No. 5 is not that easily avoided

Take, eat.  It's not gluten free, but a little nibble couldn't hurt!

Diabetics have to control their diets very carefully.  Those afflicted with celiacs disease have to avoid gluten.  There are other perfectly sensible reasons to avoid certain foods, control your diet, etc.

But do 100 million people in America really have to watch their gluten intake?

Probably not.  This, of course, is a matter of personal choice.  But what's the purpose, except to avoid death?  And what is this fear of death that creates an almost religious faith (i.e., trust) in food?  Is it merely human?

Virtually ever religious tradition has had food taboos and sacred diets. I think part of the reason is that food is something that we have direct control over. It crosses the boundary in a very personal way: we take something outside of our body and put it into our body. Eating is very personal, and it’s easy to invest those kinds of things with religious and ritual significance.

That is certainly why Christianity, alone of all world religions I know of, puts food at the center of its worship.  The Eucharist has been a point of contention since Paul and Peter argued over what to eat and Paul argued with his house churches over how to eat it; but it is still central to worship because "eating is very personal."

What's interesting is that everybody gets upset because some politician somewhere says we have to allow people to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation when it comes to serving wedding guests (which hasn't yet been upheld as legal or denied as unconstitutional) or we have to teach creationism in schools (which hasn't been upheld) or...well, I'm hard pressed to think of a true "victory" that the religious have one (the examples like Hobby Lobby v. Burwell are more like egregious errors by the Court that it will have to rein in, if only because of the bubbling arguments over state RFRA's that are its progeny).  Things are, in other words, in a state of flux.

But nobody is complaining because 100 million people think they can cheat death by cutting out the white bread.  If anything, that's a greater display of superstition and fear of death than any random group of Christians (or Muslims, observant Jews, Hindus, what have you) that I've ever encountered.

It's all about the narrative; the framing.  An expression of faith in reason as the ne plus ultra and only arbiter of human experience is no less a religious expression than putting your money literally where you mouth is by adopting a gluten-free diet because you think you will live longer; or than reciting the Apostle's or Nicene Creed, for that matter.

If you want to mention in comments that you are watching your gluten, or even maintaining a gluten-free diet, I will not argue with you.  I make no judgment, except on those who judge.  There are very small minded people out there who consider the internet their proper domain, and they insist that whatever they damn should be damned in heaven, and whatever they loose should be loosed in heaven.

But don't put it to them that way; they'll get very upset.  No one likes having their faith challenged, you see.

Dazed and Confused

I saw what I did there....

I was reflecting on the veracity, even the "proof", of polls (reading "atheists" constantly insisting on "proof" of God, and batting about "burden of proof" as if they knew what the phrase meant, has put my mind on odd tracks) in response to this post.  That led to the thought that daily life seldom reflects the divisions and acrimony of either politics or polls (two conditions that often appear alike), nor is it all that driven by what the pollsters say is important to us.

Like the latest nonsense from Alternet (via Salon).  It starts, appropriately enough, with a poll about what group Americans dislike the most.  Atheists have lost their No. 1 standing, according to this poll.  How you ever verify that is an interesting question, especially to people who screech "Burden of proof!" whenever you poke them; but leave that aside.  What interests me are the "myths", some of which are so hoary and lame they need life support from, well, Amanda Marcotte, apparently.

Take No. 1:  "There are no atheists in foxholes."  I'm guessing the definition of "myth" here is not the usual rump definition of a folktale that explains natural phenomenon.  I'm beginning to suspect that definition is itself mythological, an invention of the Enlightenment must as the old canard about medieval theologians debating how many angels could dance on the head of a pin was invented during the Renaissance.  How all those stories of Zeus impregnating fair maidens in various physical forms, from a bull to gold coins, explains anything more than the story of Oedipus explains his responsibility for a fate set before his birth, has always been a mystery to me.  But the idea that there are no atheists is foxholes is about as sound a proper observation as the watch found in the field is evidence of God as Creator.

I mean, if that's your idea of myth still being used against atheists, you really need to give up on that idea that atheism is not a religion (myth no. 5), because this one sounds as fictional as the parting of the Red Sea (something no atheist ever brings up, though I learned in seminary that there is no "Red Sea" in Egypt.  There's the Nile, and there's the desert.  Didn't anyone ever wonder where the Red Sea went after the Israelites left?) and as important to your identity as suffering for your, well....beliefs.

There's also the "myth" that atheists are aggressive and rude.  Aside from every atheist you can name as a public figure (including the late Madalyn Murray O'Hair), I can't imagine where this pernicious idea comes from.  (I know I actually read some comments by professed atheists despairing of the tone set for them by Dawkins, but I can't find the link at the moment.  Not all atheists posts on Salon or adhere to the standards set by the New Atheists.)  Ditto myth no. 6, that atheism is dominated by angry white men.  Yes, you can identify the women who wish to be prominent atheists (Ms. Marcotte does), but can anyone name them?  I'm sure this is the fault of the Christian patriarchy; or perhaps President Obama.

Do atheists have a bleak, loveless, and amoral existence (myths 6-9)?  I dunno.  The noisiest ones certainly seem to be profoundly unhappy people;  or at least, among the most cited (Maher; Dawkins; Gillette; Hitchens; Carlin) the most smug and insufferable.  Then again, so are a lot of publicly religious politicians and Christians, so we'll have to call that a draw.

So the last is that atheists are engaged in a war on Christmas.  Honestly, this war on Christmas thing existed (I think it officially ended last winter) on FoxNews.  I never saw evidence of it beyond FoxNews in the real world that wasn't clearly driven by FoxNews.

Which returns me to my original point:  there's the world we all live in; and then there's the world as represented on the intertoobs and cable television (the world represented on broadcast television is another mythology altogether).   One is a very interesting place, full of people of all kinds and demeanors working hard to get on with their lives; and the other is a flaming Nazi gasbag.

Well, I wanted somehow to work that joke and Godwin's law into it, and it was the best I could do.

Cui Bono?

What's really interesting here is the number of people in comments saying this is a situation of rape, pure and simple, because the wife, suffering from Alzheimer's, couldn't possibly consent to sexual intercourse.

And they all know that because.....?  Well, from what Mr. Pierce quotes, from this:

Michelle Dornbier, a social worker at the center, and Dr. John Boedeker, Mrs. Rayhons's family doctor, testified on Friday about her scores on a test to assess memory and orientation. In May 2014, she scored zero, unable to recall the words "sock," "bed" and "blue." But Ms. Dornbier acknowledged that Mrs. Rayhons "was always pleased to see Henry." And Dr. Boedeker acknowledged that "intimacy is beneficial for dementia patients." Ms. Dornbier testified that the Concord Care Center allows consensual sex between residents. But she said that on May 15, 2014, family members including Mr. Rayhons were given a "care plan" establishing simple routines for Mrs. Rayhons, including limiting outings with Mr. Rayhons mostly to church on Sunday.

Which comes, in Mr. Pierce's telling, after this:

It is rare, possibly unprecedented, for such circumstances to prompt criminal charges. Mr. Rayhons, a nine-term Republican state legislator, decided not to seek another term after his arrest. There is no allegation that Mrs. Rayhons resisted or showed signs of abuse. And it is widely agreed that the Rayhonses had a loving, affectionate relationship, having married in 2007 after each had been widowed. They met while singing in a church choir.

Emphasis added.

So this entire case is going to court because Mrs. Rayhon has advanced Alzheimer's, and because (according, again, to comments) the daughters are mad at their step-father, and perhaps a prosecuting attorney took his duties a bit too zealously (which happens in the area of family law and relationships far more often than it should, apparently).

There are considerations in the justice system other than punishment and the rigid adherence to the law no matter what (in this case, no matter the facts, for example; which we don't know, yet).  Justice is not just punishment meted out by the law to all and sundry and not every case of sexual intercourse where consent is a clouded question is a case of rape.  Does it matter if the Rayhons were married, or just if they were in a "loving, affectionate relationship"?  Because the people determined to prosecute (if not convict) Mr. Rayhon for rape seem to have decided sex is always desire and impulse and mindless animal behavior and has very little to do with love and the expressions of love.

Which is the first sad point here.  The second is the legal point I started to address:  is this the best use of the legal resources of the state of Iowa?  Is it the best use of the prosecutor's energies, the court's time, the jury's time, and the legal system in general?  Or is a prosecutor, like some kind of legal machine, required to try any case which might be criminal, to the fullest extent of the law?

Who benefits?  What, in short, is the point?

Steve Allen wrote a story about people gathering in a football stadium to direct their hatred at a prisoner on the stage on the field, much as a microwave oven would direct microwaves into a piece of meat.  The point of the story was the parable of how willingly people would hate the stranger, would punish whom they were told to despise, would bring to bear on the unknown person all the animosity they could muster, and use his suffering and agony (he's described as dancing around the stage like a bug on a hot griddle, until he finally falls over, barely twitching) to fuel their hatred directed at him.

More and more on the internet do I see examples in real life of the parable Allen was trying to tell.

Things that make you say "Hmmmmmm....."

This is interesting:

The “unaffiliated” group is rising much faster in North America than in Europe. Europe is projected to move from 19% to 23% of its population unaffiliated while North America would move from 17% to 26% (16% growth for Europe and 89% growth for US). Only in the Asia Pacific area is there expected to be a decline in the unaffiliated at 2% (82).

But it’s also not clear if being “unaffiliated” really means the same thing in the United States as elsewhere. Take that earlier number of 68% of the “unaffiliated” believing in God or a higher power in the United States.


That drops to 30% in France (233). According to that previous Pew research, one reason more people identify as “unaffiliated” now is that people who used to skip church and not really believe anything in particular simply felt a social pressure to identify with a religion anyway. Now, more people feel comfortable simply naming what they were already doing before.

Not because it gives a good definition of "unafflliated" (too often defined as "atheist" on the intertoobs), but because the difference in affiliation between Europe (supposedly all "atheist" and "post-Christian" according, again, to the intertoobs) and the US just now is only 2%.  Yes, Pew predicts it will rise and the percentage in the US will exceed Europe's, but that hasn't happened yet; and 2% is pretty much the margin of error with any poll.

So while religious expression is very different in America than in Europe, the level of religious affiliation is pretty much the same on both continents.  But Europe is full of atheists, and America is overrun with superstitious crackpots.

Isn't that right?

Besides, read down the article; the fastest growing religious population in North America is not "None," it is:  "Other."  Which pretty much ties in with the polls showing a steady rise in religious affiliation since the early 20th century.

Whose Season is it, anyway?

Because, sure, that's what happens:

“I believe that if the Supreme Court, as expected, enshrines gay marriage as a constitutional right, I believe it’s truly going to be, to use your phrase, ‘open season’ on Christians and those who believe in traditional marriage,” Jeffress said. “Once you make gay marriage a civil right then anyone who opposes it is guilty of a civil rights violation.”

Bob Jones University outlawed interracial dating among its students; well, until they lost their federal funding and student loans, grants, etc.  They finally gave up and changed their policy, thus giving them renewed access to federal monies.  But nobody associated with the university was arrested for a "civil rights violation."

Maybe this is just the difference between being a pastor and being a lawyer.

I remember the story of a church, too, which forced out a lay couple (just members, not clergy or anything) because they were an interracial couple.  If I recall correctly, they refused to allow the marriage to take place in their church.  Despite Loving v. Virginia, no one arrested the church members or the pastor; the church was just shamed.  Whether or not they relented on their racist policy, I don't recall.  But again:  no one was jailed.

So the "open season" has never come.  Which will be good for the rabbits and the ducks.

The future of Christianity is not hipsters

It's David. No, seriously:

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There's something very traditional here, with the idea that reason comes from God (see, e.g., Aquinas) and so leads to faith (obviously the pre-Pietist era of Christianity). But the idea that robots will be smarter, and therefore more Christian?  Well, you know, if you can process all information on earth simultaneously, imagine the sermon you could write!

Huh?*

Really, it's just too funny.

Update:  I was going to leave this in comments, but when I finished it I realized it needed to be up here:

There is huge pressure on Protestant pastors to identify and get out ahead of the "Next Big Thing." At one time Joel Osteen was identified as the "Best Preacher in America," so everyone needed to follow his example; or we needed to be a "Purpose Driven Church," a la Rick Warren; or we needed to be the next Mars Hill, or now the "hipster" pastor.

So the leap to robot pastors is not really a surprise; not to me. It's just the logic of the relentless pressure to be "relevant." Every one of those "successes" I mentioned is actually no more absurd or dehumanizing or reductionist about the Gospel than the idea of robot preachers.

It's all a matter of looking for the "silver bullet," the "One" that will save us all. Which is the real irony.....

*I have to be pedantic enough to point out this is classic Reformed theology, with the sermon (the "Word") at the center of worship, as opposed to the Eucharist, the sacrament.  Too Catholic, ya know. And the beat goes on, with a robo-drummer......

Hail to thee, our Alma Mater....

Hillary Clinton is visiting a community college today.  I wonder if if this topic will come up:

Over the past several decades, colleges and universities have come to rely on adjuncts in order to keep down education costs and tuition. According to the American Association of University Professors, "more than half of all faculty hold part-time appointments."

That simple fact usually leads to some kind of discussion about tuition costs and what students are actually paying for.  TPM cited the same statistic and made much the same argument about the poverty of adjunct teachers.   Interestingly the comments at both Slate and TPM overlooked this little fact, focussing instead on TA's (full disclosure, I was a TA for a year in graduate school, and completely in charge of the class; not just a guy handing out papers to an auditorium and grading them in some basement for the professor.  I had an office and office hours.  As an adjunct I'm still in charge of the class, get paid little better than I was as a TA, and don't have an office or office hours.  Most of my students call me "professor," not realizing I am not one and never will be.).

It's the comments where things get really interesting.  The top comment at Slate bemoans the fact any sympathy is being extended to impoverished adjuncts because "they don't have to do that job."  Because, you know, no one really needs to teach.  I mean, who needs teachers, right?

If I have to respond further to that kind of "reasoning," I can only assume you stumbled into this blog by mistake.

The comments at TPM focus on TA's and how this is just a pushing aside, if anything, of that kind of teaching.  It's the "more than half of all faculty hold part-time appointments" that disturbs me, for reasons no one addresses (well, why should they?  What do we need teachers for, amirite?).

If we are replacing more than half of our college faculty (which is well beyond the usual assumption that this is an English major's problem, English majors being emblematic of the degrees we don't really need, because we should just scrap the liberal arts anyway.  I mean, it's so medieval!) with adjuncts, we are gaining teachers who have stopped doing research when they got their degrees, and whose knowledge of the field is frozen in the year they graduated.  Not frozen in stone, but pretty well trapped in the past, which recedes more and more every year.  Adjuncts don't get paid to research or to keep up with knowledge in their field.  They get paid to stand in front of a class and to grade papers (grades being the most important part of a student's life, apparently.  I never hear from my department chair about my teaching unless it's a student complaining about the final grade in the course.).  They get paid to teach from a textbook and use a curriculum assigned to them.  They don't get paid to hold office hours (I still have memories of talking, in offices, with deans and professors; I did this from college through graduate school and into seminary.  It was, so I thought, one of the primary purposes of "higher education."  Not so anymore.), so they don't get paid to talk to students.

This is an interestingly awkward problem, because you cannot offer help to a student by discussing their academic work in a hallway (it's practically a violation of FERPA to do so anyway).  FERPA won't allow me to discuss their work via e-mail, and I don't want them having my private phone number.  I have no office, no office hours, and I'm paid by the course.  The less work I do, the better, because the number of courses I can teach is limited, I eat into my hourly rate when I do more than teach and grade papers; and I'm not going to arrange for a corner table at the local Starbucks 3 hours a week.

I never had a class in my major that was taught by a TA.  This was intentional on my part.  I went to college to learn from professors, not from recent graduates.  Now that is becoming harder and harder to do, and the result is we are eating our seed corn.  You cannot teach what you do not know, and slowly but surely we are turning colleges into high school classes.  Actually, high school teachers are, by and large, required to do continuing education to teach in public schools.  Adjuncts just need to have a graduate degree in their field; anything else they do is on their dime, and does nothing to improve their chances of getting full-time, much less tenure track, work.  Nor does it increase the per-class payment they receive by one dime.

So we are telling the adjuncts the field they work in is less and less important to academia; that their teaching skills are less and less valuable to society; and that what needs to be taught can be narrowed more and more.  We are shrinking the knowledge base, in other words; adjuncts who know only what they remember from graduate school (staying current in the field is for people who get paid for such information; adjuncts get paid to be warm bodies) are passing on diminished knowledge to people who eventually will be going to graduate school themselves and, at some point, teaching in those schools; many of them as adjuncts.

It's a noose; and we're tightening it.  In the name of what, exactly?

Sandbox logic and the limits of discourse

Yeah, I know; and considering the source, for all I know it's Photoshopped.  

But if you read the article below, the one worth reading, this picture actually makes a kind of sense.  

Besides, is provocative, so there's that....

I am a creature of habit, which means I click over to Salon (having given up, finally, on clicking over to Baby Blue), where they daily run claptrap which draws fools like shit draws flies.  I know better.  But it's become a reflex.

Most of the foolishness centers on conflating Christianity with stupidity and all Muslims with ISIS.  A favorite trope, indeed, is how benighted and bloodthirsty and purely evil all Muslims are (and how much Christians want to shove religion down every Americans throat.  Not sure why that homosexual imagery is so pervasive and persistent, but there we are.).

And if you deny it, you just draw more attention from the peanut gallery, who engage in the sandbox logic of "IS TOO!"  "IS NOT!" about which wars were inspired by religion.  Apparently Hitler saw his quest for a Third Reich as a holy crusade, because "IS TOO!!",  and Stalin never killed anybody in the name of atheism, because "IS NOT IS NOT IS NOT!!!!!!"

So this comes as a welcome relief, and a cool metaphorical glass of water.

I gotta clean my browser history....

The nature and destiny of the "unpleasantness between the states"

I've been looking at posts from, frankly, "Yankees," about the anniversary of Appomattox and what was given up by the "North" to appease the "South."  I say "Yankees" because the slant is obviously in favor of Northern sentiments over Southern ones. Which is not to say they should be more amendable to the execrable history of racism in America; but quit trying to imply, at the same time, that racism would have faded sooner had the U.S. been less conciliatory to the states of the former Confederacy.  I'd always understood Lincoln's point in going to war was to preserve the Union, not to punish the secessionists.

In other words, let's not make the mistake of Creon and try to leave the dead on the battlefield for the birds and the dogs, again.

I'm not going to name names because I don't want to start some kind of fight, here.  I don't rise to defend "the noble Cause" or the "heritage of the South."  That heritage was brutality and racism and greed and almost everything ugly about human society.  Yeah, I've seen "Django Unchained," and yeah, it struck me as being as good a representation of the pre-War South as any fictional presentation could be.  I accept Tarentino's vision as valid, at least for the sake of argument here.

Granted, I learned a different version of history growing up in Texas.  I didn't know this, for example; but I'm hardly surprised, either.  My sympathies are actually with those who don't want some of the slave states back in the Union, especially because Texas left with the Confederacy a short time after petitioning to be a state.  Texas took great pride in requiring all public school students to learn Texas history when I was a child; but I never learned that the battle at the Alamo was not for freedom, so much as it was for the ability to own slaves.  Seems Mexico had outlawed slavery, and the Texicans wanted to emulate Louisiana and points immediately east, so they resented being cut off from that kind of opportunity.  To this day, Texas has the highest percentage of persons living on minimum wage (which is not higher in Texas than the Federal floor), and our State leaders still brag about how many people in Texas are employed.

Not how many people in Texas are able to make a decent living.  Low wages are attractive to big employers, donchaknow....

But Reconstruction was not a period where the North did all it could to leave the South alone.  The town of Brenham, not far from where I sit, has an historical site in its downtown now (this is new.  Lots of Texas towns are doing it, and most are really good.  Even the history at the Alamo has greatly improved, now that they've removed the huge painting showing Davey John Wayne Crockett boldly making a last stand in a scene from the movie, a scene which has nothing to do with history.  The painting was a gift from Wayne after he shot his film there; it would have been bad manners not to leave it up for a decade or so.).  It details the history of the small town, including occupation by Union soldiers during Reconstruction.  Granted, racism still abounded in Texas (it was strong until my early adulthood; it has abated, somewhat, but seems determined to recur across the country).  But the display notes the harshness of the Union officers; men who had little regard for the Texans and not that much concern for the races in general.  The central event was a fire downtown which the Union troops did nothing to quell, and they may even have enjoyed watching the destruction.

It wasn't, in other words, the imposition of just order under the mythical Abraham Lincoln or the ideal envisioned by Dr. King, only to be trashed by Southerners who refused to bend.  It didn't make the town happy about the "occupation."

I'll grant Southerners were not willing to put aside the culture they had known from before the war; but neither did Europe give up its various cultures after a century of war (the 19th), or another half-century of war (the 20th).  It really wasn't until the fall of the USSR that Europe finally began to recover from its nationalism, but looking at Greece and Eastern Europe, one has to wonder how much has finally changed.  The Greeks still think the Germans who them reparations, for example.  And some countries can't decide (not just Ukraine) whether they want to be European or Russian.  That's a discussion that's been going on in Europe for centuries; and the beat goes on....

None of which is to justify the acts of Southerners in the late 19th century, or through the 20th century.  I'm just asking for a bit of perspective.  The United States was not full of angels in paradise trying to reform the demons in the hell of the American South.  Too much would have been asked to require the South to become like New England in the space of 14 years.  150 years later and we're still struggling with racial issues in America, from New York City to Ferguson, Missouri.  And I'm not really willing to let anybody forget what happened when Boston schools had to integrate in the late '70's, nor that the death of Brown v. Board came at the hands of a Supreme Court never dominated by Southern judges.

There is plenty of ugliness in American history.  I have no sympathies for the parties who, sometime in the '50's put a plaque up in the Texas Capitol arguing that the War between the States was not about slavery (at least it's on the back of a column in a poorly visited public area.  You have to look for it to find it.  I'd rather the State had the guts to take it down.).  But the best response to the attempted (again!) revision of American history is not to say, or just imply, that things would have been better but for the South.

Things would have been better had we never started the transatlantic slave trade, but while Britons never, never, never shall be slaves, they had no problem making slaves of others.  That was a profitable business for almost everyone, and the first thing America really learned was:  it's money that matters.

And it's violence that protects it; still two very American truths we should spend far more time being ashamed of; or at least being critical of.*

*I have to say this sounds more recent than historical, and a further proof that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.  This history also indicates the problems of trying to reconcile two disparate visions of governance, even of "America" (which also sounds distinctly contemporary, especially in our foreign policy debates; except we can't blame religion for the struggles in America).  The Southern take on Reconstruction is still formed as much by the occupation by soldiers as it is by the desire to continue the oppression of former slaves by groups like the KKK.

"All Professions are Conspiracies against the Laity"

The shorter version of this:  philosophers are like any other modern professional.  If you want them to pay attention to you, brings lots of money.

The longer version is kind of interesting.

Of nature and destiny

Just pluck this quote and regard it in the context of the current prevailing internet discussions (where atheism rules the world and will soon save us all), or consider it a much more cogent political analysis than anything you're likely to read almost anywhere:

A further consequence of modern optimism is a philosophy of history expressed in the idea of progress. Either by a force immanent in nature itself, or by the gradual extension of rationality, or by the elimination of specific sources of evil, such as priesthoods, tyrannical government and class divisions in society, modern man [sic] expects to move toward some kind of perfect society. The idea of progress is compounded of many elements. It is particularly important to consider one element of which modern culture is itself completely oblivious. The idea of progress is possible only upon the ground of a Christian culture. It is a secularized version of Biblical apocalypse and of the Hebraic sense of a meaningful history, in contrast to the meaningless history of the Greeks. But since the Christian doctrine of the sinfulness of man [sic] is eliminated, a complicating factor in the Christian philosophy is removed and the way is open for simple interpretations of history, which relate historical process as closely as possible to biological process and which fail to do justice either to the unique freedom of man or to the daemonic misuse which he may make of that freedom.

 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Intepretation, Vol. I (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press 1996), p. 24.

I mean, let's face it:  David Brooks wishes he could argue like this.  Consider the heart of the argument there:

The idea of progress is possible only upon the ground of a Christian culture. It is a secularized version of Biblical apocalypse and of the Hebraic sense of a meaningful history, in contrast to the meaningless history of the Greeks.

That is not a fundamentalist statement that we are a "Christian" country, nor is it a gratuitous swipe at Hellenic Greece.  The ancient Greek concept of the cosmos, one reflected in their invention of the tragedy, (where if anything can go wrong, it will, with terrible consequences and the only redemption is owning up to your responsibility for those consequences), is that the original state of the universe (the cosmos, "everything"), is chaos.  Logos (reason, and word; two concepts that are closely related in Western thought) imposed order on chaos, giving rise to the world/universe we live in.  But that order did not dispense chaos, only quelled it; and eventually logos fails, and chaos returns.  So history has no meaning, no telos, no purpose; it's just what happens between the quelling of chaos and the return of chaos.*

So Niebuhr's argument is not that the idea of order in history proves Christianity; it only proves the importance of Christianity in western culture, and how much we take for granted ideas that are rooted in Christian thought, though we think them now to be wholly secular.  That, to me, is the interesting point.  And then, as Niebuhr points out, if we remove the doctrine of original sin, we "fail to do justice to the unique freedom of [humanity] or to the daemonic misuse which [we] may make of that freedom."

That's all.  Although it does tie in nicely with the idea that a little knowledge (something you cannot accuse Niebuhr of) is a dangerous thing.

*If you are a hardcore Zelazny fan, this is why Amber was balanced with the Courts of Chaos, and why Chaos was eternal and would eventually "win" the effort of Amber to organize the universe.  I confess I gave up on that series after the original five books; I don't even own those anymore, though I'm sorry I lost them.  They seem to be as lost to the mists of time in popular culture as they are to me.

I still blame Hobby Lobby

I suppose I'm establishing something of a brief against the reasoning in the Hobby Lobby decision (and, by extension, the Supreme Court in general).  I can't quite make the leap from a government mandate (providing health insurance for employees) to a violation of one's religious principles as a closely-held corporation.  Can I cite Job ("Man is born to suffer as surely as sparks shoot") to defy government regulations that require I provide a safe workplace, or to allow women to work when they should be in their "time of confinement"? (Look it up, it's not worth it to me).  

At least both of those positions are tied to particular scripture.  I still can't find the scripture that says "Thou shalt not participate in a same-sex marriage, even unto letting your business sell the groom's cake!"  I do remember quite a few passages about "Who is this, that he consorts with prostitutes and tax collectors and wine-bibbers" (the latter seemed to be in the Baptist translation; or maybe it's just my bad memory).

I'm pretty sure I know who that was.....

Anyway, the reasoning in Hobby Lobby is dumb, and it's making us all dumber.  Lights, however, continue to be lit:

First, “bigotry” is not holding a belief, but denying someone else’s dignity as a result of that belief. For example, Christians for centuries believed that the Jews rejected Christ and should be punished. That belief, in itself, is not bigotry. But centuries of pogroms certainly is.

In the contemporary context, no one is saying a belief is bigotry. What is bigotry is opening a business and then denying some people service on the basis of their identities.

Second, as members of a minority religion, American Jews have long enjoyed constitutional protection from the Christian majority, which has sought to compel Jews to say Christian prayers, yield to Christian holy symbols in civic spaces, and conform to all sorts of Christian religious practices. To twist the meaning of “religious liberty,” from a shield against co-option of government by the majority religion, into a sword against minorities, would undo such protections.

What these writers are calling “religious liberty” is really Christian hegemony.

Hobby Lobby didn't really open this door, and as much as some will thrust against, it will never be opened.  But the efforts to redefine bigotry and discrimination are as ugly as they were in my childhood.  I had really imagined, at one point a few years ago, that we were finally beyond this.  Now I'm not sure we will ever be.

Niebuhr was right; and nothing from beyond us is going to save us from ourselves.  We can be saved, but we have to engage in the salvation, or nothing happens that is worth happening.*

*To which conversation I would add this post at Religion Dispatches.  My first thought was a line Dom Crossan concocted, trying to reconstruct what he thought was a more original version of the sayings of Jesus (a notable effort, but not one to be taken as scripture; more of a palate cleanser, really, a way of removing layers of varnish and dirt to restore the original):  "When you start a fire," he "quotes" Jesus of Nazareth, "You want it to burn."  It's his version of Luke 12:49.

Odd the Bishops are just now figuring that out.  And they call for calm even as they take up the vocabulary of "bigotry" and "discrimination" and claim themselves victims.  Now the piper wants to be paid for playing the music they danced to.  Now the fire wants to burn.

Elisabeth Sifton praises her father, Reinhold Niebuhr

An interview (worth reading on its own) which ends with her favorite quote from her father, which is also a favorite of mine:

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.

I am almost allergic to the topic of salvation, because it is almost always presented as something done to us, or for us; something from outside which we must accept to make effective.  That's not an originally Christian idea; Christianity actually got it from Rome.  Caesar, a divine figure in his own right, a divi filius  (son of god), was the savior of Rome and all of Rome's subjects.  Caesar saved those who lived under the empirical rule from the barbarians, the uncivilized (a notion they got from the Greeks, for whom the term meant literally those who don't speak Greek; that is, they babble, "barbarian" sounding in Greek like the language of non-Greek speakers.  To this day in America we insist all real Americans speak American English.  The more things change....).  The salvation Caesar offered was the Pax Romana, which you refused at your peril (crucifixion being the punishment reserved for those who threatened the Pax).

In modern times it's an almost purely religious concept, but it still retains the sentiment that we will be saved by an outside force, that salvation will come to us and do for us what we cannot, or will not, do for ourselves.  It's not a very Biblical idea, actually; but it also doesn't depend on an atonement soteriology that saves you from damnation in the next world no matter what happens in this one.

Niebuhr's idea of salvation is neatly captured in this quote.  We must be saved by hope; by faith; by love; and by forgiveness.  None of those are exterior to the human experience.  None of those rely solely and explicitly on a certain Christian theology.  Hope may be hope in Jesus Christ, but it needn't be.  Faith is not belief "in what you know ain't so," it is merely trust; what you trust is another question.  Love is perhaps the most difficult to define here, actually; and forgiveness is the hardest thing to do.  How can you forgive without hope, faith, and love?  And how can you have hope, faith, and love, without some belief in more than the merely material world?

But none of these, however we understand them, will come to us; we must find and use them.  Hope, I would argue, is illusory without faith; faith is empty without love; love is nothing if it is not an activity; and forgiveness flows from all three together.

Is God a necessary component of this concept, this offered salvation?  I would turn the question around:  will you reject the possibility on that ground alone?  If so, what salvation do you offer, and where does it come from?  If you tell me it comes from reason, can I not say that is your "god"?

Because I can't distinguish it from any other outside source that will supposedly save us by making us all agree on what is important, and brutally rejecting what is not.  Which is not the result I see from a formula based on hope, faith, love, and forgiveness.

The more they remain....

Yeah, yeah; we have to keep asking....

I suppose the advantage is, getting to see it stated plainly:

"This isn't about discrimination," DeLay said in an interview with Newsmax. "We love people that have chosen to be homosexuals. The problem is we abhor the sin. So yes, when I have a business and some gay person walks in —unidentified by the way, there's no way he could tell you— then I'm going to serve him. But if he comes in and asks me to undermine my values, what I believe in —undermine my religious liberty then I have the right to not serve him. It's not discrimination. It's the government telling us how we are to act, what we are to believe, and that has got to be fought with every ounce of our being."

Ignore the "have chosen to be homosexuals" line; that's a red herring.  What's interesting here is the concept of "religious liberty."  You undermine my liberty when you undermine my values. Can I use that to refuse to pay taxes that support the U.S. war efforts?  Can I use it to discriminate against other people?  But we've had that argument, haven't we?  And we decided, as a society, through our statutes, that it would not prevail.

Which brings up a separate point:  what if the Supreme Court decides same-sex marriage is not only allowed under the Constitution, but cannot be denied under the Constitution?  The precedent here is supposed to be Loving v. Virginia; but the real precedent is actually Brown v. Board of Education.

Brown v. Board was handed down 10 years before the Civil Rights Act was passed.  I don't know the legal history well, but I do know enforcement of Brown hadn't spread to East Texas (the "Southern" part of Texas; in many ways, it's just western Louisiana) until 1970.  Court ordered desegregation of Boston schools started a few years later (the year I entered college; something, as a Texan, I never quite forgot.  Of course, they were still fighting over it in Austin when I got there in 1978.).

According to this Slate article, Brown wasn't really effective until after 1964.  And I understand that by 1967, when Loving was handed down, very few states in the country still made mixed race marriages a criminal act.  Which is the major distinction between that decision, and any ruling on same-sex marriages today; at least from a Constitutional standpoint.

I also know that, today, the Loving decision is uncontroversial; while Brown, while still hailed as a landmark, is basically dead.  The news is full of failing and grossly unequal public school systems; but nobody decries them as a violation of Brown, and no court is making any effort to enforce Brown in any meaningful way.  The same can be said for Roe v. Wade:  that fight has never been won politically, and so it goes on, over 40 years later.  Roe has turned into a perpetual battleground, while Brown is honored in breach, and not at all in the keeping.

And the distinction between them is:  it takes a community to support a school system, and they will only support the school system they agree, through laws primarily, is valid.  Courts protect rights under Roe, to the extent they do, for individuals; enforcing rights under Brown requires enforcement against communities.  If the communities refuse to cooperate, enforcement breaks down.  Our school systems should be much, much better than they are; but we have to decide to make them better, not expect an outside force to do it for us.

If the Court rules that same-sex marriages must be allowed under the Constitution, don't expect the fight over "religious liberty" to end, in other words.  There was no similar fight in '67 because no one really quarreled with the Loving decision by '67.  The people had pretty much spoken, in the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

In fact, the fights that continued involved not implementation of those Acts, but whether or not they were enough.  Affirmative action, still controversial today (and never fully implemented), began after 1964; and was thwarted, more than aided, by the Supreme Court, starting with the Berger Court that succeeded the Warren Court.

As the Slate article argues, we really can't look to the Court to save us.  It's heritage and history has been more to thwart progress, than promote it.

Tom DeLay is a braying ass; but the best way to defeat his idea is in the Congress.  The legislative solution to this "religious liberty" argument, spurious and offensive as it it, is to amend the Civil Rights Act to include sexual orientation (not "preference") as a protected class.  We have never, as a society or through our legal system, allowed discrimination to be protected by the First Amendment.  We don't need to start now.

Because, after all, you can "choose" to be Catholic, or Protestant, or non-Christian; and we could even argue nationality and race are a choice, to some degree.  We know we don't want to return to that basis for legalizing discrimination.  But it will be far more effective if we make that clear in our statutes, rather than leave it up to the preferences of 9 bickering individuals.

What we talk about when we talk about...

... something we don't really know anything about.

But I don't mean something we can know anything about.  Well, I don't mean something we....well, let me just explain.

In an article at Salon, in a pretty lame discussion of evolution, there was discussion about the possibility of "uploading" human "consciousness" into machines.  It's a wonderfully trashy idea, akin to "freezing" a terminally ill patient until the cure for their disease can be found.  It's trashy for a very simple reason:  no one ever talks about uploading the "soul" or the "heart."

Why not?

In fact, the presumption in science fiction stories is always that, if you upload the "mind," the result will be a less than human product, because the "heart" won't necessarily follow.  Okay, that's a bad example, because first it's science fiction, and second narrative always needs a conflict, and what better one is there than that transferring "you" to a machine will result in something that is no longer wholly "you."

But what is "you"?

For the longest time in Western history, "you" were your soul; and your soul was your essence.  This, on the other hand, was not always true.  "Soul" as we understand pretty much reaches back to Plato, and pretty much entered Western thought with Neo-Platonism becoming wed to Christian theology.  It's a long story, but the more popular notion for centuries was a version of what the Hebrews called ruah, or the Greeks pneuma (it's used that way in the Greek New Testament):  breath, wind, life.  It was, of course, the classic method of determining whether the body was unconscious, or dead:  was there any wind, any breath, left?  Without it, how could there be life?

Soul, that abstract, inchoate, metaphysical something which both animated the corpus and provided your identity, your self, became more popularly accepted much later.  And then we discarded it as unscientific, and took up the much more secular "consciousness" as our preferred term.  But when we use it we still mean "soul," except perhaps without the "eternal" modifier.  And, of course, we still speak of "heart," although we insist we don't mean that muscle beating in our chest.  Heart is somehow not consciousness, but also somehow still important to us (to lose your "heart" is to become a machine, a soul-less being, less than human but more than a zombie, and yet frightening because, without a heart, what is there in you that human to appeal to?).  Heart is important, but we can set it aside in favor of better living through technology and eternal life through some kind of "mapping" of our "consciousness" onto....well, what's the latest hardware?  That's always the source of this kind of miracle.

"Mapping," by the way, is a mathematical concept, one I last encountered when studying Russell and Whitehead's attempt to map philosophy onto mathematics, an attempt Kurt Godel blew to pieces with relentless logic (and, not coincidentally, mapping).  Mapping persists in some corners outside the realm of mathematics as some kind of magic that will, through processes unknown, accomplish miracles, usually involving computers and human brains.  It sounds kind of like the road map we can now get on our cell phones, or maybe an atlas that shows us all the major physical features of the planet, but it must involve some kind of correspondence like that, between paper (or electronic) reality, and "real" reality.  Besides, the brain is just like a computer, right?  Neurons are hardware, thoughts are software, consciousness is A.I. we just haven't accomplished yet.  See how effortlessly mind maps onto machine?

Actually, you see what a hall of mirrors this quickly becomes.  And yet it is undone by a simple question:  why can't I expect one day to upload my heart, my soul?  Why is consciousness something machines can one day be expected to share with humans, but heart and soul are not?

It's questions like this that make me think people like to entertain themselves with fairy tales, even as they condemn religious people for believing "nonsense."

Othello and Rolling Stone at UVA

I've had personal experience with people simply making up stories about me, so I know it is possible.

The problem is, just saying that doesn't prove anything.  I could tell you the whole story, and you could believe me, or you could assume (as I would, having represented my share of clients who never tell their lawyer the whole truth, just the truth they want to admit to) that I'm shading the truth to suit my defense.   Of course, what you can't do is ask the other participants in the story what happened.  So there's that.

But I read a number of stories about "Jackie" and UVA, and how "Jackie" couldn't be making up the story of her rape at the hands of "Drew" because she was simply too credible.  Well, that is, until her story was thoroughly debunked.  Now even Amanda Marcotte no longer believes "Jackie":

Not only did Jackie not hand a specific man over to the authorities, but the report suggests that “Drew,” the ringleader of the gang rape Jackie describes, may be a fictional character. (Jackie described him as both a member of Phi Kappa Psi and a lifeguard at the Aquatic and Fitness Center. No such person fitting this description exists.) Instead of trying to bring her supposed rapist to justice, Jackie did everything in her power to stonewall any attempt to find him. When Erdely started to push to find out more about him, the investigators report that “Jackie stopped responding to Erdely's calls and messages.” The silent treatment worked and Erdely capitulated, agreeing not to try to find out anything about this man, at which point Jackie “now chatted freely.”

Which isn't as clear as it could be, so Marcotte clarifies by the end:

Jackie’s apparent lying will certainly be used against future accusers, who accuse specific men of specific crimes. But that is comparing apples to oranges. We have a story about a woman who probably made things up to get attention and sympathy. That doesn’t prove the widespread allegation that women routinely redefine consensual sex as rape to get revenge.

I'm trying to be fair by quoting Marcotte in context, because my real subject isn't her or her opinions.  Her conclusion, in fact, is sound.   I'm still not convinced campus rape is a widespread, epidemic problem, or that there is a "rape culture."  But I am convinced people tell lies easily and well, and we believe them because...well, because, we don't have any reason not to.

Call it the "Iago Syndrome."

Shakespeare's worst villain, Iago tells Rodrigo in the first scene "I am not what I am."  It's a negation of the famous identification God gives Moses when Moses asks the burning bush, "Who will I say has sent me," and God answer "Tell them I AM has sent you.  Tell them I am that I am."  (that's from memory, by the way, not a direct quotation.)  Iago, by engendering trust in every character in the play (except Emilia, his wife, who knows better), undermines the entire social order based on trust.  If we cannot trust each other, if we cannot depend on our determination of who is trustworthy and who is telling lies, society itself comes to a halt.*

Of course, it never gets that bad, but just because "Jackie" was convincing is no reason to conclude that "Jackie" was ever telling the truth.  Was she even raped?  I have to agree with Marcotte:  "We have a story about a woman who probably made things up to get attention and sympathy."   Once you say someone made up some of it, you have to be open to the possibility she made up all of it.  That's where "Jackie's" ability to act, to lie, to be credible, comes in.   But like the narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart," if we stop to consider his story about the beating heart can't be true, and that we only know the story of the murder because he says there was one, how do we know any event in the story actually occurred?

We rely on narrators not to lie about everything to us.  But when they do.....

The story of "Jackie" doesn't prove anything beyond the fact Rolling Stone did a very poor job reporting what turned out to be sheer gossip.  The line between gossip and journalism is a thin one, anyway, but Rolling Stone erased it at every opportunity.  On the other hand, "Jackie's" story doesn't prove there is a rape culture, either.  It fed that mythology very nicely, but that's how you feed a fable:  with more fables.

What we actually face here is a problem we can't resolve:  we have to trust each other.  We have to verify (the step Rolling Stone failed completely).  But we can never be sure "something happened" just because someone seems convincing, because we still don't know:  was there a rape?  Or did "Jackie" confuse imagination with reality?

Marcotte wants to reject the latter possibility because we lack a motive.  But motive is a thing in murder mysteries; it is a tool of fiction, where the behavior of the characters is always, in the end, explained.  Even Poe's narrator asks us "Will you say I am mad?", which explains why he would spin a tale of murder and confession that might not be at all true.  Reality isn't that convenient.

Murderers go to jail on the basis of intent, not motive.  We will never know what motivated the pilot to take the Germanair flight into a mountain.  All we can ever know is that he did it.  We can't even know that "Jackie" made up her story out of whole cloth.  All we can know is that the details she gave it, aren't supported by any evidence.  Why she gave it, may forever remain a mystery.


*And there is a mystery to Iago's motivation.  Is he angry at being passed over for Cassio?  Jealous because of rumors Othello may have had an affair with Emilia?  Desirous, like Roderigo, for Desdemona?  In the end none of those reasons seem to matter enough to motivate Iago across five acts and with such ruthless determination.  In the end all we can surely say is that he is not what he is, and the most frightening thing may be that his evil is without the clear motivation of Shakespeare's other villains, that it is simply something pure and undiluted, requiring nothing further to make it happen.

What rough, rude beast....

It's seems pertinent to just ask again....

I blame Hobby Lobby.

My parents were raised in Christian churches.  They got married in my aunt's living room.  As best I understand, this was quite a common practice.  The elaborate church wedding inspired by British royalty in the 20th century took a while to catch on.*

When I was a practicing pastor, I regularly performed wedding ceremonies for people who wanted a "church wedding," but who were not members of my church, nor particularly Christian.  So it wasn't particularly a religious function for them; they just liked the setting.

I've also attended weddings at churches where the participants weren't members, but the sanctuary/chapel/what have you, provided a nice backdrop for the photographs.

Protestants don't even consider marriage a religious ceremony; not officially, anyway.  My wedding was in a church, but that wasn't because I thought I wouldn't be married if the preacher didn't officiate in a building designated a "church."  (Which is another thing.  The Book of Common Prayer has an appendix volume for unusual services, which includes one for blessing, or deconsecrating, a worship space.  I know of no parallel to this in any other Protestant tradition.  It raises the question of whether the marriage must be conducted in a consecrated space, except really, it doesn't.  This whole argument isn't really about religion or marriage; it's about change, and how we have to adapt to it  The "holiness" of the service isn't even at issue; it's the fact that the state, which truly controls marriage in America, is making it possible. Yet there is no basis to claim that fact violates one's free exercise of religion.)  By the time I married, weddings in a church were the common practice.  We did it because that's what you did, not because the space or the pastor made it more acceptable to God.

There is a lot of concern now about "gay marriage," and the ability to object to it.  Legally, of course, it's a public accommodation argument:  you can't open your business to the public and then refuse to serve certain classes of people.  Well, you can refuse to serve LGBT persons, because there is no federal law (and few state laws) that prohibit discrimination against them.  But the objection now is settling on marriage, and whether or not you can be "forced" to participate in them.

And "participate" here is part of the skewed reasoning of Hobby Lobby v. Burwell, where providing insurance for one's employees as a benefit of their employment (literally as part of their compensation for their labor) is somehow a burden on the employer if it involves coverage of drugs or treatments the employer claims a moral/religious objection to.  Then again, as a society we've never allowed that argument to prevail in cases of discrimination, so even after Loving v. Virginia and now Hobby Lobby v. Burwell, no baker is demanding a right to refuse to cater a mixed race wedding.

Mostly because you wouldn't get very far with that argument in court, or in the court of public opinion. It was tried when the Civil Rights Act was passed.  In Newman v. Piggie Park Enterprises, Inc., the defendant claimed: "that the [Civil Rights] Act [of 1964] violates his freedom of religion under the First Amendment 'since his religious beliefs compel him to oppose any integration of the races whatever.' "   The court was not too impressed with that argument, and how you could distinguish it now on the basis of a Hobby Lobby v. Burwell claim of freedom from government imposition under the 1st Amendment is a bit beyond me.  I suppose you could make the libertarian argument that "the market" would work against such a position of discrimination, but I'm not sure it was "the market" that harassed Memories Pizza into taking a hiatus (or that raised a reported $800,000 in support of its owners.  You really have to stretch the idea of "the market" pretty far to hail that as a libertarian success story, on either side.).

This imbroglio will probably soon blow away.  If the Supreme Court decides there is no rational basis for disallowing same sex marriages, they will be as protected as mixed race marriages, and at that point I don't think RFRA laws in Indiana or Arkansas will be much protection to bakers and florists, if only because of the social pressure (an amendment to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is still advisable, because a Supreme Court decision might still not make sexual orientation a protected class).  As I say, no one would think today to refuse to cater, say, a Protestant/Catholic wedding, or a Jewish/Gentile wedding.  It won't be such a large step to adding that for same sex marriages, in practice if not soon in law.

Eventually this, too, will fade; not as soon as the bad reasoning in Hobby Lobby v. Burwell, but soon enough.

*Of course the British monarch is the head of the church, so it is right and proper members of the royal family are wed in a church.  But it underlines the reason Protestants in this country wanted to keep church and state and weddings as separate as possible; because weddings were not essential to Christian practice, and were largely a matter of property rights (for the state) and social order for the community.

Easter vigil Easter Morning

I originally wrote this over at Thought Criminal.  It's pretty much a bit of vainglorious navel gazing, but I decided to post it here anyway.  I was prompted by his remarks on the Easter liturgy, so you might want to there first.

I used to use a form of the Easter Vigil liturgy (probably similar to the modern Catholic liturgy; my version came from the UCC Book of Worship) on Easter Sunday.  The church was dark and silent, no paraments and I wore no stole; no candles, no lilies (which always upset people at first).  I brought in a tall candle, the "Christ Candle" (a novelty to a Protestant church) and read the liturgy of light.  The first 10-15 minutes were in a space lit only by the windows, and no sounds except spoken words.  When it came time to declare Christ risen, the organ would thunder an Easter hymn as the lights came up, the white paraments came out, the lilies appeared, and spirits (I always hoped), rose.

There were, as you say, several more readings from the Hebrew scriptures, recalling the salvation stories throughout history, leading to the gospel story of Easter morning.  There was a service of water (renewal of baptismal vows by all present), a service of word (preaching), a service of the eucharist.

It was my longest service of the year, and my favorite.  Nobody complained about the length (whereas if I ran 4 minutes over any other Sunday, I heard about it for weeks), or about the absence of flowers when they came in.

I have to admit I miss it terribly, if only because of the spiritual renewal it never failed to give me.  I hate to be the center of attention, I don't like to stand up in public, but I miss leading worship.  It was, for me, a very vivid and incarnated form of prayer.

Walter Brueggeman teaches that liturgy is a form of remembrance.  It is that.  And remembrance is a form of spirituality, of placing yourself consciously in the presence of God.  Worshipping God truly is a communal matter, and it truly isn't a matter of bending the knee before a master, wishing for beneficence from on high.  It is so much richer and more purposeful than that, and truly has so little to do with you, and so much to with the cloud of witness of which you may, for a moment, become a part.

A blessed Easter to you all, whatever your beliefs.  As the E&R eucharist said:  "May it be unto your according to your faith."

Good Friday 2015

Not a version I was familiar with, but still achingly beautiful. Aside from Bach, probably the only music I would allow on this day.

Good Friday: A Meditation

I've learned to think of Good Friday as the day the church wears black, and strips the altar of all vestments and colors.  There shouldn't even be music on this day, just words and silence.  Oddly, the images I went looking for on Google for "Good Friday" were all rather relentlessly cheery, completely at odds with my interpretation of what this day, of all days on the Christian calendar, should be.  This should be the day Christians face the absolute reality of death, if only to better appreciate Easter morning.  So, no art for this post; it isn't appropriate.

There persists in corners of the internet those who think they are "wise" because they "know" there is no evidence for the existence of Jesus of Nazareth, and therefore Christianity itself is simply a sham.  Partly because it is Good Friday, I want to address this contention.*

First, Biblical scholars by and large agree there was a Joshua (Greek:  "Jesus") who lived in Nazareth in the 1st century, and preached in the countryside, and was crucified, dead and buried.  It isn't really a controversial point; even the infamous Quest of the Historical Jesus (which almost no one has read, these days) concluded that there was  Jesus of Nazareth alive at the time specified, and saying pretty much what he supposedly said.

That's not much of an argument, though, and even Biblical scholars don't spend much effort creating an airtight case for the matter.  It really isn't of much interest, there really isn't any sound reason to doubt it (given what we know of many personages of ancient times), so they move on.  Still, that's one response to those who insist Jesus was not "real."

Then there's the example of Socrates.  He lived in Athens, a literate culture at the time where many people apparently knew him.  He was well-known enough to make it into a play by Aristophanes; there's not much benefit to a story that mocks a person almost no one in the audience recognizes.  But otherwise, Socrates didn't leave much of a record.  Yes, there are the dialogues of Plato, but Socrates is a character in Plato's dialogues, not an historical figure whose every utterance Plato duly transcribed.  We know what Plato says Socrates said; we don't know what Socrates said.

And yet the thought, the ideas, attributed to Socrates form the foundation of Western culture and civilization.  You can't overstate the importance of Socrates; but we can't even be sure he is more than a fictional character, at least the Socrates of our knowledge.

Why does it matter that Jesus lived, if it doesn't matter that Socrates did?

The importance of both men is in what they said, much more than what they did.  Even from Plato's accounts Socrates just gadded about Athens, ignoring his wife and children, staying up all night drinking when he had the mind to, and generally pissing off Athens until they decided to put him to death, a sentence he almost dared them not to pass on him.  But it isn't his prodigious ability to drink that we admire in Socrates, or his ability to carry on a dialogue at the drop of a hat, or even his claim that the Delphic Oracle pronounced him the wisest man in Athens.

We remember what he said; or, more accurately, what Plato says Socrates said.  Which puts Socrates (it has been noticed before, this is nothing new) in the same place as Jesus.  In terms of what we know about them, and what we most pay attention to, it is what they said, not what they did, that matters.

Now you may point to the miracles attributed to Jesus, and say those matter.  But to whom?  The synoptics call those actions "acts of power."  John's gospel calls them "signs."  One displays the power of the individual; one seems to signify (literally sign-ify) something other than the act itself.  And whether or not you think the gospel writers recorded them faithfully and truthfully, is an act of faith itself.  You can, rather like Jefferson, read the words of Jesus and skip over the dunamin, the semeia.  You can set aside what he reportedly did, and focus on what he reportedly said.

Nothing, so far, requires proof that Jesus, or Socrates, for that matter, was an actual historical figure.  It is the words attributed to them, the ideas associated with them, that matter.  So why is it so important that Jesus have actually lived?

Maybe because Paul says that, if Jesus didn't die, then the resurrection is a nullity, and Christian faith a pointless endeavor.  A sound enough argument, but it applies only to believers.  If you believe Jesus' death has spiritual or even metaphysical implications for you, then the life and death of Jesus are important for reasons that have nothing to do with history.  If you only believe the words of Jesus are interesting, are perhaps no more valuable to you than the words of Heraclitus, or even Thales of Miletus, then what does it matter if Jesus actually said these things, or if some tradition somehow sprang up that attributed these words to a fictional character (a fantastical idea, actually, which presumes we are far superior to people of the 1st century, an arrogant and unsustainable presumption).  If the words matter, the life of the person doesn't.  And the words of Socrates matter much more than how he did, or didn't, treat Xanthippe.

So why does the life of Jesus matter so much?  Perhaps because the faith of so many Christians rests on the historical figure of Jesus, and presumably, without that history, Christian faith disappears?  Or would that be like the Grinch stealing Christmas?

You cannot convince the faithful that Jesus of Nazareth never lived, and isn't alive now.  If you do convince someone of that, they are no longer faithful (for better or worse).  But it only matters to the world if the reality of the theology mentioned by Paul, above, matters to the world.  As a minister of the gospel, I think it does matter; but that's a far cry from saying I think it should matter to everyone in the world and it's my responsibility to see that it does.  If you don't accept Paul's faith claim, you don't care if Jesus lived or didn't.  His death is not material to you.  His lack of existence is not material to you, either.

So if you insist on arguing that "Jesus of Nazareth never existed!," you are making a faith claim no different from those who insist "Jesus is Lord!" and all the earth must acknowledge it.  You are claiming that the death of Jesus does matter, but you must erase it so it can't matter, so you can be:  what?  Free?

Free from what?

I don't make this as some kind of sneaky evangelical claim meant to prove beyond cavil that my faith claim is the only permissible faith claim.  It matters not to me whether or not you think Jesus was ever alive.  What I don't understand is why it matters to much to you that I believe he was.  Because if he wasn't, what does that change?  A theological claim you reject anyway?

What's really bothering you about the reality of Jesus?*

*I stumbled across this, this morning.  It is a fine summation of the argument I'm referring to, so I add it as a footnote:

It is not an impossible situation. We can start with Jesus, and establish a careful reading of the New Testament shows he was not an actual person. Once that one has been cleared up, I think a lot of the others might just fall by the wayside.

I'm going to call this the "Grinch" argument from now on, since it presumes the entirety of Christianity falls if the historical Jesus is removed.  And because that argument (or is it a belief?) rests more on the need of the person making it, than on the needs of the persons who call themselves Christians. 

Still unclear about the concept

“If a gay couple came in and wanted us to provide them pizzas for a wedding, we would have to say no,” O'Connor told the news station.

But:

The family later clarified for the news station that they would not deny service to a same-sex or non-Christian couple who came to eat at the restaurant.

In other words their "religious conviction" is based solely on the concept of marriage, not on providing services to homosexuals.  To be consistent, they would have to refuse to cater non-religious marriages, or maybe Catholic marriages, or Jewish ones, or Buddhist or Muslim ones (are pizzas even halal?  or kosher, for that matter?) because clearly they consider marriage to a a religious practice.

Except it isn't, not for Protestants.  So maybe they're devout Catholics and consider marriage a sacrament.  No service for Protestants, then; or atheists.  Or people who get married at the courthouse.

This rapidly devolves into absurdity, especially since they have no problem selling pizzas to gays and lesbians, they just don't want to be involved in "gay" weddings.  Unfortunately for them, that is the very definition of discrimination.  There is no rational basis for their decision, they just object to the law authorizing the marriage of certain persons.  If they said the same thing about mixed race marriages (which could be black and white, or Asian and Mexican, or any combination of "race" you care to make), how far would they be expected to get?

I wouldn't put it past the Supreme Court that handed down Hobby Lobby v. Burwell to decide that kind of discrimination is allowed (although Hobby Lobby didn't involve an issue of discrimination, so I could be wrong).  Of course, under Indiana law and federal law, homosexuality is not a protected class, so they are free to discriminate if they wish to.  Well, until the Supreme Court does for same sex marriage what Loving v. Virginia did for interracial unions.

But it seems to me Indiana's RFRA is kinda moot before that, except this kind of example underlines that Indiana's RFRA is aimed at allowing discrimination to survive that expected ruling.  Then again, if all that law does is allow people to discriminate against other people based on who is marrying whom, and nothing else, I could still see room for the courts to strike the law down now.

Because seriously, you can't preach it as round and square as that.

Same as it ever was

“It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.... Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”--Oliver Wendell Holmes

So, the other day, I found this:

“If Randers wanted to avoid 15 years in prison,” Barchenger writes, “Randers would have to agree to a condition. Sterilization.”

Why sterilization?  Because she'd "struggled with mental health issues" since she was a teenager, and because her infant daughter died of unexplained causes in 2012.  After two years of investigation into this "plea deal," she was transferred from jail to a mental health facility.

The infamous Carrie Buck case involved mental health issues.  Ms. Buck's allegedly low intelligence was leading her to get pregnant out of wedlock and create burdens on the state of Oklahoma.  You might have thought we were finally beyond such attitudes.  Nope:

“Over a 10-year period, that isn't a huge amount of money … compared to what you save in welfare paying for these unwanted children — as they procreated more.”

That 10-year period was from 2003 to 2013.  The California law allowing the practice of forced sterilization was repealed in 1979.  It was the law of California for 70 years.  Many states repealed their laws in 1979, it appears.  But as in the case of Ms. Randers, it still goes on.  The only change is cosmetic:  we don't call it eugenics anymore, because:

Eugenics is the now-discredited movement that sought to improve humans' genetic composition by preventing those seen as defective from reproducing. These supposed defects included mental disabilities and characteristics seen as making someone socially inadequate or unfit.

It didn't start with Nazi Germany, however.  Actually, the Nazis learned it from us:

Virginia's Sterilization Act became a model for similar legislation passed around the country and the world, including Nazi Germany. Nationwide, 65,000 Americans were sterilized in 33 states, said Mark Bold, executive director of the Christian Law Institute, which has been advocating the cause of the Virginia victims since 2013. In Michigan, more than 3,000 people were involuntary sterilized, according to a January 2009 article in the Michigan Bar Journal.

The Nazis hated Jews; we hated the poor.  There, I've proved Godwin's Law for you.  Forced sterilization was enforced against the poor, because this is America, and we have always feared the poor.

It's fair to say eugenics simply hasn't been discredited enough.  We dropped the word and continued the practice.  We don't even need to say it's "science," anymore; we just need to say it's simple economics:

People are too damned expensive.  As the LA Times noted:

... the intent of eugenical sterilization laws like California's was not simply to deprive victims of children, but also to ensure that they and their posterity ceased to exist. It was the state-sponsored means of eradicating entire classes of people. It is only when the victim dies that the stated objective is accomplished.

That may no longer be the stated objective; but it's still the intent.