Without the cross prophetic imagination will likely be as strident and destructive as that which it criticizes - The Prophetic Imagination in Holy Week 4

The crucifixion,then, is not an odd event in the history of faith, although it is the decisive event.  It is, rather, the full expression of dismantling that has been practiced and insisted upon in the prophetic tradition since Moses confronted Pharaoh.  As with Moses, so Jesus' ministry and death opposed the politics of oppression with the politics of justice and compassion. As with Moses, so Jesus' ministry and death resisted the economics of affluence and called for the economics of shared humanity.  As with Moses, so Jesus' ministry and death contradicted the religion of God's captivity with the freedom of God to bring life where he will, even in the face of death.

The cross is the ultimate metaphor of prophetic criticism because it means the end of the old consciousness that brings death on everyone.  The crucifixion articulates God's odd freedom, his strange justice, and his peculiar power.  It is this freedom (read religion of God's freedom), justice (read economics of sharing), power (read politics of justice) which break the power of the old age and bring it to death.  Without the cross prophetic imagination will likely be as strident and destructive as that which it criticizes. The cross is the assurance that effective prophetic criticism is done not by an outsider but always by one who must embrace the grief, enter into the death, and know the pain of the criticized one.
 

 You wonder if this paragraph might not hold the key to the scandalous history of nominal Christianity with power of exactly the kind that Pharaoh personified, what Christianity became when it was adopted as the state religion of the Roman Empire and other governments and theologians started the process of taming Christianity to make it harmless to the rich and powerful. That it was the cross, the willingness to die to practice "God's freedom," "economics of sharing," and "politics of justice."  You might compare the French Republican slogan of "liberty, equality and fraternity" and look at what happened far faster in that self-conscious age of "reason" and "enlightenment" as the various factions of "brothers" got power and immediately used it to kill their rival comrades and the worse to come under Napoleon's and his successors violent, turbulent regimes in the next century.  Or, the United States and its slave and genocide republic or the Russian, Chinese Revolutions,  etc. self-consciously scientific revolutions for which the culture of the Enlightenment "enlightened" have yet to be called to nearly as full account.  

Certainly, even more influential has been the attack on religion by the entertainment industry, writers and performers who want to be considered in the know (most of them are quite ignorant) aimed at making Judaism into a joke and Christianity a tacky, hypocritical entity which is absurd, to blame for everything and opposed to everything good in the commercial sense that comodified "good" has come to mean for most Americans. The culture of show biz has left those it keeps in ignorance through eating up most of their days with entertainment when they could be learning something real with the vague sense that Christianity is unfashionable and tacky - it doesn't help that so many nominal Christians do so much to help in the effort - and that if they so much as really look into it, it'll give them cooties.  It is always a mistake to consider that the world of accurate thinking and study and writing have much to do with the lives of the large majority of people whose real educators are TV, other broadcast and cabloid media and, God save us, the internet.  Compared to those the entire educational apparatus is totally ineffective, except in so far as it, also, has promoted that discrediting of religion.

As Brueggemann points out, in so far as they wanted to claim Jesus as their inspiration, the Christian establishment totally blew by the Gospels and Epistles. The extent to which the modern Pharaonic regimes have blown by reason and the consequences of materialism would be far harder to tease out, any alleged moral content not being something science is required to deal with. The religious ferment of the 16th and 17th centuries may have given rise to the reaction of the "Enlightenment," the "Enlightenment" has given rise to the anti-intellectualism and moral decay of consumer capitalism and, under the most self-consciously scientific regimes, nothing more than state capitalism and the brainlessness of entertainment culture.  That, as much as anything, is the consciousness, or unconsciousness, that has to be attacked now.

Prophetic criticism aims to create an alternative consciousness with its own rhetoric and field of perception.  That alternative consciousness, unless the criticism is to be superficial and external, has to do with the cross.  Douglas Hall has explored how we might think about this, suggesting that creative criticism must be ethically pertinent and premised on our own embrace of negativity.  The kind of prophetic criticism does not lightly offer alternatives, does not mouth assurances, and  does not provide redemptive social policy. It knows that only those who mourn can be comforted and so it first asks about how to mourn seriously and faithfully for the world passing away.  Jesus understood and embodied that anguish which Jeremiah felt so poignantly.

Last year, as the KGB man, Putin, invaded Ukraine the Orthodox intellectual, philosopher and theologian David Bently Hart gave a very pessimistic lecture about the future of Christianity.  I think if you started with the view that nominal Christianity may well be going into eclipse as it seems to lose the struggle with secularism his pessimism is spot on.  But I think Christianity has, in reality, always been in an eclipse since Constantine.  I've never been that impressed with nominal Christianity because those Christians don't seem to have much to do with Jesus, James, Paul or the largely unknown authors of the rest of the New Testament. I would include much if not most of evangelical and Catholic and Orthodox (look at Kyril, the Patriarch of Moscow, just now) Christianity in that critique though all of those large groups have always had those who tried to follow Jesus, even those who rather clearly took up a cross to do it.  I think Francis is trying to move Catholicism into being more Christian as Vatican II started under John XXIII of blessed memory. But they have also included the shadow on The Light for the entire time. The preface to John's Gospel is something I've come to appreciate a lot more this past year, for all of the baggage the whole book has had placed on it.

I don't know what the future holds for Christianity as a major force in Western culture, though I do know it has endured even in the face of modernity to some extent. It endured the corruptions of many a Pope, many a bishop, many a movement.  The great civil rights movement of the period of Martin Luther King jr. came out of what was largely a conservative evangelical tradition, it is certainly proof of the durability of Christianity.  There have been many, many smaller examples of it, often leading the the martyrdom which our St. Martin suffered.  I think right now the worst enemies Christianity has are probably internal, Catholic neo-integralism (listen to DBH's horrific example from Harvard Law School at the link above), Protestant fundamentalism, Orthodox nationalism, sterile academics biblical experts and theologians.  All of whom discredit Christianity.  But none so much as those who oppose the economics of sharing and the politics of justice, who, in the United States and elsewhere where the heresy of "Christian nationalism" is rampant.  

I have been deeply pessimistic since Putin invaded Ukraine and the Republican-fascists, the "religious rights" liars, on the Supreme Court here have placed women under the subjugation of state legislatures and governors in Republican-fascist dominated states, the ongoing slaughter by mass murdering gun nuts the Supreme Court and Republican-fascists enable, etc. They certainly do more to discredit Christianity than the fading snark of the new atheists who flourished in teh 00's.  

Those are the reasons I haven't felt much like posting music or radio dramas.  But it's not in my nature to give in to pessimism for long. As the historian Howard Zinn said in his wonderful 1990 essay "Failure to Quit,"

I can understand pessimism, but I don't believe in it. It's not simply a matter of faith, but of historical evidence.  Not overwhelming evidence, just enough to give hope, because for hope we don't need certaintly, only possibility.  Despite all those confident statements that "history shows. . ." and "history proves. . .," hope is all the past can offer us.

It occurs to me that is what the Gospel accounts, the professions of Paul and Acts, concerning the Resurrection are to most people who first look at them or look at them seriously for the first time "not overwhelming evidence,"  they are words on a page, if you choose not to be inclined to seriously consider them.   If they choose to take them seriously they are "just enough to give hope."  If we read it expecting "certainty" it's unlikely we'll really get to belief in the possibility of it.*  I'd say they are the beginning of choosing to believe.

I have listened to the arguments, some of them rather good in the way that you can make good arguments for anything in the evidence of history from that period, of the apologists for historicity of the Resurrection, certainly as strongly attested in the record when compared to anything else known about early 1st century history.  

But in the end it's on me, I have to choose to believe or choose to disbelieve.  I choose to believe now after I suspended belief for a long time.  It is impossible for me to conceive of believing without the experience of life as an LGBTQ+ person reacting to the oppression of both church and state, witness to the aftermath of WWII and the knowledge of the scientific regimes genocides, the discrediting of Marxism through its catastrophic and criminal test of time, my disillusionment with the secular left and secularism, in general, the great civil rights struggles, the martyrdom of so many in Central and South America under U.S. foreign policy. . . But also witness to genuine Christian belief and action.  The involvement of my mother with Pax Christi and other groups, the Martyrs of Central America, many local and others who give witness to the teacings of Jesus among the least among us.  I don't think I could have chosen to believe, finally, without that experience.  And, especially in the period when I could go online and check the primary documentation of materialist, atheist, scientism and secular (read anti-religious, anti-Christian) culture, I found that one after another most of the totems and idols and myths of secularism were just that, self-apparent myths documented to be so in the far more complete recent documentary record.   It was a long road.

I think the future of the possibility of a decent life under egalitarian democracy, probably the continuation of the human species and life on Earth depend on enough people to REALLY believe it for the first time.  I also choose to believe that the best days of Christianity are in the future, not in the past, that much of the past and present of Christianity will not be a part of it. I don't think that "just war" theory will be.  That trio of values Walter Brueggemann set out certainly must be. I choose to believe that when Jesus told his followers to pray, "Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on Earth as it is in heaven," he was telling them to pray for AND TO PERFORM that so as to make Earth as heavenly as it can be.  I don't think he'd have told them to do that if it were an impossibility or even next to impossible. I do believe The Meek will inherit the Earth.  They won't get much support from the secular left or Hollywood or academia, they won't get it from "Christian" media, the putrid EWTN or the secular media.  They certainly won't get it from most of the powers that be anywhere, left or right.  It won't come from that kind of power.

* I won't go into it again having done so recently but the idea that there is much of anything that has that level of certainty in what we choose to believe we know about much of anything is a delusion of scientistic materialism.
 

Therefore God has highly exalted him - The Prophetic Imagination During Holy Week - 3

This theological tradition of life in the shape of death and of power in the form of suffering is more than the dominant culture can receive or accept.  That alternative discernment is evident in the theology of the cross as narrated by Mark and as articulated by Paul.  While many texts might be cited,here I mention only the ancient hymn utilized by Paul:

Jesus Christ, who though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.  And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.  Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that in the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the father. (Phil. 2:5-11)

That tradition of radical criticism is above the self-giving emptiness of Jesus, about dominion through the loss of dominion, and about fullness coming only in self-emptying. The emptying is not to be related to a meditative self-negating, for it is a thoroughly political image concerned with the willing surrender of power; it is the very thing kings cannot do and remain kings. Thus the entire royal self-understanding is refuted. The empty one who willingly surrendered power for obedience is the ultimately powerful one who can permit humanness where no other has authority to do so.

The story of the foundation of the nation of Israel in the promise to Abraham made first that he would have a son and heir in his old age, a covenant that was sealed with the near but non-sacrifice of his second son, Isaac, but with the willingness of Abraham to go intentionally sacrifice his son, is something I never thought of in relation to the willingness of Jesus to, himself, go to an even more horrible death.  I haven't come across a theological investigation of that though I'm sure it must have occurred to someone in the two thousand years of Christian theology.   I don't get the feeling that it occurred to the Gospel writers, though, as I have to always mention, I'm a beginner at this.  Has this seeming adoptionist view of the divinity of Jesus in this passage has ever figured into such an exploration of it? Jesus, instead of being the patriarch of a great nation would have a status like that Paul said was his due in the crucifixion, the Son of the Father.     

The crucifixion and Resurrection are the heart of the problem Jesus and Christianity present to the world, no matter where or when in the past two thousand years.   And the Resurrection is the definitive aspect of that.  As Paul said elsewhere it is a stumbling block that a lot of even those who profess to be Christians can't get past. 

 

I think a lot of the problem for many of them, as it was for me, was that they expect to just magically find that they suddenly believe in it when that belief is as much a matter of choice as it is an act of involuntary conviction.  I think that psychology has done far more to alienate our experience of believing and knowing from what it actually is as people repeatedly demonstrate that belief and the act which is probably foolishly separated from it "knowing" through the demotion of human agency in the matter.  

Considering the enormous public demonstration of the worst part of such human agency on full display as the true believers in Trump, Putin, Orban, ETWN, Jordan Peterson, etc. who demonstrate that what those people are convinced they know the most deeply absurd and contra-factual and malignant things are exactly that, based in their choice to believe what they want to, you would think the whole matter of the automatic act which is held to be "knowing" something would get more of a deep criticism.  In fact, the very field of psychology in which huge sheets of such knowledge, as was contained in the various schools of Freudianism, Behaviorism, Evo-psy, and a myriad of other discredited and soon to be discredited structures deemed to be known enough to be taught as science in universities, only to be junked, waiting for those who made money as practitioners to die off before totally decommissioning that "knowledge" which was as much chosen to be believed as the Trumpists knew that horse medicine would cure Covid and drinking bleach was a health measure.

While the strength of an experience, such as those reporting near death experiences and, I wouldn't be surprised, Paul reported had may compel belief to the point where it reaches the level of conviction to be asserted to be knowledge seems to be a real thing - the conversion in their acts and personality are also attested to by those around such people - the final choice lies in whether or not the person chooses to believe in the reality of their experience.  In some cases, no doubt, would-be "skeptics" can talk even those who have had profound experiences which you would think would override the typically tread-bare and 7th grade style coercion, out of believing what they have experienced.  

If Jesus chose to believe what he said, as any mere human would have to, even as having a divine nature that he may well not have been aware of until his death, then that is probably singular in the history of the human species. It's unclear from the Gospels and Paul and Acts that Jesus was fully aware of being the Son of God in the Christian theological sense of the term, as I said yesterday it would explain his cry quoting Psalm 22 from the cross, or maybe he, facing the point of death, had an all too human conviction that he had been wrong about it all.  Did his knowledge of who he was have enough strength at the point of death or was it necessary for him to experience our own ultimate fear at that point?   I don't think it's possible for us to tease out the meaning of all of those things.  For me it has more power of persuasion than if he had remained tranquil at that point.  For me to believe in the divinity of Jesus,  I have to believe that he was fully human, as well.

I think if the Gospel writers, if Paul had been able to they certainly would have made those points clear.  But we would still be left with the choice to believe it or not.  I was afraid to believe it for a long time, due in no small part to the anti-Christian propaganda sold as knowledge that was virtually everywhere in my formal education but, also, the very true scandal of the behavior of Christians in the past and then and, yes, still, now. It's clear a lot of Christians choose not to believe the heart of Jesus's Gospel. I'm not afraid to believe it any more and I'm not afraid to admit that what I believe is a great mystery.  The great mystery.  I say that while being fully convinced of the truth of what Jesus said.  I had to empty myself of a lot of "knowledge" before I wasn't afraid to believe it anymore.

the old assurances and awareness's of meaning are now all gone - Reading From The Prophetic Imagination In Holy Week

Jesus' sayings on the cross as preserved in the various traditions are the voice of an alternative consciousness.  His initial plea for forgiveness for his enemies is an act of criticism (Luke 23:34), for it asserts the insanity of the dominant culture.  On behalf of the world which has now sentenced him, he  enters a plea of temporary insanity. A reference should be made here to the insightful interpretation of Paul Lehmann, who shows that the trial of Jesus before Pilate in fact has Pilate, and not Jesus, on trial.  The cry of Jesus from the cross, then, may be regarded as a decision (by the Judge) that the defendant (the old order) may not be punished because it is insane.

I never noticed that before or put it together with the prophecy that Christ would have the role of judging the living and the dead in this part of the narrative.  Now that I've been introduced to the idea in a deep way (writing down a text can do that for you) it makes a kind of sense of the passage I'd never considered from just listening to it or reading it.  It's certainly to be compared to the worldly powers which so seldom forgive unless it's to the rich and powerful or otherwise favored unequally.  Whether it's a king or president or prime minister or judge or Supreme Court "justice" of a governor, etc. even those who will make a profession of faith in Christianity have followed bishops and ministers and popes in going all old-order when it comes to even those who never offended them but especially on those who they perceive as their enemies.  In that regard, Pope Francis in not using his power to severely punish some of the worldly bishops and cardinals who have set themselves, publicly as his enemies, to silence them is impressive in a way I don't remember his immediate predecessors doing.

Second, his cry of despair (Mark 15:34) is an announcement of abandonment.  The whole known network of meaning has collapsed in and a new dangerous situation of faith has emerged.  Thus Jesus experiences the result of the criticism;  the old assurances and awareness's of meaning are now all gone.

It is certainly also something that shows Jesus was fully human, I doubt anyone of us has such complete confidence in our judgment and choices, our own perceptions that we will not fear that we were wrong in believing at that point.

Third, the ultimate criticism ends in submission (Luke 23: 46), the last thing possible in a world of competence and control. Thus in that very world of control Jesus presents a new way of faithfulness that completely subverts the dominant way.

I read this and recalled several accounts of near death experience that said the terrifying feeling of everything from hellish mirages to total aloneness and nothingness persisted so long as they tried to maintain control but passed as they gave up control.  Never having had the experience,  I have to rely on the reports of those who have.  You really can't take anything with you, including your old habits of assurance, or so it seems. Again, Jesus was fully human and one of us, perhaps this was the only way to convince us that the Resurrection is a new thing in the world, the "cosmos."  Maybe Jesus died because of our sins and also as a means of breaking through our resistance to a new reality.   

And finally, his assertion of paradise (Luke 23:43) is a speech about the delegitimization of the world that killed him. Now he speaks from a very different value system.  The very one called criminal is now welcomed to paradise;  the outcast is the welcomed one.  Jesus' new way of acting and speaking announces that another way is now operating.  It is the final assertion that the old way is null and void.

Again, this is certainly not somehting that self-called "Christian" societies, governments, churches have done much to follow.  "Christian" prisons and capital punishment - the most enthusiastic states for killing people are full of those fastest to tell you they're "Christians" - are the leaders in showing no mercy to anyone but the rich and powerful.  That's not confined to any one region of the country, it's true in even states which have abandoned capital punishment that those who are most eager to get it back include those most ready to make a show of religion. At least that's what I've seen in Maine, one of the earliest states to get rid of at least that level of old-order governance and "justice."  The prisons here are not excessively humane, though.

Too much should not be made of these isolated statements of the cross, for each has its own complex development in the history of the tradition, which is undoubtedly in part a history of the liturgy. Nonetheless, together they form a statement that completely refutes the claims of those who seem to be in charge. These statements (a plea of insanity; a cry of abandonment; a groan of submission; and an assertion of a new way of graciousness) are a refutation of the world now brought to an end.  The old order may be characterized as madness masquerading as control; phony assurance of sustained well-being; a desperate attempt to control and not to submit; and a grim system of retribution.  Thus each statement of Jesus is a counter-possibility that places all the old ways in question.  The passion narrative of Jesus provides ground for prophetic criticism.  It hints at a fresh way for the repentance of Lent.

To that all I feel like saying right now is Amen.
 

I Do Know The Difference Between A Roman Governor And A Guy Who Flies a Plane

That one was spell check, not me.

None of us is prepared for such decisive criticism.

. . .  the ultimate criticism is not one of triumphant indignation but one of the passion and compassion that completely and irresistibly undermine the world of competence and competition.

THIS WEEK I'LL BE POSTING some of what is said about the Crucifixion as the prophetic witness of Jesus in Walter Brueggemann's The Prophetic Imagination.  

It is the crucifixion of Jesus that is the decisive criticism of the royal consciousness.  The crucifixion of Jesus is not to be understood simply in good liberal fashion as the sacrifice of a noble man, nor should we too quickly assign a cultic, priestly theory of atonement to the event.  Rather we might see in the crucifixion of Jesus the ultimate act of prophetic criticism in which Jesus announces the end of the world of death (the same announcement as that of Jeremiah) and takes that death into his own person.  Therefore we say that the ultimate criticism is that God himself embraces the death that his people must die.  The criticism consists not in standing over against but in standing with; the ultimate criticism is not one of triumphant indignation but one of the passion and compassion that completely and irresistibly undermine the world of competence and competition.  The contrast is stark and total;  this passionate man set in the midst of numbed Jerusalem.  And only the passion can finally penetrate the numbness.

A number of years ago I posted something about someone I heard on the radio, a modern sophisticated non-religious person whose young son became very interested in becoming a Catholic.  Why, she wanted to know, when she went to the church with him, did anyone want to look on the hideous image of a tortured, executed man, executed in one of the worst manners sadistic dictatorial power has found to sadistically kill and, as an act of terror for the population,  display the tortured, murdered victim someone.  Why, she wanted to know, couldn't they choose something pleasant to look at instead of a crucifix?  Her son said, who would bother to notice something like that?  

If early First Century Jerusalem is numbed, the United States, the entire modern world is at least as numbed.  When Marjory Taylor Greene or some other Republican-fascist makes a show of "Christian nationalism" they are advocating something as corrupt as the Roman imperial occupation and likely far more corrupt than the corrupted Chief Rabbinate and his court in the degraded Temple.  The very people who killed Jesus.  There isn't one of them who I would doubt would play the role of Pilate in the story only without any kind of qualms.  

The corruption of Easter into something no more significant than candy and new clothes and the rest of the Easter Parade of commercial tackiness, something that many of the churches are in on and certainly the most typical American notice of the day with little to say about the undermining of the "world of competence and competition" that has entirely supplanted anything like a real Christian culture in the modern period.

But, as it's always necessary to point out, I certainly wouldn't want to go back to any previous observance of Holy Week and Easter because it inevitably got mixed in with things which may have in many cases been more charming or interesting than the chocolate eggs and greeting card companies anthropomorphized bunnies and the crappy pop music of the season, but they were on the same side of what has become so nauseating about the American version of the holiday.  The only way for a holiday to escape the American commercial trivialization of it is to be so insignificant as to escape that treatment.  Creating a national holiday for the remembrance of The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. has certainly done far more to trivialize him and for his enemies to co-opt his memory than it has to hear his message. It was a really bad idea, instead of parades they should have held sit-ins or unauthorized readings of the suppressed words of the man.  Considering what they've done to the life, death and Resurrection of Jesus, it was bound to happen in that case.

That phase Brueggemann constructed about "competence and competition" is certainly shorthand for the modern Western culture that the Crucifixion of Jesus, its prophetic meaning, is opposed to.  I don't remember where I recently heard the idea that there is nothing more powerless than dead and it's clear in the Gospels that Jesus was consciously putting himself on the road to death when he turned his face to Jerusalem even as he told his followers what was coming for him and for them.  

The radical criticism embodied in the crucifixion can be discerned in the "passion announcements" of Mark:

And he began to teach them that the Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again (Mark 8:31).

The son of man will be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill him;  and when he is killed after three days he will rise (9:31).

Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem; and the Son of man will be delivered to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death, and deliver him to the Gentiles  and they will mock him, and spit on him, and scourge him, and kill him;  and after three days he will rise (10:33-34).

There is no more radical criticism than these statements, for they announce that the power of God takes the form of death and that real well-being and victory only appear via death.  So the sayings dismantle the dominant theories of power by asserting that all such would-be power is in fact no-power. Thus the passion announcements of Jesus are the decisive dismissal of every self-serving form of power upon which the royal consciousness is based.  Just that formula, Son of man must suffer - Son of man/suffer! - is more than the world can tolerate, for the phrase of ultimate power, "Son of man," has as its predicate the passion to death.  It is true that no precise counterpart can be found in the history of Moses.  Moses never speaks or acts that way, but we may pause to discern important continuities between the two.  Moses also dismantled the empire and declared it to be no-power (remember Exodus 8:18) by disregarding the claims of the imperial reality and trusting fully in the Lord of justice and freedom.  In parallel fashion, the dominant power is dismantled by appealing to an uncredentialed God.

Could there be anything more uncongenial to the modernistic, learned sensibility than "an uncredentialed God?"  In reading Mark's Gospel as translated with what he says is faithful rhetorical style to the Greek original, David Bently Hart presents Mark as if it were an uneducated person narrating an eye-witness account of things. I have to say it is the most compelling translation of Mark's Gospel I've yet read.  Compared to it the Contemporary English Version reads like one of the smarter seniors in high school was saying it.

That the passion sayings of Jesus constitute the ultimate criticism of the royal consciousness is evident in the reaction of the faithful:  First (Mark 8:32-33) Peter, on behalf of the church, rejects the criticism as too radical and he is roundly reprimanded.  Second (9:32), the disciples did not understand and are afraid to ask.  Third (10:35-37), they respond, indicating they understood nothing, by fresh dispute about their own power and authority.  The criticism of Jesus is too radical, not only for the imperial manager but also for his own followers.  None of us is prepared for such decisive criticism.

When, inevitably, the annual snark about Mark's Gospel having no mention of the Resurrection is dragged out again, those passages above certainly prove that it is contained in the Text.  I, personally, find the theory that early in the transmission of Mark that the end of the scroll was lost from it, entirely believable. It's not as if it was likely the scribe who lettered that earliest copy which cuts off so abruptly had any way to check on the ending by looking at another copy.  I wouldn't be surprised if the extant copies of the Gospel at that point might have been fewer than a hundred.  It's not as if books that survive from that period are found in numbers. If that loss happened very early in the history of the book, I'd guess much less than a hundred copies would have existed.  The fragility of the transmission of texts in the manuscript based period accounts for a lot more than our modern habits of thought might take notice of. It's clear that far from being silent on it, Mark presents the Resurrection as a crucial part of the phenomenon of Jesus and figured heavily in the only reason the writer of the Gospel would have been writing the account to start with.  That modern snark about the "original ending of Mark" is a better example of the habit of "skeptical" atheists of ignoring the whole text and what it says.  I've got to say that was one of the things I found most enlightening about modernism, how intellectually dishonest it is. And so resistant to that criticism, perhaps another clue to why they detest Jesus so much.

I'll wait to comment on more of the Easter evergreens of modernistic mockery as they might come in.  
 

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

 

 

This isn't something I'm endorsing as what I believe is a final explanation of things, it's just one of many proposals but it's one from a point of view I wasn't familiar with before now.  

Palm Sunday is also known as Passion Sunday because in addition to the familiar story of Jesus' entry into Jerusalem on a donkey with palm branches spread before him as a sign of respect.  

Equal Rights Must Be Conditional On The Acceptance Of Basic Equality Or They Are A Virtual Guarantee Of The Worst Kind Of Inequality

NOTE: This started as an answer to someone snarking about LGBTQ+ Christians.  I revised it to reflect my thinking on the latest school shooting.  Consider this my version of "thoughts and prayers."

ONE OF THE FIRST things I remember pointing out when I started commenting online to largely comfortable, affluent, straight, white college-credentialed, secular lefties was that I've been the focus of anti-LGBTQ+ violence and intimidation and if there's one thing that was clear in all of those incidents, the attackers were not church-goin' boys.  For a start they certainly didn't take the Commandment against taking The Lord's name in vain seriously.  The use of blasphemy was a part of much, I'd be convinced, most of the anti-gay hate spoken and expressed in my presence.  Living in the same small town for most of my life, I've known a lot of the L-Q+ haters here and know many of them are quite irreligious.  Though there may be regional variations in that.  And their hatred isn't confined to LGBTQ+ People, it is quite capacious, Women being another focus of their hatred, many of them are known to me to be racists, as well.  Of course, according to my recent posts on the issue, I would hold that any professed Christian who practices hatred and false witness against LGBTQ+ People is in violation of the teachings of Jesus, not to mention the Commandments and I don't consider that to be credibly Christian.

It is impossible to deny that religious institutions and their more genteel (in some cases) and their most vicious leadership and individuals are some of the worst promoters of discrimination against us.  And I certainly don't want to pretend that isn't the case, it is immoral to cover up corporate as well as individual hatred and so sinfulness within professed Christianity. Apart from the sins of oppression, false witness and murder, it allows those evils to continue unopposed and discredits Christianity.

But those bigots certainly aren't the sole representatives or in any way good examples of Christianity  and, the extent to which they violate the teachings of Jesus in doing so, they impeach their credentials.  For any preacher, priest, bishop or pope who preaches or campaigns in favor of discrimination against us, there is more than one sincerely Christian LGBTQ+ person who rejects the slanders against us and even more non-LGBTQ+ Christians who also reject that.

Some of the earliest organizers against legal discrimination against us were Christian believers. The first leader of a gay rights organization in the United States was a Black Minister.  The first mainstream institution in the United States to call for marriage equality was the United Church of Christ. Why should those of us who believe in Jesus and his teachings listen to those whose primary interest isn't our lives and rights, it's their anti-Christian bigotry?  Of course your condemnation of Christians is an expression of hatred just as much as any anti-Queer bigot's, and in slamming those of us who are Christians you are attacking the same People as they are.  I am not a divided entity, I'm LGBTQ+ as much as I am a Christian.

Expanding On That Point.  

I am an equality absolutist, an absolutist for equal rights of PEOPLE, first and most importantly their equal rights to live, to live a decent life, have their part in a decent society and an egalitarian government. Compared to that many other enumerated rights and, especially privileges stupidly called "rights" anyone who doesn't put such things first is not qualified to comment on the situation. (See yesterday's just most recent school shooting which the US Constitution and the fucking Bill of "Rights" not only is impotent to stop but it's the primary enablement of them.)

I believe that all humans are created in the image of God and that is especially true of the least among us, I am a Christian, after all.  So I am an economic leveler who favors the elimination of great wealth held by any individual any single group or small group, it's one of the greatest impediments towards a legitimate government, a just society and a decent life. I am in favor of people having an ample life, more than enough to merely maintain them as living and able to work ie, be profitable for exploitation by the rich and generally "The Nation" (the stingy basis of Brit social policy). I am in favor of all workers being respected and all work being as dignified and safe as it is possible to make it.  Among the thing that People are amply deserving of and entitled to is respect, consideration and love.  There are many People I'm still working on doing that for, myself.

I am not an absolutist stupid enough to believe all ideas and desires People have are necessarily equal and above constraint. It is one of the stupidest nearly universal, ill considered beliefs that ideas are all equal when they are not, no more than desires or acts are all equal and deserve the full protection of the law in their expression.

That should be the egalitarian democratic deal for the inclusion of those of diverse ideologies, ideas, faiths, etc. that so long as their belief really respects the basic equality of others of such good will, including material equality, that really holding that, then those ideas can come under the umbrella of safely permissible ideas within an egalitarian country.

To the extent that they deny equal rights to others, equal rights to a decent life, then they have made their thinking dangerous in some cases impermissibly dangerous.  As to who will judge that, the answer is the same as it is now under a dangerously and absurdly danger empowering system, we, mere human beings will have to be the ones who judge that.  

We make all kinds of decisions about what is permissible what isn't in far more complex matters. If some judges and even entire states are unreliable in the honest discernment in that matter then allowing them to adjudicate in other matters is already seriously dangerous and we have far bigger problems, that means that our federal system is fatally flawed already and our society is too corrupt to sustain even liberal democracy, let alone real, egalitarian democracy.

Anyone who favors equality of People is under no obligation to pretend that all Peoples' ideas and desires are equal or equally deserving of the protection of law.  In fact, if you hold that those who deny equality to others have a right to propagate their preferred ideas, really their unthinking and often manipulated and malignant desires, appealing to the worst in their audience to seal the deal (FOX's business model) and so to very possibly endanger the lives and legitimate freedoms of other People, you can't really be taken seriously as someone who holds that all People are equal and that rights are equally held.  If you hold that libertarian liberal bullshit as right you really don't favor their safety under equality, you prefer the possibility of them being treated as unequal, oppressed or murdered more than you value their safety, their equal rights and, ultimately, their lives.  

The monumentally dishonest pretense that there is a bright line between advocating violence and oppression and the actual commission of that,  which separates the advocacy from the act, and that it is never permissible to avoid the act by suppressing even the worst speech, is something that can be maintained only by those who have a high confidence that they are unlikely to be the focus of the predictably resulting violence.  Confident that THEY won't be even as they turn a blind eye to the enormous violence that is a certain product of the violent speech and press that is what leads to the violence.  It is easy for the safe and comfortable to pretend that the lessons of the history of such violence incited by speech and, these days, especially, the media is something we are not obliged to learn from AND DO SOMETHING TO PREVENT IT IN THE FUTURE. It is far harder for anyone who is a likely target WHOSE LOVED ONES ARE A LIKELY TARGET for violence in the here and now to pretend that they don't know what the result of such speech and media will mean for them and their loved ones and, as my experience that those who know such lessons of a hard life are more aware of it when they see others so endangered, their neighbors who are also so targeted.

Absolutist positions on "free speech-press" are an expression of habitual privilege and the customs and habits of long-term privilege and family privilege.  It is either that or some other, against all evidence, acquired delusion that chooses to ignore the murder, the oppression, the violence that has been propagated by words all during our history.  I doubt anyone who REALLY has a strong chance of being murdered by a lynch mob would mouth the inane slogans of "free speech-press" absolutism unless they'd been made stupid by going to law school or "journalism school" or reading civil-libertarian propaganda.  Such a choice to ignore the most glaring lessons of hard experience is a cultivated mental debility, often imparted through entertainment media.

It is pure insanity to hold that a right to say whatever you want to, to publish whatever you want to is to be valued more highly than the equality and so lives of those who have been, are and will be damaged by that "speech," that "press" which promotes inequality and oppression, to hold that while pretending to value equality in human lives is as ass-backward an idea as possible.  

If you coo or whine that "If we can suppress the speech of Nazis, fascists, white supremacists, misogynists, etc.  . . .  then, why, . . . why, then they may someday suppress that of their intended victims." FOR PETE'S SAKE, THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT THEY INTEND TO DO WITH THAT SPEECH THE DAMNED ACLU IS ASKING FOR MY MONEY TO SUPPORT BEFORE THE DAMNED SUPREME COURT! DOLTS!  I hold that those slogans in the Bill of Rights are what made courts and judges so dishonestly stupid as they pretend they can't tell the difference.

As I pointed out in one of my earliest and most objected to posts, the idea that if we're fair to fascists or nice to Nazis, they're going to all attend some seminar in new ideas in Nazism and suddenly reciprocate and be all live and let LIVE is about the daffiest idea that people with graduate degrees nearly universally hold. Such is the power of a pat slogan over reason and reality.  Such civil liberties advocates are demanding that we all be supreme chumps for their clients.

I have no faith in the sincerity of the traditional "civil libertarians" on or off that count.  The history of their successful advocacy in front of the Supreme Court certainly discredits the idea they uphold the rights of those who have suffered due to their clients having their say given "equal-rights" or, really, privileged.  There is no such thing as a right to lie, anyone who would frame such a thing as lying as a "right" has rocks in their heads. Publishing malicious lies and advocacy for oppression, violence and murder certainly don't constitute a "right".  Such "civil liberties" lawyers and advocates certainly don't think their First Amendment clients' victims lives are as important as their lofty, legalistic abstractions.  The idea that allowing Nazis to openly organize their hate group made us more safe since Skokie in the 1970s is certainly not what happened in history.  

If you wonder how the overtly fascist Trump became president, the legal advocacy of the "civil liberties" industry and their won privileging of media owners' self-interested lies, slander, libel, hate talk media had more than a little to do with it, just as it has the rest of the long slide into the endangerment of American style democracy. Both Trump and Reagan, the head of the previously most criminal presidency in history, were both products of the "free press," the profitable entertainment division of it, Trump(!), often appearing on "news" shows.  Such is the "journalism" which has prevailed in the freest "press" in our history, such which "journalism" has been expanded through "civil liberties" advocacy and judging.

There may seem to be a paradox in holding that People have a right to advocate their thinking but that if that thinking opposes equality and favors oppressing others those ideas have no right to be protected speech. That is a bad framing of the problem due to considering those as abstractions and pretending they are equivalent. "They're both speech."  But the right to do the one is not the same thing as the alleged "right" to do the other.

If you take the demonstrably following results AND CERTAINLY THE INTENDED results of the expression of such malignant speech as the actual reality of it, such as, in the American context, the speech which has resulted, thousands of times in a lynch mob torturing and murdering mostly People of Color or to mount an insurrection, more short-of-lethal attacks, or which results in fascist or Nazi or other gangster government such as we had under Trump, it's a lot clearer to see that the real paradox is for a free speech absolutist to then pretend they favor equality in real life instead of an equally abstract notion that they blather on about in front of a Supreme Court and on talk shows.  

Since they learned nothing from Skokie except to be encouraged in their malfeasance, the ACLU represented the Nazis before the deadly Charlottsville rally and won their "right" to march in court. Those well groomed, well-spoken civil liberties lawyers have blood on their  dainty, manicured hands. So do the courts. There is no bigger lie than the Supreme Court's pretense that they have delivered "Equal Justice Before The Law."  Equal rights in real life, the only place where such "rights" mean a damned thing, are certainly not what they have delivered.

The American slogan, "freedom of the press" is what led the Clinton administration to allow the genocidalists in Rwanda At Radio Television Mille Colines to keep broadcasting encouragement to commit genocide and instructions to where the mobs' victims could be found even as that genocide was happening and as one bomb on the radio tower could have made the genocide a lot harder to carry out. And that's in a country where the American First Amendment is unenforceable by American courts. "Presses" broadcast media companies don't have rights, their owners certainly don't have speech or press rights that supersede the rights of People to go on living and without having their limbs amputated by a mob. The lawyers who headed and largely filled the Clinton Administration couldn't navigate that reality despite, more like due to, their Ivy League educations and the results are a monumental shame. If Clinton deserved to be impeached for anything, that was far more consequential than him lying about getting a blow job.  Only that epic act of moral cowardice, what should have been criminal irresponsibility, wasn't an impeachable offense, it's the ill-thought out law of the land and a culturally imposed mental disability, especially common among those with an elite law degree and "journalists."

I have made a list of ideologies that are of such unambiguously proven murderousness and oppressiveness to individuals and to members of   identity groups, and hold that those who oppose who favor those have forfeited a right to propagate their hatred into the future.  Such equality must be made conditional on respecting basic equality.  Certainly there are many ideologies which have already proven they can mount mass murders going on years and decades and centuries.   Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism, various other of the most extreme of gangster schemes of governance, the American indigenous form of fascism, white supremacy, the ubiquitous habit of male supremacy. It should never be forgotten that every day in practically every country Women are murdered by men because they are Women and Women live in a state of terror because of that. Every day in the United States the FBI has estimated 3-4 Women are lynched.  Self-defined civil libertarians who support the right of malignant ideologues from Nazis to white supremacists and on, malignant people who have proven they can gain power including right here, in the United States UNDER THE BILL OF RIGHTS and murder and oppress people and mount attempted coups here.  Those who advocate such dangerous people must be given the chance to repeat or continue that history have forfeited their right to be considered as supporters of real equality, they are enablers of the opponents of equality. They really have contributed to the endangerment of American democracy, maybe their pretenses of supporting equality is to cover up that history.  That's what it functions as.  

The lunacy of the Enlightenment idea that ideas have equal rights and so the Jewish population and others targeted by Nazis should and must eternally have to tolerate the possibility of the repeat of the Nazi genocides, Native Americans and Blacks and others should forever live in imminent fear of American style white supremacy gaining complete control, as in fact, it does in a number of states now.  As, indeed, due in no small part to "civil liberties" lawyering and judging and Hollywood's fascist chic starting in the 1970s, that danger is imminent here and now. Such a secular-civic faith holds Women should just accept that murderous male supremacy should forever be propagated through encouraging a sense of such physical entitlement in boys and men. That all targeted groups should remain targeted and ready for periodic pogroms if not genocidal violence against them as their clients get power through their hate speech.

About that last one, Hollywood, again, porn and gaming are certainly a far stronger forces in that than the misogyny of the churches which most men don't attend, some of its most angrily expressive advocates were found among online atheists in the past two decades.  I don't recall any living religious figures talking like ThunderF00t or even Richard Dawkins on that count, certainly not in any mainline church without a swift and harsh internal reaction.  

That the major figures of the Enlightenment were mostly wealthy, all  privileged, and exclusively white, males, those who weren't atheists or "deists" were nominally Christian but of the type who seldom took Jesus seriously,  certainly plays no small part in the nature of the slogans, apothegms, ideological formulas, laws and legal structures they created. And not just them.  Voltaire, the hero of such daffy current, latter day "enlightenment" was a promoter of vicious biologically based  antisemitism and racism that anticipates the racism that was promoted as science in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.  John Locke, when he was given the chance to demonstrate his political theory in practice, when he was assigned to write a Constitution for the Carolinas, recreated a rationalized feudalism with serfdom, slavery and a titled aristocracy.  The Americans who wrote the Constitution included features that were placed there explicitly to protect the small minority of very wealthy slave-holders and Western land speculators, features which still serve their purposes for today's millionaires and billionaires.  Those propertied nearly exclusively white men, the privileged minority who elected the first Congress and the even more elite who framed the so-called Bill of Rights were a very small percentage of the population that was then and ever since been has been ruled by their self-serving (at worst) and short-sighted (at best) choices cemented into place in the almost impossible to reform Constitution.  That it's unthinkable to criticize any of it, even the idol of The Bill of Rights, is so ironic in these days of anything goes "speech" and "press" and so revealing of how badly it is in need of a thorough and effective criticism and reform.

That was made worse by the even more select group of Supreme Court members who usurped powers never granted in the Constitution, the better to protect the privileges of the privileged.  That they were not immediately thwarted in that - though there was ample objection to that from Jefferson and Madison and, later Lincoln - and they still retain that usurped power is proof that there is something very basically wrong with the United States Constitution. The Supreme Court is the source of some of the most seriously dangerous non-legislated law there is, such as the creation of "corporate person-hood."

That the Supreme Court, once in a great while, make a show of ruling on behalf of those who are subjected to the exercise of that privilege does little to lessen their constant role in protecting the wealthy and privileged against the good of the majority.  The more I look into the history of the Supreme Court the more suspicious I am that those lauded "landmark" rulings don't often carry an unmentioned goal that will further enhance the privileges of the privileged, especially in much of their First Amendment rulings. If there had not been so much audacity in the lauded First Amendment rulings of the Warren Court, I doubt the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts would have dared make some of the ones they have on free speech" and "religious rights" (don't forget the First Amendment doesn't only cover "speech" and "press") and in support of the gun industry (and perhaps their side in a civil war, fascism) from the equally stupidly written Second Amendment. I think the Warren years' "liberals" did what they did largely without realizing what they were handing to future fascists in black robes, so much mis-placed faith did they have in post-WWII era "progress" such as fuels the heady insouciance of the civil liberties industry.

It is also held to be disallowed speech to criticize the damnable Supreme Court, the entirely undemocratic branch of government that has thwarted real equality and real democracy, which supports my point about how we have been gulled into thinking these kinds of things are not to be said under "free speech" absolutism.

So, no. I am not in the least troubled by being a Christian LGBTQ+ person who is a critic of Christianity (as practiced), Darwinism and science, in general, a person a who acknowledges that under "The Bill of Rights" Native Americans were murdered en masse and their lands stolen, Black People were held in slavery and then, after de jure emancipation, held in everything from subjugation to de facto slavery  under interpretations of the Constitution by the Supreme Court, eugenics made the law of the land (I believe I'm correct that ruling was never overruled, as, in fact Dred Scott never has been). Women are in no way equal and now have had their bodies nationalized by Republican-fascists on the Supreme Court and in many of the several states.  LGBTQ+ People never securely had even the most basic guarantees of equality. I was in my seventh decade before my right to hold a job, marry, to rent or buy a place to live, etc. in the majority of states that protected discrimination and not us, was recognized by the Supreme Court.  The very same court held we still have no right to access public accommodations on an equal basis and the fascist majority is making noise about reversing the decisions that allowed us equality of an insultingly limited kind.  

So, no, I don't think the United States Constitution is more than it was originally intended to be,  a way for those with privileges to protect and enhance their privileges, rigged to allow a conservative minority to override the will of a less conservative majority in perpetuity. Originally that one was in no small part so abolitionism even as a majority opinion could not end slavery through legislation.  

The same Constitution, the same damned Bill of Rights prevents the vast majority of Americans banning assault rifles and so stopping the carnage, THE SUPREME COURT PERMITTED LYNCHING OF YOUNG CHILDREN IN THEIR SCHOOLS.  The thing is a millstone around the neck of equality, democracy and the achievement of a peaceful, decent life in the United States.

As I said, I have had to face that "socialism" has been discredited through its association with some of the most evil governments in history and with some especially awful entities which never gained much political power. That is especially true when socialism is framed in secularism and pseudo-science.  And that even genuine, professedly egalitarian, democratic socialism is a poor substitute for the radical political economics and morality of the economic justice of the Mosaic Law and an even worse substitute for the Gospel of Jesus which is rather ultimately radical in that regard.  

I am far more radical as a Christian than I ever was as a secular socialist and far less inclined to think violence works or is justifiable though sometimes it's forced on us.  If I'd remained just a left-wing socialist I might never have had the insight that People are more important than the ideas they might have, that ideas that hurt People and other living things are in no way entitled to the protection that ideas that promote equality and a decent life are, that there is no right to lie and there is a moral duty to tell the truth, that the appealing sounding slogans of American civil liberties and the secular left are best viewed skeptically.  Doing unto others what we would like them to do to us is the most reliable law to put into practice and it is found nowhere in the Constitution, indeed, its opposite is there and has been since "the founding fathers" put it there for their own advantage.

In what is posted as her last interview with French TV Hannah Arendt talked about the peculiarity of the United States that a European has such a hard time getting.  That there is no American ethnicity, apart from Native Americans, that almost everyone who lives here originated from elsewhere.  She said that the only thing that defined Americans is their consent to the Constitution.  That might be something an intellectual, a fine philosopher would think but I doubt that one in a thousand Americans has ever really consented to the Constitution at any point in their lives. There may have been a time I would make an exception for those who had joined the Armed Forces or been a member of the Federal Government who take oaths to uphold and protect the Constitution.  I started being skeptical of that during the Nixon administration and in the Trump crime spree, figures like him, Bill Barr, General Flynn, and,especially, many of the lawyers who displayed such notable cowardice during the hearings on Trump's shakedown of the Ukranian President, I would not make such an unreliable assumption, now.

I think one of the great dangers of the American Constitution is that it means only what a majority of five or more unelected "justices" on the current Supreme Court says it means, which means it actually has no meaning.  The rulings of the Supreme Court, unreviewable by any elected authority and almost impossible to overturn by the only legislative means of doing so, through amendment, have produced some of the worst law in our history. The interpretations wrung out of the First Amendment by the Court since the 1960s are what produced Trump, what allowed billionaires including Putin to ratfuck American democracy.  The same billionaires and millionaires have gamed the Constitution to use the traditional American mental illness, our indigenous fascist element of white supremacy, to really put any pretense of democracy or even republican governance at risk and the Supreme Court, dominated by Republican-fascists and racists, is doubling down on that. The old "civil libertarian" lines and policies are worse than impotent, they are what was gamed by them to get us here.  That's why white supremacists, Republican-facists, Nazis are the biggest fattest fan-boys and gals of "The First Amendment."  If the civil libertarians were at all right, they'd hate it the most.

 The Republican-fascist House doesn't hold "hearings" they hold "smearings."

JoAnn Melina Lopez Preaches for the Fifth Sunday of Lent

 

On this Fifth Sunday of Lent, our readings point us to God’s life-giving love and the hope of Easter. But Lent is not over yet. We are confronted by a grieving Martha who says to Jesus today and to us “there is a stench.” A stench that comes from the reality of suffering and death in our world.  

We know that lives are being threatened by the forces of fear, racism, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, exploitation, and so many other death-dealing powers in this world which destroy lives and rupture our relationships. The pain and suffering is staggering, and it is not just theoretical, happening out there on the news – for too many people, suffering and death are felt deeply personally, tearing apart families and futures, just like it does for Martha, Mary and indeed for Lazarus in today’s Gospel.  

The grieving sisters go to meet Jesus and cry out to him with their grief and pain, they share the reality of their suffering and disappointment with their beloved friend. I love how Martha courageously enters into a dialogue with Jesus. She is a person of deep faith, who trusts and believes in that promise of resurrection life that God proclaimed through the Prophet Ezekiel as we heard in our first reading. Martha has a horizon of hope that holds on to the possibility of restoration for her brother in the future, someday, but that ‘feels out of reach to her in her grief now.  Jesus responds to Martha’s hope in a powerful and profound way – proclaiming “I am the resurrection and the life.” Jesus reveals in his words and his life-giving action the Good News of our faith: that God’s dream of new abundant life for us, is breaking into our world through Christ. Our horizon of hope in God’s love is BOTH for the future that we cannot quite imagine yet, and ALSO for the here and now.

There are times when the forces of destruction, death, and dehumanization are so strong, that we cannot see the path forward, and all we can do is cry out to God. Sometimes our only comfort when confronted by the crushing power of oppression, violence, and alienation is remembering that Jesus loves us and weeps with us outside the tombs.

I have had my own moments where I could not imagine past the tomb – when I had no choice but to say goodbye to life as I knew it.  When every door to my future seemed closed. Confronted by relationships that could not be reconciled. Injustices that seemed insurmountable. Grief that broke my heart. Moments that felt like dying. Perhaps you have too. I also know, going through these moments, that God is bringing life in new and transforming ways to us, each and every day – in ways we may not quite expect, or have ever imagined. Through new opportunities. Communities of support. The transformation of my heart. Through creative, joyful, prophetic action. Through resilience and resistance movements that challenge the powers that be. God is bringing life to birth, restoring and renewing our world. Do we see it? God is calling us to partner in rolling away the stones and untying the bonds of injustice. Do we hear it?

This resurrection hope in the life-giving power of God is not just something for us to say we believe, but it must be encountered and experienced – and it only comes to us who are at the tomb. We must be willing to acknowledge our suffering, and the suffering of the world, and open ourselves up to God's Spirit at work. It is not enough for us to shake our heads at injustice, tweet out thoughts and prayers, and then change the channel and keep our peace, hoping that someday Jesus will work it all out. Our faith demands our transformation, and our courageous and prayerful action. As Christians we have to disrupt the whole system of unnatural death which is bearing down upon the most marginalized, poor, and vulnerable. We have to act prophetically against the forces of death in our families, workplaces, community. Life has to break in through our economic choices, our advocacy, our votes, our relationships, and yes, through our prayers. We have to embody the truth that St. Paul shares in our second reading: that the same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead is with us, animating the Church. God is drawing near. We believe, yes, that eventually, in the fullness of God’s time all oppression will cease, and death will be no more. Until that time we must be instruments of God’s life, enfleshing hope and proclaiming today that death cannot have the last word.  

The truth is that here and now, Jesus is on the way to the tombs of the ones he calls beloved, and he is asking us if we know the way and if we will go with him. Do we grieve with those who grieve, do we live in solidarity with those who are despised, disposable, and put to death in our world? Do we cry out to God for help? Do we know the stench of the tomb, like Martha and Mary did, because we are siblings of those who suffer?  

For those of you who feel like you’re trapped in the tombs of life – imprisoned by the death-dealing forces of our world that deny your dignity, if you feel alone and afraid, hold on to hope because the voice of Love is calling you by name, saying “Come Out!” The voice of Love is howling for your freedom: “Let them go!”

May all of us, as we prepare for Holy Week, tangibly encounter the life-giving Love of God, may we become true Spirit-filled disciples like Martha and Mary. May we journey with Jesus to the tomb – willing to grieve, willing to tackle the stench, willing to be transformed together. Let us believe  in God’s power, trusting we will find God at work in us as we roll away the stones.

Hate Mail - Only One More Before I'm Caught Up

THAT SHORT VIDEO on the paradox that Bertrand Russell found that made the strategy he and a group of other mathematician-philosophers were engaged in to ground arithmetic in logic and so close one of the great unanswered questions of math and science, what numbers and, I'd guess, the basic operations of math are, a paradox that as Jeffrey Kaplan said "blew up the whole project" was only one of several such problems for materialist-scientism that were discovered in the early 20th century as the search for an absolute grounding of human mathematics and science intensified. The uncertainty principle discovered by Heisenberg and the famous wave-particle character of matter seem to have found similiar limits to human understanding in atomic physics.  I have to wonder if maybe God inserted those little tricks into both the human mind and the nature of physical being so that especially arrogant atheists will get their comeupance.  

As I've noted before, when A. S. Eddington laid out some of the conclusions derived from Relativity and Quantum Mechanics in the 1920s, Russell gloomily predicted the end of science when what he was really mourning was the impossibility of having his kind of faith in materailist-atheist-scientism.  It didn't, though, keep him from retaining his faith which he never abandonned that I've seen. As far as I know, Eddington kept on being a Quaker even as he became one of the first and major figures in the revolution in physics.  

I'm not as conversant with the thinking of the others involved with him to know what their motives were but I know Russells through his volumenous writing and know he, as is typical of Brit and English language atheists, wanted most of all to put the final nail in the coffin of God. When you come to think of it, it is rather amazing how that obsession of materialists has so often been inserted into their supposedly scientific quest for knowledge.  I think that lies behind the current manifestation of the same thing, the materialist-atheist-scientistic cosmologists who keep telling us they're on the verge of finding a theory of everything.  That the principles of physics named above would seem the best available proof that physicists will never have complete, comprehensive and exhaustive knowledge of even one electron, the idea that they are any day now get one of all of the electrons and all of the other bits of the entire universe, now, in the past, in the future and for all time, seems a bit premature, why, you might almost be tempted to say that their claims violate the laws of physics.  

Eddington and Einstein both tried to do the equivalent of coming up with at least more complete physical theories and both failed, in their own way. The huge advances in physics in their youth may have gotten them into the habit of thinking that with just enough theory they might break through on that problem.  It doesn't seem to have happened yet.  I think it should never go without saying that one of the results of that physics was the creation of atomic and nuclear bombs and pollution from nuclear power, it was not a perfectly harmless boon for humanity, it may end up killing us all.  

The problem that Russell was working on was in math deals only with "objects" which have no physical existence that we can discern and would seem to reside only in the conscious minds of, primarily, human beings and a few animals who have learned something of human language. As Kaplan pointed out, one of the goals of Russell, Frege and others was to banish the suspicion that numbers are a creation of human minds.  How their contention that something which is not material has a place in reality doesn't blow up materialism in a basic way maybe should be considered.  On top of that theoretical physics deals with objects as abstractions that can be treated mathematically with some regularity and reliable replicability, though, in some cases, with physical confirmation or refutation of theories.  It is certainly a revealing irony that such are some of the most devoted of materialists there are, so much so that one of their champions, Stephen Hawking, in his last years demanded that untestable equations, composed of nothing but numbers and operations be granted, by fiat, the status of scientific truth.  Though they are hardly the only ones demanding everything they can think of for their materialist ideology or their wild claims about securing the entire realm of reality for it.  The life sciences have their own branch of that ideology based sciencing. 

PS I found a paper on the "theological" thinking of Frege shortly after posting this so I will probably add more after I've read it a few times.   It wasn't pretty.

Physical bodies of organisms may be constructed of molecules, some of which are so complex that the mathematical treatment and study of them reaches another limit on the other end of mathematics* and, as is becoming increasingly clear, an attempt to reliably understand entire organisms or even what we pretend can be isolated systems within organisms** with the legitimate methods of science largely surpasses possibility.  Organisms are extremely complex and the reliability of treating them purely as scientific problems falls off rapidly as the complexity increases. To a good extent what you come up with is more a product of hope than of physical confirmation. Compared to the most complex of molecules, living beings are many orders of complexity more complex.  There is no part of an organism which can function or operate for long as an isolated unit no more than an object can escape the gravity of other objects.  Their form and operation are dependent on the whole organism, not isolated as part of an organism isolated to subject it to study. Things such as the cell-line of breast cancer taken from a Black Woman more than a half a century ago is certainly not the maintanence and reproduction of an organism.  It is a highly artificial application of human intelligence to keep it alive and reproducing well after the woman it was taken from has died.  I wouldn't be surprised if such dolts exist but I've never heard a biological scientist who worked on someting important make a stupid claim that what may well be the most studied cell-line in the history of science was in any way totally understood by scientists.  In my experience biologists dealing with real things that they can study instead of speculating about things they not only can't study but will never have enough (often any) material necessary to make such a useful or even reliable study, such as the whole of evolution, have such comprehensive understanding.

The necessary practicality that forces us to temporarily ignore that so SOME study of them to, for example, treat diseases or injuries can be undertaken too often leads us to believe that that integration isn't always a factor in the actual existence and function of those aspects of the organism. I doubt that it is humanly possible to really achieve reliable and replicable knowledge of the whole of any such integrated organism with the best, most honest science on a scale that it is currently impossible and likely will always be impossible to achieve. For one thing, living organisms are constantly changing due to environmental and internal changes, maturation, aging, illness, etc. How could anyone think they could have comprehensive knowledge of that kind of moving object? There is no calculus that can simulate it, certainly none a human can calculate. I think if they tried to use computers to do it they'd have to ignore that they wouldn't even be able to program it to really simulate so many known and unknown vectors and the changing relationships among them. And if they could the results would probably surpass any human beings ability to comprehend it.  

I have to wonder why the alleged study of evolution is considered a part of the same thing as biology done about things that can be observed, some honest attempt at measuring and analyzing them made, BECAUSE WHAT THEY ARE STUDYING IS AVAILABLE TO THEM. Though such science may reference some of what evolutionary lore tells them, I wonder if in many cases, the theories they rely on being of such questionable reliability, that might not be better not used.  The study of evolution has an entirely inadequate percentage of what it would need to study the whole thing to come to any kind of real understanding of it. I don't know how many zeros you'd have to write to the right side of the decimal point to come up with the real figure of what part of one percent of the stuff of evolution they have to study but I'd guess it's at least dozens of zeros before you'd get to even a 1.  3.5 billion years and who knows how many trillions of organisms of unknown to little known character would have to be accounted for in the denominator of that number.  You know it's a tiny fraction, we don't even know enough to know how vanishingly small that number is.

I do know why something of such little practical use has gained such outsized attention and emotional import in culture and that is entirely due to its usefulness to religiously disillusion those who were brought up in a culture of Biblical fundamentalism which insists that the first chapters of Genesis must be literally true.  I think that works best against those branches of Protestantism that hold that as an article of faith and that's hardly most of Protestantism.  It works less well on Catholics who, if they had any knowledge of that tradition, don't tend to be much bothered by the idea that Genesis is neither biology nor is it history.  I never for a second had any problem with acknowledging that evolution pretty much certainly is the explanation of the present diversity of life on Earth, an explanation of the fossil and geological record (such as that is) and ties in well with the ability to explain genetic similarity between what are otherwise apparently entirely different lines of life. As I have learned more about the supposed science of evolution, the less impressed I am with it making any kinds of sweeping claims of knowledge.  Though I suspect it can come up with some plausible claims of limited issues, even those are mostly without actual physical evidence in the fossil record and are probably better considered lore than science.  A lot of science is far more based in the characteristics of lore than the claimed methods of science.

If a "young earth creationist" has no other malignant political or ideological infections, I consider "YACs" to be rather harmless and quaint.  As to their insistence on having their unscientific, in my opinion wrong-headedly religious ideology taught as science, I have a problem with that.  I have a pretty big problem with the pretense that Fundamentalism is Christianity and that pushing it like that will discredit the real thing among those who are ignorant of the real thing.  

But I have a bigger problem with the propagation of natural selection as science. I am not as conversant with the literature and history of "young earth creationism" as I am with Darwinism but I have never seen anything tying it to, in the quintessential example of such "applied science," something like the Nazi genocides.  I have traced the direct connection of natural selection to that genocide and to the attempted genocides by less dramatic means, the eugenics programs in the United States, Canada, etc. We English speakers like to pretend that such eugenicists as Dr. Perkins who was hell bent on wiping out the Abenakis of Vermont were not doing the same thing as the Nazis were in an even more ruthless and brutal fashion, but such Americans were, actually, working towards the same goal of eliminating racial and ethnic groups from the human future.  And we American's don't like to think of it the way it really was but Dr. Perkins was trying to wipe out the Abenakis with the support of the Supreme Court, in the infamous Buck v. Bell  decision written by the confirmed Darwinist Oliver Wendell Holmes jr.  Holmes explained his motives in unmistakably Darwinist terms.  He said of all his rulings he thought that one got closest to the heart of the matter.  I have a far stronger problem with what is a shoddy scientific theory with its history of producing genocidal attempts being propagated in public schools JUST AS I WOULD HAVE THE SCIENTIFIC RACISM, ALSO BASED IN DARWINISM, THAT WAS FOUND IN THE VERY TEXTBOOK SCOPES WAS ALLEGED TO HAVE TAUGHT IT FROM in the famous Chamber of Commerce, PR staged "monkey trial."  It was that kind of science that those who champion science in that historical drama were upholding as an historical fact though if one in a thousand of them understood that, I'll eat Mencken's hat.   Darwinism is a far greater danger on a far more important issue than the silly idea that Genesis 1 and 2 yield reliable biology and physics lessons. As I've pointed out, it is the basis for Kevin MacDonald being able to insert the crudest antisemitism directly into the literature of science for decades without his fellow scientists objecting decades after the Nazi genocides were made known to the world.

I think if we as a species continues long, eventually natural selection will be seen as being the biological equivalent of Ptolemaic cosmology, a stab at coming up with an explanation of what limited evidence there is that, likewise, got stuck in a basic framework that doesn't work. Only that ancient cosmology was based on physical observation adequate to support it if you kept modifying it, natural selection is not and it, as well, has had to constantly be patched and renovated.  And I don't know of any genocides directly attributable to Ptolemaic cosmology and there are genocides directly linked to natural selection.  About the worst that can be charged against the ancient cosmology was that its last champions got Galileo in some trouble when he dissed the Pope and was given a rather plush term of house arrest with travel to get medical care.  He had plenty of time for writing writing his last and maybe best scientific work.  he conducted a fairly free correspondence, including with his daughter who was a nun.  I doubt any of those who were victimized through natural selection would not have changed places with him in a second. Though  Brecht never wrote an ahistorical play about any of them.  That wasn't on his agenda.

English language college grads are so superstitious about these things.  

* The excellent beginning made by quantum mechanics with the hydrogen atom peters out slowly in the sands of approximations in as much as we move toward more complex situations…. This decline in the efficiency of mathematical algorithms accelerates when we go into chemistry.   The interactions between two molecules of any degree of complexity evades precise mathematical description … In biology, if we make exceptions of the theory of population and of formal genetics, the use of mathematics is confined to modeling a few local situations (transmission of nerve impulses, blood flow in the arteries, etc.)  of slight theoretical interest and limited practical value… The relatively rapid degeneration of the possible use of mathematics when one moves from physics to biology is certainly known among specialists, but there is a reluctance to reveal it to the public at large … The feeling of security given by the reductionist approach is in fact illusory.   René Thom

Who Is Following Scientific Method More Closely And More Modestly? - Hate Mail

PROFESSOR LAWRENCE H. SCHIFFMAN is someone I love listening to and he's someone I think is a real intellectual.  He was one of the early scholars who benefited from and, if I'm not mistaken was kind of in on the project of using a concordance of the Dead Sea Scrolls to reconstruct the text and so break the stranglehold embargo that the intellectual gangsters in control of them enforced.  They kept the materials from being largely accessible for decades.  His colleagues reproduced the texts by carefully piecing them together word by word, document by document in a real feat of enduring boredom. I can't imagine trying to reproduce a text from a concordance and they reproduced more than one. After that the gang keeping them hostage was shown to be disreputable and that freed the texts from their control.  The rather nasty antisemitic remarks of one of the scholar-gangsters helped, unintentionally.  It's incredibly ironic that texts presumed to have been generated by a cult of super-pious Jews, for whom other Jews weren't Jewish enough were in the control of an antisemite.  How anyone expected honest scholarship from that is worth asking.  

That's not to say I necessarily agree with everything Schiffman says, agreeing with everything anyone say about something as dependent on filling in missing information while interpreting the extant evidence of first century Jewish and early Christian culture and literature and religion, politics, etc. is unwise.  The art that such scholars engage in should always be considered to be highly contingent and susceptible to new evidence being found, new interpretations of what is there, new assumptions being inserted and taken out of the mix on the basis of newer thinking and honest criticism. As is seen in the period of the embargo, if you don't do that you are apt to impose your own agenda on top of the agendas of those whose work you're supposed to be explaining.  

A lecture he gave on "The Dead Sea Scrolls Judaism On The Eve of Christianity"* at the Pontifical Gregorian University is a good example of that.  I want to focus on one small detail in his lecture, what he admits is his assumption that some of the literature found in the Dead Sea Scrolls was general literature which was in general use and not peculiar to the Qumran community, assumed to be the origin of the library found in the scrolls.  His assumption is based on twenty two tiny fragments of the same texts being found in the ruins of Masada where the famous last stand of Jewish resistance when the Romans sacked Jerusalem to crush the revolt around 73 CE.  

The honesty of Schiffman's vigorously asserted conclusions on that includes a statement of why it has to be considered a conclusion based on fragmentary information, he pretty much inserts such conditioned statements all through his lecture.  Which is typical of the good scholarship in that area.  I'm listening to a lot of the Jewish study of the origins of Rabbinical Judaism and Christianity lately and am finding it really interesting and provocative and helpful. The fact being that both religions rose at the same time and the assertions that far from the one copying the other, both of them were a product of the most intimate interaction and reaction to each other.

All of this is, as already admitted, based on fragmentary information. Those twenty-two tiny fragments of parchment or paper that as eminent a scholar as Shiffman bases a quite consequential conclusion on are something he calls "bits of nothing".  However, in comparison to the majority of the fragmentary information on which the scientific and, even more, the allegedly scientific study of evolution is based is far less informative about the phenomenon of evolution than those fragments are about what Professor Schiffman says about them.

The literary fragments have a far more reliably known semiotic content than any fossil will have.  Texts are intentionally written to impart dense information, anatomy preserved by chance and the other fossil record is not constructed with the purpose of informing anyone of anything. And not only the actual literary content of the fragments of text.  Those fragments carry evidence of the ethnicity of the people who produced them, the time they lived, their language, their general biological relations, their more extended biological relatedness, it certainly identifies their species with complete specificity and the location the people who produced them lived in or were in at the time the texts were left where they were found.  Given the contents of some of them, the gender of those who produced them is far more reliably guessed at. It's possible they can give you a good guess at the level of education or, possibly, intellectual capacity of those who had those thoughts and ideas and are a good clue into their moral and intellectual intentions.  They show things that no fossil can show, their thinking, what they thought was important enough to write it down.  

Especially such texts as Schiffman was talking about which can tell you at least something about what may have motivated their behavior in life if not carrying absolutely certain clues that make assumptions about how they may have lived more secure than almost any if not any fossil will show about the minds and behavior of the individuals or those closely related to them. If they include personal information that can tell you things that no fossil can.  Any humanly written and readable text will probably carry enormously more information than any fossilized organism, the farther back in the history of life on Earth, the more unlikely that guesses about those things, even the actual anatomy of the organism, will be as securely knowable. I learned a lot from reading Stephen J. Gould's book Wonderful Life (which I still love) about the creatures whose distorted remains are found in the Burgess Shale and then reading other paleontologists who disagreed with the  spectacular reconstructions of them presented by Gould.  Thinking back, that was one of the milestones in my increasing skepticism about the pretense that is the possibility of having the kind of  comprehensive knowledge of most of evolution the popular presentation of it claims is had.  That's something I didn't remember having that reaction to until writing this post.   I still love Gould so many years after his death, even as I have some profound disagreements with some of his contentions and conclusions.  The Mismeasure of Man deserves to be considered a classic of scientific criticism, something there is too little of.   You can learn a lot from going over who it was who slammed the book and looking into their decidedly non-scientific motives.

In so many ways the scholarly study of the field that Professor Schiffman works in with far more extensive information than much of the allegedly scientific study of evolution relies on demands that an honest person consider it closer to the methods of science than much if not most of what is now called "science" which is published in reviewed journals and shares in the "rights and privilege of membership" in the Science Club.  The conclusions drawn by good scholars in the field are often so much less of an overreach, so much more modest in their claims, so limited and expressed so contingently. Perhaps it is fortunate that Professor Schiffman doesn't get to call what he does "science" because it's possible he wouldn't practice the virtue of honest modesty over what he does if he did get to call it that.  

What he does is entirely more scientific than almost anything ever done as psychology, sociology, evolutionary psychology, etc. I don't feel in the slightest bit embarrassed to have pointed out that the tiny, tiny, bits and pieces, that evolutionary science has in the way of actual physical evidence for almost all of the billions of years of life on Earth is a minute fraction of one percent of all of it. The idea that Darwin in 1859 was able to identify THE "mechanism" of evolution is an absurd overreach.  The scientific nature of the theory of natural selection is pretty slight and highly influenced by the fond wishes of the almost entirely white, rich, aristocratic or aspiring to that status guys who had control of biology for most of that period.  As I noted Galton was quite shrewd in using the family histories of the families of eminent men of science to support his contribution to the effort in promoting his cousin, Charles Darwin's theory that inspired his eugenics.  Of course if you start by flattering their families in a feudal class-system like that of Britain, it's going to give your bogus theories a leg up.  If you can believe the British Royal Family is an example of superior breeding, and there is probably no family in Britain with a more carefully selected blood-line, you can buy such bogus science when it tells you what you already wanted to hear.  In America, it was sold through appeals to our native form of fascism, white supremacy.  It is maintained through the belief that it is a bulwark against religion and for atheism.  I can not understand how it could have, otherwise, gained the position in intellectual culture that it has.  It is a putrid morality destroying faux scientific theory that is directly responsible for genocides conducted after 1860.  It always will as long as it is maintained as the required framing of evolutionary thinking.

* I can't find a url to the Youtubes that will function as a link to the video and I can't get it to come up on Blogger from that channel, I have no idea why that is, I've never had that problem before.  Sorry you'll have to look them up at Youtube by the title. I wish they'd do a better job of editing these lectures for their content because if you don't skip to the lecture you start wondering if you should skip the video as the minutes wear on.  And there's another one from the same channel, "Did Rabbinic Judaism Emerge Out Of Christianity by Professor Israel Jacob Yuval, which I alluded to about the cross-fertilization of the earliest Christianity and Rabbinical Judaism.  I don't fully endorse all of the conclusions, I haven't read or listened enough to know how reliable any of their conclusions are, but they are well worth listening to and looking for more information on the topic.

The biggest reason that they are well worth listening to and taking seriously is the stated intent that what they believe will lead to mutual respect for those who belong to both traditions, whose experience and personal commitments lead them to choose to believe in one or the other and, by extension, those who choose to believe in other traditions.  

I've been doing a lot of off-line listening as I have very limited time with an internet hookup, probably less than three hours a week.  I download and listen or read offline.  I don't know when I'll have in-home internet again. It feels kind of like I remember the 90s as being. I guess internet cafes are about as much of a thing as video-rental places now.