Ehrman's Bible

I have to quote an Ehrman passage I just read:

Jesus Interrupted, by Bart D. Ehrman, NYC 2010

The Death of Jesus in Mark and Luke
... Since the nineteenth century, scholars have recognized that Mark was the first Gospel to be written, around 65-70 CE. Both Matthew and Luke, writing fifteen or twenty years later, used Mark as one of their sources for much of their own accounts. That is why almost all of Mark's stories can be found in Matthew or Luke, and it is also why they tell the stories. Sometimes just two agree and the third doesn't, because occasionally only one of the later Gospels changed Mark. This means that if we have the same story in Mark and Luke, say, and there are differences, these differences exist precisely because Luke has actually modified the words of his source, sometimes deleting words and phrases, sometimes adding material, even entire episodes, and sometimes altering the way a sentence is worded. It is probably safe to assume that if Luke modified what Mark had to say, it was because he wanted to say it differently. Sometimes these differences are just minor changes in wording, but sometimes they affect in highly significant ways the way the entire story is told. This appears to be true for the portrayal of Jesus going to his death.

Jesus' Death in Mark
In Mark's version of the story (Mark 15:16-39), Jesus is condemned to death by Pontius Pilate, mocked and beaten by the Roman soldiers, and taken off to be crucified. Simon of Cyrene carries his cross, Jesus says nothing the entire time. The soldiers crucify Jesus, and he still says nothing. Both of the robbers being crucified with him mock him. Those passing by mock him. The Jewish leaders mock him. Those passing by mock him. Jesus is silent until the very end, when he utters the wretched cry, "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani," which Mark translates from the Aramaic for his readers as, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Someone gives Jesus a sponge with sour wine to drink. He breathes his last and dies. Immediately two things happen: the curtain in the Temple is ripped in half, and the centurion looking on acknowledges, "Truly this man was the Son of God."
This is a powerful and moving scene, filled with emotion and pathos. Jesus is silent the entire time, as if in shock, until his cry at the end, echoing Psalm 22. I take his question to God to be a genuine one. He genuinely wants to know why God has left him like this. A very popular interpretation of the passage is that since Jesus quotes Psalm 22:1, he is actually thinking of the ending of the Psalm, where God intervenes and vindicates the suffering psalmist. I think this is reading way too much into the passage and robs the "cry of dereliction," as it is called, of all its power. The point is that Jesus has been rejected by everyone: betrayed by one of his own, denied three times by his closest follower, abandoned by all his disciples, rejected by the priests, the passersby, and even by the two others being crucified with him. At the end he even feels forsaken by God himself. Jesus is absolutely in the depths of despair and heart-wrenching anguish, and that's how he dies. Mark is trying to say something by this portrayal. He doesn't want his readers to take solace in the fact that God was really there providing Jesus with physical comfort. He dies in agony, unsure of the reason he must die.
But the reader knows the reason. Right after jesus dies the curtain rips in half and the centurion makes his confession. The curtain ripping in half shows that with the death of Jesus, God is made available to his people directly and not through the Jewish priests' sacrifices in the Temple. Jesus' death has brought an atonement (see Mark 10:45). And someone realizes it right off the bat: not Jesus' closest followers or the Jewish onlookers but the pagan soldier who has just crucified him. Jesus' death brings salvation, and it is gentiles who are going to recognize it. This is not a disinterested account of what "really" happened wen Jesus died. It is theology put in the form of a narrative.

theology put in the form of a narrative

Historical scholars have long thought that Mark is not only explaining the significance of Jesus' death in this account but also quite possibly writing with a particular audience in mind, an audience of later followers of Jesus who also have experienced persecution and suffering at the hands of authorities who are opposed to God.

authorities who are opposed to God

Like Jesus his followers may not know why they are experiencing such pain and misery. But Mark tells these Christians they can rest assured: even though they may not see why they are suffering, God knows, and God is working behind the scenes to make suffering redemptive.

God is working behind the scenes
to make suffering redemptive

God's purposes are worked precisely through suffering, not by avoiding it, even when those purposes are not obvious at the moment.

God's purposes are worked precisely
through suffering, not by avoiding it.

Mark's version of the death of Jesus thus provides a model for understanding the persecution of the Christians.

provides a model for understanding

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My King James' printed Jesus' sayings in red. Knatz.com highlighted special pk quotes in blue. Other sacred quotes, Gregory Bateson quotes, Illich; Prigogine, I left in the default setting: plain black on white. But now, at least for this post, I think I'll highlight Ehrman quotes in purple: the color of royalty.

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I transcribed the above passage manually, proofed it the best I could, posted it, and then I emailed the author to ask permission to quote his current book at length!
Backwards perhaps, but then that's me.
Ehrman responded within hours: he doesn't own the rights. Ah! So let his publisher come after me. I take it that I have the author's permission: and that matters to me one hundred times more than any technical legal "owner"!

Meantime my son offered me the e-text, so I wouldn't have to copy. Anything I add can but copied and pasted. But actually I may pause there (here) anyway. What I repeat above in purple was the point of my getting started.

authorities who are opposed to God

God's purposes are worked precisely
through suffering.

Let it suffice: for now.

Judaism, Christianity, Chrixity

Chrixian is to Christian

as Christian is to Jew:

mutually orthogonal.

The Jews are credited with founding monotheism. They honor a creation god. They'd gotten the religion with its stories going pretty well by two and a half thousand years ago. The Jews built a grand temple in Jerusalem to house this god. The Temple of Jerusalem claimed to speak for God. It's still there, it still does.

Around two thousand years ago Judaism split (I bet not for the first, or last, time). The splinter sect said that God had sent his son, Jesus, as a Messiah, to the Temple, had cleansed the Temple of degenerate practices, got arrested, scourged, crucified for his trouble. In other words, the new group was saying that the old group had lost heaven's mandate, had betrayed its charter. These Christians built new temples called churches. One church in particular became ascendant in Western Europe: the Roman Catholic Church: it's the one with the Pope.

But of course that church too splintered. Luther wanted Christians to read the Bible for themselves. (The Church knew perfectly well what trouble that could lead to.) The Pope put out a contract on Luther. But the splinters flourished, and splintered, and flourished some more. Note: the Church claims to speak for God, says that salvation is due Christians, but only through the church. Meantime splinters say salvation is due Christians ... (But ignore core Christian concepts such as Original Sin and Atonement.) (or, try to monopolize them without understand them!)

Meantime, other critics come along. Ivan Illich says that the Whore of Babylon has taken control of the Bride of Christ. The Church is in the hands of ... professionals, experts, specialists, who drink wine, have housekeepers, drive Cadillacs ... and don't understand a thing about Christ.

pk joined Illich. Now I coin the term Chrixity.

The Jews claim God; but betray God.
The Christians reclaim God; but still betray God: in the same old ways. Jesus is still on the cross, after two thousand years of torture. (The Jews (using the Romans the way Henry II used his barons) only crucified Jesus for one day!)

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I draft, post, redraft. Sometimes I see something in the first draft missing from the second draft. I'm tempted to keep both drafts. "Ms." was proposed to replace Miss and Mrs.; but it didn't: it added a third category: Miss, Mrs. or Ms.! Flaubert revised Mme. Bovary so many times he introduced new mistkaes while he erased old.

Anyone who doesn't like the chaos of my drafts, introduced infelicity compromising tightened prose, should damn well send me a budget to work with: instead of arresting me, censoring me, squashing me after crippling me (after banishing me).

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First there's the Jews: monotheists. Orthogonal to the Jews, the Christians steal their shtick, say they speak for God, mis-transcribe and reedit something they call the Bible, claiming their work is God's own.

pk repeats the same shtick: the Church betrays God, Christians are people, and people torture the bearers of God's messages. I give this vision, this metaphor, a name: Chrixity.

But I don't want to splinter. I wish I could unite. But people would have to be able to understand what's said to them first. Understanding is prerequisite to listening: and versa visa.

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I said the Jews are credited with inventing monotheism: we don't know enough of events to know what the truth is. Our records are recent, human: incomplete at best, mucked with at worst. The Jews wanted to steal the land of the people they called Canaanites; maybe they stole their one god from some other people too. I don't say they did; we don't know that they didn't. What I do know is that all of us babbling away, writing our noise down, loading it onto the electromagnetic spectrum, are kleptocrats: thieves.

Me too.

Hide & Seek

Alan Watts' The Book presented existence as a game of Hide and Seek. He credited the metaphor to the Hindus. I love it. I believe it. That is, I half-believe it. I'm not sure I entirely believe anything: not even my own theory of Macroinformation, not even Darwin's theory of the Origin of Species, not even Pythagoras' theorem. Watts developed the idea through an alien theology: give us a fresh palatte, a little independence from our brainwashing. Fine, but I wed it right back to standard western monotheism: orthodox Christianity under the Scholastics maintained that God was Real, that God was the only thing that was real: all else was illusion, mistake, error. Thus: there is God, and only God. Nothing but God. And God is spending eternity playing with himself: playing hide and seek with himself, trying to fool himself, and almost, sometimes, succeeding.

Back to Hindu symbology again. All is Vishnu. Vishnu is Shiva. Shiva is Vishnu thinking he's Shiva. Vishnu is Shiva thinking he's Kali.

God is Jehovah begetting Jesus, thinking he's a holy spirit.

OK, get it? Think it through yourself: for five or six decades. It's really good. It gets better and better. Though I was still only twenty-four or so when I made what may be my best joke with it: I told my army friend that when the world ended, when we were all incandescing radioactively, every cell of our bodies sundered and flying off in dimensions we've never heard of at velocities we can't calculate, I'm going to summon a last word, and say to the Void, "I am not amused!"

How's this for Hide & Seek? I'm going to lump metaphors!

Deep Cover & Mission Impossible

The movie Deep Cover (1992) shows Laurence Fishburne as a cop pretending to be a drug dealer. As the plot thickens we're not sure he's not a drug dealer deluding himself he's a cop. I love it. In Hide and Seek cosmology nothing is clear, except for the monotheistic axioms, and they're not really clear either. God and Satan change roles. Is Jesus a savior or a charlatan? Seems realistic, truthful to me: do you really think the cops are there to protect you? the soldiers? Or are they there to bully you, to make you pay taxes, go to school, not let on that you doubt any of the orthodoxies, while claiming to be free, independent, not a slave: certainly not a robot: absolutely not a contagion.

I gotta take a break, be back when I can. meantime: I love the Mission Impossible deep cover line "As always, should you or any of your I.M. Force be caught or killed, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions": and the utter Big Brother detail, "This tape will self-destruct in five seconds." Belief as atheism. Nazis with no Hitler to blame!

Mark's Mary

The Only Game in Town!

I "studied" the Bible as a child, in college, since, but it's only in the last few years that I've learned anything really significant from those seven decades of study. The society and its institutions can sabotage intelligence all they want, but sometimes something slips through. With John and Jesus murdered, a word may survive. Galileo, Darwin, Freud got attacked, ignorance, stupidity is triumphant, but somehow some intelligence, some wisdom may get through. Jesus may somehow save some of us even while the powers continue to crucify his successors, other saviors, continue to pervert talent, generosity, godliness ... genius. I showed an avid interest in the Bible. I demonstrated an eagerness to perpetuate the fundamentalism I was force fed. But the school, the church, my family, the whole culture steered me away from theology: no, we wanted doctors, lawyers, Ponzi schemers. Well, I'm a theologian anyway, just outside all the churches, outside the Republicans, and Democrats. And Communists! Outside. Near starving. That's me. But somehow an intelligent, honest Bible reader emerged from all those piled millennia of dishonesty: Bart Ehrman. He's was a child fundamentalist who actually insisted on learning some of the lessons of close textural and historical readings of the Bible nurtured in the isolation of the seminary/terrariums. (The Church may have been smarter than the Protestants say when it opposed confidence in the ability of yesterday's illiterate to properly read scripture. The Church wanted a lid on, Protestants blew the lid off, but without understanding much.)

The terrariums teach it, but the graduating pastors refuse to pass it on. The seminaries teach liberal readings, acknowledge problems, but the graduates immediatly return to their initial prejudices, and perpetuate them in the churches that hire them. The churches side-rail the intelligent, the honest; the morons control the misinformation.

Check out Ehrman's books. Misquoting Jesus and Lost Christianities were the first two I read. Now I'm enjoying Jesus, Interrupted too. Get your facts from him: I just want to go straight to one (set of) fact(s), known for a good while now, but not much publicized: despite Ehrman penning best sellers. Cambell got side-railed, I got side-railed; Ehrman gets lionized; but it still doesn't matter. Bishop Wilberforce will beat Darwin and Huxley over the long haul.

Ehrman is the Christian scholar who's actually reached a couple of readers with the news that the Gospel According to St. Mark is the oldest of the Bible's gospels, that it post-dates Jesus's estimated death by two-thirds of a century, that the oldest copies of it are a couple of centuries younger than that, and that the oldest Mark ends short of the Mark passed to us by churches. The oldest Mark ends its story with the opening of the tomb: then the angel tells Mary Magdalene that Jesus is risen. The angel tells Mary to go and tell the others, the disciples. But Mary is frightened, Mary goes home, Mary Magdalene tells no one! That's the "original" ending of the original Mark: that is, the oldest Mark we can deduce, can find.

If God was trying to save mankind by sacrificing himself in the person of Jesus, it sounds to me like he failed. God gave us Jesus, gave us a chance: we rejected Jesus: murdered him, then rejected the salvation. Christians are bade to bear witness. We don't. Or we do: bear witness to bullshit, to lies. To vanity. If it's vain, we'll repeat it, embellish it, embroider it. If it's tough, if its honest, if it's intelligent, if it's compatible with hard truth, we'll ignore it, sabotage it, rewrite it: till it's flattering, fits in our vanity miror.

My piece here, God's Lure, tells how it makes me sick to think that God is using me as a lure only to expose the rapacity of my fellows. I tell my girlfriends, my wife, my son, my more girlfriends ... what I promised God to try to tell people: they get it only enough to reject it, the proudly tell me that they're following Roosevelt instead, or Bush, or Rothbard, or Mises.

My girl friend sees that the Church is a liar. But she still wants to go to Church!

Gamblers have a joke that applies to Christians. The degenerate gambler is playing at a roulette table. His friend says, "Don't you know that table is crooked?" "Yes, I do," says the degenerate gambler. "Then why are you still playing at it?" "Because it's the only game in town!"

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Try this as a thought experiment: in our lab we shall for the immediate purpose take Christian symbols literally: there is a God, there is a Christ, there was a Jesus, there will be a Judgment ... Peter was a leading disciple, Peter denied Jesus, a legitimate Church made Peter its first pope ...

Now let's imagine Peter at Judgment. Let's imagine God weighing bits of evidence in a balance scales: in the Saved pan he puts Peter's eminence as a disciple, in the Damned pan he puts Peter's denial of Jesus. ... All my life I've heard jokes in which Peter is the keeper of the pearly gates: but does that make it so? Shouldn't we wait till after Judgment to see who's in heaven, what use God is making of them? If Jesus himself spent three days in hell, how long should Peter go to hell for? Should we imagine that he's out yet? ever? Maybe Peter will tend some future pearly gate.

But of course my thought experiment is just a joke, totally out of taste: because it doesn't line up with the fundamental stance of any religion: that stance which pretends to believe in a god who rubber stamps the human culture: a Big Brother bully of bullies: the bully bullies you? God will bully them! for you! a god who takes the Canaanites land and gives it to the Jews, who judges the Philistines and makes them slaves of the Jews ... who gives licence for genocide so Christians can live on Iroquois turf.

Still: try the thought experiment one step further. God judges Mary Magdalene: into the Saved pan can go lots of apocryphal traditions: she was a whore who reformed, she was Jesus' friend, she was the chief financial patron to Jesus, his ministry, and his disciples ... But: into the Damned pan God can put ... her betrayal at the end! The angel told her to tell the disciples; she didn't, she was afraid, she went home. (Or was "Mark" a misogynist maligner? like Paul?)

Imagine the President phoning the nuclear silo, saying, OK, launch. But the silo team don't launch, they cower in their barracks. The day before, the silo team was shown airbrushed in Life; today what will the media make of them?

It doesn't matter. Humans will never allow God to run Judgment. Man has already judged. We judge that your land is ours, your labor is ours, your ideas are ours, we can pay whichever royalties we feel like and not bother with those we don't volunteer. No: God is our bully on our leash. We have nothing to fear from God. Justice is political license for the church-goers.

Moral Torture

Getting crucified, what a bummer. Christianity's iconography has glutted itself for millennia on divine agony at human hands.

Some people volunteer to be martyred in one way or another: soldiers, saints, wives, husbands, parents, children ... citizens ... gods. I know, I'm one. But I bet history is full of kamikazes who are sorry once their plane is actually impacting the World Trade Center. (One saint wanted to be crucified upside down — was that Peter? Did he know that upside down meant he'd suffer less? he who wanted to suffer more? Even if he suffered much less than Jesus, still might not he have been sorry by the time he'd been on the cross for an hour or two?)

But: think of this: Jesus' crucifixion as reported in the gospels was over by sundown: first they tortured him, then they just dispatched him: so the Jews wouldn't be thought guilty of cruelty on the Sabbath. However intense the suffering, it lasted less than a day. Since the Persians instituted the torture some were known to suffer on crosses for up to three days before finally dying.

Still: I write this today to suggest that talk of Jesus' suffering on the cross, whether for one day or for three days, is misleading. Can Jesus' physical suffering on the cross exceed his moral suffering simply by being alive among kleptocrats? Among Original Sinners?

But even that suffering, at least in my imagination of Jesus' suffering, pales compared to a meta-moral suffering: the suffering endured by Jesus since the crucifixion to see that his suffering was wasted! How many did his sacrifice save? One? Ten? A hundred?

Christians think they can feign atonement and slip into paradise; fine, let Christians believe whatever they want, the morons. But what does God believe? What will God do at Judgment? if he can ever free himself of the supervision of the priests!

Will Jehovah fare any better under the ministrations of Jehovah Witness preachers than God does under the interferences of the Catholic prelates? I say we should all shut up and sit down and wait to see: abstaining from interfering. Let God be the judge without our supervision.

Hey, you know what? Maybe sitting down and shutting up might save us!

This is it! In a wave now: everyone, sit down, and shut up!

Theism

Restoring Knatz.com / Teaching / Society / Social Epistemology / gods /

Quoth Pema Chaudron, Buddhist Nun:
The difference between theism and non-theism is not whether one does or does not believe in God. It is an issue that applies to everyone, including Buddhists and non-Buddhists. Theism is a deep-seated conviction that there's some hand to hold: if we just do the right things, someone will appreciate us and take care of us ... From this point of view, theism is an addiction. We're all addicted to hope... Non-theism is relaxing with the ambiguity and uncertainty of the present moment without reaching for anything to protect ourselves ... In a non-theistic state of mind, abandoning hope is an affirmation, the beginning of the beginning.
I love Christian theology, but I despise any theology, any cosmology, having a monopoly. We're supersaturated with Christian theology: any other set of ideas can be a relief. Here's a neat related statement:

There is no greater joy than knowing there is no help coming. The decision is ours to make alone.

Lords of the Bow

The author is Conn Iggulden: from his Genghis Khan series. I suspect it's better to try on different thoughts than to always insist on one no matter how right we believe it to be.

Who's Christian?

Who's Christian, who's saved, will be judged by God at Judgment.

Meantime, in this world of thieves and liars, any of us can believe whatever delusion permits.

Atheism

The real question shouldn't be whether or not God exists. (God is too undefined a concept for the question to be meaningful anyway.) The better question is: Does truth matter? Does reality play a role in human destiny? Or can we just lie and defraud and get away with it forever?

The real question shouldn't be whether Jesus existed as a real person in history; a better question is whether or not civilization has ever bent its rules to sabotage a reformer. The following question must then also be asked: did civilization break its own laws to sabotage a reformer once? or are cheating and torture standard features of human super-groups?

Churches hawk salvation while joining society (followers leading and leaders following) in undermining the intelligence that might otherwise help us to survive. It isn't just the Temple that Jesus was prevented from being understood at; he would have been crucified had he gone to the university, or if he had performed his cures in the parking lot of the hospital: while inside the doctors were trying to get $30,000 per hour for procedures that kill as often as they help.

Meta-Theology

I love to imagine that god, as awareness, existed before man emerged with his own version of sentience. I like to push that back and imagine god as aware of the commencement of this universe. How far can we push it? Was god aware when the cosmos began: if the cosmos can be thought of as having begun. But god's forte doesn't arrive till Judgment. I love to imagine a point in the future where someone, something, some god, will actually think, observe, be aware, and most important: be right!

But, you know, maybe it doesn't really matter. Awareness or non-awareness, god or no god, what actually exists will still actually exist or have actually existed, what's true will be true. If we're a horse's ass it won't matter to the truth what our lawyer says, what fuss the priest makes, what bullshit the media propagate ...

Puppet in the Sky

Is our world a simple consistent system where rules apply? Or is it a product of magical chaoses? where rules don't exist? or they can be bent? where cheating wins?

We don't know. We can't know. We don't know enough to know. We don't know enough to find out. But my bets have long been on the former: though they started out trained to the latter. Don't observe experience, and theorize what the rules must be by some collaboration of rational processes; pray, practice magic, try to cheat.

We "know" our environment by "modeling" it. We build symbolic structures, and, insofar as we are intelligent, interested in survival, compare those models with experience, revising the symbolic structure as necessary. That's a semiotic statement of alternative one above: we live in a simple consistent system: rational processes can try to figure it out. Maybe the system is complex enough that our models won't be quite perfect the first few tries, but edition N of the model should have a good chance of being less flawed than edition M was. That's what man would believe if man were scientific: rational.

But modern man is simply edition O of man C, D, E, the failed magician. Once we wanted to control things, we tried magic. Our magic failed. So we tried specialist magicians. Their magic failed. So we imagined the perfect magician being immaterial, a spirit, and living in the sky: the meta-magician. Our magic is no good, but God's magic is perfect.

Along comes pk. I was born into a magical culture. My emotions developed around love for God, reverence for God, celebration of God, love for God, being the highest good, the highest goal; but slowly, gradually, imperfectly, I came to value reason, science, and to see that my magical society pretended to, but did it magically: as though science were a question of pronouncing Abracadabra right: or the magic wouldn't work. So what I did, what I've tried, is to blend both: believe in science, but keep the old magical vocabulary. Thus pk's semiotic universe uses ancient human vocabulary and grammar to symbolize modern human science and reason. In other words, just as Einstein substituted a rational creator for the magical creator of his Jewish ancestors, so do I, meaning natural law by "god." I define my terms, I practice at consistency: how can I help it if no one understands? when their not understanding is willful: attempts at the old magical control? Reasonable people must be sabotaged: so the priests for irrational magic can run things unopposed. Sabotage didn't work for Einstein, so he got deified. Sabotage has worked just fine for pk: pk being far more revolutionary than Einstein. Einstein merely wanted to transform Newtonian gravity; pk wants to do away with society in which the magicians have free reign to cheat: by running the churches, the state, the schools, the universities ...

Once upon a time the priests tied to make it rain. Too often it didn't rain no matter how they danced or cut themselves, no matter how many virgins they disemboweled, chanting in no matter which language. Then the priests saw the lightning hit the mistletoe way up in the oak tree. Then it rained> Ah! So it's the mistletoe that is beloved of the big magician in the sky. Now: how do we, who cannot control the rain, control the big magician in the sky? and therefore control the rain?

Through precise rituals in Hebrew! Through precise rituals in Greek! Through precise rituals in Latin! (or Sanskrit!) (How about IndoEuropean?) (It's still no good: IndoEuropean is a current (set of) language(s), not at all an ancient language.) (We don't know any truly ancient languages! the evidence is rubbed clean.)

Anyway, here we have a bunch of failed magicians, now called rabbis (translate as "priests"), convincing themselves that they have lured their creation god into the box where they keep their contract with this magician in the sky, which they call their Covenant, and the box the Covenant's "ark": the Ark of the Covenant. The Jews tell themselves, and anyone who's listening, borrowing, imitating, that the box is for the God's comfort, and protection: the people feed and care for their god. But anyone not quite buying everything they say not quite literally can suppose that they might just have lured the god into the box to hold him captive and make him behave: that is, to make the sun rise and the rain rain for the Jews: and make their enemies tremble and fall in the dust.

(French Christians followed this behavior almost exactly when they erected their Chartres Cathedral: only in the European case it was the female spirt Mary the French were trying to lure and capture: mitigating the furious judgment of her male counterpart Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

And in the US, on Morningside Heights, across the street from Riverside Cathedral, in the 1960s was erected a limestone pile called by locals the God Box. It's Church of England (Roman Catholic with the Pope (and his wops) washed out), diluted to Anglican (the British washed out): sort of generic American Protestant (Christian with the religion washed out). It's not altogether clear what American Christians want: sort of Forgiveness: while they keep the money.)

Theology

One hundred percent of pk theology is human theology. Some may be divinely inspired, some may be naturally inspired, some may be human inspired, but it's still human theology, thought by me, counter-thought by me (and maybe others). As far as I can tell the same is true of all the theology I've ever heard or heard of; though some claim otherwise. For example, the Jews say they get their idea that they, the Jews, are God's Chosen People from God. That is, the Jews make this claim based on their oral and written tradition. But does that really pass muster as being from God? Aren't' alternate explanations possible? Couldn't they, or anyone, be deluding themselves?

I don't say it's not true: I say we haven't heard it from God. It's not beyond challenge.

Never mind, I've made points like this all my life, to no avail. Let me skip straight to what's galling me today:

Last night I watched Alien 3, squirming and retching. Ripley and her perennial alien visit a prison planet run by fundamentalist Christian convicts, men who claim to be soldiers of Christ. Of course we have only their claim. Christ remains unheard from, at least on that subject, at least in the two hour confines of that bit of meretricious tripe. Same with all Christianity, isn't it? When do we get to hear the Christian accepted as Christian by God? by Christ? by Jesus?

Will it be at the same time we get to hear that the Jews are God's Chosen People from God?

Similarly, I hear the government claim to be of the people, for the people; but I don't hear it from the people. Oh, I hear it from the schooled, from the brain washed. I'd like to hear it from a couple of hundred million plus individuals, any one of which could pass my Turing Test!

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Theology: human sentience speculating on a-human sentience (as well as cause-and-effect): pre-human sentience, pre-universe sentience, pre-cosmos sentience (are these nonsense categories?) ... meta-sentience ...

Judge Not

Judge not, lest ye be judged, says the Bible. But we judge all the time!
So do I, and I don't apologize for it; but I don't practice it while pretending that I don't believe in it.

I've meant to say the following at Knatz.com for many years now. I'll just slap it here, then gather more around the seed pebble later:

The French have pretended to be Christian on more than one occasion throughout more than one millennium. Christians: aren't they known for believing, or at least pretending to believe, that God is the judge? that Christians believe that God should be the judge? not the French? not humans? Then how come the French buried the Marquis de Sade in lime?

The French buried the Marquis de Sade in lime so that de Sade couldn't resurrect! The French didn't want to allow God a chance to judge him: the French had already judged him, so God couldn't be allowed to judge him. (No body, no resurrection; no resurrection, no judgment: according to older superstitions.)

Either — Or

Humans talk about intelligence, communication, awareness ... as though they were black and white, either / or. Is the glass that has some water in it full? If it isn't empty is full the only other possibility?

I see intelligence, communication, awareness ... as spectra (as my Thinking Tools said) (see pkTools blog). At the same time I see that my fellows see things, "think" things, in either/or absolutes. God isn't intelligent, he's perfectly intelligent; God isn't aware, he's infallibly aware: can't be wrong, not in one shade of one point.

I see intelligence as evolving. It's development is related to microbial interactions with environment, as it is to the brain stem of tyrannosaurus. Lewis Thomas argued that only those capable of making mistakes, the fallible, can learn: only mistakes can be learned from. Thus any giraffe that falls short of the leaves but that then grows a longer neck, stochastically, over time, the species if not the individual, is potentially more intelligent than any infallible God palmed off (by a very fallible Church). But that's Lewis Thomas, and Darwin, and Gregory Bateson, and me. I don't think Thomas or Darwin or Bateson number among my readers, if indeed my readers have any number at all, other than zero. Thus I revert to the fundamentalism I grew up with, writing for readers that do exist: in absolute, either/or terms.

Either God exists or he doesn't. Don't tell me that there are more choices than two, that the duality is a false one, my readers won't understand it. Either, or. Either God is perfect, or he's not. If God is aware of the fall of a sparrow then God must also be aware of every possible position of every possible electron, positron, photon, neutrino ... Thus God knows every single good thing I've ever done, and every good thing I've tried to do, what I said, and what I meant, and what was done by the society, by my family, by my wife, by my teachers, by my friends, to misunderstand what I said, so that that part of my speaking that tried to convey messages from God, from Jesus, from inspired geniuses such as Bucky Fuller and Ivan Illich will be understood by God, understood perfectly, and so, no matter what God will do to me because of all the bad things I've said, or done, or meant, he'll also know how his messages were sabotaged by the society and its members, its families and its churches and its universities, its media, its governments ...

And therefore, since God can do anything, even make the stones understand Judgment at Judgment, it can only be true that everyone, every stone, every giraffe, every tyrannosaur, every teacher, priest, and moron will, at Judgment, understand what I did and said that they didn't understand in life.

And, finally, I will have succeeded in communication: God doing the heavy lifting, succeeding in the impossible part, in making human intellects understand.

Or not.

Yeah. What if there is no Judgment? What if there will be no understanding? no communication? only the false communications of the priests, the authorities?

What if the slaves, the conquered, the women, the wogs ... finally get "their day in court" only to get steamrolled? What if even in heaven Sutter never gets a dime for the gold and family and cattle and land we stole from him? What if even in heaven Ivan Illich and I get no credit for the internet we invented, trying to save the people from coercion?

Will there be Justice? Or not!

You know, it's like asking whether or not sentience will succeed in evolving in this universe! What the hell. I'm not sure I even care any more.

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pk translates: Look at it this way:
It's possible that this universe is the only one, that the beer commercial has it right. There is no karma, no meta-view, no god: just us. We're not a lab experiment, certainly not a lab experiment gone awry; we're the cats pajamas. OK. Then being or trying to be Genghis or Hitler or Stalin or Napoleon makes sense. Achilleus makes sense, Agammemnon makes sense. Jesus and Oedipus and St. Francis are just wacko.

But say on the other hand that this universe might be a petri dish in some god's lab somewhere. The god is running an experiment to see how many petri dishes of the several hundred, or million, he starts with, fifty seeded with one kind of life, fifty with another, fifty left alone, fifty plugged into the god, fifty not plugged in ... will develop sentience: and of those, how many produce kleptocracies, and of those how many produce a Jesus, of those how many listen to Jesus and how many crucify Jesus without learning a thing ... Only a human could be stupid enough to believe that he, the human, is running the experiment! Only a church could be vain enough to believe that once the Jesus is crucified, that then they're the pipeline about the experiment.

pk translates further: only a church, or a government, or a university ... could be stupid enough to believe that they're anything but kleptocratic careerists: unless: their supposed pipeline to the god is entirely open to rational examination by any subject of the kleptocracy! pk translates still further: in other words, the kid who says The Emperor has no clothes by saying The Emperor has no clothes "should" instantly cancel the legitimacy of the kleptocracy. It's not that the kid should become emperor: the kleptocracy should see that there should be no emperor: not the old one, not a new one either.

Or: let the god do whatever he wants, however he wants: it's none of our business. We, I, are not competent even to think about it.

That won't stop us from "thinking"; but does thinking, even by an Einstein, have much more significance than a fly buzzing?

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The first draft of this, posted a few days ago, began very differently. I hope this version is better, but the other had some funny devices: so I keep both up.

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Obviously what I mean is that being aware somewhere along a spectrum of awareness doesn't prove that you're aware of everything, and certainly not the most important thing. It doesn't even prove that you can know what the most important things are. In Catch-22 Yossarian bandages Snowden's wound aboard the bomber only to discover that 90% of Snowden's guts have meantime been spilling out a huge wound in Snowden's back that Yossarian had no suspicion of. It would be very helpful to human sanity if humans could have charts for other species as well as for whole pantheons of gods in a wide sampling of civilizations or other sentiences on a wide sampling of planets. It's dandy that we find ourselves more aware than a stone or a newt or an orangutan; it's dandy to say that Yahweh is more aware than Baal or that Christ is more aware than Yahweh; but it would be better yet if we could assess awareness of the smart mushrooms on Beta Dingle in the Coal Sack and the awareness of their god, Lacy Spoor, as well: assess it that is without being totally inept in the assessment.

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I realize that my obsessions are vanities. The Japanese soldier was raised to believe that the emperor was a sun god (and that the sun was a big deal; not a minor star in a galactic backwater). Stick him on a Pacific Island, and the idiot is still fighting for his immortan emperor in 1950, 1955, 1960 ... No one's fed him, no one's paid him ... He's still fighting.

Or Jesus preaches human messages to a Third World Israel, gobbled down by Imperial Rome: the biggest baddest colonizing kleptocracy in the "ancient" world. Jesus gets arrested, gets convicted, tortured, murdered, the Jews and other Third Worlders standing with their thumb in their ass, pretending not to know him. Next thing you know, other Third Worlders get demoted and swallowed by Napoleon, by Wellington, by Washington, by Stalin ...

Jesus writhes on the cross, his corpse spins in the tomb, there's an ache in heaven ... But is it his fault? Is the emperor's mortality, the abandoned soldier's fault? Maybe: but only a very little: a little nothing compared to the sins of Rome swallowing Jerusalem, or the US swallowing the Pacific ...

I tried to help helpless Jesus to save the "world." I made mistakes, sure. I wasn't always dedicated 24/7. But I was denied resources, cheated, blackballed ... stripped, arrested, tortured, censored ... How is our failure my fault?

I agree that it is my fault: the least part my fault; and the greatest part everyone else's fault.

Companion Intelligences

You know how two stars can get close enough to have a special relationship? wobble each other, wobble planets, confuse astronomers. Think of other possible pairings:

How many companion intelligences would a god have to have to be truly intelligent? Two stars can light a planet round the clock. Three satellites can cover the earth: 24/7. Two gods could watch each others' back: three might watch heads and tails as well. But would it be enough? What meta-dimensions apply? Time, for sure.

Is that why there's a Trinity? How the hell would a human know?
Or a god?

Who Pulls the Strings?

The important question to ask in any religion is Who Pulls the Strings? The Jews say God controls everything but the Jews keep that god in a box: and they, the Jews, control the box. The Christians say that God controls everything, but all the evidence is controlled by priests: the Bible is gathered by priests, edited by priests, published by people connected to priests ... What independent verification do any of the claims have?

When the Chinese of a couple of millennia ago wondered if their emperor had lost his mandate of heaven, they broke some pots to read the shards; but the shards were read by priests: and the priests said, you guessed it, that the emperor was no longer divine. The priests controlled who was or wasn't a god. Some island people once were convinced by priests to sacrifice all their wealth to pray for some boon. The people gathered all their treasure and dumped it in the sea: convinced that their god would return all to them tenfold. Their fortunes didn't improve. But it turned out that the spot in the ocean the priests had chosen to dump the treasure was shallow and calm, so all their treasure was easily recovered: so much for the people's or the priests' trust in their god.

When physicists wanted to test Einstein's god's behavior they measured light passing by a star. Classical physics said the light would come straight, at c; Einstein said the light would bend around the star, and bending, arrive a little later than classical physics predicted. They measured the light, the evidence wasn't 100% clear, but they decided that it had bent: Einstein had god more clearly than the classicists. Now that test I see as objective. The Scientists, priests of a sort, really were trying to determine the truth. They were letting nature pull the strings, without interfering themselves. At least they were trying to the best they could. Very unusual, for humans.

My favorite illustration comes from fiction: Kipling, not surprisingly (who dealt with gods and tests and evidence marvelously). In The Man Who Would Be King a couple of soldiers of fortune, Peachy and Danny, play on superstition and luck to control the people and the priests of Kafiristan. First they parley themselves into kings, then Danny gets named a god. The priests have been amassing treasure for Alexander, the Macedonia warlord who'd passed that way twenty-four hundred years earlier. The priests had hailed Alexander as a god, and the treasure belonged to him. Convinced that Danny is Alexander returned, the priests actually turn all of the gold and jewels over to him!

Fiction! You see? Can you imagine the priests of the Roman Catholic Church turning the treasures of the Vatican over to a resurrected Jesus?

Priests control the gods by controlling the evidence which is allowed to reach them.

These days universities do the same: funded by the same forces that have always controlled the evidence which reaches anyone.

Jesus' halo ought to be enough; except the priests would take his halo away from him. With mirrors.

Either / Or: First Draft

Christians say that God has a name and that his name is Jehovah. Jews say Jahweh (and Christians who've read more than one book say there's no difference: so let's ignore that.) Muslims say God has a name and that his name is Allah. Well, which is it? And why do Arabs have a say in the matter? So it's got to be Jehovah, right? As Hitler used to say, There's aways one of two possibilities. Jehovah.

There couldn't be three possibilities, could there? Could God's name be Harry? Or Barbara? Or Beeblethrux? And it couldn't be that God has no name, could it? How could a magical entity exist without a name?

Never mind, that's all trivial throat clearing: here's my real dilema: I don't care about names. What I care about is consciousness, awareness, sentience. I know that humans are hardly more aware than caterpillars, look at an ad sometime if you doubt it. So I'm used to that; but I can't stand the idea of there being no consciousness: just as I can't stand the idea of there being no God (of whichever name I don't care).

So: either there is a God (whatever his name), and he is conscious, and therefore, at Judgment, the truth can be known (at least by God) (even if he can't share it with caterpillars). Or, there is and will be no Judgment, no awareness, no consciousness, no truth: not among caterpillars — and not among gods either.

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Few have ever understood anything I've said: and at universities (or barrooms) where a few have understood varying degrees of what I've said, no quorum developed, no synergy, so I write, justifiably, with irony so heavy you may call it sarcasm.

Fortune For and Against

Believers in deities seem regularly to believe that the god is responsible for gifts received, gifts denied, rewards and punishments, good fortune or ill. Believers seem to believe that prosperity is proof of favor with a god.

Such beliefs seem to be universal, yet such beliefs are not supported by the Testaments of the Jews, and they seem flat out contradicted by the Testaments of the Christians.

Examples to follow, and more exposition. Meantime, think for yourself: Adam, Noah, Abraham ... Esau, Sampson ... Job: and John the Baptist, Jesus himself, St. Peter, etc. And think since the Gospels: Martin Luther ...

Think also of the real "saints," the truth tellers, the intellectual independents: Abelard, Galileo ... Think of me, pk, and my teacher, Ivan Illich. No: if god loves you, expect man to hate you. Expect to be the eaten, not the eater.

God's Lure

moved to pKnatz blog

The Name of God

The Jehovah's Witness who rings your door bell makes a fuss over the god of their sect having a name: Jehovah. The Jews, from whom this god is derived, have been making a fuss for millennia over the name of their tribal deity: Yahweh. And of course Jehovah is an illiterate corruption of Yahweh: so, actually, they're talking about the "same" god. (Nothing is ever the same, pk, except to the blind.) (Note: translate derived as "borrowed" but translate borrowed as stolen!)

Now to this religious, me, pk, when I was a tyke, the name of my god was important: so said my indoctrination. God name was Jehovah (though we were also told that it was a mis-transliteration: from Yahweh). I soon saw that the Bible also used a few titles. Washington could be called "George," or "George Washington," or "Mr. Washington"; he could also be called "General Washington," then "Mr. President." So God, who was called Yahweh by the Jews, and was called Jehovah by the Christians, was also called "Lord" by the Jews (Elohim) and by the Christians (Lord, from the English, not the Semitic). (Note: Elohim in Hebrew is a plural! Think of the Bible's "let us ..." (Some monotheism!))

(Meantime the Arabs call their Semitic god Allah!)

Now the tyke pk believed (as he was indoctrinated) that God (or Jehovah, or Yahweh, or Lord, or Lord God ...) (or Allah) cared about these trivia: that God was a magical, old, male magician (whose name) was not Lilith, and certainly not Beatrice) who "made" the world with magical incantations. Eventually God manifested himself to me, after a suitable period of development, alternate training, and reflection, and communicated to me (not in words, and not by graphics either) that all that was primitive ignorant supposition, harmless if you think of thinking, particularly ill-informed thinking, as metaphor: as modeling. Thus I came not to reject the idea of god, neither to quarrel about diction in a theological semantics controlled by the intolerant and unimaginative) but to translate the terms into equivalents of theory: an idea never fully tested, always refin-able.

Think of this: To a magician, "abracadabra" may turn the water into wine. It must be spelled right. The sorcerer doing the translation must have fasted the proper number of days, have deprived himself of the company of women for the proper portion of his lifetime ... But: the mathematician calls the ratio of radius of a circle to its circumference, by the formula pi r squared, "pi." What if he called it "Sam"? or "Barbara"? Wouldn't the value, wouldn't the ratio, still be the same?

God introduced himself to me in terms of my developing, always imperfect, never fully mature sense of reason. "God" is a principle more than a principal.

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More coming, but the alert reader should be able to develop the implications whether or not I drop dead before returning.

Nix Meta-Messages

Communication between the essence of existence (god as it were) and an individual human being is possible. Communication between that individual and his society (on that particular matter) is not. Jesus was crucified when he tried to pass such messages.

Even without a "Bible" I know this: from my own as well as others' experience.

Jesus' disciples meet the same fate: especially at churches claiming to represent Jesus. But it's the same with secular subjects: Galileo, for example. Ivan Illich. Yours truly.

Magic vs. Order

pk note: the state as a god of magic pretending to be a god of reason, order, honesty, truth

This blog serves to rescue a few of my destroyed Knatz.com files, specifically those on religion, theology ... Falling in love has slowed the rescue operation over the last half year. Today I want to add a thought that relates to Knatz.com modules from the 1990s:

M. Kaku distinguished between "the" "god" of "magic" and the god of "order." So do I. I urge you to do likewise.

Ivan Illich illustrated similarities between "religion" and "politics." (So do I. And I urge you to do likewise.) Illich added that "school" is the new "universal" religion, that "experts" are "secular" "priests": doctors, lawyers, teachers ... (So do I. And I urge you to do likewise.)

That all old old pk stuff: old by the time I put it online in 1995. Here's the wrinkle that brought me here today: religions work confusions between order and magic to their own benefit (and to the detriment of the public's already-limited ability to reason): today people don't believe in the Church but they do believer in "US," in "America" ... in education, in "freedom," in a "free" marketplace" ... (And so do I: if only we had any such!) 

The US-etc. uses compulsory schools, compulsory taxation, its monopoly on punishment, its tag-team-"monopoly" on resources ... to set itself up an an "Authority" (false authority, of course). Specifically: secular authority parades as representing order, reason ... truth; actually it represents, it manifests ... magic: false magic, of course.

Order is corrupted: all we are left is lies: with extinction right around the bend.