St. Patrick's Day 2014

Two ways to observe it which have nothing to do with parades or green beer.  This is the other one.


I arise today through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity, through belief in the Threeness, through confession of the Oneness of the Creator of creation.

I arise today through the strength of Christ with his Baptism, through the strength of His Crucifixion with His Burial through the strength of His Resurrection with His Ascension, through the strength of His descent for the Judgement of Doom.

I arise today through the strength of the love of Cherubim in obedience of Angels, in the service of the Archangels, in hope of resurrection to meet with reward, in prayers of Patriarchs, in predictions of Prophets, in preachings of Apostles, in faiths of Confessors, in innocence of Holy Virgins, in deeds of righteous men.

I arise today, through the strength of Heaven; light of Sun, brilliance of Moon, splendour of Fire, speed of Lightning, swiftness of Wind, depth of Sea, stability of Earth, firmness of Rock.

I arise today, through God's strength to pilot me: God's might to uphold me, God's wisdom to guide me, God's eye to look before me, God's ear to hear me, God's word to speak for me, God's hand to guard me, God's way to lie before me, God's shield to protect me, God's host to secure me: against snares of devils, against temptations of vices, against inclinations of nature, against everyone who shall wish me ill, afar and anear, alone and in a crowd.

I summon today all these powers between me (and these evils): against every cruel and merciless power that may oppose my body and my soul, against incantations of false prophets, against black laws of heathenry, against false laws of heretics, against craft of idolatry, against spells of witches, smiths and wizards, against every knowledge that endangers man's body and soul.

Christ to protect me today against poisoning, against burning, against drowning, against wounding, so that there may come abundance in reward.

Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ on my right, Christ on my left, Christ in breadth, Christ in length, Christ in height, Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me, Christ in the mouth of every man who speaks of me, Christ in every eye that sees me, Christ in every ear that hears me.

The call is coming from inside the house!

Didn't they make him a Cardinal?

I used to have this book; darned if I know what happened to it.  Maybe it's still on a shelf somewhere under this roof, but I'm not going to stop now to look.  Anyway, it's the title that appeals to me because we are still doing pretzel twists to deny the reality of venality and racism.  It appeals to me because the idea of sin is that we're all involved in it; "All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God."

Brian Beutler this morning opines that what Paul Ryan said about "inner city culture" is worse than we think (really?) because maybe Ryan isn't an overt racist; maybe it's worse, maybe he's a covert racist:

But let’s assume Ryan’s playing it straight, and his defenders, like Slate’s Dave Weigel, are correct when they argue that this is just how Ryan and other conservatives “think about welfare’s effects on social norms.” If that’s true, it’s actually a bigger problem for the right. If Ryan was even a little bit aware of how people would interpret his remarks, or understood the reaction to them when it exploded online, we could just say that some conservatives want to play the Southern Strategy at least one more round, and leave it at that. Close the book on this controversy, without drawing any larger conclusions about the state of conservative self-deception.

But if Ryan genuinely stumbled heedless into a racial tinderbox then it suggests he, and most likely many other conservatives, has fully internalized a framing of social politics that was  to appeal to white racists without regressing to the uncouth language of explicit racism, and written its origins out of the history. If that’s the case it augurs poorly for those in the movement who are trying to broaden the Republican Party’s appeal, because it’s easier to convince people to abandon a poor tactic than to unlearn rotten ideology.

Racism, in other words, is not a matter of intent (which limits it to skinheads and neoNazis and the remaining David Duke's of the world), it's a matter of culture.  It's simply a matter of attitude, of presumption, of fundamental thinking.  And it's as easy as having a political opinion, or a notion of what public policy should be.

We have met the enemy, and he looks a lot like us.

The beginning of wisdom is the recognition that you are involved in the situation, not just observing it.

Waiting for Superman

This slipped beneath the waves at Slate (only 50 comments when last I looked, and the last 2 days ago.  I had to find it through Google; there is no apparent link on the front page of Slate by now.  And, interestingly, all the comment are about how the Pope can or cannot change the nature, structure, policy, or direction of the Catholic church by fiat.  Nobody, and I mean nobody who commented, sympathetic or antagonistic to the Pope or the Roman church, offered to put a shoulder to the wheel.  Very telling, that.), which is (hello again!) unfortunate.  It is an excellent piece on the nature of churches and what they've become and what they should be.

Did you know Augustine was pressed into service as a Bishop?  The people demanded it, they forced the office on him.  Now, of course, the office seems more to be forced on the people, and the people seem more and more to think their role is to accept or reject what the Church imposes on them.  Yes, I speak in broad generalities again, but then so does Baumann; and how can you avoid it, on a subject like this?

The fixation on the papacy trivializes the faith of Catholics, the vast majority of whom throughout history have had little knowledge of, and no contact with, any pope. Traditionally, the papacy was the court of last resort in adjudicating disagreements among the faithful. But in the last century or so it has increasingly become the avenue of first resort, determined to meddle in every theological or ecclesiological dispute. If American nuns are flirting with novel styles of ministry, the Vatican intercedes. If translations of liturgical texts incorporate a bit of inclusive language, Rome takes out its red pencil. This meddling Vatican infantilizes the church’s bishops, who seem to change their tune (as well as their dress) in response to every new papal fashion. Bishops in turn demand deference from the clergy and laity. The consequences have been all too clear: As in any heavily top-down organization, local initiatives fail to gain a foothold, or fizzle out for lack of dynamic leadership, and apathy prevails in the pews. Institutional gridlock and paralysis have become the norm. Seminaries are empty, and clerical talent is thin on the ground.  

I've been in one of those empty seminaries.  In St. Louis, one of the most Catholic cities in America ("More Catholics than you can stir with a stick," my puckish Roman Catholic priest Pastoral Care teacher said of it.)  It was a huge complex built for an earlier age, with tiny cells for each student, but hallways you could literally drive a sports car down (I had an MG Midget at the time, and I could have driven it down the halls and turned around again.).  It was built to house hundreds.  It was as empty as a tomb.  Was this because of "the fixation on the Pope"?  No, probably not; but Bauman's point still stands.  When the institution becomes its own reason to exist, the congregation no longer does the work of the people (leitourgia), they expect the institution to do the work for them.

And too often, the institution obliges.

This is not a slap at the Roman Catholic church or its hierarchy.  Things are much, much worse in the Protestant churches, where congregations are more likely to be served than to be servants (not that congregations should serve the church, but in general, they aren't interested in serving anybody).  In the 19th century when no one was as comfortable as most of us are now, immigrants from German speaking areas of Europe founded orphanages, nursing homes, hospitals, mental asylums, even a place for workers on the river boats at the mouth of the Mississippi, far from the St. Louis area, in order to serve others.

Any church intent on doing that today?  Any mainline denomination committed to such service, committed not by its hierarchy or its judicatory, but by its people in the pews?  Anybody looking for an Augustine to serve them as Bishop?

This turns gloomy rapidly if you look at it too simplistically.  The fact is, of course, people want communities to belong to.  It's a fundamental reality of being social animals.  We want churches or "atheist churches" or sci-fi conventions are atheist conventions or websites or social media or something we can contact other people through, and come into contact with other people through.  But left to our own devices most social constructs break down very rapidly, as whatever brought us together soon wears out and we drift apart, looking again for something new to bring us together with less familiar people, so the novelty will be renewed.

And we tend more and more to look for that novelty in individuals whom we can make over in our own preferred image.  Until the novelty wears off again, at least; or they annoy us by not sticking to the image we'd hoped they'd conform to.

Baumann offers the right corrective for this:  rather than waiting for someone to save us from ourselves, we must get out of ourselves (is there a mathematical formula for that, yet?):

Lex orandi, lex credendi  is one of the church’s most venerable teachings. Roughly translated, it means that the church’s worship determines its theology, or as the catechism puts it: “The law of prayer is the law of faith: The Church believes as she prays.” Whatever their ideological disagreements, Catholics will find unity, and a less anachronistic relationship with the papacy, in practicing their faith together—or they will not find unity at all. That may mean that the same-sex couple in the pew next to you will provide a more faithful example of Christian witness than you might now imagine possible. Or perhaps the ardent piety of a Latin Mass enthusiast will lead you to reconsider parts of the church’s tradition you have long dismissed as irrelevant and sterile. In any event, the church’s unity and renewed vitality will be—must be—a gift that the faithful bring to the pope, and not the other way around.        

For the church, the joining point is corporate worship.  Which answers the question "What is worship for?"  It also assumes the essential nature of hospitality, hospitality as the baseline to what it is to be human, to be Christian.  We should add to that the sense that we are all guests here; that the second part of Leviticus 25:23 adjures us all to remember where we came from:  "The land shall not be sold for ever: for the land for ye  are strangers and sojourners with me."  The earth, we do well to remember, is the Lord's, and all that fills it.

That includes us.  And while we may need someone to inspire us, to show us the way; we don't need anyone to do it for us.  We are God's, too; and being a little lower than the angels, and (Romans) heirs with Christ (co-equal, in other words, not secondary), we'd do better to live up to our obligations.

Plus ca change....

If he isn't weeping, he should be.

In the novel Martin Chuzzlewit our eponymous hero finds himself in America, and almost immediately upon landing here he is identified as an Englishman and treated to a critical discourse on the sorry state of the English nation and the monarchy, complete with very exacting examples of the difficulties.

Having just left the country,  our hero knows none of this to be true.  His American interlocutor, having never visited England, assures him nonetheless that all of it is true.

In 170 years, nothing much has changed.

So I cheered up, and sure enough....

Almost unbelievably, things get worse:

Ryan has deliberately left the cameras behind during his excursions to poor neighborhoods this year in places like Indiana and New Jersey, but the stories of his interactions with the poor somehow find a way  of leaking into public view. In one anecdote related by Woodson, for example, Ryan mailed neckties to an entire classroom of teenagers after they admired the one he was wearing during his visit. It would be easy to dismiss such modest acts of kindness as fodder for a future memoir — or stump speech — but Woodson insists Ryan is sincere. “The criminal lifestyle makes you very discerning, and everywhere I’ve taken Paul, these very discerning people have given me a thumbs up,” he said. “You can’t lip synch authenticity around people like that.”

 To Republicans like Flaherty — as well as a growing contingent of conservative opinion-makers who are calling for a more authentically populist Republicanism — Ryan’s embrace of the Francis model is heartening. “What Pope Francis is doing is, instead of changing Catholicism, he’s changing the way the world views Catholicism… And I think Paul has the opportunity to do something similar for conservatism,” Flaherty said.

Where to start, where to start?  First there are many who see the Pope is actually changing Catholicism simply by changing the emphasis of the institutional church.  That is not a change I object, to, by the way, and I hope it inspires other Christian churches to follow his lead, especially with regard to actually regarding the poor.  But am I supposed to be naive enough to think the story of the neckties "just leaked out"?  Or that such an act is a "soul to soul" transaction?

“What I love about the pope is he is triggering the exact kind of dialogue we ought to be having,” Ryan told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel this week, adding, “People need to get involved in their communities to make a difference, to fix problems soul to soul.”

Yeah, I don't think you're in the same dialogue as the Pope there.  Not even sure you two are speaking the same language.

But then again, this entire article is chock full of people absolutely missing the point:

“I think he’s probably inspired by a lot of what [Francis] does,” said Peter Wehner, a former George W. Bush adviser who has known Ryan for years. “Politicians in general can learn a lot from Pope Francis in terms of how much tone and countenance matter in public perception. He has a huge appeal from the symbols he sends — from washing the feet of Muslim women, to kissing the heads of people with deformities.”

 “The clothes he wears, the shoes he wears, where he lives,” Wehner continued. “This stuff is not unimportant in life, it’s not unimportant in faith, and it’s not unimportant in politics.”

The acts of the Pope are not symbols, and they are not taken that was by the faithful.  Sending neckties to teenagers; that's symbolic.  It costs you nothing, and doesn't really mean as much to the recipients as you might think.  It certainly does nothing to lift them out of poverty or improve their situation in life.  Publicly accepting a man with physical deformities, publicly making yourself a servant in action, not just ideation, is an act for the recipient more than for you.  The difference between the acts of the Pope and the acts of Paul Ryan is more than just semantic.

And, of course, you can "lip synch" authenticity; that's all these comparisons of Ryan and Pope Francis are.

As for Ryan having found his religion in the spotlight, Joan Walsh tosses some very cold water on that idea:

But there’s one final reason that Paul Ryan hailing a “culture of work” and stigmatizing government assistance is particularly offensive. This is the same Paul Ryan whose family’s construction firm fattened itself on government contracts; who received Social Security survivor benefits after his father died and used that public money to put himself through college; who then went on the government payroll and has never done anything other than attack poor people while on the government’s dime; who makes $174,000 a year in taxpayer dollars while keeping himself camera-ready with his PDX90 routine (Paul Ryan shirtless is still one of the top prompts on Google); who enjoys $350 bottles of wine thanks to lobbyists; and then dumps on the lazy, immoral inner city poor with gambling addict and fellow government assistance recipient Bill Bennett.

This is the guy to whom the GOP is outsourcing its anti-poverty policy. Maybe he can hook the “inner city poor” up to the gravy train he’s ridden his entire life.

Or at least maybe he can give 'em all a necktie.

White Man's Burden

Yesterday all the past:

Citing Charles Murray, the libertarian academic and pundit who has previously argued that poverty is largely a consequence of low IQ and race, Rep. Paul Ryan told right-wing radio host Bill Bennett on Wednesday morning that poverty in America is largely a product of a “tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work.”


“So there’s a real culture problem here,” Ryan continued, “that has to be dealt with.”

 “If you’re driving from the suburb to the sports arena downtown, by these blighted neighborhoods, you can’t just say, ‘I’m paying my taxes; government’s going to fix that,’” Ryan said. “You need to get involved. You need to get involved, yourself, whether through a good mentor program or some religious charity — whatever it is to make a difference, and that’s how we resuscitate our culture.”

"Our culture" is somehow intertwined with "their culture," you see; and it isn't our culture that is at fault, it's the near-death of our culture that is at fault.  That is why it must be resuscitated.   It must be resuscitated by teaching the value and the culture of work.

We must, in other words, make them more like us.  Because their culture is bad, and ours is good; and we must bring our culture to them; before theirs destroys ours.  Besides, when we left the inner city, look what they did with it.

And today, the first rule of holes:

“It was a long talk and he asked about the culture and I just went off of that,” Ryan told Burke. “This has nothing to do whatsoever with race. It never even occurred to me. This has nothing to do with race whatsoever."

“This isn’t a race based comment it’s a breakdown of families, it’s rural poverty in rural areas, and talking about where poverty exists — there are no jobs and we have a breakdown of the family," he explained, repeating "This has nothing to do with race.”

Because it's never about race; it's just about "inner cities" v. "rural areas."  And we all know what kind of people we expect to find in each of those areas; and none of us connect rural areas with "a tailspin of culture...of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work."

But it's not about race; it never is.

UPDATE:  Really, it just never is about race:

Discussing urban poverty, policy responses and race ain't easy. But when you push the idea that the ills of the country's "inner cities" are the product of the intergenerational laziness of the (inner city = black) men in those cities and then cite the work of a purported scholar who argues that blacks are genetically inferior to white people ... well, the chances of your being 'misunderstood' or 'taken out of context' become extremely high.

Or maybe Occam's Razor just says the answer is "racism"?  No, can't be that.
Josh Marshall also says of Charles Murray's work:

...Murray's public career has been based on pushing the idea that black urban poverty is primarily the fault of black people and their diseased 'culture' and even more controversially that black people are genetically inferior to white people and other notional races with regards to intelligence. Yes, that last part should be crystal clear: Murray is best known for attempting to marshal social science evidence to argue that black people are genetically not as smart as white people.

Which I think is a very fair assessment of Murray's oeuvre.  Funny thing, I've seen people cite the Southern Poverty Law Center's declaration that Murray is a white supremacist, and then after citing it quickly aver that they disagree with this assessment.

Because, well, you know....

The Spheres Are in Commotion

Not to be anti-scientific, but:

“Once science has been established, once a scientific truth emerges from a consensus of experiments and observations, it is the way of the world,” [Neil deGrasse] Tyson told Colbert. “What I’m saying is, when different experiments give you the same result, it is no longer subject to your opinion. That’s the good thing about science: It’s true whether or not you believe in it. That’s why it works.”

In other words, science is the one true religion now.

Or something.

Actually, that isn't (necessarily) what Tyson is saying here, but it is how his statement is being taken:  that science is about "truth," while "religion" is about "faith," which means believing what you know ain't so.  (and listen to part two, and Colbert's response to Tyson's assertion that "the idea of the multiverse is cool."  Colbert:  "So is the idea of the Force.") (UPDATE:  Yeah, I didn't think that's what he meant.)

No wonder so many otherwise intelligent people are so confused about ethics.  Because, frankly, what Tyson says here about science could be equally said about torture.  Whether you believe in it or not, its proponents insist, it works.

Some say that about religion, even.  Which one is right?  And why?  Depends, first, on what is being declared as "working."  Medicine "works," except in the field of psychiatry, where everything does something, but nothing cures like an antibiotic (the true foundation of modern medicine).  Even then, it works so long as we don't abuse it.  Super bugs, anyone?   (And, of course, what science has established is absolutely, undeniably true, and what science has established as probably true, is not just a matter of the definition of "true," but of what little has been declared undeniable, and what how much is still a matter of Hume's synthetic statements (v. analytical).  In other words, as Hume pointed out, analytical statements are unremarkable ("This stone is heavy") and synthetic statements are unprovable opinions.)

Which leaves us with science not really telling us much about anything except how to make technology that runs on fossil fuels or leaves behind heavy metals and waste products that poison others, or generally costs a great deal which we are still expertly shifting onto others (how many of us live near the waste dumps of our computer products alone, or among the refineries of the Texas Gulf Coast, where cancer rates are higher than anywhere else in the state?  But who cares as we drive our cars and use our plastics with such abandon we through them away after one use?  We treat our citizens the same way....).

Again, not to disparage science per se but as Auden said in another context, torture works, too.  That doesn't make it an unalloyed good.   Torture, of course, is an evil; science, per se, is not.  But if the fact that science "works" is its best feature, then it doesn't have many good features at all.  Or that we certainly need more than science.

Just sayin'......

The ones who walk away from Western civilization....

Maybe I'm straining at gnats and swallowing camels, but help me out here, I'm confused.

Per Thought Criminal we come upon this review of the last book by Richard Dworkin, a review in which I learn Dworkin spent his life working on a justification of Brown v. Board of Education, a justification which rests upon some, shall we say "eternal truths" which transcend and indeed undergird the law, however the law is particularly expressed in any time and any place.  But, as the book of my youth put it, without Marx (history) or Jesus (God).

So far, so good.  I have one of Dworkin's books, which I picked up in law school when I stuck my toe in the waters of jurisprudence.  I also got Rawls' most famous book then, and spent more time trying to follow Rawls' argument (which was neatly relegated to one volume) than Dworkin's (scattered across several), but I finally discarded Rawls because he was too interested in tweaking utilitarianism than discarding it.  James and Dosteoevsky, in other words, are better people to read on the subject; Rawls, for all his attempts to surmount the ethic/economic theory, ends up just an apologist for it.  I must admit I was never interested enough in Dworkin to follow him further.

But I digress.

Back to Dworkin's last work, and we start here:

But Dworkin went further: rights don’t just limit democratic authority; they also explain where democratic authority comes from. In addition to rights, Dworkin says, human beings have interests—for example, in having income and leisure. In contrast to rights, however, interests must often be compromised. Yet here, too, rights play a role. In a world in which people are seen as equal bearers of rights, interests may be justifiably balanced and traded against one another only provided that the interests of different people are considered equally. It is in giving expression to this kind of equality—the right to “equal consideration”—that the principle of majority rule matters. If we allowed a minority to outweigh the majority, that would mean the interests of the minority were being weighted more heavily than those of the majority, and so moral equality would be violated. Only through majority rule, Dworkin argues, does “each count for one and none for more than one.”

Now here the arch-conservatives will prate:  "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights...."  And even though the arch-conservatives use this as proof the "Founding Fathers" were all fundamentalist Christians, first they overlook the radical assertion that all men (humans) are created equal, because they want to insist that some are more equal than others.  And already we have a foundering of the "democratic authority," because authority always presumes a wielder of power and those against whom it is wielded, so that originally only white male landowners had the franchise, because they alone had "skin in the game."

And if you haven't heard that argument being resurrected, you haven't been listening.  We must exclude the poor and the impoverished, the argument goes, the renter and not the owner, because they have no "skin in the game," and will only vote to get their hands in the pockets of those of us who deserve the vote.  Humans, as the reviewer says Dworkin said, have interests, such as having income and leisure.  But some deserve those interests more than others; so the CEO gets a vacation, while the desk jockey at the bottom of the corporate ladder is lucky to get any time off at all.

And so on and so on; and who is to say the CEO is wrong, or is mistreating the desk jockey?  In America, at least, almost no one.  Which doesn't argue for ethics based on religion, since Norway and Sweden are far less religious, but famously have laws mandating much more time off for employees than American allows, or would seemingly ever allow.

Still, the modern consensus is if democratic authority doesn't come from all the governed, it is not democratic authority.  And yet isn't it clear today that the interests of the minority outweigh the interests of the majority?  Or is that just a structural problem of the system of representation established by the Constitution and the 50 states, and a general disinterest in voting for anyone beyond, occasionally, the President?  Do the interest of the majority, in other words, get expressed in polls, or at the voting booth?

On the other hand, it is clear the majority of the country is not rich, and that the minority of the country has the whip hand when it comes to elections and candidates and political parties.  So if the minority outweighs the majority, isn't it clear that moral equality (whatever that is; let us not presume we know) is violated?

And then, of course, how do we constrain majority rule so that we get Brown v. Board of Education, and not the injurious status quo?

Now, you can take God out of this:

One reply—Richard Rorty was among its best-known advocates—is to say that, although rights don’t have a foundation in religion, they don’t need them: morality is just about the ways that people judge and respond to various situations, and rights theory is the name for one kind of response. To say that you believe in “rights” is no more than a substantivized way of expressing that you are convinced there are things that ought not be done to people, even in pursuit of a good end. There’s no need to think that rights are some spooky kind of entity hovering behind the ways that people think and behave. To borrow a phrase from Rorty, ascribing rights to people is “the way we do things around here.”

But then you're back up against utilitarianism, and pretty soon we're living in Omelas, and no one can explain why you should leave or where you would go, because if you reject utilitarianism and God, what do you have left?

Aye, there's the rub.

Or, as our reviewer puts it:

Yet what justification can be given by someone who rejects that view? What is it about the individual whose life would otherwise be sacrificed for the collective good that makes the sacrifice wrong? To say that she or he has a right not to be put to death in order to save others is just to put a name to the problem. We also need, it seems, a satisfying reason why—something about the victim that explains why he or she has a value that overrides instrumental calculations about the greatest good. It is at this point that religious-sounding vocabulary tends to slip back into the discussion. Rawls, for example, talks about each person having an “inviolability founded on justice,” although he does not explain just what “inviolability” might amount to.

You can, in other words, build a better ethical system; but you've got a lot of building to do.

And let me return to the foundation of western ethics:  Aristotle.  Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is descriptive rather than prescriptive.  Aristotle is the father of practical Western thought.  His ethic (behavior; customs) is to find a happy man and emulate him, because the end (telos, goal) of ethical behavior is to be happy (among those "self-evident" truths Jefferson identified), and doing what a happy man does will make you happy, too.  Monkey see monkey do is all you know and all you really need to know.

Which is why the Hebrews are more important to Western civilization for the matters of ethics than the Greeks are.

Here is the crux of the matter, and it is simply wrong, in part because it isn't in the least theological:

If morality were just a matter of God’s will, then presumably whatever God willed would be good for that reason and no more. But if God is indeed just, it must be possible for human beings to recognize independently why his commands are good. Of course, goodness is essential to God, so he could not conceivably will anything that was not good—but, still, it is not his willing something that makes it good. As Seneca once wrote, “I do not obey God; I agree with him.” So, Dworkin argues, any reasonable religion must acknowledge the priority of value over the will of the Deity. But in that case, the supernatural narrative of creation, revelation and prophecy that surrounds the moral teachings of religion is dispensable.

I say it isn't theological because the review starts out wondering why Dworkin ended his career considering theological issues.  But the presumption here is a silly one:  that obedience to God is based on fear of punishment from God (the "fear" of God referenced in the translations of the scriptures into English is not equivalent to the fear of nuclear holocaust).  That is a blinkered and frankly ignorant view of the Scriptures, a reading that often makes people think there is a disjunct between the God of Abraham in the "Old Testament" and the God of Jesus in the "New."  (One more reason I prefer the terms "Hebrew Scriptures" and "Christian scriptures").  The Hebrews were not punished by God with the Babylonian Exile; rather, God left them to their own devices.  God withdrew God's protection from them not because God was piqued, but because they suffered the consequences of their actions.  They didn't suffer for their apostasy, they suffered for their selfishness and greed.  The problem of David was that he lusted after Bathsheba; but the story of Solomon's lust for power isn't so graphically represented in the Scriptures, because he made sure he was represented by the wisdom he purchased by employing scholars.  And his representation is Ecclesiastes and the Proverbs, neither of which rests so firmly on God as to express an idea that if you don't dot every "i" and cross every "t", you will suffer for it in this life or the next.  Proverbs is practically Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, and Ecclesiastes is so dour and pessimistic it is hardly makes its way into the lectionary.  Yet both are far closer to secular ethics than to the ethic of pleasing God represented by the story (not the history, mind) of Jonah and Nineveh.

The prophets have one consistent message for Israel, which is why so many prophets over such a long period of time found their works included in the canon:  Israel failed to live the way God provided to them, so Israel suffered the consequences of that failure.  Not the consequences of their apostasy, else God might well have tossed them aside.  Israel didn't reject the God of Abraham and break the covenant; they failed to abide by the justice given to them through the covenant.  As Jeremiah says, in a passage that I think sums up the teachings of the prophets as well as any few verses do:

Woe to him who says,
"I shall build myself a spacious palace
with airy roof chambers and
windows set in it.
It will be paneled with cedar
and painted with vermilion."
Though your cedar is so splendid,
does that prove you a king?
Think of your father: he ate and drank,
dealt justly and fairly; all went well with him.
He upheld the cause of the lowly and poor;
then all was well.
Did not this show he knew me? says the Lord.
But your eyes and your heart are set on naught but gain, set only on the innocent blood you can shed,
on the cruel acts of tyranny you perpetrate.

Jeremiah 22: 14-17 (REB)

The lesson of the prophets is never about punishment and anger and rebuke; it is about justice, it is about righteousness, it is about how we treat each other.  Even when Ezekiel sees the spirit of God leave the temple in Jerusalem, it is an affirmation that God is not tied to a place (a radical notion at the time). And the valley of the dry bones affirms the "priority of value over the will of the Deity."

And the prophets all affirm that how we treat each other is the first and most proper subject of ethics.

We can argue the epistemology of revelation as only a supernatural matter another time; but that revelation, along with creation (the relation of God to what exists) and prophecy (the truth as told by God to God's people and ultimately the world) can be set aside is debatable if only because the argument here is not well founded.  God's will is not the directing of every thought and act of every individual human throughout time and across time.  Nor is priority of value superior to the will of the Deity, because we only know the will of the Deity through what is held valuable.  After all:

What does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God?

And the "Golden Rule," as pronounced by Jesus of Nazareth, is to love your neighbor as you love yourself.  Is that an expression of God's will?  Or of God's wisdom?  Once we step away from the idea of God as Cosmic Commander of our Days, we enter far more interesting territory about ethics and the nature of God.

Jesus Saves...bullets for self-defense

Apropos of nothing really, but the question of salvation, and of competing soteriologies; but when I say that some soteriologies put emphasis on salvation not just of the "unsaved" but of those who are "saved" and so have a burden to save others, this is what I mean:

In an effort it's spokesman has described as 'Outreach to Rednecks,' the Kentucky Baptist Convention is leading 'Second Amendment Celebrations,' where churches around the state give away guns as door prizes to lure in nonbelievers in hopes of converting them to Christ."

Of course, that conversion is not in any sense radical (listen to the gun rights speech in the video at the link, for example).    Being in the world is fine; not being of the world is apparently secondary to being "saved."

Which is where I throw out the baby with the bathwater (and pretty much have done since high school; I just have more complex reasoning behind it now), and discard the whole idea of "salvation."

I'm not sure what doctrine of Christianity has distorted the teachings of the Gospels and the Bible as whole, than the ideas of salvation that lead to ideas for "affinity evangelism" like this.

The Myth of Fingergprints

So, is it raining, or not?

I am old.  I am cranky.  I like fine distinctions, the kind most people can't be bothered to make.  So be it.  But I'm also intrigued by the loose threads, by the corner of the paper that won't lay down, by the wrapping we put on
Call me a closet chaos believer; call me a throwback to that Greek notion that the origin of the universe was in chaos, that logos imposed order, but that chaos was never vanquished, and will one day prevail again.  Go ahead, call me that; I'm practically there.

I think of it as a metaphor for humility; something sorely lacking in this all-too modern world.

So I'm intrigued, not by the new TV show "Cosmos" (I'm about to disconnect my satellite anyway, and go to Netflix for movies; it's almost all I watch now.  If I could stream Turner Classic Movies, or have that alone on my TV, I'd be perfectly content), but about the reaction to it.  According to two articles at Slate, it began with the story of Giordano Bruno, and this somehow, it seems, has something to do with "faith."

Because we know "science" and "faith" cannot possibly coexist.  Except, of course, in the mind of Giordano Bruno; in the 16th century; where he really just made lucky guesses (and what, Neil Tyson, Einstein was tapped into the true reality of the universe, because he was Jewish and non-religious? Don 't answer that.  It doesn't matter.)  And then of course we set aside the monk Gregor Mendel, who made it possible for Richard Dawkins to be famous for something vaguely science related before he went on to seek greater fame and fortune.  Or the Big Bang Theory, to get back to matters cosmological (although, technically speaking, everything is subsumed under the idea of "cosmos," which means "everything."), first proposed by a Jesuit priest.

It's that presumed rub that fascinates.  Religious people must betray their beliefs, or scientists must deny their science, in order for the twain to meet in one mind.  Part of this is an insistence on re-writing history so it has only one side:  science good, Church bad.  It's actually a peculiarly Protestant reading of history, not an "objective" one, because Protestants so insisted the Roman church was filled with "superstitions" that it insisted it, alone, understood the true divinity of science (even when science eventually led to empiricism in the 18th century).  To this day presumably educated people insist the Church in the dim past was virulently anti-science ("Look what they did to Galileo!"; except the ones saying that don't really know what "they" did to Galileo.) when it clearly wasn't, else many more Catholic religious would have been persecuted for their "sins."

For example, "Cosmos" apparently (or perhaps this is just Slate) thinks Bruno was burned at the stake for the "heresy" of suggesting the stars are suns like Sol.  Uh...no:

In the spring of 1599, the trial was begun before a commission of the Roman Inquisition, and, after the accused had been granted several terms of respite in which to retract his errors, he was finally condemned (January, 1600), handed over to the  secular power (8 February), and burned at the stake in the Campo dei Fiori in Rome (17 February). Bruno was not condemned for his defence of the Copernican astronomy, nor for his doctrine of the plurality of inhabited worlds, but for his theological errors, among which were the following: that Christ was not God but merely an unusually skillful magician, that the Holy Ghost is the soul of the world, that the Devil will be saved, etc.

You see the irony?  Bruno wasn't a man of "faith" at all.  At least not a faith the Roman church would countenance in 1600, by which point the Church of Rome was having more than a little political trouble with the Calvinists (who excommunicated Bruno sometime after he joined them in Geneva), the Lutherans (who also excommunicated him when he joined them in Germany) and the British (whom Bruno managed to piss off, too; though they didn't excommunicate him).  The execution had everything to do with Church authority, and precious little to do with teachings about other worlds and other suns.

The more we re-cast the past as just the present redux, the more we misunderstand everything worth understanding.  And the first thing we really need to understand in this supposed "battle" between science and religion, is that Hamlet was right:  "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

Oh, and science is just another "philosophy."

You could look it up....

Because sometimes you have to laugh instead of cry....

In lieu of a picture, we have Jon Stewart:


Who says it better than any commentary I've heard yet. Which would be sad, but at least we have Jon Stewart, so rather than curse the darkness....

In other, unrelated news, a group of atheists is upset that a cross has been placed at the memorial of the World Trade Center.  They've lost this fight in the courts, so it may be a moot issue.  But this, I think, is the right response to the suit itself:

If you want to get offended over the placement of Christian imagery in a memorial to a historic event, you’re going to be pissed off at a whole lot of museums and even more of history itself. That cross is part of what happened. It’s part of the building that was destroyed and it’s part of the experience of the people who worked on the recovery efforts afterward and it’s part of the experience of the visitors who paid their respects after them. It just is. This isn’t a school system trying to sneak Bibles into the classrooms; this isn’t the Ten Commandments in a courthouse. You want to fight against that religious infiltration into public life? I am on your side. You want to keep church and state separate? Me too. But you want to pitch a fit over an item that’s a clear-cut part of the story because you don’t like what it symbolizes? You’re mad there’s no 9/11 equivalent to that 17-foot cross because apparently nobody had the foresight to pull a satisfying secular symbol out of the wreckage? Please, just grow up. Because in this fight, you haven’t got a prayer. 

I gotta agree. Pick your battles; unless you want to be the next Madalyn Murray O'Hair, this ain't one of 'em.

And, in closing, another video from The Daily Show; because, if anything, this one is better than that one.

FREEDOM IS NOT FREE!!!!!!!!!!!

MORE BARN!!!!!

You purchase it with every firearm you buy, and you earn it by shooting all the monsters:

"You know, freedom has never needed our defense more than right now," he said. "Almost everywhere you look, something has gone wrong. You know it in your heart. You feel it in your gut. Something in our country has gone wrong...All across America, people come up to me and they say, 'Wayne? I've never been worried about this country until now.' They say it not in anger, but with sadness in their eyes...We fear for the safety of our families. That's why neighborhood streets that once were filled with bicycles and skateboards and laughter in the air, now sit empty and silent." Children do not play any more because of trigger locks? Background checks? Or is it because, as Wayne points out, the woods are full of monsters.

 "We trust what we know in our hearts to be right," he said. "We trust our freedom. In this uncertain world, surrounded by lies and corruption everywhere you look, there is no greater freedom than the right to survive and protect our families with all the rifles, shotguns and handguns we want. We know, in the world that surrounds us, there are terrorists and there are home invaders, drug cartels, carjackers, knockout gamers and rapers, and haters and campus killers, and airport killers, shopping mall killers, and killers who scheme to destroy our country with massive storms of violence against our power grids, or vicious waves of chemicals or disease that could collapse our society that sustains us all."

 "So, I ask you," he said. "do you trust this government to protect you?"

 "NOOOOOOOO!!!" replied the crowd.

How can you trust the government?  The only freedom that is really free comes from the end of a gun.  You purchase it by blowing holes in people.  So buy another gun; it keeps LaPierre in food and shelter:

“In this uncertain world, surrounded by lies and corruption everywhere you look, there is no greater freedom than the right to survive and protect our families with all the rifles, shotguns, and handguns we want!”

FREEEEEDDDDUUUUUUMMMMMMMBBBBBBBB!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Lord have mercy.

Christ have mercy.

Lord have mercy.

Because we have none to spare.

Lent 2014

 *

When wilt thou save the people?
O God of mercy, when?
The people, Lord, the people,
Not thrones and crowns, but men!
Flowers of thy heart, O God, are they;
let them not pass like weeds away
Their heritage a sunless day
God save the people

Shall crime bring crime forever,
Strength aiding still the strong?
Is it thy will, O Father,
that men shall toil for wrong?
No, say thy mountains; No, say thy skies;
man's clouded sun shall brightly rise,
and songs be heard, instead of sighs,
God save the people!

When wilt thou save the people?
O God of mercy, when?
The people, Lord, the people!
Not thrones and crowns, but men!
God save the people; thine they are,
thy children as thy angels fair;
from vice, oppression and despair,
God save the people!

---

Words: Ebenezer Elliott, 1850

So, ntodd put me onto this, by posting the Broadway cast album version (my favorite, still).  From there I went looking for the original words, which I found I'd posted before.  You can go there (in the comments), or here, to read the actual original version, which was a poem that became the hymn, above.  In looking for the words, I also found this fascinating bit of history:

[TO THR EDITOR OP THE "SPECTATOR.") will have been amusing to many to read in the Spectator of November 14th of the " revival " of Ebenezer Elliott's "When wilt Thou save the people F" as occurring "the other day." That rhyme has been one of the most popular iterns at P.S.A. and kindred assemblies for at least a dozen years past. It appears as No. 1 in Mr. Howard Kennedy's" Sunday Afternoon Song-book," published in 1892, but its revival is due to its inclusion in the hymnal of the Congregationalists, and the appropriate tune there wedded to it by Mr. Josiah Booth some sixteen years ago. Immediately on the appear- ance of the first edition of the hymnal the song was caught up, and has been sung with enthusiasm all over the country almost ad nauseam ever since. Curiously enough, during the greater part of this period of sixteen years the Government has been Conservative. After all, Sir, is there any ground for the " anxiety " to which you refer? Cannot even the most old-fashioned Conservative pray in the lines which may be called the summing-up of the whole— "Prom vice, oppression, and despair,

God save the people?"

Permit me to point out three clerical slips in your quotation. In the first line " Thy " should read " the "; in the second "Mercies" should read " mercy "; and in the fifth" breath" should be " heart."—I am, Sir, &c., CHARLES T. PRICE.

Rock House, Ash Field, Ross.

[Ebenezer Elliott's fine poem is, per se, as worthy of hick, sion in a hymn-book as Mr. Kipling's "Recessional " ; but when it was sung at political meetings in the "forties" it was certainly meant and regarded as a song of revolution.---:ED. Spectator.]

I quote the whole because it mentions the Congregationalists, my ecclesiastical ancestors in the UCC, and because of the final reference to this "as a song of revolution."  Makes it even more appropriate to the early days of Lent.

*And if you don't turn up your speakers as loud as you can for this:  you have no soul.

Ash Wednesday 2014--All Fall Down

MEMENTO, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris.

Remember, human, that you are dust, and to dust you will return

--Genesis 3:19

I

Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?

Because I do not hope to know again
The infirm glory of the positive hour
Because I do not think
Because I know I shall not know
The one veritable transitory power
Because I cannot drink
There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing again

Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessed face
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again

Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice

And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And I pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do hot hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgement not be too heavy upon us

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.

(VI)

Blessed sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.


--T.S. Eliot, "Ash Wednesday," The Complete Poems and Plays 1909-1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1971), pp. 60-61, 67)

HEAR my prayer, O Lord;
let my cry come to you.
Do not hide your face from me
in the day of my distress.
Incline your ear to me;
answer me speedily in the day when I call.
My days pass away like smoke,
and my bones burn like a furnace.
My heart is stricken and withered like grass;
I am too wasted to eat my bread.
Because of my loud groaning
my bones cling to my skin.
I am like an owl of the wilderness,
like a little owl of the waste places.
I lie awake;
I am like a lonely bird on the housetop.
All day long my enemies taunt me;
those who deride me use my name for a curse.
For I eat ashes like bread,
and mingle tears with my drink,
because of your indignation and anger;
for you have lifted me up and thrown me aside.
My days are like an evening shadow;
I wither away like grass.
But you, O Lord, are enthroned forever;
your name endures to all generations.
You will rise up and have compassion on Zion,
for it is time to favor it;
the appointed time has come.
For your servants hold its stones dear,
and have pity on its dust.

--Psalm 102:1-14

I said in my heart with regard to human beings that God is testing them to show that they are but animals. For the fate of humans and the fate of animals is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and humans have no advantage over the animals; for all is vanity. All go to one place; all are from the dust, and all turn to dust again.

--Ecclesiastes 3:18-20

ASHES, ashes, all fall down. How could I have forgotten? Didn't I see the heavens wiped shut just yesterday, on the road walking? Didn't I fall from the dark of the stars to these senselit and noisome days? The great ridged granite millstone of time is illusion, for only the good is real; the great ridged granite millstone of space is illusion, for God is spirit and worlds his flimsiest dreams: but the illusions are almost perfect, are apparently perfect for generations on end, and the pain is also, and undeniably, real. The pain within the mill-stones' pitiless turning is real, for our love for each other-for the world and all the products of extension-is real, vaulting, insofar as it is love, beyond the plane of the stones' sickening churn and arcing to the realm of spirit bare. And you can get caught holding one end of a love, when your father drops, and your mother; when a land is lost, or a time, and your friend blotted out, gone, your brother's body spoiled, and cold, your infant dead, and you dying: you reel out love's long line alone, stripped like a live wire loosing its sparks to a cloud, like a live wire loosed in space to longing and grief everlasting.

--Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm, HarperCollins, 1977.

Historic Christianity rose into a high and strange coup de théatre of morality -- things that are to virtue what the crimes of Nero are to vice. The spirits of indignation and of charity took terrible and attractive forms, ranging from that monkish fierceness that scourged like a dog the first and greatest of the Plantagenets, to the sublime pity of St. Catherine, who, in the official shambles, kissed the bloody head of the criminal. Poetry could be acted as well as composed. This heroic and monumental manner in ethics has entirely vanished with supernatural religion. They, being humble, could parade themselves: but we are too proud to be prominent. Our ethical teachers write reasonably for prison reform; but we are not likely to see Mr. Cadbury, or any eminent philanthropist, go into Reading Gaol and embrace the strangled corpse before it is cast into the quicklime. Our ethical teachers write mildly against the power of millionaires; but we are not likely to see Mr. Rockefeller, or any modern tyrant, publicly whipped in Westminster Abbey.

--G.K. Chesterton

Stop Making Sense

This isn't exactly the "religion" Bonhoeffer was critiquing, but I think had he known it in Germany, he would have:

According to the Pew Research Center, Alabama is the second most religious state in the nation with 74 percent of residents saying religion is very important in their lives. Number one is Mississippi. It is a pitiful irony that those states that are most religious are also states with the most individual suffering. More than 30 percent of the children in these two states suffer extreme poverty. In both states, the primary reason for abject poverty is that more than a third of children have parents who lack secure employment, decent wages, and healthcare. But thanks to Jesus, these poor saps vote for the party that rejects Medicaid expansion, opposes early education expansion, legislates larger cuts to education, and slashes food stamps to make room for oil and agriculture subsidies on top of tax cuts and loopholes for corporations and the wealthy.

I'm not convinced of the direct connection, or even of the correlation, between being the "second most religious state in the nation" and rejecting Medicaid expansion, opposing early education expansion, and all the rest.  But the idea that the "Ten Commandments" are God's last word on governance (which is what prompts the article; that Alabama is about to put an referendum to the state on the question of displaying the Ten Commandments on government property), is certainly a triumph of "religion," even if I don't know of too many Christian denominations who make a point of promoting such displays.

It is a curiosity to accept that Alabama (as in most of the American South) is so "religious" (and "religious" here is synonymous with "Christian") and yet so accepting of poverty, ignorance, and widespread and amenable suffering (and yes, education is basic to Christianity, not just to Christian European history.  If Jesus could read from Isaiah, it was because he knew how to read; Paul was an educated man, too.  The idea that education leads to apostasy is a modern fundamentalist concern, not an historical Christian stance.)  We don't have to link this religious posture to the acceptance of so much want and need to wonder why this religious posture doesn't work toward the alleviation of so much want and need.  The German Evangelicals who came to this country in the 19th century set up hospitals, orphanages, and even mental institutions, as well as schools, in response to such ordinary human individual and social problems, and did so because of their religious beliefs.  Concern for others is hardly antithetical to Christianity, and those German immigrants were certainly "religious."  But the question is: what has changed?  Or what never existed in the South, that so many problems persist despite widespread allegiance to Christianity?

First, of course, it has to do with the school of Christianity, which is to say it has to do with what you place are the center of your Christian faith:  soteriology, or care for others?  Soteriology, in this case, is a very specific form:  the soteriology of the "saved," of those who have secured their place in heaven and feel a responsibility to save the souls of others; but a soteriology that also puts emphasis on the sweet bye and bye, and de-emphasizes, in a kind of perverse Platonism, the life lived here.   It also shifts the problem of poverty back onto the backs of the poor; which would be perverse if it weren't so Biblical:  "Master, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born poor?"  John's Jesus ignores the question and turns the man's condition toward a sign, a semeia, a signifier, of the nature of Jesus.  Another reason the Gospel of John is the favorite of Southern evangelicals.  Luke would have turned that question against the questioners.

Such soteriology has absolutely no place for the idea that "people in need  are the ambassadors of the gods," and that "As God's Ambassadors you should be given food,  clothing and shelter by those who are able to give it."  This is not entirely peculiar to the South, however, because "the duty of hospitality is neither taught nor practiced in Christian countries."  The soteriology of this argument is  that salvation is an individual decision and responsibility, and that lodges a responsibility in the saved individual to save the soul (and not necessarily the body) of another.  The saved, in other words, is responsible for offering the salvation to another, but that other is responsible for accepting the offer.  If all you are responsible for is the eternal life of another's soul, you aren't your brother's keeper when it comes to food, clothing, and shelter.  And if your brother is responsible for their salvation, they are even more responsible for their own maintenance.  Especially if, as has been true for Southern culture since the time of the plantations, you have been kept in poverty yourself, and told to blame your poverty on other impoverished persons, such as poor blacks and even poor whites.  The bitter arrogance of Faulkner's Snopes is a fine example of what this culture produces:  poor whites who disdain both blacks and the rich whites who give them no more than subsistence wages, and less respect and regard than is paid to their livestock.  In such a culture, it isn't necessarily religion that blinds one to the needs of others.*

One other aspect of this soteriology is its emphasis on a kind of Neo-Platonism which denies the reality of this life in favor of the next one.  Of course, the people making those denials are themselves quite comfortable; but that's not a condition peculiar to conservative Christians in the American South.

Culture has a remarkable way of persisting over time; it is a persistence that cannot be overlooked, or underestimated.

So change the religion, change the outcome?  Perhaps.  Change the culture, and you will certainly change the outcome.  Aye, there's the rub.  But failing that, we're back to the question:

What would a "religionless" Christianity look like?  I think Bonhoeffer meant to use it as Bultmann meant to do; to remove the dead traditions of 2000 years accretion from the central teachings of Christianity.  But can we also use the concept to remove Christianity from its connections with the culture?  That Roman church, in large part (especially with its "Princes of the Church") clings to a past best left behind; but being international, it also tends to stand apart from culture better than most Protestant denominations (and most Protestants individually) do.  Protestantism has historically been almost entirely a creature of the culture it exists in; can it find a new way to be in the world but not of the world?

*Werleman's analysis goes completely awry on this point.  He states what he means to be his thesis:  "The point is that in an overly religious country it works too well, and to America’s detriment," but then the concluding paragraphs present analyses of the problem that rest entirely on culture, and have nothing directly or indirectly to do with religion.  He ends on this note:

The Republican Party, particularly in the South, will always dredge up these cultural issues to ensure its base remains a captive tool of corporate ideology. That way its corporate sponsors can maintain a perpetually impoverished lower class from which to draw its cheap labor.

Which is right, but marks a completely different issue than he started with.  The problem in the American South is cultural, not specifically religious or Christian.

"Freedom is not free"

"A person with a gun is a citizen; a person without a gun is a victim."--A Florida legislator, per Rachel Maddow's show

It'll cost you at least a hand and a leg.

No, I'm not kidding.  Peruse a few of the "accidental shooting" reports at Southern Beale, and consider how many truly stupid people are carrying guns.  Consider, too, the observations of Lt. Col. Robert Bateman on gun safety and the NRA; except for the fact my father has never owned a gun and I know of them only from friends who had guns (for hunting, not for "protection"), his experience is mine.

The most recent account Southern Beale has is a man in the dressing room of a Bass Pro Shop with his five year old son.  The man took his cell phone and his Glock out of his pants.  His son played with one, and then the other, and ended up shooting himself and his father.  Neither injury was described as "life-threatening," but I'm not sure a 9mm round through the hand of a five year old is going to do that hand much good.

Why the hell is anyone carrying a handgun to a concert, or into the dressing room of a store?  Are we really that insanely paranoid and jacked up on action movies where everybody is "other" and all those "others" are terrorists and thugs who can only be stopped by our manly resilience and our firearms?

Or is it because we've started buying the casual lie that "Freedom is not free"?

I will not put all my eggs in that basket, but I will put more than a few there.  Yes, the NRA has become a lobbying group for gun manufacturers, and is earning its keep increasing the sales of both firearms and ammunition.  But people are buying both the product and the concept because they cannot seem to otherwise believe that violence is the sure cure for whatever ails you.

Take Ukraine as an example.  I understand that Lindsey Graham is running again in South Carolina, so any excuse to belittle the "manhood" of Barack Obama makes electoral sense to him.  But the same stupidity that says we must "do something" about Vladimir Putin and Russia, also says we should have sent in the world's manliest men to Benghazi, and we only failed to because we don't want to pay the price of freedom (which is not free!).  Nobody wants to acknowledge that the defense secretary refused to authorize air strikes or support which wouldn't arrive for 8 hours because this isn't a movie and the jets aren't all 10 minutes away from any location where the monster/bad guy lingers waiting for the cavalry to fly in and end the movie.  If memory serves, it took George H.W. Bush months, 9 or so, to assemble the ground forces (much less the international consensus to proceed) to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait.  We didn't exactly send in Seal Team Six within 24 hours of Iraqi troops crossing the border, and drive them all out within 90 minutes.

So what the hell are we gonna "do" about Ukraine?  Start a war with Russia, immediately?  Right.  You and what army?  No, literally.....

Violence delayed is retribution denied:  that has become the American way of life, apparently.  And retribution denied is not to be allowed, because freedom isn't free and somebody's gotta pay (preferably some black kids or foreigners).   I don't understand this in some still larger sociological context, but it seems clear we have decided freedom comes from the end of a and freedom is denied if we can't carry that gun no matter how irresponsible we are with it.

This is a recipe for disaster.

"Nietzsche is dead."--God

I haven't read the book (and don't intend to; life is too short), but according to the early reviews, Peter Watson's "intellectual history" The Age of Atheists starts with Nietzsche and ends with the three horsemen of the New Atheist apocalypse:  Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris.  Funny, that; starting with a philologist and influential philosopher, and ending with three dilettantes:

Thanks to such discoveries we will eventually be able to say, objectively, that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions, because once we put religion in its place, “[w]ell-being captures all that we can intelligibly value.”

Watson is referring to Sam Harris there.  Since he starts with Neitzsche, I wonder if Watson bothers to mention the "God is Dead" theological movement of the '60's, one inspired more by the late thinking of Bonhoeffer than by the mad German.  It was a movement trying to take seriously Bonhoeffer's idea that God was about to become irrelevant to the modern world; if so, the thinking went, maybe we can establish a "religionless Christianity" by accepting that God, or at least all the "old" ideas about God, are (is) dead.  I still think those ashes might be worth stirring, but I haven't seen anything indicate Watson took any interest.

As for this evaluation of Harris:  Thanks, but I've seen Omelas, and I don't want to live there.  Besides, I wasn't aware that any religiously grounded ethic was not based on what "we can intelligibly value."  The conflict, as ever, is over what those terms mean:  both "value" and "intelligibly."  And that has been true since at least Euripides' "Medea." But then we are dealing with remarkably ignorant men:

Harris argued from the failures of the kibbutzim in Israel that some forms of social life are less moral than others; that conservative societies have higher rates of divorce, teenage pregnancy and pornography; that it is societies whose members are allowed to maximize themselves and others that are the most successful changing morally, and improving, he emphasized—for instance, we are less prepared than we used to be to accept collateral damage in conflict situations.

Harris as sociologist makes out no better than Harris as philosopher, or as observer of current events.  I'll notify the people of Pakistan immediately that the drone strikes have stopped because Americans are now too moral to accept the casual deaths of foreigners.  As soon as that actually happens, anyway.

One of his prime conclusions was that “there may be nothing more important than human cooperation.”

Honestly, this is so stupid it's criminal. This is not an argument, it's the plea of Rodney King:  "Why can't we just all get along?"  Except for Harris, the plea is followed by "Kill all the noncooperators!  That'll fix it!"  And no, I'm not exaggerating.  This argument is also pretty much the claim of everyone from the Roman Empire to 20th century fascism and communism.  The only problem is when some people think there is something more important than cooperation; and what do we do with those troublemakers?  Then again, Harris doesn't seem to have much problem with imperialism, so long as it is on his side.  But from a purely practical point of view, cooperation is the problem; how, precisely, do we attain it?  (I also think Watson's reading of Harris and Dawkins is absolute bunkum; but that's yet another matter.)

As for "improving" morally; don't make me laugh; especially since Harris clearly thinks all Muslims and Christian fundamentalists present a clear and present danger, and should be wiped from the face of the earth.  All in the name of being morally superior, of course.

Gee, who else has taken that stance against other groups of people within living memory?  Sit down, Mr. Godwin, you aren't needed here.  The thing speaks for itself, as the lawyers say.

Or there's this, from the year 1984:

Dawkins then went on to quote from his colleague Peter Atkins’s book The Second Law(1984) [i.e., of thermodynamics]: “We are the children of chaos, and the deep structure of change is decay. At root, there is only corruption, and the unstemmable tide of chaos. Gone is purpose; all that is left is direction. This is the bleakness we have to accept as we peer deeply and dispassionately into the heart of the Universe.”

Which is on the cutting edge of 1843:

“If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?”

Johannes de Silentio, Fear and Trembling.

Been there, done that, gone through it with Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Beckett, Sartre, and Camus.  A.N. Wilson covered it in popular form in 1999, for pity's sake.  Watson's book is supposedly a history that takes this all into account, at least according to the reviews.  How can anyone seriously argue that Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris are blazing a new path, except  to do so from truly benighted ignorance?

G.E.Moore.  Aristotle.  Boethius.  Cicero.  I can name philosophers ancient and modern who have essayed systems of ethical behavior without reference to religious beliefs or mores, and I haven't even touched on Eastern philosophy.  Per the reviews, Watson can, too; but there's nothing of that in this excerpt.  Why do these "atheists" insist they have just now discovered fire and invented the wheel when all they have is disdain for an imagined "other" and a philosophical tool as useful as a wet noodle?   I am convinced the only reason these people post and publish is to find someone they can look down on so they can feel superior.  Stenger conflates all religions with some version of Christianity he keeps in his head so he can stick pins in it, and clergy with theologians, a distinction and difference any clergy would insist on.  From Dawkins to Dennett to Watson they all seem to be fighting with the ghost of Jerry Falwell, when they aren't still wrestling with issues from the Victorian era (issues wrestled among public intellectuals, too; not so much among ethicists, theologians, or philosophers).  None of them want to engage a serious discussion (Dawkins likens knowing anything about theology or philosophy of religion to being well informed about fairies and unicorns).  All they do is parade their ignorance and set fire to straw men of their own imagining.

It's pathetic, really.  But it is also what passes for public intellectual discourse in America, where Stephen Pinker gets more regard than Noam Chomsky, and Daniel Dennett is more likely to be quoted than Jacques Derrida.

In the past few decades, both evolutionary biologists like Dawkins and cosmologists—physicists and astronomers—have mounted a spirited attack on the basic dimensions of religion, in particular the main monotheisms, and in doing so have tried hard to reshape what—for the sake of a better phrase—we may call our spiritual predicament.

Really?  We're doomed to repeat the 19th century all over again?  Or did you miss it the first time?  Because I think we've had that discussion, and by the 1920's it sort of came to a head, and we all moved on.

Or having learned nothing from history, are you determined to repeat it?

One of the comments at Salon refers to Pinker's assertions about the decline in violence in history as "Victorian triumphalism."  So maybe it's appropriate our public intellectuals are now atheists and philosophers who have the respect of the Victorians among us.  Frankly I always preferred Browning and Hardy over Tennyson.  ("Christmas:  1924" beats "In Memoriam" all to heck and gone for pungent insight; much as I still like portions of the latter.)  And I dare say this kerfuffle looks very serious to Very Important People, but the fact is the fears of Victorian England about a meltdown in social order were vastly overblown (and self-interested; those in power worried, as ever, about retaining their power) and the meltdown that finally came (thanks largely to World War I, which shattered the European ideal of decency and good order on the Continent) was well behind us all by the 1960's.

It's about time the "New Atheists" joined the 21st century, and quit wishing for the return of the 19th (is it any coincidence so many of the "leading lights" of the New Atheists are either British or products of elite East Coast institutions?).  And the sooner they actually learn half as much as Nietzsche knew, the better for the rest of us they insist on pestering.

New Wine in Old Wineskins

This, of course, is ever the problem:

Rev. John Bambrick, pastor of a parish in Jackson Township, part of the Diocese of Trenton, told the Star-Ledger that parishioners withholding money from the annual appeal may end up depriving funds from people in need.

"It does hurt the poor," Bambrick, who is described as an occasional critic of Myers, said. "As priests, that’s the hardest thing for us. It doesn’t hurt the archbishop. There’s no way to hold him accountable. But the poor are held accountable for his bad decisions."

Parishioners of the Diocese of Trenton are outraged by the "Bishop of Bling" and his "palace" (maybe it's time to stop calling them "Princes of the Church," eh?), and are withholding money because of what they see as wretched excess.  But, as Fr. Bambrick says, it is the poor who will suffer.

Because poverty is a matter of power; the Archbishop has power, the poor do not.  The importance of the power of powerlessness is contained in this incident.  Jesus is not the guy in the palace; Jesus is the guy on the park bench.

And who's looking out for him?