The House of David

"all your cities lie in dust"

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Themes of the Passion


I was reading Chris Tilling, and I came across a somewhat heretical roadside billboard; and it got me to thinking that the whole redemption-arc of Christianity is bigger than one event.

I'd mulled writing up this chart ever since reading the Mormon accounts of Jesus's post-resurrection appearances; I think I'd read them during 2003. It was on my mind last year while I was drawing up the 1 Peter project. As with several of my recent posts, posting this one was put off and put off - but I think I'm ready now.

These are the independent (although not always orthogonal!) topics I have extracted from the various "Passion" accounts. I am here including the Book of Mormon and also Islamic tradition.

Humiliation - Jesus, having come into the world, suffers mortal concerns. First reference I can find is in the hymn Paul quotes in Philippians 2:6-11. This is the first half of Paul's thought; it culminates in the Crucifixion. The opposite holds in Islam, whose Jesus was never divine but created, and as a Prophet over most men.

Passion - Jesus experiences pain. First reference I can find is 1 Peter; further developed in 1 Clement, and the basis for the five narrative accounts of Jesus's execution (if we follow Crossan in including that of "Peter"). This is important to Catholics. It is downplayed in the docetic accounts, among which are Islam and the Gnostics; Paul and the Johannine Epistles don't care either; and it seems secondary to the concerns of John and the LDS.

Crucifixion - By this I do not mean getting Jesus upon that cross (properly part of the Passion). Instead I mean the point at which Jesus appears to be dead, and (except in Islam) the natural order is disrupted. Did Jesus escape the fate of the two robbers; or did his spirit sojourn in Hades? Is he truly dead or did he just appear to be dead... The Crucifixion is the part that matters most to the Gnostics and Paul, and maybe Egerton.

Resurrection - Jesus defeats death. Most Christians believe with the Gospels that it happened after the burial; the Gnostics and, likely, Paul treated it as part of the Crucifixion. Muslims postpone this to Judgement Day - they believe that Jesus isn't dead (more on that later).

Epiphany - Jesus makes his post-victory appearances. These stories are many and diverse: Paul, the missing ending of Mark (one would assume - I think it's in John 21 and Peter), Matthew, Luke, Secret James, Mary, 3 Nephi, even al-Tha'alibi (< Ibn Ishaq < Wahb b. Munabbih - also, I think, Tabari, but not most Muslims). The Transfiguration of the Gospels is an Epiphany pulled back to the narrative-gospel genre. The point of the epiphany is to establish a hierarchy to take over from Jesus, and to lay out its mission; although gnostic sects add further teachings here.

Ascension - Jesus goes further than defeating or bypassing death, and is ensconced in Paradise. For some this explained the lack of a tomb; for everyone it proved that Jesus was a saint, and preserved Jesus for a future time. For the Gnostics, maybe Egerton, and probably Paul: this is of a piece with the Resurrection; for sura 3 and so Islam: this plays the role the Resurrection plays for Christians. For Christians (except Gnostics and Paul) and Muslims, Jesus also rules out future post-resurrection visits before the Return.

Return - Jesus gathers the faithful to himself and rules over them. Gnostics say this has happened already. Christians and Muslims say it will happen at the End. Muslims add that the Mahdi will be involved (although they dispute exactly how); and they insist that Jesus comes back as a sort of cryogenically thawed mortal human, who is to pass away after a few decades.

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posted by Zimri on 17:30 | link |

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

V night!


I'll let you know how this goes. In the meantime, in keeping with what seems to be the themes of this day's blogging, we have the Church and aliens.

Maybe Pope Benedict has been watching this show too...? The pilot was pro-doctrine and pro-priest, but anti-hierarchy - in that they saw the bishops selling out to the Visitors, for the sake of gathering more parishioners.

UPDATE 10 PM: Takeaway themes from V2: the anti-V protestors are an unlovely bunch who are picking fights; the Vs are ruthless and totalitarian (although most people don't see that yet); interpersonal trust is going down; the media think they can manipulate the Vs for personal advantage.

UPDATE 11/11: "V Ratings Fall From Sky - The second episode of "V" logged a 29% drop in ratings from last week. That's the largest fall from a premiere for a scripted show this season." The pilot episode was a bit rushed and preachy. I thought it was good but then - I'm anti-Progressive. Kinda like how Lefties laugh at Margaret Cho these days.

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posted by Zimri on 18:52 | link |

Is SETI a religion?


Here's Michael Crichton back in 2003, on the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (h/t Watts Up):

Faith is defined as the firm belief in something for which there is no proof. ... The belief that there are other life forms in the universe is a matter of faith. There is not a single shred of evidence for any other life forms, and in forty years of searching, none has been discovered. There is absolutely no evidentiary reason to maintain this belief. SETI is a religion.

We can handily test Crichton's thesis that there is no proof of alien life. First, forget his invocation of the Drake Equation, which is a misdirection (deliberate or not). The correct starting point is to recognise that life in the galaxy follows inductive logic. (Like the public-option in healthcare, and intelligent-design in biology.) That is, if one planet around a main-sequence, 4.567 billion year old star can support life: it becomes unreasonable to exclude planets of similar surface g and age, with similar insolation from their star.

Thus the question of intelligent life in this galaxy has been solved. This was proven in 200,000 BC by Mitochondrial Eve.

From there SETI ceased to be a religion; and became a search. Either we find life, or else we find a reason for there not to be intelligent life on every planet within radio range. To resolve either hypothesis we need data on the nature of the stars, and solar systems if any, within SETI's sphere of 50 light-years (counting from 1960).

These data just weren't available in 1960 but we are catching up now. Since 1995 we have found that many nearby stars support planets. We will shortly be in position to tell which of these systems is likely to have habitable planets. When we find enough of them (and the SETI net goes out further), we will have our answer.

Even not finding anything is interesting, once the SETI sphere expands to include too many stars. That too is likely the result of (destructive) intelligence. Brian Aldiss in Helliconia Summer, I believe, proposed that sentient beings would always wipe themselves out; but there is also the alternative of Alastair Reynolds's Revelation Space.

SETI is testable and does not qualify as a religion. The Drake Equation was a bad start to the affair, true, but that does not invalidate SETI itself.

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posted by Zimri on 16:15 | link |

Catholic states


In 1994 I read through Dante's Inferno. In 2002 (not long before starting this blog) I read a good way through Boccaccio's Decameron. In 2007 or so I got into Mencius Moldbug's earlier posts, on Jacobitism and on Dante; earlier this year I posted some of these thoughts over at The Other Green-Themed Site. I think I'm ready now...

Catholicism implies universality. Catholicism developed in Western Europe (and north Africa) during the collapse of Rome. Before Rome, Western Europe was a hodgepodge of tribes and insular kingdoms. After Rome, that state of nature re-emerged; but the local chieftains could now share a culture, faith, and language.

Outside Rome itself, the Church was not able to rule - say - northern England. Besides, it didn't really want to. Jesus and Paul had taught Christians that being a good Christian was independent of politics - almost orthogonal. Sometimes the Church even has to countenance crimes.

Between complete dependence and orthogonality is correlation, though, and that is the relationship between the Catholic Church and the secular State. It is partly for that reason that the Church has retained the right to influence politics. The Church has an interest in protecting Catholics from harm, at the very least.

By contrast: Orthodox communions (and Judaism) are based on ethnicity and often the land; Protestant churches are voluntary associations; and in Islam the ideal is an emirate of religious leaders who command the army and thereby the state.

Boccaccio and Dante both had much to say about the Church and about the various north Italian citystates in the 1300s. These cities were politically independent but subject to a low-level factional war across all of them. These two factions, both of German descent, were the Ghibellines and the Guelphs.

The Ghibellines correspond almost exactly to High Toryism in England up to the early years of Henry VIII. Each nation should be sovereign, and the Church ought never to interfere in politics. Instead the Prince of the nation retains the right to veto any non-doctrinal Church decision in his land. The landed aristocracy and the rural villagers preferred the Ghibellines. If you want Ghibelline thought today, read Mencius Moldbug.

The Guelphs' doctrine is more alien to our way of thought, but their politics are more familiar than one might suppose. They had the merchants and in general what we'd call the "bourgeoisie". They didn't think much of Ghibelline appeals to tradition and were personally affected by their protective tariffs. Taking away the doctrinal differences, the Guelphs were transnational liberals.

The Church could tell that the Ghibellines would lead to schism - "Venetian Orthodox Church", "German Orthodox Church", "Czech Orthodox Church" and on and on. Henry VIII would one day prove them right. In the meantime the Church's choice was obvious - support the Guelphs.

If I may evaluate the Guelph model for today: It has the advantage over the Ghibellines in its separation of State from Church. In addition if we have to have transnational arbiters, the Guelph model also offers a hierarchy - the Church - with a longer pedigree than the international institutions we use now.

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posted by Zimri on 05:53 | link |

Sunday, November 08, 2009

The value of the unborn, the value of the Torah


A long time ago I looked into Exodus 21:22-25. It was well-reasoned ... from a false premise. I posted it before I'd asked any Jews on the topic (which happened in the midst of last year), and before I'd looked into its genesis (so to speak). I've since posted the thoughts here on other blogs, like The Other Green One; but I'll have to drop one here before I get called on the mistakes of that prior post.

In context, this passage derives from a lost Northern-Kingdom document called the Covenant Code. We assume that refugees from Shechem and Samaria brought it down to Jerusalem ahead of the Assyrian legions in the late 700s BCE. From there the Code became part of the Torah and the Torah became the core of what it meant to be Jewish. The Covenant Code is the Torah's Torah.

Jews look at this part of the Covenant Code and they do not see in it a weregeld for the fetus in parity with the weregeld for an adult. Damage to the mother explicitly triggers lex talionis. If the fetus were legally human, it would trigger lex talionis too. The fetus does not, and therefore is not legally human.

Jewish logic currently requires that abortion remain focused on the mother, and not her child. This is not a "pro-choice" position; it is genuinely a "march for womens' lives".

An individual Jew could be pro-life, but would have to base that on a theory of abrogation of the Covenant Code. I do not know of any school of Jewish thought which offers this theory.

By contrast Christianity has the Didache, which although not in the New Testament remains a founding document of Church Tradition. The Didache counts abortion as an evil, asserting the early Christian community's right to abrogate the Torah for the sake of The Way Of Life.

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posted by Zimri on 14:23 | link |

Unreasonable forms of atheism


Atheism requires a theory of the Everything without recourse to God. The first of these theories I can find is Greek atomism. This incorporates an Anthropic Principle wherein this universe is here to be measured, because it happens to be lucky. Most universes don't have the physical laws which allow for abstraction-capable intelligence.

The Anthropic Principle doesn't hold any more explanatory power than do appeals to God. Instead of "o Jehovah" the atomists would have us say "o Infinity". That's not good enough.

The atomists need to give us a physically-practical guide to the alternative universes, or else they need to prove that this universe is the only mathematically-possible universe. Until the atomists do that I will classify atomism as a faith.

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posted by Zimri on 13:58 | link |

Forms of creationism


Conservatives propose that intelligent-design is a scientific alternative to the dominant biological paradigm (evolution via natural selection, mainly). It would help their case if they could define that alternative.

Intelligent-design proponents these days prefer to claim that they are "raising questions" about "Darwin". Evolution proponents counter that ID is a big obscurantist nothing which does not offer a testable counter-proposal.

In this country intelligent-design is a mutation which has evolved over eight decades under the restrictions of the American court system (Scopes, 1925 - Dover, 2005). The evolution of the intelligent-design argument tracks closely the evolution of creationism under the strictures of Greek philosophy 600-300 BCE. Creationism has a storied philosophical pedigree.

While I was at the Other Green-Themed Site, I discovered David Sedley's Creationism And Its Critics In Antiquity and recommended it in just about every creationism thread over there. On the weekend 16-18 October I started this essay (and several others, which I'm in the process of editing) but I'd mislaid the book, and found other topics to do, so I put all of that aside. Now that I've found the book, and also some free time...

Sedley's book describes the Greek attempts to explain life on Earth, and Earth itself, up to Galen in the 200s AD.

Greek creationism isn't taught in school, but that's not wholly the fault of the school. Sedley was the first to gather the references together and to assign them to strains of creationism (and, in two cases, anti-creationism). He also benefitted from modern papyri discoveries in Egypt. Now that we know the history, it's time to teach it.

Sedley found more advanced forms of Near Eastern creationism in the pre-Socratics. Anaxagoras figured the Creator as a cosmic Mind which separated order from primal chaos. Empedocles had the Creator stumbling upon a more ordered universe and building life from those blocks He found. Anaxagoras strikes me as a Genesis-1 Priestly sort concerned with the universe and Empedocles as a Genesis-2 Yahwist concerned with nature; both strains of thought were available to the Phoenicians as of 600 BCE. Anaxagoras and Empedocles extended these ideas and made them available to the Greek world.

Sedley found the first challenge to a theological worldview in the atomists, who proposed an arbitrarily-large cosmos of worlds - applicable also to parallel universes - of which this one happens to be the world we live in (pp. 136-7). This removes the need for any God hypothesis to explain our world.

Sedley then found in Xenophon's Memorabilia I.4 and IV.3 that Socrates was an "anti-scientific creationist" (p. 78). Socrates accepted that the world was naturalistic, but defended the gods from the atheist model by proposing a counter-model: disassociating science from theology. He assumed that if scientists wanted to, they could find out the rules by which the universe works. The universe (from a human perspective) contains an ends-based or "teleological" subset, with (e.g.) a whole class of "barnyard animals" who could never survive in the wild. Socrates concluded that gods did exist, and that some helped in creating the whole world as support for humanity; and by extension that they likely exist today, and are still the friends of humanity. Socrates asserted that scientists shouldn't bother making further discoveries, because these discoveries would do nothing to help humans live the good life. Humans should instead study their own lives to improve them, and thereby to deduce what the gods want.

Plato in the Timaeus, developed the notion of a creator god, the Demiurge, further stating that God was a pure theoretician. Aristotle fused this god with the universe, thus removing his ability to act from outside the universe; there was no act of creation, and God's thoughts and deeds were simply the actions of the universe itself.

Modern creationists from Paley to Behe base their stance on the Argument From Design / Watchmaker / "irreducible complexity" argument. That makes them Socratics.

Modern atheists (as opposed to agnostics) base their stance on the Anthropic Principle. That makes then Atomists.

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posted by Zimri on 12:23 | link |

Saturday, October 31, 2009

The gay Jesus, again


The latest Biblical Archaeology Review has revived the corpse of the gay Jesus. We may as well brace ourselves for another round of That Flamewar.

To introduce our Conservative guests to this dustup: one Morton Smith - who as far as I know is not related to Joseph Smith the discoverer of the plates of Moroni - went to the monastery of Mar Saba and found a copy, the ONLY copy, of a purported letter written by Clement of Alexandria. In it, Clement is discussing two rogue texts of the Gospel of Mark, neither of which are or were in any version of Mark available to the general public. One text talks about Jesus meeting with a young man, alone, to teach him "the mystery". The other makes it explicit that both men were naked. Clement endorses the former, "mystery" text against the "naked" text and against our text; and he tells the reader, don't let this secret leave these walls.

A decade or more ago, I'd made public my opinion that these versions of Mark were unknown even to Matthew and Luke. That is: they were forgeries. I thought that Smith had found an authentic letter of Clement and that Clement was telling the truth up to a point; I just figured that someone had screwed with the text of Mark before Clement read it. This was not unknown in Judaeo-Christian literature; the Gospel of Matthew is such a plagiarism, standing in relation to its source much as Chronicles stands to Kings, the Book of Jeremiah to Septuagint Jeremiah and so forth.

More recently I've grown to wonder if the forgery might be datable... a little later. I first showed my hand in 2005. I carried this on here, and I put down a Morton defender here.

Since Helmut Koester, a grey eminence of Biblical scholarship, is not backing down from his endorsement; we skeptics are pretty much left to the "withholding judgement" argument. This is cowardly and lame of us, and (for the Christians amongst us) even Pascalian. But it's either that or get dragged into a dispute over a text with many problems for all sides.

I won't get into all the problems here, but I have one: that we haven't seen mention of the rogue Marcan texts from Clement's contemporaries. Even if we accept that these texts were available only to Egypt, the sex-averse Gnostics in Nag Hammadi should have said something. Maybe one day we will uncover an Egyptian bathhouse with a well-preserved library.

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posted by Zimri on 17:06 | link |

Monday, October 26, 2009

Autistic atheists


PZ Myers of Pharyngula thinks that these opinions of Christians are weird:

Over 65% of Christians believe angels really exist. Over 70% think the Bible is the most important book in the world. 75% think Jesus' execution atoned for our sins. Over 50% think the book of Genesis is a true account of our origins. 75% believe Jesus was literally born of a virgin. Over 70% literally believe in a Second Coming of Jesus Christ.

I've bolded the statement that is testable. Unfortunately for PZ Myers that statement is also true.

When we talk about "importance" in a document, we must define that as "influential". That means it has an influence on people and the planet.

I agree that the Jewish scriptures, precursor to the Christian Bible/s (and to the Jewish Tanakh), had negligible influence on classical culture, outside the circles of a few antiquarians (and anti-Semites) like Manetho.

But then the Christians edited the Jewish literature alongside their own literature into "the Bible" (mind you, this would have been the Catholic Bible with the deuterocanonica, but bear with me here). The Bible, as so defined, absolutely became important. If nothing else look at how much it was copied. It remains important today - even to nonbelievers, who are stuck with it as part of their culture (and also it incorporates a not-bad Near Eastern history text, as Baruch Halpern has proven).

Some here are exhibiting the mental trait that when they think something shouldn't be important, that means it objectively isn't. We call that trait "autism" and some of the rest of us have had to work to overcome it. PZ Myers and certain of the commenters on his site ought to give that a try.

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posted by Zimri on 16:32 | link |

Friday, October 23, 2009

Criminal enterprises


The post I linked earlier from Barrett Brown rang mostly true for me. "Mostly." (As Newt would say.) It did have one section which made me sit up (labeled "The Thomas Paine Affair", although 'tis not really about Paine):

Protein Wisdom contributor Darleen Click, who has been running the site for a while now, at some point got into the habit of characterizing ACORN as a “criminal enterprise,” presumably because some of its employees were found to have committed crimes while engaged in the enterprise in question. I suggested that, if this was how a “criminal enterprise” is to be defined, then the Catholic Church must also be a criminal enterprise insomuch as that many of its employees were also found to have committed crimes while engaged in the enterprise in question, and that these crimes were not only of a more serious nature, but also seemingly more widespread even when taking into account the relative size of the church. ...

If ACORN is a criminal enterprise, then so are plenty of other things that the gang at PW would probably not want to see referred to as a criminal organization. Incidentally, ACORN is indeed kind of a criminal enterprise insomuch as that it is an enterprise with several employees that have broken the law in the course of their duties – just like ... and also the Catholic Church. So perhap we should save the term “criminal enterprise” for those enterprises that are involved first and foremost in crime, such as the Crips

Brown and Click, and I, are all agreed on the inherent criminality of the Crips; if what they did became legal, they would move to something else illegal. I reject Brown's terms of debate. The crimes which ACORN and the Church in his argument were committing were non-inherent. Even bringing in the Crips as a control group, he's talking about the gangbanger's nephew engaging in a coked-up shootout with the division head of ACORN and the local priest. The Crips then would be forced into doing the same damage control as ACORN and the Church: it would be a distraction from the work (or crimes, if you like) that they wanted to do, and they would all be saying in unison "I don' need this shit, yo". It's entirely pointless, for the purpose of this debate, to talk about individuals engaged in crimes which the parent organisation does not approve.

That's not even what Click was talking about or, at least, it shouldn't have been. I think it's worth discussing the criminality of the Catholic Church and ACORN as designed.

The Catholic Church spawned from a "proto-Orthodox" hierarchical group extant in the third century CE. This group formed its hierarchy mostly as a means to enforce stability upon a religion, Christianity, which prior to that was chaotic. Before the proto-Orthodox became the Church, we have the hostile witness of the pagan Celsus around 178 AD, "On The True Doctrine", preserved by the Christian (but not Catholic) scholar Origen and whose extracts I am reading from the translation of R. Joseph Hoffman (1987) pp. 90-1. As an organisation founded to define and preserve Christianity, the infant Church arrogated to itself the right to disobey laws against Christianity, then on the books in the Roman Empire. In that respect the Church was by definition potentially criminal; analogous to the 1950s civil-rights groups involved in disobedience.

ACORN, the "association of community organisations for reform now", spawned from the Rathke / Wiley National Welfare Rights Organization in 1970. It formed in order to implement the Cloward-Piven strategy via the tactic of Alinsky, which was to weasel into Liberal programmes which had been addressing poverty and to wreck the US Government thereby. Here too I am citing a hostile witness, Discover The Networks. Unlike the Catholics (and the civil-rights groups) ACORN was founded explicitly to work within the written law (to exploit it). Civil-rights and then the Great Society were the law of the land already in 1970.

The difference between the Church and ACORN, and the reason the Church is not inherently criminal and the reason we can call ACORN "anti-law", lies in the two organisations' core missions and in their relationship to the State. Remember here that "the State", by the Hobbesian and more recently Heinleinian definition, can be nothing less than law enforcement.

The Church's core mission, as mentioned, is to protect Christianity. Whatever lawbreaking is done on behalf of Christianity, or against Christianity, is incidental; and the Church has no interest in ending the State. If the Church is allowed to operate, and its people obey the law: then no laws will be broken. Even if everybody becomes good practicing Christians, the Church will still hang around if only for the charity works it does.

ACORN's core mission is the collapse of the State, and therefore ACORN is an organisation designed to end law itself. If ACORN is allowed to operate, the State will collapse and there will be an anarchy; after which, a new State will arise, which doesn't have the liberties ACORN now assumes, and which will not tolerate an ACORN of its own.

So Click is wrong in practice. ACORN is not a "criminal" organisation. It is following our legal standards. Even its aim, to destroy our standards of "law" and "crime" in this country, is legal under the First Amendment.

But for me, and I suspect for Click, it distorts the very meaning of "criminality" to exclude a group so structurally anti-law. What ACORN has done for four decades should be illegal. This is an example of the Liberal Loophole, analogous to that which Obama followed in becoming President. Our system allows for community organisations, and community organisers, to exploit said system so as to destroy it.

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posted by Zimri on 19:55 | link |

Monday, October 19, 2009

Pascal-completeness


I'm currently seeing a tactic on various comment threads: a (polite) dismissal of findings in modern science, on the grounds that we will all know what the truth is when we die. (There's no point linking to an example; it's easily found.)

Says the person laying out this case - evolutionists (say) have but a "theory". If there's a 90% or even a 99.9% chance that evolution is true, it is still safer for us to be wrong in denying evolution and to deal with that minor bummer, than for us to be be wrong in accepting evolution and... well.

The first step, in any problem, is to find out if the problem fits any known template. In this case we are dealing with a passive-aggressive version of Pascal's Wager, cited here almost five years ago.

A debate develops in much the same way as an automaton, or machine, or running process. Some automata can be grouped into "-complete" classes, which follow principles common across the class. For example, Turing-complete automata: once you know that your machine is Turing-complete, it's just a matter of writing the compiler and then you can run your C program on it. Conversely, the NP-complete problems: once you prove your program is NP-complete, you know you're screwed.

So here, I give you the Pascal-complete argument - once The Wager is laid, the argument has become an argument over the Wager, and the original argument is dead.

There are counters to The Wager but unfortunately, no-one you meet will accept them. Anyone who reacts to an objectively knowable fact about this world, by means of Pascal's Wager (however much Nerf foam s/he wraps it in): that one has shown their hand. They'd have to want to change their outlook and, it's not going to happen. They are not to be reasoned with. evolutionThread.Abort(); if C# is your thing.

In a moderated debate, Pascalian arguments would be slapped out of bounds. If the general population were more rational, then the other observers to the debate would step in.

Real life isn't a debating society; standard-model humans, who aren't up with the literature and have lives outside logic - they judge based on personal feelings. And anyone who puts on their Shatner-face and yells "PASCAAAAL" into the monitor isn't going to win friends.

UPDATE 10/29 - This post assumes that it is intuitive that a debate is like a computer program. I've since written an explanation for that, and linked it here.

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posted by Zimri on 19:14 | link |

Friday, October 16, 2009

Is God autistic?


The autist sits alone and writes rules.


It's not always clear what those rules are. Some say that they are a set group of commandments and prohibitions, others that they are a creed of axiomata, but most assume it's a mix. Everyone does agree that if the rules are not followed then Bad Things will probably happen.


People talk to Him but He doesn't always answer, and rarely in a way that makes much sense. The autist's friends tell people that He loves the world and loves humanity. But this isn't clear to those who don't know Him.


When people come into His presence, He judges them upon those rules. Those who followed, get to stick around. Those who didn't, are shut out. The autist holds grudges and most people agree that when someone is shut out she's probably not getting another chance.

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posted by Zimri on 16:57 | link |

Sunday, October 11, 2009

Conservatives in the mist


Robert Stacy McCain is a controversial blogger. He is Southern-born and proud of that. If he filled out a Census, he would write his ancestry "American"; most citizens instead prefer to call themselves German, Black, Irish or (in my case) English. I take him at his word that he speaks for the base Conservative.


In nineteenth-century terms, his Conservatism is a Romantic movement.


For the Conservative, Americanism has a mystical meaning. It is rooted in love of the land and of fellow tribesmen. This is what Europeans will immediately recognise as “blood and soil”, or “nationalism”; but the best word I know of is Ibn Khaldun’s asabiya.


From his standpoint, the Conservative is free to rank his fellow citizens on personal kinship and degree of fealty to America. His "Americanism" is tied to the local community, public ritual, and military service or at least belonging to a family with active duty members. It is not about the founding documents or any other set of abstract beliefs. Thinkers who argue for Conservatism exist - like Edmund Burke - but they are not, themselves, Conservative. (Burke was a Whig.) Even the Constitution is secondary to a Conservative if it conflicts with what he is used to. This sets the Conservative apart from ideological allies, like libertarians and reactionaries - even Mormons.


Conservatives retain the right to discipline members who call into question the common ideals of the community. These days the heretic is usually a Liberal.


Conservatives see no need to discipline members who are following a fundamentalist strain of the local faith. In a dispute in which side A is arguing for something clearly stupid but with a cultural basis in the community (Creationism, or Josh MacDowell), and side B is arguing against: Conservatives will pick side A as it is, at least, their side.


Conservatives join the Democrats if they are Black or central-Mexican; they join the Republicans or the Constitution Party if they are White, north-Mexican, Cuban, or Vietnamese.

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posted by Zimri on 17:51 | link |

Monday, March 29, 2004

The ancient value of the unborn


I just visited two sites, each of which linked to Allen Brill's blog "The Right Christians"; again, a blog I had never read before. One was from yet another blog I'd never read before: "The Buck Starts Here", who's now being Instalanched. The other was from one of my daily fixes, Protein Wisdom, who is no fan of TRC.

Anyway, in light of the recent Senate vote, TRC gave us the "Obscure Bible passage of the day":

"When people who are fighting injure a pregnant woman so that there is a miscarriage, and yet no further harm follows, the one responsible shall be fined what the woman's husband demands, paying as much as the judges determine. If any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe." Exodus 21:22-25 (NRSV)

Brill points out "The facts could hardly be more on point for the Unborn Victims of Violence Act." True, that. I applaud this man for giving us a relevant Scripture quote.

But Brill also claims that whether the Torah is claiming the fetus is human or not is "complex and ultimately, inconclusive". Begging his pardon, that is only because he is asking the wrong question of this passage. The Torah isn't about human rights, but human obligations. That is why it is called "Torah" - "Law" - and not "Bill of Rights". The Torah cannot apply to creatures unable to comply with it (or else we would be prosecuting wolves for eating wild boars!). The Torah applies to us sentient humans: in this case, whether we have a right to kill the fetus.

The Torah makes three points here that are relevant to believing Jews (and Christians and Muslims). First is that the fetus has value of a human baby (which is not the same as "human rights"!). Second is that the person who harms one ought to pay a penalty. Third - and here be the controversy - this penalty ought to be such that will satisfy the bereft household.

The pericope associates the ruling with the lex talionis. Now, the lex talionis typically kicks in when there has been personal damage done, up to murder; hence "life for life" even here. Since that law only limits revenge attacks, rather than ending them, the ancients had as of Torah-time already attempted to replace that system with what we Anglo-Saxons call the weregeld, literally "man-money". Some judge would weigh the victim's value to society, the heinousness of the crime, and the ability of the murderer to pay; come up with a suitably ruinous fine; and get that thug to pony up - to someone. Therefore: the Torah treats the fetus as a type of babyvaluable for the household.

The Torah decided that the legal father stands in for said household. This is because the Torah assumes that the father and mother are the most aggrieved parties, after the baby; and, in good Bronze Age fashion, that the father is in the best position to use the money in the service of his house. This Torah passage therefore must assume that the woman is married and that the baby is the husband's. (This has other implications for the pro/antiabortion debate, which are irrelevant here...)

Since we no longer live in the Bronze Age, we satisfy the berieved with means other than eye-for-eye or Weregeld. We have a justice system, which takes into account society's interest in keeping criminals from committing more crimes. Those of us who hope to have children just plain don't want to put up with those who are willing and able to murder the babes of pregnant women.

The Torah and the UVVA agree that the fetus has value; and that those who would harm it ought to be punished as if it were a full-term baby. Whether you believe the fetus is a person, or just a possession of a household, is not relevant to either. Brill is right that the Unborn Victims of Violence Act is a modern version of Exodus 21:22-25. No person who opposes this Act may call himself a Jew or Christian in honesty.

UPDATE 11/8/2009: I was wrong. The UVVA is a Christian overreaction to the passage and alien to the intent of the Torah. Read this.

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