tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-179135452024-03-08T09:23:05.819+10:30the new ussr [illustrated]reveries, reminiscence, reflectionsStewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994304766961822770noreply@blogger.comBlogger307125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17913545.post-43208985969179600762010-03-14T08:27:00.002+10:302010-03-14T08:34:24.540+10:30an important message<span style="font-size:180%;">Please go <a href="http://stewartsstruggles2.blogspot.com">here</a> for a continuation of this blog.</span>Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994304766961822770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17913545.post-28428421102941748202010-03-04T18:29:00.003+10:302010-03-04T18:49:33.837+10:30an individual struggle<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiT4QnWZ9PC_29vP_SoAWNlQAiE7aFCyHs8ts7XCQCkETKp7OYZfTKNVbRlDSR5jZqtHE-b0gK0v3L7dN6rut_4ptvYQHGoNXBE3DJvutrx42WkgCMj9nLMrxkXa27LWgM0AA9N/s1600-h/plato.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 165px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiT4QnWZ9PC_29vP_SoAWNlQAiE7aFCyHs8ts7XCQCkETKp7OYZfTKNVbRlDSR5jZqtHE-b0gK0v3L7dN6rut_4ptvYQHGoNXBE3DJvutrx42WkgCMj9nLMrxkXa27LWgM0AA9N/s200/plato.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5444687340008562050" /></a><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#00CCCC;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><b>'Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle' [P<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; "><b>lato, apparently]</b></span></b></span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal">We all suffer from lethargy from time to time, or they may be mood swings, depression. We’re all, I imagine, bipolar to a more or less pathological degree. And we’re driven, not just to keep going, but to improve, to progress, to get smarter and wiser, to experience and learn more. And then we fall into a bit of a funk and feel ashamed, disappointed, overwhelmed by our ignorance, our uselessness, our vanity, our vaunting ambition. </p> <p class="MsoNormal">It’s a particular problem, perhaps, of individualism, the myth of the auto-didact, the Nietzschean <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Ubermensch</i>. I’ve said <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">we</i>, but I have no right to generalize from myself. I wish I was a team player. I wish I had a family of my own. A daughter in which I could recognize something of myself. Myself but more confident, more sociable. More of a team player. </p> <p class="MsoNormal">In recent times I’ve been trying to get my head around science, in my dilettantish way. Science, I suppose that reveals the amateurishness of my quest. Not astronomy, not genetics, not oceanography or neurophysiology. Just science. This might seem to suggest ambition, and maybe in my youngers days that might’ve been so, but I’m no longer young, though not old. </p> <p class="MsoNormal">It seems to be a search for somewhere to belong. Even a mental place in which to belong. A way of thinking that is mine, and also shared, appreciated, understood, warmly welcomed. Science, or philosophy, something analytical, speculative. A place in which to get lost, safely, delightfully.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">Here I am, an unprepossessing <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>member of the species <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Homo sapiens – </i>I’ve also heard it designated <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Homo sapiens sapiens, </i>I don’t know why – one of over six billion currently inhabiting the biosphere of this small planet. My essential purpose is to reproduce, like every other member of the species, and like every member of the species <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Semibalanus balanoides </i>[one of some 1220 species of barnacles]<i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">, </i>the species <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Aedes aegypti</i> <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>[one of some 3500 species of mosquito] and the species <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Nocardia opaca </i>[one of a number of bacterial species, the number being so great, and so much in flux, as to be meaningless]. I haven’t managed to fulfil this purpose, but I’m reliably assured that, given the nature of our highly social existence, there are other ways to contribute to the success of our species. Knowledge, artistic excellence, possibly even a smile displayed at the right time and place. So I need not despair. <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">I have my heroes, as we all do. Let’s take some big splash-makers – Darwin, Shakespeare, Einstein. All rather remote, I admit. From my life, I mean. My next door neighbour might have led a heroic and admirable life, after all, but those great, instantly recognisable splash-makers at least provide fine examples of success beyond mere reproduction. I know Darwin produced ten kids but they weren’t his most successful productions. It makes me wonder about the meaning of the word <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">offspring</i>. That’s what civilization does to you, it complicates simple meanings with all these metaphorical overlays, confusing the purpose of life. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994304766961822770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17913545.post-26210585339626101522010-03-02T07:37:00.003+10:302010-03-02T08:03:43.101+10:30What is Christian morality? Part 11<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNYPUI65hLTNi4pj45bMMWCnrmZz_JUZP9pl1zcCbamuiNjI4SyBAU81NP9C2MzLexJVvoWatIOQZHqxpJAYZVT6xJTpmKOKDiLf7ZTfm7EkQD6b-rzHGDXZoA3PWJq3ZYJ9ZK/s1600-h/love+enemies.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 150px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNYPUI65hLTNi4pj45bMMWCnrmZz_JUZP9pl1zcCbamuiNjI4SyBAU81NP9C2MzLexJVvoWatIOQZHqxpJAYZVT6xJTpmKOKDiLf7ZTfm7EkQD6b-rzHGDXZoA3PWJq3ZYJ9ZK/s200/love+enemies.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5443781426902686930" /></a><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000066;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><b>roadsign for the soul - words words words</b></span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"></p><blockquote>5:44-48<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>....<i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for your persecutors. You’ll then become children of your Father in the heavens. [God] causes the sun to rise on both the bad and the good, and sends rain on both the just and the unjust. Tell me, if you love those who love you, why should you be commended for that? Even the toll collectors do as much, don’t they? And if you greet only your friends, what have you done that is exceptional? Even the pagans do as much, don’t they? To sum up, you are to be unstinting in your generosity in the way your heavenly Father’s generosity is unstinting </i>[see also Luke 6:27-28, Luke 6:34-35]<i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">.</i></blockquote><i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal"> <o:p></o:p></i><p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">I’ve always liked the maxim that we should be judged not on how we treat our friends but on how we treat our enemies, but I never associated it with Jesus, I thought it was La Rochefoucauld or someone. The point being that it’s common sense – <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">of course</i> we treat our friends well, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">of course</i> it’s therefore a good idea to work on our treatment of our enemies, or strangers. To work on your generosity is always good advice, and many ‘sages’ throughout history have given it. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">Of course there’s a paradox here. If you really managed to love your enemies they wouldn’t be your enemies – or would they? The renowned antitheist Christopher Hitchens has a real go at the ‘love your enemies’ injunction, calling it suicidal, amongst other choice epithets, and he certainly has a point, but, looking at the phrase in context, we can find a more sympathetic interpretation. Jesus really does seem to be trying to get people to extend the range of their generosity, to consider whether there are good, or good enough reasons to consider certain people our enemies. Often when we make a decision that person x is our enemy, or is a ‘bad’ person, we shut down on them, refusing to listen, referring to our earlier decision. Jesus is arguably saying nothing more than this, that we shouldn’t be too hasty in our judgements, and that we shouldn’t revile people for being different.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">On the other hand, if we look at the actual language used, Jesus does seem pretty decisive himself about good people and evil people. This heightens the paradox. Should we really love evil people?</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">The phrase ‘love your enemies’ has a somewhat similar logical form to the paradoxical phrase coined by the French anarchist Proudhon, ‘Property is theft’.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Such phrases have a momentary cleverness, but are soon shown to chase their own tails or to disappear up their own arseholes. To say that property is theft is to legitimise theft and to illegitimise property – both sides of the equation are diminished to the point of meaninglessness. There’s a similar problem with ‘love your enemies’, for if you love your enemies equally with your friends – if you love everyone equally, then the term ‘love’ ceases to have any real meaning, not to mention the terms ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’. So why would Jesus have said this? Well, why did Proudhon say property is theft? My favoured response is a rather boring one. They were both only human, they sometimes preferred the flashy to the deep, they didn’t think things through. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">Returning to Hitchens’ comment that this philosophy is ‘suicidal’ – this is based on an entrenched attitude about enemies. Our enemies will always be our enemies, they cannot be otherwise. It reflects a kind of evolutionary perspective, where the word ‘enemy’ is synonymous with ‘predator’, someone who threatens our very existence, someone we must either avoid or overcome. It doesn’t seem very useful to love your predator. Indeed it seems suicidal, as Hitchens claims. Better to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">know </i>your predators, to work out their weaknesses, and to build on your own strengths in combating them. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">We humans are inordinately good at that of course, to the point that we have no predators, outside of our own species, to be afraid of. We ourselves have become the most deadly and efficient predators on the planet. Our realisation of this is causing us to rethink notions of predator and prey, and even enemies and friends. A subtle Christian might try to convince us that Jesus anticipated all this with ‘love your enemies’. He was a god, after all. But this would just be another example of seeking other-worldly sources for our own ever-changing and increasingly nuanced view of ourselves. We invest ancient moral statements with all the subtleties that we have gleaned from the intervening years. We do this all the time. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"></p><blockquote>6:3-4 ...<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">when you give to charity, don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so your acts of charity may remain hidden. And your Father, who has an eye for the hidden, will applaud you.</i></blockquote><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal"> </i><p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">Of course it’s impossible to keep your charitable or any other acts hidden from yourself, but the Jesus Seminar has a collective view that Jesus loved such paradoxical remarks. The idea, clearly, is that you shouldn’t do good works for the applause of others, but this is completely undermined by the claim that God will applaud you – thus assuming we still need applause to be charitable. Perhaps, though this <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">is </i>the moral message of Christianity in a nutshell. God will reward you for your good works. Is this the moral foundation of western civilization?</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">This sort of advice – don’t pray in public but in private, where God, who sees all that’s hidden, will applaud you, and forgive the failings of others because then God will forgive your failings – continues for several more verses. It of course captures the essence of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">all </i>religious morality, that there are spirits or deities who are consumingly interested in human moral activities, who see clearly the good and bad in everyone and are able to dispense a proper and absolute justice at the end of things. It’s what you might call the ‘constant surveillance’ approach to morality. God’s cctv cameras are everywhere, get used to it and act accordingly. </p>Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994304766961822770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17913545.post-13674677445406612832010-03-02T00:28:00.003+10:302010-03-02T00:47:08.485+10:30What is Christian morality? Part 10<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKglL7ogxJCJ0LOxmkgHH0D6SqguvBQ5fLW_mTDbnX346bu9nwVD2J9NhOuoUiC3tZq1RbjGjKDQNxEmMO7pOUK8GH3DXCTlgAhLqIw_EbOQp8RbqD9IJ3hKg9THQx8jLrhSUH/s1600-h/obama+oath.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 150px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKglL7ogxJCJ0LOxmkgHH0D6SqguvBQ5fLW_mTDbnX346bu9nwVD2J9NhOuoUiC3tZq1RbjGjKDQNxEmMO7pOUK8GH3DXCTlgAhLqIw_EbOQp8RbqD9IJ3hKg9THQx8jLrhSUH/s200/obama+oath.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5443668963796845538" /></a><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#990000;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><b>Obama disobeys Jesus</b></span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"></p><blockquote>5:21-22 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">As you know, our ancestors were told, ‘You must not kill’ and ‘Whoever kills will be subject to judgment.’ But I tell you: those who are angry with a companion will be brought before a tribunal. And those who say to a companion, ‘You moron,’ will be subject to the sentence of the court. And whoever says, ‘You idiot,’ deserves the fires of Gehenna.</i></blockquote><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal"> <o:p></o:p></i><p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">Considering that Jesus himself got a bit shirty with his companion-disciples at times, especially in Mark’s version of events, this condemnation of ill-temper sounds a bit rough. I mean, if you can’t call your mate a moron, where’s the fun in life? </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">By the way, the term ‘Gehenna’, so much more evocative than ‘hell’, refers to a spot outside Jerusalem where the town’s rubbish was routinely burnt, along with the bodies of crims and the carcases of animals. Some of course dispute such a lowly truth, but they would, wouldn’t they?</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"></p><blockquote>5:23-24 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">So, even if you happen to be offering your gift at the altar and recall that your friend has some claim against you, leave your gift there at the altar. First go and be reconciled with your friend, and only then return and offer your gift.</i></blockquote><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal"> <o:p></o:p></i><p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">For those who value friendship, this is a ‘nice’ piece of advice. It also seems typical of Jesus to value substance over form [unless I’m simply creating the Jesus I prefer], and to cock a snook at rigorous and traditional religious practice. Anyway, it’s one of the few of Jesus’s adjurations with which I would wholeheartedly concur.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><i></i></p><i><blockquote>5:27-28 As you know, we once were told, ‘You are not to commit adultery.’ But I tell you: Those who leer at a woman and desire her have already committed adultery with her in their hearts.</blockquote><o:p></o:p></i><p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">This is a tough one, but we can always rationalize our way out of it. In fact, it’s quite easy. Committing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">any </i>crime in your heart is vastly removed from actually doing it. Murder is an obvious example. And we don’t punish anyone by law for anything they do ‘in their heart’, for very good reason. I wouldn’t like to guess how many women I’ve ‘committed adultery with’ [I prefer to think of it in fruitier terms] in my heart. Far more than in my bed, sadly. This whole business of thought-criminality is one that should be wholly rejected in my view – and generally it has been. Whether this remark has impacted on western morality, I can’t say. The thing is that lusting after someone who ‘belongs’ to someone, or who is happily devoted to someone else, or who doesn’t know you from a bar of soap, or who actively dislikes you, brings with it a sense of guilt as a matter of course, you feel you are imposing, though since you can convince yourself you’re not imposing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">that </i>much, the guilt is minimalized and even lends a certain piquancy to the thoughts. Anyway, better a lustful thought than a murderous one. <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>And of course the world of advertising and celebrity culture relies on lust and desire rather heavily – and a surer thing to rely on can hardly be found. I know of at least one female acquaintance who lusts after Barak Obama. Good luck to them I say. Anyway, Jesus just points out that lusting after someone is ‘adultery of the heart’, but he doesn’t call it a sin. Just don’t look at the tenth commandment.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"></p><blockquote>5 33-37 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Again, as you know, our ancestors were told, ‘You must not break an oath,’ and ‘Oaths sworn in the name of God must be kept.’ But I tell you: Don’t swear at all. Don’t invoke heaven, because it is the throne of God, and don’t invoke<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>earth, because it is God’s footstool, and don’t invoke Jerusalem, because it is the city of the great king .You shouldn’t swear by your head either, since you aren’t able to turn a single hair either white or black. Rather, your responses should be simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. Anything that goes beyond this is inspired by the evil one.</i></blockquote><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal"><o:p></o:p></i><p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">Here’s another example of remarks attributed to Jesus that have been ignored by cherry-picking sermonizers down through the ages – though there have been<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Christians sects, modelled on a return to ‘the true word of Christ’, who have refused to take oaths for religious reasons [e.g. the Waldensians]. And how could any Christian argue with them? In fact, considering the last line here, there’s not much wiggle room for true believers – if you take an oath on the holy book, or on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">anything,</i> you’re infected by Satan. How could the vast majority of Christians have gotten it so wrong for so many centuries? More positively, Jesus’s message here is that you should just tell the truth and make no fuss about it. Another example of his preference for substance over ritualistic form.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Again, not very Catholic. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"></p><blockquote>5: 38-42 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">As you know, we once were told, ‘An eye for an eye’ and ‘A tooth for a tooth.’ But I tell you: Don’t react violently against the one who is evil: when someone slaps you on the right cheek, turn the other as well. When someone wants to sue you for you shirt, let that person have your coat along with it. Further, when anyone conscripts you for one mile, go an extra mile. Give to the one who begs from you; and don’t turn away the one who tries to borrow from you </i>[see also Luke 6:29-30, Luke 6:34-35].</blockquote><p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">The scholars of the Jesus Seminar were pretty well unanimous in their conviction that these words about turning the other cheek, offering your coat as well as your shirt, and walking the extra mile, were the authentic words of Jesus. This is quite unusual, they’re generally an admirably sceptical lot. They usually reach such consensus when the words are very striking and paradoxical, when they contain no elements that could be attributed to the struggling, persecuted and sometimes paranoid early Christian community, when they make no exaggerated claims for Jesus himself, when they don’t go on about the Last Days, etc. Of course, I’m a little sceptical myself about whether a ‘real’ Jesus can ever be revealed by the careful removal of what are calculated to be the gospel writers’ innumerable additions and modifications, but the argument for their version of Jesus as a framer of paradoxes and phrases that stick in the mind, creating an oral tradition before the gospel writers got to them and half-mangled them, seems plausible enough. As to the ethical significance of these teachings, certainly they’ve been much sermonised, but few have actually followed Jesus’s advice here. They are much honoured and much ignored ideals. Is that what Christian morality is all about? </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">Perhaps more importantly, there’s an unhelpful vagueness and lack of detail and context about this advice, which is typical of all Jesus’s pronouncements. What’s meant by ‘the one who is evil’? Someone who annoys us? Someone who steals all our money and murders our children? No distinctions are made. We all know that sometimes turning the other cheek or going the extra mile is precisely the most effective response to mean-spirited or cruel behaviour, but not always, as some people are far less easily shamed than others. Of course, sermonisers often provide the detail and context the gospels lack, but they pull it from their own experience, not from Christ.</p>Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994304766961822770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17913545.post-65547296230405393322009-12-29T00:16:00.004+10:302009-12-29T00:44:21.870+10:30What is Christian morality? Part 9<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWK1EFQq94mLBLQBlxGT8iJlVOkPFQjZ23tG4Ahiu4zjXa-NUMuyn9sRWtGoVlKe91s8cP8vqkXBTiYcKyZSU9ofI6bAJwDhFtk8bpHpaIONm5LWfOQpVxhCg6rpT-_rGHDVpM/s1600-h/peace.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 170px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWK1EFQq94mLBLQBlxGT8iJlVOkPFQjZ23tG4Ahiu4zjXa-NUMuyn9sRWtGoVlKe91s8cP8vqkXBTiYcKyZSU9ofI6bAJwDhFtk8bpHpaIONm5LWfOQpVxhCg6rpT-_rGHDVpM/s200/peace.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5420289503269001986" /></a><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#993300;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><b>the good irenic stuff</b></span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal"><span style="line-height:115%;font-size:14.0pt;">Matthew<o:p></o:p></span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"></p><blockquote>4:1-4 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Then Jesus was guided into the wilderness by the spirit to be put to the test by the devil. And after he had fasted ‘forty days and forty nights,’ he was famished. And the tester confronted him and said, ‘To prove you’re God’s son, order these stones to turn to bread.’ He responded, ‘It is written, “Human beings are not to live on bread alone, but on every word that comes out of God’s mouth.’ </i>[see also Mark 1:12-13, Luke 4:1-4]</blockquote><p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">This testing is very briefly referred to in Mark, but Jesus’s response here doesn’t help us that much. The first part is a commonplace, but the second part is the real issue. God doesn’t talk to us much, though some Christians might disagree. In any case, priests talk to us a lot more. Interesting to find that God has a mouth – Jesus should know. Of course he originally said it in Aramaic, but I notice that the word is used in all translations, so it’s the beginning of a picture. We also have ‘the eyes of the lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth’ [2 Chronicles 16:9], so the guy’s starting to look almost human. I’d be willing to bet though that his mouth is much bigger than any of ours. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"></p><blockquote>5:3-10 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Congratulations to the poor in spirit! Heaven’s domain belongs to them</i>. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Congratulations to those who grieve! They will be consoled. Congratulations to the gentle! They will inherit the earth. Congratulations to those who hunger and thirst for justice! They will have a feast. Congratulations to the merciful! They will have mercy. Congratulations to those with undefiled hearts! They will see God. Congratulations to those who work for peace! They will be known as God’s children. Congratulations to those who have suffered persecution for the sake of justice! Heaven’s domain belongs to them </i>[see also Luke 6:20-21, Luke 6:24-25]<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">.</i></blockquote><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal"><o:p></o:p></i><p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>These are the first words of the sermon on the mount, the good oil. There’s little here to be objected to, except perhaps that it seems to offer rewards only in the next world, or some future world. The term ‘poor in spirit’ might suggest ‘mean-spirited’ or even ‘not very bright’ to a modern reader, but I’m assured that it simply means ‘poor’, which again suggests that Jesus just didn’t like the rich much. For the rest Jesus puts himself squarely on the side of those who suffer or are likely to suffer – the gentle, the merciful, the peacemakers. Of course you could argue that these are the people most easily exploited by false prophets. Why would someone like Jesus go around offering a bright future to those already satisfied with their lot? I’m quite mystified myself as to what he’s up to.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">Of course, being poor is not a sign of morality, nor is being in a state of grief. The best spin we can put on it is that he’s setting an example. We all should love the poor, and the grieving, and the gentle and so forth. Is this the foundation of Christian morality, the moral underpinning of Western civilization? If it weren’t for a lot of people becoming convinced that Jesus was a god, I doubt if these words would’ve rung down through the ages. Many similar sentiments have been expressed before and since – for example, scholars have pointed out that Matthew 5:5 [on the gentle] is a reworking of Psalms 37:11. <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"></p><blockquote>5:11-12 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Congratulations to you when they denounce you and persecute you and spread malicious gossip about you because of me. Rejoice and be glad! Your compensation is great in heaven. Recall that this is how they persecuted the prophets who preceded you </i>[see also Luke 6:22-23, Luke6:26]<i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">.</i></blockquote><i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal"><o:p></o:p></i><p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">Most scholars of the Jesus Seminar would argue that when persecution is the subject, it’s the early Christian community speaking, not Jesus himself. This seems fair enough, but there are obvious problems with always attributing the less palatable, or simply less memorable and striking remarks to the gospel writers rather than to Jesus, as it involves working from a pre-conceived notion of Jesus’s brilliance, or consistency, or particular orientation. If we accept, however, as Christians are expected to do, that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">every</i> word attributed to Jesus in the gospels was actually spoken by him, then we must accept a contradictory and often confusing ‘teacher’, one more concerned with the political events of his time than with providing an ideal of human behaviour for all time, as well as one subject to moods and variations. The more human, the less ideal and worthy of imitation.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"></p><blockquote>5:13-16 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">You are the salt of the earth. But if salt loses its zing, how will it be made salty? It then has no further use than to be thrown out and stomped on. You are the light of the world. A city sitting on top of a mountain can’t be concealed. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a bushel basket but on a lampstand, where it sheds light for everyone in the house. That’s how your light is to shine in the presence of others, so they can see your good deeds and acclaim your Father in the heavens </i>[see also Mark 4:21, Mark 9:50, Luke 8:16, Luke 11:33, Luke 14:34-35].</blockquote><p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">We continue the sermon on the mountain, which isn’t just about morality but, as in the above passage, also about ‘rallying the troops’. Passages such as this tend to be slated home to Jesus rather than the gospel writers [by the scholars of the Jesus Seminar] because they contain memorable imagery, but unless you think being a member of some elite [or being told you are] makes you a morally better person, I can’t think how such exhortations might contribute to right conduct.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"></p><blockquote>5:20 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Let me tell you: unless your religion goes beyond that of the scholars and Pharisees, you won’t set foot in Heaven’s domain.</i></blockquote><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal"><o:p></o:p></i><p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">Here, the term ‘religion’ is virtually synonymous with ‘morality’. In the verses preceding this sentence, Jesus exhorts his hearers to follow Judaic law and the wisdom of the prophets – a ‘back to basics’ approach which is always popular. Jesus would surely have turned Protestant had he lived long enough. </p>Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994304766961822770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17913545.post-51281436736172223892009-12-27T13:45:00.003+10:302009-12-27T14:00:12.306+10:30What is Christian morality? Part 8<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitfoGGHR9nXevzra4qVbqzO8Myv6QUEWcLgzShstSDP8GuoUHJoJ4nelbskdFDMrLyKnnQiF0hiX9h-DP962e1lXSg2Zmkjz7b2TNS0EdSAYAb1kaD7I0F_7OctS8cQcCEx62m/s1600-h/goldenrule.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 183px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitfoGGHR9nXevzra4qVbqzO8Myv6QUEWcLgzShstSDP8GuoUHJoJ4nelbskdFDMrLyKnnQiF0hiX9h-DP962e1lXSg2Zmkjz7b2TNS0EdSAYAb1kaD7I0F_7OctS8cQcCEx62m/s200/goldenrule.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5419753089388700722" /></a><br /><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"></p><blockquote>12:28-31 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">And one of the scholars approached when he heard them arguing, and because he saw how skilfully Jesus answered them, he asked him, ‘Of all the commandments, which is the most important?’ Jesus answered: ‘The first is, “Hear, Israel, the Lord your God is one Lord, and you are to love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul [and all your mind] and with all your energy.” The second is this: “You are to love your neighbour as yourself.” There is no other commandment greater than these.’</i> [see also Matt 22:34-40, Luke 10:25-29]</blockquote><p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">Both of these ‘most important commandments’ can be found in the Old Testament [Deut 6:4-5, Lev 19:18]. The first reiterates what is evident throughout the earlier scriptures, that God is a jealous god, who demands lots of attention and lots of worship. The second is something of a commonplace. Some scholars have suggested that Jesus, or ‘Mark’, was merely echoing the teaching of the famous Rabbi Hillel, an exact contemporary of Jesus. Challenged by some wag to teach him the whole of the Torah while he [the wag] stood on one foot, Hillel provided a version of the golden rule: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">‘What you find hateful do not do to another. This is the whole of the law. Everything else is commentary. Now go learn that.’<o:p></o:p></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">Some have argued that ‘neighbour’ here means only Jewish neighbours [certainly it does seem to mean this in Leviticus]. That’s to say, it was a call to Jewish solidarity. I don’t think so. To give him his due, Jesus seems genuinely to have reached out beyond his own community. This, I think, is brought out more clearly in the famous sermon in Matthew, as well as some important passages in Luke.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"></span></p><blockquote><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>12:38-40 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">During the course of his teaching he would say: ‘Look out for the scholars who like to parade around in long robes, and insist on being addressed properly in the marketplaces, and prefer important seats in the synagogues and the best couches at banquets. They are the ones who prey on widows and their families, and recite long prayers just to put on airs. These people will get a stiff sentence!’</i> [see also Matt 23:5-7, Luke 11:43, Luke 20:45-47].</blockquote><p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">These remarks may have been directed at the Pharisees or other Jewish functionaries, who might’ve been compensating for their lack of any real power under the Romans by doing dress-ups and bumping up the pomp and circumstance, much as the Catholic Church does these days. The final comment about divine justice sounds more like retribution [and wishful thinking] to me. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"></p><blockquote>12:43-44 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">‘I swear to you, this poor widow has contributed more than all those who dropped something into the collection box! After all, they were all donating out of their surplus, whereas she, out of her poverty, was contributing all she had, her entire livelihood!</i> [see also Luke 21:3-4].</blockquote><p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">This observation by Jesus is of course pleasing, but hardly original. As scholars have pointed out, they can be found in rabbinical, Buddhist and ancient Greek texts, and people make the same observations every day, for example on the disproportionate burden upon the poor of a flat tax, without needing to invoke Jesus or Christianity.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">That’s about it for Mark, moral-wise. What follows is a passage known as ‘the little apocalypse’, in which Jesus, or ‘Mark’, gives his account of the last days. This is followed by an account of Jesus’s arrest, trial, execution and resurrection. Of course many Christians have drawn sustenance from a description of Jesus’s stoicism through these events, but it’s hard to see how his behaviour provides us with any specific moral guidelines. The stoicism of heroic figures in adversity was of course a commonplace long before Jesus came along, and it’s hard to see how the gospel writers would’ve gotten away with depicting him in any other way. Also, if we take the view that the gospel writers were inheritors of the eyewitness accounts of the disciples, it’s worth noting that the disciples dispersed after Jesus’s arrest, and they certainly weren’t eyewitnesses to his demeanour and remarks during his trial, supposing there was one. That part of the story is as mythical as the accounts of his birth. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">Before going on to Matthew I should say that the scholars of the Jesus Seminar, though often divided among themselves, generally take only a fraction of the above [and following] sayings of Jesus to be authentic. Most of the sayings they believe to be the creation of the early Christian community, given a twist by the particular preoccupations and character of the particular gospel writer. For example, Mark seems to emphasise the weakness and obtuseness of the disciples, and often has Jesus castigating them for not listening, for not ‘getting it’, and for being concerned for their own status [eg Mark 10:35-41]. Matthew has a near-obsessive tendency to tie Jesus’s sayings and doings to Old Testament prophecies, for obvious reasons. Luke, generally assumed to be a non-Jewish author, emphasises good works and broader sympathies, as in the Good Samaritan and Prodigal Son parables, whereas John, or the Christian community writing under John’s name, is primarily concerned with Jesus’s status as ‘saviour’. All the gospel writers are, of course, concerned to make claims for the significance of Jesus that he is unlikely to have made for himself. I haven’t been so concerned myself to separate an ‘authentic’ Jesus from a constructed one, partly because I’m sceptical about this being possible, but mainly because I’m looking at the impact upon Western moral praxis of every remark and action attributed to Jesus in the canonical gospels, regardless of their authenticity. In other words, I’m assuming that throughout the history of Christendom, until very recently, everything attributed to Jesus in the New Testament was taken as gospel.</p>Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994304766961822770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17913545.post-40749260122686931972009-12-25T13:08:00.005+10:302009-12-25T13:21:58.903+10:30What is Christian morality - part 7<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnR-iBnNOQH-Z3NQtJnHcNCqL3c3pJ6aCFeVaNXWGYdKpwiUpZCgNfSb-xKCuqwZYJ2cM8mwLLZvfrGWhxTc_KoGrrHGmDB83uu5QEsQ-bVg9hICYU4K56MbnvaPQUa_TFGEvt/s1600-h/jesuswhip.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 185px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnR-iBnNOQH-Z3NQtJnHcNCqL3c3pJ6aCFeVaNXWGYdKpwiUpZCgNfSb-xKCuqwZYJ2cM8mwLLZvfrGWhxTc_KoGrrHGmDB83uu5QEsQ-bVg9hICYU4K56MbnvaPQUa_TFGEvt/s200/jesuswhip.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5419000606984915778" /></a><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC0000;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><b>lashings of Jesus</b></span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"></p><blockquote>11:15-19 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">They come to Jerusalem. And he went into the temple and began chasing the vendors and shoppers out of the temple area, and he turned the bankers’ tables upside down, along with the chairs of the pigeon merchants, and he wouldn’t even let anyone carry a container through the temple area. Then he started teaching and would say to them: ‘Don’t the scriptures say, ‘My house is to be regarded as a house of prayer for all peoples’? – but you have turned it into a ‘hideout for crooks’!’ </i>[see also Matt 21:12-13, Luke 19:45-46, John 2:13-17].</blockquote><p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">This passage is indicative of Jesus’s adopted role as an unorthodox, reforming rabbi. Clearly, he’s committed to the Judaic religion and wishes to purify it of these course elements. The dark mutterings of the scholars after this event are enough to reveal the danger Jesus was getting into with his uncompromising stance. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">Of course there’s an issue around the violence of this episode. It’s dealt with perfunctorily by the gospel writers, but in John an interesting detail is mentioned – <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">he made a whip out of rope and drove them all out of the temple area.</i>.. [John 2:15]. The pre-meditated decision to fashion a whip suggests more than just a sudden fit of pique. We will never know of course, but there’s surely a hint here of a deliberately confrontational nature. And how does this apparent defence of the orthodox use of the temple fit with Jesus’s unorthodoxy as regards the Sabbath and handwashing? It’s a mystery. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">I’m sorry that none of this specifically relates to any unique Christian <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">morality, </i>but I’m afraid there just isn’t that much meat to pick at.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"></p><blockquote>12:1-8 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">The parable of the leased vineyard </i>[see also Matt 21:33-39, Luke 20:9-15]</blockquote><p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">This is an interesting and tragic story, repeated in Matthew and Luke, but it’s hard to draw any clear moral from it, other than ‘watch who you lease your vineyard to’. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">A farmer leases his vineyard to some other farmers before going abroad. Later he sends a slave to collect his share of the harvest. They beat him up and send him away with nothing. So he sends another, and the same thing happens. Next time he sends someone the person is killed. He sends more slaves, and they’re all either beaten or killed. Finally he sends his beloved son, thinking this time some respect will be shown, but they kill him, hoping that, with the heir out of the way, they will inherit the vineyard.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">Of course the story almost begs for an allegorical interpretation, with Jesus as the beloved son, in which case the moral might be that we humans are ungrateful sods, never satisfied with what the good lord gives us, ready to kill for more. It would also have prophetic implications, and you know how these gospellers love a prophecy. Of course, there’s also the possibility that Jesus was simply telling a hard luck story about a guy he knew. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">The parable is immediately followed by a question and answer from Jesus: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">What will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come in person, and do away with those farmers, and give the vineyard to someone else. </i>Here we seem to be moving very much into allegorical territory, with the vineyard representing ‘God’s imperial domain’. Moral: if you do bad, no domain for you. Jesus follows this up with a verse [22] from psalm 118: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">A stone that the builders rejected has ended up as the keystone. It was the Lord’s doing and is something you admire</i>. Presumably this means that God is full of surprises, he moves in mysterious ways, but always ends up making the right decisions. So just follow God. I’m not sure if this helps much for human decision-making. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"></p><blockquote>12:13-17 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">And they send some of the Pharisees and the Herodians to him to trap him with a riddle. They come and say to him, ‘Teacher, we know that you are honest and impartial, because you pay no attention to appearances, but instead you teach God’s way forthrightly. Is it permissible to pay the poll tax to the Roman emperor or not? Should we pay or should we not pay?’ But he saw through their trap, and said to them, “Why do you provoke me like this? Let me have a look at a coin.’ They handed him a silver coin, and he says to them, ‘Whose picture is this? Whose name is on it?’ They replied, ‘The emperor’s.’ Jesus said to them: ‘Pay the emperor what belongs to the emperor, and God what belongs to God!’ And they were dumbfounded at him </i>[see also Matt 22:15-22, Luke 20:19-26].</blockquote><i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal"> <o:p></o:p></i><p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">Let me give some background to this famous episode. The Romans imposed a special tax on the Jews, which no other colonized peoples had to pay. This might seem discriminatory, but what the Jews received in return was the right to worship their own god. Generally, the Romans expected, as a matter of course, that defeated peoples would adopt the Roman gods as their own, as a symbol of their subjection. No doubt they turned a blind eye to what these people did in the privacy of their homes, as long as they displayed fealty to the Roman gods in public. But the Romans met surprising resistance from the Jews. Not that they were in any way a military threat, but they simply refused to betray their own god, who, as we know, was particularly jealous of other gods, inveighing against them as false idols. The Jews’ attitude was – kill us all if you like, but no way are we going to bow down to those gods. The Romans had no desire to inflict a massacre; it would cause bad blood among other subject nations, and might cost more than a few Roman lives. So they hit upon the idea of a special tax – a win-win situation.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">Of course, as is the way with these things, not all Jews were satisfied with this solution. The more radical Jews urged defiance of the Roman authorities and their tax-collecting Jewish proxies [hence the low esteem in which tax collectors are held in the gospels]. Among these radicals were the Essenes, of Dead Sea Scroll fame. They’ve been described as the Taliban of the period [replete with their own cave hideouts], and it’s even been argued that Jesus was one of them, but that he turned his back on them to take a more populist, but also more idiosyncratic, middle line, as represented by this particular story. The Pharisees and Herodians, essentially collaborators, were spying on Jesus and testing him to see where he stood politically. Jesus’s response has been hailed as a prime example of wily evasiveness, while also, of course, carrying an anti-materialist message. Some have also interpreted the message as anti-political, or at least apolitical. It’s an important issue, as the separation of church and state is often defended by the citing of this passage, though I would argue that this separation doctrine, which is only a couple of centuries old, arose out of bitter experience in Europe – for example, the incredibly brutal Thirty Years War in the seventeenth century, as well as the English Revolution, in which the insistence upon the divine right of kings meant that a questioning of the ruler’s authority entailed a disobedience to God. Jesus becomes a useful ally in the development of such a doctrine, but the fact remains that his words are ambiguous. </p>Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994304766961822770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17913545.post-27839737731034197212009-11-05T12:38:00.003+10:302009-11-05T12:58:14.665+10:30What is Christian morality - part 6<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAIkrQGfWhC863IHXdsTu2VYiCwWvWqq7feDWm5_HhWXn9oUIWzKQQA-AzfD7ENS1srh1yqAvrBDCiatD3VolYZ8bq1rICZnTOCJMxY3ekNumiBzHwxWWlbVT-1YKL8hZI_5hr/s1600-h/cursing_of_fig_tree.gif"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 157px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAIkrQGfWhC863IHXdsTu2VYiCwWvWqq7feDWm5_HhWXn9oUIWzKQQA-AzfD7ENS1srh1yqAvrBDCiatD3VolYZ8bq1rICZnTOCJMxY3ekNumiBzHwxWWlbVT-1YKL8hZI_5hr/s200/cursing_of_fig_tree.gif" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5400440002323778130" /></a><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#663300;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><b>essential life lessons: Jesus teaches his mates how to curse a tree with a fish-bowl on your head</b></span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"></p><blockquote><br /></blockquote><blockquote>10:17-27 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">someone ran up, knelt before him, and started questioning him: ‘Good teacher, what do I have to do to inherit eternal life?’ Jesus said to him, ‘Why do you call me good? No one is good except for God alone. You know the commandments: You must not murder, you are not to commit adultery, you are not to steal, you are not to give false testimony, you are not to defraud, and you are to honour your father and mother.’ He said to him, ‘Teacher, I have observed all these things since I was a child!’ Jesus loved him at first sight and said to him, ‘You are missing one thing: make your move, sell whatever you have and give [the proceeds] to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. And then come, follow me!’ But stunned by this advice, he went away dejected, since he possessed a fortune. After looking around, Jesus says to his disciples, ‘How difficult it is for those who have money to enter God’s domain!’ The disciples were amazed at his words. In response Jesus repeats what he had said, ‘Children, how difficult it is to enter God’s domain! It’s easier for a camel to squeeze through a needle’s eye than for a wealthy person to get into God’s domain!’ And they were very perplexed, wondering to themselves, ‘Well then, who can be saved?’ Jesus looks them in the eye and<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>says, ‘For mortals it’s impossible, but not for God; after all, everything’s possible for God.’</i> [see also Matt 19:16-26, Luke 18:18-27].</blockquote><p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">This passage has always struck me as one of the most uncompromising in the gospels, and the most embarrassing, because least followed, for any modern Christian. Luckily, Jesus gives everyone an ‘out’ by readily admitting, in the last lines, that it’s impossible for mortals to be saved, given such conditions, so presumably there’s no point in trying. The last line is ambiguous, to say the least – is he saying that it’s easily possible for God to save <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">himself </i>[which is surely absurd], or is he saying that it’s possible for God to save <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">others</i>, even though they can’t save themselves? Perhaps he’s just pointing out that God is ‘powerful as’, which seems a bit beside the point.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">One might argue that the whole Christian monastic tradition sprang from these lines, though there are a number of other ‘inspirational’ passages in the Old and New Testaments [for example, the lifestyle of John the Baptist, described in Matthew 3], and there are people even today who abandon all their wordlies for a life ‘devoted to Christ’, but it’s by no means a popular tradition. It seems that the most popular Pentecostal-type churches of today tend to wallow in their own opulence. Who of all these people can be saved? </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">The problem here of course is that the wealth/poverty distinction is surely no guarantee of moral worth/worthlessness, however much we might assume that the rich are more ‘corrupt’. Elsewhere Jesus congratulates the ‘poor in spirit’, for they’ll surely inherit God’s domain. Why? No explanation is given. So not only are we offered no moral guidance, but the issue seems to be deliberately confused by introducing anti-materialism as a ‘good’ without providing any grounding for this attitude.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"></p><blockquote>10:42-45 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">‘You know how those who supposedly rule over foreigners lord it over them, and how their strong men tyrannize them. It’s not going to be like that with you! With you, whoever wants to become great must be your servant, and whoever among you wants to be ‘number one’ must be everybody’s slave. After all, the son of Adam didn’t come to be served, but to serve, even to give his life as a ransom for many.’</i> [see also Matt 20:24-28, Luke 22:24-27]</blockquote><p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">These words are spoken in the context of a couple of disciples bugging Jesus about which of them would be sitting at his right hand ‘in his glory’, that’s to say, in the glory days of God’s imperial domain. The squabbling and dim-witted nature of the disciples is something of a theme in Mark. It’s also quite obviously spoken in the context of Judaea’s colonisation by the Romans. Jesus inverts the expected order, the greatest being the most effective servant, or the lowliest, just as ‘Many of the first will be last, and of the last many will be first’ [Mark 10:31]. Jesus shrewdly promises that the domain of the guy who might be his Dad will be a different kettle of roses altogether, though no bed of fish [just in case you were falling asleep]. There’s also of course the observation that it’s Good to serve, which again isn’t particularly original. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"></p><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">11:12-14 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">On the next day, as they were leaving Bethany, he got hungry. So when he spotted a fig tree in the distance with some leaves on it, he went up to it expecting to find something on it. But when he got right up to it, he found nothing on it except some leaves. [You see, it wasn’t ‘time’ for figs.] And he reacted by saying: ‘May no one so much as taste your fruit again!’ And his disciples were listening. <o:p></o:p></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">11:20-25 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">As they were walking along early one morning, they saw the fig tree withered from the roots up. And Peter remembered and says to him: ‘Rabbi, look, the fig tree you cursed has withered up!’ In response Jesus says to them: ‘Have trust in God. I swear to you, those who say to this mountain, ‘Up with you and into the sea!’ and do not waver in their conviction, but trust that what they say will happen, that’s the way it will be. This is why I keep telling you, trust that you will receive everything you pray and ask for, and that’s the way it will turn out. And when you stand up to pray, if you are holding anything against anyone, forgive them, so your father in heaven may forgive your misdeeds.’ </i>[see also Matt 6:14-15, Matt 17:20, Matt 21:18-22, Luke 6:37, Luke 17:6, John 14:13-14, John 15:7, John 15:16, John 16:23-26].</p></blockquote><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">The best New Testament scholars, who are always on the lookout for the authentic words and deeds of Jesus, supposing there are any, and disentangling them from the propaganda and aspirations of the early Christian community and the gospels writers who were part of that community, are naturally drawn to stories such as this of the fig tree. The story, or at least some of it, has an authentic ring to it. It’s even quite funny in a Pythonesque way. I particularly like the sentence ‘And the disciples were listening.’ Poor old Jesus, caught without his make-up on. I like to wonder what words he used when he cursed the tree. Maybe it was nothing more than ‘you unpleasant, thoughtless little tree’, but then that wouldn’t be much of a curse would it? Of course, the gospel writer wouldn’t have had much trouble transforming this story into a very minor miracle. The tree was probably half dead anyway, but I prefer to imagine it was Jesus whodunit, by shaking and throttling and kicking the tree in his temper [naturally played down in the story]. He’s bad.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">I also like the way Jesus ‘recovers’ in the second part of the story, by diverting attention from his embarrassing outburst as well as utilizing it: faith can move mountains [and wither fig trees, but let’s not dwell on that], and uhhh... forgiveness, yes forgiveness, when you ask for things, always remember to forgive everyone a lot, because then God’ll look kindly on you...</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">But that fig tree, Jesus...</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">Look, forget the bloody fig tree... think of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">mountains </i>and... and forgiveness and all that...</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">But you...</p>Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994304766961822770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17913545.post-63272274931693849872009-11-04T08:35:00.005+10:302009-11-05T13:02:29.694+10:30What is Christian morality - part 5<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsJAIFQPwiDOsaSCvaXr6sn6Tm2Gep5knqsyV9YLspzIlQm7MJsusjv5PttPWaRG8CnVsZHFXJMzWAh32EHz9VitchlQHZpFk6ayxYlGCM-qszJ6B5Mu31mDrgDsu6Vu7aUtbN/s1600-h/funny+books.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsJAIFQPwiDOsaSCvaXr6sn6Tm2Gep5knqsyV9YLspzIlQm7MJsusjv5PttPWaRG8CnVsZHFXJMzWAh32EHz9VitchlQHZpFk6ayxYlGCM-qszJ6B5Mu31mDrgDsu6Vu7aUtbN/s200/funny+books.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5400004259634706178" /></a><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000099;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><b>The Jesus industry - a $100 book presumably based on a few words in Mark</b></span></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">The book of Mark, continued</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"></p><blockquote>7:14-15 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Listen to me, all of you, and try to understand! It’s not what goes into a person from the outside that can defile; rather it’s what comes out of the person that defiles </i>[see also Matt 15:10-11].</blockquote><p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">Again this is more a jibe at orthodox Judaism, with its obsessions about oral defilement and food prohibitions, than a moral truth, though of course it does have moral implications – what we say and what we do, whatever springs from us, is what we should be judged by. In case we don’t get the idea, Jesus elaborates it at some length [Mark 7:18-23], but you could hardly describe it as insightful stuff.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"></p><blockquote>9:42-48 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">‘And those who mislead one of these little trusting souls would be better off if they were to have a millstone hung around their necks and were thrown into the sea! And if your hand gets you into trouble, cut it off! It is better for you to enter life maimed than to wind up in Gehenna, in the unquenchable fire, with both hands! And if your foot gets you into trouble, cut it off! It is better for you to enter life lame than to be thrown into Gehenna with both feet! And if your eye gets you into trouble, rip it out! It is better for you to enter God’s domain one-eyed than to be thrown into Gehenna with both eyes, where the worm never dies and the fire never goes out!’</i> [see also Matt 5:29-30, Matt 18:6-9, Luke 17:2]</blockquote><p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">What are we to make of this famous but strange passage? The last words, about eternal fire, are cribbed from Isaiah 66:24. Richard Dawkins, of course, would applaud the first sentence about misleading children, but the passage generally is just a striking way of saying that we must reform ourselves even if it means deforming ourselves. It would have been particularly striking in Jesus’s day, when deformities were considered abhorrent. Yet, apart from its striking formulation, and the notion of Gehenna or Hell, which is thankfully foreign to most modern sensibilities, the idea is familiar enough. I recall in my younger days that my eyes so troubled me, so guilty did I feel about the ‘male gaze’ so castigated by feminists of the time, that I made conscious efforts, when out and about, to stare at the pavement, or to focus specifically on elements of architecture or interior design, to make myself ‘blind’ to attractive passersby or party guests. Here we have the same idea, rendered apocalyptically. I doubt that my response to my troubles was inspired by this passage. These are issues around desire, temptation and control that humans have wrestled with since long before Jesus’s advent.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"></p><blockquote>10:3-12 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">‘What did Moses command you?’ They replied, ‘Moses allowed one to prepare a writ of abandonment and thus to divorce the other party.’ Jesus said to them, ‘He gave you this injunction because you are obstinate. However, in the beginning, at the creation, ‘God made [them] male and female. For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother [and be united with his wife], and the two will become one person,’ so they are no longer two individuals but ‘one person’. Therefore those God has coupled together, no one else should separate.’ And once again, as usual, the disciples questioned him about this. And he says to them, ‘Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery’</i> [see also Matt 5:31-32, Matt 19:3-9, Luke 16:18].</blockquote><p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">This passage, some of which is still used today in Christian marriage ceremonies, has no doubt been influential. Jesus here shows himself to be stricter than ‘Moses’ [i.e. Judaic tradition] on the permanence of marriage – though an exception is made in the case of the wife’s infidelity in Matt 5:32, another example of inconsistency in the reported ‘message’. This may well have led to a tightening of marriage laws once Christianity became the ruling religion in the west. Whether this would have been better or worse for society is of course a huge question – but essentially an empirical one, and thus answerable. Regardless of the answer, though, I’m prepared to concede that the Christian concept of marriage – particularly the heavy notion that these two people have been joined for all their lives by God, has profoundly affected and reinforced notions of commitment and family. This is not, of course, a statement of approval or disapproval, but it’s an acknowledgement that Jesus, or the gospel writers, came out strongly on this matter, with little room for interpretation. Nevertheless, different Christian denominations, and before that different Popes, have chopped and changed on the sanctity or indissolubility of marriage. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"></p><blockquote>10:14-16 ‘<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Let the children come up to me, don’t try to stop them. After all, God’s domain is peopled with such as these. I swear to you, whoever doesn’t accept God’s imperial rule the way a child would, certainly won’t ever set foot in [his domain]!’ And he would put his arms around them and bless them, and lay his hands on them</i> [see also Matt 18:3, Matt 19:14-15, Luke 18:16-17].</blockquote><p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">This is one of a few examples of Jesus’s kindness towards children. I don’t think too much should be made of this, as we’re all drawn to innocence, not always for innocent reasons. It will no doubt seem grossly offensive to some that I’m reminded in this context of footage of Adolf Hitler laying his hands on and smiling affectionately at children. I saw this as a child, and it left an indelible impression. It made me aware that these moments of tenderness and affection, which might be quite frequent, are not what we should judge, it’s the totality of a person’s life and actions.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">Of course, the call to accept religion like a child, unquestioningly, is not quite as acceptable as it once may have been.</p></div>Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994304766961822770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17913545.post-16858135546690500892009-10-23T08:59:00.003+10:302009-10-23T10:08:02.506+10:30what is Christian morality? Part 4<div><br /></div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZS9gXjlX5g8chMpN15P7xNF_p7yEkeYjPubZnR4PwzwvqU_NAFkKHnhzGrhY0qXMJUxNq7yHVtYYPGMDiTEfGZc8wNDdyXLTnhLgJEEwxl8GvvKi_-_LrXZvynUssxtb_vo9h/s1600-h/jesus+family+mythology.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 150px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZS9gXjlX5g8chMpN15P7xNF_p7yEkeYjPubZnR4PwzwvqU_NAFkKHnhzGrhY0qXMJUxNq7yHVtYYPGMDiTEfGZc8wNDdyXLTnhLgJEEwxl8GvvKi_-_LrXZvynUssxtb_vo9h/s200/jesus+family+mythology.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5395572226443898290" /></a><br /><div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#006600;">Jesus and the mythology of family</span></span></b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"></p><blockquote>3:31-35 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Then his mother and his brothers arrive. While still outside, they send in and ask for him. A crowd was sitting around him, and they say to him, ‘Look, your mother and your brothers [and sisters] are outside looking for you.’ In response he says to them: ‘My mother and brothers – who ever are they?’ And looking right at those seated around him in a circle, he says, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers. Whoever does God’s will, that’s my brother and sister and mother!’</i> [see also Matt 12:46-50, Luke 8:19-21; for other negative remarks about family, see Matt 10:35-37, Luke 12:52-53, Luke 14:26]</blockquote><p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">This story seems to reveal some family tensions, but the message is clear enough. Of course, it’s not one we associate with modern Christianity. Rather, we associate it with new cults, which Christianity once was – in fact we’ve got a snapshot here of the cult before it became Christianity. The cult becomes the new Family – if others in your family don’t want to join the cult, abandon them and join your new brothers and sisters under God, or the new Messiah, or whoever. Many new cult leaders don’t get on with their own families. Jesus’s family thought he was mad [Mark 3:21], and he very likely felt the need to be clear of them in order to be taken seriously. One can sympathise, but it does raise doubts about the traditional family values theme of conservative Christianity. Such values may or may not be Christian, but they weren’t affirmed by Jesus in this passage. One has always to remember that Jesus himself was never a Christian, though Christianity may have derived from him.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">This is a good place to reflect on all Jesus’s remarks about family. Of these, probably the most shocking is the one in Luke 14:26: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">If any come to me and do not hate their own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters – yes, even their own life – they cannot be my disciples.</i> Seems fairly clear-cut. In order to be a follower of Jesus – what was later called a Christian -you have to hate every member of your family, as well as yourself. I wonder why this passage isn’t more well-known? On the basis of this passage alone, one would surely have to conclude that Jesus was completely opposed to ‘traditional family values’. Or was he just having a little joke? </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">In Matthew 10:35-37 [and similarly in Luke 12:52-53] Jesus claims that he has come to bring conflict rather than peace, and especially conflict within families: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">I have come to pit a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. A person’s enemies are members of the same household. </i>Jesus is by no means a family man. It’s unlikely that even the most ingenious sermonisers could spin that one around. For example, you won’t find much in the way of off-setting positive remarks about family to cherry-pick [but see Mark 7:9-13 below]. Clearly, ‘family values’ conservatism does not derive from the teachings of Jesus, it just thinks it does.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"></p><blockquote>4:3-8 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">The parable of the sower.</i></blockquote><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal"><o:p></o:p></i><p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">This is the first recorded parable of the canonical gospels, repeated in Matthew 13:3-8 and Luke 8:5-8. I won’t quote it in full here, nor will I comment on the lengthy explanation of it that follows [Mark 4:13-21]. The story, well-known enough, is about a farmer’s seed falling in four different places; by the path [eaten by birds], on rocky ground [it sprouted quickly but couldn’t take deep root and was burned off by the sun], among thorns [where it couldn’t compete and bore no fruit] and in good deep soil [where it thrived and bore fruit]. Jesus’s explanation reveals, or strongly suggests, that he’s talking about his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">message – </i>i.e. God’s imperial rule. In some people it will take root, in some not. In the broadest sense it’s about receptivity to ideas, but I don’t think there’s any great ethical dimension to this.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"></p><blockquote>4:24-25 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">And he went on to say to them: ‘Pay attention to what you hear! The standard you apply will be the standard applied to you, and then some. In fact, to those who have, more will be given, and from those who don’t have, even what they do have will be taken away!’</i> [see also Matt 7:2, Matt 13:12, Matt 25:29, Luke 6:38, Luke 8:18, Luke 19:26]</blockquote><p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">This is another troubling passage, oft-repeated, which would require some sermonising work, to make it ‘obvious’ that Jesus isn’t talking of material possessions here, he’s probably talking of, say, holy spirit. If you have lots of holy spirit inside you, you’ll be given more, come God’s imperial rule. If you haven’t enough, what you do have will be taken away – perhaps to render you fit for eternal damnation. Clearly, those with lots of the holy stuff inside them are morally superior to those with little, but this doesn’t offer us much in the way of moral guidance.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"></p><blockquote>7:5-13 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">the Pharisees and the scholars start questioning him: ‘Why don’t your disciples live up to the tradition of the elders, instead of eating bread with defiled hands?’ And he answered them, ‘How accurately Isaiah depicted you phonies when he wrote: This people honors me with their lips, but their heart stays far away from me. Their worship is empty, because they insist on teachings that are human commandments. You have set aside God’s commandment and hold fast to human tradition!’ Or he would say to them, ‘How expert you’ve become at putting aside God’s commandment to establish your own tradition. For instance Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother’ and ‘Those who curse their father or mother will surely die.’ ‘But you say, If people say to their father or mother, “Whatever I might have spent to support you is korban”’ [which means ‘consecrated to God’], you no longer let those persons do anything for their father or mother. So you end up invalidating God’s word with your own tradition, which you then perpetuate. And you do all kinds of other things like that!’</i> [see also Matt 15:1-9]</blockquote><p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">This passage provides an interesting example of Jesus as unorthodox rabbi. Certainly Jesus in this gospel spends far more time arguing with the traditionalists over ritual matters [as well as exorcising demons and performing miracles] than he does pontificating on real moral issues.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify">It’s worth noting though that, in this dispute with the Pharisees, Jesus picks out the ‘honour your parents’ commandment as being defiled by them. The basic idea is that the Pharisaic notion of ‘korban’, consecrating certain goods to God, allows those goods to be subtracted from whatever is owed to the devotee’s parents. Whether or not Jesus’s accusation is correct, he seems to have forgotten that he himself has refused to even recognize his own mother. I’m sure Socrates would never have been so glaringly inconsistent.</p></div>Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994304766961822770noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17913545.post-61828415556008477522009-10-17T09:38:00.005+10:302009-10-17T10:24:47.631+10:30What is Christian morality? Part 3<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNnSyKb8qvLq9X54v8KTLTGdcRBojo1fYBO0IE_iQAqpPHdcRVl1kVJZvGMzAKlGdf770ByBBlxrbLDdpHrMfqZWHLfxHDvbPbXg88Wcyv-76A-i-yd9btSQ0qg6BJKwIjGIs4/s1600-h/christian-go-to-hell+(1).jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 113px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNnSyKb8qvLq9X54v8KTLTGdcRBojo1fYBO0IE_iQAqpPHdcRVl1kVJZvGMzAKlGdf770ByBBlxrbLDdpHrMfqZWHLfxHDvbPbXg88Wcyv-76A-i-yd9btSQ0qg6BJKwIjGIs4/s200/christian-go-to-hell+(1).jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5393350388486896994" /></a><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold; ">Mark</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><blockquote>1:15 The time is up: God’s imperial rule is closing in. Change your ways, and put your trust in the good news! [see also Matt 3:2, Matt 4:17, Matt: 10:7, Luke 10:9-11]</blockquote></div>This is Mark’s summary of the message of Jesus, placed before he actually starts telling Jesus’s story. It morally exhorts people to change their ways – pretty vague - and provides a rationale. That is, if you don’t change you’ll miss out, because with the new rule will come God’s judgement, presumably. It’s the old story of year zero, renewal, the blank state – one of the oldest tricks in the book, and not original to the gospels or the Bible. Matthew [3:2] puts more or less the same words in the mouth of John the Baptist.<br /><blockquote>1:17 Become my followers and I’ll have you fishing for people! [see also Matt 4:19, Luke 5:10]</blockquote><br />This is the first, and probably most well-known, of a number of calls to possible recruits, made much of in subsequent sermons. To be a good Christian you have to spread the word. Hard put to find anything ethical in this, though it might require bravery and self-sacrifice.<br /><blockquote>2:5 Child, your sins are forgiven [see also Matt 9:2, Luke 5:20, John 5:14].</blockquote><br />This isn’t so much about right conduct, but I think it’s crucial. The remark, directed at a paralysed child, whom Jesus also cures, is soon followed by outraged comments from some scholars listening in. They question, not surprisingly, the moral authority of Jesus. It also, of course, suggests a connection commonly made in this era, but rejected by the modern world; a connection between ‘sin’ and sickness or injury.<br />When we’re young, the moral authority generally comes from our parents. They have a near-absolute power to punish us or forgive us. Who hasn’t experienced the fear and anxiety of waiting for their judgement? When, say, you’ve broken something precious in the family home. They might just forgive you if you have a good explanation or show sufficient remorse. And their response will have some effect, however slight, on how you behave, and how you justify your behaviour in future. Of course, your parents are unlikely to say, we forgive you for everything bad you’ve done in the past, and you probably wouldn’t know how to take it if they did. You may well even lose respect for them, for this undiscriminating forgiveness. Does this mean they’ll forgive you for all the bad things you do in the future too?<br />The point is that forgiveness isn’t really what we want, or need. What we need is justice and consistency, together with an understanding of and sympathy for our human frailties.<br /><blockquote>2:17 I did not come to enlist religious folks but sinners! [see also Matt 9:13, Luke 5:32, Luke 19:10]</blockquote><br />This remark emphasises the Christian appeal to outsiders – the sinners, the lost, the marginalised. Also the sceptics, and those who were dissatisfied with the current Judaic orthodoxy. As a recruiting slogan, it’s probably quite effective, and I’m sure missionaries use it still. But even if we choose not to treat this openness cynically, it tells us little about the moral behaviour expected of those recruited.<br /><blockquote>2:22 And nobody pours young wine into old wineskins, otherwise the wine will burst the skins, and destroy both the wine and the skins. Instead, young wine is for new wineskins [see also Matt 9:17, Luke 5:37-39].</blockquote><br />This ‘common wisdom’ remark is made in the context of a dispute with the Pharisees and the disciples of John the Baptist regarding religious traditions, especially fasting. Assuming Jesus was a real person, his fame or notoriety during his lifetime would’ve sprung from his religious heterodoxy. The Messianic and deistic claims would’ve come later, largely. Jesus here is comparing himself to a young wine, which needs a new container or framework to be fully appreciated. Again, this is about renewal and year zero. However, in Luke 5:39 Jesus adds this assertion: Besides, nobody wants young wine after drinking aged wine. As they say, ‘Aged wine is just fine’. This is of course generally true of wines, but how does it relate to Jesus’s ‘new’ teaching and the traditional teaching of the Pharisees? It’s completely confusing, and has no doubt been ignored by sermonisers, but these are the anomalies that the sceptic has to highlight. No doubt it can be explained by the gospel writers’ own confusions as to what they’re trying to say, or get Jesus to say.<br /><blockquote>2:27-28 The sabbath day was created for Adam and Eve, not Adam and Eve for the sabbath day. So, the son of Adam lords it even over the sabbath day [see also Matt 12:8, Luke 6:5]. </blockquote><br /><blockquote>3:4 On the sabbath day is it permitted to do good or to do evil, to save life or to destroy it? [see also Matt 12:10-12, Luke 6:9]</blockquote><br />Probably Jesus’s most interesting remarks so far, again made in the context of a dispute with the Pharisees, this time over the sabbath. Essentially it’s a liberal v conservative dispute, with the conservatives emphasising tradition and the liberal Jesus emphasising freedom and the priority of people over tradition. We should be in charge of tradition, tradition shouldn’t be in charge of us. I’m not sure if this is an example of Christian morality, but it’s worth reflecting on in the light of the Catholic Church, for example.<br /><blockquote>3:28 I swear to you, all offenses and whatever blasphemies humankind might blaspheme will be forgiven them. But whoever blasphemes against the holy spirit is never ever forgiven, but is guilty of eternal sin [see also Luke 12:10]. </blockquote><br />This is the first nasty pronouncement. To a modern reader, it might seem almost meaningless. What is the holy spirit anyway? Have I just blasphemed against it by wondering what it is? Why are other blasphemies forgivable? A blasphemy by definition involves using the name of a god in a non-religious way, or in a way disapproved of by religious authority. Of course by this definition, god’s name is used blasphemously far more often than in any other way these days, at least in this part of the world. Jesus seems to be saying that a blasphemy against a god is forgivable, but one against the god in its manifestation as the holy spirit is not. It might be argued that he’s distinguishing between the letter of god and the spirit, it being much worse to blaspheme against the spirit, or the very idea of god. That, however, would surely be an unacceptably modern take on Jesus’s actual words. Such passages seem to me to indicate the obvious; that Jesus, however constructed, was a creature of his time, and all too human.<br />Perhaps more interesting is the distinction here between eternal sin and the ordinary garden variety. Eternal, unforgivable sin presumably dooms you to the forever fires of hell. So you’d better brush up on your holy spirit, brethren. We’re very far here from the gentle, forgiving Jesus of Christian spin.Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994304766961822770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17913545.post-70742992691002714772009-09-15T07:41:00.007+09:302009-10-17T09:51:19.362+10:30What is Christian morality? Part 2<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMwDwg4-XQX4jM-k1_AvJ7Y2ThlmW_qK7doj3xfJQFoMpFd6SpdmZeGzIxC7lyn9VjFiSMJOvAjVv74YDrQJmMhuNlSyvOWS6klW-f0SNJXf_L6sjyaQPIZlcjRumcrvurGder/s1600-h/Wrong_Hands_3126_sm_1.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 141px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMwDwg4-XQX4jM-k1_AvJ7Y2ThlmW_qK7doj3xfJQFoMpFd6SpdmZeGzIxC7lyn9VjFiSMJOvAjVv74YDrQJmMhuNlSyvOWS6klW-f0SNJXf_L6sjyaQPIZlcjRumcrvurGder/s200/Wrong_Hands_3126_sm_1.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5381457111385869538" /></a><br /><br /><br />I'm having some blog troubles, but here at last is part 2 of my longest essay [12,000 words and still incomplete].<br /><br />Still I intend to stumble on. I’ve decided to base my exploration of Christian morality on the first, tightest definition above, and as my source and guide, I am relying on the collaborative work The Five Gospels: What did Jesus really say? The search for the authentic words of Jesus, published by a group of New Testament scholars collectively known as The Jesus Seminar. However, I’ve chosen to ignore the fifth gospel, Thomas, because, however authentic it may be as a representation of Jesus, it has remained ‘buried’ for almost all the Christian era, only coming to light in the twentieth century. My aim here is not to uncover the ‘real’ Jesus, but to answer the question in the essay’s title, with an eye to the influence of Christian morality on our society.<br />There’s a question as to whether Christian morality is really Christian, in the sense that what we call the west has been dominated by Roman Catholicism, and the Protestant reactions to it. The central figure in Catholicism was Paul of Tarsus, not Jesus. Paul knew virtually nothing of the life and teachings of Jesus, and it certainly shows in his writings. Though Paul often extolled Jesus as the son of God, something never claimed by the gospel writers [though John came as close as may be] he was notoriously vague on the details. However, he was the first to commit to writing what seems to have been an oral tradition [albeit only twenty or thirty years old] which underpinned the fledgling religion.<br /><blockquote>That Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised up on the third day according to the scriptures. [1 Cor 15:3-5 – New International Version]</blockquote><br />This idea that Jesus [but now, importantly, identified as Christ] died for our sins is arguably more important for Christian morality than any of the parables and pronouncements, so it’s worth dwelling on. It’s not particularly easy to get your head around the concept. Much has been made, usually in very negative terms, of the relationship between this idea and the idea of the scapegoat, an animal ritually slaughtered to wash away the crimes of the community with its blood. This idea, that you can do what you like, individually or communally, as long as you perform the requisite sacrifice afterwards, is of course anathema to most modern sensibilities, even though it still exists, in modified form, in the Catholic confession, in which you’re encouraged to ‘come clean’. Ideas around purification and cleanliness are of course integral to all religions, but, to be fair, the idea of the scapegoat or the Christ-figure, permitting believers to get away with anything because some other person or animal has ‘taken on’ their sins, seems inadequate. Whatever the idea means, it has rarely been used as a recipe for anarchy or moral licence. There is surely a sense in which Christ’s death, and the idea that he had to die for our sins, is an attempt to focus on sin itself, on its enormity. The wages of sin is death – that seems, at least partly, to be the message.<br />But if Christ’s dying for our sins doesn’t mean that we can sin with impunity, what does it mean, and what difference does his dying for such a purpose make? There’s an elaboration in the first book of Peter:<br /><blockquote>He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed [1 Peter 2:24 – New International Version].</blockquote><br />We carry our sins about like injuries or scars – if we could be magically absolved of them we’d be healed, and this would be like a rebirth, encouraging us to go off and sin no more. It can be a powerful idea, especially as a tool to convert non-Christians - though you’d first have to convince them of the whole concept of sin and its associated burden of guilt – but it is only indirectly a moral idea. It’s the idea that you’ll be a better person if all of the bad things you’ve done in the past could be wiped away – the ever-attractive myth of the blank slate and the new leaf. The trouble is that the convert or the born-again can’t keep on wiping clean the slate or turning over the leaf – they have to learn to settle down with the same old same old sinning self.<br />More importantly, none of this gives us half a clue as to what sins are, and how to ‘live righteously’. So what did Jesus himself –real or constructed – teach us about right conduct?<br />So let’s look closely at the canonical gospels [there are some thirty or so different gospel texts or fragments, and many were destroyed during the early Christian era] to see if anything coherent and foundational can be derived from Jesus’s moralising pronouncements and stories, and exemplary acts, described therein. In doing so, I’ll follow the order of the gospels in The Five Gospels. While there is endless contestation in this field, the majority of New Testament scholars agree that Mark is the oldest of the extant gospel writings, dating from around the time of the destruction of Jerusalem in 70CE. I should also point out that, due to the repetition of stories and remarks, particularly in the synoptic gospels, most of the analytical work will be done in looking at the first gospels in this order. In any case the gospel of John contains no parables at all, and it concerns itself much more with the status of Jesus than with moral issues.Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994304766961822770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17913545.post-50134613223443460302009-08-17T13:56:00.002+09:302009-08-17T14:10:59.285+09:30What is Christian morality? Part 1<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.thatreligiousstudieswebsite.com/images_trsw/Philosophy_of_Religion/ten_commandments.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 250px; height: 200px;" src="http://www.thatreligiousstudieswebsite.com/images_trsw/Philosophy_of_Religion/ten_commandments.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br />Here is the first 1000 words or so of my essay on this subject [unfinished as yet].<br /><br /><br />You hear it endlessly, and not just from Christians. Christianity provides the ethical bedrock of western civilization. I’ve never been convinced, but how can it be proven or disproven?<br /><br />Well, the first thing to do is to define terms. So what exactly is Christian morality?<br /><br />I can think of three definitions, each one more expansive than the last.<br /><br />1. It is any morality that can be derived from the teachings of Jesus - the Sermon on the Mount, the parables and other incidental remarks, found in the gospels.<br />2. It’s any morality that can be derived from the Bible in general – the Decalogue, the proverbs and psalms – but particularly the New Testament [the teachings of Paul and the other epistle writers as well as Jesus].<br />3. It’s all of the above plus any morality that can be derived from any teacher, from Augustine of Hippo to Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Simone Weil, whose thinking is inspired by Christianity - including all the sermons of all the parish priests throughout Christendom and beyond throughout the last two millennia. <br /><br />The trouble with this nest of definitions is that each one’s not only more expansive, but also more diffuse and, arguably, more untenable. For example, as many observers have mentioned, and as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, Christian sermons and commentaries tend to track changes in our moral outlook. The fire and brimstone sermons, so common in the nineteenth century, and so powerfully rendered in James Joyce’s goodbye-to-all-that novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, are long gone, and we now have ‘eco-Christianity’, as well as a Christianity celebrating multiculturalism and diversity and inter-faith dialogue, and we have female and gay clerics in some denominations. These are developments that secularists would argue, pretty convincingly, are driven by forces external to Christianity, but many Christians argue, also pretty convincingly to some people, that it’s a return to ‘real’ Christianity, that Christianity has always been about environmentalism [who urged us to consider the lilies?], embracing all cultures [like the good Samaritan] and ways of life [fisher folk, beggars, tax collectors, laundresses]. <br /><br />I’ve known Christians who ‘shop around’ for priests who give sermons they approve of. In fact, I’m sure this is commonplace. If you’re a liberal, you’ll just be annoyed by a conservative anti-gay sermon. The priest just hasn’t absorbed the message of Jesus correctly, so then you’ll find a parish where the message is right. Sometimes the message will be so liberal that the priest will be in trouble with the higher church authorities, and, if he’s Catholic, excommunication might be in the air, and heresy, and heroism, and martyrdom. The embattled priest will collect a loyal flock of followers, he will take his stand for true Christianity, he might even hint that this is where Jesus Christ himself stood against the Pharisees, and what could possibly be more Christian than that?<br /><br />It does seem, on the face of it, that the life and teaching of Jesus, with his emphasis on the meek, on children, on the poor, his generally positive attitude to women, and his emphasis on faith over strict ritual observance and tradition, offers more to the left side of politics than the right, so it might seem strange that, especially in the US, it’s the other side that’s making the most fuss about Christian values. What the Christian right seems to be emphasising is ‘traditional family values’, including a puritanical attitude towards sex, regular church attendance, hard work, clean living, and a spreading of the gospel message [the message being no sex outside marriage, regular church attendance, hard work and clean living, etc]. I just wonder if this was what Jesus, or the gospel writers who put the words into his mouth, were really on about. <br /><br />I think it’s undoubtedly true that, since the rise to power of Christianity, a huge volume of ethical claims and pronouncements have been made in its name. Indeed, until a couple of centuries ago, just about every ethical pronouncement – with the notable exception of those made by a handful of secular philosophers like Spinoza and Hume – was made in the name of the Judaeo-Christian god and his son, the other and same Judaeo-Christian god.<br /> <br />However, this doesn’t mean that Christianity forms the bedrock of our ethics, because I strongly suspect that, had Christianity never risen to power, the volume of ethical pronouncements made over the past millennium or two would’ve been about the same, and their quality would’ve been about the same too, only they would’ve been made in the name of other gods and other religions, or maybe they would’ve been made in the ethicists’ own name, as with the ethics of Aristotle or the moral letters of Seneca or the essays of Montaigne. What Christianity did, through Catholicism, and the later Protestant sects who largely kept the Catholic model, was to provide a structure and a building program which encouraged people to congregate at particular designated sites to listen to sermons and homilies from more or less wise and charismatic characters. This provided them with an ethical education and a sense of community and solidarity – not to mention a focus for networking, deals and gossip.<br /> <br />What I’m suggesting is that Christianity was always a vague, catch-all term, allowing people to come together and celebrate and reinforce their conservative or liberal views, pat each other on the back, and selectively quote scriptural stuff to each other. It’s this vagueness that is the key to its success. Jesus, insofar as his teachings have been paid any mind at all, was a man for all seasons, but above all he has become a symbol of positivity – kindness, charity, forgiveness, love. Who can turn their backs on such grand themes? Only evil people, surely. And we can all work out the details for ourselves. <br /><br />In this essay I was hoping to try to separate the accretions – the sermons, the infinite commentaries and elaborations, and the myth-making – from the actual words and deeds attributed to Jesus in the gospels. Sounds simple, and no doubt it has been attempted many times before, but immediately difficulties arise. For a start, the four canonical gospels were written in Koine Greek [though even this has been contested – some argue for a missing ur-text, perhaps written in Hebrew]. The first, and perhaps only, language of Jesus was probably Aramaic – though some disagree. So how much has been lost or distorted in translation? Jesus may [or may not] have died in the mid thirties CE, while the first extant gospel was [probably] that of Mark, written about 70CE [a date which is the centre of a great storm of contestation].<br /><br /> Each of the gospel texts is stylistically unique, and there are contradictions amongst them, as well as different emphases. Further, there are other gospel texts to be considered, most notably Thomas. How reliable is this text? Why was it excluded from the canon? Should it simply be ignored because, not having been included in the canon, it has had little impact on the subsequent development of Christianity?Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994304766961822770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17913545.post-16510984261204070252009-06-02T18:11:00.001+09:302009-06-02T19:03:01.663+09:30Opening the chinks of reason<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://cache.daylife.com/imageserve/0dw9cnRamA8Nk/610x.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 610px; height: 398px;" src="http://cache.daylife.com/imageserve/0dw9cnRamA8Nk/610x.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /> <style type="text/css"> <!-- @page { size: 21cm 29.7cm; margin: 2cm } P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm } --> </style> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">This evening, in a news report about Jewish settlements in the occupied territories – the new US administration is trying to pressure the Israeli government into halting the spread of these settlements – a Jewish settler was interviewed. Her remarks, as presented, were brief. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;"><span style="font-size:85%;"> 'People say we shouldn't be building here because it's Arab land, but that's not accurate. This is Jewish land, given to us by God.'</span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">Such arrogant claims aren't likely to endear themselves to a secular audience, and yet, on reflection, there was one word in this small stream that shone out like a glimmer of hope. That word was 'accurate'. While not exactly a scientific word, it's a word science is fond of. Accuracy in measurement, accuracy of results, accurate experiments, accurate targeting. It's a word much associated with reason, and it tends to draw attention to itself as such. So when somebody says, 'uhh, excuse me, but that's not accurate', it alerts you. You eagerly await the details of this inaccuracy. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">So the second sentence above seems a grotesque anti-climax, both hilarious and tragic, like much religious belief. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">The hope lies in the <i>choice of the word</i> 'accurate', the appeal to reason of some kind, some claim to objectivity. The person using that word wishes to invoke an objective truth-claim, offering some hope that she can be reasoned with.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">Since my youth I've always fantasised that people could be swayed, their certitudes undermined, via the Socratic method. Get as many people to talk like Socrates as possible and the world would be a much more sociable and reasonable place. My growing awareness that I was too hot-headed, emotional and impatient to hold down the Socratic role for more than thirty seconds in 'real life' only served to make the fantasy more enticing. I talked rationally enough to myself – at least from time to time.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">Socrates: Good afternoon, Hannah, how is the building going?</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">Hannah: Slowly Socrates, slowly, but God willing it will be complete before my sister gives birth in August. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">Socrates: And are you feeling any pressure, Hannah? I couldn't help but overhear what you said to that journalist just now. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">Hannah: Ah, I should've known you would bring that up, you can always be counted on to sniff out a dispute. No, I feel no pressure Socrates, God is on my side.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">Socrates: No doubt, Hannah, but I was interested in the precise words you used. You said, did you not, that it is not accurate to say this is Arab land?</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">Hannah: That's right.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">Socrates: It's more accurate to say that God gave you and your people this land. Correct?</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">Hannah: Correct.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">Socrates: A little more accurate or a lot more accurate?</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">Hannah: Socrates, I know you're trying to trip me, but it's completely accurate. It's the truth. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">Socrates: Right, completely true then. And the claim that this is Arab land is completely false, even though the Arabs vehemently say it's true. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">Hannah: We have God's word on it.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">Socrates: And do you think that you've convinced the journalist, and the global audience he reports to, of the accuracy of your claim?</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">Hannah: The world can think what it wants, Socrates, the truth is the truth.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">Socrates: But Hannah, surely you are concerned with what the world thinks, otherwise why would you talk to the journalist and point out the inaccuracy of one group's claims to this land, and the accuracy of another's? You recognise that there are standards of accuracy, measures of accuracy, do you not? </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">Hannah: Yes of course.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">Socrates: Universal standards of accuracy, recognised by everyone we can imagine this journalist's report reaching – the Russans of the Steppes, the Australians of the Outback, the Americans of the Prairie, the Chinese of the Provinces, the Italians of the Alps, the Indians in their crowded cities. You accept that all these people will have standards of accuracy, and that they may agree with each other on these standards, as they apply to different measurable entities? </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">Hannah: Well, no, I'm not so sure about that. I think there would be a lot of disagreement. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">Socrates: Well maybe there would be some entities that people will agree can be measured accurately – the height of a mountain, say, whereas others are not so easy to agree on, as for example your case. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">Hannah: There is no measuring in the case I put forward Socrates. Who can measure God? </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">Socrates: The God who gave you this land?</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">Hannah: There is no other God. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">Socrates: So you say, Hannah, but where I came from people believed in many gods, a squabbling nest of gods. Out in the wider world, the world this reporter reports to, there are also many gods, with strange names, gods you and I have little inkling of, just as some of the people out there have little inkling of your god. You are claiming, I presume, that their gods are all false, even though these people believe in their gods as fervently as you believe in your god, and would if asked, presumably say that it is your god who is false. Do you agree that they would most likely say that?</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">Hannah: Most likely. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">Socrates: Most likely indeed, for these are the matters upon which people most fervently disagree, is that not so?</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">Hannah: Yes, history shows this. Let me assure you I'm not a fool Socrates. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">Socrates: I've never thought so, for I recognise and admire your great concern for accuracy, in this and in all matters. But here we have reached an impasse. You say there is one god, your god, the Jewish god, and that this land was given to you by that god. The Arabs in this neighbourhood say it is their land and, though I haven't spoken to them, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they claimed this land in accordance with their own god. How can this situation be resolved? </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">Hannah: For me it is already resolved. We are on this land and we will remain on it. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">Socrates: You would be prepared to die for the sake of this land?</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">Hannah: I don't think it will come to that, but if need be, yes.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">Socrates: And does that make your claim more accurate?</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">Hannah: That's a very clever question Socrates. I know your tricks. I think I need to be getting on with my work now.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">Socrates: But I can assure you Hannah, I ask this question only because I want to know what makes your claim to this land an accurate one, or more accurate than the claim of the Arabs. Do I understand from your response that you don't consider the preparedness to die for this land of you and your people a proper measure of the accuracy of your claim to it?</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">Hannah: No I don't. You're right about that.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">Socrates: So we return to our impasse. You claim this land according to your god. The Arabs claim this land according to their god. We need a way of measuring the objective accuracy of these competing claims, do you agree?</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">Hannah: Yes, but that will never be achieved. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">Socrates: That's a terribly pessimistic response Hannah, but at least you agree that an objective standard is needed, even if it's impossible to arrive at such a standard? You will concede that much?</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">Hannah: I concede no such thing. I'm not prepared to concede anything, Socrates, least of all my own God-given land. This conversation is futile, and I really have work to do. Good day to you. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">Socrates: Well I'm sorry you feel that way. For me it's been most absorbing. You've recognised the need for objective standards of judgment, and that's very wise, though there's so much more to discuss and hammer out. Hopefully we'll both continue to think about these matters, and get further on in some future discussions. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">Hannah: Yes, yes, goodbye Socrates. You're a good man.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">Socrates: Well thank you Hannah, you're a good woman to say that, whether it's true or not! Good day to you. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><br /></p>Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994304766961822770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17913545.post-19990989124928066822009-05-31T19:44:00.007+09:302009-05-31T21:02:08.828+09:30God may be great, but is he good? Plato's Euthyphro<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://72.232.229.42/thumb/a/a4/Socrates_Louvre.jpg/180px-Socrates_Louvre.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 180px; height: 240px;" src="http://72.232.229.42/thumb/a/a4/Socrates_Louvre.jpg/180px-Socrates_Louvre.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />I'm well under way with these essays. Only another month's work should see them ready. Here's a finished one.<br /><br /> <style type="text/css"> <!-- @page { size: 21cm 29.7cm; margin: 2cm } P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm } --></style><p style="" align="justify"> <style type="text/css"> <!-- @page { size: 21cm 29.7cm; margin: 2cm } P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm } --> </style> </p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">One of the problems with a god who is transcendant and also personal, a problem felt heavily not only by Christian theologians but also the Islamic </span><span style="font-family:Electron;"><i>faylasufs, </i></span><span style="font-family:Electron;"><span style="font-style: normal;">is the problem of free will and its essential opposite, predestination. Interestingly, this is a problem not only for humans, but for the god or gods. So Christians might ask, is God making me sin or am I sinning against God's wishes? If God is making me, then I have no reason to feel any shame [but nor should I feel pride in doing good things, as this also is God's responsibility, not mine]. On the other hand, if I'm free to do what I want, how do I know that what I'm doing is something God approves of? I feel pride in my actions, I'm winning the praise of others, but what about God? Are God and the good one and the same? We often hear that God is good, but is this an equation of precise identity? And if not, which is more important, God or the good? Is God constrained by the good, or is the good constrained by God? </span></span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;"><span style="font-style: normal;">The problem's a very old one, dating to well before the advent of Christianity, and it was addressed head on in an early Platonic dialogue, the justly famous </span></span><span style="font-family:Electron;"><i>Euthyphro. </i></span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">In this dialogue </span><span style="font-family:Electron;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Socrates encounters Euthyphro outside the court-house, where Socrates is facing a charge of impiety [he is later to be found guilty and sentenced to death]. Euthyphro, an expert in religious law and lore, is there, we discover, to prosecute his own father on a charge of murder. </span></span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; font-style: normal;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">Socrates is keen, or at least pretends to be, to probe Euthyphro on this life and death issue of piety and impiety:</span></p> <pre style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family:Electron;"><span style="font-size:85%;"></span></span><blockquote style="font-family: arial;"><span style=";font-size:100%;" >Soc. And what is piety, and what is impiety? </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span><span style=";font-size:100%;" >Euth. Piety is doing as I am doing; that is to say, prosecuting any one who is guilty of<br />murder, sacrilege, or of any similar crime-whether he be your father or mother, or whoever<br />he may be-that makes no difference; and not to prosecute them is impiety. And please to<br />consider, Socrates, what a notable proof I will give you of the truth of my words, a proof<br />which I have already given to others:-of the principle, I mean, that the impious, whoever he<br />may be, ought not to go unpunished. For do not men regard Zeus as the best and most<br />righteous of the gods?-and yet they admit that he bound his father (Cronos) because he<br />wickedly devoured his sons, and that he too had punished his own father (Uranus)</span><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span><span style=";font-size:100%;" ><span style="font-style: normal;">for a similar reason, in a nameless manner. And yet when I proceed against my father, they<br />are angry with me. So inconsistent are they in their way of talking when the gods are<br />concerned, and when I am concerned.</span></span><span style=";font-size:100%;" ><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></blockquote><span style="font-family:Electron;"><span style="font-style: normal;"></span></span></pre><span style="font-family:Electron;">It should be noted that the murder Euthyphro accuses his father of is a murky affair. The victim was a farm labourer, a dependent of Euthyphro's family. He had slain one of the family's domestic servants in an argument. Euthyphro's father had tied him up, thrown him in a ditch, and then sent to Athens for advice as to the next step to be taken. The messenger was delayed, and by the time he got back, the bound and neglected labourer was dead. Certainly there is blame to be attached, but Socrates is taken aback at Euthyphro's certitude about how the gods view his father's act – that is, as an act of impiety.</span> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Euthyphro's response above, that he is following the example of the gods, prompts Socrates to express doubts about these tales of the gods, a scepticism which, he speculates, might be the reason for his being accused of impiety. Euthyphro assures him that all the stories of the gods are true, whereupon Socrates returns to the general category of piety. He wants a more catch-all definition than 'doing as I do', or 'doing as the gods do'. The next definition Euthyphro comes up with is that </span></span><span style="font-family:Electron;"><i>piety is that which is dear to the gods, and impiety that which is not dear to them</i></span><span style="font-family:Electron;"><span style="font-style: normal;">. </span></span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">However, as both interlocutors agree, the gods are often in discord, and when they argue, it's always about Big Issues; right and wrong, justice and injustice. And the same goes for humans. So, as Socrates points out, the gods appear to be on both sides, arguing for 'right' one minute, and 'wrong' the next. So it's impossible to tell whether piety or impiety is dear to the gods – which way they will go on any particular Big Issue. </span> </p> <p align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">Socrates next gets Euthyphro to agree that the gods don't argue about whether just actions should be rewarded or unjust actions punished; they accept that's how it should be, as do mortals. Instead they argue the particulars of cases, whether such-and-such an action was right or wrong. So Socrates amends Euthyphro's definition to say that piety is that which is dear to </span><span style="font-family:Electron;"><i>all</i></span><span style="font-family:Electron;"> the gods, impiety that which is hateful to them all, and any action or thing about which they're in dispute is neither pious nor impious. He then asks a question which greatly perplexes Euthyphro. He asks – but are these acts loved by the gods because they are pious, or are they pious because they are loved by the gods? </span> </p> <p align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">The question here, of course, is one of priority. Which came first, piety [roughly equivalent to our <i>morality</i>] or the gods? Do we do what is right because it is right [and the gods too are subordinate to right and wrong], or do we do what is right because the god – when they're in agreement - will it as right [in which case we must be constantly trying to determine the will of the gods]? The crucial nature of this question, for all religions and for all believers, cannot be underestimated. To put things monotheistically, if God simply <i>determines</i> the good, or if goodness is an attribute or defining characteristic of God, then it would be as pointless to praise God as it would be to praise [or blame] a cat for having fur, or a fly for producing maggots. If, on the other hand, the good is something antecedent to God, something which God strives to achieve along with the rest of us, then this puts something of a dent in God's omnipotence and all-round Supremacy. </span> </p> <p align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;">This issue has indeed proved a headache for all three major monotheistic religions. Different positions have been taken on it, and many lives have been taken as one side or another has gained power. The position of Plato is clear enough, both in the </span><span style="font-family:Electron;"><i>Euthyphro </i></span><span style="font-family:Electron;"><span style="font-style: normal;">and the </span></span><span style="font-family:Electron;"><i>Timaeus. </i></span><span style="font-family:Electron;"><span style="font-style: normal;">He gives priority to piety, justice and all the general 'forms' of virtue. Interestingly, the writer or writers of Genesis also seem to give the good a prior existence to God. In the very first chapter the phrase 'God saw that it was good' is written several times. The chapter begins with a satisfying crescendo, '</span></span><span style="font-family:Electron;"><span style="font-style: normal;">And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good'. I wonder who he was trying to please?</span></span></p> <p align="justify"><span style="font-family:Electron;"><span style="font-style: normal;">To return to the </span></span><span style="font-family:Electron;"><i>Euthyphro, </i></span><span style="font-family:Electron;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Socrates continuing treatment of the relationship of piety to the gods, and to justice in general, of which he sees piety as a subset, only succeeds in bewildering Euthyphro all the more, until he's reduced to agreeing with whatever Socrates suggests to him - a familiar pattern in Plato's dialogues. When he finally gets Euthphyro to assert himself once more, Euthyphro can only come up with an elaboration on a previous statement of the nature of piety:</span></span></p> <pre style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family:Electron;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><blockquote style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><blockquote>Euth. I have told you already, Socrates, that to learn all these things accurately will be very<br />tiresome. Let me simply say that piety or holiness is learning, how to please the gods in<br />word and deed, by prayers and sacrifices. Such piety, is the salvation of families and states,<br />just as the impious, which is unpleasing to the gods, is their ruin and destruction.</blockquote></span></blockquote> </span></span></span></pre><p style="" align="justify"> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-family:Electron;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Socrates is very disappointed with this answer. Why would prayers and sacrifices be pleasing to the gods, who have no need of them? Or if they need them, how could they be omnipotent? Are offerings and supplications good in themselves? We appear to be back at the starting point, and Socrates prepares to begin the exploration from scratch. Euthyphro is having none of this, and begs off; he has a court case to attend to. Whether his confidence in his cause has been affected by the dialogue is anyone's guess.</span></span></span></p> <p style="" align="justify"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-family:Electron;"><span style="font-size:100%;">The implications of Socrates' central question, though, should be clear to all believers. If morality is just the will of God or the gods, that doesn't help us much, as nobody seems quite to know what that will is. There are interpreters, mediators between the god or gods and ourselves, who try to teach us this will, but they notoriously contradict each other, just as the sacred writings of the deities are full of apparent contradictions. If morality is <i>separate </i><span style="font-style: normal;">from the gods then we have to work it out for ourselves, just as, presumably, the gods do. Either way we appear to be on our own, morality-wise, no matter how fervently we believe. </span></span></span></span> </p> <p style="" align="justify"><br /><br /></p> <p></p>Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994304766961822770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17913545.post-92032537370898674712009-05-11T00:09:00.005+09:302009-05-16T00:11:07.299+09:30the end of the journey: chez nous<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://images-eu.amazon.com/images/P/1845112423.02.LZZZZZZZ.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 326px; height: 500px;" src="http://images-eu.amazon.com/images/P/1845112423.02.LZZZZZZZ.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />I've continued reading<span style="font-style: italic;"> Journey of the Magi</span>, and sure enough it has only irritated me the more. In this passage he gets more blatant, and ridiculous.<br /><br /><blockquote>Freedom without divine laws results in, to paraphrase Shakespeare, humanity preying on itself like monsters of the deep; and progress has brought us to the brink of doing to the world what God promised he would never do to it again himself.</blockquote>First, to exonerate Shakespeare. The beauty, and to some the frustration, of the reflections expressed in Shakespeare's plays is that none of them can be pinned on the bard himself. The words belong to Albany, in <span style="font-style: italic;">King Lear, </span>who mordantly asserts that, without the 'visible spirits' sent down from the heavens to tame us 'humanity must perforce prey on itself, like monsters of the deep' - and yes, he uses the plural, just as Gloucester does when he famously says, 'as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport' - which gives an idea of what <span style="font-style: italic;">he </span>thinks of divine law, a view not dissimilar to that of Mark Twain. <span style="font-style: italic;">King Lear </span>is a pagan play, so what is asserted here about 'divine law' is hard to ascertain, suffice to say that humanity needs taming - something we can perhaps all agree on.<br />As to progress, that long-suffering whipping-boy, if we define it, uncapitalized, as positive change, or improvement, it reflects a thoroughly human and indispensable striving. The notion that we're on the eve of destruction, going to hell in a handcart etc, is as old as civilization itself, and hardly needs any effort expended on it here.<br />It might be pointed out, though, that divine laws, whatever they are, are inimical to the notion of progress, because of course they're eternal, as divine stuff tends to be. How can anything which is eternal <span style="font-style: italic;">change</span>? This is, of course, a big problem, bigger than is recognised, for all proponents of 'divine law'. If you think biblical injunctions, or sharia laws, really are divine, then you're stuck with them for ever and ever. Hardly any wonder then that so many experts on divine law, imams and rabbis and so forth, have sprung up over the centuries to 're-interpret' the laws for changing times. Not that they've done a particularly impressive job - sharia law, in particular, continues to be a gross insult to anyone who has any respect for human rights [that construction of miserable, despised human beings].<br />Of course, there are no divine laws. Roberts should have written 'freedom without laws leads to humanity preying on itself', as, basically, Hobbes asserted. But that would've been way too prosaic, I suppose.<br /><br />I feel almost guilty about getting stuck into Roberts like this, searching for 'gotcha' moments, or passages. I remember Glenn Gould, the pianist, saying that he gave up concert performances because he felt that the audience was only there to hear him fail, to wait for that 'gotcha' moment when the whole performance might collapse on a bum note. Roberts' book, which he sees as an entertainment, is contradictory, muddled, funny, angry and occasionally inspired. He has apparently written acclaimed reportage on both gulf wars, and he has some of the footloose, rambling quality of a Hunter S Thompson. Also, I read on his website that he has gone blind in both eyes, a fate I don't even want to begin to imagine. Yet I also feel something like a duty to challenge sentences such as the one quoted above. To not let people get away with hazy-lazy religious talk, to show up the emptiness at its heart. Human laws are imperfect, but they're all we have, and if we accept they're always going to be only human, we'll accept the challenge of constantly modifying them. Unlike the mysteriously misplaced ones given to Moses, they're not written in stone.Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994304766961822770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17913545.post-57407432104356705372009-05-10T07:44:00.006+09:302009-05-10T08:33:21.529+09:30Twitter - winning the war against eloquence<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.jeffsweather.com/archives/birds%20squarking.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 276px; height: 402px;" src="http://www.jeffsweather.com/archives/birds%20squarking.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />Having had a lot of time off from blogging, I'm even more out of date than usual. Some months ago, after listening to a radio segment about Twitter, I wrote the following, and since then Twitter seems to have taken over the world. Of course, it seems to be essentially a networking vehicle, and I'm the world's worst networker, and a completely isolated, pathetic soul. Anyway, here's my piece, for my own amusement.<br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">Being a dweller in the most pathetic Beckettian solitude, I'd never heard of Twitter before this morning, when I listened to a Radio National program called Future Tense - more moderne than moderne.<br />According to the program's hype, Twitter is rapidly replacing Facebook etc as the latest thing in networking - not exactly my forte.<br />A very brightly speaking young gent was interviewed, and he enthused about the level playing field that Twitter is - largely because all communications are limited to 140 characters. The advantage of this, according to our interviewee, is that eloquent people - this is the term he used - don't have an unfair advantage. You begin to get a sense of why it's called Twitter. He also pointed out that [presumably articulate] people don't get a chance to hijack the space and 'debate politics' or some such subject.<br />So, lpf or lcd? What do they actually talk about on such sites? I'm sure that, at a pinch, you can say something substantial with 140 characters, but why do I get the impression that the push is <span style="font-style: italic;">against </span>substantiality? That Twitter is a dumbing down of Facebook which is a dumbing down of Blogging which is a....<br />I know it's nowhere near as linear as this, and that imposing restraints can sometimes lead to greater creativity, but really the move is not towards greater creativity but towards more bums on seats. A democratisation which has its downside. I can well imagine that the next great networking service might be Twitch, in which those who can't read or write will also be included [it could even be used to bridge the language barrier by simply eliminating language, or creating a new universal one, in which each touch of the keyboard represents a gesture or emotion. We can all Twitch, and someone will be Twitching all the way to the bank. Good luck to them.<br /><br /></span>Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994304766961822770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17913545.post-50357350315656821082009-05-07T23:44:00.003+09:302009-05-09T01:34:44.885+09:30I return - to a religious mishmash<div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHeecgMzEj7QRGO4wHHnWDSTAGl0CrkHbBKRtvN7lQQonOi3N3abp9FLD1ggOjl7ynviieQ8ftaInbzaG8AEKtejkL4Sm14hhIPz2r3yYOJW0Wn_eP-X7hYN6RlRjE0mGNKjyCWA/s400/jesus_meditating_forest.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 274px; height: 323px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHeecgMzEj7QRGO4wHHnWDSTAGl0CrkHbBKRtvN7lQQonOi3N3abp9FLD1ggOjl7ynviieQ8ftaInbzaG8AEKtejkL4Sm14hhIPz2r3yYOJW0Wn_eP-X7hYN6RlRjE0mGNKjyCWA/s400/jesus_meditating_forest.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style="color: rgb(153, 51, 0);"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-size:85%;">Jesus the cutely meditating Essene Nazarean</span></span></span><br /></div><br />Thought I'd lost my blog there.<br /><br />I've been awol for a while, trying to write essays for <span style="font-style: italic;">The Faith Hope</span>, The Book.<br /><br />This leads me to read all sorts of stuff I wouldn't usually read. <span style="font-style: italic;">Journey of the Magi </span>by Paul William Roberts, has some good humorous bits in it, but it's an odd and unconvincing mixture, part travel novel, part speculative thingy [about inter alia the influence of Zoroastrianism on Judeaism and so Christianity], part satori, part mockery of Marco Polo, part spruik for Zoroastrianism and eastern-style Christianity as opposed to the nasty materialist Roman Catholics, and I'm becoming less and less interested in the evidence-free dogmatism - for example, on Zoroaster, he writes:<br /><blockquote>It is... worth repeating the traditional account of the prophet's life - since there is no doubt that he lived one, and lived it under very human conditions, too.</blockquote>He then goes on to point out that nobody knows when and where the guy lived, and that claims about the dates of his life vary by a millenium or so! In fact nothing is known about his life, and he seems to be as shadowy a figure as Homer. The 'no doubt' claim is simply absurd. What's more, Roberts also has no doubt that Jesus was a 'pure Essene rabbi' - having read three quarters of the book now, I'm still waiting for a skerrick of evidence to support this. Many of Roberts' conjectures are interesting and even ingenious, and certainly he knows far more about Judaic and early Christian history than I do, but I detect a clear bias. Organised religion generally repels him, but he's drawn to the unorthodox, idiosyncratic religions, or dimensions of religion, such as Sufism, Zoroastrianism, Eastern Christianity and Essene Judaism. He depicts Christianity as being hijacked in the west by an orthodox, power-hungry clique who divested of its real essence. He writes of Eastern Christianity as the Truth and Western Christianity as the Lie. Naturally this doesn't convince me, as I don't find anything 'true' about religion, though it might be sometimes appropriate to talk about authenticity versus cynicism or disingenuousness. Clearly though it's the authoritarianism of established religion that gets my goat, while I find individual mystics merely quaint, or sad - and sometimes, admittedly, impressive, For example, I'm not sure if Leonard Cohen would want to call himself a mystic but he has that aura of calm and strength about him which is just what you need from a guru, and it clearly engenders great respect and love. And does no harm that I can think of, which is far more than you can say about organised religion.<br /><br />So I've been reading the passages in Roberts' book which deal with the histories of these religious movements with increasing skepticism, and boredom. And when I got to this infuriating passage I really wondered whether it was worth continuing. He is writing about his differences with Dead Sea Scrolls scholar Barbara Thiering:<br /><br /><blockquote>As brilliant as many of her interpretations are, Thiering's major shortcoming is her inability to realize that the "Eastern" gnostic, or Magian, or Nazarean Essenes were not superstitious fools: they opposed Pauline Judaeo-Christianity for the very reason that, by removing doctrines and practices regarding the subjective experience of "Truth", it would end up as little more than the secular humanism Thiering herself seems to have arrived at - besides creating a society governed increasingly by political or personal expediency rather than eternal spiritual values and truths. </blockquote>Now this really is a load of tosh. What are these 'eternal spiritual values and truths'? Apparently they're arrived at through doctrines and practices dealing with the subjective experience of truth. Basically he's lost himself in a mire of theological claptrap - amazing how you can do that in one short paragraph - and the onus is on him, as it is upon any theological spruiker, to let us know what these eternal spiritual values are. As for the political and personal expediency that, he intimates, flows from secular humanism, we've all heard that one before. It conveniently ignores the fact that all our laws are secular, and those that haven't been, historically, have generally been bad laws. Even if you look at the decalogue, the commandments that are most convincing and 'eternal'-seeming are the least 'spiritual' - thou shalt not lie, thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal. That's because they're based on a common-sense understanding of how we are to best survive and thrive as social beings.<br />I've been reading Geoffrey Robertson's important book <span style="font-style: italic;">Crimes Against Humanity, </span>and in it he traces the history of human rights since the Universal Declaration, that monument to secular humanism, came out in 1948. As he points out, many nations with poor human rights records signed up to the document cynically believing it to be a paper tiger, but the tiger is beginning to grow some baby teeth. I think it has largely defeated claims about western bias and 'Asian values' and it still stands, in fact more so than ever, as a model to aim for, and to measure performance against. Enforcement is of course the primary problem, but the human rights model, it seems to me, has a solid basis in our practical understanding of what it is to lead a life of value. Whether they embody 'spiritual values', I don't know, as I've never understood what that word means, but they do embody 'eternal' values, at least for as long as human beings go on being human.Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994304766961822770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17913545.post-21504898700053652112009-02-19T10:33:00.002+10:302009-02-19T10:40:12.889+10:30a familiar refrain<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.nathanielturner.com/images/New_Folder3/floodino4.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 508px; height: 310px;" src="http://www.nathanielturner.com/images/New_Folder3/floodino4.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /> <style type="text/css"> <!-- @page { size: 21cm 29.7cm; margin: 2cm } P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm } --> </style> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 100%;" align="justify"> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-family:Electron;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:Cortoba;">It's pretty well impossible</span> to get round the fact that the god who stars in the Old Testament is not a nice guy. There are numerous instances of gobsmacking cruelty and barbarity throughout, but I'll just focus on one event: the Flood.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 100%;" align="justify"> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-family:Electron;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Kids tend to like this story, with the animals tramping into the ark two by two, joined, we can imagine, by love and loyalty, eager to face a new beginning. But outside the ark? Apparently we needn't worry about the people outside the ark, not to mention the other living things. We're assured that they all deserved to die:</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 100%;" align="justify"><a name="v01006005-1"></a> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-family:Electron;"><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span></span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 100%;" align="justify"><a name="v01006006-1"></a><a name="v01006007-1"></a> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-family:Electron;"><span style="font-size:100%;"> <blockquote>5 The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. 6 And the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. 7 So the Lord said, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them.” [Genesis 6: 5-7 – ESV Bible]</blockquote></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 100%;" align="justify"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 100%;" align="justify"> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-family:Electron;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Of course the god's judgement is infallible, so if he says [or somebody says that he says] every person's thoughts were continually evil we aren't really in a position to demur. As for all the other creeping and flying things, the fact that the god is sorry that he made them should be enough for us.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 100%;" align="justify"> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-family:Electron;"><span style="font-size:100%;">But of course it isn't, not for any thinking feeling person. It was this part of the story - of drowning, desperate people, of toddlers and six year olds swimming and struggling desperately for disappearing higher ground, seeing their siblings and parents washed away, seeing dead babies and animals floating by – that haunted me. It didn't get much of a mention in the sermons. </span></span></span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 100%;" align="justify"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-family:Electron;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">Yet the sermonisers and interpreters can't quite wash their hands of this crime. On About.com's page about the Flood, under 'Points of interest from the story', the interpreter kindly informs us that</span></span></span></span> <span style="font-family:Cortoba;"><i>God's purpose in the flood was not to destroy people, but to destroy wickedness and sin. </i></span><span style="font-family:Cortoba;"><span style="font-style: normal;">So the god really wanted to get rid of unspecified 'wickedness and sin', and the only way he could think to do that, in spite of being all-powerful, was to destroy every living person, not to mention, again, all the other living things. I should've paid attention to this explanation when I was younger, but somehow it slipped by me. All I kept in my head were hundreds of drowned babies, and screaming, gurgling children. And later, in association, the bowed, cowed children following their wicked parents into gas chambers. After all, the Reich's purpose wasn't to destroy people, but to make everything cleaner and brighter for the chosen ones of the earth. </span></span> </p>Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994304766961822770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17913545.post-8590087309832049062009-02-17T21:34:00.003+10:302009-02-18T08:51:52.277+10:30religion and moi<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2007-02/07/xin_350204070906522060570.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 430px; height: 279px;" src="http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2007-02/07/xin_350204070906522060570.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />Here is my introduction to the book, first draft.<br /><br /> <style type="text/css"> <!-- @page { size: 21cm 29.7cm; margin: 2cm } P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm } --> </style> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="color: rgb(35, 0, 220);"><span style="font-family:Cortoba;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="">Religion has always been a troubling phenomenon for me</span></span><span style="">.</span><b> </b><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="">I can't recall it ever holding any attraction, or any sense of reality, though that is probably a false memory, as many researchers are now saying that religion and childhood go together like fish and chips. If not official religion, then its general territory - magic, monsters and coming alive again after being snuffed out by cops, Indians, assorted bad guys or the afore-mentioned monsters. Of course I marvellled at Superman and fantasised flying faster than bullets on errands for attractive schoolmates, but the god I heard about at Sunday School was nothing but a source of irritation. I felt ashamed of the gullibility and self-deception of my elders, and the questions I posed, without ever vocalising, were much the same as those of the young Christopher Hitchens; why would a perfect being want to be worshipped and praised by his creations? Wouldn't he be as squirmily embarrassed as I was by all this fawning? Okay, that was making the mistake of thinking the god was just like me only more super, but surely by worshipping him and singing to him and dedicating buildings and babies to him, they too were making assumptions about his nature, or at least how he preferred to be treated, and these assumptions actually made him all the less attractive, as someone totally insatiable, never entirely appeased, never satisfied, like the most nightmarish of parents. He was far more remote and less believable than Superman, who, like us, had gone through childhood and survived his parents and looked sexy even in his ridiculous outfit [well, okay, unlike most of us] – in fact he was the most reassuringly human of extra-terrestrials</span></span></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="color: rgb(35, 0, 220);"><span style="font-family:Cortoba;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="">It seemed so patently made-up and yet, as I glanced about at the adults during the Sunday service, they all seemed to believe so fervently. It seemed to make such a </span></span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><i><span style="">difference </span></i></span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="">to them. I didn't get it at all. Even if their god existed, which I could never concede, what would be the point of sitting around, swaying and chanting and smiling and fervently </span></span></span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><i><span style="">believing</span></i></span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="">? </span></span></span></span></span></span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;" align="justify"><span style="color: rgb(35, 0, 220);"><span style="font-family:Cortoba;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="">I wondered what they believed when they were in the throes of believing. Or what they were thinking at least. Were they thinking, </span></span></span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><i><span style="">He exists, wow he really exists</span></i></span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="">, </span></span></span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><i><span style="">wow</span></i></span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="">, </span></span></span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><i><span style="">I mean I just can't get over it, and he created us all, and me especially, I mean I know i'm nothing special but to me I am, and it's all because of him, I can just never thank him enough, or praise him or... I just wonder if he notices how impressed I am with him, because I really really am, but maybe I'm not showing it enough, though he sees everything, but maybe he wants me to smile more, to sing louder, to spread the word, I'm not spreading the word enough, I'm keeping it to myself, that's selfish, that's a sin, PRAISE THE LORD!...</span></i></span></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; font-style: normal;" align="justify"> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-family:Cortoba;"><span style="font-size:100%;">It worried me. I felt rather contemptuous of these swaying, smiling chanting elders, even as a young boy, but I also felt intimidated. I didn't know how to deal with such conviction, and of course I still don't. The sense of intimidation is heightened of course when there's a congregation of them. I've never attended personally to feel the love, but I'm thinking of masses of shining-faced believers in massive modern evangelical churches, chanting and stomping and halelujaing, presumably in gratitude for believing, and also masses of bobbing madrassa students and streetloads of breast-beating Iraqi men chanting something about Allah. I don't wonder so much then about what they might be thinking, as the whole impetus appears to be about unthinking, submitting to some kind of chain of basic believing being. </span></span></span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; font-style: normal;" align="justify"> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-family:Cortoba;"><span style="font-size:100%;">So, in the following, I want to put some pressure on all this believing, and to consider the alternatives. I want to look here and there at the history of religious belief and unbelief, and to wonder about the future. I doubt if I'll come to any earth-shattering conclusions, but I feel it's one of the most important issues to try to get our heads around, as the gap between believers and unbelievers widens, and exasperations grow. </span></span></span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; font-style: normal;" align="justify"> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-family:Cortoba;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Not that this will necessarily be a bridge-building exercise! Partly it will be my attempt to come to terms with the intimidating nature of relentless religious belief. I've no idea, honestly, as I write this, what the outcome will be.</span></span></span></p>Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994304766961822770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17913545.post-37781926408192035952009-02-14T11:45:00.002+10:302009-02-14T13:28:30.147+10:30the soul of the white ant<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.utoronto.ca/forest/termite/Ergatoid.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 306px; height: 442px;" src="http://www.utoronto.ca/forest/termite/Ergatoid.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />I remember a dog-eared paperback on the shelves of my first bohemian inner-city residence, shared with a book-collecting bowerbird of an art student. It was called <span style="font-style: italic;">The Soul of the White Ant, </span>by one Eugene Marais. I never read it, or even looked into it, though its title somehow encapsulated for me something of the new life I was entering, mad and unexpected, surrealistic and romantic. It would probably have been better for me to have read the book.<br />For its South African author was a strange and tortured genius, a bewitching story-teller who loved and was beloved of children, a drug addict and a suicide. Above all though, he had transformed himself, for a time, into a painstaking, patient and insightful observer and recorder of the lives of termites and baboons. Mr Darwin, I feel sure, would've been proud to make his acquaintance.<br />All of this I've only recently discovered, and it's not the subject of this piece, more's the pity. The book's title has long symbolized for me the weirdness of the religious, and particularly Christian, notion of the soul. I've heard that some Buddhists claim that every living thing, prokaryotic or eukaryotic, has a soul, which transmigrates in the process of reincarnation. If you've led an exemplary life as a bug or a germ, you will migrate to a higher form next time, maybe a booby or a red panda. It sounds pleasant, as anything does if you put it the right way. I've probably got this Buddhist teaching quite wrong, but in any case it seems problematic to me to impose morality on the life of a bacterium. Then again, how much more problematic must it be to impose morality on the life of a human being.<br />Be that as it may, Christians are supposed to believe in the soul as a specifically human apparatus. As such, it has taken something of a battering since the theory of evolution by natural selection has gained wide acceptance [among the intelligentsia]. Those Buddhists and others who believe in a soul for every organism have at least the advantage of consistency.<br />The Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church has generally been quite woolly in its response to evolution, while all the time insisting that its god, formally known as Yahweh, now called God, created everything. If you don't accept this, you're anathema. Now of course this doesn't necessarily pit the HRCAC against evolution, even though it's highly unlikely, and possibly impossible, that the Darwin-Wallace theory would ever have been developed by a Christian. The HRCAC can simply say that God created evolution, and let's see you prove otherwise.<br />Unfortunately for Christians, though, they have to have to believe what they believe through a set of sacred texts called the Bible, written by God apparently through various scribes.* We find there no hint of evolution or natural selection, not to mention fossils, dinosaurs, plate tectonics, other galaxies, black holes or anti-matter. What it does say is that God created humans in his image.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">*Why god chose this method, rather than just writing the stuff himself, is one of those mysteries that form the backbone of religion. After all, he wrote the ten commandments in his own hand, on two stone tablets, now lost to posterity, and I can't help but feel that to lose one such tablet was unfortunate, but to lose two was downright carelessness. To think how much the divine handwriting might've fetched at Sotheby's is surely to bring the spiritual and material world together in the most delightful way. </span>Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994304766961822770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17913545.post-13079490537093411222009-02-08T09:32:00.006+10:302009-02-12T12:47:10.817+10:30the problem of compatibilism 1<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.godtalkstoyou.com/God%20bless%20you.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 640px; height: 427px;" src="http://www.godtalkstoyou.com/God%20bless%20you.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 102, 0);">see him?<br /><br /></span></span></span><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-family:Nimbus Roman No9 L,serif;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Religious thinking is hard to encapsulate in a single simple definition, though we generally know it when we encounter it. Rather than trying to capture the whole of religion, from Australian Aboriginal Dreaming to ancestor worship in China or Africa, to the deistic hierarchies of the Vikings or the Greeks, I'll focus on the inter-related monotheistic religions we in 'the west' are most impacted by. These religions require belief in a creator god, and in some notion of the soul and another world.<br /><br /></span></span></span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-family:Nimbus Roman No9 L,serif;"><span style="font-size:100%;">The biblical god created humans in his own image [Genesis 1: 27, Genesis 5:1], but no such claim is made in the Koran, which seems rather to emphasise the otherness of god - <span style="font-style: italic;">there is no god but god </span>is chanted some 2700 times throughout the book, and more specifically, <span style="font-style: italic;">There is nothing comparable to him </span>[112:<span style="font-style: italic;"> </span>4] and <span style="font-style: italic;">vision cannot grasp him, but his grasp is all over vision </span>[6: 103]. Clearly, the biblical references help to cement a special relationship between humans and their god, very much like producing a 'chip off the old block'. We're all god's children, which is more than can be said for rats, bats and mosquitoes. Yet it's notable that despite this biblical assurance that our god is like us, this god is almost never depicted in Christian iconography [in fact there were intense arguments in the early centuries of Christianity on just this issue]. Many would have considered such depictions as blasphemous, as all Moslems did vis-a-vis their god [arguably the same god], but the real issue around whether or not to forbid images of god was that there must be a gap between human and god, and to depict would mean somehow to depict the gap, and how could this be done? The safest approach would simply be to forbid.<br /><br /></span></span></span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-family:Nimbus Roman No9 L,serif;"><span style="font-size:100%;">This gap is of course a major problem not only for iconographers, but for the compatibility of religion and science. It's the gap that must be crossed in a leap of faith. Nevertheless, in many people's understanding of their personal god, there isn't much of a gap; their god answers their prayers, soothes them, reassures them, watches over them and so forth, or so they claim. He also offers them a life after death, though again, as with the shifting nature of the Christian god, from raging biblical tyrant to omnipotent omniscient effulgence, the nature of the afterlife has shifted, as the literal concepts of heaven and hell have become a growing embarrassment to thinking believers. Not that such concepts were ever particularly fixed. Hell isn't mentioned in the Old Testament, but it was one of Jesus's favourite subjects - or perhaps rather a favourite subject of the 'gospel' authors. When it's described, it's usually in terms of fire, but also darkness, and everlastingness. The most fulsome descriptions are in Revelations, not surprisingly, but they aren't very fulsome either. The really imaginative work on the subject was done in later centuries, culminating in Dante's dazzling but idiosyncratic vision of nine circles, and the more populist representations of the mystery plays.</span></span></span></div></div> <style type="text/css"> <!-- @page { size: 8.5in 11in; margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } --> </style> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;" align="justify"> </p>Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994304766961822770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17913545.post-69459344332135596662009-02-05T22:58:00.004+10:302009-02-06T00:26:47.081+10:30Anita Bryant lives, but fades<div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://img.timeinc.net/time/time100/images/main_milk.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 376px; height: 250px;" src="http://img.timeinc.net/time/time100/images/main_milk.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="color: rgb(0, 102, 0);"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-size:85%;">The real Harvey milk</span><br /></span></span></div><br /><br />After watching the film <span style="font-style: italic;">Milk </span>recently<span style="font-style: italic;">, </span>an inspiring and tragic story which will hopefully reach a lot of young people and affect their thinking about the rights and treatment of homosexuals, I wondered about the arch-enemy of the tale, Anita Bryant, a former small-time singer driven, presumably by conscience, to campaign against the horrors of homosexuality. <br />The fact is that Bryant's campaign turned out to be a rather less than successful career move. Initial successes in the late sixties led to a galvanization and mobilization of the opposition. A campaign to boycott Florida orange juice, because Bryant featured in commercials for the drink, led to her losing the contract, and her singing career stalled because of the polarization of opinion around her. Later she came to regret the extremity of some of her anti-homosexual remarks, though one wonders if this was simply an acknowledgment of tactical errors, for in spite of her many setbacks, she still lends her name to churchy arguments against the so-called gay agenda.<br />It seems that, in spite of the noisiness of religious conservatives, especially during the Bush years, homosexuals continue to make more gains than losses, in spite of the passing of proposition eight, outlawing gay marriage, in California recently. Many of Bryant's legal victories have since been overturned, and I'm confident that as people learn more about the realities of human behaviour, and the dead hand of religion is gradually loosened, homosexual relations, of every formal and informal type imaginable, will be accepted and enjoyed as enriching the tapestry of social life.Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994304766961822770noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17913545.post-79546153476463663982009-02-05T22:09:00.004+10:302009-02-05T22:55:53.264+10:30the compatibility issue<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.jorivers.com/images/sci_vs.religion.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 460px; height: 336px;" src="http://www.jorivers.com/images/sci_vs.religion.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />Is science compatible with religion? It's a very popular question currently, not only directly but in an indirect way, with so many believers of an intellectual persuasion employing scientific techniques, or at least the language associated with them, to render their beliefs more persuasive to themselves and others. It's surely a great compliment to science that so many modern believers feel the need to invoke it in the interest of their beliefs - though it should be noted that this tendency hasn't spread to Islam to any significant degree. Though there are obviously only two possible answers to my initial question, there are two opposed perspective from which each of these two answers can be given. The two answers are of course yes and no, and the two perspectives are the religious and the scientific. From these we arrive at four possible positions:<br /><br />[1] religious compatibilism - this is the official position of most of the established Christian churches, though whether it is tenable is another matter. There's also the question of whether this compatibilism is sincere, or an alliance of convenience with an untamable adversary.<br />[2] religious incompatibilism - the least interesting position intellectually, but also by far the most popular, given that the vast majority of the human population know nothing or very little about science, and of that majority almost all of them are religious and take their religion very seriously.<br />[3] scientific compatibilism - a position taken by some scientists, who claim that science and religion operate in mutually exclusive spheres, so that they can do their stuff harmoniously, presumably by completely ignoring each other. [Most, and perhaps by definition all, religious scientists are compatibilists, due to the primacy of their religious beliefs].<br />[4] scientific incompatibilism - to my mind, the only coherent position.Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994304766961822770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17913545.post-16831924486182941372009-02-04T20:03:00.005+10:302009-02-04T22:50:46.694+10:30processing to irrelevance<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.newprophecy.net/Pope_Benedict_XVI_holds_a_cross.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 255px; height: 345px;" src="http://www.newprophecy.net/Pope_Benedict_XVI_holds_a_cross.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br />In normal circumstances, in decent, civilized society throughout the West, a person who expressed the view that the Harry Potter novels, with their incantations and magical games and mythical beasties, posed serious dangers to our kids, and that hurricane Katrina could well have been a god's retribution upon the residents of New Orleans for such iniquitous activities as homosexuality and prostitution - such a person would be politely shunned or perhaps referred to authorities as a suitable case for treatment. Certainly such claims would, and should, cast serious doubts on that person's fitness to hold any responsible political or community position.<br />However, <a href="http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2009/feb/09020207.html">the values of the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church</a> are not those of society at large. It doesn't bend to mere public opinion, because it believes its values are eternal, given to it by its god - who is our god too, even if we know nothing about the fellow. Besides, the claim about Katrina is quite plausible, as this god has committed such mass murders before when he has been displeased by members of his specially created species. Indeed he once murdered the whole species apart from one small family, apparently for disloyalty - something dictators rather relish doing, or would relish if only they had the supernatural powers of a deity.<br />So it's not surprising that a person who would be rightly reviled by most reflective secularists should be promoted within the Catholic Church. Yet there are some good signs to note here. The promoted ultra-conservative pastor is Austrian, and his appointment to a bishopric in Linz will undoubtedly turn ever more people away from a rigid, backward, bigoted church hierarchy. The Catholic Church is completely on the nose in Austria, apparently, and the numbers of its followers have dwindled dramatically. It can only be hoped that Herr Ratzinger continues on this track.<br />The Catholic Church hierarchy's response to Ms Rowling's massively popular magical adventure series is in fact highly diverting, offering light relief from consideration of its campaign of intimidation, repression, misinformation and outright murder in many African countries in recent years. There seems more than a touch of jealousy in their critique of the books' effects on the young innocent minds who flock to them. Take these remarks by none other than the Vatican's chief exorcist: <blockquote>"You start off with Harry Potter, who comes across as a likeable wizard, but you end up with the Devil. There is no doubt that the signature of the Prince of Darkness is clearly within these books."</blockquote>We may well laugh, both at the primitive manichaeism of these remarks, and at the title of chief exorcist, but we would do well to remember that this gentleman, Gabriele Amorth by name, is the inheritor of a long line of murderers, rapists and torturers doing their all for the glory of their god and church. It should never be forgotten that this church has never never willingly given up an inch of its power to destroy any rival superstition. It has been dragged kicking and screaming to its current state of relative impotence. It lives and breathes solely for a return to its old medieval powers.<br />Herr Ratzinger is very much at the centre of these dangerous puerilities. In a letter written before he was 'elevated' to the popehood, he wrote to a conservative critic:<br /><blockquote>It is good that you shed light and inform us on the Harry Potter matter, for these are subtle seductions that are barely noticeable and precisely because of that deeply affect (children) and corrupt the Christian faith in souls even before it (the Faith) could properly grow<br /></blockquote>I can only commend the Harry Potter author for corrupting the Christian faith by means of a fun rival, and I'd urge other authors of imagination and verve to continue the process. The human imagination, and especially the deliciously bottomless imagination of childhood, surely deserves much better than the murderous bigotry of Catholicism.Stewarthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08994304766961822770noreply@blogger.com0