This is where I came in.....

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans obliquely, but the levees that were supposed to protect the city, gave way and drowned the city.*  The result made people as near as Houston think the apocalypse was upon us, because when Hurricane Rita threatened Houston, everybody from Galveston to Houston fled to Dallas, creating a traffic jam some 250 miles long.

As I said at the time, this led to the deaths of several elderly people when the nursing home van they were in caught fire after idling for several hours. Local officials made matters worse by telling everyone in the path of the storm to evacuate.  Tout le Houston thought of themselves as "in the path of the storm," and evacuate they did.  I live well inland from even the Houston Ship Channel, but people well to my west (away from the coast) were jumping in their cars and heading for the exits.  They didn't get very far; even the roads to Austin, almost due west of here, were clogged beyond capacity.  Had the storm actually struck Houston, the damage would have been nearly incalculable, as some people rode out the night of the storm on the freeways in and around the city.

In the end, Rita struck Beaumont and Lake Charles, well to the east of Houston.  As I said at the time (again!), this is pretty much the damage Houston got directly from Rita.



So now comes ebola to the U.S. via Texas (actually via Belgium and one of the airports in D.C., but why split hairs), and I'm seeing the same panic again.  When Rita threatened Houston, not only did the fourth largest city in the country turn into a ghost town (city streets were empty around me; it was like the Rapture), but I saw a man in my neighborhood board up his house and paint the wood with the legend "Looters will be shot!"

When Ike took out power in the city for three weeks a few years later, nobody panicked or boarded up their house and waited for the rapacious looters.  In fact, no chaos befell the city at all, and nobody was afraid.

In this scenario, ebola is Rita; the crisis in west Africa is Katrina.  And Rick Perry is the hapless administrator in Houston (one of several) telling us panic is our best option just now; when he isn't blaming the Federal government for not keeping Texas safe.  Yes, the same Federal government which shouldn't tell Texas how to pollute its air, water, and soil, should have protected Texas from one terminal case of ebola, and two people who are symptomatic but being treated.

In other states, because we don't have the wherewithal, even with the Texas Medical Center and UTMB-Galveston, to handle it.  Apparently.

The panic, though, is familiar.  It is media induced.  Nobody who came to Houston from Katrina to find shelter in the Astrodome was blind with fear.  No fear swept through Houston at their presence.  Local people helped out, even if Tom DeLay made a fool of himself down there.  We were calm.

Until the threat of a storm came.  We didn't panic when Ike was coming, either; or after it tore up the city and wrecked our power system and scattered trees like they were Tinker-toys.

But now, the country has turned into Houston, and panic is the word of the day.  It's almost funny, talking about a "travel ban" from "west Africa," when no one is calling for a travel ban on Texas, which is where the virus is in this country.  Well, now we've taken it to two other states, so I suppose we should quarantine those states, too.

Just a long winded way of saying I've seen this movie, and shame on us all for not knowing how it ends, and for replacing native American xenophobia for native American common sense.  Houston embarrassed itself in the Rita debacle, and people died who should have been safely home.

How far are we going to follow the analogy this time?

*yes, you can even use that neglect by the Federal government as part of the analogy, if you want to.

Will someone please pour the tea?

The comments, for once, are better than the commentary over at Esquire's Politics Blog:

But what is at issue here are not criminal acts, but the discovery process in a civil suit, and a discovery process aimed at pure speech -- namely, what the pastors said to their congregations during a religious service -- and that process should end at the church's door as well. If that isn't protected speech under the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of religion, then it's protected speech under the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of political speech. And if you want to make the argument that the latter consideration should be enough to revoke the tax-exempt status of the churches in question, I'm right there with you. But that's not what the city of Houston is up to here, either. It is going on a fishing expedition into what the pastors thought and what the pastors said. If the city wants to prove that the pastors encouraged their flocks to finagle the signature process, it simply has to find another way to do it. If it wants other documents to that effect, it should draw its subpoenas more narrowly.

First, let's get the facts narrowly right:  the City of Houston didn't draft these subpoenas; their pro bono non-city-employee lawyers drafted them.  A narrow point, but not an insignificant one, that leads us to Point the Second:

This lawsuit was not brought by the City, and these subpoenas are not an attempt by the City to use legal process to quell speech, even religious speech.  The City is a defendant in a lawsuit, and as such entitled to wide-ranging discovery into any information that might aid its defense of that lawsuit, even if the information obtained is not ultimately admissible under the rules of evidence.

And point the Third:  sermons are public speeches.  Many pastors put them on the church's website, advertise them on church signs, maybe even distribute copies available to anyone who walks into the sanctuary (which is generally open to anyone who can get in).  No church I know of closes to doors to non-members when it comes time for worship, or shoos out non-members for the sermon (the eucharist may be closed, but the sermon?)  There's nothing private or special about them, and there is no reason for the city not to ask to see them.

Because the purpose of these subpoenas to parties not parties to the lawsuit, is to find out what was being said about the petition process that tried to get signatures from church members and others, in order to force the HERO (Houston Equal Rights Ordinance) to be decided by referendum.  The City declared a number of signatures invalid, denied the petitions. and refused to hold the referenda election.  That's what the suit is about.

So, the City wants to know, did the plaintiffs know they had problems with their petitions and their signatures?  That kind of information may be found in the correspondence (which the City is still seeking) of the subpoenaed entities, and in their speeches (which the City is also still seeking) and public presentations, and even in sermons.

Which are not protected by the First Amendment because they are made in churches.  If a pastor, in time of war, gives aid and comfort to the enemy in a sermon, that's treason, despite the First Amendment.  If a pastor calls for the assassination of a President from the pulpit, that's still a crime.  You don't get a "King's X" because you claim what you said was a "sermon."  It simply doesn't work that way, and it shouldn't work that way.  Eugene Volokh's examples all come from criminal law (grand juries aren't part of civil lawsuits), so his conclusion that this subpoena even may be overly broad is inapplicable here.  Subpoenas in civil cases are always "overly broad" when compared with criminal cases.  If this one is truly too broad, the court which issued should retract it or modify it.

As I type the local NPR station is running its daily local news discussion program, and three people are discussing this very issue.  But they are interpreting it as an investigation of political speech from the pulpit.  The point of this discovery is not to catch the pastors out or turn them over to the IRS; it is to find out what was said about the petition process, and finding that out from sermons is as legitimate as finding it out from statements made in Fellowship Hall, or in e-mails, or in church newsletters.

What I really resent is how easily even people like Charlie Pierce are persuaded to agree with Sean Hannity.  The fact that you think Hannity could be right about anything should be enough to make you realize you need more information on the issue.  After all, if Mr. Pierce or Mr. Hannity were defendants in a civil suit, and they thought the sermons of local churches might provide them useful information for their trial, they'd make quite a different argument about this subject.

"...a sign of both His anger and of His grace...."

Continuing with the continuing story of just what the synod in Rome is doing and saying, AP reports (I won't quote them, it would be too extensive) that the language we read in English from the "working document" was true to the original Italian, and that's the problem.

So a translation in English (because apparently the conservative Bishops speak the language of Christ, which we all know is English) has been made, changing the "welcoming these people [you know who]" to "capable of providing for these people," which isn't hospitality at all.

JCF, in comments below, picked up on the other change, from providing "precious support" to providing "valuable support."  Maybe because in America we only like things that are valuable, because our standard of measure for all things is money.

The drafting committees will fight this out (conservatives demanded changes, the Pope appointed "progressives" to draft the final statement), but the final statement has to be approved by a 2/3rds vote.

And there is still some confusion on the point.  The Catholic News Agency provides the original Italian of a portion of the statement, but argues that "valutando" should be translated as "evaluate" in English, not "value."  But is that the same passage that has been translated as providing "valuable support"?  It's impossible to tell without the full statement in Italian, and an analysis of the English translation by an expert in both languages.

What this language, whatever it is, clearly doesn't do is radically shift the teachings of the Church on homosexuality, teachings which, from a pastoral point of view, are a bit of a nightmare.  First, there's a sort of "love the sinner, hate the sin," except that homosexuality isn't a sin; it's more an "objective disorder:"

Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder.

Which pretty much means, be careful how you welcome them:

no authentic pastoral programme will include organizations in which homosexual persons associate with each other without clearly stating that homosexual activity is immoral. A truly pastoral approach will appreciate the need for homosexual persons to avoid the near occasions of sin.

If you combine that with the insistence "that departure from the Church's teaching, or silence about it, in an effort to provide pastoral care is neither caring nor pastoral and that:

An authentic pastoral programme will assist homosexual persons at all levels of the spiritual life: through the sacraments, and in particular through the frequent and sincere use of the sacrament of Reconciliation, through prayer, witness, counsel and individual care. In such a way, the entire Christian community can come to recognize its own call to assist its brothers and sisters, without deluding them or isolating them.

What I hear is something very much like an act of the medieval church as described by Michel Foucault:

"My friend," says the ritual of the Church of Vienne, "it pleaseth Our Lord that thou shouldst be infected with this malady, and thou hast great grace at the hands of Our Lord that he desireth to punish thee for thy iniquities in this world."  And at the very moment when the priest and his assistants drag him out of the church with backward step, the leper is assured that he still bears witness for God:  "And howsoever thou mayest be apart from the Church and the company of the Sound, yet art thou not apart from the grace of God."  Brueghel's lepers attend at a distance, but forever, the climb to Calvary on which the entire people accompanies Christ.  Hieratic witnesses of evil, they accomplish their salvation in and by their very exclusion; in a strange reversibility that is the opposite of good works and prayer, they are saved by the hand that is not stretched out.  The sinner who abandons the leper at his door opens his way to heaven.  "For which have patience in thy malady; for Our Lord hateth thee not because of it, keepeth thee not from his company; but if thou hast patience thou wilt be saved, as was the leper who died before the gates of the rich man and was carried straight to paradise."  Abandonment is his salvation; his exclusion offers him another form of communion.

Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, tr. Richard Howard (New York:  Vintage, 1965), pp. 6-7.

No, the Church does not now drag homosexuals from the sanctuary and deny them any communion with the company of saints and believers.  The exclusion has stopped being external and physical, but continues to be internal and social, if not spiritual.  They must avoid "near occasions of sin" by not being who they are, a condition for which they are as blameless as the lepers.  The blame is on them only when they try to socialize their condition by sharing it with even one other.

If that will ever change is anyone's guess.*

*adding:  this is going to get more confusing before it gets clearer.

So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow

Or upon what the meaning of "is" is:

"Contrary to perception, death is not a specific moment but a potentially reversible process that occurs after any severe illness or accident causes the heart, lungs and brain to cease functioning. If attempts are made to reverse this process, it is referred to as 'cardiac arrest'; however, if these attempts do not succeed it is called 'death'. In this study we wanted to go beyond the emotionally charged yet poorly defined term of NDEs to explore objectively what happens when we die."

I'm not interested in shoehorning all human experience into an empirical or positivistic frame, the better to explain that "love ain't nothin' but sex misspelled" or even that love is nothing more than neurochemistry.  The above, however, is a statement about that study of death I mentioned earlier, and the statement there is so full of ideas it needs to be unpacked slowly.

First, the real result of this study is to redefine our definition of death.  This isn't really new; we've been at that definition since the 19th century, at least.  Poe leaves us the most accessible legacy of the condition we now call "comatose," in his stories about premature burial (a key plot point in "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Black Cat") and, of course, his story "The Premature Burial."  People declared dead were not, after all, dead; and there was something of a cottage industry in supplying burial places the interred could escape from, should they wake up in their coffins.  We've been struggling pretty much since then to decide when someone is really, truly dead, and when they are just non-responsive.

But we've always assumed death was a moment.  Tolstoy subtly challenged that reasoning in "The Death of Ivan Ilyich," but the events of Ilyich's death point more to "death in life" as Ilyich descends into misery and despair, only to find just before the moment of death that he is at peace, and reconciled (though they may never know it) with the family he neglected long before his slow slide to oblivion.  The story ends with Ilyich embracing his fate, and leaving little doubt the last moment of the story, is Ilyich's last moment of life.  Death-in-life may be the product of Ilyich's fears and anxieties, but death itself is still that instant between the last breath, and never drawing breath again.

Now, this study tells us, we may need to reconsider our definition of death as an irreversible instant.  As Dr. Parnia says:

If attempts are made to reverse this process, it is referred to as 'cardiac arrest'; however, if these attempts do not succeed it is called 'death'.

Death is announced when attempts at resuscitation are said to have failed; but when did death occur? Before the efforts?  When they were abandoned?  Somewhere during?  We aren't really left with the question "What is death?"  Death is the cessation of life, or animation, of breath (pneuma, spirit, breath, geist).  No, the question now is:  "When is death?"  And the answer may be not a moment:  but a series of moments.  Ilyich's death begins the moment he injures his hip; his agony is self-inflicted and terrifying, until his last moments when he ceases to struggle and accepts the end of life.  In those moments he is at peace, and more, he suddenly understands his family as people he loves, wholly and unconditionally.  These last moments, his spiritual struggle turned to spiritual revelation, Tolstoy implies, are the moments of his death.

Perhaps Tolstoy got it right after all.

This study, conducted over 4 years, in 15 hospitals, in many countries, is an examination of what happens in death; but not at the moment of death.  Near death experiences present empirical evidence of life after death, or of hallucinations in the extremis of death which are only recovered by the "miracle" of modern science, only if death itself is an instant, a boundary line, truly that bourne from which no traveler returns and which to step over is to make an irrevocable step.  But if death is understood more carefully, it is a process of existence, truly a matter of time; and of time in its fullness.

Which may challenge our notions of euthanasia, of death-in-life, of suffering and prolonging life.  The argument for euthanasia presumes death is a simple cessation of life.  But what it if is not so simple after all?

I have to add, having put in that link to the Salon article, that end of life decisions are not as simple as we imagine they will be.  You may tell everyone you love exactly how you want to die; but you leave them with the burden of acting on your wishes, and that burden isn't a real one until the time comes.

I stood in the basement of a hospital with a woman whose husband had just been brought in by ambulance, the victim of a stroke that took his life a few hours later.  As I spoke to her (as her pastor), the doctor came in to ask he she wanted to keep her husband on life support, as that was all that was keeping him breathing.  She looked at me in panic and asked:  "What do I do?"

What would you tell her?

She clearly didn't want to consider herself responsible for her husband's death, even if he was all but dead already.  When is death?  It can be when you decide it is, and she wasn't ready to take that responsibility.  We imagine our loved ones will act for us as we would act, but do we really understand what that means to them, when they face the decision?  (To end the story, she denied the request and her husband went upstairs, where he died a few hours later.)  We want to be responsible for our deaths, but in the end, we can't be.  And maybe that's another lesson:  despite appearances, (and Tolstoy's story supports this, too, in the end; although Ilyich anguishes for much of the story that death is only his), none of us dies alone.  Our death is a part of our life, and our life is lived among others.

If we are truly blessed, among others who truly care for us, and for them our death is their loss, too.

Meanwhile, back at the courthouse....

Yes, twice in a row; but is it my fault there's so much legal stuff to cover all at once?

Speaking of things in Texas, it seems we are in the news for other reasons:

Houston's embattled equal rights ordinance took another legal turn this week when it surfaced that city attorneys, in an unusual step, subpoenaed sermons given by local pastors who oppose the law and are tied to the conservative Christian activists who have sued the city.

Sorry we can't read more of that there, but it gives you the most information I have on this issue.  "Conservative media" is screaming, but then, that's what they do:

It is astounding to have to say that most Houston citizens – including most Christians and pastors – are still unaware of the radical nature of Mayor Annise Parker’s commitment to imposing the full “San Francisco Style” Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgendered, etc. agenda. … We have a sin-sick city and we need the power of God through Jesus Christ changing lives and changing City Hall!

 For the record, I like our mayor, and so does most of the city, since she was re-elected rather handily since that denunciation was recorded.  So this is a very definitely minority view in Houston.

But anger over the subpoenas apparently is not:

The Rev. Welton Gaddy, president of the Interfaith Alliance and an advocate for both LGBT rights and religious liberty, has penned a letter to Houston’s Mayor Parker and City Attorney David Feldman, opposing the subpoenas. “I will work as hard to defend the freedom of speech from the pulpit for those with whom I disagree, as I will to defend the rights of the LGBT community. As long as a sermon is not inciting violence, the government has no business getting involved in the content of ministers’ sermons,” Gaddy wrote.

When I was working for a law firm (before law school; yes, it's been a long and checkered career at chez Adventus), I quickly learned that the next thing I said on the phone after "I work for ---------- law firm," was to reassure the party on the other end that they weren't in trouble, they weren't being sued, and in fact I was a nice guy with no ulterior motives.  Had to do that a few times as a lawyer, too.

People are afraid of lawyers.  And I guess when you combine "subpoena" (which is issued by the government; in this case, a court of law) and "City Hall," suddenly everybody hears jackboots ringing on the floor.

Seems there is a lawsuit, NOT filed by the City but against it, by:

activists who claim the City wrongfully rejected their effort to put a recently-passed amendment to the city’s anti-discrimination ordinance up for a voter referendum. The recent change to the law would bar businesses from denying a transgender person entry to a restroom consistent with his or her gender identity. After the city attorney ruled that many of the signatures collected for the referendum petition were invalid, the petitioners no longer had the requisite number of signatures to place the referendum on the ballot.

So lawyers working pro bono for the city (not city attorneys, IOW, who might have consulted with Herroner), issued subpoenas duces tecum (Law talk!  Very scary!):

The subpoenas, served on pastors who are not litigants in the lawsuit, seek a broad range of documents and communications, including sermons, regarding their statements on homosexuality, the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO), and the petition process. Represented by the religious right legal firm Alliance Defending Freedom, the pastors are seeking to quash the subpoenas.

Now maybe these subpoenas go beyond the pale, maybe not.  I'd let the court decide, myself.  Discovery in civil cases is very open-ended, and non-parties can be asked to turn over documents that might be useful to the defense of a case.  According to the Houston Chronicle, these pastors are not just names drawn from a hat, but people associated with the plaintiffs in this lawsuit; or may associated with people associated with the plaintiffs in this lawsuit. I dunno, to be honest.  And the further you get from the plaintiffs, the less legal ground you have for the subpoenas.  But a court issued these at the request of the defense lawyers, so some judge has already decided this is not a bad idea on its face.

It may still be a bad idea on reflection, of course.

I was mostly moved by the statement of the Rev. Gaddy, who somehow imagines this is a free speech case and his rights are tied up with the rights of the subpoenaed pastors.  Personally, you want my sermons, come and get 'em.  I gave them (o long, long ago!) in public; there's nothing in 'em I don't want people to read.    This isn't the government "getting involved in the content of sermons."  This is the government trying to defend itself in a civil suit.

Now, some of the documents may not be amenable to discovery.  As I say, civil discovery is broad, and its best to go on a "fishing expedition" as much as you can; never know what you might net, and the Texas courts are usually lenient in these matters.  I can understand the conservative pastors screaming about what this lesbian mayor is doing to them now.  I can almost understand the hyperventilating about the 1st Amendment.  But the Rev. Gaddy needs a calm voice from a knowledgeable source to tell him he's not about to be frog-marched into the city jail, and a subpoena for his sermons would hardly be equivalent to censorship.

I mean, seriously, you give those things in public.  You speak them out loud to large rooms.  What difference do you think it makes if someone wants to read the paper version?

Hell, I'd be flattered.

More fun with state laws

Yeah, pretty much any excuse will suit me....

I'm really not trying to proof-read Charlie Pierce over the intricacies of Texas legal culture, and it's a minor point, but this is what i get for not being on Faceplace (or MyBook, or whatever it is.  I don't Twit, either.)

Charlie say:

(I do believe it would be very helpful if we could keep it out of an election for county judge in which the primary issue seems to be Who's The Biggest Yokel? More proof that an elected judiciary is the second-worst idea in American politics.)

But his link is to an article about the race for county judge in Dallas County.  That's a Constitutional position in Texas (under our Constitution, Rube-Goldberg mechanism that it is).  It's the presiding officer over the County Commissioner's Court, the ruling body over the county (we have 256 of them, if I recall correctly).  They have nothing to do with legal disputes.  They get to out yokel each other because they will be responsible for lots and lots of people, not just for criminals and parties to lawsuits.

In Texas, legal cases go to the County-Court-at-Law (with hyphens), a creation of the statutes.  Those judges, also elected (we'd elect janitors in Texas if they'd thought of it when the Constitution was being re-drafted after the War.  You know which war.), preside over courtrooms in black robes on "benches."  The County Judge does not.

Nor is the County Judge ever addressed as "Yur Honor."  Nor does anybody with business before the County open with "May it please the court" when they rise to speak.

Always liked getting to say that; kinda miss it, to be honest.

Anyway:  that's go nothin' to do with ebola or the CDC or why nurses in Dallas are probably overworked, underpaid, and under protected (I tend to believe the nurses who say they weren't properly trained and didn't have adequate protective gear.  I suspect everybody expected the first case of ebola to be in NYC, or El "A", or some bigger and more glamorous location than a Presbyterian hospital in Big D.  I also expect private hospitals to be cheap when it comes to staff, and stingy when it comes to protective gear they don't think their staff will ever need.  I'm cynical that way.)

Nothin' to do with anything important, as I say:  but now you know.  Carry on.

"So rudely forced, tereu...."

Jonathan Chait says:

For various reasons, including the long stalemate in Washington, the movement to confront campus rape has shot up the list of liberal priorities. One can detect in this movement an impatience with balancing risk against liberty that, in other contexts, would be readily recognizable as a tone of creeping illiberalism.

Or it could be that rape has been a topic of political discourse for the last couple of years, including trying to redefine rape as "forcible rape", and declare that pregnancy after rape (a medieval canard, literally) is impossible (proving, by the way, that the rape is "legitimate," because, well, you know how women are)?

I stirred a strong discussion when I posted an entry about the complexities of consent, the central legal issue in a charge of rape (and pretty much the central social issue, too).  I have, in the recent past, used a textbook that included an essay on the question of how consent is defined in rape cases.  The essay presented examples from "stranger rape" (assault by a stranger, the kind we all think of as "definitely rape") to a case where a college student, drunk, slept with her close friend (male, and also drunk), and a day or two later decided it was a bad idea and the fault was his,  She condemned him on campus as a rapist, largely because she decided, as much as 72 hours later, that she had withdrawn her consent to the sexual intercourse.

Rape turns on this question of consent.  The stranger in the bushes seems a clear case of non-consensual sex.  Regrets the morning after, or the morning after the morning after, seems far less clear.  But when can consent be withdrawn?

California's affirmative consent law apparently tries to address this issue, although only in the context of sex on college campuses; it is not an alteration to California criminal law.  I don't know how effective this law should be, or even if it is a sound idea (the devil is in the details, and I haven't studied the details).  But it's the return to the question of consent that intrigues me.

Chait thinks this new law redefines most sex as rape.  The law, he says:

...requires all sexual activity among college students to obtain “affirmative, conscious, and voluntary agreement” and requires such consent be “ongoing throughout a sexual activity.”

Okay, and the problem is?

Sex, as I recall from my college years, is a delicate minefield of negotiations and desires.  I'm not sure "affirmative, conscious, and voluntary agreement" is too high a standard to set for an act that can involve identity, disease transmission, morality, intimacy, and self-consciousness (did I mention identity?).  And why shouldn't the consent be "ongoing throughout a sexual activity"?  Because once the train leaves the station, it ain't gonna stop 'til it reaches its destination?  I understand small animals can't control their bodily functions as readily as adults (pick up a housecat peeing in the wrong place and watch the stream continue unabated), but are we saying once she lets him in, it's too late to change her mind?  Isn't Chait's argument still aimed at making the male experience of sex normative, and the woman at some point just has to give up some agency in order to prevent unwanted outcomes (like a male college student being accused of rape)?

Is it "illiberal" to not want to turn off the issue of consent once penetration has occurred?  Or even before the clothes come off?  Isn't it more liberal to recognize there are two persons involved here, and both have equal agency in the event, and that agency doesn't come crashing to a halt at some event horizon beyond which the law cannot peer?

Besides, how does Mr. Chait think the culture of racist attitudes in this country began to change?  Because of Dr. King's inspiring speeches? Or because of changes in the law?

I just gotta say

Look carefully; you'll see her hand is out, and his hand isn't.  On such matters do elections turn.

Yes, tout le monde is upset that Wendy Davis put a wheelchair in a campaign ad, because Greg Abbott (her political opponent) is in a wheelchair following an accident that Charlie Pierce tells me made Mr. Abbott a very rich man (it happens, though usually payments are for medical expenses and pain and suffering; perhaps punitive damages added to that high total Mr. Pierce records.  Anyway....).

That bothers me not a bean.  Texas politics is routinely ignored unless there is a reason to pay attention to it, and then it is routinely distorted.  Rick Perry has won re-election constantly, so he is the Great White Hope of the GOP until...."Oops."  Wendy Davis has gone "too far, TOO FAR, I say!" by including a wheelchair in a campaign ad about how tort liability is good for Greg Abbot, but not for other people.  Whatever; because this is what bugs me:

Davis has been less of a candidate than people thought she would be, and remains likely to lose the election.

Davis was never likely to win this election.  The fact people are still paying attention to her candidacy, that Greg Abbott is on FoxNews trying to milk this "controversy" for some mileage, should speak volumes.  But it doesn't, because no one understands the peculiar political culture of Texas.

When I was a child, Texas was a one-party state, and that party was the Democrats; the party of the Civil War, of the non-Reconstruction government of Washington, D.C.  The party not the party of Lincoln.  If the GOP has changed in the last few decades (as Mr. Pierce says they have), the Democratic Party changed with the ascension of LBJ to the White House.

You cannot overstate the power of one-party.  In Texas, no one voted for Republicans, because they were anathema.  The first non-Democratic governor elected in Texas since Reconstruction was elected in 1978.  You do the math.  Before that, Texas had some of the most nondescript men in the state as governor.  Texas Monthly even ran a memorable photo spread showing Dolph Briscoe (yes, that was his name) sitting in the Governor's office, smiling at the camera.  Reading from left to right, Mr. Briscoe slowly faded from view until there was just the empty chair, a metaphor for his governorship, according to the magazine.  It is a perfect illustration of the campaigning Democrats had to do, that a non-entity like Briscoe could be Governor of the state.  They weren't all picturesque figures like John Connolly.  Most of them were worse candidates  than Bill White, who ran four years ago.  Despite having been Mayor of Houston (a city that loves business), White couldn't get elected State Dogcatcher (if we had such an office, it would be an elected position), because he ran as a Democrat.  He ran a campaign so low-key, by the way, it makes the Davis campaign look like a Hollywood version of a "barn-burner."

Wendy Davis faces the same uphill battle.

But, you will say, Ann Richards charmed her way into the Governor's Mansion.  As a fluke, I will respond.  She was the last Democrat to sit in the Governor's office, and she lost in her second run to George W. Bush, as the state shifted allegiance from one party to the other.  She only won the first time because her opponent, Clayton Williams, refused to shake her hand at a debate, and the TV cameras captured that moment for posterity.

And this was a man who compared rape to the weather:  "There's nothing you can do about it, so just lie back and enjoy it."  Anybody want to call him less of a candidate than Wendy Davis?  But he probably would have won, if he'd shaken Ms. Ann's hand.  We're political neanderthals here, but we know how to treat a lady.

Will Davis lose?  Probably; but only because she never had a chance to begin with.  Although she has a GOTV effort working that hasn't been seen in this state since I was born.  I've been called, I've even been approached in my own front lawn, by Davis supporters.  I've literally never had that experience before.  Will it make a difference?  Time will tell.  Texas is a notoriously low-voter turnout state; perhaps she can change that.

But in the meantime, please stop telling me what a poor candidate Wendy Davis is.  She mopped the floor with Abbott in their one debate (on public broadcasting stations, who the only people who saw it were in major urban areas; and the rural vote swamps the "urban liberal" vote every time).  Her ads are sharp and pointed and good, even the "wheelchair" ad.  Can she win?  Only if she can turn out the vote.

And then the best thing she can do is replace as many Perry appointees as she can get her hands on in the next four years.  The Lege doesn't really listen to the governor, and it's gonna be in GOP hands for the foreseeable future.  But that's another thing the pundits who aren't from Texas don't understand.....

Airing out the welcome mat

I had one similar to this outside my dorm room in college.  Could it be we Christians who have acted as if this was our sentiment de facto, if not de jure, might start throwing our personal mats away?

I haven't much to say about the pronouncement coming out of the synod in Rome just now, except to note there's another week to go and let's wait and see what else is said (will the other shoe drop, in other words).  I'm sure Fr. Martin is right, and "This is a stunning change in the way the Catholic church speaks of gay people."  I hope he's also right, and it means "The Synod is clearly listening to the complex, real-life experiences of Catholics around the world, and seeking to address them with mercy, as Jesus did."

That's the interpretation going around, and it's a very hopeful one.  This Pope is making a pastoral effort in the church, at a time when pastoral efforts are needed in the world.  So I am hopeful.

I'm also interested, because the statement from the Synod:

"Homosexuals have gifts and qualities to offer the Christian community: are we capable of welcoming these people, guaranteeing to them a further space in our communities? Often they wish to encounter a Church that offers them a welcoming home," said the document, known by its Latin name "relate".

"Are our communities capable of proving that, accepting and valuing their sexual orientation, without compromising Catholic doctrine on the family and matrimony?" it asked.

Echoes my own concerns in theology as a pastoral effort; the centrality of the idea of hospitality. No, I'm not congratulating myself.  I'm intrigued that this idea is becoming a focal point of institutional pastoral interest by the church.  When I was in seminary the focus was on "community," so my attention to hospitality not a credit to me, but to my teachers.  As I read this statement from the Synod, I'm fully in accord with it.  As they clarify their position over the next week, I'll pay attention.

But it is clear to me, in this day and age at least, hospitality is the key to Christian community,  Christian life, and the Christian gospel.  This new language, inasmuch as it at least marks a change in emphasis, is a good thing.  It could also be interesting.

The Gift of Death(?)

I heard about this on BBC World Service yesterday, where the author of the study was interviewed at some length.

It was something I'd thought about before, having taught Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich," and asked my students to ponder what "death" means since we say someone is dead, has died, perhaps even is dying; but when we mention "death" we always mean the transitional moment (or seconds, or parts of seconds) between being alive and being dead.  And why did Tolstoy name his story "The Death....", when death only occurs in the last sentence (though Ilyich is dying for much of the story).  What, I wondered with my class, did Tolstoy mean about death, to title his story that way (If you haven't read it, or don't remember it, it opens with Ilyich's funeral, then jumps back to his birth (mentioned only in connection with his parents) and childhood, quickly through marriage, fatherhood, and his legal career, until he injures his hip in hanging a curtain in his new (and final) home, and slowly descends toward the end of the story, which creates the story's beginning.)

So now it seems death is not a moment, a sudden transition, but must be understood as a process, as something "smeared," perhaps, over time, like the cat in Schrodinger's diabolical box.  Well, not quite like that, because that thought experiment presumes death is an event, not a process.

But still, the interesting issue here is not that science has perhaps "discovered" life after death; it is that perhaps we need to redefine death.  It is an issue that plagued the 19th century (Poe got a great deal of mileage out of "premature burials," and it was a cottage industry in an age that suffered comas but didn't understand them medically); and now it seems it is with us, in another guise, again.

So what is death?  When are we dead?  Is this a brave new world?  Or just another scholastic diversion?

All too....something

Combing my hair.  Why do you ask?

I decided I should read some Nietzsche again, just to test myself against a "real" atheist (v. the ones I keep obsessively reading at Salon; not in the articles, in the comments.  Is there a "Comments Anonymous" group I could join?  I don't have a problem, I can quit whenever I want to.....).  The results were not what I expected.

What I found was the same material I see at Salon, only with a 19th century European/Romantic edge to them.  I mean, this stuff was flat out laughable  Here's just one, from Human, All Too Human (it's worth pausing here to note Nietzsche and Kierkegaard are the two great writers of psychological insight in the 19th century, a direct outgrowth of Wordsworth's insistence on his own childhood as template for humanity.  Freud and the Vienna school would make us all think we are psychologists and taught us the vocabulary of psychotherapy came by the end of the century.  It was something in the air....  I mention this because Walter Kaufmann points out the title of this text refers to Nietzsche's "concern[...] with human psychology."):

Christianity as antiquity.  When we hear the ancient bells growling on a Sunday morning, we ask ourselves:  Is it really possible!  this, for a Jew, crucified two thousand years ago, who said he was God's son.  the proof of such a thing is lacking.  Certainly the Christian religion is an antiquity projected into our times from remote prehistory; and the fact that  claim is believed--whereas one is otherwise so strict in examining positions--is perhaps the most ancient piece of this heritage.  A god who begets children with a mortal woman; a sage who bids men work no more, have no more courts, but look for the signs of the impending end of the world; a justice that accepts the innocent as a vicarious sacrifice; someone who orders his disciples to drink his blood; prayers for miraculous interventions, sins perpetrated against a god, atoned for by a god; fear of a beyond in which death is the portal; the form of the cross as a symbol in a time that no longer knows the function and ignominy of the cross--how ghoulishly all this touches us, as if from the tomb of a primeval past!  Can one believe that such things are still believed?

Friedrich Nietzsche, from Human, All Too Human, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin 1976, pp. 52-53.

100 years later, what seems revealed there is more about the writer's psyche than the human psyche in general.  A more poetic version of it comes from Wallace Stevens early in the 20th century.  I admire Stevens' poetry, but his argument is no sounder than Nietzsche's.

I'm not going to spend time debating the points of that argument.  I would rather, in response, simply quote Wittgenstein:

Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For 'consciousness of sin' is a real event and so are despair and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them, whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it.

 Ludwig Wittgenstein, "Ethics, Life and Faith," The Wittgenstein Reader, ed. Anthony Kenny (Oxford, Blackwell Press 1994).

Nietzsche is experiencing Christianity from the outside, and describing only what he sees.  Christianity from the inside is very different issue, and the difference is not a failure of reason (especially since reason failed Nietzsche at length, though I don't think, with Chesterton, that Nietzsche's thought and his ultimate madness were causally related); it is a difference of experience.  To get at that difference I would turn to Dom Crossan's book, The Greatest Prayer.

Crossan explains, chapter by chapter, the words of the Our Father.  In chapter 3 he discusses the Genesis story, linking it to Leviticus 19 (and "Hallowed by thy name."  Read the book if you want to see how he goes from Halloween to the Jubilee.  It's pretty interesting.)

He points out that Genesis 1 and Leviticus 19 belong to the Priestly layer of the Torah (J, E, D, P, are the four schools discerned in the torah.  Jehovah, Elohim, Deuteronomist, and Priestly, if you were wondering.  Further affiant sayeth not.).  Crossan makes the fascinating observation that the Priestly school was writing a parable about creation in Genesis 1, not an eyewitness account. "The authors know exactly what they are doing.  They know they do not know how God created the world, but they are equally sure the know its purpose and meaning."(emphasis in original).  Crossan points out there are 8 actions of creation squeezed into six days, so all the actions needed will fit the schema of a seven day week.  It is the schema that is important here.

It is that compression of eight chunks into six days that clarifies the authors' intention and purpose.  Put negatively, we humans are no the crown of creation.  (We are the work of a late Friday afternoon. And maybe not even God's best work is done on a late Friday afternoon.)  Put positively, the crown of creation is the Sabbath day itself.

Creation is not the world of six days, as is often mistakenly said--and whether is said literally or metaphorically, historically or parabolically, it is still mistaken.  Creation is the work of seven days, and, as its climax, the Sabbath day is built into the very fabric of our world, the very creation of our earth.

John Dominic Crossan, The Greatest Prayer (New York:  HarperOne, 2010, p. 64.

Crossan goes on to argue that this rest, established for one day a week, and every seven years (Exod. 23: 10-11 and Leviticus 25:2-7), and then the jubilee every 50 years (Leviticus 25:8-10), is a rest from work as worship.  It is a ritual; an ordering of life that reminds the people of Israel whose people they are, and how their lives are to be lived in order to enjoy "life into the ages" (the biblical formula often translated as "eternal life").  And that is where my interest lies:  in the importance of ritual.

Christianity is condemned from the outside as a community where individuals are told what to think, herded through meaningless actions from medieval Europe, and taught mythologies of the Bronze and Iron Age.  Religion is disparaged as the redoubt of the frightened:  afraid of death, of mental independence, of the world they live in.  What religion brings to humanity, according to this broad school of criticism, is not only of no value, but is in fact a detriment.  And one of the worst things religion can bring to human existence is ritual.

Which is funny, really, since our secular calendar in America is based upon holidays, which once meant "holy days," days set apart for special activities.  The rituals are thoroughly secular, but their observance is as ingrained into our lives as sunrise and sunset.  No longer mindful of the seasons except as how we change our wardrobe to respond to the weather, we will follow the year based on a calendar that actually starts in August (not January or December, as the Christian calendar does).  That beginning is the First Day of School.

It gets mentioned on the news every year.  Texas has a "Tax Free Day" when sales tax is suspended on certain purchase meant to return children to school in new clothes and shoes (mostly).  Columbus Day pops up in October, but the real holiday is Halloween, an excuse for everyone, child to adult, to dress in costume and be seen in it in public.  Thanksgiving follows hard thereafter, gateway to the shopping season that is Christmas, a season that ends with New Year's Day.  The next holiday is Easter, whether celebrated at a church or with an easter egg hunt and another excuse for a feast (the last of the three feasts which began with Thanksgiving almost six months earlier).  Then, as with the Christian calendar, comes the long season until August, punctuated only with the 4th of July (Memorial Day is a day for shopping and expecting school to end).  Take away too many of these days and the rituals that surround them (shopping; handing out candy; eating turkey and watching football; exchanging gifts and eating again; drinking and eating on New Year's Eve; eating again at Easter, and the last time on the 4th), and the year becomes flat and listless.  It is our rituals that give the year it's shape as well as its order.

So ritual is not something priests do while an audience sits silent and has incomprehensible words muttered over it.  Crossan points out the sabbath day, year, and jubilee, all put into daily life the lesson that the world was God's and we just live in it:

The Priestly tradition was not interested in crop rotation, agricultural management, or responsible farming [all modern explanations of the Sabbath year concept].  It was intended as shock treatment, to make the hearers realize that God's land was a living thing and to make them ponder its right to have a rest like everything else in God's creation.

It is...not about agricultural wisdom, but about distributive justice--for the land itself, the inhabitants, the domestic animals, and the wild animals.  It applies, furthermore, across the great Mediterranean triad of grains, olives, and vines.

Crossan, pp. 68-69.

And what is the point of this?

The logic of all these Sabbath injunctions it an attempt to return once more to that beginning moment of Sabbath creation, when all the world as distributed fairly and equitably by God and was declared good and blessed in its inaugural glory.

Crossan, p. 69.

What is the purpose of Christmas?  To merchants, it is to balance the books before the calendar year ends.  What is the purpose of the first day of school?  To begin another year of education for students, teachers, and parents.  What is the purpose of Halloween?  To give us a holiday that, at least in the northern states, can still be observed out of doors before winter shuts us in.  What is the purpose of Thanksgiving except to reunite us with family, and Easter except to mark the beginning of spring, and the 4th of July except to break the monotony of summer with an occasion to rest from our labors?

None of those, mind, are the "official" purposes of those holidays, and most carry multiple purposes (candy sellers love Halloween in particular; turkey farmers count on Thanksgiving; etc.).  But there is great purpose to ritual, and great need for it.  Religion provides the ritual (except for July 4th all of those rituals are church related; even school for all began in England as "Sunday school," Sunday being the only day of the week the children of laborers could attend any educational opportunity, rather than be expected at work).   Ritual gives meaning, purpose, and order to life, even daily life:

Woke up, fell out of bed,
Dragged a comb across my head
Found my way downstairs and drank a cup,
And looking up I noticed I was late.

Found my coat and grabbed my hat
Made the bus in seconds flat
Found my way upstairs and had a smoke,
Somebody spoke and I went into a dream. 

Lennon and McCartney aren't describing a ritual there as much as a routine, but it is a routine familiar enough to make most of us recognize it, or at least the truth of it, and it seems familiar enough it anchors our sense of place in the world and in our time; which is what ritual does.  Ritual's root purpose is to provide order imbued with meaning.  Does that mean ritual cannot become rote, become:

Shape without form, shade without color,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion

Well, yes, it can be.  Everything loses meaning if we allow it to be lost; but the meaning can also be recovered.  Crossan's close reading of scripture (you have to read his work to see what I mean) is an attempt to recover from the text what time has buried.  Reading his analysis can be like watching a painting be restored step by step, as layers of varnish and dirt and the accumulations of age are stripped away, and the glory of the original is revealed.  Ritual itself can have that effect, if it restores us rather than becomes gesture without motion and shape without form.

Ritual that connects us to ideas like redistributive justice can be a powerful source for morality, and certainly a more effective expression of morality than a philosophical treatise.  To understand's Kantan ethics I must persevere in my understanding of the Categorical Imperative; but there is no ritual to refresh my appreciation for Kant's ethical imperatives.  Jean-Paul Sartre understood that an ethics without god puts the responsibility solely on the individual:  you choose what humankind is by what you think is right or wrong; so choose wisely.  It is such a terrible burden no one wants to undertake it, and what ritual would renew our sense of responsibility and purpose, so that we would carry on as Sartre advises us?  Re-reading his essay on existentialism as a humanism?  Beating ourselves with cords (and isn't that choosing what humankind is, too?  Yes; and heart, every ethic does that.  Now go forth and expand that ethic into a social norm.)?

Ritual gives meaning to life, but does not place meaning in life.  Our secular rituals remind us to buy turkeys in November, ham at Easter, hot dogs in July, and start shopping in September for the annual event in December.  Whether those actions give life any meaning, is another matter.  Ritual can imbue life with meaning, but ritual that only reminds us what foods to buy when, is certainly "shape without force, shade without color/Paralysed force, gesture without motion."  And what system of pure rationality, what philosophy, can imbue it with any other meaning?

Religion is not simply a set of ideas or doctrines.  It is not simply a set of practices and ordinations.  It is not merely a set of rules and regulations.  No more than worship is about adoration and heaping up praise.  Worship is about acknowledgment, and adjustment of the worshipper to right relationship with all of creation.  It is in line with what Kierkegaard said about prayer:  "The function of prayer is not to influence God, but to change the nature of the one who prays."

Just as is the function of religion, an end it achieves through ritual, and remembrance, and connection to others, inside and outside the community.

Gotta go drag a comb across my head....

I'll be bald and nothing to show for it.....

Pascal might have a challenge for that; but we should point out, that may express an ethos,

but it doesn't exactly lead to a morality. 

Somewhere in the 19th century morality became linked to religion; perhaps as a redoubt against the onslaught of Darwinism and the rising success of science to explain it all to you (at least until Godel and others began to prove it couldn't).  I don't really know where it started, but it's hardly a felicitous connection.  The law of Moses became, somehow, both that which the Christ had set aside (how many Christians eat pork and shellfish, or cheeseburgers, for that matter) and at the same time fulfilled.  Christians went through the law with a broom, sweeping away inconvenient injunctions, and keeping the convenient ones (all 10 of them).

I speak too harshly.  The point is, at some point morality became tied to religion, and the argument became that only religion could truly make people moral.  I've never really agreed with that, and I don't now.

There is a case to be made, and Anthony at Thought Criminal makes it very well, that religion is a better motivator of social justice and even sociable behavior than non-religion, but I think that is a byproduct of religious faith, not something available only to the faithful.  That's a distinction worth holding onto.

CJ Werleman is now concerned about the moral posture of atheism.  He thinks atheists (or atheism; the distinction is important, apparently, but Werleman doesn't make it*), needs "to provide a moral narrative for the economic and social realities that ail your everyday American."  A moral narrative.  He doesn't explain what he means by that; apparently he thinks it is self-evident.  But it's an interesting declaration, well set out or not.

The best clue to what Werleman means by "moral narrative" is provided in this paragraph:

Google any combination of the following keywords — “atheists for the environment,” “atheists for economic equality,” “atheists for racial and gender equality,” “atheists for ending poverty,” “atheists for world peace,” “atheists against resource motivated wars,” etc. – and you come up with nothing. In other words, the some 2,000 atheist groups and organizations in this country are almost wholly silent on the moral issues that affect Americans the most.

I don't think of any of those as necessarily "moral" issues, because I think of morality as the problem of individual human behavior in society (you don't have to be moral if you are alone on a desert island).  So the minute I start talking about what is moral, I'm clearly not talking about what Werleman is talking about.  But it is interesting that most of the issues he mentions were taken up by, or promoted widely first by, religious groups.  Maybe that's why Werleman thinks they are "moral issues."

But he insists "that religion is no more moral than the absence of it," so it must just be coincidence, huh?

That is a pretty silly statement, actually.  Aristotle started us formally talking about "ethics" in the West.  In his original tongue "ethics" simply meant "behavior."  His ethics are wholly without what we call morality.  He simply advised finding the most successful person in your society, and doing as that person did.  That, said Aristotle, would make you ethical, because everyone would approve of your behavior.   For Aristotle behavior was guided by the telos of happiness, and happiness was attained by the most admired person in the community (so to this day we think the rich are "successful").  If that behavior included sex with young boys, well, that's fine; noble, even, to the Athenian Greeks at least. But would we today call that moral, or would we decry it as an abuse of power?  And why do we see the humanity of those young boys as significant?  The historical answer is:  because of religion; Christianity, specifically.

Not because Christianity is particularly superior to other religions, but because Christianity dominated and pervaded Western culture from the 4th century on.  The importance of the individual which finally became the cornerstone of Western thought with the Romantic movement, began with Christianity and the truly radical teachings of Paul of Tarsus (the ones we ignore today, and Paul-bashers erase entirely).  The importance of children began with at least the Gospels, and while it took until the Great Depression for a President of the United States to finally get child labor laws passed, the idea of children having any value as persons is rooted in religious morality.  Sadly our morality doesn't control us nearly as much as our economic and other selfish interests do, but whenever the topic of morality comes up people start to imagine all manner of imaginary controls over their behavior which make them anxious and unnerved.

Which is really funny, seeing as morality is more honored in the breach than in the keeping.

Yes, there are Christian pastors who decry and denounce immorality in others; but there is always someone ready to point out the splinter in your eye, which is but a reflection of the log in theirs (especially those virulently anti-gay pastors and anti-adultery pastors who were all found to have secret lovers).  And yes, theoretically, morality is perfectly possible without religion.  But in reality, it has never worked out that way.  All of our moral imperatives in Western culture are based in Christianity.  It may be possible to create a moral society, as we would define it today (no buggering young boys for pleasure and purity, thank you!) without religion, but in fact it has never been that way.  It is an odd thing that atheists who insist so much on empiricism and decry even philosophy as "faith-based," refuse to acknowledge this simple point.

What brought the tribes of Israel together and created their moral system was religious belief.  While the Greeks were telling tales of Zeus raping young maidens in various disguises, the children of Abraham were telling each others stories of justice and fairness to all.  While the Greeks were telling the tale of Medea, the children of Abraham were telling each other the story of Ruth and Elijah and the widow, of feeding the widow and caring for the orphan.  The Hebrews, again, were not morally superior to the Greeks, or even superior in any one way.  But while the Greeks were telling tales of superhuman beings behaving as we would expect superhuman beings to behave (and as Jesus behaves in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and the Cherry Tree Carol), the Hebrews were telling stories of their history and the involvement of their God in their history.  The Greeks produced "Oedipus Rex" and (I think the more superior moral examination) Antigone.  The Hebrews produced "Job" and "Ecclesiastes."  One can say religion is supposed to be unimportant; but one has a hard time producing evidence that it is.  Medea is almost just in her revenge on the Greeks for treating her as a non-person; the prophets told Israel their problems with Babylon started when they stopped dealing justly with the widow and the orphan and the alien among them.  Their stories, from Abraham's visit by the three angels to Elijah and the widow to Sodom and Gomorrah, are about hospitality to the stranger (or the lack thereof).  Their stories are about living in this world, and the wisdom of God which they ignore as often as they adopt it.  They are much more powerful moral teachings than the Iliad or the Odyssey, or any of the Greek tragedies.

And pretty clearly, it has something to do with being rooted in religion.

So perhaps I am wrong, and the problem of the link between morality and religion isn't that it exists, but that we think it doesn't have to exist.  In theory it seems we could discard it.  In practice, however, it would not yield the world we live in today, and there is no reason, based solely on history, to believe such a separation would yield a better world tomorrow.

To draw on a concrete example, I understand the theory behind John Rawls' Theory of Justice (despite its assumption that utilitarianism must be accommodated rather than rejected), but the key problem "is to show how such principles would be universally adopted."  It is one thing to say "the right of each person to have the most extensive basic liberty compatible with the liberty of others" is of first importance, and further that "social and economic positions are to be (a) to everyone's advantage and (b) open to all."  It is quite a different thing, and yet the same telos, to say all are equal before a just and loving God, and the first of all should be last and servant of all, so that justice is truly done for everyone.  The latter is not necessarily more achievable, but it is certainly easier to show how is would be universally adopted; and besides, it's entirely in keeping with Isaiah's vision of the holy mountain (see Isaiah 11; Isaiah 56; and Isaiah 65.  It's such a powerful vision it appears for all three of the "Isaiahs.")  The purpose of Israel, according to the prophets, was to be a light to all nations, not that they should be converted (the covenant was with Israel, not humankind) but that all humankind should enjoy life into the ages, that they should, in other words, achieve the telos Aristotle set for his ethics.  But do so through a universal application, not an ethos that excluded barbarians who didn't speak Greek and were NOK.  Rawls asks us to give up our privileges in the abstract name of justice, which has to begin with the idea that we have privileges at all (most of us don't think so; it's the other guy who's privileged!).  Religion in Western culture, whether it is based on the vision of Isaiah or the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, compels us with concrete teachings that we are, in fact, our brother's keeper, and only in that keeping of each other are we all kept; only in justice for each other is there justice for all; only in treating everyone as God treats us, do we achieve life into the ages in this life.

Philosophical arguments like Rawls require us all to understand the entire philosophical principle behind them, and to consider the reasonableness of their application.  The concrete religious visions exemplified by Isaiah or the stories in the gospels, make the lesson both more immediate and far easier to grasp (though notably not any easier to follow).  They ask us simply to do good because it is good; because the humble will be invited to the head of the table, because all nations will stream to the glory that would be, could be, Israel.

There are other arguments to be made.  I'm sure, for example, the Niebuhrs made them, and I have only to consider the question and look to find their answers.  This is just off the top of my head, but it's a start.  And I do not end where I began, that's a good thing, too.  Like I said, this is a start....


*Commenters at Salon regularly make much of the disorganized nature of atheists.  They proclaim it the true hallmark of an atheist that the only agreement among them is to deny the reality of a deity.  It's not as much to agree on as they think, but they insist it is all "true" atheists have in common, so whether one can even speak of "atheism" can be up for debate.

And that, by contrast, does lead to a morality, as well as an ethos

More honored in the breach than in the keeping.....

Because Brown v. Board is still hailed as a high-water mark of Supreme Court jurisprudence, even though its central holding has been reduced to nothing more than an aspiration we think we still live up to just because the Court once said so.

As Charlie Pierce points out, according to the Fifth Circuit some Constitutionally protected actions are less protected than others because it just doesn't affect enough people:

The three-judge panel agreed with the state's lawyers that there was insufficient evidence that a "large fraction" of women seeking abortions would face an unconstitutional burden because of the surgical-center requirements and clinic closings. They wrote that the data provided by one of the plaintiffs' experts, Dr. Daniel Grossman, suggested that about one out of six Texas women seeking an abortion would live more than 150 miles from the nearest clinic if the surgical-center rules went into effect. "This is nowhere near a ‘large fraction,' " the panel wrote.

So if a law restricting speech or allowing soldiers to quarter in your home only affects about 15% of the populace, it's still constitutional.

As I've mentioned before, I used to work for Lee Yeakel.  We didn't agree on much when it came to politics, and he was no fan of Roe v. Wade.  But I never imagined I'd see the day when Lee was the champion of the people and could almost be called a liberal icon:

In an unusual move, the judge granted the abortion providers who sued the state broader relief than they had requested. Lawyers for abortion facilities had asked him to strike down the requirement as it applied to two clinics, in El Paso and McAllen. But Judge Yeakel ruled the admitting-privileges requirement and the surgical-center standards, operating together, put undue burdens on women statewide, and created "a brutally effective system of abortion regulation that reduces access to abortion clinics."

Strange days indeed.  I suppose if we reduce access to legal counsel in criminal cases by denying it to one in six defendants, that would be okay, too.

I'll retire to Bedlam.....

Everything old is unknown again....

Once I fall down a rabbit hole, I keep tripping over it even after I've climbed out.  I wasn't going to post this; then I was; then I wasn't; then I was.

What tipped me over?  A new article at Salon complaining about the rampant sexism promulgated by the public face of the New Atheists, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins.  Aside from the usual defenses ("what you heard is not what he meant!"), there's a lot of screaming about how atheists aren't a "movement" or even a cohesive group so it's unfair to say Harris and Dawkins speak for them.  It isn't unfair, of course, to say all theists think alike, and the most absurd voices of believers speak for all theists; but leave that aside.  The really funny part about it is the defensiveness born of blank ignorance.  When you don't know what you don't believe in, you make all kinds of silly noises. Which brings me around to the reading I've been doing lately.

My favorite Philip K. Dick story revolves around a case of mistaken identity.  An ordinary man (this is like a Hitchcock story, but with an ending Hitchcock was never allowed) returns to earth from a vacation to Jupiter (it's science fiction; go with it).  He is immediately arrested by the authorities.  He escapes and spends the rest of the story trying to figure out why the police think he is a dangerous killer, when he is an ordinary person leading an ordinary life.  In the end the police finally capture him because he isn't secretly a professional assassin with mad skills at intrigue and escape.  They explain to him that he has become a pawn in the war between Earth and an alien race; that he was kidnapped on his trip to Jupiter, and replaced with an android.

He insists, of course, that this is impossible.  He knows who he is, he has memories contiguous from childhood to the present, and he's no android.  The police information is wrong.  No, they insist, they are right.  He was killed, and replaced by an android; moreover, an android with a bomb sufficient to destroy the entire earth.  The only problem is, they don't know how to disarm it, or what the trigger is for it.  The evidence the police present is so overwhelming the man is finally convinced he isn't who he thinks he is, and he says:  "If I'm not me, that means I must be an...."

The final sentence of the story, which is the only part I'm sure I remember correctly, is:  "The blast could be seen from as far away as Alpha Centauri."

It's a lovely, if gruesome, object lesson in what Johannes Climacus was getting at when he said we cannot prove Napoleon's existence, we can only prove that an individual can be identified as Napoleon.  The slippery concepts of existence and identity (two separate concepts, as separate as body and soul) become almost concrete in Dick's story:  the man no longer exists, but his identity does.  It's a separation almost impossible to understand except in the almost impossible scenario of the story; but once you see it, you begin to understand what Climacus meant, and how difficult it is indeed to prove the existence of any living being.

I mention this because the volume I referred to earlier includes a Philip K. Dick story, and it is about God.  In the story, Chinese communism has risen to conquer the world (this is 1967, remember).  The protagonist is a bureaucrat in the far-flung Chinese empire who comes to the attention of his superiors, that he might rise in the hierarchy.  He also comes to the attention of rebels, who convince him (to make a long story short) that the water supply is laced with hallucinogens.  They give him an anti-hallucinogen, and after taking it he sees the Absolute Leader as a mechanical construct making senseless noises on television, rather than as an old man exhorting the people with another long-winded speech.

The curious thing is, different people see different things that are not the Leader; there are twelve groups of such people:  each sees something completely different from the others.

Our hero is soon invited to a dinner with the Absolute Leader, where he takes the anti-hallucinogen and meets:  god.  Not the God of Abraham, but a creator god who is interested only in observing and partaking of the failures of all humanity.  It is a nightmare vision in which god is inescapable and implacable and from whom there is no appeal, and the vision renders life meaningless and horrible for our hero.  Lovecraft never envisioned anything as soul-destroying as this.

I bring it up because of the note Dick appends to the end of his story, with a quote that probably didn't mean to him what it does to me.  He quotes John Scotus Erasmus (accurately or not I have not determined):  "We do now know what God is.  God himself does not know what He is because He is not anything.  Literally God is not, because He transcends being."

That may be nothing more than a statement of apophatic theology, but it points up the true difficulty to discussing the nature of God.  It is a difficulty believers and theologians alike wrestle with.  But the New Atheists prefer to pretend it can't possibly be a struggle, because the idea of God is simply a childish illusion, and can't be any more than that.  Which is sort of like saying the idea of the cosmos can't be any more complicated than could be understood by the average 5 year old child.

The crux of Dick's story is our old friend theodicy:  more specifically, the problem of evil.  Dick's solution is not a novel one, though he may not have been aware of it.  His solution is a god who is a demi-urge:  a creator without power to create perfection, capable only of creating a mixed bag of good and bad, a lesser power with lesser abilities who is temporarily in charge of creation until replaced by a purer, better God.  It's an old heresy, one I should know the name of but can't call to mind at the moment (somebody in comments help me out here).  It's not a knock on Dick's story to point this out.  I'm on my way to explaining something.

Dick's story is some 45 years old; the heresy he stumbles upon is well over 1000 years old.  The quote from Erasmus, Dick dates to 840 C.E.  There is, in other words, nothing new in these ideas; but they strike me as utterly new and far beyond the capabilities of most "New Atheists" to begin to comprehend.

I've been thinking more and more about the "New Atheists," and what a pitiful group they are. Richard Dawkins is a zoologist who wrote a best-seller about genetics that made him famous, though I understand most of the genetics in that book has already been rejected by contemporary theories.  His second best-seller was simply a spew of ignorance, ignorance he proclaims gives him greater knowledge.  Sam Harris writes reams about the evils of religion, without the knowledge of the subject that someone like Martin Marty brought to his analysis of religious fundamentalism (and Marty is hardly a fundamentalist).  Over at Pharyngula religion is regularly skewered by someone with degrees in biology, but none in anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, or theology.  Three of those five are sciences, by the way, but I know of no one trained in those sciences who have made careers out of diatribes against religion.  There are atheists like the late Richard Rorty or Jacques Derrida who understand the place of religion in the world, rather than treat it as a shibboleth.  But they never published best-sellers, so who needs them, amirite?

All this is known, of course:  same song, 100th verse, around here especially.  But it's interesting how everything old isn't even new again now:  it is, in fact, completely unknown.  It doesn't surprise me Dick would reach for an ancient heresy as the basis for an interesting story; it doesn't surprise me he would quote John Scotus Erasmus.  What does surprise me is the ignorance of the New Atheists, who have never heard of JSE (and so they continue to speak of an "Invisible Sky Daddy") or even know enough to bring up the old heresy about God being Creator but not all-powerful, and therefore generally malicious.  They don't know anything, and while the sources I speak of are over 1000 years old, the iteration of them I cite here is not yet 50 years old.

And yet everyone who shouts about religion and God and the church has been to college; they think themselves smart, largely because they make things go.

Good science fiction is often a good cautionary tale.  The story of the Pakleds is another good story to keep in mind.  I noted at that thread at Salon that the article ended with this sound advice:

....it’s up to living atheists to strive to be more than a bunch of people who simply don’t believe in God, but stand up to irrationality in all its forms, including sexism.

But self-reflection and self-criticism is hard, as hard as rationalism or religious faith; it requires humility and self-examination to live a life you proclaim to be worth living.  It's a lot easier to bash someone else for what you think they're doing wrong.  Just because you are smart does not mean that you are strong.  More commonly, believing the former means you are neither.  The real power is in powerlessness, the real strength is in weakness.  Better to ponder what you don't know in the face of all the knowledge you have worked to acquire, than to proclaim your ignorance to be your salvation.

Again, Dangerous Visions

I pulled a 50 year old book off my shelf (which sounds romantic:  dusty leather bound volumes of ancient wisdom.  Nope.  The one in the picture.  Paperback.  Science fiction.  1967, so I'm fudging a bit on the age, even.), something I do from time to time for night-time reading:  re-read something so old I've forgotten most of it.

And I had certainly forgotten this, in the author's note at the end of the story (I still love anthologies like that; too bad they are so few and far between).  The story is about a dystopian future which ends with a son killing his mother (who has run desperately from danger to home, where she will be safe) because his wife and children need to eat, and she is fresh meat.  The note isn't that long, and context matters, so:

Perhaps I wrote the story because sometimes that's the way the world seems, or perhaps I hope that when my daughter's generation grows up [which they have by now; it's been nearly 50 years, as I said] it won't need or want to run for its life, or perhaps because, in the seventeenth century, Jeremy Taylor wrote:  "...when it is enquired whether such a person be a good man or no, the meaning is not what does he believe or what does he hope, but what he loves."  Amen.

Or, as I've had occasion to put it before:

Ideas don't matter. Things don't matter. People matter.

Hope comes from such unexpected places; wisdom is often found hiding where you least expect it.