Whither Marriage

The Edwards affair once again brings social notions of marriage and its obligations to the fore, all of which leave me uncomfortable and intellectually unsatisfied. People mean different, disparate and often contradictory notions while using the same word.

Ask the average man or woman on the street about marriage and you'll get answers such as "a sacrament," "a commitment," and "a contract." What do these mean?

I still have the actual illustrated Baltimore Catechism no. 1 from way back when the dinosaurs roamed, which Sister Catherine Agnes used to teach us in second grade that "Matrimony is the sacrament by which a man and woman bind themselves for life in lawful marriage."

Sister also used one of her classic and mildly scary illustrative stories -- which I later learned had not been her own invention, but part and parcel of a U.S. catechetical teaching method devised in the 1930s -- to drive home the point. Here's how I remember it:

There was once a little girl who was very sick. Her family and the parish and everyone prayed and prayed and prayed so she would not die. She lived. Years later, she died in a car crash. She had been married three times and went straight to hell. Better that she had died when she was young and pure.

Save your gasps for the comment box.

One need not have been a child in a pre-Vatican II American Catholic school to agree that, traditionally in the West, marriage has meant that a man and a woman publicly committed to mutual and exclusive sexual congress, with childbearing and rearing in mind, along with a series of social and economic obligations that flowed from parenthood, for as long as both would live.

Social mores have amended that commitment in almost every respect. A man and woman? To have sex? Exclusively? To have children? To rear children properly? For life? No, no, no, perhaps (say some economic studies), and ha-ha!

Perhaps that's because marriage is a contract.

Traditionally, again, in marriage a propertyless woman was conveyed to a man for the purpose of bearing an heir and keeping house, in exchange for economic benefit. In the Cinderella scenario, the aspiring, talented, voluptuous woman provided sexual, childbearing and house-managing services to the handsome, well-heeled man, a prince of a fellow.

Some view marriage, then, as the sole surviving universally legal and respectable form of prostitution. In exchange for unnecessary, ephemeral promises in ceremonies whose luster barely survive the very day they take place, a man gets sex and a woman gets money -- even though in contemporary society, marriage is utterly unnecessary for either.

I mean, if it is a contract: who is selling and buying what, why and how do the terms make sense?

If not, why then, marriage?

Slouching Toward Craziness

Why is it that when you begin to slouch toward partnering things get crazy and all you want to do is head for the hills?

OK, I almost saw myself on "Sex in the City" typing on Sarah Jessica Parker's laptop. (Except I'm a guy who can't stop wondering why she uses a Mac, fer cryin' out loud.)

I'm told this is obvious and true and inevitable. Why am I the only person in the universe who doesn't know this? And don't tell me RTFM. This wasn't in the manual!

Why is it that even when you get along with someone, have great sex, enjoy similar movies, generally "get" one another, you still have rip-roaring arguments of the type you've had before with someone else who can't possibly live with you?

Why do people drive each other crazy? Why did I feel impelled to comment at the wedding I attended "If they think the wedding is difficult, wait till they get to the divorce part"? (Note: I did not say this to the couple.)

Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?

Oh, and did I say "why"?

What Trump Is Probably Hiding

Donald J. Trump is probably not a billionaire if you subtract his debts from his assets, that is why he is hiding his tax return. He has a smaller wallet than he would like everyone to think; almost certainly he didn't add to what he inherited.

He probably coasted, at best, on what used to be called "gentleman's Cs" in the fancy schools he attended. He got in mostly because his father had money.

He has enough money that he could buy sex anywhere, hence his claim to have better sex than anyone else. But I bet he's not a particularly good performer in bed. Why brag about it otherwise?

As for business, he has been in the easiest, least productive sector of the economy that there is: real estate. Let's face it, land just sits there. It contributes nothing to a society to put one more ugly chrome and glass structure on it. It doesn't help the average consumer do anything.

He doesn't have to hide that he is rude, crude, dishonest and basically selfish. That is perfectly in evidence. As is that he has never opened the Bible for more than appearance's sake -- such as at the inauguration.

Which reminds me, he probably hides most of all that he is not interested in the job of president, at least not as the official described in the Constitution. He would like to be CEO of the United States, but CEOs are neither elected nor particularly accountable to anyone; it's not what the Constitution prescribes.

Make True Images

We have seen that loving ourselves is not an automatic free pass to indulgence and bacchanalia. Alcohol abuse can ruin the liver, wanton sex can kill, overeating can make us obese and diabetic, and so forth. Nor is self-love a door to solipsism; self-delusion is as dangerous as self-abuse.

Who is in the mirror? Is it an image of my father or mother? Is it a person older or younger, handsomer or uglier than the one in my dreams? Can I agree with myself which image is truly me?

Making true images of oneself is a task of a lifetime.

We can be proud only of the true selves we are, with commendable traits, as well as drawbacks. Not "proud to be [put nationality, local identity, race, sex here]," nor "embarrassed to [same categories]." Not what I was born but who I am.

Who am I? Am I a son, a father, a husband? Am I a professional, an employee, a business leader? Am I the guy sitting in the back of the bus reading a novel? Am I all of these? More?

Am I capable of revealing what I know about who I am without fear or concern for the opinion of others? To be who I am simply because that is who I am?

Have I come to believe the false images of myself that I have made to deceive others? If so, I am in trouble.

Good

Someone I know doesn't meditate much on what is good, but simply does it as best as it is understood, without any obvious or immediate gain and in surprising measure. Instead of imitating the example, of course, I set myself to think: Does good exist and, if so, what is it?

"The important thing is kindness," my friend said.

"What?"

"The important thing is to be kind to everyone."

Years ago I believed that. If all we shared, if all loved each other, if… If nothing! What is this mass of humans, this human anthill, for? To sell, to buy, to eat, to have sex, to bathe, to sleep. To wake up to repeat the same thing.

We don't love, we don't share. We are deeply and irremediably selfish.

We get to want one another, now and then. That is to say, we share selfishness: she fulfills him, he fulfills her, they run together selling, buying, eating, having sex, bathing, sleeping, waking, repeating.

From time to time an altruistic impulse arises; it's selfishness more carefully camouflaged: I want to feel I am good.

We don't deserve kindness.

Dead Faith of the Living

The argument developing in the Anglican Communion over the election, as head of the U.S. Episcopal Church, of a woman bishop who has blessed gay civil unions brings to mind a phrase of the late historian of Christianity Jaroslav Pelikan.

"Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living," Pelikan told an interviewer with the U.S. News & World Report in 1989. "Traditionalism supposes that nothing should ever be done for the first time, so all that is needed to solve any problem is to arrive at the supposedly unanimous testimony of this homogenized tradition."

In his Jesus through the Centuries, Pelikan insistently reminds the reader just how much of what is attributed to Jesus is really in the eye of beholders throughout history. This is something that the author of the five-volume The Christian Tradition: A History and Development of Doctrine should know well.

The Jesus of the gospels shows absolutely no interest whatsoever in the moral status of homosexuality, same sex orientation and so on. The absence of direct teaching from Jesus on sexual behavior was so patently obvious that it continued in the teaching of those who lived and accompanied Jesus while he walked this earth.

It's not until at least 30 years after Jesus' execution that we have the very first imprecation against homosexuality (and almost every form of sexuality outside marriage). This comes from a man who first persecuted Christians, then changed his mind and became, to be anachronistic about it, more papist than the pope; I'm referring, of course, to the apostle Paul, a man who never actually met Jesus in the flesh, the way you and I might have.

Paul felt he had to introduce a farrago of maledictions upon a wide range of sexual behavior, although he admits to a "thorn" in his own flesh, the nature of which could very well be precisely the activity he deplores. No greater temperance leader than a former drunk.

But never mind Paul. What was Jesus concerned with?

Take Jesus' "basileia theou," a Greek phrase commonly translated as 'Kingdom of God," which I think is more aptly rendered as the "reign of God." In what could easily be described as Jesus "constitution" of the new realm, the Beatitudes (Matt 5:3-11; Luke 6:20-26), he exalts the poor, the meek, the mourning and those who hunger for justice; he reviles those who are rich, who are satisfied, who are laughing, who are blessed by men.

In brief, Jesus up-ends every known social order in history, including many that churches and clerics have blessed from their questionable perch as spokesmen for God.

In the remainder of the discourse surrounding the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus does not once -- not a single time -- dwell on the subject of homosexuality, and never on the subject of the appropriate sex of priests.

Indeed, Jesus has no kind words for priests at all. The one time he portrays one, in the parable of the Good Samaritan, the priest is in too great a hurry to get on with his priestly business to care for someone who lies wounded at the side of the road. Throughout the gospel narrative priests show nothing but hostility toward Jesus.

Oddly enough, Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori has insisted that the message of the General Convention that elected her is that "we're more interested in feeding hungry people and relieving suffering than we are in arguing about what gender someone is or what sexual orientation someone has."

Jefferts Schori was referring to the adoption, at the Cincinnati, Ohio, convention held in June, of a new initiative, called ONE Episcopalian, which seeks to rally Episcopalians -- one by one -- to the cause of ending extreme poverty in the world. It's not a bad idea, considering the average influence and wealth of Episcopalians, who include the father of the current U.S. president.

Each Episcopalian who joins the advocacy campaign will pledge that "We believe that in the best American tradition of helping others help themselves, now is the time to join with other countries in a historic pact for compassion and justice to help the poorest people of the world overcome AIDS and extreme poverty."

The campaign will advocate fair trade, debt relief, fighting corruption and directing additional resources for basic needs education, health, clean water, food, and care for orphans in the poorest countries -- and a pledge to assure one additional percentage point of the U.S. budget to this purpose.

That's a lot more like what the Jesus in the gospels was talking about.

(Telling trivia quiz: What percentage of the U.S. gross domestic product (or gross national income) do you think goes to foreign aid? Click here for an answer. A good article on the myths about foreign aid is found here.)

The Godless Law, Commented

Starting from the principle of survival, it is possible to flesh out a set of ethical imperatives modeled, for the sake of familiarity, after the tablets of Moses. To make the purpose of each imperative clearer, I have appended after each a brief explanation.

I. THOU SHALT LOVE THYSELF WITH ALL THY POWER, THY WILL, AND THY MIGHT, FOR THOU ART THE ONLY ONE UPON WHOM THOU MAYEST ALWAYS RELY.
Replacing any god with the true center of anyone's life, oneself, these ethical imperatives start at the real source of one's scale of values. The imperative to love oneself is not an endorsement of indulgence and bacchanalia. Alcohol abuse leads to diseases of the liver, promiscuous sex can kill, excessive eating leads to obesity, and so forth. You can't say you really love yourself if you inflict yourself any of these problems. The corollary proposes the reality that, in the end, no one loves you as much as you love yourself.

II. THOU SHALT MAKE TRUE IMAGES OF THYSELF, TO REVERE, CHERISH AND KNOW FULLY.
Lying to others about yourself through false images, false impressions, a false facade, is the beginning of lying to yourself about yourself. You can be proud only of the true self you are, which in one way or another is sure to have commendable traits, as well as drawbacks. Learn to know yourself as you really are and to respect yourself.

III. REMEMBER TO SET APART TIME FOR THY RECREATION AND JOY, FOR THOU HAST ONLY ONE LIFE IN WHICH TO REJOICE.
The Protestant Work Ethic deserves to be challenged. It is not a source of joy. Do you live to work or work to live? If you work hard, is it because it fullfills you or is it for some other reason that does not give you joy? Are the things you get through the fruits of labor really sources of joy to you, or are they what you think you are expected to have? Remember: you have only one life! Enjoy it for yourself, the true self mentioned earlier.

IV. BE MINDFUL THAT THOU CANNOT LIVE ALONE FOR LONG, THUS RESPECT ALL THOSE WHO NURTURE THEE.
In the Mosaic decalogue, this applied to parents. In reality, it should apply to all who are in the nurturing chain. We are not islands, we are social animals.

V. THOU SHALT NOT DIMINISH THE LIFE OF ANOTHER FELLOW HUMAN, WHETHER BY TAUNT OR PREJUDICE OR DEPRIVATION OR THE TAKING OF LIFE, FOR EVERYONE IS IN THE NURTURING CHAIN THAT NURTURES THEE.
I have expanded and made more explicit the most common ways in which even civilized human beings are likely to rob one another of life. Whenever we make life miserable for someone else, for even one second, we have stolen a possibility of joy that is irreplaceable. That second will never come again, that chance at some semblance of happiness is gone forever. We have killed that person for one moment.

VI. THOU SHALT RESPECT THE SURROUNDINGS THAT SUSTAIN THEE AND THY FELLOWS.
Biblical adultery, which was the object of the item at this location in Moses' law, was ultimately about maintaining an unquestioned lineage for the purposes of inheritance. I have expanded it to deal with a respect for not merely personal property but all things in the environment that allow us to live.

VII. THOU SHALT RESPECT AND HONOR THOSE THINGS THAT ENABLE THY FELLOWS TO SURVIVE, THEIR PROPERTY, THEIR FAIR AND JUST WAGES, WITH THE SAME RESPECT THAT THOU SHALT CLAIM FOR THAT WHICH IS THINE OWN.
The opposite of stealing is to respect what others need to survive.

VIII. THOU SHALT HONOR THINE OWN REPUTATION BY BEING A TELLER OF TRUTH AS BEST THOU SEEST IT.
This needs little commentary.

IX. THOU SHALT ENJOY THE FLESH OF OTHERS, RESPECTING THEIR OWN DESIRES AS WELL AS THINE AND TAKING RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANY CONSEQUENCES THEREOF.
We need a positive imperative about sex, a principle that will allow us to enjoy our sexual side, so long as we respect others and live up to the duties that may arise as a consequence (parenthood or disease).

X. THOU SHALT REIN IN DESIRES THAT GIVE RISE TO HATE, THEFT, DISRESPECT OF OTHERS, DESPOILING OF THE EARTH THAT SUSTAINS THEE, AND THE DIMINISHMENT OF LIFE.
Here I take the ancient notion of coveting as a source of much mischief and expand it to cover any desire that, unbridled, leads to disrespecting nature and fellow human beings -- including greed, envy and prejudice. To raze a forest merely to make more money, to wish an accident for a neighbor who has a car that is better than ours, to derive one's own self-respect from a pejorative view of entire classes of people, these are instances of what this imperative is intended to prevent.

Now I have come down from the mountain.
Copyright © 2004 by Cecilieaux

Did God abuse Mary?

As inevitable as mistletoe and the Tannenbaum, the argument about Mary’s virginity has been brought up by news of theologian Kyle Roberts’ new book, A Complicated Pregnancy: Whether Mary Was a Virgin and Why It Matters.

The author is a professor of public theology and church and economic life at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities, a school with essentially Calvinist affiliations near Minneapolis. His work attempts to be a new scholarly examination of the claims concerning Myriam of Nazareth, or what in some theological circles is known as Mariology. I have not read the book, so I have to rely on a Religion News Service interview of the author, a piece that is flippantly titled “Flunking Sainthood.”

What emerges is that Roberts is clearly wrestling with a literal belief in the asexual conception of Jesus. This is a problem that might bedevil evangelicals and fundamentalists, but need not and does not present a major problem for the majority of Christians. In fact, Roberts grapples with a bit of a straw man.

The gospels are trying to convey orthodox teaching of the Christian faith as held by non-evangelicals and non-literalists: Jesus of Nazareth was born divine, an unusual circumstance conveyed by way of a literary shortcut described as “born of a virgin.”

This is not meant to be a scientific statement.

Most of what science knows about birth today — which is not all that is knowable by a very long shot — was unknown to the authors of the gospels. Importantly, until the 1830s no one even knew about the existence of the ovum, let alone DNA. The prevailing understanding at the time of Jesus and all the way to the time of Presidents Jackson, Polk and Van Buren, was that the sperm was a “little man” that was implanted in the womb, which was merely a passive receptacle.

This understanding explains a lot about the thinking on a huge range of sexual topics — and the status of women — over that period and earlier.

It’s what the gospel writers “knew.”

Given such an understanding, the literal meaning of the gospels’ text in Matthew and Luke (Mark and John have no birth narratives) is that Jesus came from a divine “little man/sperm” that was placed in Myriam’s womb by God. The idea of a sperm and an ovum, let alone the resulting zygote, would never have occurred to any of the evangelists.

However, the gospels are not literal documents, not newspapers providing facts. They are literary texts aiming to convey to believers a theological message. Matthew’s and Luke’s birth narratives make use of the “science” of the day, appeal to a customary Greco-Roman literary device that accompanies the birth of an important figure with portents. Lastly, they draw on Isaiah 7:14, the prophecy of a virgin giving birth, which was probably meant to convey the unusual character of the Messiah.

The divine origin of Jesus the Christ is also put quite distinctly and poetically by the gospel of John (1:1,14a): “In the beginning was the Word … and the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.” No conception, no birth mentioned. This is particularly odd since John reputedly took care of Mary after the crucifixion. Tradition has it that the widowed Mary lived with John in Ephesus.

All of this is distinct from the facts of Jesus’ birth as scholars know them, which follow.

Jesus was probably born around the year 6 BCE (an oddity resulting from a calendar miscalculation). According to some of the earliest sources, the birth occurred in the summer, possibly July or August. Arguably but not definitively, the evidence suggests his mother may have had several other children. There is no factual evidence concerning the conception of Jesus.

The notion of Mary ever virgin is not implicitly and indisputably a gospel message. The phrase “ever virgin” referred to Mary is first attested in the 4th century, far from any contemporaries of Mary or Jesus. Also, it is unrelated to the origin of Christian views concerning chastity and marriage.

I align with the view of Elaine Pagels, in her book Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity. She proposes, with some evidence, that the early Christian view of chastity as a virtue emerged as a proto-feminist attempt by Christian women to avoid marriage as prescribed by imperial Roman law, which in effect made the wife the property of her husband. This, in turn, has little to do with the apostle Paul’s statements on sex, which were heavily influenced by a combination of his rabbinical training and his personal shock at the common behavior in Greece, which was not entirely dissimilar to current sexual social mores in North America.

In sum, we know extremely little about Jesus’ actual birth as a matter of fact and nothing about his conception. For God, however, nothing is impossible; if God wanted to swell in a human born from a virgin, it could happen science notwithstanding because God is lord of science and the world. The teaching of the virgin birth is merely about the original divinity of Jesus: he was born God, of God directly, and did not become God in some way.

Finally, to bring it back to the topic of the day, Luke 1:34-38 provides a virginal conception that is consensual. In verse 34 Mary asks: “How can that be, since I have no knowledge of man?” The angel replies in 35: “The Holy Spirit will come upon thee, and the power of the most High will overshadow thee. Thus this holy offspring of thine shall be known for the Son of God.” Then in 38, Mary says: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; let it be unto me according to thy word.” Consent!

A Survey of My Political Opinions

Continuing my top 10 influential books, I turn now to my politics and three emblematic books that informed the views I have developed: 2. Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver; 3. Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell; 6. All the President's Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

All three are widely known and their authors do not, unlike the obscure Catholic writers of the preceding post, need introduction. What may need explanation is how they, and the genre they represent, influenced me.

I was first drawn to Soul On Ice as a classic first-person cri de coeur (cry of the heart), rather than for its ideas. It was the early 70s, I was a white college student with no experience of the South nor of the petty-apartheid that Cleaver and his kind had endured.

From before the 1964 Civil Rights Act, I remembered as a child separate drinking fountains and bus seating in Washington, D.C., but I completely missed the fact that an amusement park I went to was only for whites. In brief, I had very little in common with Cleaver, or so I thought.

My secondary school years in Latin America had exposed me to crushing poverty, but not to overt, accepted, legally sanctioned racism. However, I had come to see that want was not merely a failure of the prevailing economic system, but a feature, greasing the wheels of commerce with the anxiety to succeed.

A child of the McCarthy Era, I could never call myself a "Communist," but like many of my age, time and circumstance, in the face of appalling poverty I found liberation theology appealing.

Cleaver added to my religious political economy dimensions I had not considered. For the first time I realized that parallel, or somehow enmeshed with the hierarchy of socioeconomic classes, were the strata of race and sex. Atop the pyramid was the white man, followed by the white woman, then the black man, and at the bottom the black woman.

This seems obvious today. In 1970, to a young man from a family that possessed relative privilege and capacity to shelter, it was startling.

Cleaver's spicy terms were experientially discomfiting. He wrote about how black women cried out "Jesus" during lovemaking, thinking always of the iconic blue-eyed Jesus of American Protestantism. He spoke of the forbidden lust of white women for the fabled large black banana and the white Massa's exploits in the slave quarters.

How aroused he made me feel! How ashamed of myself I felt in discovering how easily I could lust like a slaveowner!

He, and writers like himself, whom I devoured, also reminded me that my Mediterranean looks were far from those of the revered Teutonic Jesus and that I and my forebears had not been part of that equation. Where did I fit in this revolution that simply had to happen to bring peace and justice?

Orwell's Homage, to my mind the best 20th century work in the English language, fit with the more overtly ideological works to which I was drawn. I found in Orwell's experience of the suppression of the Anarcho-Syndicalists by the Stalinists, the key lesson in intramural sparring within the Left: you can never trust the Stalinists.

This reconciled my budding and amorphous leftism, which I styled as Anarchism (but was not), with my anti-Communist upbringing. The Soviet Union was a useful bogeyman to help keep in check the ruling classes -- the undefined and always mysterious "them" who were the Wizards of Oz -- while the revolution had been, in theory, perhaps necessary and even good. But something had gone badly wrong once Uncle Joe took over the Party.

There is an ample literature of warnings from the Left about the potential for disaster in Soviet authoritarianism by figures no less distinguished and disinterested than Rosa Luxemburg. All of which was fine if I projected myself into port World War I "red" Berlin.

Yet here I was in North America, with capitalism chugging along quite fine, thank you very much Comrade Vladimir Ilych. Which is why a more sober voice such as Orwell's, and later Edouard Bernstein's, led me to milder electoral forms of reform-minded socialism, such as they have had in Western Europe.

Finally, there's the question of my own role. I never conceived of myself as a propagandist or revolutionary. I was too bourgeois for that. Yet change could be had through the power of the pen, I learned, when I first saw a 1930s movie called "The Front Page," later remade in 1974.

That's how Woodstein influenced my life. At a crucial time in my development, they showed that a reporter could, with honesty, integrity and without setting out to confirm foregone conclusions, bring to light information that, by itself, could cause change.

Our North American system of political and economic power has since adjusted to its vulnerabilities at the hands of the press, which is slowly being killed -- some say transformed -- by this very medium.

All The President's Men, however, was about the brief moment in which two unknowns could bring down a president.

The Bloscars

Ever since Chani (aka Thailand Gal) handed me the Thinking Blogger Award at the virtual ceremony on her blog I've been beating my brains out to fulfill the condition. She was wearing a long white dress at the virtual podium. In the hall the whole blogging industry was there in stunning dresses and black tie.

Her terms? That I find five other bloggers to reward similarly. My problem? I blog but I don't really participate in the "blogosphere."

I'm a new boy on the block, although in the fourth year (which in Internet time is what ... four centuries?). Not so long ago a faux chick blogger.

I suppose I think of blog posts in terms of the only other opinion form I know: an op-ed column. I've written a few of those for newspapers and news syndicates.

And I have a touch for choosing things that don't have commercial successes. I was a die-hard WordStar user. I didn't buy a CD player in the 80s and 90s because I was convinced they would go the way of 8-track tapes. I also predicted 10 of the last 3 recessions.

Call it the Midas curse, rather than touch.

So I looked at blogs I'd bookmarked: nutgroist, muhammad and me, langa blog. Guess what? They've all stopped posting new material. Advice to bloggers: don't get noticed by me.

Then there are two racy ones I've dabbled in: girl with the one-track mind and suburban sex blog. The saucy British "Girl" is now a publishing sensation (she says ... I'm not aware of her book, but then I'm not aware of much that is merely a fad). "Suburban" has gone back to doing what he does with his wife -- without telling the world.

There's also Daily Kos, on the correct side of the political fence, but commercial.

A neighbor has several fairly scientific blogs -- thinking, yes, but what do I know? I can barely understand what this uberbrain writes about.

One person I cyberknow, Mayou, blogs in French. She has convinced me that my French is much worse than I thought. So how am I to assess whether the blog is worthy?

Finally, I am left with Thailand Gal herself (can one award the awarder?) and Head Reactivated by my cyberfriend Tom Head. Imagine being a doctoral level academic in religious studies and philosophy, but living stuck in Jackson, Mississippi.

This man can discuss Whitehead until the cows come home ... and he does, watching them mosey in from them thar hills. Call me a snobby New Yorker, but I couldn't do it. Nor can I match the depth of his expertise in his fields.

Tom is also a limpid writer, earnest and, from what I can see, someone who seems to have credibly integrated the values for which he speaks.

Without further ado, let me award to him the well-deserved Thinking Blogger Award, so I can get out of this tux.

A Call for Glückenfreude

We all cheer for the underdog, the person who is depressed, who lost a job, who is ill. Secretly, we also occasionally cheer when someone we dislike experiences misfortune, deservedly we believe: schadenfreude. But perhaps the opposite is required somewhat more -- and is considerably nobler.

Schadenfreude, we all know, comes from the German Schaden (harm) and Freude (joy): joy in the misfortune of another.

Face it, you think you might not feel a teensy weensy bit of it if Bill and Melinda Gates got divorced? If Osama got cancer? You weren't secretly glad when Barry Bonds got caught using steroids, Hugh Grant was arrested for getting oral sex from a prostitute in a car, banks lost money due to shady loans, when Scooter Libby was convicted?

Good. Now it's out in the open. We all feel a little schadenfreude now and then. Now Let's consider the opposite.

Your pal gets a promotion or award while you're still stuck in the same old job. Your best friend falls madly in love and you can't get a first date to save your life. Your neighbors take that dream vacation you've always wanted and you haven't been to the next town in three years.

Don't these people make you mad?

For years I felt invidious irritation toward James Fallows. Although he is only three years older than I am, he was Jimmy Carter's chief speechwriter, when I was an apprentice aide to the speechwriter of an international diplomat.

He glided from the White House to the Atlantic Monthly, NPR and endless books, essays and a generally placid and comfortable life with wife and, I believe, daughter. I was let go, later fired from another job and have since toiled obscurely on an economic publication that is revered in its field -- but let's face it, I'm no James Fallows.

How dare he show me up like this!

At first I comforted myself that his passage through Harvard and Oxford were mere perquisites of being born with a silver spoon. But no! He had the effrontery of coming from a working class background and winning scholarships on his own merit.

Surely he would divorce. Surely he would have children with disabilities. Get cancer. Turn out to be a plagiarizer. No, no, no.

People like James Fallows should be shot.

So imagine my shock when I discovered that other people felt similarly about me. Ten years ago I had the good fortune to manage a very leveraged buyout of the firm where I worked. I went to lunch with a dear friend, showed her my new business card with "President" on it. Her face was blank. I thought she didn't understand, so I told her.

"Oh, I have thought of starting a publication," she said. No "congratulations" or "I'm so happy for you," no matter how insincere. I chased her for another lunch over the next three months and it was clear she despised me for my good luck. At least, she was honest; she just couldn't deal with my admittedly modest success.

Since then, I have experienced moments in which I wanted to cry out for joy -- all amid the humdrum teeth-gritting reality in this vale of tears. Sons getting into prestigious universities and embarking upon challenging, make-a-Dad-proud careers.

I have gradually learned that no one is interested in my good fortune. Indeed, they'll likely get upset.

So beginning in this Winter Solstice season, I am calling for a new campaign of Glückenfreude -- joy in the happiness and good fortune of others.

Let me begin with James Fallows: I raise a toast to you, sir, I am honored to have read your marvelous prose, am delighted you have traveled well with your delightful family. If we ever meet, I admit, I will be starstruck, bask in your good fortune and consider it my own to have such a privilege.

Advocacy on One's Own Behalf

During the four years in which I was paid to advocate on behalf of my own diffuse ethnic group, I occasionally referred to my work as "the Hispanic biz," from which I was grateful to depart. Decades later, as a blogger who happens to be Hispanic, I am watching a blogosphere in which identity is almost a profession entitled to disrespect everyone else for shock or sympathy value.

Since when is defending the ethnicity, sex or sexual preference into which, no doubt, you wisely chose to be born, or the religion your sagely selected parents brought you up in, a ticket to fame, fortune and a get-out-of-shame card when you spill your offensive bile against others?

• In Fernham, a wannabe feminist literary analyst, devotes a post to a paper she heard about Jorge Luis Borges' translation of Virginia Woolf's A Room of Her Own, parroting the notion that the version is "fatally muted," despite her mangling of Spanish because she doesn't speak the language!
  
  
• My adored Bloguera posted a funny but somewhat excessive slam on the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, admittedly an unrivalled collection of blowhards, because they called the chairman "presidente" in the Spanish version of their Web page -- even though presidente happens to be an accurate translation of the title for the head of a committee.
  
  
• Then there's Gawker's dizzying spin on the New Yorker cover caricature of Barack Obama: early in the morning they were outraged, by noon they recognized satire and in the afternoon they talked their way out of it by pretending that they were undergoing the five steps of "how you were supposed to respond."
  

OK, so it's only blogging, not neuroscience. And, pace regular readers, yours truly deeply resembles these remarks.

Still, here are the nagging philosophical conundri: What is the value, if any, and what are the ethical limits of advocacy on behalf of one's own interests, culture, point of view? What about when one blogger's identity treads on another?

The Zone

It's often the small things that make a difference.

Giggling through an otherwise boring transaction in which the bank staff just can't spell your name (three times). Gliding through traffic after a satisfying workday. Finding the perfect parking spot even thought it's 8pm. You feel you have the karma and nothing can touch you.

Sure, having karma is itself a contradiction in terms. Karma just is, like grace. No one owns it.

Like The Zone. Capitalized. Mysterious. Undefinable. Without clear borders. It's a strangely satisfying state of mind that comes from nothing (no drugs, sex or rock and roll), probably doesn't last too long, but what a high when it's there!

Pornographic or Risqué?

Savia's recent post on the joys of a toy for gals and related matters has set off an e-mail controversy: is the Savia Bella blog pornographic or merely risqué?

I only cyberknow Savia through Schmutzie, another cyber-acquaintance. They both strike me as charming women too old to be my daughters, but too young to date, who are articulate about some poignant experiences -- and occasionally a little edgy, saucy and, yeah, not quite what you would read out loud to your great-aunt Julia.

They are articulate and funny and painfully honest and Saskatchewanian -- I've never met anyone like them in real life. For all I know, they may be one 45-year-old overweight, beer delivery guy in Yonkers. But I doubt it.

I found Schmutzie's Milkmoney ... goodness, I don't remember how! Someone's blog roll, I'm sure. I was amazed to discover someone blogging about such serious setbacks as being diagnosed with cancer (and beating it!) with compassion-evoking lightness. This is how I would like to get cancer (knock on wood) if I had to.

Then Savia guest-posted on Milkmoney about her incestuous-but-not-quite adventures with her hunky Italian cousins. She revealed to me the female side of sexual temptation and limits in a way I had never quite encountered before, in a language franker than any woman I know uses, or has used, at least since college.

Part of the allure is hearing the in-your-face raw sexuality of the younger generation, of course. But another part is that it is literate, delicate and well short of raunchy.

I would argue that it is not pornographic. To me pornography aims to titillate, to profit, to manipulate the hormonal imagination. Savia seems merely to speak her mind (and body) in a "just us girls" tone that makes all of it very natural.

We all like sex. Want some. Know that some people are off limits. Would rather focus on just one, but are maybe less virginal than the nuns said we should be.

To my mind, Savia (occasionally) holds up this aspect of life for all to titter a little but ultimately enjoy in a good, clean sense. And besides, she writes about any number of things, such as the death of a loved one's parent or getting soaked in a London afternoon rain, in ways that are memorable and even moving.

Schmutzie, for her part, may prefer to have the first syllable of her blogging handle pronounced like "smut," but she is delightfully child-like and heart-warmingly adoring of her mate. Even when she's edgy. Sorry, Schmuts.

42

This is a post about a post about a post. The circle will be completed when they post about this post, which is really about the ultimate answer to the great question of life, the universe, and everything. For a very long time -- since 1978 -- we have all known the answer is 42.

But this is not about the answer. Unlike Chani or perhaps Sober Briquette, I harbor profound doubts concerning that which we have called God, Allah, Deus, Theos, YHWH (go ahead, zap me for writing it!) and so on.

Instead, this is about what the answers to the question about God are really unlikely to be.

Like Sober, whose reference to "Veggietales" flies completely past my head, I have found Joan Osborne's "If God was One of Us" an intriguing song. I even found the TV show "Joan of Arcadia" reasonably charming. Both avoid crossing the line into preaching what we all "should" believe and instead offer some possibilities.

Karl Marx thought the word "god" and theism would disappear; a century later, Karl Rahner argued that the word would survive as a question, even if theism disappeared, because without it human beings could never face the whole of reality.

We might not agree whether God exists, but we might reasonably agree on what God might not be like if She did. The scholastics called this sort of inquiry, the study of the attributes of God.

One need not hew to any particular philosophical school, however, to agree that if She existed, God would not be the sum of all things, immanent in everything. The essential problem with pantheism (Greek, pan = all; theos = god; "all is god") is that it amounts to something similar to italicizing everything.

Emphasize everything and you emphasize nothing.

Pantheism ultimately means that She does not exist except as some quality or entity so pervasive as not to be seen or heard or even be meaningful in any discernible way. I call that an atheist, which is fine insofar as I am concerned; just let's not pretend otherwise.

Similarly, I think it's very, very unlikely that She is more than one. Anyone who is the bestest and the mostest can't have peers. It's lonely at the top.

When you have a whole bunch of gods on Mount Olympus, you get to the point where everyone starts begetting demigods and sprites and heroes and who knows what and eventually Zeus has to come out, throw a thunderbolt and say "stop effing around, ch'all!" (Of course, he carefully writes an escape codicil for himself.)

She would not be a capricious bearded man on Mount Olympus. Not likely.

If God existed, She would be just your regular one-of-a-kind god next door. The Supreme! (Take that, Martha and the Vandellas!)

Oh, of course, She would not really be a she -- nor a he. I use She merely to offset some 20,000 years of masculine misattribution of a sex. (I'd say we've got about 19,965 years of saying She before we get into trouble.)

From my perspective, gynomorphizing God makes eminent sense. I have as much chance of understanding women as I do of ever understanding God. Even if I sometimes feel I "get" them.

I could go on, but you get the idea. The principle is that the really clear thing about God is that you can't really say too much about Her without falling into a serious logical rabbit hole.

God, in any case, is such a charged name. She would probably prefer being called 42.

Self-Conscious Amoebas

Knowing little about the science, but enough to understand its implications, I am reluctantly coming to the conclusion that there is no free will, nor much less any individuality arising out of it. Yet I rebel at the thought that we are only distinctively self-conscious.

Everything we always attributed to the "soul," the "spirit" and that idealized thoracic muscle that beats faster when we see an attractive specimen of the opposite sex -- all that amounts to complex biochemical interactions in the brain. We are as "instinctive" as animals, responding to social conditioning and evolved genetic predispositions, as well as the immediate environment.

Self-consciousness does not seem redeeming enough. How do we know that animals aren't also self-conscious in their own way? All we know is that we are hardy, violent, we reproduce in astonishing numbers and we manage to infest any environment we colonize.

Sometimes I even wonder if we're not really bacteria in some galactic-scale organism. We might even be a cancer of sorts in some gigantic being's body or the agents of murder being sought by some humongous crime scene investigators.

I know and wonder about all this, but I don't feel it.

I remain as anthropocentric as ever, blogging about what I am thinking as if my thoughts, or the form of their expression (which is what copyright law protects), were so worthwhile as if to justify burning in minutes the remains of dinosaurs and glacial ages, that took millions of years to become coal and gas, into vast electricity generation plants, so that a server somewhere (in New York?) can allow me to create the electromagnetic impulses that configure into symbols of written language when seen by the human eye. Here I pause ... forcing the gigantic humming network to await my next word.

This is very important! These are my thoughts!

Yet in a blink of an eye I will be gone, soon enough forgotten, all trace of my existence likely erased from the face of the Earth, assuming the planet as we know it even continues to exist.

What is all this growing, striving, reproducing, aging and dying for? Only a hungry stomach, the pull of a selfish gene that commands me to feed myself, makes me get up for work, to earn the value-tokens that will allow me to buy carcasses of animals and plants that others have slaughtered, sliced and diced to suit the tastes I have developed through a complex of nature, nurture and happenstance. (Not to mention advertising.)

Sure, I like my work and my job. Really.

All told I am remarkably fortunate among the 6 billion specimens of my species. I have food, clothing, shelter and amusements far beyond what easily the 2 billion poorest people would find utterly unimaginable.

Among the tiny fraction of university educated people -- no more than roughly 25 percent even in the United States graduate from a four-year college -- I am fortunate enough to be one of the few who captains his own company. Even though I am merely a thousandaire, I have unspeakable unmerited freedom in the way I earn my bread.

Yet again, all this for what? To avoid pain? Point taken. Then what?

The only thing that comes to mind is what Aristotle found distinctive about humans. Maybe we live to enjoy our own laughter.

Pity

Few things are more irritating to one who has lived outside the anglophone world than its shibboleth that it is somehow unseemly to be the object of pity. What is so wrong with the emotion that stirred Michelangelo to sculpt the Pietà?

Of course, and thank you Max Weber, the opposition to pity is all part of the Calvinist-capitalist construction that your own good fortune is the fruit of your virtue and God's wise finger in selecting you as one of the select few. Should you fall from grace, it's your own damned fault -- so goes the theory, which settles on evidence of those it calls utterly "undeserving" poor (essentially all poor people).

The corollary to "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" is "if your poor, it's your own stupid fault."

This is one of the absurdities that remind me of George Bernard Shaw on patriotism.

But there's more. Ever since the end of romanticism in art and society, and I'll place the moment the last nail was driven into its coffin as the fall of 1914, every effort has been made to squelch every possible emotion as hollow, mawkish sentimentality -- except to sell war bonds or long-distance telephone fees.

Feelings, however, are a lot of what make us human -- even if they all come from a chemical compound in the brain. Altruism and humanitarianism is based on the feeling of empathy.

This is what allows me to see that, even though your skin is a different color, or you are of a different sex, if I pinch you, it hurts. I know because if you pinch me it hurts me. You are like me; when you suffer, a measure of your suffering spills onto me -- if I am humane and allow myself to feel.

"Never send to know for whom the bell tolls," said John Donne in reference to the death knell, "it tolls for thee."

But what if I am the dead or the dying, physically, emotionally or in any of the myriad of ways in which we die before our body becomes stone cold dead? Am I not worthy of my fellows' empathy?

Might I not expect a respectful removal of the hat when my casket passes by? Or a kind word when I am in pain, even if that word is only inspired by pity, because the other person cannot remove my pain?

Given that we are not, ultimately, in charge of every element of our destiny, even though we are responsible, for a few decades, for some aspects of our behavior, do we not all deserve and need pity? Isn't pity a gift, to be received gracefully and gratefully?

Imagine our desire to banish pity come true. We wake up shivering, dazed, stiff-jointed and uncomfortable, on a sidewalk grate and passers by let us know we are pitied by no one. A few mutter, "Get a job!"

Luckily, right now I do not feel in any way in need of my fellow humans' pity. But the day I stumble, the day my energies begin to flag, the day I am poor and hungry. That day, please, pity me!

What happened to the high ideals of the Declaration of Independence?

We are all moved by those eloquent words penned by Thomas Jefferson, but not only did the Founding Fathers borrow and misrepresent their intentions in the Declaration of Independence, the United States government has not lived up to the stated original goals.

Take the opening sentence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The Second Treatise Of Government by John Locke, published in 1690, states that the premise of all political power is “equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another; there being nothing more evident, than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another without subordination or subjection.”

Was that really true for the United States?

We know than there was no thought given, implicitly or otherwise, to the equality of women (indeed, Southern lawmakers added “sex” as a protected class under the Civil Rights Act being debated in 1964, partly as a poison pill, partly as a joke). So let’s stick to men.

In what sense were the male African slaves or Indians equal? Or how about white indentured servants? Or was the point that the Creator endowed them with equality and certain rights, but hell if the Founding Fathers were going to follow suit?

This is not to mention the Jeffersonian claim in the Declaration that 

whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Here Jefferson went well beyond the Lockian writ. In effect, Locke had considered the question as follows:

May the commands then of a prince be opposed? may he be resisted as often as any one shall find himself aggrieved, and but imagine he has not right done him? This will unhinge and overturn all polities, and, instead of government and order, leave nothing but anarchy and confusion. To this I answer, that force is to be opposed to nothing, but to unjust and unlawful force; whoever makes any opposition in any other case, draws on himself a just condemnation both from God and man; and so no such danger or confusion will follow.

In fact, Locke’s views are reflected in the work of U.S. lawmakers over time.

In 1798, Congress passed four Alien and Sedition Acts that made it illegal for any person “with intent to oppose any measure … of the government” to “print, utter, or publish … any false, scandalous, and malicious writing” against the government. Citizens or foreigners were barred from opposing the execution of federal laws, preventing a federal officer from performing his or her duties, engaging in aid “any insurrection, riot, Unlawful Assembly, or combination” or make any defamatory statement about the federal government or the president.

The Sedition Act of 1918 added willfully employing “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language”  about the U.S. form of government, the Constitution, the flag, or U.S. military or naval forces.

In 1940 the Alien Registration Act allowed the government to detain any national of a country at war with the United States without trial.

These laws were used against Federalists, southern secessionists and more recent political dissenters including socialists, anarchists, pacifists and labor leaders. Not to mention foreigners.

Arguably, the democratic experiment has some ways to go.

What are the best Christian criticisms of Elaine Pagels?

What are the best Christian criticisms of Elaine Pagels?
This is a partner question to: What are the best Christian criticisms of Gnosticism?

Let's first note that Elaine Pagels is a distinguished academic who has specialized in the Nag Hammadi Library finds. Pagels has written provocatively titled books for a middle-brow educated audience—among them, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas, The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans, and Heretics and Adam, Eve and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity. Her books tend to discredit the established facile impressions of early Christianity held by pious believers unfamiliar with scholarship older, newer and deeper than Pagels' own.

For this reason, a number of Protestant fundamentalists and orthodoxy monitors of other Christian leanings find Pagels' work annoying and even "anti-Christian." However, her writings and their actual implications do not automatically disqualify nor discredit the Christian faith. I am not aware of any particular anti-Pagels "school" of worthy critics, but I am aware of criticisms, some of which are valid.

In my opinion, Pagels books tend to overcredit herself and undercredit those on whose shoulders she stands. Pagels became interested in Nag Hammadi as a graduate student and was a minor assistant in a team working on the texts. The principal scholar on Nag Hammadi is James M. Robinson, the principal translator of the codices to English, not Pagels.

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This is a repost from my replies to questions posted on Quora, a question-and-answer site where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users, at quora.com. The questions in italics and their subtexts are not mine.

Santa Claus shows us the fine line between truth and lies

Today's news included a Christmas item about a letter in the JFK Library in which the president wrote to a child assuring her that Soviet nuclear testing at the North Pole would not affect Santa, with whom the man in the White House claimed to have spoken on the telephone the day before.

Forgive me if I stop to point out at just how many levels this letter exemplifies the myriad of ways in which children of the 1950s and 60s, of whom I was one, were lied to blatantly, nonchalantly and unnecessarily. Some of these lies continue today, at some level, to children of the new millenium.

"Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus," looked upon today as a heartwarming story, is the quintessence of the American mythmaking. The 1897 New York Sun editorial, in which Francis Pharcellus Church replied to a letter by Virginia O'Hanlon, was an antecedent of the John F. Kennedy letter.

Let me begin by pointing out the crass commercial motive behind the Sun editorial's profession of a broad nonconfessional "faith." It was no accident that Church prominently cited the bias of O'Hanlon's father, another lie: "If you see it in The Sun, it's so."

Church was selling his newspaper and, along with it, the singular and fundamental philosophical flaw in American society's thinking: the notion that facts are truths to be believed, especially if an authoritative source says so.

Facts are not truth. They are only realities observable within certain contextual circumstances. Almost everything we "know" about physics ceases to be certain, for example, at the quantum level. Facts are only tenable claims, not truth.

Church did O'Hanlon no favor, really. Look up her life and you learn that within little more than a decade she ended up in a short-lived marriage in which the man deserted her before her daughter was born.

Skepticism is warranted. We should not base anything on fact alone; or if we do, we must remind ourselves that the facts are dependent on how perception occurs. Even myth, which is not factual but not necessarily untrue, must be handled with care lest it become an actual falsehood rather than an intuitive inkling of truth.

This is where the gratuitous and arrogant twist of Kennedy's mendacity gets me. He did not have to tell the girl that he had spoken to Santa. It was true enough that Soviet testing of nuclear weapons would not hurt Santa Claus.

In a broader arena, there is little doubt that during the Cold War era the Soviet regime was harsh and repressive. But was it necessary to tell children Superman fought "for truth, justice and the American Way," when that Way featured blatant injustices such as racism and patent falsehoods such as fairly rewarded hard work?

As a child I once wrote a letter to the pope asking that the assassinated Kennedy be canonized. Today, the Irish name summons the indelible image of a young president bidding an infatuated young woman to perform oral sex on an aide in the White House pool. So much for Camelot; King Arthur was a frat boy.