I get a lot of flack for my writing, which doesn't much bother me. I'm not a writer. But a lot of it is rather funny. One of the favorite accusations is that I sometimes, well, quite often, write long sentences. To that I say that it's not possible to write about complex things without using complex and compound sentences. Especially not on the amount of time I have to write.
The idea that short sentences are mandatory and the definition of good writing is evidence of the decrease in intelligence of the intelligentsia in the past hundred years. I haven't noticed that the fetish for short sentences, particularly popular since at least the idiocy of such popularizing as is contained in "Strunk - White" the idiotic "Elements of Style"*, has resulted in an increase in either general sophistication of thought or literacy. I think the short sentences so dutifully written in accord with "Strunk -White" are generally banal in content and, quite often, are not worth reading. And that's not the only source of non-wisdom on the topic of short sentences. There are a number of sources ordering that only short sentences consumable by someone with what used to be considered a fourth-grade reading comprehension are allowable.
In the early months of my blogging I experimented with writing short sentences in easy style and found it only worked at all when the topics were rather obvious and simple and of general agreement. I also found it was a lot harder to avoid banality while doing it. None of which is compatible with exploring what's wrong with the common received wisdom. The common received wisdom seems to be compatible with such rules mandating banality and such corsets on expository content.
The fetish for "elegance", of supposed simplicity, supposedly a virtue in science, has come to dominate over the humanities. That is a basic denial of the exigencies of the topics of the humanities, including history, including commentary on the widest of human experience and the literary record of humanity which are far vaster in their complexity than the proper topic of rigorous science. There has also been a pudding headed decision that nothing of any difficulty, things that won't be readily comprehended is to be deemed elegant. Elegance, though, doesn't cut it when the topic is hard and thorny and inescapably ambiguous and handled only in a way which will and can not have unanimous and instant agreement.
To dictate short sentences while dealing with the complexities of human experience and life is as stupid as it would be to dictate linear equations while dealing with science that requires more complex calculations.
I look at the writing of E. B. White, so admired, so often held up as a model and it looks banal to me. There is a reason that his most famous writing was either in the form of children's books or light, semi-flippant magazine articles for The New Yorker. So much of what people admire in White is a mirror of their preexisting ideas or, more so, their attitudes than any kind of hard challenge of their previously held beliefs and wishes. I don't do that stuff. It's not what I do. I'm not an elegant, polished writer, I have a different agenda. I will not bow down to the oracles of Cornell and pledge obeisance to their dictates.
* Some will remember I committed the mortal sin of dissing "The Little Book" the sacred "Elements of Style" the very end of last year. I still think there is no better short source pointing out the incompetence in English grammar of both Strunk and White than the article 50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice by Geoffrey K. Pullum. . Him pointing out that not only did the authors of the great work demonstrate they couldn't even reliably identify passages in the passive, as they condemned it, but also that they baldly and ignorantly violated their own edicts as soon as they'd laid them out. Not only does that prove the incompetence of Strunk and White on the topic of the book, it also identifies those who have lavished praise on the book as incompetent to do that. He notes some of their worst instances of that incompetence are dutifully repeated by would be critics and language mavens to this day, unaware of the wrongness of their perfect masters.
Note: I should also repeat that I have good reason to despise E. B. White who was the foremost of the "Maine writers" who moved here and held up the natives of my state as a quaint amusement for his readers in New York and the alleged sophisticated world. He was a cultural imperialist and an example of the folks from away who convinced too many Maine natives of the inferiority of our thoughts. I will also mention again the anthology of "Maine writers" once published which contained not a single piece of writing by someone who was born and grew up in the state. The literary lights who produced it, no doubt fans of irony as read in the friggin' New Yorker, apparently didn't see the irony of that. I'll bet they don't know what a passive construction is either.
Update: Here is some more of Pullum from a blog post on the writing dictates of the Harvard economics prof, Greg Mankiw
My heart began to sink when I found he advises against using the passive voice (expressing that instruction by saying "The passive voice is avoided by good writers' — I am assuming this is economist humor) — a long-standing, indeed tired, old theme (see here for discussion).
And ultimately (perhaps you guessed this was coming), he says:
Buy a copy of Strunk and White's Elements of Style. Also, William Zinsser's On Writing Well. Read them—again and again and again.
Oh, dear. Again and again and again, American professors with absolutely no background in English grammar insist that their 21st-century college students should study this unpleasantly dogmatic little work, written by men born in the 19th century. But the dictats given in The Elements of Style range from the redundant to the insane. Anyone who read the book again and again and again, and took its edicts literally, would do disastrous damage to their writing.
Most of those who dip into it come out with some signs of a nervous cluelessness about grammar: they get edgy around adverbs and prepositions and instances of the verb be, without exactly knowing why they feel like that, or what they should do about it.
I am quite convinced that The Elements of Style harms students more than it helps them. Yet the Google search term {Strunk White "Elements of Style" site:harvard.edu} calls up nearly ninety hits. Replacing harvard.edu by mit.edu yields more, about 140. At Princeton it's 23. At Stanford it's about 95. The finest universities in America continue to insist that this awful little compilation of century-old peevery is an important accessory for today's literate student. It isn't. The difference between carrying around The Elements of Style in your backpack and carrying around a slide rule is that slide rules gave accurate answers. (I actually don't know much about Zinsser's book; I'm trying to obtain a copy, but it is apparently not published in the UK. What I do know is that he makes the outrageous claim that most adjectives are unnecessary. So I have my doubts about Zinsser too.)
I will bet you that 99 out of 100 of those who venerate Strunk-White don't get the point in the first sentence. I doubt Mankiw realized it. Is it any wonder that a product of both Yale AND Harvard asked "Is our children learning? " when the cream of the Ivy League class of universities contains so many examples of obviously ignorant erudition.
Such stuff led Pullum to declare:
I've simply had it with all the people who keep telling me that they revere The Elements of Style because it's such a nice little book and helped them so much with their writing when they were in college that they carry it everywhere they go and give it to all their students or hand a copy to each new employee that they hire for their company yadda yadda yadda… I have decided that my campaign against Strunk and White's toxic little compendium of unfollowable dumb advice, bungled grammar claims, and outright mendacity must be taken directly to America's colleges, starting with the great universities of the East Coast.
Tuesday, December 15, 2015
Monday, December 14, 2015
William Bolcom - Gospel Preludes Book 3 -
Blessed Assurance
Nearer My God to Thee
William Bryant, Organ. Recital was on June 1st, 2015 at University Presbyterian Church - Seattle.
Olivier Messiaen - Twenty Visions of the Baby Jesus - XV The Kiss of the Baby Jesus
Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano
Update: This is a really wonderful video of Messiaen improvising at the organ of the Paris Church of the Holy Trinity, where he was organist for more than six decades. The first improvisation is on the Gregorian chant Puer Natus Est, A Child is Born. I think the second one is on Reges Tarsis about the Magi coming from the East but I'll have to listen more carefully, I've only been able to listen to it once, it would take a lot of listenings to unlock more of its meaning.
Update 2: Listening a second time, I think the third one is based on Omnes de Saba Venient,on a text from Isaiah. But don't quote me on that.
Hate Mail - No, There Is No Doubting That Jesus Is A Jew
In your your ignorance which is so typical of those with a college degree these days, wise guys who could tell you every line in some stupid TV show or movie but whose every concept of Christianity is based in not knowing what you're talking about, you are flat wrong.
For example, overlooking the birth narratives, the presentation narrative, Jesus being lost and found at the temple as a boy, etc. In the Gospel considered the least friendly to Jews, often accused of being the source of antisemitism among Christians, the Gospel according to John, Jesus identifies himself as a Jew and says that salvation is through Jews. In the narrative of Jesus talking to the Samaritan woman at the well, there is this exchange in which Jesus unmistakably identifies himself as a Jew, even as he proclaimed the universality of salvation.
19 “Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet. 20 Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.”
21 “Woman,” Jesus replied, “believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. 22 You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23 Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. 24 God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”
John 4:19-24
There is no doubting that the central figure in Christianity not only was identified by every single person who encountered him in the Gospels as a Jew, he identified HIMSELF as a Jew. Those who worship Jesus as the second person in the Trinity, beyond any question, believe a person who is a Jew is the embodiment of divinity.
That so many people who professed Christianity in the past and today overlooked that and lied about, oppressed and murdered Jews is through essentially the same ignorance you, yourself lie out of. And you've been to high school and college, they were mostly illiterate or uneducated.
I think that the prophesy in that passage could as clearly identify modern Judaism in the period after the temple worship had ended as legitimate as it could Christian worship. After all, Christianity didn't even exist at the time Jesus said that. He had to be referring to something the Samaritan woman would have known about. There isn't any reason to believe that modern Judaism wouldn't be approved of in this narrative.
For example, overlooking the birth narratives, the presentation narrative, Jesus being lost and found at the temple as a boy, etc. In the Gospel considered the least friendly to Jews, often accused of being the source of antisemitism among Christians, the Gospel according to John, Jesus identifies himself as a Jew and says that salvation is through Jews. In the narrative of Jesus talking to the Samaritan woman at the well, there is this exchange in which Jesus unmistakably identifies himself as a Jew, even as he proclaimed the universality of salvation.
19 “Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet. 20 Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.”
21 “Woman,” Jesus replied, “believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. 22 You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23 Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. 24 God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”
John 4:19-24
There is no doubting that the central figure in Christianity not only was identified by every single person who encountered him in the Gospels as a Jew, he identified HIMSELF as a Jew. Those who worship Jesus as the second person in the Trinity, beyond any question, believe a person who is a Jew is the embodiment of divinity.
That so many people who professed Christianity in the past and today overlooked that and lied about, oppressed and murdered Jews is through essentially the same ignorance you, yourself lie out of. And you've been to high school and college, they were mostly illiterate or uneducated.
I think that the prophesy in that passage could as clearly identify modern Judaism in the period after the temple worship had ended as legitimate as it could Christian worship. After all, Christianity didn't even exist at the time Jesus said that. He had to be referring to something the Samaritan woman would have known about. There isn't any reason to believe that modern Judaism wouldn't be approved of in this narrative.
Sunday, December 13, 2015
A Public Service Announcement
I wish there was some way for you to see the stupidity of the comments I'm sparing you from having to read. You'll have to take my word for it.
Olivier Messiaen - Twenty Visions of The Baby Jesus - XVI - The Vision of the Angels
Christoph Scheffelt, piano
The image of angels in recent popular culture has gotten them all mixed up with the quainter notion of faeries. The Biblical angels were hardly all like Gabriel who delivered the news to Mary that she was going to be the mother of the Savior, they are generally scary to the people they appear to. Even the one who announced the birth of Jesus to the shepherds scared them, they "feared a great fear" until the angel told them the glad tidings of great joy.
The angels appearances were generally far from quaint and homey and comforting they marked some of the most momentous occasions in Biblical narrative. Rainer Maria Rilke, in the first Duino Elegy t says "Every angel is horror" all of them mark a major disruption in the givenness of things. The concentration on the typical events of the physical universe in the last several hundred years have bound us to expectations that everything must be reducible to the simplest terms because those have a banal, seemingly all potent universality. But that way of looking at human experience isn't any less blinding to a larger reality than thinking everything is reducible to dollars and cents or what the gods of fashion have deemed you are to wear this year. All of them are a willful narrowing of view out of a willful denial of things which can't be so easily disposed of.
In thinking about the snark I've gotten over the assumption I believe that the story of the Virgin Birth is something that actually happened, it makes sense to me that, given what people are like, how caught up we are in our own narrow vision of things, it would take something of such total uniqueness, something so outside of the bounds of biology and expectation to make a dent in our world. The same thing with thinking about the Resurrection. When the rich man looking up from the flames at Abraham and Lazarus asks to be sent back to witness to his brothers so they won't suffer the same fate, Abraham tells him that they didn't believe Moses and the prophets so they wouldn't believe him. Even after reportedly seeing the miraculous cures, even the Transfiguration, even the followers closest to Jesus lost faith at seeing him crucified and denied him. If I ever do believe in the literal truth of the incarnation, it will be on the basis of it taking something that outrageously audacious to get our attention so we can do the even harder things like giving what money we have to those who won't pay it back, loving our enemies and praying for them... Compared to those, things which even the strongest believers in the literal truth of the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection consistently fail to do, believing in an angel being necessary to shake things up is easy. Hard truths can't become real without things being what you don't expect them to be, you've got to get shaken up. I doubt they look like they've got wings and pretty gowns on. I'll bet they look dead serious.
.... Every Angel is terror.
And so I hold myself back and swallow the cry
of a darkened sobbing. Ah, who then can
we make use of? Not Angels: not men,
and the resourceful creatures see clearly
that we are not really at home
in the interpreted world.....
Rilke, Duino Elegy One
Hate Mail - The Advice Of Being Careful of What You Wish For Is Perhaps Called For?
This question of the promotion of paganism, or Paganism. of you will, as an alternative to Christianity has been something that I've grown more interested in. It is, obviously, a product of buying mostly 19th and 20th century BS about pagan culture, alleged "Old Religion" most of which, on inspection, turns out to be about as authentic as a Hollywood movie about the "Old West".
It seeming to be of most concern, I've concentrated on such quaint practices as ritual and horrifically brutal human sacrifice, including that done periodically in celebration or observation of the winter solstice at places like Uppsala. the ritual murder of female slaves to be the concubines of warrior thugs who have died, and have noted the practically universal practice of infanticide among pagans, especially the disabled and, probably most often women. Killing people was a major feature of paganism, the Germanic and stylish Celtic forms of them, what with various bog burials of its victims and archaeological excavations of the burials of upper class thugs prove. I have also shown the direct documentation by such pagans as is seen in the Oseberg ship burial tapestry depicting, as in the literary sources, nine men ritually hanged in a grove.
Pagans wanting to deny the fact that their imagined nature loving, gender egalitarian "old religion" was an unequal and horrifically vicious reality have the problem that the same Sagas and early Christian works that they depend on for whatever information they can have about the Pagans, apart from such excavations, also document those horrific sacrifices and the grotesque patriarchal inequality of pagan cultures. They can't use them as a reliable source for what they want without also having to turn around and say they were lying about the things they don't like. Even some of the supposed scholars try to do that, on the basis of nothing I can see, saying that the sacrifices of nine men every nine years was a pantomime, not an actual sacrifice. I haven't seen anything about pantomime in anything I've found. The bog burials and other obvious victims of sacrifice who have been dug up would have been some kind of theatrical accident, I guess?
The recent desire to push paganism in English speaking countries gaining ground since the 1960s has been something which a lot of supposed liberals have done, part of the push to diminish the influence of Christianity. Well, as I've learned and shown this week, that is right in line with what the Nazis did and, as I indicated, the neo-Nazis have pushed that old "Christians stole Christmas from the Pagans" line as well. And,as you can see if you go searching through the sewer that is the neo-Nazi internet, if anything they are more overtly antisemetic about it than their Nazi predecessors may have been. The original Nazis had to peddle their lies to Christians for whom Mary and Jesus and Joseph were all identified as Jews, the post-war neo-Nazis don't have to deal with that because their converts probably never learned that inconvenient fact.
I look at it all and think that any Jewish people and women and liberals in general who push that line had better be careful for what they wish for. The pagan fundamentalists who could arise in a country with large numbers of them could make the Southern Baptists look mild by comparison. The Nazis rose out of a sort of pagan club, The Thule Society in Munich. It's newspaper, the Münchener Beobachter, became the chief organ of Nazi propaganda, the Völkischer Beobachter. They were really big on Nordic mythology and folkways complete with lost lands and powerful, runic symbols which became part of Nazi symbolism which became potent parts of Nazi recruitment and organization. These things didn't happen at a glacial rate, the same people involved in such neo-paganism in Munich in 1918 formed the Nazi party the next year and within 14 years took over Germany and began killing people. The whole thing from beginning to end took about 27 years and about 50 million lives sacrificed.
Saturday, December 12, 2015
FOX Hunt - The Unspeakable In Control Of The Ineducable
I am being trolled over this post at Americablog about the unfit to be president Ted Cruz saying that atheists aren't fit to be president. It's meaningless. It's him throwing meat to the tire biters who he needs to get elected into office and send him money. It means nothing. What? Did anyone believe he wouldn't say something like that if he had the chance?
This is a ritual. Here's the program, step by step.
1. Fascist says something outrageous on a religious topic insulting atheists, Muslims, etc.
2. His or her intended audience cheer.
3a. "Secularists'" atheists', liberals'. etc. knees jerk in reflexive outrage, much of it as much for show as the fascist's provocation. They insult the majority of voters who are Christian if not even more voters on the basis of their universal hatred of religion.
3b. In the exact mirror of what Cruz says, lots of "secularists" etc. say that it's Christians who are too stupid and superstitious to ever be president, thus showing that they, as well as Cruz and his bots, have a religious test on who should be allowed to hold office.
4. The fascist gets what they want, campaign contributions, maybe votes, suffering no ill effects while being able to point to the idiots who insulted even more voters in step 3, thus making even more hay.
5. Repeat the dance of the dunces.
Tell me that the suckers who fall for what Cruz et al do are the masters of this game so I'll know just how stupid you are.
As I've been pointing out on various blogs since 2006, no one has a right to be president, that being president is a responsibility which only the winner of an election has the PRIVILEGE of assuming. No president has the right to the office, it is a privilege granted by THE PEOPLE. THE PEOPLE get to decide who ever they are going to vote for on whatever criteria they choose to base their vote on. That atheists would seem to not have the confidence of enough voters to seriously have a chance at winning the presidency might be unfortunate in some cases. I'd vote for Barney Frank for president and assumed Barry Commoner might be an atheist when I voted for him .
But, after looking intensively at the literature of atheism, as written by atheists and thinking about, especially, the consequences of materialism for equal rights and the moral obligation to respect those, I'd want to either have a long public record to go on or a real and rational articulation of where an atheist believes those come from and why they are mandatory instead of an optional vestige of Kroptkin's ridiculous attempt to tame natural selection. Even the neo-Nazis believe that (see Kevin MacDonald)/ That it would be necessary for someone running as an atheist to prove he had a solid basis on which his understanding of those prerequisites are mandatory and absolute before he would get my vote is the doing of atheists. It is the declarations of atheists, their assertions of science which is biological determinsim that makes those questions entirely responsible ones for anyone who values egalitarian democracy and equal rights.
The only reason I might have hesitations about voting for an atheist who could answer those questions and who could convince me that they would fight for a platform I would support is that a considerable number of their supporters would probably throw the election so they could indulge themselves in their attention getting offensive Christian bashing.
Update: Simps is saying that as I said he was unfit to be president that I"m on the same page as Ted Cruz. If he got Bezos bucks for every time someone lied on his blog, Duncan could stop begging his tiny little commenting community to keep buying stuff so he can get his cut.
This is a ritual. Here's the program, step by step.
1. Fascist says something outrageous on a religious topic insulting atheists, Muslims, etc.
2. His or her intended audience cheer.
3a. "Secularists'" atheists', liberals'. etc. knees jerk in reflexive outrage, much of it as much for show as the fascist's provocation. They insult the majority of voters who are Christian if not even more voters on the basis of their universal hatred of religion.
3b. In the exact mirror of what Cruz says, lots of "secularists" etc. say that it's Christians who are too stupid and superstitious to ever be president, thus showing that they, as well as Cruz and his bots, have a religious test on who should be allowed to hold office.
4. The fascist gets what they want, campaign contributions, maybe votes, suffering no ill effects while being able to point to the idiots who insulted even more voters in step 3, thus making even more hay.
5. Repeat the dance of the dunces.
Tell me that the suckers who fall for what Cruz et al do are the masters of this game so I'll know just how stupid you are.
As I've been pointing out on various blogs since 2006, no one has a right to be president, that being president is a responsibility which only the winner of an election has the PRIVILEGE of assuming. No president has the right to the office, it is a privilege granted by THE PEOPLE. THE PEOPLE get to decide who ever they are going to vote for on whatever criteria they choose to base their vote on. That atheists would seem to not have the confidence of enough voters to seriously have a chance at winning the presidency might be unfortunate in some cases. I'd vote for Barney Frank for president and assumed Barry Commoner might be an atheist when I voted for him .
But, after looking intensively at the literature of atheism, as written by atheists and thinking about, especially, the consequences of materialism for equal rights and the moral obligation to respect those, I'd want to either have a long public record to go on or a real and rational articulation of where an atheist believes those come from and why they are mandatory instead of an optional vestige of Kroptkin's ridiculous attempt to tame natural selection. Even the neo-Nazis believe that (see Kevin MacDonald)/ That it would be necessary for someone running as an atheist to prove he had a solid basis on which his understanding of those prerequisites are mandatory and absolute before he would get my vote is the doing of atheists. It is the declarations of atheists, their assertions of science which is biological determinsim that makes those questions entirely responsible ones for anyone who values egalitarian democracy and equal rights.
The only reason I might have hesitations about voting for an atheist who could answer those questions and who could convince me that they would fight for a platform I would support is that a considerable number of their supporters would probably throw the election so they could indulge themselves in their attention getting offensive Christian bashing.
Update: Simps is saying that as I said he was unfit to be president that I"m on the same page as Ted Cruz. If he got Bezos bucks for every time someone lied on his blog, Duncan could stop begging his tiny little commenting community to keep buying stuff so he can get his cut.
Foot Notes to Yesterdays posts
The cover and a page from a wartime Nazi Advent pamphlet of 1941.
There is no mention of Christ but plenty of family-oriented propaganda and a celebration of the cycle of the year, complete with Swastika.
It looks not all that different from a lot of the supposed neo-pagan stuff you'll see in a similar attempt to de-Christianize Christmas and to be rather stupidly inclusive.
I have to thank the troll who led me to look more into how the Nazis stole Christmas because there are few things that more firmly demonstrate their determination to obliterate Christianity. And, to the point I made about the apparent lack of Pagan opposition to Nazism, they were obviously wildly pro-Paganism as long as it was Germanic paganism. I hadn't realized that the SS insignia was an overt use of runic symbolism, as, in fact, a large number of other Nazi insignias are. In addition to being the rune for the sound "s" as in the name of the SS, it stands for "victory".
There really is no bottom to the creepiness of the Nazis taking over the holiday.
These are ornaments made in the shape of hand grenades.
as mentioned yesterday.
And to go along with the "axial tilt" post this morning, the Nazis were determined to replace winter solstice as the point of the holiday, they also wanted people to think that the axial tilt was the reason for the season.
But Christmas was too popular even during the Nazi period to be banned, Mueller told Deutsche Welle. "They therefore decided to corrupt it."
Initially Nazi officials had tried to reject all Christian traditions. They renamed the festival Julfest and propagated the Germanic origins of the winter celebration of light on December 21, the winter solstice.
'And, as to the Nazis rewriting the words to Silent Night to take Jesus and God out of it - see the Deutsche Welle article linked to - Garrison Keillor noted that was also being done in what should be an annual holiday tradition.
I've just come from Cambridge, that beehive of brilliance, where nerds don't feel self-conscious: There's always someone nerdier nearby. If you are the World's Leading Authority on the mating habits of the jabberwock beetle of the Lesser Jujube Archipelago, you can take comfort in knowing that the pinch-faced drone next to you at Starbucks may be the W.L.A. on 17th-century Huguenot hymnody or a niche of quantum physics that is understood by nobody but himself.
People in Cambridge learn to be wary of brilliance, having seen geniuses in the throes of deep thought step into potholes and disappear. Such as the brilliant economist Lawrence Summers, whose presidency brought Harvard to the verge of disaster. He, against the advice of his lessers, invested Harvard's operating funds in the stock market and lost the bet. In the cold light of day, this was dumber than dirt, like putting the kids' lunch money on Valiant's Fancy to win in the 5th. And now the genius is in the White House, two short flights of stairs above the Oval Office. This does not make Cantabrigians feel better about our nation's economic future.
You can blame Ralph Waldo Emerson for the brazen foolishness of the elite. He preached here at the First Church of Cambridge, a Unitarian outfit (where I discovered that "Silent Night" has been cleverly rewritten to make it more about silence and night and not so much about God), and Emerson tossed off little bon mots that have been leading people astray ever since. "To be great is to be misunderstood," for example. This tiny gem of self-pity has given license to a million arrogant and unlovable people to imagine that their unpopularity somehow was proof of their greatness.
And all his hoo-ha about listening to the voice within and don't follow the path, make your own path and leave a trail and so forth, encouraged people who might've been excellent janitors to become bold and innovative economists who run a wealthy university into the ditch.
Unitarians listen to the Inner Voice and so they have no creed that they all stand up and recite in unison, and that's their perfect right, but it is wrong, wrong, wrong to rewrite "Silent Night." If you don't believe Jesus was God, OK, go write your own damn "Silent Night" and leave ours alone. This is spiritual piracy and cultural elitism, and we Christians have stood for it long enough. And all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls every year, Rudolph and the chestnuts and the rest of that dreck. Did one of our guys write "Grab your loafers, come along if you wanna, and we'll blow that shofar for Rosh Hashanah"? No, we didn't.
Christmas is a Christian holiday - if you're not in the club, then buzz off. Celebrate Yule instead or dance around in druid robes for the solstice. Go light a big log, go wassailing and falalaing until you fall down, eat figgy pudding until you puke, but don't mess with the Messiah.
I'd better stop or it will get me on the Christmas Revels and I'm in a bad enough mood seeing all that Nazi stuff, already.
Unfortunately It's Necessary To Post This Again Too
American Moloch: The Ignored Verse Right Before The One They Push
Do not give any of your children to be sacrificed to Moloch, for you must not profane the name of your God. I am the LORD. Leviticus 18:21
Two now three years after the sacrifice of children at the Sandy Hook Elementary School, the actual patron gods of the United States, Moloch and Mammon, are fatter than ever, fed on the blood and flesh of children sacrificed to them as certainly as any thrown on the heated statue of one and ground up by the daily mechanism of the other. The various mass feedings of those gods is supplemented by daily sacrifices, especially of children of color and poor children instead of those of the elite, sanctioned and enabled by the state, the high church of the Supreme Court, the media, the NRA, Koch bros. the press....
Olivier Messiaen - Twenty Visions of The Baby Jesus - XIII Christmas - Yvonne Loriod
As close to a definitive performance as we have, it brought tears to the eyes of the composer.
It's a Blunderful LIfe: Still Dealing With Family Problems So Another Christmas Classic Rerun
Original Title: I So Don't Miss Carl Sagan (and his smirky self-satisfied mug).
I wonder how many of the sciency smart boys even understand what axial tilt means or how many of them realize that the planet is tilted all of the time. I'll bet not one in a hundred of the atheist sci-rangers who parroted that line yesterday could even define what the term means.
Considering that it's more than just an arguable case that Johannes Kepler, a very devout Christian, and Galileo, another very devout Christian, can be pretty much credited with understanding that the system of Copernicus, an actual Christian cleric, led to the conclusion that axial tilt produced the seasons, I don't see that atheists have much of a claim to the concept.
Update: Ah, no, no joy for the atheists in the Greek guy who first estimated it
It is related that Oenopides, seeing an uneducated youth who had amassed many books, observed, “Not in your coffer but in your breast.”24 Sextus Empiricus25 says that Oenopides laid special emphasis on fire and air as first principles. Aëtius26 says that Diogenes (of Apollonia), Cleanthes, and Oenopides made the soul of the world to be divine. Cleanthes left a hymn to Zeus in which the universe is considered a living being with God as its soul, and if Aëtius is correct then Oenopides must have anticipated these views by more than a century. Diogenes is known to have revived the doctrine of Anaximenes that the primary substance is air, and presumably Oenopides in part shared this view but gave equal primacy to fire as a first principle.
Update 2: Yeah, Galileo got house arrest for tangling with Urban VIII who, in a fact little known to atheists of little brain, had actually been Galileo's patron and defender up till the time Galileo spoofed him as "Simplicus", not a wise thing to do to a Pope in early 17th century Italy. They tended to be touchy about being mocked. His house arrest was so brutal that he managed to write and, as I recall, publish one of his major works, The Discourse on Two New Sciences, which I am sure you are aware, only not. By the way, it was published in Leiden. During his house arrest Galileo was awarded a gold chain by the Dutch government, which he refused. His main enemy and former friend, Urban VIII commended him on his refusal. From that treatment we can see how the treatment of Galileo proves the evil nature of Christianity.
And we can confirm that by noting how those humane atheists have dealt with such enlightened ways with their scientists who opposed the officially approved science of their day such as Georgii Karpechenko, Georgii Nadson, Isaak Agol, Solomon Levit, Grigorii Levitskii,... Oh, um. But..... well, yeah..... they were actually all executed as enemies of Lysenkoism. How about someone who they didn't execute, who had that in common with Galileo. How about the great botanist Nikolai Vavilov. Well, true he got sent to prison instead of house arrest in his own digs and, well, true he did die of starvation there but, hey, at least it wasn't those evil Xians who did him in. It wasn't like what they did to Lavoisier, cutting his head off..... well, yeah, I guess it was atheists who did him in during that great event in the history of atheism, the Reign of Terror in France, But I'll bet they used that symbol of their materialist enlightenment, the guillotine.
Actually, considering the internal exile of Andrei Sakharov, that's a better comparison with Galileo. Like you know, when they let Galileo move to another one of his houses, in Florence, to be closer to his eye doctor. Hey, now there's a coincidence for you, Sakharov's wife Yelena Bonner went to Italy when she had eye trouble too. Only they had to wait till a change of government before their internal exile was lifted for her to go.
Update 3: Well, your great hero Lillian Hellman we tangled over last night was a devoted Stalinist during the entire time those scientists were being killed by the great hero of scientific atheism, Stalin, even as my distant cousin was having the falling out with her that makes such entertaining reading now. As was the god(less)father and patron of Paul Kurtz and, so, sugar daddy of neo atheism, and "Humanist of the Year" Corliss Lamont. I'd love to go through his papers to find out if he ever mentioned Lysenkoism or the trail of scientists who either got offed by his hero, Stalin, or died in prison or never worked in science again. Compared to the high 17th century crime against science that is held to merit death to Catholicism and religion in general, the scads of bodies wracked up within living memory by atheist governments is held, by you guys and the people who control the media to be barely worth noticing.
Friday, December 11, 2015
Mikołaj Zieleński - Magnificat a 12
Last year this time I was posting dozens of settings of the Magnificat, most of which I'd never heard before, some from composers I'd never heard before. This one by Mikołaj Zieleński was one of those, I don't know why I'd never encountered him before, he was clearly a master composer of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. The piece is for three choruses of four parts distributed -SATT.ATTB.TTBB. With only one of Sopranos and two Altos and three bases, that leaves half of the parts in the tenor range. The effect is fascinating. He also wrote a fascinating setting of Vox in Rama that I will try to remember to post on the appropriate day. He is clearly well remembered in Poland, from the Youtubes of performances, he should be better known here.
Score
More On The Nazi Yule As Evidence of Its Anti-Christianity
Housewives were encouraged to bake biscuits in similar shapes. One of the exhibits is a page from a Nazi women's magazine with a baking recipe: "Every boy will want to bake a sig (SS) rune," proclaims the accompanying text.
The Nazification of Christmas did not end there. The Christmas tree crib was replaced by a Christmas garden containing wooden toy deer and rabbits. Mary and Jesus became the Germanic mother and child, while dozens of Christmas carols, including the famous German hymn "Silent Night", were rewritten with all references to God, Christ and religion expunged. At the height of the anti-Christian campaign, an attempt was made to replace the coming of Christ the Saviour with the coming of Adolf Hitler – the "Saviour Führer."
"We cannot accept that a German Christmas tree has anything to do with a crib in a manger in Bethlehem," wrote the Nazi propagandist Friedrich Rehm in 1937. "It is inconceivable for us that Christmas and all its deep soulful content is the product of an oriental religion," he added.
Mrs Breuer's mother, Rita, began collecting antique Christmas decorations in the 1970s. Her husband had said he wanted the sort of old-fashioned German tree that his grandmother used to have. But Rita Breuer and her daughter soon started to unearth bizarre tree decorations that had little to do with the traditional Christmas. First World War items included a miniature glass soldier carrying a hand grenade and military tree baubles in the shape of shells and tanks.*
"The trend continued into the Nazi era," Mrs Breuer said. The church was too intimidated to protest, and the majority of Germans continued with the traditions they had become used to. "The Nazi Christmas ideology appears to have been adhered to most by the families of party activists who lived in towns," she added. The Nazi version of some German carols that were stripped of their Christian content survive and are still unwittingly sung by today's Germans.
The hijacking of Christmas did not end with the Nazis. There were also attempts to de-Christianise the event in the former communist East Germany. Prominent communist authors tried to substitute the birth of Jesus with that of the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, who just happened to have been born in a humble Russian hut on December 21. "It may seem peculiar now, but in some cases the transition was almost seamless," Mrs Breuer said.
It's too bad that The Independent mares an otherwise interesting report by repeating some of the parallel English mythology about Christians stealing Christmas I talked about this morning. As I said, RMJ has done some good debunking of that nonsense.
* I've done more research about Vernon Kellogg's book "Headquarters Nights" expressing his horror over the "neo-Darwinian" beliefs of the German military and intellectual class in what is clearly proto-Nazi beliefs about how nature has ordained survival of the fittest and the death of those who are less fit. It will take some writing up but maybe I'll get to that in the new year. That assumption would account for those pre-Nazi-proto-Nazi Christmas decorations associating war with Christmas.
The Nazification of Christmas did not end there. The Christmas tree crib was replaced by a Christmas garden containing wooden toy deer and rabbits. Mary and Jesus became the Germanic mother and child, while dozens of Christmas carols, including the famous German hymn "Silent Night", were rewritten with all references to God, Christ and religion expunged. At the height of the anti-Christian campaign, an attempt was made to replace the coming of Christ the Saviour with the coming of Adolf Hitler – the "Saviour Führer."
"We cannot accept that a German Christmas tree has anything to do with a crib in a manger in Bethlehem," wrote the Nazi propagandist Friedrich Rehm in 1937. "It is inconceivable for us that Christmas and all its deep soulful content is the product of an oriental religion," he added.
Mrs Breuer's mother, Rita, began collecting antique Christmas decorations in the 1970s. Her husband had said he wanted the sort of old-fashioned German tree that his grandmother used to have. But Rita Breuer and her daughter soon started to unearth bizarre tree decorations that had little to do with the traditional Christmas. First World War items included a miniature glass soldier carrying a hand grenade and military tree baubles in the shape of shells and tanks.*
"The trend continued into the Nazi era," Mrs Breuer said. The church was too intimidated to protest, and the majority of Germans continued with the traditions they had become used to. "The Nazi Christmas ideology appears to have been adhered to most by the families of party activists who lived in towns," she added. The Nazi version of some German carols that were stripped of their Christian content survive and are still unwittingly sung by today's Germans.
The hijacking of Christmas did not end with the Nazis. There were also attempts to de-Christianise the event in the former communist East Germany. Prominent communist authors tried to substitute the birth of Jesus with that of the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, who just happened to have been born in a humble Russian hut on December 21. "It may seem peculiar now, but in some cases the transition was almost seamless," Mrs Breuer said.
It's too bad that The Independent mares an otherwise interesting report by repeating some of the parallel English mythology about Christians stealing Christmas I talked about this morning. As I said, RMJ has done some good debunking of that nonsense.
* I've done more research about Vernon Kellogg's book "Headquarters Nights" expressing his horror over the "neo-Darwinian" beliefs of the German military and intellectual class in what is clearly proto-Nazi beliefs about how nature has ordained survival of the fittest and the death of those who are less fit. It will take some writing up but maybe I'll get to that in the new year. That assumption would account for those pre-Nazi-proto-Nazi Christmas decorations associating war with Christmas.
Athe-Pagan Hate Mail - A Quick Response
I don't have time to write today due to work and a family emergency. Here's a quote from an article about an exhibition about how the Nazis co-opted Christmas.
"Christmas was a provocation for the Nazis -- after all, the baby Jesus was a Jewish child," Judith Breuer, who helped prepare the exhibition and co-authored the accompanying book with her mother, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "The most important celebration in the year didn't fit with their racist beliefs so they had to react, by trying to make it less Christian."
The exhibition, which includes such peculiar objects from the Breuers' massive collection as swastika-shaped cookie-cutters and Christmas tree baubles emblazoned with the Nazi symbol, shows the bizarre ways the Nazis came up with to try to take the Christ out of Christmas. They tried to persuade housewives to bake cookies in the shape of a sun wheel, a form similar to the swastika, and they attempted to replace the Christian figure of Saint Nicholas, who traditionally brings German children treats on Dec. 6, with the figure of Odin, the Norse god.
One symbol posed a particular problem for the Nazis, namely the star, which traditionally decorates Christmas trees. "Either it was a six-pointed star, which was a symbol of the Jews, or it was a five-pointed star, which represented the Soviets," Breuer says. Either way, the star had to go.
And to the points you object to in yesterday's post:
One particular sinister example of the Nazi Christmas tradition is the Julleuchter ("Yule lantern"), a kind of candlestick which can also be seen in the exhibition. Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, had the supposedly "Germanic" lantern produced by inmates in the Dachau and Neuengamme concentration camps to give as a present to members of the SS. The same version of the Julleuchter that Himmler had made is still sold today in certain shops with a New Age bent as a traditional Christmas decoration.
And many of the myths that the Nazis invented are still circulating. "You can still read in places about how Christmas is really an ancient Germanic festival of the winter solstice," Breuer says, pointing out that there is little evidence of any such celebration.
That article refers to that myth in German popular culture, the English speaking world's source of it, as RMJ has pointed out, is likely the product of English Puritan anti-Catholic invective. Which would account for the fact that in the United States many of the Christmas traditions such as Christmas cookys come from the Dutch influence. I remember reading an essay from Thomas Boyleston Adams in which he talks about how the proper Boston Calvinists were scandalized when their fellow Calvinists, the Huguenots, celebrated Christmas which their ancestors had made illegal. Not all Calvinists were opposed to some form of Christmas celebrations. If I can find where I put the book I'll type out that passage.
Update: I wonder what would happen if someone asked you to own Sheldon Adelson, Richard Perle, Midge Decter, William Kristol, .. the neo-cons in general. So I just pose that as a topic for consideration alongside your asking me to account for pseudo-Christians on FOX.
Update 2: I don't think I've ever refered to Sheldon Adelson in a way that would be used to carecterize other Jews as you are using some clearly phony Christians on FOX to characterize Christians. Here's the only other reference to him I find in a word search of this blog.
That SOME Jews have too much power, Sheldon Adelson, for example, is not a matter for serious doubt, but that's due to the undue power of that what is probably, historically, the least Jewish of all branches of our government, The Supreme Court. It is the Supreme Court which has given the country to billionaires and millionaires. As I recall, it was the Jewish members of the court in recent years who would probably have done the most to sustain the congressional limits on such as Adelson's political influence, enhancing the power of The People as a whole. I would suspect if most of the Jews who have sat in the Senate had more power, they would have blocked the nominations of the corporate Republicans to the court and we would have gotten the government out of the hands of the billionaires. If we had a Judiciary committee staffed by Howard Metzenbaums and Russ Feingolds the country wouldn't be in danger of becoming a fascist oligarchy. I would love it if such Jews had a decisive voice in making the laws of the United States, though we might sometimes part company on support of the Israeli government. That survey question is something I couldn't possibly answer and would never have any inclination to answer for all of those reasons stated above and below.
Update 3: You know Bunky, I could publish your comments to show that's exactly what you claimed the only reason I haven't is because they are rather stupid.
Update 4: I have no problem allowing you to show what a fool you are, it's that I don't want to cheapen my blog by posting it.
Update 5: 2 comments Setting Up the Simp So He Suckers Himself
2 comments:
steve simelsDecember 11, 2015 at 4:57 PM
"I don't want to cheapen my blog "
Well, that horse left the barn some years ago.
The Thought CriminalDecember 11, 2015 at 5:08 PM
Well, yeah, I have published your comments before.
"Christmas was a provocation for the Nazis -- after all, the baby Jesus was a Jewish child," Judith Breuer, who helped prepare the exhibition and co-authored the accompanying book with her mother, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "The most important celebration in the year didn't fit with their racist beliefs so they had to react, by trying to make it less Christian."
The exhibition, which includes such peculiar objects from the Breuers' massive collection as swastika-shaped cookie-cutters and Christmas tree baubles emblazoned with the Nazi symbol, shows the bizarre ways the Nazis came up with to try to take the Christ out of Christmas. They tried to persuade housewives to bake cookies in the shape of a sun wheel, a form similar to the swastika, and they attempted to replace the Christian figure of Saint Nicholas, who traditionally brings German children treats on Dec. 6, with the figure of Odin, the Norse god.
One symbol posed a particular problem for the Nazis, namely the star, which traditionally decorates Christmas trees. "Either it was a six-pointed star, which was a symbol of the Jews, or it was a five-pointed star, which represented the Soviets," Breuer says. Either way, the star had to go.
And to the points you object to in yesterday's post:
One particular sinister example of the Nazi Christmas tradition is the Julleuchter ("Yule lantern"), a kind of candlestick which can also be seen in the exhibition. Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, had the supposedly "Germanic" lantern produced by inmates in the Dachau and Neuengamme concentration camps to give as a present to members of the SS. The same version of the Julleuchter that Himmler had made is still sold today in certain shops with a New Age bent as a traditional Christmas decoration.
And many of the myths that the Nazis invented are still circulating. "You can still read in places about how Christmas is really an ancient Germanic festival of the winter solstice," Breuer says, pointing out that there is little evidence of any such celebration.
That article refers to that myth in German popular culture, the English speaking world's source of it, as RMJ has pointed out, is likely the product of English Puritan anti-Catholic invective. Which would account for the fact that in the United States many of the Christmas traditions such as Christmas cookys come from the Dutch influence. I remember reading an essay from Thomas Boyleston Adams in which he talks about how the proper Boston Calvinists were scandalized when their fellow Calvinists, the Huguenots, celebrated Christmas which their ancestors had made illegal. Not all Calvinists were opposed to some form of Christmas celebrations. If I can find where I put the book I'll type out that passage.
Update: I wonder what would happen if someone asked you to own Sheldon Adelson, Richard Perle, Midge Decter, William Kristol, .. the neo-cons in general. So I just pose that as a topic for consideration alongside your asking me to account for pseudo-Christians on FOX.
Update 2: I don't think I've ever refered to Sheldon Adelson in a way that would be used to carecterize other Jews as you are using some clearly phony Christians on FOX to characterize Christians. Here's the only other reference to him I find in a word search of this blog.
That SOME Jews have too much power, Sheldon Adelson, for example, is not a matter for serious doubt, but that's due to the undue power of that what is probably, historically, the least Jewish of all branches of our government, The Supreme Court. It is the Supreme Court which has given the country to billionaires and millionaires. As I recall, it was the Jewish members of the court in recent years who would probably have done the most to sustain the congressional limits on such as Adelson's political influence, enhancing the power of The People as a whole. I would suspect if most of the Jews who have sat in the Senate had more power, they would have blocked the nominations of the corporate Republicans to the court and we would have gotten the government out of the hands of the billionaires. If we had a Judiciary committee staffed by Howard Metzenbaums and Russ Feingolds the country wouldn't be in danger of becoming a fascist oligarchy. I would love it if such Jews had a decisive voice in making the laws of the United States, though we might sometimes part company on support of the Israeli government. That survey question is something I couldn't possibly answer and would never have any inclination to answer for all of those reasons stated above and below.
Update 3: You know Bunky, I could publish your comments to show that's exactly what you claimed the only reason I haven't is because they are rather stupid.
Update 4: I have no problem allowing you to show what a fool you are, it's that I don't want to cheapen my blog by posting it.
Update 5: 2 comments Setting Up the Simp So He Suckers Himself
2 comments:
steve simelsDecember 11, 2015 at 4:57 PM
"I don't want to cheapen my blog "
Well, that horse left the barn some years ago.
The Thought CriminalDecember 11, 2015 at 5:08 PM
Well, yeah, I have published your comments before.
Olivier Messiaen - Twenty Visions Of the Baby Jesus - XII - The All Mighty Word
Markus Bellheim, piano
The identity of Jesus as Christ as The Word is some of the most overt part of the mystic content of the accounts of his life and teachings. As given in the various places it is said, especially in the John Gospel, it is more than a metaphor, it is actual identity, The Word is conceived of as being the actual being of Jesus Christ. Whatever else there might be to understand about what that means, one thing is clear, The Word that is to be understood by that is absolute truth, absolute reality. I used to not understand the first thing about that, it took me the better part of six decades to start to understand it, I'm still, slowly, beginning to see, not how it fits into reality but how it resolved so much about reality.
Thursday, December 10, 2015
Hate Mail
I make no apologies for being aggressive in arguments. I rejected the losing, lame-brained, loony code of liberal niceness which I never signed onto and if I'd been asked to I'd have told them to go climb a tree. I did that in my very first ever blog post.
To start with, there are two things about the Code of Liberal Ethics that bother me. One, that we are supposed to be entirely fair to everyone and especially in instances when that would put us at a disadvantage, will be dealt with later. The one I will deal with first is the assumption that liberals must get it right every time, not only right but correct. That liberals and leftists, such as myself, must be purer than pure or relegated to the tip, is something I'd better address right now in this first post.
I have no intention of getting it right every time. I begin with no expectation of getting it entirely right a plurality of the time. No guarantee of such is given or offered. I will not allow considerations of the possibility of failure from keeping me from action. On occasion I'll plow straight ahead if conditions seem to warrant it. I, friends, am the thoroughly bad sort and claim as mine, as the sacred possession of every liberal and leftist, the absolute right enjoyed by the rest of humanity to get it wrong. And not only this but I claim as the birthright of leftists to present our side of things to the advantage of our side. I have absolutely no intention to be fair to fascists either, but that's for another day and I hope that Nat Hentoff doesn't die before I get to it.
The Code of Liberal Ethics is a standard operating setting required in every organ of the media. It is applied without consideration, without thought, as a matter of habit. It is a solid state component of the minds of far too many liberals. It is a weapon used exclusively against liberals and leftists and is applied to no other segment of the political spectrum. Everyone, from mushy moderate to rabid fascist is allowed their failings and their biases. But not liberals. Certainly not leftists.
No more. Here, today, I issue our own manumission, my fellow leftists. We have shaken off the chains of perfection, we are free of the lash of faultlessness. We claim our right to consider our own opinions superior and worthy of dominance. Never again will we present the arguments of conservatives as if they merit equal treatment. We will scorn their folly and expose their lies and their entertaining hypocrisies without apology. We will get off our knees and kick every fascist where it counts. In all seriousness, our lives, the lives of our loved ones, the life of the biosphere absolutely depend on it. We must crush out of ourselves and our kind the remains of these mind forged manacles and wipe their residue from every voice and their assumed existence from every ban. Friends, we have nothing to fear. We are free.
If I hadn't been much more innocent and naive, I'd have thrown in a few more things. Needless to say, I've included the pseudo-left as my intended target, I was only vaguely aware of its existence back then. I did learn a few things from otherwise wasted hours at Eschaton.
Here is that one about not being nice to Nazis.
To start with, there are two things about the Code of Liberal Ethics that bother me. One, that we are supposed to be entirely fair to everyone and especially in instances when that would put us at a disadvantage, will be dealt with later. The one I will deal with first is the assumption that liberals must get it right every time, not only right but correct. That liberals and leftists, such as myself, must be purer than pure or relegated to the tip, is something I'd better address right now in this first post.
I have no intention of getting it right every time. I begin with no expectation of getting it entirely right a plurality of the time. No guarantee of such is given or offered. I will not allow considerations of the possibility of failure from keeping me from action. On occasion I'll plow straight ahead if conditions seem to warrant it. I, friends, am the thoroughly bad sort and claim as mine, as the sacred possession of every liberal and leftist, the absolute right enjoyed by the rest of humanity to get it wrong. And not only this but I claim as the birthright of leftists to present our side of things to the advantage of our side. I have absolutely no intention to be fair to fascists either, but that's for another day and I hope that Nat Hentoff doesn't die before I get to it.
The Code of Liberal Ethics is a standard operating setting required in every organ of the media. It is applied without consideration, without thought, as a matter of habit. It is a solid state component of the minds of far too many liberals. It is a weapon used exclusively against liberals and leftists and is applied to no other segment of the political spectrum. Everyone, from mushy moderate to rabid fascist is allowed their failings and their biases. But not liberals. Certainly not leftists.
No more. Here, today, I issue our own manumission, my fellow leftists. We have shaken off the chains of perfection, we are free of the lash of faultlessness. We claim our right to consider our own opinions superior and worthy of dominance. Never again will we present the arguments of conservatives as if they merit equal treatment. We will scorn their folly and expose their lies and their entertaining hypocrisies without apology. We will get off our knees and kick every fascist where it counts. In all seriousness, our lives, the lives of our loved ones, the life of the biosphere absolutely depend on it. We must crush out of ourselves and our kind the remains of these mind forged manacles and wipe their residue from every voice and their assumed existence from every ban. Friends, we have nothing to fear. We are free.
If I hadn't been much more innocent and naive, I'd have thrown in a few more things. Needless to say, I've included the pseudo-left as my intended target, I was only vaguely aware of its existence back then. I did learn a few things from otherwise wasted hours at Eschaton.
Here is that one about not being nice to Nazis.
Footnote To The Morning Post
Since he has said he was guilty, I will not pretend that there ever was any doubt but that Robert Dear murdered three people and injured more when he shot people in and around the Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs. I saw some, but not that much, Christian bashing over his declaration in court that he'd done it "for the babies". That one of those murdered was a woman who, for all he knew, could have been pregnant, it's not especially credible that he was that concerned about embryos or fetuses as much as he was just angry and out of control. But, as hard as it is to do, taking him at his words that was his motive, it was nothing to do with Christianity.
I have pointed out that those using this as an occasion to blame Christians, en masse for this kind of violence are, actually, blaming the victims for their own deaths, very possibly blaming many of the injured for their being shot or harmed in some other way.
The first identified murder victim of Robert Dear, officer Garrett Swasey was not only a Christian but a part-time pastor at his church. Unlike every blog rat I saw using his death as an occasion for Christian bashing, he was responding to a call to stop Dear and to protect people put at risk by his attack.
We now know that the other murder victims were also Christians.
Jennifer Yurie Ah King Markovsky was an adult convert to Orthodox Christianity,
Father Anthony Karbo of the Holy Theophany Orthodox Church told the congregants that Markovsky had been baptized into the church a few years ago and had taken the name Anastasia, which means "resurrection."
Ke'Arre Stewart was, evidently, a Baptist, he was buried from the Carver Park Baptist Church in Waco, Texas.
Since the names of the other victims who didn't die of their wounds haven't been named, it isn't possible to find out if they, too, were responsible for their being attacked by Robert Dear because they, as well, professed a Christianity which they probably followed whereas he didn't.
You wonder why science never gets the blame for its part in producing the weapons a Robert Dear or the Syed Rizwan Farooks and Tashfeen Maliks of the world use to terrorize, injur and murder people. The weapons they used aren't designed and made for anything other than killing people and other living beings.
I have pointed out that those using this as an occasion to blame Christians, en masse for this kind of violence are, actually, blaming the victims for their own deaths, very possibly blaming many of the injured for their being shot or harmed in some other way.
The first identified murder victim of Robert Dear, officer Garrett Swasey was not only a Christian but a part-time pastor at his church. Unlike every blog rat I saw using his death as an occasion for Christian bashing, he was responding to a call to stop Dear and to protect people put at risk by his attack.
We now know that the other murder victims were also Christians.
Jennifer Yurie Ah King Markovsky was an adult convert to Orthodox Christianity,
Father Anthony Karbo of the Holy Theophany Orthodox Church told the congregants that Markovsky had been baptized into the church a few years ago and had taken the name Anastasia, which means "resurrection."
Ke'Arre Stewart was, evidently, a Baptist, he was buried from the Carver Park Baptist Church in Waco, Texas.
Since the names of the other victims who didn't die of their wounds haven't been named, it isn't possible to find out if they, too, were responsible for their being attacked by Robert Dear because they, as well, professed a Christianity which they probably followed whereas he didn't.
You wonder why science never gets the blame for its part in producing the weapons a Robert Dear or the Syed Rizwan Farooks and Tashfeen Maliks of the world use to terrorize, injur and murder people. The weapons they used aren't designed and made for anything other than killing people and other living beings.
A Scot Is Born A Scot A Christian Decides To Be One There Are Untrue Christians
The other day, when I pointed out that the brutality of Christian medieval Europe lacked at least one feature that made the brutal pagan European cultures worse, human sacrifice, I got someone's pinafore in a twist. I pointed out that any brutality done by those nominal Christians would have been in contradiction to the very teachings of the man they revered as divine, no less a figure than the only Son of God. That isn't something you can say about the brutality of paganism, warfare and brutality, human sacrifice were part of pagan religion, just those things which made it so popular with some of the most brutal of the Nazis, Himmler, for example. For those who go all romantic about the Yule, the SS under Himmler were real big on celebrating the "Jule" there was a special ceramic, the Julleuchter, candle holders created as an award for members of the SS who participated in Nazi celebrations of the Yule, the candle symbolic of the "undying sun" which was apparently, to be associated with Nazism as well as the little yellow star we enjoy.
I have seen identical "Yule lights" sold as neo-pagan holiday items and as decorations on pagan websites, some of them also, neo-Nazi webites ("Heathern English" is one, though I will not post a url for a neo-Nazi website.) There is even an apparent pagan revisionist who includes a cross and a star of David along with the SS lightning bolts and other Nazi symbols. I'm not sure of his motives but I doubt they're honest.
It was all part of the promotion of paganism which the Nazi hierarchy were pushing to be an eventual replacement for Christianity, as was, in fact, the pseudo-Christian, "Postitive Christianity" in which everything would be redefined because the original contained such anti-Nazi facts that the man who was held to be the second person in the Godhead was a Jew, all of his earliest named followers were Jews, the morality taught by Jesus was the direct and absolute opposite of what was taught by Nazism, etc. That a number of those pushing paganism were atheists, such as Alfred Rosenberg, who saw it as something the simple people needed as they were turned into atheists and Nazis rather demonstrates my point.
The Nazi substitute for Christianity, "Positive Christianity" is also useful to refute the line used in the hate mail this post is inspired by, "No true Scotsman". There is a problem when applying that pat phrase to what I said in that you can be a true Scotsman by simply being born a Scot, you can be a perfectly good Scot by that simple fact no matter what course of conduct you take. It's a matter of biological heritage. You can't say the same thing about Christianity, which is not biological but is based at its rock bottom foundation on belief in the teachings of Jesus. The extent to which you follow those is the extent to which you are being good at practicing Christianity, of "being a true Christian" if you will. The extent to which you violate and contradict those teachings is the extent to which you are being an untrue Christian. Someone who followed the Nazis' "Positive Christianity" was in no way a true Christian.
That many such have pretended to be successful at being Christians is something which is, as well, a part of the Gospel of Jesus. Over and over again he noted there were and would be people who professed their belief in his teachings only to prove by their actions that they don't. He said there would be false prophets who led people astray. The Gospels show that Jesus wasn't under any illusions as to that, it would also be false to his teachings for anyone professing Christianity to not admit to it and to question, critically those who profess their Christianity especially when their actions are radically in opposition to the moral teachings that define Christianity.
You would never say that someone who insisted on doing their arithmetic wrong was a "true mathematician" you wouldn't say that someone who, despite their having a doctorate in Biology, denied the reality of evolution or the scientific method was being a "true scientist". Like science, Christianity is something that you adopt as a conscious choice, it's not something you're born to. You can't say that even a Scot who betrays Scotland isn't a true Scotsman, their parents determined that at conception. You can easily say someone isn't being a true scientist or Christian because those choices are entirely in their own hands. That phrase in that context should be put away because it is especially ill considered. That it seems to have been the biology teacher, P.Z. Myers who has popularized it among atheists is especially revealing of his lapse in analytical rigor, he's had a number of those.
I have seen identical "Yule lights" sold as neo-pagan holiday items and as decorations on pagan websites, some of them also, neo-Nazi webites ("Heathern English" is one, though I will not post a url for a neo-Nazi website.) There is even an apparent pagan revisionist who includes a cross and a star of David along with the SS lightning bolts and other Nazi symbols. I'm not sure of his motives but I doubt they're honest.
It was all part of the promotion of paganism which the Nazi hierarchy were pushing to be an eventual replacement for Christianity, as was, in fact, the pseudo-Christian, "Postitive Christianity" in which everything would be redefined because the original contained such anti-Nazi facts that the man who was held to be the second person in the Godhead was a Jew, all of his earliest named followers were Jews, the morality taught by Jesus was the direct and absolute opposite of what was taught by Nazism, etc. That a number of those pushing paganism were atheists, such as Alfred Rosenberg, who saw it as something the simple people needed as they were turned into atheists and Nazis rather demonstrates my point.
The Nazi substitute for Christianity, "Positive Christianity" is also useful to refute the line used in the hate mail this post is inspired by, "No true Scotsman". There is a problem when applying that pat phrase to what I said in that you can be a true Scotsman by simply being born a Scot, you can be a perfectly good Scot by that simple fact no matter what course of conduct you take. It's a matter of biological heritage. You can't say the same thing about Christianity, which is not biological but is based at its rock bottom foundation on belief in the teachings of Jesus. The extent to which you follow those is the extent to which you are being good at practicing Christianity, of "being a true Christian" if you will. The extent to which you violate and contradict those teachings is the extent to which you are being an untrue Christian. Someone who followed the Nazis' "Positive Christianity" was in no way a true Christian.
That many such have pretended to be successful at being Christians is something which is, as well, a part of the Gospel of Jesus. Over and over again he noted there were and would be people who professed their belief in his teachings only to prove by their actions that they don't. He said there would be false prophets who led people astray. The Gospels show that Jesus wasn't under any illusions as to that, it would also be false to his teachings for anyone professing Christianity to not admit to it and to question, critically those who profess their Christianity especially when their actions are radically in opposition to the moral teachings that define Christianity.
You would never say that someone who insisted on doing their arithmetic wrong was a "true mathematician" you wouldn't say that someone who, despite their having a doctorate in Biology, denied the reality of evolution or the scientific method was being a "true scientist". Like science, Christianity is something that you adopt as a conscious choice, it's not something you're born to. You can't say that even a Scot who betrays Scotland isn't a true Scotsman, their parents determined that at conception. You can easily say someone isn't being a true scientist or Christian because those choices are entirely in their own hands. That phrase in that context should be put away because it is especially ill considered. That it seems to have been the biology teacher, P.Z. Myers who has popularized it among atheists is especially revealing of his lapse in analytical rigor, he's had a number of those.
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