Trapped Between Two Ideals

The religions I see around me all talk of people as if they are scum. We are all sinners. We are unworthy. We are saved by God’s grace, not by becoming a good person, or achieving a stage of enlightenment. Speaking for myself I have never sinned. I have no reason to seek salvation as I am not condemned, except by the ignorant or those seeking political advantage over me.

There seems to be little middle ground in this discussion. On one side we have statements such as:
“What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an Angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals!”
Prince Hamlet (via a Mr. W. Shakespeare)

And on the other we have:
“I am, after all, only human”
Everyone

Admittedly, Prince Hamlet’s outburst is stated with no little irony, but there are oodles of comments of how humans are “the peak achievement of evolution,” “made in God’s image,” etc., etc. Likewise the “what can you expect from me?” comments abound also.

Interestingly, religions encourage both of these extreme viewpoints.

Both viewpoints, I hope you believe, are deeply flawed, playing upon common emotions and observations. We are amazed at the things infants can do; we sometimes amaze ourselves. We see professional athletes and scientists and artists do things that are so far beyond our abilities that we must believe that we have some sort of divine spark in them and therefore, us.

We also see incredibly stupid things done by humans having temporarily, we hope temporarily, been bereft of their senses. There seems to be a cottage industry on cable TV providing video clips of these astoundingly stupid things, for us to marvel and laugh at, and despair of.

But the vast majority of people I meet are just people, people who have skills and flaws, and are mostly just trying to get through life with some grace. When a religion comes around addressing us as we really are and encouraging “the better angels of our nature,” I will consider it.

 

 

 

I Am Completely Gobsmacked (An Easter Special!)

I do not understand why the major Churches are not protesting the Finding Jesus series on CNN. The only reasons I could come up with is they do not know it exists or they are corrupt to their core. I can’t imagine they believe the things being said on that show.

In the latest episode of this travesty of a series we are treated to the story of Lazarus. This is described as “the ultimate miracle of Jesus’ mission” by one of the usual talking heads. There are relics in the episode, of course, to submit to testing. In this case, we are told that a church in Cyprus has in its possession some of the very bones of said Lazarus. To utilize the “latest scientific techniques” these relics are to be tested. Since you, by now, know that the pattern of this show is to use any scientific results as a tease to keep you watching, they do not announce the results until minute 58 of the one-hour show. The test was a C-14 determination of the age of some wooden shards that were found in the sarcophagus along with what they believe are Lazarus’s bones. The relics, of course, were not made available for testing. We are told that the wood, shown being handled by naked skin over and over (an absolute no-no for things to be dated by C-14 as this will add modern carbon to the sample), is juniper wood, native to Cyprus and known to be used for coffins and the like. So, blah, blah, blah, tease, tease, tease and the date? The wood was harvested in the last 200-300 years, so it is “modern.”

Jesus was a stud, don’t you know. Lazarus was, too. They were best bros!

Every episode I have seen so far has a similar pattern. And if you compare this pattern with how scientists communicate, you will find a complete contrast. First of all a scientist will not report negative findings, unless it is part of a larger investigation. First they will tell you what their findings were, they will tell you how they obtained them (in enough detail you could verify their work), and then they would go on to discussing what they might mean once everyone is in possession of the facts. In this series, the discussion takes place ad nauseum and the facts are dropped in when you aren’t paying attention, usually at the very end.

So, where to start? The revivification of Lazarus is “the ultimate miracle of Jesus’ mission”? Well, that is interesting because there was no mention of it in the Gospel of Mark. No mention in it in the Gospel of Matthew. No mention of it in the Gospel of Luke. Only in the Gospel of John are we treated to this powerful story. (To their credit, they mention this.) The Gospel of John is put anywhere from roughly 100 CE to 125 CE by most scholars. This puts it almost 100 years after the events being described and at least 25-50 years after Mark was in circulation and 10-35 years after Matthew and Luke. Some argue John came first; others much later; I don’t want to get into that. While there is a great deal in common between the other three gospels (some of it because of direct copying) there is little in John that is common with the other three. This is explained away by many as “The Johannine narrative is indebted to oral and possibly written traditions that were transmitted from earlier decades.” The person who wrote that sentence had no idea, he was only speculating, wishfully speculating at that.

So, resurrecting Lazarus was “the ultimate miracle of Jesus’ mission” but failed to even be mentioned until two to three generations have passed from this most impactful of events. One wonders how such a story survives in the oral tradition and is neglected by the written tradition.

Please also consider that there are three pillars of Christianity: one is the scriptures, the other is prophecies, and the third is the miracles. It is said that were any of these three to fail, the whole edifice would crumble. So, this is a big fucking deal. But was the Lazarus miracle all made up? Was it a forgery? Good question. Don’t look at this for answers.

Throughout this debacle of a TV show, the talking heads make the most astounding claims and statements. When Jesus is told that Lazarus, his “best friend” according to the story (they basically declared them to be He-bros.), Jesus dawdles and doesn’t come running. The talking heads ask “Why was Jesus delaying?” “Was it hesitation …?” Hello? All of the Christian religions believe that Jesus was God (and declared it a heresy that he received the holy spirit when he was baptized so he has been god for a long time). many claim Jesus was 100% man and 1005 god. If he was God, would he not know all that had happened and what would happen? One of the talking heads jumps in and offers “I think Jesus had mixed emotions. He seems to be waiting for word from on high.” From “on high”? From himself? My incredulous meter just cracked. No one seemed to mention the obvious: Jesus can’t do a big resurrection miracle if somebody isn’t dead.

So, as the story goes, Jesus finally winds his way to Lazarus’s place and is confronted by Lazarus’s sisters Mary and Martha. Jesus takes center stage and tells Martha the now famous speech “ I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live even though they died and whoever lives by believing in me will never die.” The talking heads gush about what all this means! I would like to point out that this show is, in part, about Lazarus’s bones. You see … he lived and then died and then he lived … and then he died for good. And according to John, nobody loved Lazarus more than Jesus. So, if that is how he treats his friends …

In the re-enactment Jesus cries when he approaches the tomb of Lazarus. And then … and then … the Announcer, using his best “voice of god voice” says “ Jesus has shown his humanity, now he will show his divinity.” WTF? Where in scripture does it say that? This is stated as a fact, pure and simple! The re-enactors then re-animate Lazarus, but that was a fairly easy task as they did not kill the actor playing Lazarus.

And they are not done. After Jesus raises Lazarus, the announcer or one of the talking heads says that this action “would identify Jesus as the Messiah.” Nowhere in Jewish scripture is the Messiah identified as a miracle worker; the messiah is a military man, a political leader, a deliverer of the people from oppression by outsiders. This is why the Roman occupation produced so many messiahs. They were needed for the Israelites to be saved from the Romans. To prove that Jesus was the messiah, all he had to do is point his finger to the sky and curse all of the Roman soldiers living in that region and have them fall dead. Those are the credentials that will convince every Jew that Jesus was the Messiah. (If you are nor a fan of death and destruction and would want Jesus to earn his title as the Prince of Peace, he could cause all of them to lose their memories, to forget they were Roman soldiers. That would do the trick.) Get caught and being executed as a petty criminal is not how one establishes oneself as a messiah.

Of course, they have to whip through the rest of the Jesus story in short order to complete the context for the Lazarus story. And in doing that they make the statement “Jesus is betrayed by Judas …” Hello? Jesus wasn’t betrayed by Judas, Judas was proving himself to be at least Jesus’ second best friend (after Lazarus, I am sure now). If Jesus isn’t taken by the Romans and crucified so he can be resurrected, there is no Christianity. (Can you imagine Jesus wheezing his last breath as an old man say “But I am the Son of God, I tell you …”?) Judas is doing this task at the behest of Jesus, knowing he will incur the wrath of the ignorant fisher-folk who are the core of Jesus’ followers.

Of course, there is no such thing as an ultimate absurdity in these shows. We are treated to a talking head who says “I think it is wrong to only find value in a story if we can trace it back to some historical events … this story (of Lazarus) tells us about the willingness to lay down your life for a friend.” WTF? My incredulous meter just healed itself and then cracked even worse. Since it is a good story, nothing else matters? What? <sputter, sputter> … not when you are using that story as evidence for the existence of your god; it is not good enough and never will be. Plus who laid down his life for a friend? I wonder if she read the story?

Why, oh, why is this word hash of a Christian abomination not being protested by the major churches? Blasphemy right and left. Idiocy right and left. Over and over these people make the mistake historians are taught never to make: the introduction of present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions or interpretations of the past (presentism). They are taking conclusions from far after the period and applying them to first century Judea and Israel. At this point, stoning, which I suggested in my last post, is too good for these people. They need to be condemned to some vile and hideous torture. Maybe being forced to get all of their news through Fox, something awful like that.

The series is “Finding Jesus,” the subtitle is “Faith, Fact, Forgery” but they never seem to use the word forgery.

Inquiring Theists Want to Know!

Theist apologists are always coming up with questions for atheists, kind of like the questions Catholic kids come up with for their Catechism teachers, e.g. “If God is all-powerful can he create a rock so big even he can’t lift it, Father?” Here is one of the latest:

“Without a personal Creator-God, how are you anything other than the coincidental, purposeless miscarriage of nature, spinning round and round on a lonely planet in the blackness of space for just a little while before you and all memory of your futile, pointless, meaningless life finally blinks out forever in the endless darkness?”

Gosh, as an announced atheist, this makes me want to go slit my wrists, but I am laughing too hard to undertake that task with any skill, so I will just tackle this question first.

Underneath all of the snark embedded in this “question,” is a feeling of superior knowledge, that the questioner knows that without his creator god, life is just futile. (None of the other creator gods will do, don’t you know.)

So, “a coincidental, purposeless miscarriage of nature,” hmm. Well, I can’t be a miscarriage because I actually was born, but coincidental, I’ll own up to that. My parent’s believed in planning their family and I was the third of the two children they planned, so, coincidental I am.

Now, “spinning round and round on a lonely planet in the blackness of space.” I can detect no spinning. There is a gym nearby that offers spinning but I do not subscribe for that. The planet is “lonely,” that I do not get. The solar system has eight major planets, some minor planets, and myriad moons, etc. This guy makes it sound like there is the Sun and the Earth and little else. He must be reading his Bible. Maybe he means that I am lonely. Well, if I am, then I am very picky regarding having friends with over seven billion other humans to chose from, plus myriad other non-human companions I could entice to come live with me (for free room and board). No, I am not lonely; he got that wrong.

“In the blackness of space?” We seem to be quite well adapted to the light-dark cycles on our planet. The Scandehoovians who experience almost no “dark” during the winter go a little batty behind that, so “dark” is apparently a good thing for us. I like looking up at the dark sky and seeing all of the pretty lights, so not really dark at all, so he got this wrong, too.

But, yes, in a little while (littler all of the time) I shall die and kinda-sorta be forgotten. I still remember my parents and grandparents and other deceased relatives, so I expect to remain in memory of my younger relatives for some time. I am named in a family genealogy that goes back to the 1700’s and am recorded in a number of diverse histories, so will be “remembered” that way to some extent, and I have written close to a dozen books, which will remain available for a very long time, possibly many decades, but really I will not give a shit as I will be dead.

I have to ask, are all of those people supposedly in Heaven and Hell enjoying their immortality? Are they “remembered” by the living? Is not everyone remembered by your God who cannot forget anything (otherwise He would not be all-knowing), so is not everyone, in your world view, remembered forever and ever? Very puzzling attitude then for for you, a believer, to have.

And “your futile, pointless, meaningless life finally blinks out forever in the endless darkness.” I am looking forward to the endless blackness, far preferable to the Lake of Fire you promise my kind. But where do you get “futile,” and “pointless,” and “meaningless” from? Are you saying that because you are a Christian, your life is automatically not futile, not pointless, and not meaningless? If so, you are going to have to provide some details. What is your purpose in life? If it is to end up in Heaven at the side of your God, isn’t that a little self-serving? It sounds a lot like “I am going to get mine and the rest of you can go roast in Hell.” Many of your ilk tell us that good deeds will not get us into Heaven, but faith will, so you exalt people who do not do good deeds by have faith over people who lack faith, like me, who do good deeds. Sounds a lot like “I am going to get mine and the rest of you can go roast in Hell.” It also sounds as if you believe that your God has a plan for you. (He believes in family planning, unlike our current GOP.) Can you tell me what your plan is so I can see whether or not you are meeting your quarterly goals? No? Another thing I just have to take on faith, I guess.

And, last, regarding “meaning” as applied to one’s life. Meaning is something that is created in the hearts, minds, and words of others. You can read about the meaning of people’s lives in Wikipedia, for example. These meanings are divined, if you will allow the use of that word, from others observing our deeds. So, one creates the meaning of one’s life by doing. I can live with that.

And, I can die with that.

 

A Class Warfare Blog Public Service: A Review of “Finding Jesus: The Bones of St. Peter”

I have just completed a review of Finding Jesus: The Childhood Home of Jesus, finding it puzzling and rather self-defeating. But a couple of nights ago, I was bored in the extreme and another episode of Finding Jesus showed up on the TV schedule. Well, “in for a penny, in for a pound,” I thought, “why not?”

You may recall that this CNN series has the following description: Finding Jesus discovers fascinating new insights into the historical Jesus, utilizing the latest scientific techniques and archaeological research. Finding any meaningful research in this series will be a miracle, I am afraid.

In this episode we are treated to one half of an hour of talking heads reciting the story of Peter from the Christian Gospels, there being virtually no other records of the man. Peter is not spoken of as a literary character but as a real person through all of this and since talking heads can be rather dull, they had actors re-enact parts of the story for the talking heads to talk over. (The parts of scripture were selected from here and there as there are myriad conflicts in this story, but I am setting that aside for the moment.) We are told that Peter was a large man, a strong man … because? Well, “he was a fisherman and fishermen have to be strong.” Well there is a good story line, might as well use it. The fact that the boats were small and one could not be quite large and still move around in a small boat, thus favoring small, strong men as fishermen seemed to escape the gentleman with the, uh, opinion. The average Israelite was about 5´4˝ tall. More than likely fisherfolk were about the same.

Peter also had long straight hair, and Anglo features, including blue eyes. Gosh, Jesus looked Anglo, too. Nobody looked particularly Palestinian in the enactments, instead they looked like Anglos in drag. At least Jesus wasn’t a blond (he was a hunk, though, just sayin’). The commentary focused on how Peter and Jesus were best buds, bros even. They claimed that Jesus gave Peter his new name (Simon being his old one) because he would be the rock upon which Jesus would build his church. I suspect the nickname Petros was more likely given because Peter was hard headed and obtuse, failing to understand Jesus’  teachings over and over. Plus the “foundation of his church” comment was the only such utterance or action taken that had anything to do with founding a church or new religion, which leads me to believe it was an interpolation of the author of that gospel and not anything planned by Jesus. Why Jesus would want to build a church is puzzling since he saw the coming of the new age in just a few short years and stated this over and over.

Jesus (above) was a stud, don’t you know. Peter, uh, not so much … but he did have blue eyes!

Anyway, we are treated to the “traditional” Peter stories for half an hour, peaking in the joy of Peter meeting Jesus after resurrection. They emphasized once again, the betrayal of Judas and Peter’s denial of Jesus … three times(!) … as if they were important actions. Hello? If Judas doesn’t lead the police to Jesus, how does he get arrested, executed, and resurrected? If Peter leads an armed resistance to Jesus’ arrest and is successful, no resurrection and no Christianity. If Peter says “Yes, I was Jesus’ chief acolyte,” he gets rounded up along with Jesus and ends up on a cross, too. Judas had to be Jesus’ best bud, because who else but your best friend would help you commit suicide?

They end up with the absurdity of Peter’s final execution insisting he be crucified upside down because he wasn’t worthy of dying as his master had. WTF? Being suspended upside down in such a brutal way would lead to a quick death, certainly one would be unconscious in short order. Crucifixion is designed as an extended tortuous death. Why would the Romans do Peter this favor and shorten his agony? Why would the Romans do anything Peter asked? It doesn’t end there, apparently, because according to Catholic tradition, Peter’s body was taken down from the cross by “Christians” and buried on the site over which St. Peter’s Basilica was eventually erected. Crucifixion victims were largely left to rot on their crosses, as a deterrent to other criminals. Why the Romans would allow the body to be taken down and buried is puzzling, but what the heck, they did it for Jesus, too.

Well, so much for the first half an hour. In the second half hour, we are treated to a parody of an archaeological

expedition into the catacombs under St. Peter’s Basilica. We are told stories about the finding of the bones of St. Peter! In the first serious episode, we are told of an archaeologist who finds a graffito stating that St. Peter’s bones are within some chamber and lo and behold, bones are found. Upon examination, they seem to be a mixture of the bones of two men, a women, and some animals. Oh, well.

But then another set of bones is found by Vatican sleuths and we are told that these are the real bones of Peter, no further investigations are needed. Hey, if we can’t trust the Vatican to tell the truth, who can we?

Well, not having those bones to do any fancy scientific testing on means there is no scientific evidence at all, so the researchers wind two teeth (in Belgium!) said to be St. Peter’s enshrined in a church. The church gives permission for carbon-14 dating and DNA testing, so … boy, oh boy, oh boy! We gonna do some science. The dating result? The teeth were part of a live person in … drum roll, please … 250-340 CE! (This range represents the error of measurement of about ±50 years for this short of a span from the present.)

So, the episode concludes with the lame claim that “without permission from the Vatican to examine what they claim are St. Peter’s bones, it is impossible to tell …” Pathetic.

Stop for a minute and ask. If the teeth had dated to first century CE, what would that have proven? Were they Peter’s teeth? Or Jesus’? Or Jehoshaphat the Carpenter’s?

What if the Vatican said, “Sure, take the bones, play with them all you want, grind them to make your bread, have at it.”? If they were carbon dated to first century, DNA tested showing they were of an Israeli man, what would that have proved? Hello, the Church believes Peter was a real man, having done the deeds claimed for him in their scriptures. It doesn’t need proof but it sure doesn’t want its “holy relics” proven false.

The producers did one thing rather well, pointing out there are no records whatsoever that Peter was ever in Rome or that he founded the Catholic Church. (Peter is referred to as the first Pope.) They go to some length to claim that the tradition is real, but what does that mean? It means that the word was handed from person to person down the centuries in a game of historical “Telephone;” that has to be accurate, right? (If you are not familiar with the party game of Telephone, look it up.)

Then you have to ask: why would the bones of a man constitute a holy relic? This passion to have a touchstone to important events leads to the modern practice of buying tee shirts at concerts and sporting events, so it is very human, but what religious function might bones serve? They do not speak. They have no message, etc. And this is from a group of people who have perpetrated myriad hoaxes involving weeping or bleeding statues, etc. As mentioned, enough splinters of the “one, true cross” have been sold to make an entire log cabin. But there was the current Pope displaying the bones of St. Peter (kept in a little coffin-like box) to rapturous crowds at the Vatican.

Can you imagine scientists bowing their heads if Einstein’s skull were displayed? Or how about Aristotle’s knuckle bones?

Amazing!

Again, the only purpose for an episode such as this is to make money from the gullible. No new facts were revealed (other than those teeth were not Peter’s), no wisdom was revealed, no nothing.

Finding Jesus … Holy Shit: Follow-up

CNN blurb for the series: Finding Jesus discovers fascinating new insights into the historical Jesus, utilizing the latest scientific techniques and archaeological research.

I recently posted regarding watching an episode of a CNN series called “Finding Jesus: Faith, Fact, Forgery.” In this episode (S1, E9) the title of which is “The Childhood Home of Jesus” we were led to consider whether said home had actually been found. The sole line of evidence for this “discovery” was a reference in a 7^th C. document about Nazareth which referred to two churches, one of which was still in existence, the other was lost. The other was reputedly built upon the ruins of Jesus’ family home!

An archeologist, Ken Dark, had been invited to view the ruins beneath the Sisters of Nazareth Convent which was in a building “said to be built upon the ruins of a church.” The examination of the catacombs under that building did indicate a former church being there but also there were “walls” within the walls indicating that the church might have been built upon the ruins of a house!

So the question got asked for the first time: “Was this the childhood home of Jesus of Nazareth?”

The motivation for the asking of this question is clear right off of the bat as a Jesuit cleric admits that if it were that house, then Jesus was not a fictional character, that “He led a real life.”

Whoa, quite a bit of validation there, I would say.

Let’s stop to consider if such an identification is possible. What they managed to prove so far is that a 7^th C. document about Nazareth claimed a church was built upon what were claimed to be the ruins of Jesus’ family home. The authenticity of that document wasn’t claimed to have been corroborated, nor was any other documentation provided. But, what if a chain of documents leading back to the appropriate time were found, that could be authenticated, identified the site as that home, the home of an artisan named Joseph. Since that name was quite common, how could one verify one had the right one? Documents would not have included the names of spouses and children surely. There could have been two people with the same name, ten years apart, or twenty, or thirty that occupied the house. How would you know which was which?

If they found a message carved into the stone of the house’s original foundation that said : “This is the home of Yahushua bar Joseph.” Would that prove anything? The answer is always “no” because of the perfidy of human beings. If someone built a church on the foundation left of a house and that church got into financial trouble, could you not imagine someone carving that message into the stone, weathering it a bit, and then announcing the miracle of miracles, the discovery of Jesus’ childhood home, and reap a large number of new members to support that church.

Could you honestly say that a chain of documents could not be forged? (Such a chain is useless in any case as such documents were not made, let alone kept.)

My point is that the entire question is dishonest.

There is no possibility of identifying any common building from that long ago. Large, ornate public buildings might be identified from written descriptions. Other buildings might be identified from their structures as being a forge or a stable for horses or barracks for soldiers, but the home of a fairly ordinary person? Zero chance.

So, you have to ask yourself what the purpose of such a TV show is. What possible “new insights into the historical Jesus, utilizing the latest scientific techniques and archaeological research” could be had from such a bogus search? Apparently the purpose of the show is to make money off of gullible consumers of such shows. There is no scientific purpose, nor is there an historical, or archaeological, purpose for such a speculation.

It is the equivalent of going to the possible site of Goliath and David’s epic possible individual combat and picking up a stone asking: “Is this the stone that David used to slay the warrior Goliath?” Or could it have been ancient aliens?

Finding Jesus … Holy Shit

I just finished watching a recorded episode of a CNN series called “Finding Jesus: Faith, Fact, Forgery.” In this episode (S1, E9) the title of which is “The Childhood Home of Jesus” we are led to consider whether said home has actually been found. The sole line of evidence for this “discovery” was a reference in a 7^th C. document about Nazareth which referred to two churches, one of which was still in existence, the other was lost. The other was reputedly built upon the ruins of Jesus’ family home!

An archeologist had been invited to view the ruins beneath the Sisters of Nazareth Convent which was in a building “said to be built upon the ruins of a church.” The examination of the caves under that building did indicate a former church being there but also there were “walls” within the walls indicating that the church might have been built upon the ruins of a house! Artifacts were found that date to the first century and we are off and running.

The question gets asked, “Could this be the childhood home of Jesus?” We are then treated with breathless commentary along the lines of “the house seems exactly to be the sort that Jesus would have grown up in,” and “this was clearly a home inhabited by a pious Jewish family.” Imagine that. A home in first century Nazareth inhabited by a pious Jewish family, how rare!

They have trouble steering a course through the lack of evidence, of course. They keep asking the question, “Could this be the childhood home of Jesus?” but in a one hour show it takes them to the 59^th minute to finally utter “… it is possible, but can’t be demonstrated.”

Really? Then what was used to fill the time between the asking of the question and the answering?

Well, we got all kinds of comments indicating that understanding how Jesus was raised would tell us a great deal about who Jesus was as a man. Really, a god incarnate was going to be shaped by his upbringing and the teaching of his parents? Must be a particularly feeble god.

Part of the filler was descriptions of Joseph and Mary. (I wonder where they got the information?) It was carefully explained that Joseph wasn’t a carpenter but an artisan, a class of people who were consider lower than peasants who worked the land, yet later we were lead to believe that Jesus must have been part of an upper middle class household. (I would guess this was to not offend the upper middle class target audience for this diatribe.) Later we are told that Jesus worked for many years as a carpenter, which is rigorous work, making Jesus into a manly man. Apparently he worked his way up from artisan, making his father proud.

They found artifacts, such as wool spinning tools, which a “woman of the time” would use to spin wool (I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked!) … but immediately thereafter that woman had a name … Mary. Sentences began Mary this, Mary that, etc. They found glass beads that were typical of women’s dresses across the Roman empire for centuries, which would, of course, been part of Mary’s dresses.

Interestingly, Mary was responsible for teaching the boy Jesus how to be a Jew and be part of God’s plan. How a god incarnate would have gotten along without that instruction, is horrifying to consider.

Then there was a longish aside involving a revolt in 4 BCE involving rebels capturing the city of Sepphoris. This city was four miles from Nazareth but 15,000 Roman troops took the city back, crucified 2000 rebels and sold the rest of the inhabitants into slavery. Four miles is a brisk walk of an hour for a mature adult but Jesus was about two years old at the time (having been born in 6 BCE) and could never have made the trip, nor would a two-year old remember anything as an adult from when he was two.^* But we were told that “even if Jesus didn’t see the events himself, he would have heard stories from that point onward.” Possibly this shaped his nonviolent mission, it was claimed. Apparently they hadn’t heard about Jesus’ cleansing of the temple. And, the god of all creation fear the Romans? Really? I thought he made the Romans.

Then they segue to a Bible story from Luke about how Jesus went into the synagogue in Nazareth to preach and was rejected to the point of being dragged to a cliff with the intention of being thrown him off of it. But Jesus walked away … mysteriously … never to return to his boyhood home village. How this added to their case for the discovery of Jesus’ childhood home was not made clear.

I think they should have titled this series “Finding Jesus: Fantasy, Fiction, Fable.”

The only “evidence” they have is a mention in a 7th C. text regarding a church reputed to have been built upon the ruins of Jesus’ childhood home. At that time, I am sure there were no false claims of artifacts from that time being holy. The fact that an entire village of houses could have been built from the then known fragments of the cross was just another miracle. So, if that document said it, it is probably true.

They then took the ball and ran with it, using their imaginations and little else, they entertained the fantasy that they had found the childhood home of Jesus and, amazingly, that if that were able to be confirmed that it would tell them something. To most Christians, Jesus is the Creator God of their religion. He is the Father and Holy Spirit as there is only one god. That he was capable of creating the entire universe, the Earth, all of the plants and animals, and the first human beings and still needed his mother to teach him what “God’s plan” was is preposterous. That he would need any help at all is preposterous. That his mission was ever in doubt or in danger is preposterous. Everything must have happened as he planned it to happen. Period.

What were these people thinking?

And if that place really was Jesus’ childhood home, how could it have been forgotten? Oh, yeah, God lived around her a long time ago but we forgot where. Really?

What were these people thinking?

Oh, I forgot, thinking is not encouraged. It is entirely okay to get some press for your believers and provide them with some support for their beliefs even if it is entirely patent nonsense.

Just listen to the pretty stories and, above all, do not ask any questions.

* * *

* According to BibleWalks.com “The city (Sepphoris) is not mentioned in the acts and events of Jesus, but he probably has (sic) visited the city, which is in the near proximity of his childhood village of Nazareth. The city was a commercial center for the whole area and he may have received work as a carpenter.” And the beat goes on … they have no evidence but “he probably has visited the city,” looking for work … in the site of the horror that lead him to fear the Romans so very, very much.

 

Apparently It Is Never Enough

The oligarchs running our government could just rest on their laurels as they have won on every front, but apparently that is not enough. If you think things could not get worse, read this “Right-Wing Billionaires Have a Project to Rewrite Our Constitution, and They Are Shockingly Close to Pulling It Off.”

Betsy DeVos and The Christian Right’s “Big Ideas”

In Rolling Stone there is a big article on our new U.S. Education Secretary (Betsy DeVos’ Holy War by Janet Reitman). (How did Rolling Stone get from being an “entertainment” magazine to the only U.S. magazine with the balls to publish the truth?”)

Here is a condensation of one part of that article:
“A staple in modern evangelical teachings is the concept of Christian spheres of influence – or what the evangelical business guru Lance Wallnau dubbed the ‘Seven Mountains’ of society: business, media, religion, arts and entertainment, family, government, and education – all of which urge the faithful to engage in secular culture in order to ‘transform’ it. The goal is a sweeping overhaul of society and a merging of church and state: elevating private charity over state-run social services, returning prayer to school and turning the clock back on women’s and LGBTQ rights. It would also be a system without a progressive income tax, collective bargaining, environmental regulation, publicly funded health care, welfare, a minimum wage – a United States guided by a rigorously laissez-faire system of ‘values’ rather than laws….”

More than a few people have questioned my writing about religion in a Class Warfare blog. I tend to write mostly about fundamentalist religions, such as the DeVos family beliefs, because they are seriously at odds with reality. Tell me if you don’t think these people have a political agenda.

For example, look at the list of “features” of our society the DeVos family would rather we did without: a progressive income tax, collective bargaining, environmental regulation, publicly funded health care, welfare, a minimum wage, etc. Notice how these are all ideas that conflict with basic Christian ideology. These are very rich people, Ms. DeVos’ father created Amway, but I don’t expect them to sell all of their worldly goods and go follow Jesus any time soon. The Bible is full of regulations, pages and pages of regulations, including one to be a good steward of the land, hardly in line with the elimination of environmental regulations. Did not Jesus tell his followers to go forth and heal the sick and did he not complain when someone else did likewise (as long as it was in his name)? This is hardly compatible with the elimination of publicly funded health care. People don’t realize how much poverty and ill health there were in our senior citizens before Social Security and Medicare were implemented. These two government programs alone are responsible for pulling massive numbers of old folks out of poverty and desperation.

What the DeVos family and their ilk have done is made a new religion
out of being  politically conservative and rich.

What the DeVos family and their ilk have done is made a religion out of being politically conservative and rich. They are dead set against progressive income taxes and estate taxes as a form of “rendering unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s.” Again, this is hardly Christian, but it is right out of the rich man’s plutocratic playbook.

And we now have that new time religion at the highest levels of the US federal government with an attitude of “Well I’m rich and if you aren’t, you can go suck eggs,” the embodiment of Christian charity.

Neoliberal Roots

I was reading a very good piece on the privatization of public education posted by the wonderful Yves Smith (Dismantling Public Education: Turning Ideology into Gold by Alex Molnar)—which I highly recommend—when a particular section struck me. Here it is in full:

“The major education reforms of the past 35 years — education vouchers, charter schools, tuition tax credits, and education savings accounts — all seek to remove public schools from the control of elected bodies; to subject them to the ‘laws’ of the ‘market’; and to put them at the service of the economic elite. The world being called into existence is based on the belief that anyone, but not everyone, can succeed—a world of winners and losers, each of whom has earned his or her fate. Thus, as British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, one of neoliberalism’s foremost champions, proclaimed: “’There is no such thing as society. There is living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate.’

“This is a world in which the poor must be judged by the rich to be ‘deserving’ of private charity rather than one that allows collective action through the democratic political process to secure the common welfare.”

That final sentence rang a bell for me. It connected in my mind the current neoliberal disdain for the poor with the efforts of Franklin Roosevelt’s administration to address the ravages of the Great Depression. At that time (the 1930’s) the Roosevelt’s New Deal administration wanted to get money back in people’s hands by the shortest possible route. Many Americans were reluctant to admit they need the help but finally, driven by desperation, they applied for “relief.” But the rate at which the funds allocated to this were being disbursed was impossibly slow and Roosevelt ordered his right-hand man, Harry Hopkins, to look into it. It turned out that the people hired to distribute the funds were spending most of their time ensuring that the poor felt shame for their current state. So, before you could get a little money (it was a pittance), you first needed a heap of humiliation and shame just for asking. Hopkins put an end to then standard practice of shaming the poor and the money soon flowed much faster and people felt positive effects sooner.

So, what could be the source of this need on the part of large swaths of the American people to make sure that poor people feel shame associated with their economic state? Are Americans uncharitable? No, quite the contrary. So, what is it? A clue may be in the phrase quoted above “the poor must be judged by the rich to be ‘deserving’ of private charity rather than one that allows collective action through the democratic political process to secure the common welfare.” Americans tend to honor wealth as a sign of hard work and industry and business smarts. That honor conveys a certain rectitude as well as high social position. So, rather than Americans striving to be pigs at the public trough as they are oft portrayed by Neoliberals, they are just the opposite.

There is one more strain woven into this attitude and I think it is the Protestant Work Ethic which emphasizes that hard work, discipline, and frugality are a result of a person’s salvation in the Protestant faith. Taken to an extreme, the people wedded to this ideology condemn the poor because they obviously lack “hard work, discipline and frugality” otherwise they wouldn’t be in need of assistance.

This is yet another example of religion tainting otherwise worthy collective attempts to assist those less fortunate, especially in an age when the rich have transferred so much wealth out of middle class and poor pockets into their own.

What Are Your Views on Abortion?

A recent piece in the N.Y. Times pointed out that in a recent survey of views on abortion, just over half of all American women want to see further restrictions on abortion. The piece also chastised “feminists” for ignoring this fact.

As far as I am concerned, both parties and their opinions can go take a flying leap.

In my opinion, having an abortion … or not …. is an intensely personal decision and the opinions of the rest of society just do not matter. In order for them to matter, the issue would have to involve one in which there was a profound societal interest. We are talking about birthing new citizens here. If we had a profound worker shortage or a severe lack of people available to serve in the military, I would recognize a significant societal interest. But we are up to our assess in people and no such interest exists. The only reason there is an abortion issue is that there is a morality issue.

There is an axiom that “you cannot legislate morals,” but we keep trying, idiots that we are. The danger here is if we do insist that there is a profound societal interest, we open a box of snakes. The only form that interest could take would be a population based one (morals aren’t addressed in the Constitution). If we take “action” in the form of policy, say an anti-abortion policy, we are essentially saying we have the right to force women to bear children. A short step away are laws restricting the uses of contraception. Neither of these kinds of policies touch the American experiment where it lives. These are totalitarian policies and are supported only by totalitarian religions.

If a pregnant woman is considering an abortion, the decision is a very emotional, personal decision. She is not deciding to “never have children.” She is not deciding to restrict the number she will have. But if we collectively were to force her to have this baby after she decided she did not want it, the emotional scars from that action may affect those possibilities and how would that serve the societal interest? And who wants there to be more unwanted children in the world? The impact on the child is rarely mentioned by the anti-abortion zealots, other than to describe an abortion as a murder. Once the child is brought to term it can go fuck itself for all of the anti crowd cares.

Much of the anti-abortion fever, I believe, is fueled by people wanting “others” to be responsible for their actions. The punishment for a young girl exploring sex and getting pregnant (made unsafe by the same politics as the antis espouse) is to be forced to bear that child and raise it, possibly forestalling any hopes she had for her own life and possibly truncating any positive future for that child. “That will teach her not to be promiscuous.” (Is there any evidence that this form of “discipline” works?)

If a woman is contemplating an abortion, the best thing we can do is get out of the way. If we are close to her, offer support, share your opinion if that is requested, but get out of the way. And stop recommending laws to restrict peoples actions in these personal decisions.

How would you like it if you are told you have heart disease, but the procedure that could cure you and save your life has been condemned as immoral and made illegal. (It involves the use of stem cells.) How would you feel if laws were passed that operations were immoral as they denied the healing powers of God? Do not let totalitarian religions determine our social policies. Only when there is a demonstrated significant societal interest should we intervene. Child abuse, spousal abuse, poverty, hunger, homelessness: there are so many problems of this sort that have societal interests and citizens involved that deserve our attention. In the absence of such an interest, as in the case of the “legality” of abortions, we should get out of the way and reinforce our belief in individual action. To do otherwise is to extend the totalitarian aspects of these religions to our collective agreements with one another.

PS Pop Quiz Can you tell from the graph what year abortion was made legal in the US? (If not legal abortions do not affect population growth and there can not be a societal interest in them.)

(Answer to Pop Quiz: It was 1973.)