Psychology Trancendent

People I know who are currently doing graduate studies in Psychology in Northern California give me the impression that, if Religion is discussed at all, it is relentlessly pathologized. As if the only role that Religion could play in a person's life were as a crutch to make up for his or her deficiencies. I get the impression that most of the students and their professors are - in psychotherapeutic parlance - completely unprepared to deal with the counter-transferrence issues they would face, if they were to have a devoutly religious client.

How refreshing to read an article by Paul C. Vitz in the current issue of First Things entitled, "Psychology in Recovery." Vitz observes that psychotherapeutic psychology is outgrowing some of its early hubris as it turns from "negative psychology" (the study of traumas and mental illness) to "positive psychology"(the study of personal strengths and mental health).

A one-sided emphasis on negative psychology has changed our culture. Let me quote:

The general perspective provided by negative psychology is that we are all victims of past traumas, abuse, and neclect caused by other people. This victim mentality has been widely noted and criticized, quite legitimately, as having become extreme....

A further disturbing consequence of this mentality is the widespread belief that we are not responsible for our bad actions.....

Positive psychology, on the other hand, as Vitz quotes Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman from their book, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification:

should reclaim the study of character and virtue as legitimate topics of psychological inquiry and informed societal discourse. By providing ways of talking about character strengths and measuring them across the life span, this classification will start to make possible a science of human strengths that goes beond armchair philosophy and political rhetoric. We believe that good character can be cultivated, but to do so, we need conceptual and empirical tools to craft and evaluate interventions.

Peterson and Seligman (the originator of the theory of "Learned Helplessness" as a contributor to depression) identify three conceptual levels in descending order: virtues, character strengths, and situational themes. They argue that their selection of virtues is universal, drawn from world cultures and traditions, and may even have a basis in the evolutionary biology of ourselves as a social species.

And their six core virtues are: wisdom and knowledge, humanity, courage, justice, temperance, and transcendence. As Vitz points out, these are not far from the Cardinal Virtues of prudence, charity, courage, justice, temperance, hope and faith. The mention of those last virtues, transcendence or its equivalent hope and faith, make me think here may be more than an incidental connection with Seligman's earlier work. It seems to me that if you have absolutely no hope or faith in anything, you are likely to be or to become depressed.

Psychology may be turning from an exclusive regard for the past to preparing people for the future. All things considered, it seems like a good turn to me. And I must admit, it is also refreshing to see someone pathologize un-faith for a change. Vitz is the author of a book called Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism.

Predestination is just a Word

"How can I be blamed for something that God knows ahead of time I'm going to do anyway?"

Good question. Those of you who believe in Predestination are welcome to take a crack at it. I, however, think the doctrine of Predestination is the kind of trip people put over on God because they don't stop to think that the Author of Time is not bound by Time.

Time consists of one dimension only, and we move along it in one direction only - but only in this Universe. Since the Creator of this Universe is not stuck in this Universe, the Creator is not constrained like a bead moving on the wire of Time. So, "knowing everything in advance" and Predestination are human ideas that may have nothing to do with the way God relates to us.

God's relation to us seems to involve kenosis, a Greek word meaning the "emptying out of oneself." I think God comes all the way into our lives to experience them as we do. I think God gives up any priveleged position (comes down off God's "Throne") to do so.

Predestination and "knowing everything in advance" are human philosophical constructs that have no meaning in this context. Since this is all the context we know, it is meaningless to speak of any other. But we can still speculate, and I speculate that in the Universe to come all of our Time is Redeemed and made whole.

In the meantime, God lives and co-creates our lives with us. And Predestination is just a fourteen-letter word.

Bleep my VCR!

If there is one thing that serves as the quintessential icon of bad human interface design it is the VCR. I mean, in my time, I've programmed everything from micro-chips to supercomputers. I can handle computers. But I fat-fingered the wrong button on the remote control to my VCR and got it into a state from which it would not exit.

The "Cancel" button would not cancel it. The "Menu" button brought up inappropriate menus. After dinner, I found the manual and turned to "Trouble Shooting." To my surprise there were two entries that mentioned something like what was on my VCR's front panel display. Both entries said the same thing: "Read Chapter 3." The longest chapter in the manual. Like I don't have enough to read.

Thumbing through Chapter 3 for a half-hour, I found that there was a button on the remote I should push. Nothing happened. A little experimentation soon showed that nothing on the remote did anything at all. I changed the batteries. Ah, success! Finally.

There used to be only one group of people whose minds I longed to illuminate with a flamethrower: the designers of the Application Programming Interfaces to ArcGIS. To them let me add the people who designed the user interface to my VCR.

Oh, yeah. And the twits who did the user interface to my long-discarded sports watch.

Re-Dreaming Christianity

Beer and Belief

contributed by Peter J. Walker*

The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned. — 1 Corinthians 2:14

 

Have you ever seen two babies try to have a serious, intimate conversation? Each baby is entirely wrapped up in what he or she wants and never listens to find out what the other baby is asking for. One baby wants milk and the other wants its diaper changed and neither is interested in the other, nor in learning how to walk the road ahead. A life of Faith often starts like that conversation. I'm learning to listen. In doing so, I hope I'm learning to walk.

Lots of my friends are not Christians. That is to say, most of them don't go to church or read the Bible often or identify themselves by any religious label. Most of my friends are spiritual, though. The Bible says that we are supposed to meet together regularly and share things about each other. The Bible says this will make us stronger. I think that's true, but Christians like to use this as an excuse to stay away from anyone who doesn't agree with their theology. This is a mistake. There are lots of Christians who aren't very close to God and lots of agnostics who are closer. I don't think God is a doctrine or denomination or political party. He's bigger than all of that.

Lately God's been moving me to listen in on what atheists and agnostics are saying about Christianity. Sometimes I find these revelations in bars or cafes. More recently, I sat down with two old friends, Chris and Bryan, over a six-pack of Fat Tire Ale.

Bryan is quiet, friendly and unshakably agreeable. In college, Bryan joined the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. He wasn't a Christian then, either. He just thought it would be a nice way to make new friends. Bryan and I have had numerous conversations about God but they always end in Bryan's openness to faith and his simultaneous lack of commitment. He doesn't feel any urgency to make a choice and it makes the fundamentalist parts of me squirm.

Chris is a self-identified philosopher and intellectual. He smokes lots of marijuana too. Once when he was high, Chris spent an hour explaining the beauty of human yearning that exists in the story of Pinocchio. When he gets started like that it's best to just let him go.

I began our conversation with a few questions: “I want to know what you guys believe about God and creation and eternity.” Not too broad, right?

“Well... okay,” Chris answered. He carefully began rolling a cigarette, first sprinkling his tobacco onto a small square of paper. “How about evolution first?” Chris licked the paper and sealed it tight. “I mean, if there's evolution, why is there still everything else? Like, why are there men and apes at the same time?” He flicked spilled tobacco leaves off his lap, “and why are fish and lizards and birds all here if they're all heading toward the same place?”

“It's random, so it doesn't affect an entire species,” said Bryan. He was staring out across the apartment complex. Not fully vested in the topic, I thought.

Randomly, Chris jumped on to a convenient tangent. He blurted out, “So, if God created Adam and Eve, maybe they were just super dope human beings! You know? Genetically! Maybe Jesus and Buddha and Gandhi were all in that bloodline,” he had a grin on his face as if that thought brought him some deep satisfaction.

I had little to say about Adam and Eve being “super dope.” I laughed and pushed into the subject Chris brought up himself with the Creation reference: “What do you think about Christianity?”
Chris thought again, paused, “Harmless.” Not what I expected. “Harmless... possibly benevolent. It's non-threatening to me… I guess the only threat is homogenization.”
“How do you mean?” I asked.

“If everyone became a Christian it would dilute the intellectual evolution of man. Just one big pool of similar ideas. No room to question things.” An interesting thought, since I've met few Christians who thought alike. I understood his point, though.

Bryan came in, “So what do you think happens when you die?”

Chris didn't answer. I followed: “Death? Do you think there's a Christian heaven?”

“That's a creatable thing,” Chris answered. “Either on earth or in actual heaven,” Chris paused on that thought, then, “If Christianity were good enough I'd be there now, but other things are good too. The path things enter my life through must be convenient. If I pick this beer up, it had better be convenient!” He gulped and Bryan rolled his eyes.

“Convenience,” Bryan chimed in now, “If you're looking for a spirituality, church doesn't have to be the end-all be-all of being spiritual. I can think about it on my own or hang out with friends like this. Church is fellowship. I can respect that. But there are so many ways to have that fellowship.”
I asked, “Then is there value in organized religion?”

“There's value in fellowship,” said Bryan. “It would have to be people whom I trusted and who were open minded. There's not a lot of value in going somewhere to have people tell you you're wrong.”

“Can I expand?” Chris asked. We nodded. “Churches are like support groups, you know, for people who want guidance... It validates them. I think marriage is a compact version of that. It's also easier for people to become excited when there are lots of people. It makes them zealous.”
“But some people go because they think they have to,” said Bryan.

“Yes. In Catholic church, my parents judged me from a standpoint of perfection instead of understanding I was imperfect,” said Chris. “I just wanted to sleep in on Sundays.”

“I wish people were more open-minded,” Bryan said. “It's intimidating to discuss all this with those who are so knowledgeable in their own religion. For me it's much more abstract. There's nothing I can gain from someone who doesn't value my questions.”

Something in that last statement rang true for me, like I needed to highlight it and pray about it and tell people to listen closely. No one had ever valued Bryan's questions; they had treated his curiosity as a battle to be won.

“And Hell is a good form of extortion,” Bryan continued, “Being good has a lot to do with it but it doesn't seem logical that someone could live an evil life and be saved on their deathbed,” A tough concept for us all. “I don't know. There are so many religions telling me so many things, and that if I don't choose one of them I'll go to hell. It just feels like extortion.” There was that word again. Extortion. Blackmail.

A part of me used to get frustrated that I couldn't “close the deal” with friends like Bryan and Chris. The other part was always left ashamed at the way my heart for God was still thinking in sales terms. That salesman will always be an embarrassing part of my inner-self, trying to turn my passions into marketable products.

So how do I make Christianity work for guys like Chris and Bryan? Do I tailor it to fit their comforts? Do I try to make it less offensive? I think not, but my humanism desperately tries to create a politically correct apologetic. Bryan himself said there was right and wrong — he even said that evil people shouldn't deserve heaven. So Christian or agnostic, we all have judgment hiding somewhere. God tells us to let that judgment go and trust Him to cover us with love. That makes all of this so exasperating: no matter how much I try to appeal to sensibility and logic, the Biblical God still flies in the face of all our wisdom.

* Peter Walker works with youth and worship ministries, desperately trying to forget the wrong answers and recover the right questions. He also creates the Essence Project.

Speeding through Baghdad

"An Italian Intelligence officer was gunned down by Americans as he was escorting a newly freed Italian journalist, who had been held hostage in Iraq," say the meadia lead-in lines. The journalist, who was wounded in the encounter, implied that the Americans fired on her because America opposes paying ransom to terrorists.

Now lets see... The officer and journalist were driving through Baghdad at high speed at night. The Italian's car approached an American checkpoint at high speed, and tried to charge through it (presumably to preserve the secrecy of their mission, which had not been coordinated with the Americans). The driver disobeyed signals and other warnings to stop. The American soldiers had standing orders to fire at the wheels and engine of any car that tried to charge their checkpoint. If that failed to stop it, they had standing orders to fire at the driver. Now why would that be so?

Because they have had plenty of VBIEDs (Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Devices) driven at them, already. It's one thing to see the daily death toll that is the price of fighting an insurgency. It was quite another to talk with a young officer who was back in the States to get shrapnel from an IED removed from his knee.

So now we know that it is dangerous to drive a car at high speed at people who are armed and jumpy. This isn't rocket science, folks.

The Americans should apologize, of course, for this tragedy. But both the Americans and the Italians should try not to let it happen again.

Credit Card Theology

A friend recently commented about how "real" the Incarnation and Crucifixion could have been.

"If Jesus was truly God and truly Man, then wasn't it like a kid leaving home, but taking Daddy's credit card?" he asked.

To me, the phrase, "truly God and truly Man" means that, in the Incarnation, God became an ordinary human being, just like the rest of us. No Divine Credit Card included. Jesus would have been able to buy his way out of the Crucifixion, if he had that. It was all as real for him as it is for you and me.

All of which strikes me as capturing a major difference between Islam on one hand, and Judaism and Christianity on the other. In Islam, all the Prophets got the Credit Card, in order to maintain the Dignity of God. In Judaism and Christianity, all the Prophets got was a message to deliver, and the barest of instructions. They did what was asked of them, often at great cost to themselves, to show their Devotion to God.

A Duty to Remember

My mother told me that many Germans are comparing President Bush to Hitler. Sure enough, some are.

Now before I say what I must say next, let me point out that I speak German, and I am married to a German-American. Further, I think that Germany's embrace of the Nazis came from a quality of soul that exists in every human being and every human organization. But the Germans, alone in Western Civilization, gave in to it en masse.

Apparently, some Germans have studiously forgotten what Hitler was like, and what National Socialism (Nazism) really was. In this they commit a new moral outrage. Because, for themselves and for all humankind, it is their duty to remember.

How do you solve a problem like Korea?

North Korea isn't a country. It's a family owned and operated business that masquerades as a Communist dictatorship. Moreover, the family appears dysfunctional, and its business acumen appears to be zero.

Let me illustrate. Take a look at NASA's Night Lights of the World. Scroll over to the Korean Peninsula (just above Japan). South Korea looks like an island! Between China and South Korea there are virtually no lights, despite the presence of several nuclear reactors that North Korea used to claim were for generating electricity. What you are looking at is a picture of bad government -- so bad that it can be seen from space.

I think that the US needs to tell North Korea that the Cold War is over, and that it is time to go beyond the current truce and make formal and actual peace between North Korea and South Korea. A process needs to be put in place (with South Koreans leading it) that begins with cultural exchanges and food aid, and grows to include ever more frequent contact between North Koreans and South Koreans. Then South Korea should start building businesses in North Korea and employing North Koreans, with the goal of developing North Korean businesspeople who can create North Korean businesses for which South Korea provides investment capital. Someday the DMZ should be make into a Wildlife Sanctuary (and lucrative Tourist Destination), and lanes cleared through the minefields for some North-South roads to enable more social contact and commerce.

You get the drift. And to get Kim Jong Il and company to go along, South Korea should buy them out. Give the dysfunctional family and friends huge stipends and homes on the French Riviera for life, provided they never come back to Korea.

In other words, we need to try to stimulate the kind of reunification that East and West Germany experienced, with the people leading and the governments following. It may take a long time, but its probably the the most constructive way to deal with the North Korean nuclear weapons. A united, democratic Korea would dismantle them because they are cost too much to keep.

And what of the US? Our troop levels should decrease as the North Korean troop levels decrease. Call it constructive disengagement.

Or do I just hope for too much?

Does God have a Religion?

It depends on what you mean by religion. If religion is a set of beliefs that cannot be proven objectively, then, according to Judaism and Islam, two of the worlds major monotheistic religions, the answer is no. God does not believe, because God knows.

But, according to Christianity, God does manifest an opinion that seems incapable of objective proof: God believes that people are worth dying for.

If one had to give it a name, I suppose it could be called "Sacred Humanism."

The Shape of Politics

To me, the American Political Spectrum is shaped like a dancer's butt. Imagine that the dancer is doing a split, and then laying his or her torso on the floor, with legs outstretched, and both butt and feet sticking up. Now imagine that you are also lying on the floor, viewing the dancer's posterior, or fundamental, aspect.

What you see is something like the graph sketched above. The extremists on either end of the political spectrum are represented by the toes — they are in a distinct minority, but they do stand up. Typically they are the ones who host and call in to the Talk Shows of the Right (aka the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy) and the Left (aka the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy Theorists). On the heels of this distribution (so low in numbers that they don't show up at this scale) are the real kooks, such as the American Communist Party on the Left, and the John Birch Society on the Right.

So who are those willing to devote their time and energy working for political candidates and parties? The ones who work without pay, stuffing envelopes, making cold calls, knocking on doors, distributing leaflets and bumper stickers, delivering yard signs, et cetera? These friends, are the people of the ankles and calves, possibly extending as far as the knees. If you are a political candidate, these are the people to whom you must "play" in order to win your primary election. And even though you must pull to the center (the butt cheeks, where repose the vast majority of voters) to win the general election, you can't leave your ankles behind. Because if you do, your campaign will have no "legs," no one working for it, and you will disappear from the political stage.

This brings us gluteal part of the political distribution, the twin loaves of the Great Divide. The vast majority of Americans hold views that are remarkably similar to one another. The majority of both Republicans and Democrats want the same things, such Liberty, Peace, and Prosperity — they just differ on how to get them. That is to say, just like the groove in your butt, the divide is deep, but not very wide.

But why is the divide so deep? Why is there almost nobody down in the hole there except former President Bill Clinton (the most centrist US President in recent times)? It seems to me that the media, looking for excitement, and manufacturing it if there isn't any, and the political strategists, looking to exploit division, and manufacturing it if there isn't any, have been working separately and together for a long time to develop and use aptly named "wedge issues" to pry us apart.

Now if the majority is letting the media and pols give us a world-historical wedgie, the majority can do something about it. We need to get off our butts and volunteer for candidates and parties. And when the candidates and parties get too extreme, we have to let them know it, by speaking up in policy and strategy meetings and conventions, and by walking out when necessary. But the majority are just too apathetic to do more than drag themselves to the polls once in a while. By voting, they prove themselves to be citizens, not merely subjects, but to them, democracy is still largely a spectator sport.

Religion comes into play because, historically, Christianity has not only been the glue that held Western Civilization together, but in the form of Protestantism and its Work Ethic, Christianity has been the engine that drove it. Moreover, Protestantism has arguably been the wellspring of Liberty in the West. Those on the Right, because of their concern with tradition, generally seek to preserve the West's legacy of faith. Those on the Left, on the other hand, see the West as particular, rather than universal. In order to spread Liberty, and other Western values, they seek to universalize themselves — to universalize the West. Thus the Left tends to diminish the particular, especially the particularity of Religion. The concern of the Left for Religion thus ranges from compromise with worldly concerns and Universalism on the part of the Center-Left (the Left Cheek) to outright antipathy toward Religion on the part of the extreme Left (the Left Foot).

So much for US politics. What of the rest of the West — Europe, the UK, Australia, Canada, Central and South America? President Bush, in remarks to President Putin said that a democracy must have a functioning opposition. I think the West is a democratic polity, with America as the current Party in Power, and Europe leading the Loyal Opposition. So far, despite all the angst on all sides, it seems to be working.

In the meantime, the politics of this website has floated up from the hole at the center, spreading like a mushroom cloud of flatulence above the fray. We call our political orientation "up" as in "uppity," because we are 90-degrees up, away, and out of the box (see below) from both the Left and and the Right. Our range of opinion spreads out over both cheeks, with a few stray molecules drifting even further.

The Art of Digital Photography

To manipulate or not to manipulate

There is a reason that some shots don’t look like you thought they would. You and your camera see differently. Your camera merely records the way light from a scene passes through a lens and excites an array of solid-state devices at a single moment. You, on the other hand, (consciously) see a highly processed and synthetic memory that you have built up from multiple impressions of that same scene. Awareness of how you see versus how your camera sees can free you to make your photography achieve your creative vision.

 Unlike a camera, your eyes do not stare fixedly at some point in a scene. (If you succeed in staring at a fixed point without letting your eyes move, the whole scene will fade.) Your eyes sweep the scene in a series of twitching movements, called saccades. (Your eyes actually jitter durring each saccade, which your brain removes from your visual image before you become conscious of it.) During each saccade, your eyes change focus and pupil size (f-stop) as they take in various elements of the scene. What you consciously see is a memory your brain has built up from these eye movements, in which the whole scene is in focus, and everywhere properly exposed despite large differences in brightness from one part of the scene to another. To get a similar effect with your camera, you would need to use a tripod and take tens, perhaps hundreds of shots, and then make a seamless composite. [Note added 2016 - Something close can be achieved with High Dynamic Range (HDR) digital photography.]

Actually, you would need to shift the tripod about 2 inches (the distance between your eyes) and make two composites, which you would then view on two screens, one for each eye, to get the effect of your natural binocular, stereoscopic, 3D vision. Your 3D vision intensifies the drama of most senes, and separates scene elements that are mashed together by the 2D focal plane of your camera.
As if that were not enough, whenever there is a brighter area next to a darker area in the scene, your retinas enhance the contrast at the border by a process called lateral inhibition. In lateral inhibition, a retinal cell receiving a lot of stimulation (light) actually turns down the response of the retinal cells next to it that are receiving less light. This tends to sharpen or even create edges in the scene that your camera cannot see.

Then there is the issue of color response. Your eyes respond more to some colors than to others. So does your camera, but the response curves are different. Your eyes are most sensitive in the yellow-green part of the visible spectrum, while the sensor in your camera is most sensitive in the red, and perhaps even some of the (invisible to you) infrared part of the spectrum. And then there is the issue of the continuous, dynamic color-correction your brain applies, which far exceeds in subtlety the grossness of your camera's white-balance presets.

The bottom line is simply this: you manufacture what you see from multiple impressions of the scene you are viewing. Your preconscious mind together with your conscious emotional and intellectual reactions determine the course your eyes take as they dance over scene, the time spent on each element, and whether your eyes tend to return to some elements again and again, and how much your pupils dilate when you view those elements.

As you shoot the scene, and as you process the image through your workflow, you strive to choreograph the dance that your viewer’s eyes perform as they scan your photograph. Your tools are composition, focus, texture, tone, color, and subject matter. In the end, what counts is the emotional and intellectual reaction of the viewer to your photograph. Does that reaction match the reaction you had to the original scene? Does the scene evoke some emotionally or thematically charged likeness of it in your mind, which you convey to the viewer of your photograph? Can the viewer of your photograph feel why you made it?

That, it seems to me, is the goal of art photography. Other goals belong to documentary photography, scientific or engineering photography, advertising photography, or photography for graphic design. These other types of photography strive to meet various criteria of realism. Art photography strives to communicate emotion through esthetic sensibility. In art photography the reality to which the image must be faithful is the inner vision of the photographer.

Thus, the technology is not so much a vehicle through which an exterior reality is reported, as one through which an interior impression is expressed. All manipulations are fair, if they succeed in bringing the interior image out for all to view. To PhotoShop or not to PhotoShop? Ah, PhotoShop!
Let me give an example:

Before	After

The sun was beginning to set as we passed this graveyard in Nova Scotia. There was a faint violet tinge to the eastern sky. I was struck by the way the wooden and stone crosses seemed to pop out of the background at me, as as if they were sheltered, looked upon with pity by the suspended figure of the crucified Christ, who had himself experienced death, who was himself going into the ground with each of these souls in his care, to gather them up and raise them tenderly, to a glory that none of us in life can imagine. Now, which image is more real? The way my camera saw it, or the way I did?

I could exhibit the un-manipulated image, and then describe what I had seen when I made it. But I'd rather fire up PhotoShop and show you.

Photoshop is still the state of the art in 2016, with a reasonable price to rent monthly or annually. But the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) is free.

A Real Victory for Islam

Today, together with the elections in Palestine and Afganistan, may mark a turning point in the history of Islam and Islamic culture. The people of Iraq turned out in their millions to vote in a free election for the first time in over half a century, despite terrorist attacks that killed 35 of them, and the nine suicide-bombers who turned out for al-Zarqawi's War on Democracy.

The only places in Iraq with low turnout were exclusively Sunni enclaves, where prospective voters were successfully intimidated by the Sunni terrorists who take cover among them. Perhaps they may be realizing that the terrorists to whom they give "social cover" have cheated them out of their chance to make their voice heard in the emerging Iraqi government.

But back to Islam. Islamic culture has been in decline for over 600 years. Islamic Fundamentalists blame this on a failure to return to the purity of the time of the Rightly Guided Ones — the Prophet and his Companions. Now, there is unity of opinion in Islam that these people were indeed Rightly Guided by God. But after that time, the unity of opinion breaks down, particularly over the issue of who should succeed as Caliph (Commander of the Faithful), which led to the schism between Sunni and Shi'i Islam. The last Caliph was deposed in Turkey at the close of World War I. The Caliph, however he was guided, made the mistake of siding with Germany, which lost the war.

Thus, Islam has been experiencing a crisis in Right Guidance, apparently since its early days, which intensified as a rising Western Civilization pushed Islam out of Spain and back from the gates of Vienna. Those to whom the guidance of Islam were trusted decided that the infidels of Western Civilization had no knowledge of value to them. The development of democracy, the creation of the social capital that is the real force behind the engine of Western creativity (and thus its power and wealth) passed them by. But especially, an important development in Western theology passed them by.

Martin Luther (by no means a perfect man) asserted that, in effect, any person could and should read Scripture for themselves, and understand its meaning through Faith in God alone. This opened a new path for Right Guidance. Instead of coming exclusively from the top down (from God to the Pope, from the Pope to the Cardinals and Bishops, from the Cardinals and Bishops to the Priests, and from the Priests to the People), Right Guidance could come from the bottom up — from God to the People, who could enter into a dialog with their clergy. (This dialog in the West has occasionally resulted in the use of force, we Westerners being who we are, but those days, thank God, seem to be behind us.)

Now Islamic Fundamentalists may think that democracy is un-Islamic, because in democracy, the people make their own laws (through their elected representatives), instead of submitting to the Sharia (God's Law for Muslims, as given in the Qur'an and elaborated through a tradition of Islamic Jurisprudence).

On the other hand, it is untenable to go back to the times of the Prophet and his Companions. It is apparently not the Will of the One who made Time move forward. Thus, new laws and decisions need to be made to deal with the circumstances of new times. Rather than view democracy as willfulness and apostasy, democracy in predominately Muslim countries could come to be viewed as a new "bottom up" channel for Right Guidance.

Islamic Fundamentalists may try to prevent this realization by asserting that, without dictatorship by the Fundamentalists, God would let his entire ummah go astray indefinitely. My hope is that such assertions will be discredited, and that the Islamic World will embrace democracy as an additional "bottom up" channel for Right Guidance, paving the way for a new resurgence of Islam as a dynamic culture of life and liveliness. This is in stark contrast to the future offered by al-Zarqawi, Bin Laden, and their kind — an Islam forever looking backward, bound to a culture of death.

But how could the election in Iraq happen at all? The country was not ready. The country is in a state of ongoing disaster. Everyone over there hates Americans and Westerners, and resents the Occupation and all it stands for. As proof, note that 964 Americans were killed in Iraq from the capture of Saddam Hussein to the end of 2004, according to AntiWar.com. On the other hand, according to USA Today, 445 Americans were murdered in Chicago, and 565 Americans were murdered in New York, during approximately the same period. That comes to 1010 Americans killed in just two American cities.

I'm not asserting that the Western Press can't add. But they do seem to be unable to think meaningfully about numbers or to present them in reasonable context. If the Press is the Intelligence Service for the Common Person, then this is an Intelligence Failure, a defeat for the Press.

Some Favorite Quotations

 

Self-interest

"... what souls are these that run through this black haze?"
And he to me: "These are the nearly soulless
whose lives concluded neither blame nor praise.

They are mixed here with that despicable corps
of angels who were neither for God nor Satan,
but only for themselves. The High Creator

scourged them from Heaven for its perfect beauty,
and Hell will not receive them since the wicked
might feel some glory over them."

— Dante, Inferno III,29-48, John Ciardi, trans., Mentor Books, 1952, 1982.

"Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm — but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves."" — T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)

 

Church & State

The sword and crook are one, and only evil
can follow from them when they are together;
for neither fears the other, being one.

— Dante, Purgatorio XVI,110-112, John Ciardi, trans., Mentor Books, 1952, 1982.

 

Preaching

You mortals do not walk a single way
in your philosophies, but let the thought
of being acclaimed as wise lead you astray.

Yet Heaven bears even this with less offense
than It must feel when It sees Holy Writ
neglected, or perverted of all sense.

You do not count what blood and agony
planted it in the world, nor Heaven's pleasure
in those who search it in humility.

Each man, to show off, strains at some absurd
invented truth; and it is these the preachers
make sermons of; and the Gospel is not heard.

— Dante, Paradiso XXIX,85-96, John Ciardi, trans., Mentor Books, 1952, 1982.

 

The Big Picture

Oh grace abounding that had made me fit
to fix my eyes on the Eternal Light
until my vision was consumed in It!

I saw within Its depth how It conceives
all things in a single volume bound by Love,
of which the universe is the scattered leaves...

— Dante, Paradiso XXXIII,85-90, John Ciardi, trans., Mentor Books, 1952, 1982.

 

War

Oh shame to men! Devil with Devil damn'd
Firm concord holds, men only disagree
Of creatures rational, though under hope
Of Heavenly Grace: and God proclaiming peace,
Yet live in hatred, enmity, and strife
Among themselves, and levy cruel wars,
Wasting the earth, each other to destroy:
As if (which might induce us to accord)
Man had not hellish foes enow besides,
That day and night for his destruction wait.

— John Milton, Paradise Lost, II, 496-505, 1667

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is far worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. — John Stewart Mill

 

Faith & Reason

Without reason we would not know how to apply the insights of faith to the concrete issues of living. The worship of reason is arrogance and betrays a lack of intelligence. The rejection of reason is cowardice and betrays a lack of faith. — Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man, 20, 1955

The Greeks learned in order to comprehend. The Hebrews learned in order to revere. The modern man learns in order to use. — Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man, 34, 1955

Religious thinking is in perpetual danger of giving primacy to concepts and dogmas and to forfeit the immediacy of insights, to forget that the known is but a reminder of God, that the dogma is a token of His will, the expression of the inexpressible at its minimum. Concepts, words must not become screens; they must be regarded as windows. — Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man, 116, 1955

It is impossible for a man to begin to learn what he thinks he knows. — Epictetus

If you shut your door to all errors, truth will be shut out. — Rabindranath Tagore

 

Faith & Humor

God is a comic, playing to an audience that's afraid to laugh." — Voltaire
Thanks to Rev. Janet Sunderland, August 2001 Newsletter, Church of Antioch, Kansas City

"When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realized that the Lord doesn't work that way, so I stole one and asked Him to forgive me." - John Howard, past Olympian, ultracyclist, and Ironman Triathlon world champ

 

Inanimate Things

Inanimate objects are dead in relation to man; they are alive in relation to God. — Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man, 97, 1955

 

Ultimate Concern

Certainly God is more than "a name for that which concerns man ultimately." Only saints are ultimately concerned with God. What concerns most of us ultimately is our ego. The Biblical consciousness begins not with man's, but with God's concern. The supreme fact in the eyes of the prophets is the presence of God's concern for man and the absence of man's concern for God. — Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man, 127, 1955

 

The Body of Christ

If we despise our brother, our worship is unreal, and forfeits every divine promise. When we come before God with our hearts full of contempt, and unreconciled with our neighbors, we are, both individually and collectively, worshipping an idol.... Not just our own anger, but the fact that someone has been hurt, damaged, or disgraced by us, who "has a cause against us," erects a barrier between us and God. Let us therefore as a Church examine ourselves, and see whether we have not often enough wronged our fellow men. Let us see whether we have tried to win popularity by falling in with the world's hatred, its contempt and its contumely. For if we do that, we are murderers. Let the fellowship of Christ so examine itself today, and ask whether, at the hour of prayer and worship, any accusing voices intervene and make its prayer vain. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, 144-145, 1937.

 

Duty

It is our duty as human beings to proceed as though the limits of our capabilities do not exist. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955)
Thanks to Kay Goodnow

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. — Edmund Burke (1729-1797)

 

Studying without a Teacher

Too often we put saddlebags on Jesus and let the donkey run loose in the pasture. — Rumi, The Essential Rumi, Coleman Barks, trans., 256.
Thanks to Christopher Hoover.

 

Specialization

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, design a building, write a sonnet, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, solve equations, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. — Robert Heinlein, The Notebooks of Lazarus Long.

 

Business

The way you train the high-flying administrators, the mandarins, can be summed up in one sentence. It is to train people to be at ease with their consciences when they take decisions about things they do not understand. — Alan Dickinson (quoted in Rhodes, Deadly Feasts)

Many companies are attracted by a fantasy version of empowerment and simultaneously repelled by the reality. How lovely to have energetic, dedicated workers who always seize the initiative (but only when 'appropriate'), who enjoy taking risks (but never risky ones), who volunteer their ideas (but only brilliant ones), who solve problems on their own (but make no mistakes), who aren't afraid to speak their minds (but never ruffle any feathers), who always give their very best to the company (but ask no unpleasant questions about what the company is giving them back). How nice it would be, in short, to empower workers without actually giving them any power. — Peter Kizilos

 

Government

It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd. — Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume II, Chapter 4, Section 6, "What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear"

It's unwise to pay to much, but it's worse to pay to little. When you pay too much you lose a little money — that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot — it can't be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it si well to add something for the risk you run. And if you do that, you will have enough to pay for something better. — John Ruskin 1819-1900

Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm, but the harm does not interest them, or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves. - T. S. Eliot

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote! - Benjamin Franklin

 

Language

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words. — Philip K. Dick (1928- 1982)

It depends on what the meaning of the word "is" is. — William Jefferson Clinton

When ideas fail, words come in very handy. — Goethe

 

Truth

In an age of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. — George Orwell
Thanks to Jay Nelson, Church of Antioch, Albuquerque, who uses it as a an e-mail signature.

As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand. — Josh Billings

 

Vanity

I went out of that gallery and into another and still larger one, which at the first glance reminded me of a military chapel hung with tattered flags. The brown and charred rags that hung from the sides of it, I presently recognized as the decaying vestiges of books. They had long since dropped to pieces, and every semblance of print had left them. But here and there were warped boards and cracked metallic clasps that told the tale well enough. Had I been a literary man I might, perhaps, have moralized upon the futility of all ambition. But as it was, the thing that struck me with keenest force was the enormous waste of labour to which this somber wilderness of rotting paper testified. At the time, I will confess that I thought chiefly of the Philosophical Transactions and my own seventeen papers upon physical optics. - H.G. Wells, in The Time Machine as quoted at the end of Al Garcia's publication list.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away". - Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ozymandias"

 

Progress

It is astounding to realize that perhaps half of all human knowledge has been discovered or created in the past century. But then again, so has half the bullshit. — Mrs. Scooper, circa 1988

There is a kind of stupidity with which even the Gods struggle in vain. — Schiller

 

Equality

The demand for equality has two sources: one of them is among the noblest, the other is the basest of human emotions. The noble source is the desire for fair play. But the other source is the hatred of superiority. At the present moment it would be very unrealistic to overlook the importance of the latter.

There is in all men a tendency (only corrigible by good training from without and persistent moral effort from within) to resist the existence of what is stronger, subtler, or better than themselves. In uncorrected and brutal small men this hardens into an implacable and disinterested hatred for every kind of excellence…

Equality (outside mathematics) is a purely social conception. It applies to man as a political and economic animal. It has no place in the world of the mind. Beauty is not democratic; she reveals herself more to the few than to the many, more to the persistent and disciplined seekers than to the careles. Virtue is not democratic; she is achieved by those who persue her more hotly than most men. Truth is not democratic; she demands special talents and special industry in those to whom she gives her favors.

Political democracy is doomed if it tries to extend its demand for equality into these higher spheres. Ethical, intellectual, or aesthetic democracy is death. A truly democratic education - one which will preserve democracy - must be, in its own field, ruthlessly aristocratic, shamelessly "high-brow." — C. S. Lewis, "Democratic Education" (1944)

That Old Time Religion

Review: Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world throught him might be saved. He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved the darkeness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God. — John 3:16-21, KJV

The meaning in the message

Before we jump into a critique of Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ," a decent respect for people who are other than Christian requires that we set the ground for the discussion by saying a few words about the film's premise.

From the New Testament writers, through St. Augustine to the present, Christian apologists (explainers) have used the narrative of Genesis 3 to establish the necessity for God to "beget" a Son who can bear God's Wrath against us for the Sin which we have inherited as a result of Adam and Eve (the first humans) having eaten a piece of fruit from the "Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil" that God had forbidden them. To the first Christian community, almost all of whom were Jews familiar with Genesis, this made sense. But judging from the declining membership in mainline churches, it doesn't make sense to many people today.

Rather than scoff at the doctrine — and scoff one can, starting with St. Augustine's argument that we inherit Adam's Sin through our fathers' semen — let's try to extract its meaning by letting go of Genesis and focussing on the Crucifixion itself. And though we will only extract mere words, we ask that they may point to the Living Truth whose silence answered Pilate when he asked, with haughty cynicism, "What is Truth?"

Let's start with the barest outline of the Christian narrative: God, the Creator of the Universe and everything in it, chose to become born as an ordinary person, like you and me, named Y'shua (whom we call Jesus) about 2000 years ago, as we reckon time, in Judea (a remnant of the ancient kindgom of Israel, which in Jesus' time had been annexed and occupied by the Roman Empire). At the same time, God remained God, separate from Jesus, so that Jesus could only connect with God through prayer, just like you and me. Ordinary people, like you and me (many of the Judeans and their religious-political leaders), had Jesus killed because his practices and his preaching threatened their existence in three ways:

• Jesus' laxity of ritual observance undermined the purity of Judeans' system of beliefs and worship practices (the root of both modern Judaism and Christianity). Many writings in their Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament Scriptures) led them to believe that purity of Religion was necessary to retain God's favor, which they believed necessary to sustain them as a people, especially under the brutal heel of Roman occupation.
• Jesus' thinly veiled sedition against the Roman occupation of Judea (His "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's: render unto God that which is God's," would seem to indicate that he thought Judeans owed their primary allegiance to something greater than Caesar) threatened to ignite a new round of violent persecution by the Romans. The Judeans had been exiled from their land once before — into Babylon — and they were afraid the Romans would exile them again. Indeed, the Romans coined the term Palestina (after the Philistines) in order to divorce the Judeans from their land by changing its name.
• And finally, the Judean leaders were concerned that Jesus would turn the subjugated (and angry) populace against them for desecrating their Faith by collaborating with the Romans. Certainly he seemed to demand a kind of "inner purity" that he accused them of not practicing.

So, they did the prudent (and self-serving) thing. They handed this charismatic, but dangerous kook over to the Roman authorities, who routinely killed barbarians (non-Romans) by crucifixion, a method so horrific, that no one depicted Christ on the Cross until about A.D. 400, a century after the practice had been abolished and had passed from living memory.

As for the Romans — they thought it only proper to kill any overly religious Judean who might be taken to impugn the Divine Mandate of Caesar to rule Judea or any other part of the whole world. As for the Judean leaders and many of the Judeans themselves — their moral compromise was in vain: within forty years, the Romans massacred the Judeans and dispersed the survivors into the wider world. (Which set the stage for Jewish and Christian sensibility to shape the mores of Western Civilization to this day.)

But then, on the third day after his execution, people began seeing Jesus alive, and having conversations with him in which they walked with him, touched him, and ate food with him. Finally, after many days he appeared to be taken upward into heaven.
These events transformed the followers of Jesus. They had been humiliated, disillusioned, and terrorized by the brutal and comtemptuous execution of their leader. But after the Resurrection, they embraced death — both his and their own — and defiantly proclaimed his teachings, his death by crucifixion, and his resurrection against all authorities, despite all ridicule, and despite all hazards. And they changed the world.

But first they had to explain the meaning of the events they had witnessed. Which means they had to interpret these events using words and images that would be understood by their audiences, both Judean and Greco-Roman.

Now all explanation is simile and metaphor. One can only explain the unfamiliar by likening it to something the novice already knows and understands. All human language is a series of symbols, which stand for things, or point to things, but are not the things themselves. One is not going to capture the infinite God in a finite string of words, even if that string is as long as the whole Bible. Nevertheless, they had to explain, and, between forty and ninety years after the events themselves, their explanations (which had become oral traditions of several tiny and persecuted minorities) were written down as the four Gospels familiar to us now. But even before the Gospels were written, the gifted, educated, and driven Apostle Paul, wrote letters that explained Christ in terms familiar to both the occupied and their oppressors.

Though it seems inoffensive to us now, the reaction of anyone who had seen a crucifixion to the Paul's declaration, "I knew only Christ, and him crucified," would be shock. They would think him to be an idiot. Yet many would listen for a while, in horrified fascination.

Jesus is indeed our Messiah, he would tell the Judeans, because he conquered the greatest enemies of all, Death and Evil. He came into this world precisely to submit himself to the worst they could do, and then to triumph over them, on our behalf. And now that he has triumphed, he will come back for every single one of us who will follow him and lead us to Eternal Life with God — not some dim semi-existence like the Judean Sheol, or the Greco-Roman Hades, but Eternal Bliss with the Father, the Son, and the angels.

The Judeans would understand Jesus in terms of the sacrifice of Abraham, and the lamb sacrificed at Passover, as being the sacrifice to end all sacrifice. For the point of all sacrifice is to give up something of value in order to make things right with God. Now God himself has provided the highest value, his Son, just as God provided a ram so that Abraham would not have to sacrifice his only son, Isaac. God's Son, Jesus, is the stand-in for us all, for the debt we owe God, because, on our own, we are not right with God. The Judeans would understand this through the narrative of Genesis, in which Death and hardship entered the world, because the first humans, Adam and Eve, disobeyed the only commandment God had given them.

To the Romans, Jesus would be understandable as a tragic hero, who, like Hector in Homer's Iliad, carried out his honorable duty, though the path of honorable duty was doomed to a tragic and painful end. He would also be understandable as a truth-teller, who, like Socrates, chose to die rather than to appease respectable society by abandoning the truth. The Romans would understand that we are not right with God by observing the evil and corruption rampant in society. They were also familiar with Death and hardship entering the world through an act of disobedience — Pandora opening Epimetheus' box, against his order.

To either audience, the occupied or the oppressors, Paul and the Apostles would preach that the crucifixion of Jesus had been necessary, not for human purposes, but for God's purpose of redeeming humankind from Sin (actually hamartia which refers to a tragic flaw or a tragic mis-direction, in Greek, the language in which the New Testament was written) and the consequence of Sin — Death.

We, on the other hand, now know that hardship and Death were in the world from the beginning of Life, long before there were humans. Further, we know that evolution is the response of Life to hardship and Death, and that humans are one of the expressions of that response. In other words, God used hardship and Death to make humans. In response to hardship and Death, we often disregard others and look out only for ourselves. But, since we are evolved to be a social species, we know that it is wrong for us to do so. We know that we must do good for ourselves and our society, and that sometimes, we must sacrifice our personal desires and interests for some higher good. We know that this is what God's Justice has written on our hearts, yet we disobey, and we lie to ourselves about it. And we attack those who threaten to expose our lies — like Socrates, the Prophets, and Jesus. (Or anyone who challenges our way of seeing the world and ourselves.)

We don't want to be confronted with our lies. Which means we can't accept our true selves, and we don't believe anyone else can, either, unless we pay the price, unless we earn acceptablity by self-sacrifice to a higher cause. Yet we need to accept our true selves, in order to be able to tolerate God, in whose presence we confront the truth about everything. The price is beyond our ability to pay, for in the presence of God, we have nothing to offer but tainted goods — the selves that even we cannot accept. So God pays the price for us. God came into the world as one of us, to endure abandonment by God, and to be killed by us.

That is the price of admission for people like us into God's Presence — Paradise. It is a shock, a horror, and a scandal. And since we don't want to be confronted by the inference that we are that bad, we deny it, and attack (at least verbally) those who proclaim it.

Ecce Gibson

"The Passion of the Christ" opens with the camera moving at night between tree trunks toward the sweating, trembling figure of Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane. "Oh my God, this is really Catholic," I think as I brace myself for a two-hour ordeal. James Cazviel portrays spiritual distress so intense that it manifests itself in physical agony even before Judas and the Sanhedrin's private guards arrive. (Protestants discreetly emphasize the spiritual agony of the Passion, while Catholics emphasize the physical suffering. Points to the Catholics — we Protestants are often too prissy about embodiment. On the other hand, most lay Catholics I know have never really thought much about theology.)

We go on to see Jesus beaten and spat upon by the Sanhedrin's guards, and then beaten, whipped, flayed, kicked, and crowned with thorns by Pilate's Roman soldiers. We see him forced to carry his own cross, which he embraces. We in the audience are relieved that his torture is nearly over, but the worst is yet to come. Gibson forces us to look as each nail is driven into Christ's sacred hands and feet. Mother Mary watches, her hands clenched into the gravel on which she kneels. I look down at my own hands, clenching the arms of my seat.

Other commentators have deplored this graphic depiction of violence as excessive and offensive, unaware of what views they have been spared. We do not see Jesus naked, even though the Romans commonly humiliated their victims by exhibiting them without clothing. We do not see Jesus raped, even though Roman soldiers had license to further humiliate their captives by sexual abuse. (Perhaps Jesus was spared such treatment, as he was spared the breaking of his bones, but the Gospels and Catholic tradition are silent on this point.) Nor do we watch for six or eight hours as Jesus hangs from the cross, the motion of each involuntary gasp for breath causing such agony that he prays it to be his last.

Other commentators take issue with some of Gibson's portrayals, as do I. Pilate, for one, comes off far too sympathetically. Roman writings by his contemporaries describe Pilate as being so wantonly cruel that he was eventually recalled (fired) from his position as Prefect (Roman Governor) of Judea, because his brutal repression of the Judeans was itself causing too much resentment. I can't imagine that Pilate would have given a damn about yet one more charismatic, faith-healing preacher. Even Jesus' admission, "My Kingdom is not of this world," would have offended him. The only kings were those to whom Caesar and the Senate granted that title.

By the same token, Caiaphas (the chief Priest) comes off too unsympathetically, and the story suffers his loss as a potential figure for instruction. I have given my own more sympathetic interpretation above. In Gibson's rendition, however, Caiaphas has about as much regard for human life as the Taliban, and even threatens Pilate with stirring up a rebellion if Pilate does not crucify Jesus.

Caiaphas and his followers may have been the official priests of the Temple, but they had been installed and maintained by Rome as useful collaborators, and everyone knew it. Those with legimate claim to be priests — descendants of Aaron and members of the tribe of Levi — had been suppressed, and their line of descent had been obsured. In other words, Caiaphas and the Judean religious-legal body called the Sanhedrin were in no position to start a rebellion.

They were not even in a position to execute a man (although stoning the occasional adulteress seemed to be okay). The Roman occupation reserved that power for itself. That is to say, Jesus was executed on Pilate's order.

By contrast, I almost weep for Peter's anguish at realizing how he had betrayed Jesus by denying that he knew him. I feel the same even for Judas, who in his mortal regret for having betrayed Jesus, commits suicide before he could see the Resurrection, and seek the Forgiveness that the Risen Christ would surely have granted him. Perhaps these shadings of emotion are merely my projections, derived from my prior meditations on the Crucifixion. Or perhaps they are reactions to the shadings of portrayal in the cinematic art of Gibson and his cast.

May we legitimately ask of Gibson that he slant the portrayals ever so slightly toward more modern sensibilities? After all, the Gospels themselves are slanted toward the sensibilities of a Greco-Roman audience (they were written in Greek, not Hebrew or Aramaic) living in the latter part of the first century, A.D. The Gospel writers whitewash Pilate and tar Caiaphas, because you don't win converts and avoid persecution by implicating your audience's favorite governing structures in a crime against the God-Man for whom you seek to win their conversion. But you must implicate some group — religion back then was even more of a team sport than it is now — so why not some group who wasn't able to defend itself, like the Judeans? And besides, the Judeans were there, many of them must have called for, or at least assented to, the Crucifixion, and just as most of them had successfully resisted contamimation of their religion by the Romans, most of them also resisted contamination of their traditional religion by the Jesus movement, which must have engendered some animosity on the part of the early Christians, both Roman and Judean.

[OK. I could call them "Jews," but the Judeans were divided into about five religio-political factions, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Essenes, the Zealots, and the Jesus movement. Of these, the Pharisees evolved through the crucibles of the occupation and the Diaspora, and their creative reaction to them — the Talmud — into modern Judaism. The Jesus movement was absorbed by Greco-Roman culture and became Christianity, which means that Christianity is, culturally speaking, an extremely Hellenized branch of Judaism. The other factions did not survive the Roman occupation. Besides, the Romans didn't call them Jews, either. They called them Judeans, which is translated into modern languages as "Jews."]

So, the Gospels are anti-Judean, or at least anti-the-Judean-factions-that-were-not-the-Jesus-movement. Thus written, they have lent themselves to later interpreters who were anti-Semitic, which contributed to anti-Semitism becoming one of the Sins of the Christian Church. Can we therefore ask that Gibson re-slant the story, so that the Judeans appear more sympathetic, and the Romans less so?
Within limits, Gibson already does it. It is clear in the film that many Judeans are in the Jesus movement. Several members of the Sanhedrin itself challenge the legitimacy of Caiaphas' midnight "trial" of Jesus, before they are ejected. But the limits are narrow.

The limits are set by mostly by the Gospel texts as we have received them, collected, selected, and preserved for us by the Roman Catholic Church. And with the exception of a few touches, Gibson stays within them. Jesus and his Mother Mary, for example have few speaking parts in the Passion narratives, and therefore, few speaking parts in the film. Rather than fully developed characters, they are cinematic icons. Jesus, is the innocent Lamb of God, who bears the Sins of the World. Mary is the Mother is the embodiment of comfort and strength, even as she herself bears the unbearable torment of witnessing her Son's slow and brutal execution. Other than Christ, she alone seems to understand what is happening and to accept its necessity.

The other limits on Gibson's film are set by the extra-biblical traditions of the Roman Catholic Church regarding the Passion. One of those extra-biblical traditions, perhaps one may serve to illuminate Gibson's motivation.

As Jesus collapses yet again while bearing his Cross toward Golgotha, a woman steps forward to wipe his bloody face with a cloth. In Catholic tradition, she is only named for what she posesses, Veronica, the True Image (of Christ). Again, I feel tears welling in my eyes. If only the tradition were true, and if only the Veronica had not been lost. I care not so much to look on an image of Christ, whether true or not, but something in me yearns to touch, even to kiss, something that had touched my Lord in kindness. I surprise myself that I am capable of such piety.

Piety is obviously Gibson's motivation for making this film. It is a thank-you card from Mel to his Redeemer, and to the Church that instructed him in the Faith. Mel gave it everything he had, and stayed as close as the film-maker's art would allow to the text and traditions as given. His piety permits no slanting or softening to meet the demands of modern sensibility. Nor is it needed. Rather, modern sensibility has for too long been trying to forget its roots in the ancient faith. It is modern sensibility that could stand to be less smug.

So, bottom line. Is "The Passion of the Christ" anti-Semitic? As writer-producer-director, he had complete creative control over this film. I was told that the hand he chose to show driving the nail into Christ's hand is his own. (And until you can come to an understanding that, spiritually speaking, the Blood of Christ is on your hands, too, you have yet to make a truly Christian confession.)
The Passion of the Christ (both the narratives in the Gospels, and Mel Gibson's film) is a shock, a horror, and a scandal, but it is also the beginning of the Good News. The completion is the moment of Resurrection, with which the film ends.

If you are Christian, I recommend that you see "The Passion of the Christ" for the opportunity to expose yourself to the emotional impact of what it is you say you believe. If you are other than Christian, this is an opportunity to find out what makes the Christians with whom you share this world tick. There is very little "background" in the movie, so you might want to read one or more of the Gospels first. But don't bring the kids. It's rated R for a reason.

Editor's Note: After 2006, it appears that if you get Mel Gibson drunk, let him drive, and then try to arrest him, he gets anti-Semitic Tourette's Syndrome. The film may not be overtly anti-Semitic, but we're not so sure about Mel.

GWOT, Islam, Big Brother and You

On this third anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I must write a stream of consciousness. My day job has been demanding, which is why I have updated these pages infrequently this past year. I can't say that I get more than a 3000 mile away perspective out here on the Left Coast of California. On the other hand, maybe distance helps.

My reading this summer has been directed at trying to make sense of this new world we are in. I've read books like Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Re-Making of the World Order, Barnett's The Pentagon's New Map, and Jessica Stern's Terror in the Name of God. Now I'm in the middle of Friedman's The Lexus and the Olive Tree.

What I find is that we are seeing a privatization of war, from something done by "Great Powers" (WW I and WW II) to something done by "Rogue States" (Iraq in Gulf War I) to something done by individuals with private armies (Usama Bin Laden and the 9/11 attacks). But Great Powers like the United States are not static entities. They respond to stimuli, and they adapt. By privatizing war, the Bin Ladens of the world think they have found a way to fight Great Powers, without presenting targets at which the Great Powers can strike back. In response to this, I think it is fair to expect the Great Powers to discover or invent new ways to fight, tailored to the new kind of war. Quite frankly, I hope that the first few snowflakes of discovery and invention have already begun to move down the mountain, triggering an avalanche that eventually lands on these private warriors.

On the other hand, since international legal structures recognize war as something only nation-states do to each other, I should call these private warriors, "illegal combatants." Illegal combatants are in a kind of limbo with respect to international law, which, as far as I'm concerned, is something they should have thought about before they got into this business.

Another thing they should have thought about is that war is lost by whoever quits fighting first. The illegal combatants have nobody who can surrender for them. Nobody who can signal the Great Powers that they have had enough. Nobody who can, on behalf of them all, ask the Great Powers to stop. At first glance, this might seem like a problem for the Great Powers. But as the Great Powers learn to fight the new kind of war, the Great Powers will make this a problem for the illegal combatants.

But I can't go on calling them illegal combatants. There is more to them than that, and it needs to be acknowledged. In the current conflict, known around the Pentagon as the Global War On Terror (or GWOT for short), the illegal combatants identify themselves a Muslims. But that isn't specific enough either. On one project I was involved with this past year, my boss's boss was a Muslim. He is a great guy, and I'd work for him again, given the chance.

No, they are not just Muslims. They have been called Islamo-Fascists by Francis Fukuyama, which is a pretty good term, because they are more Fascist than Islamic. This term concentrates on their zeal to force everyone to look and act like they do. There was a time in Afghanistan when you could get killed by the Taliban for trimming your beard too short. But that term captures what they do when they gain power over people. It doesn't address their attachment to war. I prefer a more perjorative term: jihaddicts. It is an amalgam of jihad (Islamic sacred effort or holy war) and addict, as in addiction, being hooked on alcohol, heroin or any other drug.

Yes, they won a successful jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980's. But did they quit when the war was over? No, they fought against their erstwhile Afghan allies until they took over most of the country. In the 1990's Afghanistan did not "harbor terrorists." Afghanistan was taken over by a government that was bankrolled by the present Jihaddict-in-Chief, Usama Bin Laden. Then, did they quit when they had won Afghanistan? No, they picked a fight with the United States on 9/11. (They had tried to pick this fight many times before, but they just couldn't seem to get our attention.)

Now, the jihaddicts use several charges against the West in general and the United States in particular to justify their actions to themselves, and to recruit more jihaddicts. There is some justice to some of these charges. But, suppose we fix all these complaints. The jihaddicts are in business to stay in business. They will "remember" or invent new charges and complaints. They won't even choose a new enemy. To complement their grandiose image of themselves, they need a grandiose enemy. That's the US, permanently in their gunsights, and the weaker we appear, the more fire we will receive.

It's also Russia, whom they are still targeting, even though Russia withdrew from Afghanistan. Just as things were about to get better in Chechnya and Ingushetia, the jihaddicts struck a school full of kids. We forget that when the jihaddicts struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, we all felt that they had "crossed a line." Well, now they have crossed another line. It's what they do. Ever more, ever worse, trying to get that elusive high. (Ah the "Pleasure of Hating," the title of an essay by William Hazlitt. And yes, lines have been crossed against Muslims, but committing atrocities as revenge for atrocities is losing sight of the moral law as a whole, and Muslims want to think Islam is superior to other religions.)

Another thing the jihaddicts engage in is the rhetoric of humiliation. They claim that Muslims have been "humiliated" by non-Muslims at various times in the past. This is perhaps a poisonous residue of honor/shame-based cultures in which Islam has taken root, but it is not Islamic, as far as I, an outsider with a 3000 mile away viewpoint, can tell. Consider that Islam teaches that a Muslim is closest to God at the moment he or she bows his or her forehead to the ground in prayer. Muslims do this in imitation of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), who taught them to do this by example and exhortation. Now the forehead of any praying Muslim cannot ever go below the forehead of the Prophet, because the ground that God created stops the forehead. In other words, when closest to God, the ordinary Muslim is on a level with the Prophet himself. Which means to me, that it is (or should be) theologically impossible for anyone to humiliate a Muslim, unless that Muslim chooses to be humiliated. In particular, maltreatment of Muslims, such as occurred at Abu Ghraib prison, does not humiliate the victims of that maltreatment — rather it humiliates the perpetrators, who should have had the mental and moral sense to treat Muslims decently. But I doubt that this theology of Muslim pride will catch on with the jihaddicts. They need their theology of humiliation to generate the rage that generates the new recruits who shed the blood of children.

What else they do is meticulously justify to themselves doing things that the Qur'an explicitly and implicitly forbids. Since they do this in the Name of God, and ask God's blessing, they imply that God approves what God has already declared to be manifest evil. Now attributing to God that which is evil is attributing to God that which the Qur'an attributes to Iblis (and equivalently, the Bible attributes to Satan). In other words, in order to enable themselves to pursue their addiction, the jihaddicts commit blasphemy.

Let's savor the irony of this. The Wahhabis are the puritanical ultra-reformist sect of Islam that destroys mosques that are too ornate and that even demolished the houses of the family of the Prophet Muhammad. They did this because they did not want people to worship or revere or associate anything with God, but God alone. Associating anything else with God, they call shirk, one of the worst sins. Yet the jihaddicts are overwhelmingly Wahhabi or Wahhabi-influenced. Surely, associating evil with God, is worse that associating something good with God. Surely, blasphemy is worse that shirk, even to a Wahhabi. But the jihaddicts continue on, oblivious to the Wrath that awaits them, and the Wahhabis, with their explicit encouragement of anti-Western hatred, keeps preparing new recruits for them. In some parts of the world, the Wahhabis even give the jihaddicts shelter and supplies, a sort of co-dependent relationship.

So the jihaddicts are blasphemers. They are also idolaters, because addiction forces the addict to make his or her drug of choice the most important thing in his or her life. If forced to choose, many addicts will choose to sacrifice any and all relationships in their lives to go on using the drugs to which they are addicted. Similarly, the jihaddicts choose jihad in preference to God. Again, the evidence is the way they minutely rationalize the Qur'an, the Sunnah, and the entire deposit of Islamic faith and law to support their actions, which directly and obviously violate those things. Again, such idolatry is worse than shirk. The Wahhabis ignore this and continue their message of hate against the West.

But while the rhetoric of the Wahhabis is anti-Western, that really captures only the surface. What really seems to me to be happening is Globalization. The West in general, and the United States in particular are the economic engines behind much of Globalization for now. But more engines are being added all the time. Think of India, China, Japan, Singapore, etc.

The hallmark of Globalization is connectedness, and its symbol is the Internet. I can type these characters tonight, and anyone anywhere in the world with an Internet connection can read them tomorrow. Connectedness is necessary to participate in the global economy, to get what Friedman calls the Electronic Herd of investors to invest in your country. Without being connected, the Electronic Herd can't see into your country to find what to invest in, and they can't trust your country with their money if they can't see inside. And if you don't get them to invest in you, then you're poor, relatively speaking. But the price of connectedness is the free flow of information and ideas. People see how other people live. They are free to reject what they don't like and adopt what they do like.

This is what the jihaddicts really hate about Globalization. Let me express it as an oversimplified bottom line:

If Globalization comes to your country, your women may still choose to cover their heads, but you won't be able to keep them under house arrest for their entire lives.

Ultimately, that's what I think its about. We have to beat the jihaddicts, and the way to do it is the liberation of women, by way of continued Globalization. In other words, GWOT, the Global War on Terror can be lost without sufficient use of force, but it can only be won by increasing freedom and ability of everyone on earth.

So are we winning or losing? If you get your news from the Western media, you cannot tell. Western media report conflict, action, and especially body count. Body count, however, is the measure of success of the jihaddicts. The more non-Muslims they kill, the more they think our resolve will weaken. As indeed it does, because all we see in the news is more bodies, with no end in sight. On the other hand, the measure of success of the good guys is what percentage of the health care, social services, and education they are providing. You see, if the good guys don't provide these things, the bad guys will, gaining credibility and support. This isn't common sense on my part. I read it in Tom Clancy's Shadow Warriors, which is a history of US Special Operations Forces. The soft stuff — health care, social services, education — is how an insurgency takes root and flourishes. The local recipients of these benefits cannot help but sympathize with the insurgents and give them "social cover." But the media do not report these measures of our success, because they think it is soft news, and therefore not important and especially not marketable. The result: we see only the enemy's numbers on the scoreboard, and none of our own. Even when we are winning it looks like we are losing. The press need to educate themselves that their reportage is one-sided against the society that guarantees their freedom, and is therefore not merely neglectful, but pernicious.

But there is another way to lose the GWOT. And that is by failing to build the legal and social norms to protect ourselves from some of the tools of GWOT. Let's rewind to the earlier part of this piece. I said that an avalanche of discovery and invention may some day (maybe even "before this decade is out" to quote John F. Kennedy) land on the jihaddicts. Is is unreasonable to suppose that some of that avalanche may consist of new ways to gather information on people? Does anyone remember John Poindexter and Total Information Awareness (TIA)? Now it would be just plain stupid and irresponsible to refuse to develop and use the means to find the jihaddicts, if we can do so. But is would be equally stupid and irresponsible to think that our present body of law can deal with ever inproving ways to gather and analyze information, whether by governments or corporations. I have already proposed that we recognize information that identifies a person as that person's property, and that we enlist our tradition of property law to aid in protecting people's privacy. I ring that bell again now.

And now let us pray. God, our Heavenly Father, those of us who live in liberty and abundance thank You, and ask You to help us extend liberty and abundance to everyone. We ask you to comfort those who have lost loved ones in the struggle against the jihaddicts. And we ask You to manifest your Judgement on the jihaddicts swiftly and soon, for the good of Islam and all religions. Amen.

God Bless you all.

Bin Laden's Performance Appraisal

In what follows, take employee to mean servant of God.

1. Please provide your assessment of this individual's performance based on your observations, needs and/or expectations. Whenever possible, include specific examples.

Usama has built al-Qaeda, a global organization to wage war against non-Islamic peoples in general and the United States in particular by using the methods of terrorism to bypass their defenses and to deny them targets at which to strike back effectively. He has set up interlocking networks to recruit people of all levels of ability, to obtain supplies and weapons, and to distribute charity and propaganda to host populations. This organization can now sustain itself without his active leadership.

Usama orders and encourages atrocities committed by al-Qaeda and its sympathizers, and justifies them by lengthy arguments in which he and the mullahs he recruits work step-by-step from statements in the Holy Qur'an, the Sunna (the extra-Qur'anic deeds and words of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him), and Sharia (Islamic Law and Jurisprudence).

In the first, he shows real genius at building a self-sustaining organization, with safehouses, operatives, training facilities and manuals, secure communications methods, all necessary matieriel, etc., but it exists to commit increasingly outrageous acts of mass murder in hope of starting a global war between everyone else and the Islamic world. Ultimately this ill serves the interests of Islam, both as a society of people and as a proselytizing religion.

In the second, he has committed the most meticulous and sustained work of blasphemy in the entire history of ethical monotheism (be it Judaism, Christianity, or Islam) by twisting the words of God and his Prophet to justify manifest and obvious evil.

2. In what areas of performance are the employee's strengths?

Usama is brilliant at marshalling money to make more money, at developing and grooming his personal contacts to maintain support for his organization, at mediating disputes amoung its supporters, and at organizing and motivating people. He has also had experience in agriculture and engineering. If his motives had been genuinely good, he could have been instrumental in raising the standard of living of the Islamic world.

3. What areas of performance should the employee concentrate on developing or improving?

Usama's understanding of God and Islam, the religion to which God has called him, is severely defective. Whether his intellectual failure to understand is what leads him to commit such enormous blasphemy and such atrocious deeds, or whether hate perverts his will so that he misunderstands Islam, or whether he perverted both his will and his understanding because he has become addicted to jihad (idolatrously loving jihad more than he loves God) is immaterial to this review. He needs to work on both his hate and his understanding.

4. What goals or expectations do you have for this individual in this coming review period?

Usama needs to seek teachers who are more connected with God, and less connected with their own hate, or worse still, with the one whom the Qur'an describes as "the Slinking One, who whispers into the hearts of men." He needs to repent of his ways, and stand down his organization, or else convert it to genuinely constructive action and charity.

My expectation is that Usama has set himself up to experience suffering and death as punishment for his crimes against humanity, including his fellow Muslims (which he callously regards as "collateral damage"). From his public statements, I believe he is fully prepared for this. For his crimes against God and God's creatures (his fellow humans), however, I fear that Usama may face a humiliating and sustained (perhaps eternal) punishment on the Last Day (the Day of Judgement), a fate for which he cannot be prepared.

5. Additional comments important to the evaluation of this employee.

Usama utters the most vile blasphemy, the most outrageous distortions of history, and the most viscious threats and orders with a calm and gentle demeanor. He may have tendencies toward a paranoid psychopathy. He seems to have taken on a narcissistic injury (an imagined or construed blow to his self-esteem) on behalf of all Islam and Islamic history, and to blame non-Islamic peoples, particularly Westerners and Americans, rather than to seek both the cause and the remedy from within.

Commandments, Virtues & Sins

In case you need a reminder, here is an abridgement of the first ten (of 613) statements of law from the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament):

The Ten Commandments
No worshipping gods other than God. No worshipping human creations. No disrespecting God's name. No working on the Sabbath. No disrespecting parents. No killing. No adultery. No stealing. No lying to harm another. No wanting another's spouse or possessions.

You might also find it helpful to remember:

Theological Virtues	Cardinal Virtues	Capital Virtues	Capital Sins
Faith Hope Charity	Prudence Justice Temperance Fortitude	Humility Liberality Fraternity Meekness Chastity Temperance Diligence	Pride Avarice Envy Wrath Lust Gluttony Sloth