Goya: The Rape of Europa, 1772Forget for a moment
the god’s handsome hide,
the princess’s spray-thin tunic.
How small Europa’s parents
look in the faded light —
the king and queen,
disheveled in their grief,
with their perennial missing-person ad:
“Last seen on the back of a white bull.”
The parents do not count next to the divine
distended nostrils, or Europa’s thighs.
Again they blame themselves for having let
their little girl weave daisy chains
too near the shore, for failing to warn her
not to trust strange bulls.
blind to Europa’s starring role
in future titillating art, they cannot grasp
the honor of it: their little girl
abducted to the island of Crete,
the cradle of new myths, her name
stretched over the whole continent.
The queen, swollen from weeping,
says over and over, “I wanted to hide her
under an ordinary name,
but you wanted her to shine
round-voweled like the moon.”
The king is silent.
In Crete, new art is being born,
frescoes showing bulls,
new religious ideas.
Europa’s parents, in worn-out robes,
wander about their provincial palace,
now empty of their daughter’s steps.
They remember how she laughed
running to catch sun spots, butterflies;
how, when she was five,
she picked poppies that grazed like fire
in the ruins of an old temple,
but they withered in her eager clasp
before she got home, and she cried.
But mostly, like an echo
traveling away, they grow silent.
~ Oriana
**
Myths do not mention
those left behind.
~ that’s the insight from which the poem unfolded. But I’ve decided that those lines are too direct, and omitted those lines.
Forget for a moment
the god’s handsome hide,
the princess’s spray-thin tunic.
How small Europa’s parents
look in the faded light —
~ that says it right there: the myth pays no attention to the parents’ suffering. I devote the poem to correcting this omission, trying to imagine the bereft parents. My tiny spark of compassion doesn’t change the myth — Zeus, a sexual predator par excellence, gets his way as he always does. But for a moment the reader is distracted from that “triumph” and made aware of the grief it caused.
It’s interesting that according to the myth Europa had three sons with Zeus — Minos, Rhadamanthus, and Sarpedon — who became the judges in the underworld, assessing each new arrival’s vices and virtues.
Mary:
The gods, like the rich, do tend to take what they want, unconcerned about the damage left behind. If you are a God, you need answer to no one. If you are a rich corporate billionaire, you are unconcerned about what will be left after you have grabbed all you can. Both kinds of predators look no farther than their own greed, and their drive to satisfy it. Everything, and everyone, else, is simply grist to their (infernal) mills.
Oriana:
An excellent point: the gods are like the rich. And like dictators. Who cares about the victims? Those are the “losers,” aka “sinners.” The link between religion, power, and wealth has always been present. Early Christianity was an interesting exception, but it certainly didn’t last very long.
**
DOSTOYEVSKY’S VISION OF MODERN TOTALITARIANISM (in his novel THE DEVILS, also translated as THE DEMONS or THE POSSESSED)
“It isn’t the revolutionaries who are demons. It’s the ideas to which the revolutionaries are enslaved.”
~ “What Dostoyevsky diagnosed — and at times suffered from himself — was the tendency to think of ideas as being somehow more real than actual human beings.
When Fyodor Dostoyevsky described in his novels how ideas have the power to change human lives, he knew something of what he was writing about.
Born in 1821, the Russian writer was in his 20s when he joined a circle of radical intellectuals in St Petersburg who were entranced by French utopian socialist theories. A police agent who had infiltrated the group reported its discussions to the authorities. On 22 April 1849, Dostoyevsky was arrested and imprisoned along with the other members, and after some months of investigation they were found guilty of planning to distribute subversive propaganda and condemned to death by firing squad.
The punishment was commuted to a sentence of exile and hard labor in Siberian prison, but the tsar's authority to decree life or death was confirmed by forcing the prisoners to undergo the ordeal of a mock execution.
In a carefully stage-managed charade Dostoyevsky and the rest of the group were taken on the morning of 22 December 1849 to a regimental parade ground, where scaffolding had been erected and decorated with black crepe. Their crimes and sentence were read out and an Orthodox priest asked them to repent.
Three of the group were tied to stakes in readiness for execution. At the last moment there was a roll of drums, and the firing squad lowered its rifles. Reprieved, the prisoners were put in shackles and sent into Siberian exile — in Dostoyevsky's case for four years of hard labor, followed by compulsory service in the Russian army.
Dostoyevsky's experience had altered him profoundly. He did not abandon his view that Russian society needed to be radically changed. He continued to believe that the institution of serfdom was profoundly immoral, and to the end of his life he detested the landed aristocracy. But his experience of being on what he'd believed was the brink of death had given him a new perspective on time and history. Many years later he remarked: "I cannot recall when I was ever as happy as on that day." [after getting a reprieve]
From then onwards he realized that human life was not a movement from a backward past to a better future, as he had believed or half-believed when he shared the ideas of the radical intelligentsia. Instead, every human being stood at each moment on the edge of eternity. As a result of this revelation, Dostoyevsky became increasingly mistrustful of the progressive ideology to which he had been drawn as a young man.
Dostoyevsky's indictment of nihilism is presented in his great novel The Devils. Published in 1872, the book has been criticized for being didactic in tone, and there can be no doubt that he wanted to show that the dominant ideas of his generation were harmful. But the story Dostoyevsky tells is also a dark comedy, cruelly funny in its depiction of high-minded intellectuals toying with revolutionary notions without understanding anything of what revolution means in practice.
The plot is a version of actual events that unfolded as Dostoyevsky was writing the book. A former teacher of divinity turned terrorist, Sergei Nechayev, was arrested and convicted of complicity in the killing of a student. Nechayev had authored a pamphlet, The Catechism of a Revolutionary, which argued that any means (including blackmail and murder) could be used to advance the cause of revolution. The student had questioned Nechayev's policies, and so had to be eliminated.
Dostoyevsky suggests that the result of abandoning morality for the sake of an idea of freedom will be a type of tyranny more extreme than any in the past. As one of the characters in The Devils confesses: "I got entangled in my own data, and my conclusion directly contradicts the original idea from which I start. From unlimited freedom, I conclude with unlimited despotism."
Though he criticized him for relying too much on individual acts of terror, Lenin admired Nechayev for his readiness to commit any crime if it served the revolution. But as Dostoyevsky foresaw, the use of inhuman methods to achieve a new kind of freedom produced a type of repression that was much more far-reaching than the theatrical cruelties of tzarism.
Dostoyevsky's novel contains a lesson that reaches far beyond Russia. Early English translations bore the title The Possessed — a misreading of a Russian word more accurately rendered as The Devils or Demons. But the earlier title may have been closer to Dostoyevsky's intentions. Though at times he is merciless in his portrayal of them, it isn't the revolutionaries who are demons. It's the ideas to which the revolutionaries are enslaved.
Dostoyevsky thought the flaw at the heart of Russian nihilism was atheism, but you needn't share his view on this point to see that when he writes of the demonic power of ideas he has fastened on a genuine human disorder. Nor do you need to approve of Dostoyevsky's political outlook, which was a mystical version of nationalism deeply stained with xenophobia.
We like to think that liberal societies are immune to the dangerous power of ideas. But it's an illusion to think we don't have demons of our own. Possessed by grandiose conceptions of freedom, we've tried to change the systems of government of countries we don't begin to understand. Like the deluded revolutionaries of Dostoyevsky's novel, we've turned abstract notions into idols and sacrificed others and ourselves in the attempt to serve them.
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30129713
Oriana:
Let me quote the crucial statement here:
By the way, the folksy, vulgar, super-contemptuous term that D uses for “The Devils” does not have the dignity of “demons.” Based on the Russian title (the same word also exists in Polish), I think the Dostoyevski meant the anarchist revolutionaries themselves. Nevertheless, we don’t have to go by the writer’s presumed intention. I like the article’s thesis that it’s the ideas that are the enslaving demons. Interesting how the mistranslation of the title actually added a layer of depth.
Mary:
Certainly Dostoyevsky has experienced first-hand the power of ideas to change lives, and the circumstances under which we must live. Nothing is as dangerous as an idea that becomes the primary root of action, that subsumes everything else, for which any and all sacrifices must be made, and for which any crime is permissible. To be possessed by such an idea is certainly something approaching the demonic.
We witness this in the violent extremities of the “Islamic state” armies — nothing is too brutal, too unthinkable, too morally repugnant, if it is done in the service of their ideas — to create a "Caliphate " in the modern world. Murder, rape, human bombs, sawing off heads while being filmed, mass murder of innocent strangers....all seen as not only permissible, but necessary, and good.
And this is nothing new. The French Revolution, the German Nazi state, the Russian Revolution with its Stalin, the Chinese Revolution and Maoism, the Slave states of the US south, even that long-stuck bone in the throat of the mideast, the Crusades — all developments of ideas that became megalomanias...individual and social 'demons' that left rivers of blood and fields of bone and ash in their wake.
Oriana:
Funny, when we speak about “the power of ideas,” we tend to mean good ideas, visions of a better world. We think of Jonas Salk trying to develop the polio vaccine (which he deliberately didn’t patent, to make it affordable to all — now that’s ethics).
Alas, bad ideas, harmful ideas, can also have tremendous power — and you’ve just provided examples. And Dostoyevski understood that noble-sounding ideas can turn men into self-justifying Raskolnikovs, except worse.
**
THE FASCIST BACKLASH AGAINST EXTREME CAPITALISM: KARL POLANYI
~ “The great prophet of how market forces taken to an extreme destroy both democracy and a functioning economy was not Karl Marx but Karl Polanyi. Marx expected the crisis of capitalism to end in universal worker revolt and communism. Polanyi, with nearly a century more history to draw on, appreciated that the greater likelihood was fascism.
As Polanyi demonstrated in his masterwork The Great Transformation (1944), when markets become “dis-embedded” from their societies and create severe social dislocations, people eventually revolt. Polanyi saw the catastrophe of World War I, the interwar period, the Great Depression, fascism, and World War II as the logical culmination of market forces overwhelming society—“the utopian endeavor of economic liberalism to set up a self-regulating market system” that began in nineteenth-century England. This was a deliberate choice, he insisted, not a reversion to a natural economic state. Market society, Polanyi persuasively demonstrated, could only exist because of deliberate government action defining property rights, terms of labor, trade, and finance. “Laissez faire,” he impishly wrote, “was planned.”
Polanyi believed that the only way politically to temper the destructive influence of organized capital and its ultra-market ideology was with highly mobilized, shrewd, and sophisticated worker movements. He concluded this not from Marxist economic theory but from close observation of interwar Europe’s most successful experiment in municipal socialism: Red Vienna, where he worked as an economic journalist in the 1920s. And for a time in the post–World War II era, the entire West had an egalitarian form of capitalism built on the strength of the democratic state and underpinned by strong labor movements. But since the era of Thatcher and Reagan that countervailing power has been crushed, with predictable results.
In The Great Transformation, Polanyi emphasized that the core imperatives of nineteenth-century classical liberalism were free trade, the idea that labor had to “find its price on the market,” and enforcement of the gold standard. Today’s equivalents are uncannily similar. We have an ever more intense push for deregulated trade, the better to destroy the remnants of managed capitalism; and the dismantling of what remains of labor market safeguards to increase profits for multinational corporations. In place of the gold standard—whose nineteenth-century function was to force nations to put “sound money” and the interests of bondholders ahead of real economic well-being—we have austerity policies enforced by the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, with the American Federal Reserve tightening credit at the first signs of inflation.
This unholy trinity of economic policies that Polanyi identified is not working any more now than it did in the 1920s. They are practical failures, as economics, as social policy, and as politics. Polanyi’s historical analysis, in both earlier writings and The Great Transformation, has been vindicated three times, first by the events that culminated in World War II, then by the temporary containment of laissez-faire with resurgent democratic prosperity during the postwar boom, and now again by the restoration of primal economic liberalism and neofascist reaction to it. This should be the right sort of Polanyi moment; instead it is the wrong sort.
Polanyi got some details wrong, but he got the big picture right. Democracy cannot survive an excessively free market; and containing the market is the task of politics. To ignore that is to court fascism. Polanyi wrote that fascism solved the problem of the rampant market by destroying democracy. But unlike the fascists of the interwar period, today’s far-right leaders are not even bothering to contain market turbulence or to provide decent jobs through public works. Brexit, a spasm of anger by the dispossessed, will do nothing positive for the British working class; and Donald Trump’s program is a mash-up of nationalist rhetoric and even deeper government alliance with predatory capitalism. Discontent may yet go elsewhere. Assuming democracy holds, there could be a countermobilization more in the spirit of Polanyi’s feasible socialism. The pessimistic Polanyi would say that capitalism has won and democracy has lost. The optimist in him would look to resurgent popular politics.” ~
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/12/21/karl-polanyi-man-from-red-vienna/
Nazi veterans in Vienna in 1930Oriana:
Not that the opposite extreme works either. Let me quote myself from another blog:
“COMMUNISM IS LIKE PROHIBITION”
In 1929 Will Rogers visited the Hammer brothers, Armand and Victor, in Moscow. He made a very perceptive remark — I’m surprised that it remained unknown. “Communism’s like Prohibition. It’s a fine idea, but it won’t work.”
That’s a marvelous analogy. Alcoholism is a great evil, but you can’t combat it by making alcohol illegal. The same goes for greed.
Actually Lenin saw that communism didn’t work. That’s why he introduced NEP, the “new economic policy,” which allowed limited private enterprise and restored the use of money (in his desire to “destroy the power of money,” Lenin tried the coupon system).
Perhaps communism, like Prohibition, simply had to be tried so that humanity could see that an extreme approach doesn’t work. Capitalism (in some form -- it's constantly evolving) is here to stay, as is legal, regulated alcohol and tobacco (at long last, the “war on drugs” seems on its way out too). The difficult problem is how to encourage creative, entrepreneurial capitalism while restraining predatory capitalism.
The only thing we know is that no system will ever be perfect. But we must keep on trying to create a better world — in all possible ways, without rigid ideologies.
Moscow 1950; Semyon FriedlandCAN DEMOCRACY BE SAVED?
~ “The British are catching up with an American awareness of the intertwined political influence of the secretive super-rich, social media, and the Kremlin. In America, illicit support for Trump has been investigated by intelligence agencies, Justice Department officials, and major media organizations. Uncovering election interference in Brexit-Britain has been a more freelance business . . . mapping the scale and penetration of Russian trolls and bots sowing hatred and division via social media.
In both the US and the UK, investigations into the deployment of these shadowy forces are still in progress. In close contests, every influence counts. There is, therefore, an understandable temptation to emphasize that without secretive billionaires, or the Russians, or Facebook, the outcomes of the Brexit referendum and the US presidential election would have been different. And as elections are likely to carry on being close-run, it is important to track down and expose systemic manipulation. But it does not follow that slush funds, algorithms, and alleged conspiracies were primary causes of the electoral shocks of 2016. Nearly 63 million Americans voted for Trump, although Hillary Clinton outspent him by half a billion dollars. In the UK, 52 percent of voters backed Brexit. A widespread revolt against elite entitlement and genuine resentment against a rigged system are the most important explanations in both cases.
The emerging picture of efforts to manipulate the outcomes of the US election and the Brexit referendum leads to an awkward paradox. For the first time in a long time, voters who recognized the rigged nature of the system voted in large enough numbers to overthrow “the swamp” of “politics as usual”; at the same time, the system itself was perhaps more rigged than ever, thanks to the new-fangled methods. While it is vital to expose how these worked, it is even more important also to develop a politics that validates voters’ legitimate repudiation of a corrupt establishment, rather than dismisses them as ignorant and gullible. The risk of exaggerating the effect of novel methods of subversion is that it will only reinforce cynicism about politics and government in general—and that would be a win for billionaires like Robert Mercer, and their friends and helpers like Nigel Farage, and all they stand for.
Behind both Brexit and Trump was a widespread repudiation of entitlement. Part of its energy in Britain has now gathered around a resurgent Labour Party, which made unexpected gains in June’s general election despite vicious attacks from the right-wing press on its leader, Jeremy Corbyn. In the US, the current of opposition and resistance is running through the #MeToo wave of revulsion at sexual harassment and male abuse of power. A groper-in-chief president faces his own public reckoning, as more and more voices—this week, a blistering denunciation from the editorial board of USA Today—call out his presumption of the right to belittle and humiliate. Trump remains in office, and Brexit proceeds, but unearned entitlement is everywhere on the run. The enemies of democracy—from oligarchs to billionaires—have reason to be fearful.” ~
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/12/14/democracy-and-the-machinations-of-mind-control/
School in the year 2000, as imagined in 1910ARNOLD’S CULTURE AND ANARCHY — AND “SWEETNESS”
~ “BY ANARCHY Matthew Arnold meant a toxic kind of freedom. He meant a society where market forces dominate the nation; where the commercial media sets the agenda and coarsens and simplifies everything it touches; where corporations are barely restrained from despoiling the environment, where human beings are treated as tools to be picked up and put down at will; where there is no more pastoral care and precious little sense of community, where hospitals treat the body but no one treats the soul, where no one knows their neighbors any more, where romantic love is seen as the only bond worth pursuing –- and where there is nowhere to turn to at moments of acute distress and inner crisis. It’s a world we’ve come to know well.
Arnold believed that the forces of anarchy had become overwhelming in Europe in the second half of the 19th century. Religion was in terminal decline. Business reigned triumphant. A practical, un-psychological money-making mentality ruled. Newspaper circulation was growing exponentially. And politics was dominated by partisanship, conflict and misrepresentation.
In the past, religion might have served to reign in these anarchic tendencies. But in his best poem, Dover Beach, Arnold described how ‘the sea of faith’ had ebbed away, like a tide from the shore, leaving only a ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.’
What could replace the function that religion had once played in society? What forces might constrain anarchy and civilize, guide, inspire and humanize instead? Arnold proposed one resounding solution: Culture. It must be Culture, he proposed, that would overcome the forces of anarchy inadvertently unleashed by Capitalism and Democracy.
But to play such a role, by Culture one could not simply continue to mean what a lot of people then (as today) understood by the term: namely, an interest in going to art galleries on holiday, watching an occasional play and writing some essays about Jane Austen at school.
By Culture, Arnold meant a force that would guide, educate, console and teach, in short, in the highest sense, a therapeutic medium. The great works of art weren’t to be thought of as mere entertainment. They contained – when interpreted and presented properly (and this is where Arnold thought his society had gone so wrong) – a set of suggestions as to how we might best live and die, and govern our societies according to our highest possibilities.
Arnold’s goal was therefore to try to change the way the elite establishment (the museums, the universities, the schools, the learned societies) were teaching works of Culture, so that they could become what he felt they had it in their power to be: a proper bulwark against modern Anarchy and the agents to deliver appropriate doses of those important qualities, ‘Sweetness and Light’.
By ‘Light’, Arnold meant ‘understanding.’ The great works of culture have it in their power to clear mental confusion, they give us words for things we had felt but had not previously grasped, they replace cliche with insight. Given their potential, Arnold believed that schools and the mass media had a responsibility to help us get to know as many of these light-filled works as possible. He wanted a curriculum that would systematically teach everyone in the land: ‘the best that has been thought and said in the world,’ so that through this knowledge, we might be able to ‘turn a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits.’
POPULARIZING CULTURE
By ‘sweetness,’ Arnold meant that he wanted works of Culture to be presented to the audience in sweet ways. He saw the absolute necessity of sugar-coating things. In a free society, cultural authority could no longer be strict and demanding – people would simply turn away or vote for something less severe. Anyone who wanted to advocate serious (but potentially very beneficial) things would have to learn the art of sweetness. They would have to charm and amuse and please and flatter. Not because they were insincere but precisely because they were so earnest. In Arnold’s ideal world, the lessons of advertising – which in his day discovered how to sell expensive watches and fire tongs and special knives for boning chickens – would have to be used by intellectuals and educators. Instead of wondering how to persuade middle-income people to purchase potato peelers or soup dishes, they would ponder how to make Plato’s philosophy more impressive or how to find a larger consumer base for the ideas of St Augustine.
By sweetness, Arnold also meant kindness and sympathy. He wanted a world where people would – in the public realm – be nicer to one another. Enough of the brutality and coarseness of the Daily Telegraph, a publication that every day took pleasure in gunning down new victims and turning personal tragedies in to the stuff of mockery. He wished Culture to help foster a spirit of kind-hearted enquiry, a readiness to suppose that the other person might have a point, even if one didn’t quite see it yet. He wanted to promote a tenderness to people’s failings and weaknesses. He saw sweetness as an essential ingredient of a good, humane society.
Culture and Anarchy remains filled with eminently valid answers to the problems of the modern world. With religion gone, it really is only Culture that can prevent Anarchy. But we still have a way to go before Culture has been divested of, to use Arnold’s words, all that is ‘harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional, exclusive’ about it.
http://thephilosophersmail.com/perspective/the-great-philosophers-14-matthew-arnold/
Oriana:
A while back I wondered why, aside from an occasional esthetic nostalgia for the old liturgy (vanished now, stamped out by Vatican II), I never missed religion. That’s that practically all apostates tend to say: I don’t miss god, I miss the singing.
But wasn’t there supposed to be some sense of emptiness? What emptiness?? I never felt it. I think it was mainly because my mental life was so rich, and became even richer once the constraints of religion and the sheer time devoted to it were no longer a problem. Just literature was enough, or just science, but I had both . . . and was just beginning to explore classical music, and of course learning English in my own mad and insatiable way — and learning a language to a functional level is tremendously enlarging.
I didn’t realize how lucky I was: even long before college, my education gave me the tools to enjoy the pleasures of culture, and those were endless. Matthew Arnold was hoping that culture — and he meant “high culture” — would become available to almost everyone.
**
An excellent phrase: government by organized money
Mary:
Indeed, those citing "religious freedom" to act out their antagonism toward women and LBGT people aren't concerned with religious freedom at all..they want to assert the hegemony of right-wing Christian evangelicals as the base of American culture. And that means the old 'white man on top’, women and children beneath, all locked into the traditional nuclear family. It's all about sex, and for them, sex is all about power.
Women can't be allowed control of their bodies, because that would be too dangerous — it would shift the social distribution of power. Gender and gender roles must remain rigid and narrowly defined — any fluidity is perceived as a threat to the power of the patriarchy. Sexual diversity, like social diversity, scares them to death, and they become rabidly fanatic.
Oriana:
Yes, that, and more — as the article points out, women have to be forced to bear children even if they don’t want any because fundamentalist churches need new members, and nothing succeeds like childhood indoctrination, before the brain is fully developed. If you were to tell an adult who’s never heard of it before that woman was created out of a man’s rib, the person might burst out laughing.
Mary:
Indeed, those citing "religious freedom" to act out their antagonism toward women and LBGT people aren't concerned with religious freedom at all..they want to assert the hegemony of right-wing Christian evangelicals as the base of American culture. And that means the old 'white man on top’, women and children beneath, all locked into the traditional nuclear family. It's all about sex, and for them, sex is all about power.
Women can't be allowed control of their bodies, because that would be too dangerous — it would shift the social distribution of power. Gender and gender roles must remain rigid and narrowly defined — any fluidity is perceived as a threat to the power of the patriarchy. Sexual diversity, like social diversity, scares them to death, and they become rabidly fanatic.
Oriana:
Yes, that, and more — as the article points out, women have to be forced to bear children even if they don’t want any because fundamentalist churches need new members, and nothing succeeds like childhood indoctrination, before the brain is fully developed. If you were to tell an adult who’s never heard of it before that woman was created out of a man’s rib, the person might burst out laughing.
Mary:
Oh Oriana, so many ugly things going on!! But like you, I believe in our capacity for beauty, for love, for hope. The things being stirred up now, women raising their voices after such long and painful silences, could lead, yes, to a backlash, but once some things are said, it may be very very hard to silence them, to forget or deny them again.
Oriana:
Yes. Once certain things are said, it’s never quite the same. Once someone cries out, “The Emperor has no clothes!” it’s not as easy for people to keep on deluding themselves. It always takes the first few brave ones — or just one person — think of Anita Hill — and then the chorus of “Me Too” cannot be silenced.
ove, for hope. The things being stirred up now, women raising their voices after such long and painful silences, could lead, yes, to a backlash, but once some things are said, it may be very very hard to silence them, to forget or deny them again.
Oriana:
Yes. Once certain things are said, it’s never quite the same. Once someone cries out, “The Emperor has no clothes!” it’s not as easy for people to keep on deluding themselves. It always takes the first few brave ones — or just one person — think of Anita Hill — and then the chorus of “Me Too” cannot be silenced.
*
“Beggars do not envy millionaires; they envy other beggars who are more successful.” ~ Bertrand Russell
I think that Russell hit on something that may be relevant to the phenomenon of why the poor adore Trump and the rich in general. But there are countries in which the rich are resented; it seems that in no other country do the poor adore the rich as they do in the US. As someone (at this point the attribution to John Steinbeck is disputed) observed, only in America do the poor regard themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
Speaking of beggars, Bertrand Russell's childhood home, Pembroke Lodge:
THE WEDDING-CAKE WARS AREN’T ABOUT RELIGIOUS FREEDOM; THEY ARE ABOUT SEX
~ “The slippery-slope argument goes something like this: If Masterpiece Cakeshop, and its owner, Jack Phillips, can refuse to bake a cake for a gay wedding, what’s to stop him from refusing to bake a wedding cake for two Jews, or an interracial couple, or anyone else for that matter?
But ultimately, it misses the point: that it’s not Jews or people of color or anyone else who are the targets of these “religious freedom” claims. It’s women and LGBT people. Because at the end of the day, these “religious freedom” claims aren’t about religious freedom. They’re about the Culture War. They’re about sex.
First, if Phillips and his ilk were consistent, they would have plenty of sinful people to turn away from their businesses. In Matthew 5:32, for example, Jesus forbids divorce and says that remarriage is the same as adultery. So why isn’t Phillips turning away the remarried?
Here’s another example. In 1 Corinthians 6:9, one of the seven so-called clobber verses (out of 31,102 in the Bible) that talk about homosexuality, Paul states that “neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes (malakoi) nor homosexual offenders (arsenokoitai) nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.” Whoever Paul is talking about here—it’s almost certainly not all gay men, and definitely not lesbians, but even if it were—they are placed on the same level as thieves, slanderers, and swindlers. No better and no worse.
And yet, I’m unaware of a single case in which a service provider sought the right to refuse service to a slanderer on the basis of a religious belief. Why?
Nor has Phillips asserted a right to refuse to bake a wedding cake for a Hindu wedding, even though most evangelical Christians believe Hinduism to be a form of idolatry—which is forbidden over 100 times in the Bible, on penalty of death.
In other words, these “religious freedom” claimants are being highly selective about when their conscience compels them to discriminate. Of all of the sins in Scripture, it seems that only those involving sex and gender—contraception, abortion, LGBT people—are the only ones which trigger such claims.
These “religious freedom” claims are extensions of the five-decade old Culture War. They are front-line issues in politicized Christianity, not Christianity itself, and are stand-ins for a cultural clash that runs deeper than any individual claim.
The Culture War is a battle about sex, but it is really a battle about what country we are living in: either a Christian nation, with right-wing Christianity as its moral bedrock, or a diverse, secular nation, in which religious claims are respected, but not used as a trump card over the civil rights of others.
After all, the reason I’ve scare-quoted “religious freedom” here is that these kinds of claims are really quite novel. For two centuries, the First Amendment was primarily a shield held up by persecuted religious minorities—Jehovah’s Witnesses, Native Americans—against governmental interference in their religious practice. No third parties were involved; these minorities wanted to practice their religion and be left alone.
To be sure, this history is still marred by Christian domination. The First Amendment didn’t stop Mormon polygamy from being banned, and it didn’t stop the government from seizing lands held to be sacred by Native Americans. It was often used against Catholics as well.
But in principle, the Free Exercise clause of the First Amendment was a shield protecting minority religions from government interference.
Only in the last 20 years has it been used as a sword, allowing a religious individual to discriminate against someone else. In cases like Masterpiece Cakeshop or 2014’s Hobby Lobby, it’s not just the government and the practitioner. It’s the government, the practitioner, and the person the practitioner is harming. That is a crucial, and unprecedented, difference: Today’s “religious freedom” claimants want to abridge the rights of others.
And it’s not a coincidence. Poll data shows that when you scratch a “religious freedom” claimant, what you find underneath is someone who really wants to ban abortion, overturn same-sex marriage, and bring back anti-sodomy laws. These organizations—the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Becket Fund, Liberty Counsel—are fundamentally insincere. They’re not defending our “First Freedom.” They’re fighting the Culture War.
Ultimately, Christian conservatives don’t just want to be left alone to practice their religion in peace. Ultimately, they want to impose their religious beliefs on others. They want to win the Culture War and ban the stuff they don’t like.
That’s why the slippery-slope argument is off point. We shouldn’t be asking “what’s to stop this person from turning away Jews?” We should be asking “why is it that the only people this person wants to turn away are women and gays?” Because that’s what reveals this campaign for what it is.
Now, two important caveats.
First—and this is a historical point I wish we could all keep in mind—this kind of religious freedom claim was, in fact, used against African Americans during the 1960s and 1970s. Bob Jones University, for example, argued that it had a First Amendment right to refuse admission to black students (and, later, to segregate them in special housing).
And on a local level, “religious freedom” was offered as a pretext by restauranteurs and hoteliers to deny service to blacks. God separated the races on different continents, evangelicals said in the 1950s, and we must not interfere with His plan.
So it’s not as though the slippery slope isn’t true. It was true quite recently, in fact. The modern “religious freedom” movement was born in segregation.
It’s also true that, when pressed, “religious freedom” activists admit that the slippery slope is accurate in principle. In one memorable exchange from 2014, Congressman Jerrold Nadler asked the Liberty Counsel’s Mat Staver why, under the laws Staver favored—which have now become law in 22 states—a wedding photographer couldn’t refuse service to Jews.
Anti-Semitism has surged during the Trump administration, but probably Staver’s clients—including the Kentucky Clerk Kim Davis, now a hero of the New Christian Right—wouldn’t turn Jews away. That’s not what they’re worried about.
No—what they’re worried about are women and gays; sex and gender; the Culture War and the Christian Nation. And they want to win. Don’t let claims of “religious freedom” fool you.” ~
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-gay-wedding-cake-fight-isnt-about-religious-freedomits-about-sex?via=newsletter&source=DDMorning
EVOLUTION OF THE JESUS STORY
~“If the Bible story were true, it would be consistent. It wouldn’t change with time. God’s personality wouldn’t change, God’s plan of salvation wouldn’t change, and the details of the Jesus story wouldn’t change. But the New Testament books themselves document the evolution of the Jesus story. Sort them chronologically to see.
What did Paul know?
Paul’s epistles precede Mark, the earliest gospel, by almost 20 years. The only miracle that Paul mentions is the resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:4). Were the miracle stories so well known within his different churches that he didn’t need to mention them? It doesn’t look like it.
~ Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles (1 Cor. 1:22–3). ~
The Jews demand signs? Then give them one. Paul had loads of Jesus miracles to pick from. But wait a minute — if the Jesus story is a stumbling block to miracle-seeking Jews, then Paul must not know of any miracles.
Evolution of the story
Miracles come later, with the gospels. Looking at them chronologically, notice how the divinity of Jesus evolves. He becomes divine with the baptism in Mark; then in Matthew and Luke, he’s divine at birth; and in John, he’s divine since the beginning of time.
The four gospels were snapshots of the Jesus story as told in four different communities at four different times. The synoptic (“looking in the same direction”) gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke share much source material, and they have much overlap. Nevertheless, 35% of Luke comes uniquely from its community (such as the parables of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son), and 20% of Matthew is unique (such as Jesus and his family fleeing to Egypt after his birth and the zombies that walked after Jesus’s death). And John is quite different from these three, having Gnostic and (arguably) Marcionite elements, reminders of important early versions of Christianity that are now gone.
There are dozens of noncanonical gospels. Christian churches reject these in part because they were written late. But if we agree that the probable second-century authorship for (say) the gospels of Thomas, Judas, and James is a problem because stories change with time, then why do the four canonical gospels get a pass? If the gospel of John, written 60 years after the resurrection, is reliable despite being a preposterous story, why reject Thomas, written just a few decades later?
The answer, it seems, is simply that Thomas doesn’t fit the mold of the flavor of Christianity that happened to win. History, even the imagined history of religion, is written by the victors.” ~
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/crossexamined/2014/12/the-evolving-jesus-story-2/#ixzz3Ld4nBJqH
Michelangelo: Last Judgment — St. Peter holding the keys to heaven. Look at the size of those keys! I like the little head next to Peter's massive thigh. Who’s that??**
“The whole notion of one true faith being the ticket to heaven, while the rest of humanity is to be tortured forever, must have come from a sick, sadistic mind . . . yet it's still currently held by millions.” ~ Robert Ingersoll (I think)
KEEP MOVING NOW, OR YOU MAY NOT BE ABLE TO MOVE LATER
~ “Being immobile for many hours each day does more than raise the risk of a host of diseases. DiPietro and her colleagues have good evidence that, as the years wear on, it actually reduces the ability of older people to get around on foot at all.
To measure the effect of prolonged sitting on mobility, DiPietro and colleagues took data from the large NIH-AARP Diet and Health Study of men and women ages 50 to 71. The participants were all healthy when the study started in 1995 and 1996.
The researchers recorded how much those in the study watched TV, exercised or did gardening, housework or other physical activity at the beginning of the investigation. They included "light" physical activity like "puttering around, walking to get the mail, or walking to the car" says DiPietro.
The results: Those who watched five or more hours of TV per day had a 65 percent greater risk of reporting a mobility disability at the study's end, compared with those who watched less than two hours per day. DiPietro says this association was independent of their level of total physical activity and other factors known to affect the ability to easily move around.
She offers an antidote: Get up at least every 30 minutes when staring at a screen.” ~
http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/09/04/547580952/get-off-the-couch-baby-boomers-or-you-may-not-be-able-to-later
ending on beauty:
God made everything out of nothing,
but the nothingness shows through.
~ Paul Valery
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