Stupidly Grasping On To Intelligent Design To Abolish Intelligent Design - Stupid Darwinist Hate Mail

IT IS A FACT that the actual evolution of a new species has never been observed, not in the wild, certainly, and not in a lab under artificial conditions.  Even in the most obvious apologetic and polemical claims about that, such claims have to be couched in special definitions and blatantly conditional statements.  And that's when those who make such statements are trying to be responsible.   Darwin's theory of natural selection carries within it claims that make that evolution in nature impossible to observe but I'll get to that after pointing out a problem with your accusation against me of "intelligent design" with fantastic claims about what "science has done" even as you witlessly grasp onto intelligent design to "prove natural selection" and "disprove intelligent design".

I will start by pointing out about your claim of scientists working in a lab could actually  produce a new species, claiming that that was evidence for the reality of natural selection has the insurmountable obstacle that the new species would not have been produced by nature but by the intelligent design of the scientists. You cannot filter out the design of that experiment from the results that you got from it.

They would not "prove" nature did something without intelligent design, they would have proven that they did it with their intelligent design.  They'd certainly want that to be the conclusion of anyone who read the paper they'd proudly publish with the intelligent review of their most likely "intelligent design" disdaining colleagues. Though that inconvenient fact about the whole operation would probably be discretely not mentioned.

The idea that any scientist or any group of scientists or even the whole world wide body of scientists could experimentally "prove that intelligent design is unnecessary" for whatever aspect of nature they want to claim is demonstrated by the results they got is a logical impossibility.

While a claim that "intelligent design" is proven in nature from that is problematic, intelligent design having produced the result, it's far less problematic than claiming that what is known to be the crucial component in experimental science is not there and not a crucial consideration in what is known about it.  

To reinforce the point, it is possible that, as in human science, intelligent design is present in nature, it is impossible to claim that it is absent from what scientists produce through their designed experiments and from the extension of those into claims of what happens in nature.

As to its presence in evolution, that's almost certainly not a claim that is testable by science, though I have come to the conclusion there is nothing unrespectable about that conclusion as a product of the logical consideration of the complexity of life especially thinking about how complex even the most primitive theorized "first organism" in the line of life on earth would have had to be, the stupendously seeming improbability if it, its survival, probably most of all its entirely unprecedented act of reproduction and the survival of more than one organism in the act so as to increase the number of living organisms on Earth. But that is not a scientific conclusion though many of the conclusions put directly into the professional substance of science by materialists and atheists are not, either, so used are they to getting away with inserting their ideology into science that they don't even notice when they do it.  

It is probably as unwise to try to use human science to introduce intelligent design into science as it is unwise to try to dispel it from nature by the same means and for exactly the same reasons. That the culture of Western science has made that folly repeatedly over the past several centuries in a number of ways is something to marvel at but nothing to pretend is an honest practice.

To my point made in a previous paragraph about the impossibility of observing the rise of a new species, a theoretical lab created "new species" produced in a few months or years could no more be reliable evidence of what would happen over many thousands of years in nature than the production of new varieties of cattle or show dogs by human design - in many cases rather cruel and stupid design - under entirely artificial conditions.* I doubt there will ever be a scientific project, with funding, with a reliable line of conduct and reporting as to last as long as that. The longest lines of human culture, such as Hebrew monotheism, pottery making aren't long enough to match it.

That is, by the way, such an obvious flaw in Darwin's presented "evidence" of natural selection in On the Origin of Species, that no new species were produced by animal husbandry and animal husbandry is not natural but intentional human choice that it is a major scandal that he and his disciples got away and still get away with pretending it "proves" to do what it doesn't do at all. What they were observing was the manipulation of existing lines of genetics WITHIN A SPECIES but they either didn't know or didn't take Mendel seriously so they never corrected themselves even after his paper was published. Not that the geneticist Darwinists of the next generations seemed to care to correct it, either.

Darwin's own theory and the geological evidence of how long it takes for species to arise out of parent species makes it obvious that science can never see it happen except, perhaps, in very rapidly reproducing things like viruses which I doubt could have the same mechanisms of evolution that large multi-cellular species of plants and animals can be said to have. That it could happen rapidly enough for scientists to observe it would make the claim that it happened by the same mechanism that requires many thousands or more years in even single-celled species entirely far fetched.

The reproduction of viruses within the cells of other species is certainly not like the reproduction in entire kingdoms of life with entirely different means of reproduction. To believe the same, single mechanistic theory could explain both of those seems to me to require pretending things that are entirely and obviously unlike are like each other.  I don't think anyone is required to believe that without conclusive evidence which will never be had.

I have the greatest objection to something which is claimed to take many, many times longer than the longest recorded human lifetime, certainly longer than the history of science and the existence of human culture being claimed to be "observable."  Especially if it is claimed that it can be done with the observational rigor and measurement that is required to produce valid science and its reliable knowledge.  The means with which the aftereffects of long ago events in physics can be observed and reliable conjectures about those being made - with observable predictions in many cases - would certainly not work in the study of life because living organisms are far, far more complex and far, far more variable than generalizable aspects of non-living objects. But that's a side-track.

To repeat, the many examples of variations within a species grasped onto by scientists as an example demonstrating Darwin's theory of natural selection or, in fact, any other scheme of the origin of species in nature has the added and rather profoundly stupid problem that such new varieties are not new species but merely variants of existing species.  I think that in many if not virtually all cases that might be true for every single generation within the evolution of new species. New species don't evolve from long ago parent species, they evolve in the many generations of life which don't remain static but change in every generation, no generation of an existing line can be held to be "unfit" for the time and place they lived and reproduced.

The theory of gradual change over time, and even the already old updated version of that in punctuated equilibrium both of which are theorized to produce new species merely support my contention that scientists and, in fact, human beings have never witnessed the evolution of new species in nature, never mind studied even one incident of natural speciation to be able to reliably describe it from the observation and measurement required to identify things so subtle as mechanisms that work themselves out over tens of thousands of years.

Though I think it's quite probable that what we imagine as a "mechanism" to do that may be nothing like a mechanism at all.  To repeat a point just made, the most typical presentation of that as a new species arising and its parent species "going extinct" is likely wrong because what probably happens in many if not most cases is an entire branch of a species changes over many generations, the changes incorporated into that branch of the species every step of the way. No one "trait" defines a new species, even as they might be a stunningly noticeable feature of later fossils as compared to far older ones. Organisms come as a complete package, and in living organisms, especially those that behave, that package is stupendously complex. And evolutionary scientist have a decided tendency to grasp onto one "trait" and ignore the rest of the organisms and their varied lives. If they consider those at all, they make up a cartoonish story about them most often with absolutely no evidence at all.

You might as well say that the ancient ancestors of a continuing family line all go extinct even as their progeny successfully continue into the future.  To claim they lost in a "struggle for life" is only true in the sense that everyone eventually loses that struggle as we all die.  That claim made from fossils of what seem to be closely related species separated by thousands of years makes as little sense. That is assuming the younger fossils are of the same line as those of an the older species which I wonder how you can tell in most cases, so many intervening generations being lost, probably none of the later examples being from direct descents of the far earlier ones they are compared to.  You might be able to make claims in a far more general sense in lines of genetic inheritance among closely or even enormously remotely related species but that doesn't do much of anything to tell you how those changes happened.

As it is usually presented, both in the vulgar understanding and the alleged valid ones,  we are to imagine the unchanged "parent" species existing at the same time as the new species and it losing in what got the rather whimpish hypochondriac, Malthusian Brit aristocrat Darwin all hot, imagined stories of them dying in a violent "struggle for life" when by the time the new species is called a new species, probably most if not all of the descendants of the parent species have changed in one or many branches into other species. Most of the individuals of any generation and many entire generations leaving no fossil evidence of their existence including their reproductive success or failure.

If there were identifiable members of the parent species around at the time the new species had changed, the individuals of that species could certainly not be held to be less fit for the environment they were in, I'd guess they probably interbred with the branch of the "new species" all along as we have discovered some of our "extinct cousin" humanoids have with branches of modern humans.  I don't get how Neanderthals which have living human descendants can be said to have "gone extinct" anymore than the homo sapiens they had children with can be held to have.  If they survived under changed conditions that allegedly caused the rise of the "new species" they must have adapted to such new conditions, their great grand kids may have not looked much like their fossil remains lead us to think they looked but the same is true within modern human families with no neanderthal genes.  

I doubt there is any such thing as natural selection except in the human imagination as much as I doubt there is or ever will be any one sufficient explanation of how and why species changed over time.  There are apparent and well evidenced events that wiped out many species, such as the impact of a large meteorite that is the current best idea of what led to the end of the big dinosaurs and, certainly, many other species but that has nothing to do with Darwinism.  Darwin's imagined Hobbsian (perhaps typically British) mechanism had nothing to do with that. The relationship of that catastrophe and the gradual change of the surviving lines of life are in no way "explained" by the fact of that mass extinction event.  I don't understand why you mentioned it.   

I think there are probably a myriad of causes in how species change and even how they die out rapidly. The rise of a new strain of viruses, especially in gregarious species such as humans have become, is probably much more to do with it in many cases than Darwin's titillating "struggle for existence" the stuff that fuels the imagination of so many pasty, soft-handed male aristocrats and milquetoast academics and, no doubt, motivates their fantasies and which leads more ambitious Darwinists of action they inspire to commit genocide.

I think a lot of what is interpreted from the geological record of old species "dying out" is actually just entire species evolving over time and changing the general appearance of the scanty fossils of organisms within that continuing line of life. I think the old habits of reading the fossil evidence and telling ripping yarns about it has become one of the most obvious unscientific habits of scientists.  One engaged in even by scientists who criticize the telling of "Just-so stories".  

It has occurred to me that the habit of story-telling out of our lived human experience or even our imaginations of the several thousand years of highly biased and selective and self-contradicting articulated human history carries a huge danger when it comes to making up stuff about far longer epochs of time, especially those extending into tens, thousands and billions of years, especially in other, especially quite unrelated species.  Telling stories, making up scenarios from lived human experience or reading recorded human history as if the ill-understood aspects of that can be made to extend throughout hundreds of thousands of years is certainly an unreliable means of understanding what happened on that far longer scale of time.

Almost a century ago A. S. Eddington rather stunningly suggested there may be realms of physical law that entirely escape human comprehension and which we will never understand (and may well never even notice). I think it's possible there are aspects of long stretches of the history of life on Earth that are, as well, beyond our comprehension.  If any of those aspects impinged on speciation, we would never be able to put those into our Just-so stories.  The stories might seem plausible because we judge them on the basis of our experience but that resort to familiar human experience could be, I'd say could probably be what makes them unreliable.  Or at least of questionable reliability without rigorously tested evidence of which very little to none is available in either the fossil or genetic records. There are things which we could never understand even if the evidence was looking us right in the face. If some hegemonic ideology stood between us and that evidence, as it does in evolutionary biology, I'd say we probably wouldn't be able to see it.

I think if we have a future, the hundred and sixty years and more of Darwinist hegemony of science and the imagination of western culture will probably be looked on as more of a quaint or more honestly called disastrous ancient folly than classical cosmology and such things as alchemy are considered today. Though none of those classical and medieval theories come down to us with such a huge mountain of murders motivated by them so fast. Those kinds of things ruled the culture and intellectual class of their times as much as Darwinism has in its period of hegemonic domination.  I think it's long shown signs of being problematic and, really, is just not a very good theory - a theory of science which is not capable of being observed in nature has no more than a fadingly, improbably narrow chance of being the right one - and I think now it is ever less credible as the one and only explanation of what it claims to explain.  

That there is no other universally accepted explanatory theory that has taken its place may well be due to the fact that there is no one way in which species arise and, if any are proposed, they also have the problem of not being observable in nature for the reasons I've mentioned above.

I hold that the ideological hold that natural selection has on science makes the requirements placed on any proposed rival or superseding theory entirely higher than natural selection was ever subjected to.

The domination of Darwinist storytelling, as mentioned, will limit the imaginations of most people, the coercive bullying not to criticize natural selection probably even more so. I don't think there will ever be a real, secure, validly scientifically identified mechanism of speciation in nature because the needed evidence is forever lost in the millennia and epochs of the irretrievable past.  That one or more will never finally tip the bust of Darwin into the embarrassing boneyard of discontinued science, however; is not anything like certain, even at that.

Biologists might not like that because they use natural selection as if it explained things that it can't be demonstrated to explain and things which, other than by claims of "natural selection," they may not be able to present any evidence for at all. They can pretend they understand a lot of things which they really don't. That habit expanded from story-telling of merely seeming plausibility to fill in the enormous voids in the study of evolution through natural selection's imaginary universal explanatory power into a whole host of rank pseudo-sciences, starting with eugenics and modern scientific racism and the allied pseudo-scientific field of psychology. As mentioned, Darwinism has reaped a body-count already numbering in the millions.  It's deeply embedded in the culture and the professional interest of scientists but so were those antique mechanisms of cosmology and chemistry mentioned above.

I have no doubt that all known existing species evolved from earlier species of life, I am certain that the general theory of evolution is true but the longer I look into and think about scientific claims about that other than the most general ones, the dodgier those generally are. I don't think there is any one dodgier than natural selection nor any one which is more stupidly held to be a required article of scientific faith or respectability in the college-credentialed world. And few such follies, other than things like the denial of human-made climate change, are more dangerously maintained.

* Reading through this, I think it's not a surprise that Darwin's use of human breeding to get results human beings wanted from the plants and animals they breed led him to believe that evolution weeded out the "unfit" so the survivors would be "the fittest" even though the resulting varieties of plants and animals human breeding produced very often were quite to entirely unsuited for life in the wild. Making his use of that to make claims about what happened in nature, even more logically inept.   No incident of human breeding can ever be reliably claimed to represent what happens over far longer periods in nature, especially if it is claimed that that natural progression happened without the intelligent intent the human act is saturated with.

The folly of mistaking what was held to be economically more beneficial or merely desired from a human standpoint to be a demonstration of "fitness" in terms of the natural world is not surprising as the theory of natural selection starts with Malthus's absurd notion that the entirely artificial  consequences of intentionally and interestedly invented English and then British law, which is largely centered around the construction and support of a brutal and unjust economic and social caste system and even more brutally gangsterish imperialism, was a model of how "the law of nature" he proposed leaving the British poor to worked.  

That was such a stupid aristocratic idea of nature that not long before Darwin started the production of his theory the British radical William Cobbett correctly noted that if the British poor were left to "the law of nature" as Malthus called for, the poor would quickly strip the rich of what they'd stolen and hoarded from them as nature knows no legal rights to property of the kind Malthus, Darwin and virtually every one of their supporters had as the foundation of their thoughts.

If there is one thing that is obvious in the study of evolution it is the substitution of narrative fiction for actual observation and quantification due to the fact that

a. all but a vanishingly small and almost certainly non-representative sample of evidence of past life is now and forever lost and that evidence tells us little to nothing about the actual lives of the fossilized organisms and their reproductive success or failure,

b. the time scale of the evolution of species is so long that scientific observation of it is impossible in the resolution that would make the identification of the mechanism(s) of evolution nothing but guess work,

c. the actual complexity of organisms, their lives, their reproduction individually and of a species makes any claims as to that absurd,

means that every and all of the stories told by humans about evolution will be intrinsically wrapped up in such cultural and ideological and habitual artifacts of human imagination. There is every reason to believe those stories tell us a lot more about the minds of the tellers of such tales than they do about nature. Other than some very general conclusions based on fossil records and the inheritance of genes, virtually all of the lore of evolutionary science is of unknowable reliability but each item of that lore is of very highly improbable reliability. The shelf-life of claims about evolution as compared to those of experimentally verified physics and chemistry is not impressive.  The more elaborate and so attractive the claim is, the quicker it rots. That is especially true of the violent and self-interested theory of natural selection, I doubt much of any of its true believers believes themselves to be an example of a degenerate biological type worthy of weeding out of the future such as they readily consider those they don't like to be.

I think biologists should spend the time they waste on telling Just-so stories that are frequently pretty dangerous on studying aspects of biology that can actually be seen and measured. Those are dauntingly complex enough to be getting on with and may well be extremely important, little to nothing said about evolution matters in the same way. That is assuming the Just-so story tellers had the chops to do important science of that kind. A number of the most famous ones, I doubt could.  They should leave telling lies about cavemen to pop-novelists and trashy made-for-TV pseudo-scientific with nauseating-background-music, nauseating video-game-zoomily edited "documentaries."  They shouldn't appear on those.  Appearing often on TV is a contra-indication of good scholarship or science.  TV is intellectually dysgenic.

I hate TV. It makes people stupider.

Note: Still having consequences of Covid, still feel like crap, I'm feeling ranty.

Only Words - The Needed Fights We Can't Afford Not To Have

CHRISTIANITY NEEDS to have a real knock-down,drag out fight with the Republican-fascist Mammonists who the mass media refer to, I'd guess well over three quarters of the time, as if they represent Christianity. The media goes along with those fascists claiming the mantle of "Christianity" for themselves even more often,  never seeming to have on people to refute their self-anointing.

They are not Christians. By their fruits you will know them, their fruits are not Christianity - there is absolutely nothing ambiguous about that. An abundance of what has been called "Christian" in the history of Christianity is obviously opposed to the Gospel of Jesus.  

I think to a large extent anti-Christian and anti-religious people in the media are happy to have the fascists and neo-Nazis, the Republican-fascists, the gaudy TV style preachers, the cargo-cult prosperity "gospel" circus be what is "Christianity" for the media addled masses.  They are happy because they want Christianity to be discredited and diminished in numbers by it becoming unfashionable. Fashion is the primary god of so many of us under materialism, especially of the college-credentialed class which stupidly provides us with most of those who comprise "the media".  That is what they want even risking the already obvious dangers that giving the Mammonists the upper hand and corrupting our society and our politics as they have successfully done.

To a large extent, even those in the media who don't have strong feelings hostile to Christianity or religion in general have adopted the practice, probably in most cases as unthinkingly as some has-been Hollywood actor turned talk-show-host recites the expected lines they know they're supposed to. The practice of thinking most of what's said in the media has all the intellectual substance and sincerity of an ad is probably the beginning of wisdom about it. I think most of "the press" and media are that unthinkingly automatic in promoting attitudes not even ideas.  As I believe I've mentioned recently, I think that kind of casual desire to be part of the in-crowd for professional benefit is behind much if not most of the academic anti-Christianity that is more than typical of that milieu.  And the media doesn't even have the degraded professional requirements of our pathetic excuse for academics, these days.

On the second of December RMJ reminded us of the four martyrs murdered by the US trained and supported fascist military in El Salvador, Ita Ford, Maura Clark, Jean Donovan and Dorothy Kazel, four voluntary servants of the poorest people in Central America, four martyrs who were murdered by a military at war with the poor.  Martyrs who were subsequently slandered under oath by Al Haig and Jean Kirkpatrick, on behalf of the Reagan administration. The Reagan administration conducted a vicious terrorist campaign in a number of countries, against the law of the United States. I will point out that Reagan, certainly one of the most active terrorist leaders of his time, is automatically lauded by the American free-press whose freedom has seldom led to widespread telling of inconvenient truth. Even the liberals mouth those empty pieties regarding one of our worst presidents.

I have to wonder just why it is that those who might believe in the Gospel of Jesus are so shy about defending it against the false prophets warned about in it.  It could be the habits of mistaking the essential administrative secularism in government for some idiotically assumed requirement that restricts us from defending Christianity from pseudo-christians, hallelujah peddlers, white supremacists, etc. An inhibition I'll note none of those white supremacy sepulchers feel restricted by at all. Or it could be that a watered-down notion of Christianity is superseded by the old rule of etiquette that you don't talk about politics or religion among those who put superficial niceness, the best to go along to get along, over all else. I seem to recall Miss Manners once yearning to hear such fights at a dinner party, so false is that namby-pamby niceness rule. If there is one thing that niceness liberalism of that kind proves to be, it is totally impotent when it comes to fighting against fascists (white supremacy being our indigenous form of that), neo-Nazis, Republican-fascists, etc.  Such "christianity" is certainly useless to the effort expressed in "thy Kingdom come, they will be done," such as, no doubt, many of them might occasionally pray for.  The idea that such a thing might come to humans without human agency in doing the will of God is absurd.  It is certainly useless to the least among us such as those who the four martyred church women gave thier lives for.  

Jesus told the truth and it got him killed in the sadistically brutal Roman Imperial way, so with so many of those who followed him. Reagan's agents in Central America practiced the same kind of terror murder.  Jesus said he came not to bring peace but strife that would divide people.  He used the most violent of metaphors to tell his followers that it wasn't all going to be church socials, prayer breakfasts and faculty luncheons, that they were going to get killed for spreading the Gospel. I will note that the earliest martyr generations of Christianity were pacifists, they weren't reticent or especially nice when it came to asserting the Gospel.  The willingness to at the very least be shunned and looked askance at, being considered uncouth or not invited to go on a chat show for saying the unfashionable is the very least that should be expected from someone who really believes in the Gospel of Jesus, the Epistles, the testimony of the martyrs, etc.   I think calling anyone who isn't willing to do that a Christian is probably false labeling.  Though maybe like the words "socialism," "democracy," and "republic" the word "Christian" has come to mean nothing, so distorted in use has it become. From the mouths of M.T. Greene, Nick Fuentes, Kanye, Donald Trump, etc. the word means not only less than nothing, it means Mammon worship of the worst kind.

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"Right's" Too

I think along with the brawl advocated above, we need a real knock-down, drag-out over just why, against all experience, we are to revere the "right" of "freedom of the press" when they use that freedom to peddle so many lies on behalf of billionaires, millionaires and other evil guys who hate equality and democracy.

Jefferson's idiotic 1780s slogan about preferring newspapers to governments - you wonder why Jefferson spent his life in government instead of starting a newspaper if he really believed that - is certainly a lesson in the folly of that kind of idolatry of the free press.   With that idolatry you get things like the Reagans and George W. Bush's they peddle as idols and with them terrorist campaigns in Central America and the illegal invasion of Iraq, the consequences of which we are still paying for.  

Not so publicized in the media is the more mature quote from Jefferson in 1807 when his experience of "the free press" led him to say, " "nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle."  Which demonstrates the stupidity of his earlier, unconditioned proclamation.

Since there is no requirement to serve the truth to be considered and to peddle yourself as a journalist, a requirement that the alleged profession of journalism would be universally hostile to because "the First Amendment", it is the height of absurdity to hold journalism as if it lived by that professional requirement.   As things are, they are more likely to profit from lying.  The Warren Court stupidly, no doubt thinking of the slogan of Jefferson just slammed by me, made that situation far, far worse by allowing journalists to lie about, as it turned out, Democratic politicians. For which journalists ever since have praised that emancipation from the requirement to serve the truth a carte blanche to tell some of the most consequential of lies.  

If journalism doesn't choose the side of telling the truth, it has to be required to serve the truth. As it demonstrates, it has to be required to serve its only legitimate function. They should have the privileges stupidly denominated as "rights" in the First Amendment taken from them except to be used to tell the truth. As I've said before, only natural born creatures have rights endowed by their Creator, human invented entities don't have rights.  But such man-made things might be granted what are honestly called "privileges"  but doing so without requirements is too stupid for any responsible democracy to do.  There is no right of the press, there is a privilege and if the First Congress that wrote the Bill of Rights really was stupid enough to give the press a privilege to lie - as people today are stupid enough to believe - they were even more callow amateurs than I suspect they were. Remarkably, the subsequent congresses and courts, till the Warren Court, didn't see fit to knock down libel and slander laws.

Now that, under "free press" that has come to include the total degeneracy of "social media" - Twitter's popularity among journalists is certainly indicative of that profession's degenerate state - things have gone to hell in ways that the epically myopic Supremes in 1964 could not have imagined. Even more so now that a whimsical and stupid white South African-libertarian-fascist billionaire owns it. I haven't noticed the automatic exodus of professional journalists from it.  I would like to see Elon being deported, by the way.  He is a clear and present danger to American democracy.

Even among natural born humans, there is no such a thing as a right to do what's wrong.  There is no such a thing as a right to lie, especially the most consequential and damaging of lies that fill the most free media in the history of the world such as in the United States. There's a good reason the beneficiaries of lies, Republican-fascists,neo-Nazis,fascists, our indigenous fascists of white supremacy have taken up the mantle of the ACLU which represented so many of them in court.

The Warren Court, encouraged by the ACLU and the media paid lawyers pretended to think the First Congress were that stupid, though the subsequent Rehnquist and Roberts Courts who have taken full advantage of that opportunity given to them to lie fascists into power in perpetuity and to destroy democracy only cited the Warren Court. Anyone who thinks the Republican-fascists, the owners of large media care about the consequences of this for equality and democracy is an idiot.  They couldn't care less about good government or equality or democracy, they are all about the amassing of power by the rich and privileged, it was exactly that which the Warren Court stupidly enabled in their "free speech-press" rulings.  That is proven by the subsequent history of the country under their rulings, real life is the proof of that, the fruits by which you will know the actual nature of things, the actual truth of the matter outting itself.  If the Warren Courts theory of "free speech-press" was valid in an egalitarian democracy the consequences would be greater equality, greater democracy instead of Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, Bush II and Trump, perhaps DeSantis next.  There should have been no prospect of any of them gaining power if the ACLU's theories of "free speech-press" were right.  That has lead to the steady worsening of things, not things getting better.

Republican Fascist Hate Has And Wields Enormous Power When Will Unassociated White People Be Required To Disavow And Condemn It?

WHILE LIGHTING MY STOVE this morning, I came across an almost five year old Boston Globe op-ed by Renee Graham,  Why We Can't Afford Farrakhan, a criticism of a Woman's March activist who had praised the then 84 year old fountain of hate for LGBTQ People, the putrid old cesspool of antisemitism, etc.  I have no problem with criticizing someone who does that, it's the kind of game as has knee-capped the real struggle for justice over and over again but let's make the rule apply when the voices of hate have actual instead of insignificant effect.

It brought back to me the time a couple of decades ago when there was a media ritual whenever a Black Person being interviewed on the radio I listened to or on TV (which I still watched a bit) who would be required to ritually disavow and criticize Louis Farrakhan on the basis of his antisemitism, no matter how unassociated with him they seemed to be. It went from being a little bit silly to being extremely offensive.  I remember considering that the context of white racists who the media could have demanded unassociated white interviewees disassociate themselves from but, of course, that wasn't the common practice.  In preparation of this,  the fascist American media is still playing that game against Democratic politicians who have literally nothing in common with him except skin color and whose careers champion what he hates.

Farrakhan is, thankfully, being taken care of with time and senescence.  I was left wondering if he's still alive, like, from time to time, I used to wonder if Lyndon Larouche was.  But, as the recent loused-supper at Mar-a-Lago proves, new figures of hate have sunk to that same bottom he fed and flourished in. I'm not, of course, in favor of the same degradation ritual being reenacted with Kanye taking his place.  Which he seems to be. But I do have to ask the same question during the "denounce Farrakhan" fad of the 90's if the media will ever feel as virtuous about the far more relevant and justifiable requirement that those who were and are actually associated with Republican-fascism to disavow figures as extreme to far more extreme, those who have had and still do have actual power and violent followers to put their hate, antisemetic, anti-LGBTQ, racist, misogynistic hate into deadly action.

The Nation of Islam is and always was a tin-pot criminal gang compared to the Republican-fascist Party which is, today, the political party of America's native fascism, white supremacy, the very thing that, among other things, led to the congealing of The Nation of Islam and its development as a hate group. Its presence on the Supreme Court is a far more serious danger than Louis Farrakhan with actual power that does disenfranchise, oppress and get us killed RIGHT NOW. And that's only one of the organs of government and actual power where Republican-fascists control things.  You can say that about many police departments who have a license to kill, and we all know who is quite likely to get killed by them.

Without America's native form of fascism it's almost certain that The Nation of Islam would never have existed and LF would likely have been an obscure member of a violin section who taught applied lessons and made the lives of his students miserable. Or, maybe, he would have been a happier person and not gone full little Hitler,  mad with the power his hate got him.

I'm not going to hold my breath to see if I listen to NPR or PBS or some network talk show for every current member of the Republican-fascist Party to be required to disavow the scores and hundreds of Republican-fascists with actual power and influence of the kind that Farrakhan, for all his putrescence, never had. It's different when you're a white supremacist.

I have no hesitancy in calling The Nation of Islam a hate group and a criminal gang, being one of its targeted People.  No more than I do the Republican-fascists and white supremacists.  There might have been a time when I would not have felt as comfortable holding the entire groups responsible for the character of their leadership, but hate groups seem to become ever more like themselves, ever less diverse, ever more honestly characterized. I have no problem or hesitancy in calling both for the hate groups they are.   Anyone who doesn't want to be associated with that has had ample time to quit the things. 

Really. "Angels Dancing On The Head Of A Pin" - Ignorant Hate Mail

I HAVE REPEATED THAT the mid-1990s book "The Historical Jesus" of John Dominic Crossan had the effect of sparking my interest in and taking seriously the Gospels and, from there, the writings of the rest of the Second Testament. And, inevitably from that, the Jewish Bible.  But I've also mentioned that I have become very skeptical about the "historical Jesus" business since then. I freely admit that along the way I have adopted some of that skepticism from such eminent scholars as Walter Brueggemann, Luke Timothy Johnson and Marilynne Robinson.

Recently reading about the theories, modern and quite old, about the various hands that went into the creation of the First Testament, I have found myself far more skeptical about similar claims made about the early Christian texts which have a far shorter history before they became the canon of orthodox Christian Scripture. I think a lot of New Testament Scholars envy the complex richness of First Testament scholarship and they want those kinds of publication generating opportunities for themselves. I have gone from taking the claims of the various, often disagreeing modern pruners and adders to and ideologically interpreting scholars about the Christian scriptures as being no more reliable than those who produced the canonical books of the Second Testament. And, in some ways, for me, quite less so, so removed from the milieu in which Jesus and his earliest followers lived.

As an aside, I have come to ask why the "historical Jesus" industry is allowed to have it both ways, discrediting the canonical Gospels because they were written a few decades after Jesus lived because they were written too late to be credible while allowing the far later ones, even some of them making clearly inauthentic and incredible claims and even some pretty wacky "sayings," more current cred.  Such as the devalued thing that current cred is.  They should get their industrial standards straightened out, like right now.

I think the reason Luke and the others wrote what they did (and with some details, we have a pretty reliable text of what they did) is because they knew people who knew Jesus or who learned from those who did and those things are what they told them. It's not out of the question that some of them may have known or witnessed his named followers or been eye witness to some of it. And they believed they were saying what was said about him was accurate. That is while it's clear none of them believed they were producing a biography, accurate in every detail chronology or even a comprehensive account of what was taught and what happened. I think the author of Mark probably didn't have time or paper or the educational background nearly as much as the author of Luke-Acts did.  

And I think when they said Jesus was talking about life and death, in a time and place when early and often violent death was so common, that's what they were talking about. I think people were probably, day to day, even more anxious about our fate at death than modern people are till they face death full on. When Jesus had Lazarus and the rich man existing in present time versions of what Christianity interpreted as heaven and hell, I think that's what they think he meant.  And I think the obscure passages of Jesus prophesying were presented in quite confusing terms because that's the nature of prophesy, as done by Jesus as it was the seers of Isaiah and Jeremiah. Just what he was referring to is open to interpretation.

As to the use of metaphor by Jesus, given his life and violent death, the testimony about the Resurrection, life and death, the two richest sources of metaphorical potential, it wouldn't be anything but expected that he and his followers would use those terms metaphorically to deal with the pre-decease vicissitudes of human experience and to describe things we cannot experience.  The very act of using terms metaphorically requires there to be common aspects of what is used metaphorically and what those are used to describe.  But sometimes life and death and claims about life after death aren't metaphors but facts and claims about those. If that were not the case the metaphor would be powerless to describe anything.   And, unless you see the risen Jesus, unless you see what was described, when it comes to Resurrection, human beings are stuck with relying on the metaphors. And even if you saw Jesus risen from death, if you wanted to talk about it, that's how you'd probably do it.

Try reading some modern theoretical physics and tell me which is more sensible in human terms.  Oh, you'll need more math than you probably have. Otherwise, like other than a few thousand people in the world, including me, you have to take that on faith. Though, like me, you aren't required to believe it. Which of the conflicting multiverse legends of physics are you to choose?

------------------------

I can say that the commentary of The Jewish Study Bible published by The Jewish Publications Society and, right now, the collection of Essays in the back of the book will probably influence me much more than Crossan or the better of his colleagues will.  And the more I look at the scholarship and careers of some of them, I don't hold them to be reliable. In a few cases, even some who got faculty positions at some of the more elite universities out of the fame they got from the "historical Jesus" fad, I don't find them credible.  

Among the things I've gotten from  reading the JSB has been its account of not only commentary after the present texts of Scripture have been determined but the way that all through the production of the texts the insertion and incorporation of commentary on the earliest kernels of the various books has been going on and what we have is a rich and varied and often conflicting compound based in the interpretations of large numbers of unknown rabbis, editors, theologians, priests, etc. based on their understandings, their preferences and, in the way of every human language document ever produced, influenced by often very different experiences and points of view and, so, commentary on scripture is an extremely hard thing  to do but you can't read it without doing that. So it's not any great surprise it's often done badly.  For example,

Finally, some later comments on biblical passages occur within those passages themselves, at least in the text of the Bible has been in use for the past two millennia. Like modern readers, ancient readers penned explanations or reactions to the text they were reading in margins or between the lines. Some of these marginal comments were subsequently inserted into the text itself by scribes who copied the scroll containing the marginal comment. (It is also possible that some of these comments were inserted to begin with by scribes who made them as they were copying a scroll.) For example, 1 Kings 15.5 originally limited itself to a comment praising King David, and one important manuscript of the ancient Greek translation of Kings preserves that original text. A later scribe found the fulsome praise of David inconsistent with the story in 2 Sam. ch 11. That story is exceedingly critical of David for committing adultery with the wife of Uriah the Hittite (one of his own soldiers) and for having Uriah murdered to insure that the adultery was not discovered. Therefore, the scribe added a qualification in 1 Kings 15.5: "except in the matter of Uriah the Hittite."  These words became part of the Masoretic Text, which thus contains both the original author's evaluation of David and a later reader's reaction to that evaluation.  

And, more consequentially, I'd think, that's true of even the most central parts of Scripture, even THE CENTRAL text, Exodus.

Similarly, Exod. 22.24 originally read,  "If you lend money to My "am," do  not act toward them as a creditor; extract no interest from them."  Now,  the Hebrew word "am" usually means "people,"  but it can also mean "the poor" or "common folk, peasantry" (see Isa. 3.15; Ps.72.2; Neh. 5.1).  To make clear that in this case the second of these meanings was to be understood, a later scribe added the words "to the poor among you" immediately after "'am."  Since the meaning of "am" as "people" was more common, the scribe worried that without clarification the verse would be misread.

When I think of how I could be spending my dwindling days instead, teasing out the so abstract as to have no meaning games of modern philosophers, the thinking of "ethicists" whose primary professional activity is writing up lists of who it's Ok to let die of neglect or to actively murder, following the absolute trash of commercial "culture," cinematic "art,"(I was recently subjected to a Hallmark Christmas crap movie) I'd rather be doing this. Modernism turns out to be the ideological focusing on the equivalent of counting angels dancing on the head of a pin, materialist-atheist-scientism requires the demotion and inconsequence of human minds and modern kulcha follows suit, from the basest to the ritziest.

And as to "angels dancing on" which, contrary to the college-credentialed common received wisdom of my and he immediately preceding generations Aquinas doesn't seem to have proposed doing, it was an anti-Catholic early modern era Brit who seems to have made that polemical myth up. I wish I had a ten for every in-the-know university teacher,student or hanger on I heard make an in-the-know disdainful reference to that.  If I had one for every time I got a comment as ignorant as yours, I might not be able to buy a crappy social media company but I could buy a better computer.

Unlike modern philosophy in its most esteemed form, I'll take anything that ends up with it being even slightly more likely the poor will receive the material support they need, enough so that it will contribute to their having a decent life, even if that is some "historical Jesus" text. I'll leave it to the atheist theoretical physicists to argue how many universes are generated when I hit the wrong key or my damned space bar sticks.  I'll certainly take the moral conclusions of Crossan over the death lists of modern "ethics."  

Magnificat J. Michael Thompson

 

 

 

The Schola Cantorum of St. Peter the Apostle, 

 J Michael Thompson Director

 

The setting uses the Orthodox style of interspersing a devotional text between the verses.   

 

Excellent chorus.  

Magnificat in a Minor - Harold Darke

 

Hereford Cathedral Choir 

Roy Massey director

 

On The First Monday of Advent

This book proposes that one fruitful approach to the theology of Mary, historically the mother of Jesus, called in faith the Theotokos or God-bearer, is to envision her as a concrete woman of our history who walked with the Spirit."
Elizabeth A. Johnson from Truly Our Sister

IN AN E-MAIL INTERVIEW of the theologian Elizabeth A. Johnson by Clint A. Schenekloth, a Lutheran pastor, the Magnificat came up. But there's a lot more to come before then.

Clint:  If I am reading you correctly, it is not necessary to understand the virgin birth as parthenogenesis in order to confess the virgin birth of faith.  Rather virginity has to do with the independence for the woman, and is related to Mary's free assent to the work of the Spirit in making her the Theotokos.  Is that correct?

I will break in to note one thing, the common resort to parthenogenesis to describe the conception of Jesus makes a big mistake because parthenogeneis always results in an offspring who is the same gender as the mother in species which have the XY chromosomal form of reproduction.  I believe it has never been observed to.  Whatever the story of the conception of Jesus in Luke and Matthew is, it is not nearly a conventional description of the biological phenomenon of parthenogenesis.    

Elizabeth:  I'm not sure you hit the nail on the head with this one, though what you say does reflect some of the aspects of what I think.  Basically, the virginal conception (which is different from the virgin birth) is a christological truth, not a doctrine about Mary.  In Scripture, as I try to show on pp.  251-254, the Spirit's overshadowing Mary signals that God is doing a new thing here.  God is taking the initiative.  As in Gen. 1 when the Spirit moves over the chaotic waters and in Exodus with the cloud and pillar of fire leading the people and in the transfiguration scene in the gospels, the words used by Luke point to the creative presence and action of God doing a new thing in the world.  The conception of Jesus told in this language means that who Christ is cannot be traced to the efforts of human beings alone.  His origin is in God.  He comes to us as a gift of God, at the Creator Spirit's own initiative.  It's kind of like sola gratia in a different setting.

As you note, women today also read the scene as a marvelous story of how God and a woman can bring about the Messiah, without the help of men, which symbolized both women's spiritual empowerment and also a critique of patriarchal power.  This is a great gain toward understanding the propoer relationships among human beings.

But the heart of the text is theological, saying a truth about Christ.

And here I'll break in to note that what she says about there being no men involved in the birth of Jesus mirrors a point that Sojourner Truth made at a suffrage meeting when they were being harassed by men,

Then that little man in black there, he says women can’t have as much rights as men, ‘cause Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.

If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it. The men better let them.

Clint:  I'd like to hit the nail on the head with this one,  so we'll try a second time (and point taken, the virginial conception is a different issue than the virgin birth).  I'm not quite sure, given the context of its usage, what Carsten Colpe means when he insists that the Holy Spirit overshadowing Mary is "the opposite of human creation" (253). I understand that it is different, by why opposite?  To ask it another way, you emphasize that God is not a sexual partner but a creative power in the beginning of Jesus, but why is God's being a creative power set in opposition to the procreative understanding traditionally ascribed to the Holy Spirit in the virginal conception?  Of we could point out that might be obvious - God is present and "creative" in may situations, and God's Spirit is with us, empowering and protecting in many situations as well.  But humans, at least a vast majority of the time, only experience the procreativeness of God through childbearing when there is sexual intercourse involved (or the technologized versions of the same).  So what about Mary?

Elizabeth:  Regarding the creative action of God and procreation:  As I point out on pp. 227-233, thinkers from the second century on have put forth at least four interpretations namely that the child was conceived by Mary and Joseph having sexual relations, or that an unknown man seduced her, or that she was raped by the Roman soldier Panthera, or that this was a biological miracle.  This last became the teaching of the church.  Even here, however, no mechanism is ever described.  Given that the Holy Spirit is the creative agent and given that there is a tradition of considering the Spirit in feminine imagery,  it is too naive to posit the Spirit as the male sexual partner of Mary.

My fundamental position about the historical root of the virginal conception agrees with the biblical scholar Joseph Fitzmyer:  "What really happened?  We'll never know." Since the popular imagination has slipped into the idea that God acted as the male sexual partner in this conception, I spend a lot of energy deconstructing this notion.  
 

This does not mean that God could not have done so.  There is no opposition between the creative action of God and procreation, in priciple.  My point is, though, that such is not the theological heart of the Christian belief: "Conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary."

I have said that I have no great emotional attachment to the story of The Virgin Birth of Jesus but I have also said that there is no way that we can ever know if the angel Gabriel came and told her that she was going to have a baby by the action of the Holy Ghost even though she was a virgin.  Before I became too wrapped up with the anti-religious babble of Richard Dawkins - I'd been an opponent of his evo-psy since the late 1970s - I answered his claim that the question of the Virgin Birth could be solved with science by pointing out he made essentially the same mistake he did, over and over again, in his claims about evo-psy, that the absolutely necessary evidence to study the question scientifically was not and almost certainly never would be available, the resolvable and identifiable biological remains of Jesus, Mary and whoever his natural father might have been.  If he had a super-natural father, that crucial piece of evidence would never be had so the great champion of science did nothing but prove, again, that he really had very little conception of what the requirements to do science are.  Since then I found out that he seldom bothered to make observations, preferring to do his "science" from his writing table instead of in the field.  Yet he was probably one of the most influential writers on biology for the past forty five or so years.

I have to say I do like the story, especially as someone like Elizabeth Johnson goes over and thinks over it.  I love the Magnificat, probably the best Canticle in the Bible, certainly one which has generated perhaps more really good music than any of the others.  I believe what it says because I choose to believe in its radical, leveling view of reality in terms of equal justice, the kid of justice that secularism and human governments don't bring.   As I've pointed out, that's directly in opposition to the natural selection which is Dawkins' creator god substitute.

CLINT: Proclamation and preaching are important and integral loci of the Lutheran tradition. When I read your book [Truly Our Sister:  A theology of Mary in the Communion of Saints] and then note the placement of the Magnificat the beginning of Luke, it is my sense that Mary is one of the first preachers in the gospels, and certainly the first female preacher. Can you say more about what this means for the ecclesiology of the church as it relates to gender?

ELIZABETH A Johnson: The implications of the Magnificat for women in the church are many (271–274) [referring to the pages in her book, it's an e-mail interview]. Fundamentally, these words signal that the lowly will be lifted up.

In so far as women have not functioned or been treated equally in the churches, either in theory or practice, they count among the lowly (though thankfully that is beginning to change). The Magnificat urges even greater efforts in this regard, in light of God’s design revealed in this song.

CLINT: From an interpretive/theological perspective, is there a difference between preaching (say the preaching that goes on in Acts, for example) and prophetic singing (the songs sung by Hannah, Mary, etc.)? How does this relate to the ordination practices of our churches?

ELIZABETH: Obviously, there are differences among the churches here. I also draw attention to the feminist critique I made of Luke-Acts on pp. 213–216 and 301–302, in view of which Luke is not a reliable historical guide to what women did and how they preached in the early decades of the church. Luke had a different agenda. But women did preach in an apostolic way, even though he did not see fit to record this. So in truth, I do not see any direct connection to the ordination practices of the churches.

CLINT: My question here has more to do with the fact that Mary speaks/sings the Magnificat than it does with the actual content of what she speaks forth (as important as that content is). If we look at the text from a rhetorical perspective, it is a song and sermon placed very early in the Gospel of Luke, and placed on the lips of Mary. If we take Luther’s observation to heart, that “she sang it not for herself alone but for all of us, to sing it after her,” should we not say, and encourage the church to practice, the continued singing of this song not by a solo female voice with male priestly accompaniment, but rather with the full voice of the choir summoned forth by God to preach the gospel?

ELIZABETH: I agree—the Magnificat is a song for the whole church to sing.

I will speak up for Luke who was certainly not close to a feminist but who, for example, showed the Women of Jerusalem as faithfully and sorrowfully accompanying Jesus as he was going to his death instead of running away like the men did.  And he did give Mary more lines, not to mention Elizabeth, than in the other Gospels.  I think her critique is probably more relevant to Acts, which the author of Luke probably wrote as well.

I have always had a bit of unease with the idea of the trinity though I've read quite a lot about that theological idea and am more comfortable with it now than I used to be.  Part of what makes me more comfortable with it is exactly what Elizabeth Johnson says about the virginal conception of Jesus, "We'll never know."  I like the idea that God acts decisively in the midst of our physical reality, our lives in such a radical way as to be incarnated in the person of a human being, Jesus, who is also more than merely human as he is fully human.  I especially like the idea that with him all of physical reality is transformed - or, perhaps, that with his life and resurrection human beings can conceive of that transformation - and that we are all on our way to be more than merely physical beings in a physical world, while being that, as well.  I especially like the idea that these things surpass our ability to understand them.  I think that's in no small part because the human act of understanding is tied up so intimately with our experience of material existence and human thinking about mathematical objects so it would be absurd to think we could use understanding to become fully familiar with something partially, perhaps mostly outside of both our experience of physical reality or the manipulation of numbers and abstract lines and planes and points on those. These questions are a bit more complex than the axioms of math or our observations of the movements and combinations of objects.

As to who actually sings The Song of Mary, you have to take into account the practice of only allowing males, men and boys, to sing it in church for so many centuries.  While it is certainly a song that has meaning for everyone, I'd like there to be a whole slew of good to great settings for Women's voices, Women and girls as well as those which would have been composed with the idea that it was men or men and boys or, as in one of my favorite English settings by George Dyson, for boys, mostly younger than Mary would have been.  And I'd like a lot of those settings to be composed by Women as well as men.

I'm going to be dipping into some of the text of the series I did a number of years back where I posted one or more musical settings of the Magnificat during let almost every day of Advent.  I still am offline at home so it might be hit or miss and I will be concentrating most but not exclusively on living vernacular translations of it - I WILL NOT BE POSTING THE APPALLING ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF BACH'S SETTING OF THE LATIN TEXT BECAUSE IT IS A MUSICAL AND TEXTUAL ABOMINATION.  I will probably not post some of the pop style versions.  While those might mean something to some people, the show-biz style and format is something I can't imagine will lead anyone to the meaning of those.  I don't think they have the musical integrity of the songs of some of the more sincere blues or country musicians.  I wonder what someone like Dolly Parton might have done for a setting of it.  I'll bet it would be worth hearing.  Having had that thought, I can think of a whole list of Women I'll bet could do a good job of that.

More On The Tales of Genesis That Atheists Love To Embarrass Literalists With But Not Me - Hate Mail

THE JEWISH STUDY BIBLE says this about the similarities found in Genesis with some articles of Mesopotamian literature that so many like to claim the Jews stole from those poor, put upon pagans who repeatedly overran Israel and Judea.

Largely because of its focus on creation, the primeval history exhibits a number of contacts with Mesopotamian mythology.  The account of creation with which Genesis opens (1.1-2.3), for example, has affinities with Enuma elish, a Babylonian epic, which tells how one god, Marduk, attained supremacy over the others and created the world by splitting his aquatic enemy in half.  The story of Adam and Eve's sin in the garden of Eden (2.25-3.24) displays similarities with Gilgamesh, an epic poem that tells how its hero lost the opportunity for immortality and came to terms with his humanity.  And the story of Noah (6.5-9.17) Has close connections with Atrahasis, a Mesopotamian story in which the gods send a flood to wipe out the human race with the exception of one man from whom mankind begins afresh (the story was eventually incorporated into Gilgamesh as well).  In each case, the biblical narrator has adapted the Mesopotamian forerunner to Israelite theology.  The primeval history thus evidences both the deep continuities and the striking points of discontinuity of biblical Israel with its Mesopotamian antecedents and contemporaries.

I have no problem accepting this because I would have no problem with them using local folklore to make theological points or to assert the Hebrew ideas of morality.  Vatican II had what I think is a very honest teaching that the Scriptures contain what is needed for salvation, they are not history books or science books or even accurate in terms of those intellectual categories.   I can accept it on those terms and might be prepared to believe those were borrowings if we had a solid basis to make that assumption on, so far as I can see, we don't have that.

I do wonder why it never seems to occur to people that as with the variant texts of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, the Masoretic text, those of the Samaritans, etc. it is impossible to know what version is "original," assuming we have "the original," when they set the text of Genesis against the recovered texts of these related stories.  

The physical objects, encoded in clay might be older than the surviving fragments of the Hebrew Bible but that, in itself, doesn't guarantee that the non-Hebrew texts have a prior, independent existence from what we have now.  It never seems to be asked if the earlier versions of what appears in the Hebrew Bible may not have been copied by the source we have Gilgamesh, etc, from.  I think that the "older" versions of the story might seem to us older because the clay tablets used to write them down were more durable than either oral transmission or a language commonly written on far less durable paper or parchment.  I wonder if the reason there is so much cuneiform around is because it was a lot cheaper than paper or parchment would have been, its material substrate is literally as common as dirt and, given a pure enough source, is far easier to produce. And it never seems to be asked what the Gilgamesh, etc. came from, how the telling of it might have differed from an "original" form, altered to fit the local culture, heavily influenced by their theology and, almost certainly, their politics.  I wonder how much textual criticism of those has been done.

Or it is possible that the different versions grew from an earlier oral tradition that both of them knew and adapted but which we don't know.  The fact is, we simply don't know and likely never will know.  We know which tradition persisted, even with that less durable, more easily lost medium of its preservation which forces a reliance on the human choice to take it seriously enough to preserve it.  And that is the tradition that had such a radical, egalitarian content, a moral foundation of universal justice to it to make it worth preserving even in the more ephemeral, difficult to produce medium of writing on paper or parchment.

The fact is, like with my critique of much of, perhaps most of the alleged science done about biological evolution, the evidence to make any kind of reliable conclusions about that is not available.  Though it is possible that, unlike with so much of the stuff of evolution which covers millions and billions instead of thousands of years, is certainly lost for all time and comes with the inconvenience of not being as articulate or safely interpreted as written text.  There might be a better chance of something earlier coming up in this much narrower area of research, though I doubt it will be written on paper or parchment. It is unfortunate that the earliest Hebrew tradition that we know doesn't seem to have often used a more durable medium for writing, though it must have been a lot easier to lug around some scrolls than a bunch of heavy clay tablets, Genesis and Exodus show them to have been people on the go.  The fact is, unless we have readable texts that we can understand, earlier human culture is nothing but a product of rank conjecture and story telling, the modern versions of that lacking the basis in knowledge that those who produced the earliest available texts may have had access to.  In the modern pop version of that, the stuff of internet babble and "journalism" and in a good deal of the modern academic babble about it, there is an obvious anti-religious, anti-Jewish and, so, anti-Christian bias assumed from the start.  Even many Christians and Jews, wanting to be good and, more so, respectable academics go along uncritically to get along with that.  I think a lot of them give up too much way too easily when a MORE CRITICAL look at the evidence would not necessarily lead to the modern debunking of the texts.

Even if you make the stupendous mistake of mistaking Genesis for history as written by modern scholars, what makes Fundamentalism, in spite of itself a product of modernism, the fact is that the literary and editorial practice of including two versions of the same story in the text makes that far less credible than, as Brueggmann advocates, taking it seriously but "holding it loosely."  Following that advice, I take it seriously but never hold on to any ideas I might have about this or that passage of most of it as being certain knowledge.  That is especially true of the Gospels and the Prophets which contain passages that surpass that kind of knowing.

Of course I don't believe in the literal truth of the creation of the human species in Genesis (which one of the two accounts?).  While I respect his brilliance, his responsibility in formal intellectual discourse and his incredible work ethic which makes him such an effective debater with scientistic atheists, I think William Lane Craig's attempt to locate a biological Adam and Eve isn't his best work.  His evangelical orientation leads him to hold onto some things too hard, a criticism I can make of another current and very effective apologist, the Oxford mathematician, John Lennox.  If there's one thing we know about the literary cultures  that gave us Genesis and the other Books of the Bible (and there was considerable cultural change all during the period when those were written), they used exaggeration as a method of giving emphasis and to make things more noticeable.  I would guess that a Sarah might have been in her late 40s or early 50s, that a Moses would have had a considerably narrower number of years in which to do what is attributed to him. But that's my conjecture.  The record in Scripture is the only record we've got.  

Of course I don't believe that the flood in the story of Noah was a weather report on the most catastrophic rain storm in history - though the 1990s or so conjecture that it might have been a vaguely remembered cultural report on the flooding of the Black Sea basin thousands of years earlier had some appeal for me.  If I'd lived through it I might wonder what we'd done to make God do that to us.  And stories about it may well have persisted in oral literary culture for a very long time.   Though the scientific basis for such an origin is certainly in hot dispute with some evidence that it was horse feathers.

I think the Tower of Babel might have been a satirical (though not necessarily unreliable) report on a Trumpian building project that collapsed in arrogance, rich-guy insistence on their builders doing the impossible.  I predict "Neom" will turn out be one going on right now.  Maybe their architects were as incompetent about materials and physics as so many modern celebrity ones are in our "enlightened" culture.*  

Or through  misplaced confidence in unproved building technology.  And then there is the injustice that allowed the ruling class to waste resources on self-aggrandizement which could have gone to improve the conditions of the least among them.  I'll bet the poor people of knew they were getting the shaft so they could build the thing, like some realize that when the grifting Mayor and Council try to build a new football stadium or they put in a bid with the gangsters of the International Olympics Committee. Slave labor would almost certainly have been involved at some level.

In that there is certainly a parallel in the Pharaonic regime and its pyramids and other useless self-aggrandizing extravagances.  I'm more convinced that the cultural memory of that kind of thing might have something to do with the reluctance of the Jewish tradition to mention the afterlife except only very occasionally and generally somewhat askance. I'll bet that's part of what they thought of when they remembered that they were slaves in Egypt.

* And, or so my carpenter brother told me, even many non-celeb architects who run up huge costs doing the same.  He's worked on two hospitals that wasted enormous amounts on cost-overruns for totally useless architectural ornamentation such as an ornamental tower that didn't even contain a radio antenna, even more so on a very large indoor waterfall that carried such an obvious danger of becoming infectious that you have to wonder at the absolute stupidity of having such things IN A FRIGGIN' HOSPITAL approved by idiots who should never have been in a position to do that. I don't know if they still have it going but when I went in there the lobby stank of chlorine, so much so I had a hard time standing it for a few minutes.  Our hospitals are run by idiots and gangsters, the medical industry in the United States is a moral cesspool.  Obamacare was a huge advance over what was but it doesn't come close to fixing the basic problem of for-profit medicine, which should never have been allowed to become for-profit.

I Give Thanks For The Commandment To Do To Others What We Want Them To Do To Us

the basis of a politics so radical that we don't believe it will ever be possible.

IN HIS COMMENTS on his translation of Genesis, Everett Fox says this:

It appears that the Mesopotamian origins of Israel are reflected in such narratives as the Creation, the Flood and the Tower of Babel, and are transformed or repudiated in the biblical versions.  What in the older culture appears arbitrary and chaotic has been changed in the Bible into stories that stress morality and order.  Further, human beings in Genesis Chapters 1-11, despite their failure to live up to God's expectations, are nevertheless considered capable of doing so, in contrast to the Mesopotamian view that humankind was created merely to be slaves to the gods.

I would certainly defer to such a deep scholar of the Hebrew text and its context  - of which I am not - in that assessment. I certainly agree with what he says about the Hebrew Bible in that statement. I would also note that the commentary on Genesis I've been reading both leads me to a far better appreciation of what those who complied the book were doing, the frequently brilliant Rabbinical and Christian theological reading of it and how related seemingly unrelated Scriptures are to what I consider important in the Monotheistic tradition I've chosen to put my trust in, equality, justice, the commandments to love even when I don't like those I'm commanded to love.  The Reverend Martin Luther King jr.'s observation that we are to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us isn't based in OUR liking of them but in the requirement that we love them because GOD LOVES THEM.  That is one of the most profound theological statements I know of and one which I cannot think is possible in materialism or secularism with any force or durability because under materialism, it has no credibility.

I am more convinced every time I look into it that those of us who live in some highly imperfect approximation of equality, some scheme of democracy have the Hebrew religious tradition to thank for the moral concepts that have allowed us to imagine such things which rarely, if ever, . . . probably safest to say never appeared in earlier history.  As the historical books of the Hebrew Bible attest, even the Children of Israel, with those concepts in their tradition, had a hell of a time holding on to something better than what God warned them against reverting to over and over again. Christian history proves it is as illusive closer to the modern period, the current Republican-fascists blasphemers like Green, Boebert, etc. are a lesson in that.  America proves that secularism, while diminishing the scourge of sectarianism, wasn't really any kind of guarantor of overcoming other inhibitions of evil governance - apropos of the passage from Everett Fox, slavery and racism were the origins of almost all of the greatest of durable defects in American democracy, the tool that the enemies of egalitarian democracy successfully have wielded against it from even before the inception of the country.

I think it was the Hebrew concept of God and God's creation that allowed those ideas to develop in human culture.  While some of it may not have been absent from other cultural traditions (the Hebrew Bible certainly doesn't present God being unconcerned with or not making covenants with other people and with animals) it is through the Hebrew Scriptures that such ideas came into the cultures that developed modern egalitarianism and egalitarian democracy as well as the corrupt and misguided attempts to secure the blessings of democracy without equality. That is the original sin of American Democracy that is still embedded in our Constitution and the clap trap erected over that by the Supreme Court which made that worse, etc.  

Another danger we have before us is that a similar line to what I just owned is often in the mouths of those who hate equality, hate democracy and, in fact, are gangsters and crooks.  I will note the observation of Jesus, by their fruits you will know what they're really up to.  Bad government is ALWAYS best understood as being motivated by the same motives as gangsters, from every monarchy to every fascist republic, every Marxist regime, unequal schemes that try to give a democracy to white men or other select groups while denying it to others - such as the original United States Constitution was and, under the lying gangster bought Supreme Court is becoming again - all of them are governments of, by and for gangsters.

The original Jewish Law, equal justice, and the development of Jewish thought in the Gospels and Epistles in an ethic of universal love is the only solid basis for egalitarian democracy, the only democracy worth the struggle to obtain, the only one without known glaring, fully demonstrated and fatal defects in it.  That was true of the supposed original anti-egalitarian democracy in ancient Athens** and it is of the one set up in the unammended United States Constitution, a document which is still dangerously, likely fatally defective in no small part due to the manipulations of the slavers and those who made corrupt deals with them for their own shady profit in the Constitutional Convention.  

The blather of political science that is based firmly on different ideas of how money should be moved around is insufficient to imagine a government of legitimacy and stability.  With inequality that guarantees that people left out, whether through racial, gender, ethnic, gender difference, CLASS INEQUALITY, SNOBBERY, etc. will not only have no reason to care about or support a decent government, they will be vulnerable to opposing one. Those of the American underclass who unthinkingly support some of the most evil manifestations of American politics, Trump but also the Bush I administration, his son's illegitimate Bush II regime, Reagan, Nixon, . . . are gulled into doing that by the mass media lies and social coercion.  That might get a pack of gangsters power but it is no reliable basis for a safe and stable governance.  It is no wonder that when they have power the Republican-fascists don't do much but transfer money to the billionaires and millionaires and throw bones of hate to their duped base.  It is not safe for us, as the Trumpian-Republican-fascist insurrection of January 6th showed, as the threats to use "Second Amendment remedies" when Republican-fascists lose (a threat encouraged by Republican-fascists on the Supreme Court, one made considerably before Trump gained the Republican-fascist nomination) various other minor manifestations of America's indigenous fascist tendencies, and the granddaddy of them all, the Confederacy and the Civil War it started are proof in reality and the history of the country that inequality, the gaming of privileges for some, the management of class conflict for the benefit of the elites is deadly.  Yet political-science doesn't seem to notice that.  "Economics as if People mattered," was a minor blip of the late 20th century, drowned in the mainstream of economics and poly-sci as done at elite universities.

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When I first started going online and reading the spontaneous and unedited and unselected thinking of other people, most of them either of the left or of the college-credentialed class, mostly vaguely lefty, my focus was entirely political. Thoroughly indoctrinated in mid-20th century notions of the virtues of secularism, I had no real intention of getting into religious matters.  In 2006 I started investigating why "the left" was so bad at winning in politics and what it could do to win. Still the official theme of my blogging.  

But the longer I read and seriously thought about politics, testing ideas, reading the babble of the then fashionable "new atheists" and the old ones who the new ones merely copied, the more I realized that, in the end, the primary problem of politics was people who wanted to do bad things to other people, the environment, etc. and what it would take for people who wanted to do bad things to restrain themselves or be restrained by society and the law from being able to do bad things, to motivate the indifferent to doing what had to be done, what should be done, it became obvious that what those were were religious problems.  

The secular American left, dating from the late 19th century till now, a thing of epic non-feasance, malfeasance and misfeasance when it wasn't being just plain stupid, was certainly not going to to it because it had bad habits such as attaching itself to some of the worst criminals in modern history and some of the stupidest ideas generated in the allegedly educated class.  The legal arm of that in the ACLU is emblematic of that, it was too busy fighting for the right to lie and promote Nazism and white supremacy and a whole host of other counter-productive causes, things that were guaranteed to destroy any progress made in their idiotic conception of "rights" and "freedoms."  The Republican-fascist ascendancy starting in 1968 is directly attributable to its and its allies "free speech-press" activities, the right to lie is what Republican-fascists and Trumpzis mean when they champion "freedom of speech."  And it is only one example of that, the lefty media, the magazines, the rare broadcast entities and personalities, etc. the scribbling class of the secular left usually had little to contribute.  

At the same time, largely through my mother's social justice work through her church reading what she brought home to read, and reading the liberation theology that I had access to, ESPECIALLY READING THE REVEREND Martin Luther King jr.  AND HIS ALLIES I knew there was a religious left which, while certainly not perfect actually had some success.  The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. was the most successful leftist in modern American history just as I would assert the Baptist minister Tommy Douglass in giving Canadians universal healthcare was probably the most successful leftist in the history of North America.  I would point out the role that the faithful Catholic, Nancy Pelosi had in making the greatest though far from last bit of progress toward that against all odds, including from resistance within the Obama administration.  Also, probably the most Catholic president we have had or are likely to have, Joe Biden trying to fix some of the greatest defects left in the system by the Obama administration.  Healthcare is far from a solved problem, in some ways it's as bad as it was as the insurance and hospital industries game the new rules to screw us as they profit.

Meanwhile the repetitious idiocy of the secular left thus exposed online forced me to fully face the fact that it was never going to amount to anything but self-defeat and they were more than fully prepared to take any effective left down with it.  The damned Green Party of the United States fully deserves to be the quintessential representative of that.

The problem of politics is inescapably a problem of moral behavior, a fact that one of the idiotic online commentators of the 00's brought home to me as she and those who agreed with her whined and complained about being sick and tired of "morality."  What the hell she thought everything that everyone on the online-left whined about didn't have to do with morality, I asked but got no answer. I came to wonder if the reason that observation got no response any time I pointed it out was because the secular, materialist, atheist, scientistic ideology of such "leftists" had absolutely nothing to generate a real and effective concept of morality from. And, unsurprisingly, it, like Nazism, like many forms of fascism, like Stalinism, etc. despised, more than anything, the Hebrew religious tradition and what it asserts. I would bet that in most of the secular, anti-religious allegedly leftist entities, it would be more detested to openly assert the radical justice of the Scriptures than to advocate the "right" of Nazis to promote their opposition to that.  Secular lefties are clueless as to their real motives and inclinations.  

We have had, in the modern period and, I would argue, throughout history the most ample regime of humanly conducted experiments into what happens when you base laws and customs on the opposite of that Hebrew tradition.  It has never been good and only not been a disaster for brief spans of time.  The historical books of the Old Testament and the New Testament are a record of the disaster that comes with injustice, economic injustice, inequality, indifference to the poor, the alien living among you, the sick, those in prison, etc.  

I've been reading Genesis so its stories are much on my mind. We don't have any real detailed knowledge of the destroyed polities or regimes described in Genesis, what the sins of Sodom were other than inhospitality and the story makes that morally problematic.  Especially as compared to the ways of Lot whose conduct, especially in relation to his daughters, doesn't exactly comport with our notions of fatherly sexual morality, offering them to be gang raped before getting drunk and committing incest with them.  Great host, a horror show of a father.  We are given some idea of the sins of those who were building the Tower of Babel, arrogance, self-importance, probably with heaps of injustice thrown in, the building project probably led many poor people to go hungry and be even more in need.  I will only call attention to the known character and obsession of Donald Trump in passing in regard to that story, him and the real billionaire master builders of the modern era.  

We do have the model of injustice in the new Pharaoh who grew up uninfluenced by the Hebrew tradition and his attempt to wipe out the Children of Israel by a combination of infanticide and, I'd guess it was to be understood, assimilation though Egyptian men siring any children the remnant female Israeli population would then have. But it was the injustice to the Children of Israel, their enslavement which is specifically mentioned as setting in motion the major events in what survives in the Jewish tradition and, Christians should never be allowed to forget, what leads up to Jesus and Christianity and through it the Western concepts of equality and egalitarian democracy.  

I should note here that the structure of the Torah invites a comparison of the Children of Israel in Egypt as given in the Joseph narrative at the end of Genesis and of them generations later in the first section of the Exodus and the contrast to The Law given to Moses.  Walter Brueggemann notes that Joseph, in becoming part of the Pharaonic regime as Pharaoh's food Czar during the famine years, is presented as administering first the debt impoverishment of the hungry people, who in successive years were forced to give up their wealth, their land and, finally, became the slaves of Pharaoh - and those were the Egyptians - which I never heard anyone discuss before hearing him make that observation in one of his lectures.  Brueggeamnn notes that it didn't occur to Pharaoh or Joseph to just give food to the hungry People.  The radicalism of the Mosaic Law in its context, what Jesus and Hillel sum up in their two versions of The Golden Rule,  The Law that won't pass away, a durable law of human nature BECAUSE IT IS A LAW OF GOD, is still the basis of a politics so radical that we don't believe it will ever be possible.  We are still committing the sin of Genesis in all its various forms.  

In that sermon by Fr. Dan Donovan I typed out for you the other day, he spoke of:

the future when the whole of created reality, including ourselves will be caught up and transformed by God

That is close to the best story ever told or at least that I know, the Orthodox concept of the end of creation, even that which is presently evil, in some Orthodox traditions, even the demons and Lucifer and Satan being fully reconciled to God and having their existence within God.  What you can get by giving up what I suspect is the remnant of the European version of that old Mesopotamian view of the gods,* the demotion of human beings (except, as always, the ruling political-priestly class) and their modern incarnations in the gods of materialism, things like a mythical conception of "DNA," natural selection, probability mathematics, random chance, etc.

Everett Fox's translation of the first line of Genesis is not typical and, so is provocative, implying that Creation is continuing.   

At the beginning of God's creating of the heavens and the earth,

Which implies to me, at least, that Creation is continuous. That it moves from the past, through us to the future and on from there.  That it has a direction in one way (perhaps why some materialist cosmologists have concluded that time travel to the past is impossible, though we certainly all experience normal travel into the future) that it is in a direction and that direction will arrive into eternity.  Or, perhaps there is no final arrival but continuing on.

This is a long answer to the assertion that the materialists are right, that there is no purpose in existence.  I would give you some of the partial answers I've given to that, noting that every single atheist-materialist I've ever seen getting into a lather about that proves they don't really believe it by trying to make other people believe their claims, as well as many of their claims about such things as evolution and the development of the semi-science that tries to study it but gets side-tracked into their atheist ideological struggles.  Jesus said, "By their fruits you will know them," and by their ideological struggles and claims about natural selection, such cosmological punching at God as multiverse sy-fi,  I know they don't really believe what they claim to believe.  

I tell you, if there is no purpose in existence, then that means everything that human beings conceive of as purposeful, of having a purpose, of having a direction toward an end, an end that is either temporary or of greater permanence must be illusory.  Think of how many statements in human culture, literature, even in science would have to go or be discredited by that ultimate devotion to the atheists' ideological tool of non-teleology.  It leads to the ultimate regime of intellectual assertion possible.  I suspect that, if it were taken seriously, it would have to debunk huge areas of science, I would suspect some of that science would include the gods of modern materialist atheism, natural selection and maybe even many of the schemes of cosmology.  This is similar to the problems that come with the insistence that there is no significance to minds and that there is no meaning to anything.   Killing off God comes with a huge price.  I don't think even Nietzsche really understood how much you would have to abandon to take his claim seriously.

As I looked more into the idiocy of the incorporated 20th century atheist religion "Humanism" it became ever more obvious to me it was one of the silliest labels ever given to a club promoting an ideological position.  It is as stupid as the fascist organizations that claim to promote "freedom" especially "free speech."  

If there is one thing that materiast-atheism has done, it is to demote the status of human beings, human thought, human capabilities, lowering them probably lower than any of those ancient Mesopotamian systems did.  The take-over of the Humanist club by Corliss Lamont (the sugar-daddy of most of today's organized English language atheist ideological struggle), the Last Stalinist, the trust-fund Communist, the author of 1950s (!) propaganda promoting Stalinism well past the time his Hitler level mass murders were exposed,  brought it into clearest focus because there is certainly no human regime which outdid Stalin's in demoting human beings to as low a state as they have, so far, been brought.  His only rivals for that position being, of course the Nazis and other Marxist regimes, from the the microcosmic example of Enver Hoxha in Albania or the larger one of the Kim regime in North Korea or the largest in the Communist Chinese dictatorship.  The other forms of fascism, including the indigenous American version of that, white supremacy, approximate, closer or somewhat removed, that degenerate view of humanity through practicing inequality, certainly of entire racial and ethnic groups of human beings while, like, I suspect, Stalin, the Nazi hierarchy, the present day dictators of North Korea and China, holding a higher view of themselves.  I find it ironic that that superiority is imagined to consist of superior intelligence in the modern era, something their ideology attempts to discredit in its discrediting of human minds and consciousness, which they rob of freedom. Their devotion to materialism, to atheism, require that demotion, it is never not going to be a feature of that ideology.

The key political understanding I came to since going online is that absolute equality of people is what makes any decent political system, regime of laws, and society possible.  Without equality, most of all economic equality and social equality, the decency of mutual respect and the often unpleasant, sometimes terribly difficult care for the least among us, it all goes to hell faster or slower.  The American attempt at unequal democracy is only a slower descent into hell, despite the attempts to remedy those original sins of our system. Embedded in the Constitution as those are but, more so, in the hearts of a dangerously large percentage of the population, those dangers will be there as long as those sins are.  Many of whom mistakenly regard themselves as faithful Christians. By their fruits you will know them, indeed.

If there is a human history on the other side of this age that extends as many thousands of years into the future as that from which Everett Fox is writing about the Mesopotamian thought that the Jewish view of reality differed with, I wonder if the modern "scientific" materialist regimes, including non-egalitarian democracy, will present a far better documented example of what we can more dimly view of the pagan Mediterranean and European regimes which the Hebrew tradition, including Christianity, is in radical opposition to.  The Hebrew conception of God as the God who blessed three times in the Creation story in Genesis, to conscious living beings, animals, to human beings and to the Sabbath (rest from labor, the chance to experience life's goodness, that experience dependent on consciousness) makes possible the conception of human lives and minds as significant and meaningful and important, even more important than things without minds, the mindless atom which is the symbol of ideological atheists, gold, money, status symbols.  Compared to that, materialism, atheism, scientism, have nothing with which to build an egalitarian democracy, any kind of durable and reliable decent life.  That's something I wouldn't have said twenty years ago though I suspect I was already beginning to suspect that.  Now I'm absolutely certain of it and, like some of my other investigations, it becomes clearer the more I test my hypothesis.  And I do look for disconfirmation, NO INVESTIGATION IS WORTH A THING IF YOU DON'T TEST YOUR PREFERRED CONCLUSIONS AT EVERY STEP.  I just don't find much if any.

* In the same short essay on The Primeval History, the beginning of Genesis, Everett Fox says:

The nature of God, as he will appear throughout the Hebrew Bible, is firmly established.  He is seen as a Creator who is beyond fate, nature, and sexuallity, as an all-powerful orderer and giver of meaning to history as a bestower of blessing to living creatures, as the giver of choice to human beings, as a just punisher of evil and, simultaneously, a merciful ruler, and as maker of covenants.  The one Quality of God which does not unfold until the Patriarchal Stories (Part II-IV) is his shaping of human destiny through focusing on the People of Israel.  It is portrayal of the logical outcome of the characteristics just mentioned.

I don't think a higher view of humanity is possible without belief in that character of the Creator, God, taking into account that no human description of God will ever be sufficient, certainly not comprehensive. Not even that, perhaps better, "those" contained in the Scriptures, not that contained in the minds of all of humanity combined, which, of course, can't exist.  There is no such a thing as the combined minds of human beings, it is an illusion not unrelated to bigotry which attributes characteristics to large groups of People.  

** I remember being puzzled at I. F. Stone, in his The Trial of Socrates having such an incomprehensible reverence for the Athenian democracy when it was, in fact, everything which any modern democracy worth anything would consider abhorent.  It was based on slavery, exclusively andro-centric, misogynistic, anti-egalitarian, bigoted, closed and exclusive.  I think it's a case in which even someone as generally open to reality as Stone could not get over the word and its connotative virtue to consider its consequential denotative complexities.  Without equality, non-egalitarian democracy is merely an extended oligarchy.

He had a similar problem when it came to the word  "imperialism" such as when he condemned the Vietnamese government for ending the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, a communist variant in which an elite of murderous thugs enslaved and was in the process of destroying the Cambodian People in ways not dissimilar to the plans of the Nazis for dominating Eastern Europe and whatever part of Asia they held. I'm sure the Vietnamese government didn't have the purest of intentions or operations as they carried it out but of the two alternatives, that was, by far, the lesser evil.  It took me a lot to face the shortcomings of someone like I. F. Stone who I had revered.  

I could write this post in the terms of my new proposed graph of political identity that takes the conditions of the lives of People and living beings as the basis of any honest assessment of political systems and regimes.  Instead of a continuing line from a center, I think an honest graph of politics would be a ray starting at the completely debased notion of human beings as determined objects such as is held by materialism, close to that the political regimes which reduced People to objects, well on the way to the last identified point away form that would be egalitarian democracy, perhaps the ray going on forever. There is egalitarian democracy as an ideal position and there is every other government which is, to one extent or another, the rule of gangsters and thugs lording it over those held under the boot of inequality.  I have never read or heard a Communist or a secular lefty who could face the fact that that's as true of Marxism as it is capitalism, fascism and Nazism.  The anarchists have such a scant knowledge of reality that they don't understand that when there is no civil government, the gangsters seize control immediately, some of them in the name of anarchy which as it really is, isn't an improvement over monarchy.

I could note that my conception of a ray starting with the debasement of living beings into non-living material objects mirrors the conception of evolution starting in inert matter, only to do that I'd have to be honest and say that I cannot help but think of it in terms of at least development of which we, at least by our lights, are more important than the many micro-organisms from which we are descended, I think our moral sensibilities and minds can honestly be considered progress over earlier mammals, though I think the early humanoids, those who we are descended from and their many cousins were probably far more intelligent and possessing a moral sensibility than the old-line of evolutionary blather hold them to have been.  I was greatly surprised when relatively recently old Noam Chomsky, on the basis of his theories of linguistic, I gather, asserted a very old fashioned view of the ancestors of many of us outside of Africa, the Neanderthals.  A view which recent discoveries of their cave art, made deep in caves, requiring planning and taking their paint stuff with them, seems to make highly unlikely.  I like thinking about what we firmly know about earlier life and what stories can be derived from it but I never forget, without first hand testimony of those living beings, we cannot really know what's in their minds.  Same with living animals.  

I love thinking about evolution and the often mistakenly related problem of the origin of life from non-living matter.  But that doesn't mean I think we can actually do science about most of it, we don't have the required observations and measurements to do that and, the facts of the decay of time and geology, the minuscule examples of the evidence which has been destroyed of forever hidden from us, most of evolutionary "science" is just the Just-so storytelling that Gould and Lewontin criticized when faced with the neo-eugenics of evolutionary-psychology and Sociobiology, even as they both endorsed the worst of that in the theory of natural selection, perhaps the worst story ever told. Natural selection will always, inevitably, lead to claims of eugenics and attempts to cut groups of People out of the human future.   Biology has more than enough that it can do science with to get ideologically fixated on what it can't do science about.