something we must consider in their Bill of Rights and whether, after more than two centuries of living under it we can ignore all of the problems it creates as well as the ones it supposedly solves. I will remind you that slavery, American-apartheid, the genocide against the natives of the United States, the subjugation of women, massive discrimination, murderous imperialism, the ratfucking of our elections, . . . have all coexisted quite nicely with our First Amendment, along with the Second Amendment which has created an informal fascist militia that Trump calls on to keep him in office. I would not be surprised if "civil libertarians" went to court to defend the right of those people to organize more effectively to kill us. I have no reason to expect the Federal courts wouldn't rule in their favor. Even the liberals who have bought that "more speech" slogan.
Saturday, August 17, 2019
Saturday Night Radio Drama - Martin Jameson - DCI John Stone- The White Van
Another week when I'm too busy to track down a comprehensive cast listing, luckily, the announcers of the BBC usually do a good job of that. I listened to this on another source, I'm pretty sure this one is where they got it from.
You can download mp3s of the whole series at Archive.org. As critical as I've been of cop operas this week, this series is generally very good and not much like an American one.
Here, I'll Post What The Spam Bot Tried To Post, It Makes About As Much Sense As Stupy's Comment And Is As On Topic
What a data of
un-ambiguity and perserverness
of vauable experince on the topic of
unpredicted emotions.
"religion is necessary to keep the proles in line" - Stupid Mail
The ubiquitous idiocy of the atheist play-left in the United States and elsewhere in the English speaking world holds that religion is, as Marx said in abbreviation, "the opiate of the masses" when the actual effect of the Mosaic Law and the Christian Gospel, when taken seriously and as a mandatory moral foundation civil law, economic justice or injustice, as most law really comes down to, has exactly the opposite effect. The fact that it is, actually, in modern officially atheist, officially and brutally anti-religious states that "the proles" have been kept in harsher bondage than they have been in just about all modern democracies, certainly including the comparatively religious United States. The greatest number of slaves, right now, are in such countries such as North Korea and China. Atheism is, actually, in the modern context, the ideology most associated with oppression of the masses.
I, as so many others have noted before that when those held in slavery looked for inspiration for an example of slaves being freed, they looked to Exodus, that central narrative of the Hebrew Bible and to the Gospel of Jesus, the Epistles and Acts.
The history of liberation theology in Central and South America and elsewhere is a history of martyrdom of people organizing in resistance to oppression inspired by their reading of the Gospels. There was a reason the Samosa government bombed the Christian base community at Solentiname as part of its war against Catholics organizing through the church, why St. Oscar Romero was assassinated as he said Mass, why the six Jesuit theologians, their house keeper and her daughter were brutally assassinated, why the Black Churches were bombed and attacked all during the days of official and unofficial slavery, throughout the Jim Crow period and up till today when Churches are burned and Bible study classes of old people are attacked by the likes of Dylan Roof, why Synagogues are attacked, why they were attacked by Nazis, Marxists, fascists, etc.
As Noam Chomsky once said, the reason those things started happening in reaction to the Second Vatican Council and the theological movements demanding equality and economic justice fell under attack by the CIA and other agencies, why the graduates of the School of the Americas are such notable nun and priest killers, it is because "the Gospel is radical". It is more radical than Marxism, as is, in fact, the Mosaic law, as is the economic program of even the otherwise reactionary Popes that came after St. John XXIII. As Bernie Sander correctly said, his economics program is less radical that the Pope's, I believe it was Francis he said it about though, oddly enough, that's probably true of his reactionary predecessor, Benedict XVI. I know of no secular, certainly no atheist political babbler who is as radical as Walter Brueggemann, none who was as radical as James Cone.
The utter ignorance of the college-credentialed, anti-religious play-left in such matters is as total an eclipse as they could imagine, attributing such benightedness to religion, alone. The issuance of such bull shit from them is of such a regularity, of such dependability that it is generally unremarkable. As I said, having been brought up - though not by my parents - on the academic babble on such thing, I had just bought into the idea that atheism was an intellectual position. It took the new-atheism, the spectacle of its cover in the "skepticism" industry and fact checking them to begin that unraveling. sTARBABY as exposed by one of their own, the ultra-asshole-atheist in his own right, Dennis Rawlins, was very important in breaking through the accretions of habit, being able to fact check atheists and their holdings - few of which stand up to close investigation - has been a constant abandonment of habits of thought and bull shit and lies and, yes, leaving behind the people who will always be more of a help to the gangsters of the left as well as the right such as the new-atheist and the old ones are.
A political economy governed by The Law and the Gospel would be the most radical redistribution of wealth and power down in the history of the world, a legal system of civil rights based in the moral teachings of Jesus would shatter the injustice that has constituted the majority of the history of humanity.
On that I am entirely more willing to think the abolitionists such as David Walker, Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman were right, on that I am willing to trust the likes of The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. Cesar Chavez, Dorothy Day, than I am any ideological atheist who, so often, advocates the Marxism that adds total hypocrisy to the brutal gangsterism of fascism - as the Nazis added Darwinism to the mix.
I'm certainly not willing to trust the idiot who believed that Alexander Nevsky was up against Nazis and who has never demonstrated that he's capable of discerning the truth and certainly seems to have an inherent revulsion to it.
As I've noted several times in explaining why allowing lies is to only add to the natural advantage they have in that you can make up any old lie that people like to hear, you have to tell even the most unpleasant and hard-to-sell truth to tell the truth.
Maybe it's because the truth is, in that eternal Freshman whine, haaarrrrrrd! Atheists are generally quite lazy, mostly a bunch of semi-affluent and affluent self-satisfied slacker boys and the contented cattle of college faculties and the scribbling class, something you can see if you compare their writing to that of someone like Hans Kung or Elizabeth Johnson or Walter Brueggmann. Brueggemann's exposition of economic justice, flowing directly from The Law, The Prophets and The Gospel is quite coherent. You can't get that out of biological or material determinism.
I, as so many others have noted before that when those held in slavery looked for inspiration for an example of slaves being freed, they looked to Exodus, that central narrative of the Hebrew Bible and to the Gospel of Jesus, the Epistles and Acts.
The history of liberation theology in Central and South America and elsewhere is a history of martyrdom of people organizing in resistance to oppression inspired by their reading of the Gospels. There was a reason the Samosa government bombed the Christian base community at Solentiname as part of its war against Catholics organizing through the church, why St. Oscar Romero was assassinated as he said Mass, why the six Jesuit theologians, their house keeper and her daughter were brutally assassinated, why the Black Churches were bombed and attacked all during the days of official and unofficial slavery, throughout the Jim Crow period and up till today when Churches are burned and Bible study classes of old people are attacked by the likes of Dylan Roof, why Synagogues are attacked, why they were attacked by Nazis, Marxists, fascists, etc.
As Noam Chomsky once said, the reason those things started happening in reaction to the Second Vatican Council and the theological movements demanding equality and economic justice fell under attack by the CIA and other agencies, why the graduates of the School of the Americas are such notable nun and priest killers, it is because "the Gospel is radical". It is more radical than Marxism, as is, in fact, the Mosaic law, as is the economic program of even the otherwise reactionary Popes that came after St. John XXIII. As Bernie Sander correctly said, his economics program is less radical that the Pope's, I believe it was Francis he said it about though, oddly enough, that's probably true of his reactionary predecessor, Benedict XVI. I know of no secular, certainly no atheist political babbler who is as radical as Walter Brueggemann, none who was as radical as James Cone.
The utter ignorance of the college-credentialed, anti-religious play-left in such matters is as total an eclipse as they could imagine, attributing such benightedness to religion, alone. The issuance of such bull shit from them is of such a regularity, of such dependability that it is generally unremarkable. As I said, having been brought up - though not by my parents - on the academic babble on such thing, I had just bought into the idea that atheism was an intellectual position. It took the new-atheism, the spectacle of its cover in the "skepticism" industry and fact checking them to begin that unraveling. sTARBABY as exposed by one of their own, the ultra-asshole-atheist in his own right, Dennis Rawlins, was very important in breaking through the accretions of habit, being able to fact check atheists and their holdings - few of which stand up to close investigation - has been a constant abandonment of habits of thought and bull shit and lies and, yes, leaving behind the people who will always be more of a help to the gangsters of the left as well as the right such as the new-atheist and the old ones are.
A political economy governed by The Law and the Gospel would be the most radical redistribution of wealth and power down in the history of the world, a legal system of civil rights based in the moral teachings of Jesus would shatter the injustice that has constituted the majority of the history of humanity.
On that I am entirely more willing to think the abolitionists such as David Walker, Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman were right, on that I am willing to trust the likes of The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. Cesar Chavez, Dorothy Day, than I am any ideological atheist who, so often, advocates the Marxism that adds total hypocrisy to the brutal gangsterism of fascism - as the Nazis added Darwinism to the mix.
I'm certainly not willing to trust the idiot who believed that Alexander Nevsky was up against Nazis and who has never demonstrated that he's capable of discerning the truth and certainly seems to have an inherent revulsion to it.
As I've noted several times in explaining why allowing lies is to only add to the natural advantage they have in that you can make up any old lie that people like to hear, you have to tell even the most unpleasant and hard-to-sell truth to tell the truth.
Maybe it's because the truth is, in that eternal Freshman whine, haaarrrrrrd! Atheists are generally quite lazy, mostly a bunch of semi-affluent and affluent self-satisfied slacker boys and the contented cattle of college faculties and the scribbling class, something you can see if you compare their writing to that of someone like Hans Kung or Elizabeth Johnson or Walter Brueggmann. Brueggemann's exposition of economic justice, flowing directly from The Law, The Prophets and The Gospel is quite coherent. You can't get that out of biological or material determinism.
Friday, August 16, 2019
Cecil Brooks III - Sunny
Cecil Brooks III, drums arranger.
Matt Chertkoff, guitar
Kyle Koehler, organ
Penn Relays
I heard the first of these on the radio this morning and decided to post it because I can. Late summer usually makes me think of Hammond organs and Kyle Koehler is one of my favorites on that instrument. No idea what the association is in my mind but it's there. I wasn't familiar with Cecil Brooks III or Matt Chertkoff but I'll be following them up, one of the best things about Youtube, that you can try new stuff. Makes me wonder why so many only listen to the same old, same old stuff on it.
Announcment Of The Fall Season
I have decided to do with Hans Kung's little book Why I Am Still A Christian what I did with Walter Brueggemann's excellent small book The Bible Makes Sense and go through it over several weeks. I won't do what I'm tempted to, type the whole thing into Blogger, Kung's book being worth reading in its entirety. It isn't as comprehensive as the three longer books I've posted short excerpts from* but it makes a succinct form of the major arguments in those great works. Yet my stupidest troll slams the literature of theology which he has never, ever read a page of. Joined in that by the equally ignorant college-credentialed cohort I've mentioned otherwise today.
I might start today or tomorrow. Depending on an ever more busy calendar. I'm teaching again starting the end of this month.
* Does God Exist?, On Being A Christian and Eternal Life? You could spend a lifetime reading and rereading these books and looking up all of Kung's voluminous citations from all over the sciences, history, literature, philosophy and religion. I am unaware of anything in secular scholarship that matches them and, in fact, most of the theological works I've been reading. Once in a while I recall the passage from Richard Lewontin's essay-review, Billions and Billions of Demons in which he mocks the naive and arrogant pretensions of Carl Sagan:
Third, it is said that there is no place for an argument from authority in science. The community of science is constantly self-critical, as evidenced by the experience of university colloquia "in which the speaker has hardly gotten 30 seconds into the talk before there are devastating questions and comments from the audience." If Sagan really wants to hear serious disputation about the nature of the universe, he should leave the academic precincts in Ithaca and spend a few minutes in an Orthodox study house in Brooklyn.
I adore Lewontin, that dear old atheist materialist, may he be glad when he discovers he was wrong. He should get into heaven on his honesty, if nothing else.
I might start today or tomorrow. Depending on an ever more busy calendar. I'm teaching again starting the end of this month.
* Does God Exist?, On Being A Christian and Eternal Life? You could spend a lifetime reading and rereading these books and looking up all of Kung's voluminous citations from all over the sciences, history, literature, philosophy and religion. I am unaware of anything in secular scholarship that matches them and, in fact, most of the theological works I've been reading. Once in a while I recall the passage from Richard Lewontin's essay-review, Billions and Billions of Demons in which he mocks the naive and arrogant pretensions of Carl Sagan:
Third, it is said that there is no place for an argument from authority in science. The community of science is constantly self-critical, as evidenced by the experience of university colloquia "in which the speaker has hardly gotten 30 seconds into the talk before there are devastating questions and comments from the audience." If Sagan really wants to hear serious disputation about the nature of the universe, he should leave the academic precincts in Ithaca and spend a few minutes in an Orthodox study house in Brooklyn.
I adore Lewontin, that dear old atheist materialist, may he be glad when he discovers he was wrong. He should get into heaven on his honesty, if nothing else.
Hate Mail - In Which I Say Something Nice About My Enemies Which They Won't Like One Little Bit
I should admit that I owe a debt of gratitude, though not one they'd be gratified to know about, to my antagonists at Duncan Black's blog and those of the past when I used to get into brawls at the Science Blogs, at some blogs of Marxists, etc. that they provided me with the first evidence I'd noticed of how the American and, I'd say, British lefts have failed through the enforced secular regime of the past century. Though before that it was the part the Black Churches, the Peace Churches, the Catholic Left (of which my mother was an active part) and other parts of the religious left that were the first part of what has developed into the major theme of my online activity. I just didn't realize that's what I was learning from the example of the height of success in liberalism which occurred when I was in my late adolescence in the 1960s. It was the wave of Civil Rights activism which was, in fact, most successful when it was centered in the Black Church, was staffed by figures such as St. Cesar Chavez, that was my first clue that any successful left, any successful American style liberalism is, in fact, and of necessity, based in religious conviction of the right kind, the kind that fuels and feeds and originates the morality of that left.
The atheist online invective and dishonesty, the new-atheism fad of the 00s and its contiued presence till today, had everything to do with why I have concluded it is and has been one of the main engines of failure on the American and British left, of lefts in other places. I have come to the conclusion that their intellectual products of the past two centuries are the major hurdle to the progress that others have made. Even what they and so many of us like to think of as their loftiest ideals, embodied in the slogan "The First Amendment" unguided by even more fundamental values, both those within and external to religion, will be turned into poison of self- government by people with sufficient moral conviction, willingness to sacrifice and adequate knowledge of the kind that can produce egalitarian democracy and a concern for posterity strong enough to do what needs to be done to create what we all claim to desire.
The quote from Eric Alterman I gave, again, the other day, confirming that Jurgen Habermas - an atheist who is also one of the most eminent post-war scholars in the relevant areas, the eminent historian James T. Kloppenberg, presumably Alterman - no novice in this area of study, himself, and, by inference FDR, agree with what I'd concluded independently from the experiences noted in my first paragraph, that any hope for any revival and effective American style liberal left, a left of egalitarian democracy, the salvation of the environment, the best chance for a decent life for everyone in a sustainable world, will come from the kind of religious belief that Christianity is based in but which is not exclusive to Christianity, it is shared by many other religious groups.
Those bases cannot be found in an effective way without religious foundation, the secular, allegedly scientific articulations of them will always be accompanied by stronger and more highly valued ideological beliefs which undermine them. If individuals within that secularism do not have their personal commitments to egalitarian justice or environmental sustenance diminished by their ideological camp, others in that camp will effectively thwart them being enacted. There is a reason that Habermas, an atheist and Marxist scholar and philosopher with every reason to find a secular basis for the foundations of freedom in equality and democracy could not, after a lifetime's study, find those though he could find them in the Jewish and Christian religions, calling those the only source that nourishes those essential values.
Other religious groups contain the potential to do that, I believe, as long as their firmly held beliefs in them are strong enough to overcome what Plantinga calls "defeaters". I was listening to a lecture about the history of the Cree language that led me to conclude that traditional Cree religion seems to contain that potential. But I know from a lot of reading of the history of secularism, of atheism, of scientism, of science, to know that none of those can generate or sustain such values and certainly, in practice, they undermine them in a very real and very dangerous way.
The insights I gained as to the folly of the traditional "left-right" graph of political identity were part of that as well. The massive spectacle of the secular left being willfully blind to the piles and mountain of corpses racked up by atheist governments, Marxist, amassed in the 20th century, rivaling those amassed by the Nazis and fascists and under capitalism, the claim that all of the non-egalitarian, non-democratic governments of all degrees are not all morally unacceptable and deplorable is confirmation of my theme, as well. When someone like Alexander Cockburn could argue in the 1990s (If I'm recalling the timeline correctly) that, somehow, Stalin was better than Hitler because their hit lists were drawn up slightly differently, that others pooh-poohed the as massive murders of Mao and other self identified scientific regimes, when they can ignore that it is, in fact, university trained physicists, chemists, etc. who have put us all in the greatest peril in human history, blaming the woes of the world on probably the least potent origin of some evil in the past, religion, provides anyone who is looking honestly all the reason they need to conclude that it is, in fact, secularism that has destroyed American style liberalism and kept us in the wilderness for half a century.
Update: Reading through this in my typical practice of publishing in haste and editing at leisure, I should note the part that the lefty magazines - I used to subscribe to four, not to mention newspapers and other media - played in my disillusion with the secular left. I think the first clue was when I read those annoyingly self-satisfied and pious claims of the virtue of non-voting that appeared in such magazines, the ones that advocated never-would-win candidacies and the "third parties" that popped in and out of existence as if out of some quantum vacuum, never producing a fucking thing except futility and publicity for their inventors, etc. I read those long enough to know they all, with perhaps the exception of the later years of Mother Jones and only then to some extent, were dedicated to exactly what was self-defeating in the secular left and dedicated to much of the pseudo-left depravity of the kind I noted in the last paragraph above. The line that The Nation magazine took on Putin's ratfucking in our last election, producing Trump who they railed about, otherwise, has really opened my eyes to the affection that left has for foreign dictators - apparently a fascist gangster like Putin gets in under the habits formed when it was other Soviet gangsters and others who had their support. I have to say it and the memory of things like Cockburn's columns mentioned above, killed off any residual affection or trust I had for such entities.
The atheist online invective and dishonesty, the new-atheism fad of the 00s and its contiued presence till today, had everything to do with why I have concluded it is and has been one of the main engines of failure on the American and British left, of lefts in other places. I have come to the conclusion that their intellectual products of the past two centuries are the major hurdle to the progress that others have made. Even what they and so many of us like to think of as their loftiest ideals, embodied in the slogan "The First Amendment" unguided by even more fundamental values, both those within and external to religion, will be turned into poison of self- government by people with sufficient moral conviction, willingness to sacrifice and adequate knowledge of the kind that can produce egalitarian democracy and a concern for posterity strong enough to do what needs to be done to create what we all claim to desire.
The quote from Eric Alterman I gave, again, the other day, confirming that Jurgen Habermas - an atheist who is also one of the most eminent post-war scholars in the relevant areas, the eminent historian James T. Kloppenberg, presumably Alterman - no novice in this area of study, himself, and, by inference FDR, agree with what I'd concluded independently from the experiences noted in my first paragraph, that any hope for any revival and effective American style liberal left, a left of egalitarian democracy, the salvation of the environment, the best chance for a decent life for everyone in a sustainable world, will come from the kind of religious belief that Christianity is based in but which is not exclusive to Christianity, it is shared by many other religious groups.
Those bases cannot be found in an effective way without religious foundation, the secular, allegedly scientific articulations of them will always be accompanied by stronger and more highly valued ideological beliefs which undermine them. If individuals within that secularism do not have their personal commitments to egalitarian justice or environmental sustenance diminished by their ideological camp, others in that camp will effectively thwart them being enacted. There is a reason that Habermas, an atheist and Marxist scholar and philosopher with every reason to find a secular basis for the foundations of freedom in equality and democracy could not, after a lifetime's study, find those though he could find them in the Jewish and Christian religions, calling those the only source that nourishes those essential values.
Other religious groups contain the potential to do that, I believe, as long as their firmly held beliefs in them are strong enough to overcome what Plantinga calls "defeaters". I was listening to a lecture about the history of the Cree language that led me to conclude that traditional Cree religion seems to contain that potential. But I know from a lot of reading of the history of secularism, of atheism, of scientism, of science, to know that none of those can generate or sustain such values and certainly, in practice, they undermine them in a very real and very dangerous way.
The insights I gained as to the folly of the traditional "left-right" graph of political identity were part of that as well. The massive spectacle of the secular left being willfully blind to the piles and mountain of corpses racked up by atheist governments, Marxist, amassed in the 20th century, rivaling those amassed by the Nazis and fascists and under capitalism, the claim that all of the non-egalitarian, non-democratic governments of all degrees are not all morally unacceptable and deplorable is confirmation of my theme, as well. When someone like Alexander Cockburn could argue in the 1990s (If I'm recalling the timeline correctly) that, somehow, Stalin was better than Hitler because their hit lists were drawn up slightly differently, that others pooh-poohed the as massive murders of Mao and other self identified scientific regimes, when they can ignore that it is, in fact, university trained physicists, chemists, etc. who have put us all in the greatest peril in human history, blaming the woes of the world on probably the least potent origin of some evil in the past, religion, provides anyone who is looking honestly all the reason they need to conclude that it is, in fact, secularism that has destroyed American style liberalism and kept us in the wilderness for half a century.
Update: Reading through this in my typical practice of publishing in haste and editing at leisure, I should note the part that the lefty magazines - I used to subscribe to four, not to mention newspapers and other media - played in my disillusion with the secular left. I think the first clue was when I read those annoyingly self-satisfied and pious claims of the virtue of non-voting that appeared in such magazines, the ones that advocated never-would-win candidacies and the "third parties" that popped in and out of existence as if out of some quantum vacuum, never producing a fucking thing except futility and publicity for their inventors, etc. I read those long enough to know they all, with perhaps the exception of the later years of Mother Jones and only then to some extent, were dedicated to exactly what was self-defeating in the secular left and dedicated to much of the pseudo-left depravity of the kind I noted in the last paragraph above. The line that The Nation magazine took on Putin's ratfucking in our last election, producing Trump who they railed about, otherwise, has really opened my eyes to the affection that left has for foreign dictators - apparently a fascist gangster like Putin gets in under the habits formed when it was other Soviet gangsters and others who had their support. I have to say it and the memory of things like Cockburn's columns mentioned above, killed off any residual affection or trust I had for such entities.
Wednesday, August 14, 2019
"you're an anticatholic conspiracy theorist" - Hate Mail From A Different Direction Than Usual
I have got to go do an errand, I don't have time to develop a fuller answer. Here, though, is a passage from a kissy face New York Times piece about the now defrocked, sexually abusive (women, not little boys that we know of, yet) Opus Dei priest, C. John McCloskey III, one of the bigger right-wing media priests of the recent past. This is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about, though it's a hell of a lot bigger than that.
Some priests are
known for their work among the poor, others for their learning, still
others for decades of service to a parish. The Rev. C. John McCloskey
III, a priest of the traditionalist Opus Dei order, has a different
calling. He makes converts, often of the rich and Republican.
He has personally
prepared for conversion to Catholicism, among others, Gov. Sam
Brownback of Kansas; the Supreme Court nominee Robert H. Bork; the
columnists Robert D. Novak and Lawrence Kudlow; the conservative
publisher Alfred S. Regnery; the anti-abortion activist Bernard
Nathanson; and Lewis E. Lehrman, an investment banker and former
candidate for governor of New York.
Father McCloskey,
61, is hardly the only conservative priest or minister. But few have
his knack for persuading political conservatives to adopt a different
religion.
The neo-fascist movement in the Catholic Church is full of money and empty of morals.
About The Developing Putinian Nuclear Disaster
Back when neo-atheism was new and at its most obnoxious on lefty blogs and comment threads, back when I was just realizing what a problem it was other than the obvious ballot-box-poison that such atheists were peddling, I remember getting into a massive row with a bunch of them at Eschaton and other places over the, then, hero of such dopes, Sam Harris. The now infamous passage saying that it might be a good thing to launch nuclear first strikes that would kill tens of millions of innocent people in a day in order to prevent "The Islamic Bomb" figured in it. I was just learning how to really get under the skin of such atheist idiots so I made the much more modestly murdering suggestion of, instead, going to the root of the problem and killing all of the nuclear scientists of the kind who had been exposed for selling nuclear know-how to the Kim regime in North Korea and who, in fact, are the ultimate source of all of the danger from nuclear technology.
The idea that killing several thousand scientists, or perhaps fewer, was a lot more fair than killing tens of millions of innocent people was far more of a terrible idea to the college-credentialed atheists than the idea of killing tens of millions of innocents. That was a major parting of the ways between us, I have seldom been so glad to leave such former ill considered comrades behind me. I have had that same argument in several forms since then, though not so much involving Sam Harris who has, like Richard Dawkins, given himself cooties as his former fan boys and gals parted ways with them.
I am reviving my modest proposal in view of this new nuclear catastrophe in Putinia which, as the gangster regimes lies and cover up gives way, is getting ever worse. If they're now admitting to the horrific original news, it can only be because things are far worse. I don't feel sorry for the nuclear scientists and technicians who have been killed and contaminated - no doubt to die later - I feel sorry for the innocent people who will die and be injured, the wildlife that will die, who knows who else who will die as a result of their science. Such scientists are the ultimate source for what they produce, for what they propose for what they dream up. They are probably the foremost evidence that the creators of the story of the fall of man by eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, of stories such as Faust were on to something.
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I don't know the supposed religious nature of the nuclear scientists who produced these disasters - atheists love to brag that they fucking OWN science, man - but they certainly aren't moral people. They are likely to get us all killed, certainly many of us, through the replacements of morality in instrumental and utilitarian systems of reasoning, of the sheer nihilistic depravity that is the result of the materialism that so many of them adhere to. I have recently posted a criticism of the Russian Orthodox Church which, recently, suspended the practice of blessing nuclear weapons - to the objection of some nationalist Orthodox clergymen. I think that such Orthodox collaborators with Putin's regime are a variation on the corrupted, Nazi enthusiasts of Nazi "Positive Christianity". In many ways, I think, the Putin regime is going to reproduce what Hitler did only, now, with nuclear capability. Putin is, I am convinced, a cynical gangster with no moral convictions or religious beliefs at all. Exactly the kind of person you would have expected would rise in the KGB and out of the corrupt, incompetency of the Yeltsin government. I don't see the Patriarch of Moscow as any kind of opponent of this depravity. I think Putin is merely a more skilled and manipulative gangster than Hitler was, and Hitler was bad enough for being good at that. His rapprochement with the Russian Orthodox establishment is sheer cynicism by a man of no religious conscience. The Orthodox hierarchy has no such excuse, they're not supposed to do that. But science, of course, takes no position on the morality of any of it, it is the prime example of how instrumental reasoning is a maladaptation that might end up killing us all.
The idea that killing several thousand scientists, or perhaps fewer, was a lot more fair than killing tens of millions of innocent people was far more of a terrible idea to the college-credentialed atheists than the idea of killing tens of millions of innocents. That was a major parting of the ways between us, I have seldom been so glad to leave such former ill considered comrades behind me. I have had that same argument in several forms since then, though not so much involving Sam Harris who has, like Richard Dawkins, given himself cooties as his former fan boys and gals parted ways with them.
I am reviving my modest proposal in view of this new nuclear catastrophe in Putinia which, as the gangster regimes lies and cover up gives way, is getting ever worse. If they're now admitting to the horrific original news, it can only be because things are far worse. I don't feel sorry for the nuclear scientists and technicians who have been killed and contaminated - no doubt to die later - I feel sorry for the innocent people who will die and be injured, the wildlife that will die, who knows who else who will die as a result of their science. Such scientists are the ultimate source for what they produce, for what they propose for what they dream up. They are probably the foremost evidence that the creators of the story of the fall of man by eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, of stories such as Faust were on to something.
---------------------
I don't know the supposed religious nature of the nuclear scientists who produced these disasters - atheists love to brag that they fucking OWN science, man - but they certainly aren't moral people. They are likely to get us all killed, certainly many of us, through the replacements of morality in instrumental and utilitarian systems of reasoning, of the sheer nihilistic depravity that is the result of the materialism that so many of them adhere to. I have recently posted a criticism of the Russian Orthodox Church which, recently, suspended the practice of blessing nuclear weapons - to the objection of some nationalist Orthodox clergymen. I think that such Orthodox collaborators with Putin's regime are a variation on the corrupted, Nazi enthusiasts of Nazi "Positive Christianity". In many ways, I think, the Putin regime is going to reproduce what Hitler did only, now, with nuclear capability. Putin is, I am convinced, a cynical gangster with no moral convictions or religious beliefs at all. Exactly the kind of person you would have expected would rise in the KGB and out of the corrupt, incompetency of the Yeltsin government. I don't see the Patriarch of Moscow as any kind of opponent of this depravity. I think Putin is merely a more skilled and manipulative gangster than Hitler was, and Hitler was bad enough for being good at that. His rapprochement with the Russian Orthodox establishment is sheer cynicism by a man of no religious conscience. The Orthodox hierarchy has no such excuse, they're not supposed to do that. But science, of course, takes no position on the morality of any of it, it is the prime example of how instrumental reasoning is a maladaptation that might end up killing us all.
The Education Of Kenny - A Rant In Response To His Latest Evil
Ken Cuccinelli, tool of racist, fascist depravity, can be added to the list of morally depraved Republican fascists who are a product of elite Catholic prep schools, Gonzaga College High School, that includes such figures of pure, cruel, opportunistic evil as Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, and so many others in and around the Trump administration, serving the closest we have had to the most vulgar of late medieval gangster strong man rulers, a devoted worshiper of Mammon and himself while posing as Catholic-Christians - though as I understand it, in the case of Gorsuch and Thomas, posing as Anglo-Catholics in right-wing Episcopalian churches, the last I heard.
The product of elite Catholic education and Catholic education in general is certainly varied but the status of some of its most evil alumni and alumnae should be extremely troubling to the Jesuits and other teaching orders who run these training grounds of elite criminals and gangsters.
I think the continued existence of such elite Catholic prep schools, expensive and selective for the elites they serve, are an important part of the more general Catholic-establishment edifice complex in which the institutions turn into objects of veneration, devotion, and, in every practical meaning of the word, worship. The eminence of such institutions, like all elite institutions, are both a sign and a practice of corrupted morality. I know in the wake of the exposure they got in the Brett Kavanaugh hearings there was a lot of talk about reforming such elite Catholic schools, especially boys' schools but I wouldn't count on anything more than that talk to happen. Such elite institutions will always service their rich patrons and supporters and they are exactly the kinds of people who have no problem with the perverted amorality of such people as Kavanaugh. I didn't see any elite - rich Catholic backlash as the prep school days of Kavanaugh and his posse was laid out in florid detail for the world to hear.
The best thing to do with those places, if the Catholic orders, organizations, institutions who run them were interested in not gaining a chunk of the world at the loss of their souls, would be to shut them down, sell the physical plants, perhaps preserving green space they own, using the assets to serve the poor, the downtrodden, the people who Cuccinelli wants to edit out of Emma Lazarus's most famous poem.
Of course that won't happen, the idiotic movie Shoes of the Fishermen in which the first Slavic Pope sold the Vatican to feed the poor was a piece of Hollywood crap. In reality the first one managed one of the most corrupt modern papacies and he adored everything about the lavish spectacle and centralized power that is the absolute worst part of Catholicism. Francis is doing better but his papacy is fighting against the entrenched fascism that John Paul II and Benedict XVI appointed to so many bishops palaces and to head institutions of the Catholic Church. He is clearly afraid of a right-wing schism and is so afraid of that, led by the likes of the putrid drag-queen queer basher sometimes partner with Steve Bannon, Cardinal Raymond Burke and assorted gangsters in red and purple caps, that Francis is in danger of leading many of us to despair. There is a large group of ultra-rich Catholic millionaires and billionaires funding an anti-Francis putsch, already.
I doubt that he, unlike the Wojtyla pope, saw Shoes of the Fishermen in all its unrealistic stupidity. In real life it was the Slavic Pope who reignited the inquisition that censured and silenced theologians, those represented in the movie, Hans Kung clearly one of them. I was convinced that the Cardinals who elected him did so because they saw that piece of junk.
But if Francis wanted to make an even more impressive gesture, impressive because it would be real and would strike at the heart of the rich elite who are his enemies, might I suggest that he do exactly what I described, sell off the parts of the church that service the elite, preparing them to be the Kavanaughs, the Cuccinellis, the Clarence Thomases and worse, sell them off to serve the ones that they are crushing under their feet. If he's waiting for a reform from those in the hierarchy and in charge of such institutions, there aren't enough merely reforming papacies left before the Second Coming to do it that way.
Of course, there is just a possibility that Francis, being the first Latin American Pope, might understand that, by a very large percentage, the people Cuccinelli is trying to exclude and destroy are Catholics. Though that shouldn't make the slightest difference in their right to justice and asylum.
The product of elite Catholic education and Catholic education in general is certainly varied but the status of some of its most evil alumni and alumnae should be extremely troubling to the Jesuits and other teaching orders who run these training grounds of elite criminals and gangsters.
I think the continued existence of such elite Catholic prep schools, expensive and selective for the elites they serve, are an important part of the more general Catholic-establishment edifice complex in which the institutions turn into objects of veneration, devotion, and, in every practical meaning of the word, worship. The eminence of such institutions, like all elite institutions, are both a sign and a practice of corrupted morality. I know in the wake of the exposure they got in the Brett Kavanaugh hearings there was a lot of talk about reforming such elite Catholic schools, especially boys' schools but I wouldn't count on anything more than that talk to happen. Such elite institutions will always service their rich patrons and supporters and they are exactly the kinds of people who have no problem with the perverted amorality of such people as Kavanaugh. I didn't see any elite - rich Catholic backlash as the prep school days of Kavanaugh and his posse was laid out in florid detail for the world to hear.
The best thing to do with those places, if the Catholic orders, organizations, institutions who run them were interested in not gaining a chunk of the world at the loss of their souls, would be to shut them down, sell the physical plants, perhaps preserving green space they own, using the assets to serve the poor, the downtrodden, the people who Cuccinelli wants to edit out of Emma Lazarus's most famous poem.
Of course that won't happen, the idiotic movie Shoes of the Fishermen in which the first Slavic Pope sold the Vatican to feed the poor was a piece of Hollywood crap. In reality the first one managed one of the most corrupt modern papacies and he adored everything about the lavish spectacle and centralized power that is the absolute worst part of Catholicism. Francis is doing better but his papacy is fighting against the entrenched fascism that John Paul II and Benedict XVI appointed to so many bishops palaces and to head institutions of the Catholic Church. He is clearly afraid of a right-wing schism and is so afraid of that, led by the likes of the putrid drag-queen queer basher sometimes partner with Steve Bannon, Cardinal Raymond Burke and assorted gangsters in red and purple caps, that Francis is in danger of leading many of us to despair. There is a large group of ultra-rich Catholic millionaires and billionaires funding an anti-Francis putsch, already.
I doubt that he, unlike the Wojtyla pope, saw Shoes of the Fishermen in all its unrealistic stupidity. In real life it was the Slavic Pope who reignited the inquisition that censured and silenced theologians, those represented in the movie, Hans Kung clearly one of them. I was convinced that the Cardinals who elected him did so because they saw that piece of junk.
But if Francis wanted to make an even more impressive gesture, impressive because it would be real and would strike at the heart of the rich elite who are his enemies, might I suggest that he do exactly what I described, sell off the parts of the church that service the elite, preparing them to be the Kavanaughs, the Cuccinellis, the Clarence Thomases and worse, sell them off to serve the ones that they are crushing under their feet. If he's waiting for a reform from those in the hierarchy and in charge of such institutions, there aren't enough merely reforming papacies left before the Second Coming to do it that way.
Of course, there is just a possibility that Francis, being the first Latin American Pope, might understand that, by a very large percentage, the people Cuccinelli is trying to exclude and destroy are Catholics. Though that shouldn't make the slightest difference in their right to justice and asylum.
Tuesday, August 13, 2019
Redux, Redux, Redux, . . . Stupid Mail
So you don't want to believe me. How about Eric Alterman?
For the purposes of defining liberalism today, the most common objection to the Rawlsian pardigm comes from the communitarians, who borrow considerably from the same republican precepts of America's founders that come into conflict with the more liberal ideas popular at the time of America's origins more than two hundred years ago. To what degree, asks the political philosopher Michael Sandel, are our liberal virtues fashioned in relative isolation, and to what extent can they be found embedded in relations with others? Are we, ultimately, atomistic, individual beings or members of various interlocking communities? "Rawlsian liberalism defines certain actions as beyond the bounds of a decent society," Sandel complains, "but wherein lies its commitment to the good, the noble of purpose, the meaning, as it were, of life?"
For guidance in these intractable liberal positions, the historian James T. Kloppenberg suggests we turn to one of civilizations oldest moral traditions, and one whose roots are shared by most Americans: Christianity. Conceptually, Kloppenberg notes, the central virtues of liberalism descend directly from the cardinal virtues of early Christianity: "prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice." He adds that "the liberal virtues of tolerance, respect, generosity, and benevolence likewise extend St. Paul's admonition to the Colossians that they should practice forbearance, patience, kindness and charity."
This view is reinforced by the arguments of Jurgen Habermas, post war Europe's most significant liberal philosopher and perhaps the last great voice of the once preeminent (and neo-Marxist) Frankfurt School. "Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civiliaztion," Habermas told then cardinal Joseph Ratinger, now Pope Benedict, during a January 2004 conversation, "To this day, we have no other option [than Christianity]. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter." No one understood this better than Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Asked by a reporter about his political philosophy, FDR replied, "Philosophy? I am a Christian and a Democrat - that is all."
Why We're Liberals: A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America
By Eric Alterman
Note, he doesn't only cite Jurgen Habermas, agreeing with me about what Habermas said, he also cites the historian James Kloppenberg saying the same thing.
You know, I posted this quote on this very blog four and a half years ago. I believe you were trolling me then, I know Stupy was, you guys never, ever listen, you're ineducable. That was one of the huge surprises I got when encountering you guys online, you're as much a bunch of ignorant, static loci of predigested prejudices as any identifiable group on the right. I grew up believing atheists were intellectuals, they turn out to be largely untellectuals.
For the purposes of defining liberalism today, the most common objection to the Rawlsian pardigm comes from the communitarians, who borrow considerably from the same republican precepts of America's founders that come into conflict with the more liberal ideas popular at the time of America's origins more than two hundred years ago. To what degree, asks the political philosopher Michael Sandel, are our liberal virtues fashioned in relative isolation, and to what extent can they be found embedded in relations with others? Are we, ultimately, atomistic, individual beings or members of various interlocking communities? "Rawlsian liberalism defines certain actions as beyond the bounds of a decent society," Sandel complains, "but wherein lies its commitment to the good, the noble of purpose, the meaning, as it were, of life?"
For guidance in these intractable liberal positions, the historian James T. Kloppenberg suggests we turn to one of civilizations oldest moral traditions, and one whose roots are shared by most Americans: Christianity. Conceptually, Kloppenberg notes, the central virtues of liberalism descend directly from the cardinal virtues of early Christianity: "prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice." He adds that "the liberal virtues of tolerance, respect, generosity, and benevolence likewise extend St. Paul's admonition to the Colossians that they should practice forbearance, patience, kindness and charity."
This view is reinforced by the arguments of Jurgen Habermas, post war Europe's most significant liberal philosopher and perhaps the last great voice of the once preeminent (and neo-Marxist) Frankfurt School. "Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civiliaztion," Habermas told then cardinal Joseph Ratinger, now Pope Benedict, during a January 2004 conversation, "To this day, we have no other option [than Christianity]. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter." No one understood this better than Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Asked by a reporter about his political philosophy, FDR replied, "Philosophy? I am a Christian and a Democrat - that is all."
Why We're Liberals: A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America
By Eric Alterman
Note, he doesn't only cite Jurgen Habermas, agreeing with me about what Habermas said, he also cites the historian James Kloppenberg saying the same thing.
You know, I posted this quote on this very blog four and a half years ago. I believe you were trolling me then, I know Stupy was, you guys never, ever listen, you're ineducable. That was one of the huge surprises I got when encountering you guys online, you're as much a bunch of ignorant, static loci of predigested prejudices as any identifiable group on the right. I grew up believing atheists were intellectuals, they turn out to be largely untellectuals.
What Really Has Powered Liberal Change In America What Has Disempowered It
One of the most important things I've learned in the last twenty years has been how truly hard it is to change peoples' minds for the better. How hard it is to overcome self-interest - a fancy word for selfishness - the inertia of comfort, self-satisfaction, habit, laziness, etc. to get people to even save their own lives. Contented snobbery and self-image and fashion are probably as important, especially among the credentialed and affluent.
Part of that was through watching two of my siblings drink themselves to death while otherwise not mentally ill, both of them atheists hostile to religion.
Part of it was watching my country go from the depravity of the illegitimate president, Bush II to the moderate correction of that in Obama and then, through the media appeal to racists, primarily, but also through other weaknesses, misogyny in no small part, to the utter depravity of the illegitimate regime of Trump. A large part of it was in watching the elite media, the New York Times as good an example as any, normalize Trump and Republican-fascism, even normalizing what brought him to the presidency by a conspiracy to use the media by billionaires, domestic and foreign.
And a big part of it was by being a close-up witness to the idiocy on the supposed left, the secular left, that claimed to champion equality, democracy, the salvaging of the environment and protection of the basis of life but who couldn't even face the reality that a lot of this came about through its ideological holdings that were put into place by the Supreme Court during the Warren Period, prepared by some earlier and often ill suited heroes of liberals and peddled by lawyers with a financial and professional interest through their paid representation of media companies, the entertainment industry and who worked on behalf of neo-Nazis, fascists, Klansmen, etc. The pious holdings of 1950s and 1960s liberalism helped pave the way for what came later, the successful use of freely spread poison appealing to the worst in us which has successfully thwarted the other, stated intentions of the secular left but whose loss through the campaign their theories of libertarian free speech and free press is clearly a secondary matter to them. That most of that came from fairly affluent to truly affluent, white liberals, most of them males, is certainly relevant to how and why they have been willing to allow corporate fascists a chance to destroy any progress made in the agenda of equality for those who are oppressed, self-government by an adequately and honestly informed public and not even the environment on which even their own rich white, most often male lives depend on.
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I have come to the conclusion that it takes a hell of a lot to change even individuals for the better, it takes a choice to believe in what will be effective in changing ourselves, not to mention society and a country. I have come to see that education and science and reason alone won't do that. The belief they will is a foundational folly of current liberalism. I have come to see that even having adequate information available to a country won't do it. Having a well-informed, well-educated, competent formation can only get you a more competent, more capable gangster such as William Barr, such as Trump's more competent or merely wily staffers.
Without the right kind of moral foundation, firmly held, you just get more ruthless gangster governance such as we have under Trump, foisted on us by the clean-handed, well educated elite of Ivy League law schools and their equivalents using Constitutional casuistry which their fellows in the elite media will sell, no matter how depraved the results are.
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Hans Kung's book I'm posting excerpts from, Why I Am Still A Christian, is not primarily a book about saving egalitarian democracy, freedom, and all the rest of what I'm talking about, including whether or not we destroy ourselves by destroying the biosphere for the profit of billionaires. It is a book of why someone should make the choice for Christianity - though he is more than generous in regard to other religions in that regard, few contemporary writers are more generous in that regard than Kung has been.
But I do think there is much in it that does, in fact, provide the moral foundation on which egalitarian democracy, a sustainable life can rest on. And that could begin in what it provides individuals if they make that choice. Taking up where I left off yesterday:
It is only now, and with the utmost caution, that I introduced the idea that has been misused by so many in order to enslave humanity and to deceive with false consolation: the cross, or, rather, the One crucified, enables us to cope even with the negative element. Who can deny that human existence - under whatever social and economic system, and even after all reforms and revolutions - is and remains an existence shot through with pain, anxiety, guilt, suffering, sickness, and death and is in this sense a thwarted and unsatisfactory thing? But this frustrated existence of ours acquires an indisputable meaning in the light of the resurrection of Jesus. For no suffering in the world can dismiss the offer of meaning - it is no more than an offer - presented in the suffering and death of the One who was raised to life. For the person who trusts in God, even the negative, even the greatest danger, the utmost loneliness, futility, nullity, guilt and emptiness are encompassed by a God who identifies himself with humanity, even if we do not perceive this at the time. We are not under any illusions here: there is no way of ignoring the negative things. What we are given is the ability to endure without self-pity, a way through, a future to which our own live and suffering leads. This does not mean seeking out the negative, but enduring it; not merely enduring it, but fighting against it.
I will stop here and say that this passage reminds me, first and foremost of James Cone's last great sermon, The Cross And The Lynching Tree and the part that the Black Churches have played in the resistance to exactly what in the American system what has to be fought. It is remarkable that both of these great Christian theologians begin this theme confessing the abuse of the cross and Jesus. And the rest of what Kung said in this book also parallels Cone's observations on how that use of it is wrong and how the exact opposite is the true meaning of it. And, most significantly for my commentary on it, it's productivity in terms of American politics and the politics of egalitarian democracy and, I am convinced, the wider results that are obtainable only through government of, by and for a People convinced of the moral foundations found in such religion.
In the Spirit of the One Crucified, a struggle against all the negative aspects of the condition of human life and their causes is possible at a very much deeper level by both individuals and society. That is:
- a struggle to ensure respect for human dignity against all animosity toward humanity - and even to the point of love for one's enemies;
- a struggle for freedom against all oppression - and even to the point of selfless service;
- a struggle for justice against all injustice and even to the the point of voluntarily surrendering one's rights;
- a struggle against all selfishness - and even to the point of giving up things we own;
- a struggle for peace against all strife - and even to the point of infinite reconciliation.
Why, then am I committed to the essential Christian values? Here is a third answer, which gives a last clarification: I know what I can rely on, what I can hold on to, because I believe in the Spirit of Jesus Christ, who is alive today, who is the Spirit of God himself, who is the Holy Spirit. This living Spirit enables me and countless others to be truly human: not only to act in a truly human way, but also to suffer; not only live, but also to die - because in everything, both positive and negative, in all happiness and unhappiness, we are sustained by God and can sense our fellow human beings. And in this sense we as Christians represent not just any kind of humanism but a truly radical humanism: a humanism that goes to the roots, since it is able to embody not merely the true, the good and the beautiful, whatever is human and humane, but also the untrue, the bad, and the ugly., whatever is all-too-human and even inhuman. These things too it is able, suffering and struggling to embrace positively.
This list includes exactly those things which self-satisfied, content, lazy liberals as much as conservatives are willing to sacrifice equality, decency, democracy, even the environment for.
In the case of liberals nothing has been more of a temptation than the assertion of depravities misidentified as "rights" such as an asserted right to lie, a right to lie for self-profit, a right to lie to harness racism, misogyny for profit and self-satisfaction, etc. The fetish of "rights" even when those are clearly evils misidentified as rights, is strong enough that the ACLU has championed the "right" of Nazis to try to reproduce the rule of the Nazis here, of Stalinists to, more ineffectively, try to reproduce Stalinism here, of the "rights" of American terrorists and murderers to promote their depravity, of corporations to lie and destroy the environment and the rights of workers to a decent life and decent working condition. That such "liberals" end up championing the rights of fascists and enemies of liberalism, witnessed for more than half a century of ever worsening conditions, lead me to conclude that their devotion to the traditional American liberal agenda is less than sincere.
Witnessing the secular left of the past fifty years of ever worsening result of secularism under their theories of rights has left me to be entirely unimpressed with the results of secularism and the secularization of the left. I am unimpressed with the devotion of secular humanism to the values they claim to hold onto with the weak and ineffective library paste of preference and the kind of contentedness that is so characteristic of passive, lazy, satisfied people. And a lot of them were hardly what they claimed to be. A lot of them were atheists who wanted a cover story that was more acceptable to people who had no stake in what they really wanted, the trust-fund millionaire who bought out the original Humanists, Corliss Lamont primarily wanted to promote the atheism he wrote about in his doctoral dissertation, his devotion to atheism led to him supporting the Hitler equivalent of Stalin probably longer than almost any other communist on North America - a few of those still exist. I think promoting his own, cherished, claim to intellectual distinction was his primary motivation in that. I don't think it sold very well, though it was much promoted in lefty circles. His devotion to Stalinism provides material to meditate on Kung's point about the ultimate failure of revolutions and even reforms.
In the meantime I am far more impressed with the accomplishments of the American religious left, a short list of some of them are contained in James Cone's sermon. They provided the real power behind the last great period of American liberalism, during the Johnson administration. Nothing in the meantime, provided by "enlightened self-interest" and scientistic materialism has had that record of success. Secular leftism is and has been a near total failure and I think that is because secularism can fuel self interest, it can't effectively provide the power to do what we need to do. I think that possibility of success in the religious left, such as The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr embodied, constitutes actual evidence of the truth of their beliefs.
As James Cone said:
We should not turn away from the Cross because people use it for evil. The Cross is the most empowering symbol of God's loving solidarity with the least of these, the unwanted in society who suffer daily from the great injustices.
Part of that was through watching two of my siblings drink themselves to death while otherwise not mentally ill, both of them atheists hostile to religion.
Part of it was watching my country go from the depravity of the illegitimate president, Bush II to the moderate correction of that in Obama and then, through the media appeal to racists, primarily, but also through other weaknesses, misogyny in no small part, to the utter depravity of the illegitimate regime of Trump. A large part of it was in watching the elite media, the New York Times as good an example as any, normalize Trump and Republican-fascism, even normalizing what brought him to the presidency by a conspiracy to use the media by billionaires, domestic and foreign.
And a big part of it was by being a close-up witness to the idiocy on the supposed left, the secular left, that claimed to champion equality, democracy, the salvaging of the environment and protection of the basis of life but who couldn't even face the reality that a lot of this came about through its ideological holdings that were put into place by the Supreme Court during the Warren Period, prepared by some earlier and often ill suited heroes of liberals and peddled by lawyers with a financial and professional interest through their paid representation of media companies, the entertainment industry and who worked on behalf of neo-Nazis, fascists, Klansmen, etc. The pious holdings of 1950s and 1960s liberalism helped pave the way for what came later, the successful use of freely spread poison appealing to the worst in us which has successfully thwarted the other, stated intentions of the secular left but whose loss through the campaign their theories of libertarian free speech and free press is clearly a secondary matter to them. That most of that came from fairly affluent to truly affluent, white liberals, most of them males, is certainly relevant to how and why they have been willing to allow corporate fascists a chance to destroy any progress made in the agenda of equality for those who are oppressed, self-government by an adequately and honestly informed public and not even the environment on which even their own rich white, most often male lives depend on.
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I have come to the conclusion that it takes a hell of a lot to change even individuals for the better, it takes a choice to believe in what will be effective in changing ourselves, not to mention society and a country. I have come to see that education and science and reason alone won't do that. The belief they will is a foundational folly of current liberalism. I have come to see that even having adequate information available to a country won't do it. Having a well-informed, well-educated, competent formation can only get you a more competent, more capable gangster such as William Barr, such as Trump's more competent or merely wily staffers.
Without the right kind of moral foundation, firmly held, you just get more ruthless gangster governance such as we have under Trump, foisted on us by the clean-handed, well educated elite of Ivy League law schools and their equivalents using Constitutional casuistry which their fellows in the elite media will sell, no matter how depraved the results are.
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Hans Kung's book I'm posting excerpts from, Why I Am Still A Christian, is not primarily a book about saving egalitarian democracy, freedom, and all the rest of what I'm talking about, including whether or not we destroy ourselves by destroying the biosphere for the profit of billionaires. It is a book of why someone should make the choice for Christianity - though he is more than generous in regard to other religions in that regard, few contemporary writers are more generous in that regard than Kung has been.
But I do think there is much in it that does, in fact, provide the moral foundation on which egalitarian democracy, a sustainable life can rest on. And that could begin in what it provides individuals if they make that choice. Taking up where I left off yesterday:
It is only now, and with the utmost caution, that I introduced the idea that has been misused by so many in order to enslave humanity and to deceive with false consolation: the cross, or, rather, the One crucified, enables us to cope even with the negative element. Who can deny that human existence - under whatever social and economic system, and even after all reforms and revolutions - is and remains an existence shot through with pain, anxiety, guilt, suffering, sickness, and death and is in this sense a thwarted and unsatisfactory thing? But this frustrated existence of ours acquires an indisputable meaning in the light of the resurrection of Jesus. For no suffering in the world can dismiss the offer of meaning - it is no more than an offer - presented in the suffering and death of the One who was raised to life. For the person who trusts in God, even the negative, even the greatest danger, the utmost loneliness, futility, nullity, guilt and emptiness are encompassed by a God who identifies himself with humanity, even if we do not perceive this at the time. We are not under any illusions here: there is no way of ignoring the negative things. What we are given is the ability to endure without self-pity, a way through, a future to which our own live and suffering leads. This does not mean seeking out the negative, but enduring it; not merely enduring it, but fighting against it.
I will stop here and say that this passage reminds me, first and foremost of James Cone's last great sermon, The Cross And The Lynching Tree and the part that the Black Churches have played in the resistance to exactly what in the American system what has to be fought. It is remarkable that both of these great Christian theologians begin this theme confessing the abuse of the cross and Jesus. And the rest of what Kung said in this book also parallels Cone's observations on how that use of it is wrong and how the exact opposite is the true meaning of it. And, most significantly for my commentary on it, it's productivity in terms of American politics and the politics of egalitarian democracy and, I am convinced, the wider results that are obtainable only through government of, by and for a People convinced of the moral foundations found in such religion.
In the Spirit of the One Crucified, a struggle against all the negative aspects of the condition of human life and their causes is possible at a very much deeper level by both individuals and society. That is:
- a struggle to ensure respect for human dignity against all animosity toward humanity - and even to the point of love for one's enemies;
- a struggle for freedom against all oppression - and even to the point of selfless service;
- a struggle for justice against all injustice and even to the the point of voluntarily surrendering one's rights;
- a struggle against all selfishness - and even to the point of giving up things we own;
- a struggle for peace against all strife - and even to the point of infinite reconciliation.
Why, then am I committed to the essential Christian values? Here is a third answer, which gives a last clarification: I know what I can rely on, what I can hold on to, because I believe in the Spirit of Jesus Christ, who is alive today, who is the Spirit of God himself, who is the Holy Spirit. This living Spirit enables me and countless others to be truly human: not only to act in a truly human way, but also to suffer; not only live, but also to die - because in everything, both positive and negative, in all happiness and unhappiness, we are sustained by God and can sense our fellow human beings. And in this sense we as Christians represent not just any kind of humanism but a truly radical humanism: a humanism that goes to the roots, since it is able to embody not merely the true, the good and the beautiful, whatever is human and humane, but also the untrue, the bad, and the ugly., whatever is all-too-human and even inhuman. These things too it is able, suffering and struggling to embrace positively.
This list includes exactly those things which self-satisfied, content, lazy liberals as much as conservatives are willing to sacrifice equality, decency, democracy, even the environment for.
In the case of liberals nothing has been more of a temptation than the assertion of depravities misidentified as "rights" such as an asserted right to lie, a right to lie for self-profit, a right to lie to harness racism, misogyny for profit and self-satisfaction, etc. The fetish of "rights" even when those are clearly evils misidentified as rights, is strong enough that the ACLU has championed the "right" of Nazis to try to reproduce the rule of the Nazis here, of Stalinists to, more ineffectively, try to reproduce Stalinism here, of the "rights" of American terrorists and murderers to promote their depravity, of corporations to lie and destroy the environment and the rights of workers to a decent life and decent working condition. That such "liberals" end up championing the rights of fascists and enemies of liberalism, witnessed for more than half a century of ever worsening conditions, lead me to conclude that their devotion to the traditional American liberal agenda is less than sincere.
Witnessing the secular left of the past fifty years of ever worsening result of secularism under their theories of rights has left me to be entirely unimpressed with the results of secularism and the secularization of the left. I am unimpressed with the devotion of secular humanism to the values they claim to hold onto with the weak and ineffective library paste of preference and the kind of contentedness that is so characteristic of passive, lazy, satisfied people. And a lot of them were hardly what they claimed to be. A lot of them were atheists who wanted a cover story that was more acceptable to people who had no stake in what they really wanted, the trust-fund millionaire who bought out the original Humanists, Corliss Lamont primarily wanted to promote the atheism he wrote about in his doctoral dissertation, his devotion to atheism led to him supporting the Hitler equivalent of Stalin probably longer than almost any other communist on North America - a few of those still exist. I think promoting his own, cherished, claim to intellectual distinction was his primary motivation in that. I don't think it sold very well, though it was much promoted in lefty circles. His devotion to Stalinism provides material to meditate on Kung's point about the ultimate failure of revolutions and even reforms.
In the meantime I am far more impressed with the accomplishments of the American religious left, a short list of some of them are contained in James Cone's sermon. They provided the real power behind the last great period of American liberalism, during the Johnson administration. Nothing in the meantime, provided by "enlightened self-interest" and scientistic materialism has had that record of success. Secular leftism is and has been a near total failure and I think that is because secularism can fuel self interest, it can't effectively provide the power to do what we need to do. I think that possibility of success in the religious left, such as The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr embodied, constitutes actual evidence of the truth of their beliefs.
As James Cone said:
We should not turn away from the Cross because people use it for evil. The Cross is the most empowering symbol of God's loving solidarity with the least of these, the unwanted in society who suffer daily from the great injustices.
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