Related to Why Noam Chomsky was “Not a Postmodernist”

 Brian Barbour:“This decline has gone hand-in-glove with the rise of, first, Theory, and then, slightly later, various types of politicized approaches that together define the way literature is studied in graduate school and taught to undergraduates. This “turn to Theory” has had ruinous consequences. Each of these approaches is anti-humanist (and proudly so) and none has any patience with the imaginative exploration of the individual moral life that great literature provides. This is not the place to rehearse the sad story of the displacement of a sense of wonder by a hermeneutics of suspicion, but at bottom all the regnant approaches graduate students are permitted are both ahistorical and broadly Cartesian (in that they start with ideas) and then either force the literature to fit the ideas or use the literature to exemplify some favored social pathology.”

https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2023/12/reaching-silence-brian-barbour.html

‘Spooky action at a distance’ may be an underlying mathematical reality enforcing its rules.

 On what Einstein called “spooky” (spukhaft) action at a distance:

I read an article(1) which, if I understood it, said it was just about mathematics. If x1 plus x2 = 0, then if x1 is1, then x2 would have to be -1. And vice versa.

If the relationship between two particles is that one must have positive spin and one must have negative spin, then changing one from positive spin to negative spin requires that the other particle have positive spin.

It’s not spukhaft “action”. No information has been transmitted. It is solely that the underlying mathematical order of the universe has been preserved.

This does suggest that the implicate order is prior to the observed order. What we call distance is an emergent effect of an underlying reality, not something having reality in it itself.

And since distance is a primary factor in the speed-of-light limitation, a greater understanding of reality’s underlying mathematical essence might eliminate the FTL barrier. - /* 2/17/2023 */

/* Addition 2/19/2023 */

(1) From https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/quantum-entanglement-isnt-all-that-spooky-after-all1/

Chris Ferrie: “Intuiting the solution requires some familiarity with linear algebra, so I won’t detail it here. But it is a fact that the quantum information they share requires correlations, which means it is entangled. This appears spooky to the investigators because they only reason with classical information. But it’s not spooky. In any theory of information, correlations are ubiquitous. Through the lens of quantum information, then, entanglement is not strange or rare, but rather expected. The information perspective beautifully illustrates the core problem with demanding a classical description of quantum phenomena: it’s the wrong language.”

Harper’s “A letter on justice and open debate” is criticized by some of the narrow-minded ideologues targeted

The Objective criticizes Harper’s “letter”:

1. Harper’s is “a prominent magazine that’s infamous.” “The signatories [include those who are] white, wealthy, and endowed with massive platforms … even as they speak from one of the most prestigious magazines in the country.”

2. “Nowhere in it do the signatories mention how marginalized voices have been silenced for generations in journalism, academia, and publishing.”

3. “The content of the letter also does not deal with the problem of power: who has it and who does not.”

4. The authors avoid “The ongoing debate about who gets to have a platform.”

5. “‘Professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class.’”  “Laurie Sheck, who said the N-word when referencing a James Baldwin piece in class.” The Objective implies she wasn’t punished, therefore this is a bogus issue. In fact, it was made an issue;(1) and though she wasn’t fired, many others have been fired on the same grounds.

6. “The heads of organizations are ousted for what are just clumsy mistakes?” John McWhorter cites many such instances in Woke Racism, for example, the person who strongly supports Black Lives Matter, but made the mistake of noting the universal liberal principle that all lives matter as well, in passing.

What’s wrong with this stuff? First, it’s an example of the people being rightly criticized objecting to their critics for not writing about their issues. It’s like criticizing an article objecting to high taxes for not writing about how the government needs to spend more. Wokeness is a current ideology - a set of dogmas which seeks to dictate what everyone else should believe and say and do. That’s not compatible with “open debate,” so they fault a critique for 1. having massive “platforms”; 2. not addressing marginalization; 3. not addressing “the problem of power”; 4. not addressing “who gets to have a platform”.

5. and 6. They dismiss the problem of Woke taboos’ hampering open debate.

I call ideology “the restriction of thought, language, and truth in the service of power.” Usually the power of a self-aggrandizing group or faction. As such, ideology is a mere belief system (“thank you for speaking ‘our’ truth”), and a much better option is an information system, such as liberalism throughout the ages.

/******/

(1)“The Idea That Whites Can’t Refer to the N-Word”

Linguist John McWhorter rightly names this: It’s a taboo. I cite his article because of Orwell’s warning about the deadly effects of taboos, below. “Even a single taboo can have an all-round crippling effect upon the mind.”

McWhorter: “Laurie Sheck is a professor of creative writing at the New School in New York, a decades-long veteran of the classroom, a widely published novelist and essayist, and a Pulitzer nominee. She’s also spent the summer in trouble with her bosses for possibly being a racist.”

“Early last spring semester, Sheck, who is white, was teaching a graduate seminar on [James] Baldwin, and one of the questions she posed for discussion was why the documentary title had substituted “Negro” for [the n-word.]”

“A white student in the class objected to Sheck’s having uttered the word. And administrators were apparently dissatisfied with Sheck’s attempt to defend herself, because the school put her under investigation, while directing her to reacquaint herself with the school’s rules about discrimination. This month the school determined that Sheck had committed no offense. But the fact that smart, busy people felt it necessary to investigate Sheck for mouthing the word when referring to it—not using it independently, much less directing it at someone—suggests a preoccupation less with matters of morality than with matters of taboo.”

Internet sources: The claims of trans activists have no basis in reality. You’d never know this from the news.

The below is one of my work files assembled from internet accusations of  “transphobia.” Notable:

1. Harry Potter author Rowling is being condemned, even in the mainstream media, as bigoted (“transphobic”) for the equivalent of saying she believes in evolution. It is not bigotry to support known science. Sullivan’s example is “A natal man who is a transwoman, for example, cannot have a vagina exactly as a natal woman does.”
2. The flaws of the discussion are the flaws of neo-Marxist left ideology. (“Ideology is the deformation of thought, language, and truth in the service of power.”) Ideology is a belief system. As such it is post-truth: “We cannot debate a subject because debating itself is a form of hate,” as Sullivan writes.
3. The “transphobia” ideology requires the citizen of a free democracy to be, as Sullivan says, “unequivocally on the side of anything the trans activists want.” In contrast, democracy provides that citizens be able to change bad policies. In order to do this, free people must be able to discuss what the trans activists want, and to disagree based on evidence and reason, without foregone conclusions of bigotry.
4. Sullivan bells the cat: “The mainstream media is, at this point, completely unreliable as a source of balance or information. They openly advocate the most extreme critical theory arguments about sex and gender as if they were uncontested facts and as if the debate can be explained entirely as a function of bigotry vs love.”
5. “Check out this video from the Washington Post. It doesn’t even gesture at fairness: no presentation of counter-argument; instant attribution of bigotry for anyone deemed in disagreement.” (See previous post on The Newsroom)
6. “That the author of the Harry Potter books, a bone fide liberal, a passionate feminist and a strong supporter of gay equality can be casually described, as Vox’s Zack Beauchamp did yesterday, as “one of the most visible anti-trans figures in our culture” … is, in fact, bonkers. Rowling has absolutely no issue with the existence, dignity and equality of transgender people.” - Again, Andrew Sullivan, one of the leading gay intellectuals of our society.
7. My working assumption: Democracy, justice, science, and scholarly endeavor are liberal. Sullivan suggests that trans activist rhetoric outlines a decline in scholarly endeavor: “…if we cannot state an objective fact without being deemed a bigot, and if we cannot debate a subject because debating itself is a form of hate, then…

   Then we have arrived at much of the academic world at present. The outlawing of objective facts is exactly why the woke are so partial to postmodernist jargon; and the outlawing of debate is precisely what they mean when using the term “hate speech”.

   We can lay all this at the feet of the academics who, a generation ago, allowed the growth of whole departments based on and spewing out the New Obscurantism. Ideas have consequences, but bullshit does too.”

Andrew Sullivan on J. K. Rowling & Transphobia From Weekly Dish / substack July. 24 2020

04/13/22 (corrections 04/16): “Sullivan, who is of course gay, has an eloquent defense of Rowling, and here’s some of it:

[Rowling] became interested in the question after a consultant, Maya Forsteter, lost a contract in the UK for believing and saying that sex is a biological reality. When Forsteter took her case to an employment tribunal, the judge ruled against her, arguing that such a view was a form of bigotry, in so far as it seemed to deny the gender of trans people (which, of course, it doesn’t). Rowling was perturbed by this. And I can see why: in order either to defend or oppose transgender rights, you need to be able to discuss what being transgender means. That will necessarily require an understanding of the human mind and body, the architectonic role of biology in the creation of two sexes, and the nature of the small minority whose genital and biological sex differs from the sex of their brain.

This is not an easy question. It requires some thinking through. And in a liberal democracy, we should be able to debate the subject freely and openly. I’ve done my best to do that in this column, and have come to many of the conclusions Rowling has. She does not question the existence of trans people, or the imperative to respect their dignity and equality as fully-formed human beings. She believes they should be protected from discrimination in every field, and given the same opportunities as anyone else. She would address any trans person as the gender they present, as would I. Of course. That those of us who hold these views are now deemed bigots is, quite simply, preposterous.

Where Rowling and I draw the line is saying that a trans woman is in every single respect indistinguishable from a natal woman. We believe that a natal man who is a transwoman, for example, cannot have a vagina exactly as a natal woman does. That’s all. And that is objectively true. Note also that this has no impact whatever on how someone should be treated by society or under the law. A transwoman can and should be treated exactly as a woman, even if she isn’t in every single respect a woman.”

/******/

Sullivan: “…if we cannot state an objective fact without being deemed a bigot, and if we cannot debate a subject because debating itself is a form of hate, then…”

Then we have arrived at much of the academic world at present. The outlawing of objective facts is exactly why the woke are so partial to postmodernist jargon; and the outlawing of debate is precisely what they mean when using the term “hate speech”.

We can lay all this at the feet of the academics who, a generation ago, allowed the growth of whole departments based on and spewing out the New Obscurantism. Ideas have consequences, but bullshit does too.”

“My favorite part of the kerfuffle is parents who insist that their children no longer enjoy the Harry Potter books because Rowling believes that the biology of sexual dimorphism is a real thing.”

“I just saw this tweet by Sullivan vis a vis Rowling and her thinking of trans controversy:

[https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1287015159907655681]”

Sullivan: “We’re used to public apologies by now, but this one is a little different. It comes from a magazine for schoolchildren in England, called “The Day”. It reads: 

“We accept that our article implied that … J K Rowling … had attacked and harmed trans people. The article was critical of JK Rowling personally and suggested that our readers should boycott her work and shame her into changing her behaviour … We did not intend to suggest that JK Rowling was transphobic or that she should be boycotted.”

“I have to say it’s good to see this apology in print. It remains simply amazing to me that the author of the Harry Potter books, a bone fide liberal, a passionate feminist and a strong supporter of gay equality can be casually described, as Vox’s Zack Beauchamp did yesterday, as “one of the most visible anti-trans figures in our culture.” It is, in fact, bonkers. Rowling has absolutely no issue with the existence, dignity and equality of transgender people. Her now infamous letter is elegant, calm, reasonable and open-hearted. Among other things, Rowling wrote: “I believe the majority of trans-identified people not only pose zero threat to others, but are vulnerable for all the reasons I’ve outlined. Trans people need and deserve protection.””

[https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/09/andrew-sullivan-when-the-ideologues-come-for-the-kids.html]

Sullivan: “She does not question the existence of trans people, or the imperative to respect their dignity and equality as fully-formed human beings. She believes they should be protected from discrimination in every field, and given the same opportunities as anyone else. She would address any trans person as the gender they present, as would I. Of course. That those of us who hold these views are now deemed bigots is, quite simply, preposterous. 

Where Rowling and I draw the line is saying that a trans woman is in every single respect indistinguishable from a natal woman. We believe that a natal man who is a transwoman, for example, cannot have a vagina exactly as a natal woman does. That’s all. And that is objectively true. Note also that this has no impact whatever on how someone should be treated by society or under the law. A transwoman can and should be treated exactly as a woman, even if she isn’t in every single respect a woman.”

Sullivan: “But if we cannot state an objective fact without being deemed a bigot, and if we cannot debate a subject because debating itself is a form of hate, we have all but abandoned any pretense of liberal democracy. And if a woman as sophisticated and eloquent and humane as J K Rowling is now deemed a foul bigot for having a different opinion, then the word bigotry has ceased to have any meaning at all.”

/******/

[https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/a-truce-proposal-in-the-trans-wars-c49] Not paywalled

“The mainstream media is, at this point, completely unreliable as a source of balance or information. They openly advocate the most extreme critical theory arguments about sex and gender as if they were uncontested facts and as if the debate can be explained entirely as a function of bigotry vs love.”

“If we were going to construct a test-case for how dysfunctional our politics have become, it would be hard to beat the transgender issue. It profoundly affects a relatively minuscule number of people in the grand scheme of things, and yet galvanizes countless more for culture war purposes. It has become a litmus test for social justice campaigners, who regard anyone proposing even the slightest qualifications on the question as indistinguishable from a Klan member. It has seized the attention of some of the most extreme elements among radical feminists, who in turn regard any smidgen of a compromise on the rights of women as a grotesque enforcement of patriarchy. 

Worse, it has now excited the Christianist right, who see the recognition of trans rights as an effort to destroy the sexual binary that is at the core of almost all orthodox faith. And it has become a Twitter phenomenon, where all reasonable arguments go to die. If you are an opinion writer, you really do have to be a masochist to even want to dabble in the debate. And the mainstream media is, at this point, completely unreliable as a source of balance or information. They openly advocate the most extreme critical theory arguments about sex and gender as if they were uncontested facts and as if the debate can be explained entirely as a function of bigotry vs love. (A recent exception to this, though tilted clearly from the start in one direction, is this explainer from the NYT last night.)

Big global stories — for example, a high court case in Britain that found that minors under 16 are not developmentally capable of making the decision to take puberty blockers — are routinely ignored. Check out this video from the Washington Post. It doesn’t even gesture at fairness: no presentation of counter-argument; instant attribution of bigotry for anyone deemed in disagreement.

And the issue has recently become, even more emotively, about children — how they are treated, how the medical world deals with them, amid complicated arguments about specific treatments, their long-term effects, and genuine scientific disputes. And all of this is taking place with far too few reliable, controlled studies on transgender individuals, as children and adults, or on medical interventions. A lot of the time, we’re flying blind.

I’ve been trying to think these things through for the past few years. I used to think trans rights were a no-brainer. Of course I supported them. And I still do. I believe trans people when they tell the stories of their lives; I empathize because I’m human, and the pain and struggle of so many trans people is so real; and perhaps also because being gay helps you see how a subjective feeling can be so deep as to be an integral part (but never the whole) of your identity. 

Equally, however, I have some reservations. I trust biology on the core binary sexual reproductive strategy of our species, without which we would not exist, and which does not cease to exist because of a few variations on the theme (I’m one of those variations myself). I do not believe that a trans woman or a trans man is in every way indistinguishable from a woman or a man. If there were no differences, trans women and trans men would not exist as a separate category. I do not buy the idea that biological sex is socially constructed, or a function of “white supremacist” thought, for Pete’s sake. I further believe that no-one should be excluded from this or any debate; and that “lived experience” cannot replace “objective reality”, …”

“The woke establishment — all major corporations, the federal government, the universities, all cultural institutions, the mainstream media and now the medical authorities — are unequivocally on the side of anything the trans activists want.”

The problem of the dishonest, anti intellectual intellectual

If democracy, justice, science, and scholarly endeavor are liberal then such intellectual-seeming constructs as Critical Race Theory, Whiteness Studies, Structuralism, Deconstruction, Postmodernism, Existentialism, Marxism, and Platonism are not, when examined by “the known rules of ancient liberty,” intellectual. They fail Immanuel Kant’s test, that the one indispensable intellectual attribute is “a good will,” because all the other intellectual attributes can be subverted to anti intellectual purposes.

The first volume of Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies states, some forty pages in, that Plato’s philosophy is essentially totalitarian, a position the modern university has answered by treating Popper as an outlier.

American thought, as evidenced in its Constitution, has such liberal intellectual sources as John Locke, David Hume, Montesquieu, Aristotle, William Blackstone’s Commentary on the Laws of England, and Abraham Lincoln’s Selected Speeches, but Critical Race Theory, Kendi’s Antiracism, and the New York Times’ 1619 Project tend to skip over the Founding principles and to base their critique on the fact that slavery, which as Lincoln noted, “already existed,” was not abolished until the Civil War.

Although Lincoln noted that the Constitution could not have been ratified if the initial version had abolished slavery, critics such as Ta-Nehisi Coates argue America’s origin in sin is what Princeton Professor Eddie Glaude calls its “ugly truth,” inescapably leading to what Coates calls “the certain sins of the future.”

Currently, such products of higher education in our democracy as Critical Race Theory, Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, and Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist, which pretend to advance the public good, have quite a different purpose: To document that white supremacist sinfulness is so pervasive and so monstrous that public policy must focus on improving the lot of those who denounce the country they live in. Never was Kant’s warning about the intellectual who does not have “a good will” more timely.

“How thoroughly campus cultural Marxism has come to be tolerated in mainstream society”

[From a July 2019 Facebook post] - I was once a fan of Ta-Nehisi Coates. He is a writer with phenomenal natural talents. Then he took a part-time teaching position at MIT, and he began saying things like, “Sometimes you do need the master’s tools to dismantle his house.” (As Doris Lessing wrote, “There is a Communist jargon recognizable after a single sentence.”)

Ta-Nehisi adopted a social-justice warrior stance which made him the idol of a surprisingly large number of progressive journalists, despite positions which were often rather strange, as you will see in the following instances.

Carlos Lozada, at the end of this post (“Radical Chic”), describes an adulation which made me realize how thoroughly campus cultural Marxism has come to be tolerated in mainstream society:

For instance, Ta-Nehisi said that the deaths of those who tried to save people on 911 left him “cold”:

“He writes of the police and firefighters who died running into the burning buildings [the twin towers on 911] in a forlorn effort to save all the people whose bodies were about to be obliterated into dust, “They were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could — with no justification — shatter my body.””

Ta-Nehisi would apparently let _all_ criminals out of prison:

“[Jeffrey] Goldberg asked what [Ta-Nehisi Coates] would do if he were in [Mitch] Landrieu’s position — surely there was something, “I don’t know what I’d do if I were mayor, but I could tell you what I’d do if I was king.” [Ta-Nehisi Coates would] let criminals out of prison, he said. “And, by the way, I include violent criminals in that.” Goldberg asked what he meant by “violent.” “Gun crime, too,” Coates said.”

He is unconcerned with the civil rights of any group but his own:

“Everywhere he goes, Coates hears versions of the same plea: What about my group? What about Native Americans? What about Latino immigrants? What about me?

“You get here and people say, ‘Why can’t you do that for our community?’ ” Coates says one morning at a Capitol Hill coffee shop. He calls the reaction “disrespectful” ... Disrespectful because he believes the experience of blacks in America deserves its own, focused examination.”

Ta-Nehisi said that reparations would end “white guilt.”

-*—

In The Radical Chic of Ta-Nehisi Coates, Carlos Lozada writes:

“In an America consumed by debates over racism, police violence and domestic terror, it is Coates to whom so many of us turn to affirm, challenge or, more often, to mold our views from the clay. Among public intellectuals in the U.S., writes media critic Jay Rosen, he’s the man now. When the Confederate battle flag on the statehouse grounds in Columbia, S.C., seemed the only thing the news media could discuss, my Washington Post colleague Ishaan Tharoor put it simply: Just shut up and read @tanehisicoates. These days, you hear many variations on that advice.

Coates is more than the writer whose thinking and focus best match the moment. With his 2014 Atlantic cover essay on The Case for Reparations, which explores the brutal U.S. history of redlining and housing discrimination, and now with the critical rapture surrounding his new book, Between the World and Me, he has become liberal America’s conscience on race. Did you read the latest Ta-Nehisi Coates piece? is shorthand for Have you absorbed and shared the latest and best and correct thinking on racism, white privilege, institutional violence and structural inequality? If you don’t have the time or inclination or experience to figure it out yourself, you outsource it to Ta-Nehisi Coates.”

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/book-party/wp/2015/07/16/the-radical-chic-of-ta-nehisi-coates/]

Matthew Yglesias on “Critical Race Theory and Actual Education”

 Matthew Yglesias, of slowboring dot com, quotes a bad educational idea associated with the antiliberal left.

“Valuing “written communication over other forms,” [Glenn Singleton] told me, is “a hallmark of whiteness,” which leads to the denigration of Black children in school. Another “hallmark” is “scientific, linear thinking. Cause and effect.””

/******/

1. Implying that something would be wrong with “blackness” would be racist. Singleton’s suggestion that “whiteness” is bad reveals a common double standard of those with his political outlook.

2. Opposing “written communication” is anti-intellectual.

3. The reason skyscrapers don’t fall down; and the wings didn’t break off your airliner during turbulence, is that those who designed them engaged in “linear thinking.” (Anyway, science is much more than linear thinking: It’s Discovery and Demonstration. Newton’s apple: Discovery. Newton’s phenomenal conceptual analysis, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica: Demonstration via linear thinking.) I was pissed off when the hippies whined about linear thinking, and am flat out offended that Singleton carries their stupidity into the 21st century.

A hallmark of those who, unlike Singleton, are not delusional, is that they get “cause and effect.”

/******/

Yglesias concludes: “If we stigmatize tests because they tell us bad news about racial gaps in academic achievement and then flood the zone with questionable initiatives whose efficacy we refuse to even try to measure, bad things are going to happen to the country.”

On growing up in a parsonage and coming to think that all the theologies seem to be stuck in the Bronze Age

Before modern democratic societies, rulership was the model of a head of state, and this influenced the concept of God:

“Truth stands independently of social opinion.” - Robert Pirsig

The person who realizes this will march to the sound of a different drummer.

In Matthew 19, Mark 10, and also in Luke, the rich young ruler appears, wanting to join Jesus’ movement: “And a certain ruler asked him, saying, Good Master, what shall I do … ?” The young ruler says he has kept the commandments: “All these I have kept from my youth up.”

“Now when Jesus heard these things, he said unto him, Yet lackest thou one thing: sell all that thou hast, and distribute unto the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, follow me. And when he heard this, he was very sorrowful: for he was very rich.”

This should be understood in context. This is not against wealth as such. But for the “very rich” man, more than keeping the commandments, more than assuring agreement with “the community,” was needed. He had to give up what mattered so much that it got in the way.

And he couldn’t. The man got personally tailored advice from Jesus of Nazareth himself, and rejected it, because he valued something else more.

/******/

Rulership was considered legitimate in the time of Jesus of Nazareth, but not in ours:

I’m a PK. Church twice on Sunday and once in the middle of the week. Wonderful KJV quotes pop up as I go about life.

Bill Gates lives in my area. Pursuing his interest in software development, he became a multimillionaire in his twenties. ”I have essentially infinite money,” he marveled.

In the first three, “synoptic,” gospels there is a man Protestants call the rich young ruler, a person of lands and estates and many servants. The rich young ruler shows up when he comes to barefoot Jesus of Nazareth and says he wants to join the movement.

But it struck me, Bill Gates, the equivalent in our society, would not be called a rich young ruler.

We don’t do that.

The mayor is not our ruler, the county executive is not our ruler, the governor is not our ruler, the president is not our ruler.

When the flying saucer lands, the creature inside doesn’t say, Take me to your ruler. It says, Take me to your leader.

Something became apparent that I’ve never seen written down: Rulership is illegitimate in our society. In a democracy, no one is subject to the will of another. We are governed, not ruled.

/******/

The founder of Christianity used “father” to refer to God in the way the scriptures he read did not, except in the Psalms:

Quoting from memory, “If an earthly father’s child asks for bread, will he give him a stone? How much more will your Heavenly Father reward you?”

I once asked a religious person why so many worshippers are attracted to the idea of a Jealous God, a God of Wrath. They answered that God is so great he gets to do whatever he wants to do.

But Jesus, above, implied that divine greatness required greater kindness. I, Preacher’s Kid that I am, hold that the Father God of Jesus, above, is kind, generous, loving, and good.

After all, a father is a parent, just as many of us are parents. We know that normally parents don’t want their children to worship them; so God, being ego-secure, does not want to be worshipped (although what he stands for should be worshipped). We know that when parents rule their children or impose their will on them they are using them; much less will God’s greatness, or his love, allow him to do this.

But, you say, Jealous God and God of Wrath are scriptural. So are the passages in early Leviticus which say how to treat women when they are unclean, or which say the Israelites may enslave Philistines but not each other. “Rightly dividing the word of truth” (Second Timothy 2:15) tells us that the scriptures were a work in progress: “Whatsoever things are true … honest … just … if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.” (Philippians 4:6-9)

The truest passages of scripture are those which celebrate lovingkindness. Which constitute the preamble to democratic society.

/******/

These out of date theologies lead worshippers astray:

At a national faith gathering, the last leader of this nation, following a prayer for love, kindness, and turning the other cheek, said he didn’t particularly go along with that. That was acceptable to many millions of people of faith who, under the Bronze Age theologies of rulership, do not remotely follow the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.

We live in a democracy which, as I understand it, grew out of Jesus of Nazareth’s teaching of love, cooperation, and altruism. The world cries out for the theologies to come into the age of Jesus’ Peaceable Kingdom.

The conservative justices’ incessant drive to radically enhance the court’s power

 Simon Lazarus, Robert Litan: As the first term of the Mitch McConnell–engineered 6–3 right-wing Supreme Court supermajority drew to a close last week, most liberal observers expressed qualified relief. With some exceptions—in particular, the last day’s evisceration of Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and simultaneous invalidation of California’s donor-disclosure mandate for charities operating in the state—the assessment was that the decisions were, overall, less “conservative” than had been anticipated. The Economist summarized the state of play by announcing (albeit before the last day’s bombshell decisions) that this is a 3–3–3 court now, with an emerging middle consensus centered around Chief Justice John Roberts. This take is oversimplified and much too rosy.

The problem is that these observers have focused on particular substantive issues at stake in the highest-profile cases: the Affordable Care Act was saved, 7–2; religious claims were held not to automatically or presumptively trump laws barring anti-LBGTQ discrimination, again, 7–2; the National Collegiate Athletic Association was subjected to surprisingly strict Sherman Act strictures against price-fixing, applicable to all other “industries,” this time unanimously. Indeed, such results were positive and should be welcomed. But there is an underlying agenda embedded in the fine print of some of the court’s hot-button cases, as well as, more often, in less noted decisions, that’s been overlooked.

What these critics have missed is the conservative justices’ incessant drive to radically enhance the court’s power—power in opposition to Congresses past, present, and future; as well as against the federal executive branch and state and local governments. This historic trend, steadily gaining momentum over the 16-year span of John Roberts’s tenure as chief justice, escalated sharply in several end-of-term decisions. In these, the court’s dominant bloc—which President Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general, Charles Fried, labeled “reactionaries,” not conservatives—asserted for this court power on a level and scale unprecedented in the nation’s history: power de jure as well as de facto.

“We All Live on Campus Now” when “liberal” journalists write of “Conservative Panic about Critical Race Theory”

The news is routinely treating critique of Critical Race Theory as partisan racist bias, oversimplifying free democratic discussion of doctrines which have major flaws. “Critical race theorists attack the very foundations of the liberal legal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism and neutral principles of constitutional law".” … “There is a difference between criticizing an unfair system and criticizing individuals who perform well inside that system.”(1)

Wikipedia contains substantive criticism of CRT as seen below. In addition, CRT fosters:

1. A society enviously suspicious of achievement, ability, and success, which it denounces as “privilege”
2. Criticism of “privilege” implicitly praises mediocrity
3. In a truly Orwellian phrase, insinuates that accomplished Asian Americans are tainted by “white adjacency”

Wikipedia - Academic criticism:

“Daniel A. Farber and Suzanna Sherry argue that critical race theory lacks supporting evidence, relies on an implausible belief that reality is socially constructed, rejects evidence in favor of storytelling, rejects truth and merit as expressions of political dominance, and rejects the rule of law.

Additionally, they posit that the anti-meritocratic tenets in critical race theory, critical feminism, and critical legal studies may unintentionally lead to antisemitic and anti-Asian implications. In particular, they suggest that the success of Jews and Asians within what critical race theorists argue is a structurally unfair system may lend itself to allegations of cheating, advantage-taking, or other such claims. A series of responses to Farber and Sherry was published in the Harvard Law Review. These responses argue that there is a difference between criticizing an unfair system and criticizing individuals who perform well inside that system. In the Boston College Law Review, Jeffrey Pyle argues that critical race theory undermines confidence in the rule of law, saying that "critical race theorists attack the very foundations of the liberal legal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism and neutral principles of constitutional law".”

Criticism by jurists:

“Judge Richard Posner of the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals argued in 1997 that critical race theory "turns its back on the Western tradition of rational inquiry, forswearing analysis for narrative", and that "by repudiating reasoned argumentation, [critical race theorists] reinforce stereotypes about the intellectual capacities of nonwhites." Former Judge Alex Kozinski, who served on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, criticized critical race theorists in 1997 for raising "insuperable barriers to mutual understanding" and thus eliminating opportunities for "meaningful dialogue".”

Other criticism:

“Political commentators including George Will see resonances between critical race theory's use of storytelling and insistence that race poses challenges to objective judgments in the U.S.” …

“We All Live on Campus Now” by Andrew Sullivan in New York Magazine

Conservative fear of CRT in Washington Post

/******/

(1) This doctrine’s jaundiced view of “individuals who perform well inside that system” tends to produce a society enviously suspicious of achievement, ability, and success. Its implied commitment to mediocrity accuses its own mainstream of “white privilege,” and in a truly Orwellian phrase, insinuates that accomplished Asian Americans are tainted by “white adjacency.” “May unintentionally lead to … anti-Asian implications.”

On publicly funded NPR, writer says it’s not enough to oppose racism. One is required to be an “antiracist” activist

On NPR, Eric Deggans wrote: “Opinion: Tom Hanks Is A Non-Racist. It's Time For Him To Be Anti-Racist.” - June 14, 2021

Opinion: publicly funded NPR should not be promoting antiliberal left ideology (or any ideology). Our founding documents wisely emphasized that in a free country busybodies like Deggans(1) don’t get to tell you what to do. All people are created equal, proclaims the Declaration, meaning that a politics of identity, in which some identities are better than others, does not comport with liberty; and one of the inalienable rights is “the pursuit of happiness,” meaning that no one can assign you a cause to support. If they could, you wouldn’t be a free citizen. You’d be living in a regimented society rather than a liberal society.

Science writer Neil deGrasse Tyson relates, in a podcast, that when he was young another talented African American said the needs of their community were such that black people couldn't afford to have him devoting his skills to science rather than the battle against racism. I don’t remember what Tyson said, but the aim of a society free of racism is that a young black person can choose whatever vocation they wish.

V. S. Naipaul on “Our Universal Civilization”

Excerpt: “A later realization—I suppose I have sensed it most of my life, but I have understood it philosophically only during the preparation of this talk—has been the beauty of the idea of the pursuit of happiness. Familiar words, easy to take for granted; easy to misconstrue. This idea of the pursuit of happiness is at the heart of the attractiveness of the civilization to so many outside it or on its periphery. I find it marvelous to contemplate to what an extent, after two centuries, and after the terrible history of the earlier part of this century, the idea has come to a kind of fruition. It is an elastic idea; it fits all men. It implies a certain kind of society, a certain kind of awakened spirit. I don’t imagine my father’s parents would have been able to understand the idea. So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement. It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known to exist; and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away.”

/*** Update June 18, 2021 ***/

Tim Graham on NewsBusters: NPR's Ritual Shaming of Tom Hanks: “On July 13, NPR television critic Eric Deggans penned a piece for their website titled “Tom Hanks Is A Non-Racist. It's Time For Him To Be Anti-Racist.” Deggans proclaimed that he liked Hanks and his work … but as a subhead warned, “He's built a career playing righteous white men.”

Deggans wrote “I know the toughest thing for some white Americans — especially those who consider themselves advocates against racism — is to admit how they were personally and specifically connected to the elevation of white culture over other cultures.” He complained Hanks has “built a sizable part of his career on stories about American white men ‘doing the right thing.’”

Somehow making movies like “Saving Private Ryan” and “Apollo 13” and “Forrest Gump” is aggressively defined as a malignant whiteness-elevating conspiracy: “Baby boomer filmmakers have made fortunes amplifying ideas of white American exceptionalism and heroism.” Now Hanks needs to make amends and be an “anti-racist” and acknowledge Hollywood’s responsibility “now lies with helping dismantle and broaden the ideas they helped cement in the American mind.””

/*****/

(1) Deggans wrote: “For those of us who speak often on these issues, one of the toughest things to do is to go to a white person who is trying hard to be an ally and tell them they need to do more. And I'm sure there are plenty of Hanks fans out there of every stripe who will say I am expecting too much, being ungrateful toward a big star who said more than he had to.

And understand: I'm not saying Hanks, Howard or Spielberg are racist. I'm not even saying that Hanks should have made or supported a film specifically about the Tulsa Race Massacre long before now (though I am astonished that a guy who has been making film and TV projects rooted in American history for at least 25 years didn't find out about Tulsa until 2020.)

But over this summer, in the wake of George Floyd's murder by a white police officer, I spent a lot of time investigating the difference between being non-racist and being anti-racist. Anti-racism implies action – looking around your universe and taking specific steps to dismantle systemic racism.

So I am saying it is time for folks like Hanks to be anti-racist.

What he (and Hollywood) should do next

If he really wants to make a difference, Hanks and other stars need to talk specifically about how their work has contributed to these problems and how they will change. They need to make specific commitments to changing the conversation in story subjects, casting and execution. That is the truly hard work of building change.

Rather than talk about what "historically based fiction entertainment" must do, why not talk about what Tom Hanks, longtime scripted and documentary executive producer, will do? As a star who can get a movie made just by agreeing to appear in it, what will Tom Hanks, movie star, actually do?

People often say columns such as the one by Hanks are published to start a conversation. Well, here is my suggestion: Let's make part of that conversation how baby boomer filmmakers have made fortunes amplifying ideas of white American exceptionalism and heroism.

And how their responsibility now lies with helping dismantle and broaden the ideas they helped cement in the American mind.”

This is what The 1619 Project denies and distorts

Akhil Reed Amar: “[The] constitutions that sprang to life in 1776 [had] certain overarching elements that are now so commonplace that we forget how truly revolutionary they were back then: writtenness, concision, replicability, rights declaration, democratic pedigree, republican structure, and amendability. Never before in history had this particular combination of features come together. After 1776, this cluster would sweep across the continent and, eventually, across much of the modern world.”

“The history of the world before 1776 was a history of “accident and force.” Most people in most places were ruled by brute power or by old customs that the populace had never formally consented to in any self-conscious moment of collective choice. Very few advanced societies in or before 1776 could be described as self-governing. The history of the world was a history of emperors, kings, princes, dukes, czars, sultans, mogul lords, tribal chieftains, and the like.”

The spirit of 1776 updated politics, despite the essentially Marxist spirit of The 1619 Project.

Tragically, Organized Religion has not been updated. It still reverts to sultan language Jesus transcended: God of Wrath, Jealous God, not compatible with Loving Father. In the KJV version of Matthew’s Gospel, the Lord’s Prayer ends, “For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever.”(1) Not only did Jesus never say that, it contradicts his teaching that God is kind, generous, loving and good. If Jesus had seen the “Christian” religion continuing the language of “emperors, kings, princes, dukes, czars, sultans, mogul lords, tribal chieftains, and the like,” he would have been as angry as he was at the money changers in the Temple.(2)

/******/

(1)The translators of the 1611 King James Bible assumed that a Greek manuscript they possessed was ancient and therefore adopted the phrase "For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever" into the Lord's Prayer of Matthew's Gospel. - Wikipedia

(2) “It is written, 'My house shall be called the house of prayer,' but ye have made it a den of thieves.” - Matthew 21:13

Why the “progressive,” “woke” left accuses the author of the Harry Potter series of “transphobia”

Andrew Sullivan in Questioning the roots of wokeness: “Questioning whether a trans woman is entirely interchangeable with a woman—or bringing up biology to distinguish between men and women—is not a mode of inquiry. It is itself a form of “transphobia”, of fear and loathing of an entire group of people and a desire to exterminate them. It’s an assault.”

The seven Harry Potter novels are one of the great examples of ethical literature in the early 21st century. When the leader of Harry’s world, the Minister of Magic, tries to recruit him to perform public relations for the Ministry of Magic, Harry’s moral instincts are quick and sure: “I don’t think that will work.” When Aberforth, the late Dumbledore’s brother, suggests using the Slytherin children as decoys and cannon fodder during Voldemort’s final assault, Harry firmly replies that it’s a bad idea “and your brother wouldn’t have done it.”

The present-day left’s dictatorship of virtue demonizes J. K. Rowling, the series’ author, for correctly noting that it is known science that “a trans woman is [not] entirely interchangeable with a woman.”

This century already has another great example of liberal ethical art: Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom. A previous blog post here, "Nothing is more important to a democracy than a well-informed electorate", received an unusual quantity of hits, probably because it contained extensive quotes from the series. For example, the description of the shibboleths of one of our major political parties, from ten years ago, could have been written yesterday:

“Rabid ideological purity

Compromise as weakness

A fundamentalist belief in scriptural literalism

Denying science

Unmoved by facts

Undeterred by new information

A hostile fear of progress

A demonization of education

A need to control women’s bodies

Severe xenophobia

Tribal mentality

Intolerance of dissent

A pathological hatred of the US government

[Newsroom Anchorman Will McAvoy:] They can call themselves the Tea Party. They can call themselves Conservatives. And they can even call themselves Republicans. Though Republicans certainly shouldn’t. But we should call them what they are: The American Taliban.”

 — The series is a passionate warning to (hopefully) “a well-informed electorate.” "The Newsroom" nailed the reactionary nature of the tea party in its discussion of  "The American Taliban." Its discussion of "America is the Greatest Nation" placed the meme in its rightful context: Manifest Destiny; and The White Man's Burden. "The Newsroom" gave two actresses outstanding roles. MacKenzie (Emily Mortimer) has an early scene in which she owned Will McAvoy. Sloan Sabbith (Olivia Munn) is the smartest person in the organization. 

Nevertheless progressive critics went with male dominance. There are far more criticisms, of conduct by male Republicans that is harmful to the public good, than of mean social standards in which women may play a part; but the fact that Sorkin dares to criticize, for example, soap opera gossip, is treated as proof of sexism. Charlie Skinner dares to say, "I'm too old to be governed by fear of dumb people," thereby showing insufficient respect for The Community. "The Newsroom" promoted Frank Capra/Don Quixote idealism; naive, sentimental public-spiritedness; thinking (and writing) fearlessly; the vital importance of truth and good information to a democracy; respect for dignity, privacy, and autonomy; and indifference to orthodoxy. It criticized gossip columns and TV shows dedicated to gossip; the associated glee for the "takedown" of prominent or successful public figures; news-as-entertainment; and mean, petty, uncivilized social practices — all things intolerable to a progressive wokescenti rendered livid when it encounters anyone who is free and refuses “to be governed by fear of dumb people.”

To the ascendant and increasingly dictatorial antiliberal progressive left, nothing is more infuriating than free, liberal artists who aren’t afraid of them. They have rejected J. K. Rowling and Aaron Sorkin, two of our best, because they are great, free, independent liberal moral voices.

Original Sin and Zero Sum Game are crucial political and cultural issues which the “news,” in its current form, simply will not address

 Original Sin is not compatible with democracy (rejects Presumption of Innocence), nor is Zero Sum Game (denies there is a universal Public Good). Jesus of Nazareth rejected Original Sin in The Parable of the Prodigal Son;(1) but Christianity, under the enormous influence of St. Paul and St. Augustine, uses Original Sin as the foundation of The Atonement on The Cross, mandatory doctrine from which Christianity seemingly cannot extricate itself.

Zero Sum Game is the harmful notion that whenever someone gets something, someone else loses something. “Cast your bread upon the waters,” and the parable of the Good Samaritan, suggest that “Love thy neighbor as thyself” was more acceptable to the Christian spirit, and to the public-spiritedness of democracy, than looking out for number one.

“Original Sin and Zero Sum Game are crucial political and cultural issues which the “news,” in its current form, simply will not address.” Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom” contains hints concerning this situation:

Nothing is more important to a democracy than a well-informed electorate

Why did "The Newsroom" offend progressives?

/***   ***/

(1) The Prodigal Son commits error, not sin. The error does not define who he is, but is only a temporary situation. Unlike Original Sin, which implies that man’s capacity for wrongdoing is greater than his capacity to correct wrongdoing (only divine intervention — the sacrifice on the cross — can atone for human sinfulness), the parable reverses much of Christian theology in four brief words.

“He came to himself.”

Any decent literary critic would know that art should not be didactic.

 Any decent literary critic would know that art should not be didactic. “This frenzy for censure, moralizing, and a seemingly endless expansion of the definition of harm.”

Otis Houston: “Literature used to be … a place to question taboos, and seek naked insights into humanity. …

Critics, writers and publishers are today enforcing a new vision that treats books less as a vehicle for artistic expression … a series of moral pronouncements. … sin of writing about marginalized characters without belonging to the same identity group. …

[They say] Jeanine Cummins, a white American woman with some Puerto Rican background, had no business writing about a culture and identity group to which she didn’t belong. … sensitivity to people writing about heritages that are not their own because, at its worst, this practice perpetuates the evils of colonization, stealing the stories of oppressed people for the profit of the dominant.”(5) …

The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen, who is chair of English at the University of Southern California, has pressed fellow authors to repurpose their writing into progressive advocacy.(6) The only respectable goal of contemporary literature, he suggested in a New York Times essay last December, is to bring change through “the kind of critical and political work that unsettles whiteness(1) and reveals the legacies of colonialism.” Poetry and fiction that fail to advance politics (specifically, his politics) descend from a legacy of whiteness, conquest and genocide, he said …

Publishers seek to protect themselves by employing “sensitivity readers,” who scour unpublished fiction for offensive themes, characterizations or language. … moral, rather than artistic, gatekeeping(3) …

Two thousand years before the advent of mass print publishing, Socrates was sentenced to drink poison for having polluted the minds of the YA community of Athens. From the mid-16th century until 1966, the Catholic Church maintained its Index Librorum Prohibitorum, a list of prohibited books. Over the past century, the establishment used anti-obscenity laws to ban Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. …

New, though, is the trend of policing books for social goodness from within the left-leaning literary community …

This new literary moralism isn’t only scrutinizing contemporary writing for evidence of sin; it’s looking to the past as well. #DisruptTexts, a group dedicated to helping teachers “challenge the traditional canon,” talks of “problematic depictions” in Shakespeare(4), and complains of The Great Gatsby being defined by the white male gaze(2). …

It diminishes the prospects of the reader too, restricting the scope of books to narrow conceptions of power and privilege. …

Art forces us to see with complexity. In return, we must accept that no easy solution awaits. Profound writing is never just an answer. …

This frenzy for censure, moralizing, and a seemingly endless expansion of the definition of harm …”

/***   ***/

[Reduces aesthetic writing to mere expository prose, “talking politics.”]

/***   ***/

(1) Liberalism holds that it is just as wrong to say there is something wrong with being white as saying there is something wrong with being black. It violates the principle of equality.

(2) Liberalism holds that it is just as wrong to say there is something wrong with being male as saying there is something wrong with being female. It violates the principle of equality.

(3) The purpose of art is to be good art. (Is that so hard?)

(4) Chairman emeritus of the Cal Lit Department Frederick C. Crews spoke of moral critics “perpetually scandalized by the past.”

(5) Isn’t our mainstream religion’s heavy reliance on the Tanakh, the Book of the Israelites, disrespectfully called the Old Testament by gentiles, “cultural appropriation” by this logic?

(6) Liberalism, in our very own Declaration of Independence, holds that one of The Rights of Man is “the pursuit of happiness.” In this context, it means that writers get to write about whatever they want to write about.

[www . persuasion . community/p/beware-of-books]

Homage to a good cop

From Alaska connections (I’m an eighth grade graduate of a one-room school in the Alaskan bush; and graduate of a high school in one of those small Alaska “cities” not reachable by car):

“Nick” on Sergeant Walters: “He was there when I was there in the late 70s and early 80s.  Great guy.  Probably why I still have a drivers license.  No DUI's  Just where do you want to go and you can pick up your keys at the cop shop at 9 tomorrow morning.  Great Guy!!!”

Fundamental problems with the thinking of Karl Marx

“Ability to speak about fictions is the most unique feature of Sapiens language.” - Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari.

Animals, Harari argues, can only talk about things you can point to. “No animal,” goes an old saying, “can say, ‘My parents were poor but honest.’” Animals are natural materialists.

1. Marx’s Dialectical Materialism is founded on his Labor Theory of Value. Only the physical things made by the hands of workers have value, and only the laboring proletariat should get the money in our society. (As a businessman remarked, this ignores management, distribution and marketing.) The bourgeoisie and their fictional capitalist corporations are robbing workers of the value produced by their hands.

On the one hand Marx is reactionary, his objection to “capital” (Das Kapital) a reversion to medieval prohibitions on “usury.” On the other, Marx is engaging in the fundamentalist oversimplification of valorizing the “materialism” of limiting thought to those things you can point to.

A digression: In 2012 I bought an iPad 3. It couldn’t perform the videophone function of FaceTime. Before long, a free software update from Apple enhanced the usefulness of my purchase. According to Marx, the hundreds I paid for my iPad should have gone to the workers at Foxconn who made it. In reality, which has an antiMarxist bias, without the thousands of hours of design, the iPad would just have been a paperweight. Ditto for the additional thousands of hours for iOS, the software (FaceTime, etc.) which enables Personal Electronic Devices to actually do things. Add software development and design to “management, distribution, and marketing.”

2. So, based on the fallacy of The Labor Theory of Value, what is the place of everybody else — the bourgeoisie, the middle class — in the Workers’ Paradise Marx envisioned?

There isn’t any. Marxism is eliminationist. Marx’s abstract theory, in real life, implies Ethnic Cleansing. In any case where someone not a laborer has the good things of life, it’s unjustified “privilege.”(1)

Moreover, political democracy is about all the people. Civil rights is about all the people.

Marxism’s unrelenting bias against everyone except the One Favored Class — its class warfare aspect — means that Marxism is essentially discriminatory in its very nature.

It is no accident that no Marxist regime has ever been democratic; or that Marxist regimes, with respect to civil rights, have consistently been autocratic. The late Soviet Union; North Korea; Maoist China, the DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republik).

Marx’s thought was in its very nature arbitrary and bigoted. In the founding of societies its emergent property was autocracy.

/***   ***/

(1) In my experience, no one will listen to criticism of “Check your privilege,” even though “privilege” arguments are concealed Marxism.

Epistle to the Christians

 First, a little background. When I was four my father began college on a pre-sem track. Seven years later he was ordained a Protestant minister and began his life career as a pastor. My comments on Christianity are from the status of a PK (Preacher’s Kid).

I’m a secular student and follower of Yeshua. Because he lived in the Hellenistic Near East of the first century, the world knows Yeshua by the koine Greek form of his name, Jesus. The Hellenistic town Sepphoris was less than an hour’s walk from Jesus’ boyhood home, Nazareth. Jesus grew up and lived out his life in the concept-rich environment of the Roman Empire. (I’ve already used a number of Graeco-Roman terms - comment, status, concept, Christianity.) His crucifixion was formally authorized by a colonial Roman overseer.

Jesus belonged to a third-world African culture and spoke a third-world language related to Arabic, but the entirety of the scriptural writings about him were in one of the languages of his European overlords, the koine Greek of the first century. For example, the word Christ was no more a word in Jesus’ language than Caudillo is in ours.

Jesus’ culture was no more likely to wonder if a person who had a mother and father, and siblings, was divine than ours is. His monotheistic religion, Judaism, had a built-in antipathy to adding another god, however that might be done. The Europeans did impute divinity - it was claimed that Emperor Caesar Augustus was divine, for example.

So Jesus’ alternative name, Christ, and the “Christian” doctrine of his divinity, came from the European overlords of Palestine who wrote his story and wrought Christian theology, creating an organized religion as Judaism, Islam, etc., have their organized religions.

/******/

My epistle to the Christians objects to organized Christianity, on the grounds that it is intellectually unsupportable; is reactionary in a world of democracy and civil rights; and is unChristian in major beliefs, particularly rejecting Yeshua’s teaching that God is kind, generous, loving, and good in favor of a jealous God, a God of wrath who is angry, punitive, and vindictive.

1. Christians’ intellectual problems begin with the oxymoron “literal interpretation,” failing to understand that their scripture is one of the longest, most complex texts in existence. Such a text can’t have a single literal transparent meaning. Jesus himself reinterpreted the fourth commandment, “Remember the Sabbath, to keep it holy,” saying “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”

One viable approach to the scriptures is that it is the felicitous outcome of a Semitic tribe, related to the Phoenicians who invented our alphabet, deciding to become the people of the book. They wrote down the best of their thought. Then, for centuries, public intellectuals they called prophets looked at where their predecessors had been - and raised the consciousness of their culture. “Write the vision clearly upon the tablets, so that it may be read readily”, wrote Habakkuk. “The vision will come - Wait for it, it will not be late.”

2. There is no democracy, no leaders chosen by the people and responsible to them, in the Tanakh, the Israelite scriptures Christians call the Old Testament. Much of it presents God in the autocratic terms of the kings, shahs, rajahs and emperors of the time, demanding fear, unquestioning obedience, and fawning worship of sinful human beings. Sometimes sin is presented as a violation of the rights of God.

Christian theology presents humans’ capacity for sin as exceeding humans’ capacity to make amends. That theology portrays us as inheriting the original sin of Adam, and as such, born guilty.(1) Under this outlook, salvation is an unreturnable favor, coming from God, and putting humankind permanently in the one-down position relative to him.

This is unhealthy; and the founder of “Christianity” disagreed with it in the parable of the prodigal son. Raised on the estate of his wealthy father, this son obtains his inheritance in cash, goes to a city, and blows it all on an extravagant lifestyle, becoming a beggar. Then, Jesus said, “He came to himself.” He returns to his father’s estate, hoping that there he will be better than a beggar, and to his surprise, his father welcomes him with open arms and prepares a feast.

Frankly, this upends Christian doctrine. There is no sin, but rather correctable error. The son, representing fallible humankind, does correct the error by his own action, able to recognize his mistake, and change the course of his life. In doctrine, there would be “salvation” — sin, rescue by a Power to whom one would be in debt, and at best forgiveness. Interestingly here the father, representing God, is focused on the joyful future with his returned son, not the past, thus does not need to forgive. No sin; no salvation; no lingering taint implying ongoing subservience.

3. Doctrine is “unChristian”: Rejects the founder of Christianity’s” teaching that God is kind, generous, loving, and good, and other important teachings.

I once asked a Christian teacher why God is often portrayed as dominating, demanding, punishing those who disobey him in fearsome ways. They said, “God is so great that he gets to do whatever he wants to do.” Again, Jesus of Nazareth disagreed, saying, “Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, … know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!”

God’s greatness, it is implied, requires him to be better than we are.

It seems to me that organized Christianity has never bothered to explore the implication of their term, God the father who is even better than earthly fathers. In this context, language should change: “Lord” is inappropriate, and “every knee should bow,” and even “worship,” if applied to the creator rather than the creation. On the other hand “Jesus wept,” which according to theology would betoken an incidence of a Weeping God, is well worth pondering. At my grandson’s christening a priest cited a Concerned God passage from Ezekiel, which I paraphrase from memory: You say that I am unfair. But I am not pleased by the death of him that dieth. Wherefore turn ye from the way of death to the way of life, that ye may live life alive.

I understand, from the example of the prodigal son, that Jesus had progressed beyond the doctrine of original sin, but the Greek Paul and the Roman St. Augustine bore false witness to his teaching on this matter.

/******/

Other matters — I found the Jesus Seminar persuasive on a number of matters: Jesus did not predict his death and resurrection; he did not utter the “I am” statements in the Gospel of John; Jesus’ family and disciples knew him to be a perfectly ordinary human being.

In Mysteries of the Middle Ages: The Rise of Feminism, Science, and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe - The one-time theologian Thomas Cahill writes: “Though the idea that Christ died to repay his Father for human sin is still a favorite theory of many (especially evangelical) Christians, it is a doctrine that no one can make logical sense of, … it necessitates a sort of voraciously pagan Father God steeped in cruelty and, in the case of Jesus’s horrific death, his son’s blood.” p. 199

/******/

(1) In Romans 5:12 the Greek St. Paul wrote, according to the Geneva Study Bible: “Wherefore, as by one man [Adam] sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned: From Adam, in whom all have sinned, both guiltiness and death (which is the punishment of the guiltiness) came upon all.”

Liberalism, underlying theme of modern civilization, misunderstood and widely under attack at the moment

The previous post described the American Founding as a liberal event. A working hypothesis: Democracy, justice, science, and scholarly endeavor, are liberal. While the left and the right are ideologies, belief systems, the catechisms of vested interest political parties, liberalism is an information system, dedicated to getting things done. Ideology is the deformation of thought and language in the service of power; liberalism is the methodology of the good life: its keyword is efficacy, not power.

The ancient foundations of liberalism are the Roman concept of universal justice, the Greek concept of an independent nature, and Jesus of Nazareth’s teachings of cooperation, altruism, care for the neighbor, and passion for optimum outcomes. The spirit of liberalism slowly grew throughout the Middle Ages; its emergent first step the Renaissance; and got a second wind with the scientific revolution, producing the Enlightenment and its world-changing manifestos, the Declaration and Constitution.

Corollaries: The irony that one of the political parties emerging from the enlightenment liberalism of the Founding uses “liberal” as a derogatory epithet. The irony that the media describe the antiliberal left as extreme liberalism. The irony that the academic humanities do not reflect the liberalism of scholarly endeavor, but embrace anti intellectual ideological dogma, such as the unconstitutional content-based censorship of “no-platforming.”

The proposed Great Synthesis, Democracy, justice, science, and scholarly endeavor, are liberal, leads us to consider whether what applies to one, such as scholarly endeavor, may apply to others. Examine Immanuel Kant’s observation that the one indispensable intellectual property is “a good will,” since all the other intellectual attributes may be subverted to unintellectual ends. Where there is not a good will: A small-d democrat who is not public-spirited; a justice who uses the courts to thwart government by consent of the governed by furthering voting restrictions; a scientist who, instead of honoring feedback from reality, tries to fudge the data; an academic who, instead of fighting to create a space for passionate discussion among informed people who disagree, dictates that only that which is true shall be given a platform in the university.

Liberalism is not partisan, not political; it is the practical, neutral, methodology of the good life, the bedrock of modern civilization. The current mischaracterization and widespread attack could undermine that civilization in ways few of us would want.

The difference between liberalism and left-progressivism, updated

 

Part I:

Since “liberal” and “left” are often treated as synonymous, Historian Fritz Stern’s discussion may be useful:

Fritz Stern was born in Breslau, Germany in 1926, and moved with his family to the United States in 1938 in response to the rising anti-semitism of the Third Reich and became an American historian.

From Fritz Stern Op-Ed New York Times September 4, 1988 (in response to Ronald Reagan's derogatory use of ‘liberal’):

Liberalism—one of “America's noblest traditions,” I insisted, often defined as a state of mind—had “transformed the world . . . 

[I]ts greatest victory has been the American Revolution; its greatest pronouncement, the Declaration of Independence; its greatest bulwark, the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights.” 

It had “stood for freedom against tyranny. At its best … a force for change and progress, seeking the institutional defense of decency.” ... In America's liberal premises the world had seen “the best promise of the West.” - This from Stern’s Five Germanys I Have Known

Stern is saying that the Founding was a liberal event. Liberalism is the raison d’etre of the United States. It’s in our DNA. Enlightenment liberalism proclaimed the Rights of Man — immunities which no government can abrogate. Liberalism declared that all are created equal, which over time finally rendered slavery unthinkable, something no society prior to liberal modernity had done.

Part II:

How my own life history taught me that “liberal” and “left” are not alike:

I went to high school during the second Eisenhower administration, and to college during the first Kennedy administration. I thought of myself as liberal/left, and at that time the public understanding of these terms was not as divided as it is now.

By the time I reached middle age, I realized that the left was telling me that white was bad, male was bad, European was bad; and I began searching for a political philosophy that did not require me to hate myself.

I learned that liberalism, unlike the outlook of the left, does not care about identity. If, as the Declaration proclaimed, all are created equal, immutable characteristics that we are born with and can’t change don’t matter.

Can there be anything more unjust than considering a newborn baby guilty because of its race and gender?

There’s much more to be said about this, but if it is understood that any analysis which conflates “liberal” and “left” is necessarily intellectually incoherent, that’s a good start.

https://adissentersnotes.blogspot.com/2018/10/on-difference-between-liberalism-and.html