Listics

I wonder which is more alienating, twenty-two new Israeli homes in the West Bank, or an American pissing on the Qu’ran.

While America fusses about the Newsweek reports of the Quran used for toilet paper… that’s a money making idea incidentally, and I’ll make it available to novelty print-shops under a Creative Commons license… toilet paper scrolling off the sacred texts from the bathroom roll, perforated, two-ply…  while America frets and fusses about the nasty liberal media and the usual suspects try to turn our attention to the non-news regarding sourcing of a dull story by Newsweek, the Brits (bless their repressed little hearts) have begun the tortured process of attempting to share the truth with this bloated democracy that is too apathetic to listen.

But enough about the Brits, let’s talk about the "people of the book."

Talk about a historical blind alley.  Several thousand years ago the technology shifted from carved stone and clay tablets to parchment and papyrus.  Monotheistic believers in the middle-east took advantage of the media and laid their myths down in writing.  A millenium or so later, several hundred years after the Trojan war had played itself out, the christian cult showed up and entered the competition for religious mind-space.  Never mind that there were lots of fine North African gods languishing following the defeats of the Barca clan, these people discarded perfectly fine alternatives like Baal and Moloch, ignored the precepts of fire worshippers, dissed the entire pantheon of Greek and derivative Roman deities, and ripped off the one true G-d that the Hebrews worshipped while installing their guru as the annointed son of same…  "same," dammit, not "SAM"  What kind of people are you anyway?

It remained for them to append several poorly written and conflicting stories regarding son-of-same to the book the Hebrews had been carrying around, to write a few letters to each other confounding common sense and propping up a cultural patrimony, then to shut down any debate with a whiz-bang dip of ergotamine snuff and record the original apocalyptic vision.

Things were quiet for several hundred years give or take the roar of the occasional lion, the crunch of a martyr’s bones.  But out in the desert a few local chapters of the Sons of Hagar were forming (no - not sons of Sammy Hagar, but rather descendants of Ishmael, he of the Book, the original, the one true protagonist of Moby Dick who shared with us the wisdom of Starbuck, the first mate and brewer of coffee, and of Queequeg, the harpoonist and maker of coffins).  They, the sons and daughters of Hagar - not Starbuck and Queequeg - invented algebra, eschewed alcohol, and they brewed a fine cuppa Joe.

Then came the crusades, Attaturk’s genocide of the Armenians, Hitler’s genocide of the Jews, and what’s next?  He’s a loving god, a fierce god, and everything we know about him we learned from bad acid or from the book. 

And we know how to get each other’s goat around that book thing.  Take what they did down in Gtmo.  It wasn’t about a TP shortage. It was about disrespect.  Imagine what the Tennessee snake-handlers would have said if they’d used a Holy Bible that way in Islamabad.  And would the Jews have risen up in massive violence if somebody had so used a Torah?  It really doesn’t matter. 

A few days ago Norm Jenson posted an op-ed by Shadia B. Drury, "Virtue Trumps Freedom."  Included were these observations,

When virtue becomes the supreme value in a society, the result is the criminalization of "sin" as defined by the sacred texts - and as these texts are interpreted by the powerful. You end up with a society that resembles the reign of the English Puritans in seventeenth-century England-they abolished Christmas because it was too much fun and there was too much pleasure and indulgence associated with it. Or you end up with a society that resembles the reign of the Taliban in Afghanistan of recent memory: no music; no dancing; no kite flying; no films; no female voices singing on the radio; no female voices broadcasting the news; and no female arms, ankles, or faces seen in public. All these harmless freedoms and pleasures are supposedly too obscene - unlike public executions, stoning, burning witches, or tormenting Jews. 

[…another] reason that biblical religions are an obstacle to free societies is their attachment to the concept of collective guilt. The biblical God tends to punish the whole community for the sins of the few. In fact, the biblical God brags about his penchant for that kind of justice: ". . . I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me . . ." (Exodus 20:5). Time and again, the anger falls on the whole community for the transgressions of some. Some of the Hebrew prophets, such as Jeremiah, rightly objected to this divine justice and looked forward to a new covenant in which "everyone shall die for his own iniquity" (Jeremiah 31:30). Ezekiel echoed the same principle (Ezekiel 18:20), but to no avail. When Jesus came, things got even worse. Jesus took it for granted that all men and women are justly condemned for the sins of their ancestors-Adam and Eve. Jesus supposedly came to bear the punishment that we justly deserve for original or inherited sin.

Moby Dick was a good book, and there are enlightening and interesting passages in the bible.  I’m sure the same can be said of the Jewish texts and the Islamic, but when oh when are we going to get over this need to elevate "the sacred" to anything more than a state of mind?  And what is the medieval attachment to the printed page that would make people of whatever faith rise up in anger if one were somehow construed as mistreating it?  Of course, I don’t get it about flags and the pledge of allegiance either.  I think this world needs more Jainists and fewer Janissaries.  (And no offense to these guys is intended.  They seem to be the exception that proves the rule).

A dead bluejay is where this starts.  Molly picks it up and runs off with it.  I roar for her to "LEAVE IT!" and I take off after her.  She whips away around the arbor vitaes and is half way down to Cathy’s place before I round the grove.  I see her there on the other side of the fence.  The bird is gone, dropped during the excitement of the chase no doubt, certainly not out of obedience. 

I ignore the little West Nile carrying brat and let the old dog out of her kennel.  We oldsters shuffle away, out the path toward the orchard.  Pretty soon Diggy wanders away and Molly whips past like a bullet train, tightens her trajectory around a clump of red twigged dogwood and barrels on in with a grin.  I give Digster a wave and she catches the hand motion and ambles our direction.  Molly is off like a shot again, twice around the woodlot, back to the house and then back out on the bullet train orchard path cutting as close to Diggy and me as she can without knocking us down.  I walk over the little rise and I see the beekeepers out by their hives in the orchard.

Shit.

Molly has burned off the first few stages of rocket propulsion so she’s back in a nominally biddable state of dog.  I suggest that she be seated and remain there while I leash her.  Mirabile dictu, she obeys.  I suppose I could have turned my little herd back toward the house at this point and avoided conflict.  I knew there was a chance that Diggy was going to do the next wrong thing.  But she vectored off toward the road and I wanted to check out the service berries that we planted a few weeks ago, so I led Molly on the west side of the orchard headed north, well away from the beekeepers.

The shrubs were doing fine.  We headed back and of course there was the Digster tail-wagging on her arthritic way toward the guys in the moon suits.  She’s deaf so I didn’t call.  I waved at her, trying to give her the signal to come back our way.  The spacemen waved back.  "The dog!" I yelled and they got it, too late.  She’s being stung anbd they’re doing nothing and I have  to go down there and try to rescue her and she rubs her nose in the grass, and comes my way, and I tell these guys, "I’m really angry.  If you had stopped by the house I wouldn’t have taken the old dog out in the field." 

They didn’t handle the anger part very well.  They gave me back attitude, kind of a "humph - well now we know how you feel" kind of thing.  I’m not a fully realized master.  I said, "Well, you can get the hives off my land then."   

Guy says, "Okay, we will.  When I get back from Mexico."

To which I politely replied, "If that shit’s not gone in a week, I’ll burn them."

"Thanks for the warning," the guy says. 

This stuff may be deeper than it appears.  I went back to apologize for my hostility after I put the dogs away, but they were gone.  Last year, the people who have the CSA here at our place kind of invited the bee keepers to do their thing and I was in the position of agreeing or looking like a jerk.  So this is kind of the slow reflex.  I look like a jerk a year later.

If the guys had stopped back at the house to talk, to ask about Diggy, to connect, then this thing would have resolved itself.  They didn’t.  Life’s too short to let people take advantage of you.   Diggy is only going to be around another summer.  Why mess it up with a bee-stung nose?

Speaking of the buckle of the bible belt…  The Frist filibuster at Princeton continues.  Here’s a link to their web presence (includes a blog and webcam).  Pleasing to see that Frank Wilczek took part.

(…again, thanks to Beth for pointing me to this item that I would have otherwise missed.  No disrespect intended to my Tennessee hosts, but how embarrassing it must be to have to know that Dr. Frist represents you in the Senate.)

I am on some strange mail lists…  the subject of this post came from a NARAL promotion.  Can I just help NARAL and skip the free phone minutes?

Oh, if YOU want the phree phone minutes, here’s the link.

Murdered by the State of Ohio National Guard in complicity with the Nixon administration:

ALISON KRAUSE

JEFFREY MILLER

SANDRA SCHEUER

WILLIAM SCHROEDER

Pope-a-dope alert.  The discriminating reader will skip this post. 

Ratzo is a brilliant, cultivated man, who in later life, like some kind of hippie, has changed his name from the harsh "Ratzinger" to the more mellifluous "Benedict," a reminder of catholic culture and fine liqueur.

I was ready to lay this down, but there’s an echo of "So, he was a Nazi… heck, everybody was in those days" floating around the room like a dog-fart that won’t go away.  Somebody let the divine rottweiler our for some air please.  Actually, not everybody was a Nazi in Bavaria.  For sure the Jews and gypsies had a hard time joining the party, and homosexuals and communists were socially disadvantaged.  But even regular old lederhosen and hassenpfeffer dudes could stand aside if they chose to follow their conscience:

There were boys in Traunstein and in the surrounding area who managed
to avoid being in the Hitler Youth. Rupert Berger is the same age as
Ratzinger and was ordained as a priest in the same class and seminary
as Ratzinger in 1951. Berger’s father was sent to a concentration camp
for a month because of his anti-Nazi activities; his son refused to
join the youth organization.

[Berger said] "There were teachers who exerted pressure and also other teachers
who were against the Hitler Youth.  My father said, ‘I give you the
freedom to choose.’  …The majority went. That does not make all of them Nazis … I wouldn’t
say that Ratzinger made a choice. He rather slipped into the Hitler
Youth thing."

My argument isn’t with Ratzo, nor even especially with catholicism.  Rather, the whole cultural morass of deism is what gives me trouble.  I was ferreting around for references to "epistemology" and I came across this thread o’ links…
Epistemology
Certitude - reminding me of Doc’s none too flattering classification of yours truly as a "certidude" a few years ago when the Iraq war had just begun.
Truth - this link is where things got thorny for me, because for some people "truth" seems to be founded in something called "god." 

Every existing thing is true, in that it is the expression of an idea which exists in the mind of God, and is, as it were, the exemplar according to which the thing has been created or fashioned.

Rather than starting with Thomas Aquinas, a man who lacked the experience of the 17th century and times since, these people ought to seriously consider starting with Bertrand Russell.  And perhaps if Ratzinger had been willing to subordinate his own reason to ethical considerations in the thirties and forties, he would have been a better man for it.

yes, yes, I’m making leaps here… this is a blog posting during break time for goodness sakes…

Like a tooth extraction, I can’t seem to keep my tongue out of the gap.  Anyway, while the preceding post pointed to the best way through the whole pope muddle in the long run, I must refer you now to a friend who writes shyly under a pseudonym and who has some serious observations to share.  A taste…

Benedict’s election seems to be close to the worst possible
result. There’s no chance that the moral issues that divide the church
– abortion, gays, divorce, contraception, the role of women — will be
downplayed. Nor will the needed decentralization occur. The
church window once opened by John XXIII will remain shut for another
pontificate. And, as a consummate Vatican insider, Benedict enjoys the
support of the curia, so there is little hope of him soon dying in his
bed like Pope JP1.