The Word of the President

I’ll take a pause in my investigation of the Bible- the Word of Man- and dip my toe back into the world of politics. Yet, I wonder if I can string a thin thread back to the Bible and/or to the Israelites as I wade into the brackish waters of politics. The tether is community. The story of the Jews in the Bible is one of constant struggle in an attempt to bring The People together in a unified land, in a unified community. Although that early community was by no means a democracy in the sense of the word today, there was a common mutuality among the citizens.

In his 3rd State of the Union speech last evening, President Obama called for a similar common mutuality among the citizens of our nation. It is obvious and one does not need a graph to see that there is a huge bulge of wealth concentrated in a very few members of this society. The rich, as in Monopoly,  continue to collect more “Go” money while the other players on the board are immersed in mortgage problems with their houses, needing more and more money from the Bank to continue on with the ‘game.’

Were this a pinball game, the word tilt would appear on the board. The lower 90% are suffocating under the pomposity of the uber rich. When has this nation last been so tilted in economic inequality? Further, when has one political party so rabidly defended the status quo?

Two ‘grassroots’ movements in the past few years raised the issue of inequality. To be accurate, the Tea Party movement was not grassroots but rather a concocted turf-grass scheme. Yet the Occupy Movement honestly brought the issue to the attention of The People of this nation. In last night’s SOU address, President Obama took the torch from that movement and proposed that The People amend the tax code to make it more fair for all of our citizens. In other words, the President asked for a more mutual commonality among the citizens.  Rather than favoring one segment, the President hopes that Congress will adjust the tax code and remove the perks that have been enacted to benefit those of greater affluence so that the tax code of this nation reflects the common mutuality of The People of our nation.

The political red herring, ‘class warfare’ has been injected into this current conundrum as to muddy the waters and hide the reality of an unjust tax burden upon ‘the many.’ Propagandists began shouting ‘foul’ even before the President delivered his words on this subject, hoping to mute and obscure the obvious inequality of our tax code. No doubt all day long, the professional propagandists on right-wing media will continue the obfuscation and confusion.  Sadly, many blue collar Republicans will absorb the propaganda and begin repeating the nonsense, even though they themselves are unjustly punished by the tax laws they defend. There is no logic to it at all; don’t bother to look for logic here.

So here we are, the day after. The angry shouts, the propaganda, the confusion falls like a miasmic fog over The People. Some will ‘believe’ the spin and will join turf-grass movements to defend the status quo, even though they are mules pulling the wagon of gold ore towards the owner’s mansion.

Others will rise above the din and move to demand a more fair, more mutual tax sacrifice for all of The People of our nation. As the Jews pulled together after they at last settled into a community, our nation needs remember our common mutuality some 3000 years later.

Word of Man- Right-wing Fodder from the Pages of the Bible

In his book, Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non Religious World, Bishop John Shelby Spong breaks open the Torah and exposes it as the Word of Man rather than the Word of God. I discussed that in the past several posts. I’d like to discuss a fascinating parallel that I discovered between the culture of the Israelites of 400 BCE and the right-wing, fundamental Christian citizens of the United States in the 21st century. A few weeks ago a naive right-wing blogger stated that he was ‘more of an Old Testament Christian.’ Gulp.

As I read farther and farther into Spong’s expose’ of the foundation of the Jewish faith and its effect on the lives of the 4th century BCE Semites of the Middle East, I am struck with parallels between these ancient people and the fundamentalist Christians of the 21st century in our country. Spong does not make that connection, but I do. As I read the story of the people behind the layers of Biblical mythology, I note characteristics of modern-day fundamentalists- especially the political characteristics of the people at the far right end of the political spectrum.

The question arises: does the exposure to Bible stories in Sunday school and the subsequent reading of these stories in adulthood alter the mind-set of modern-day Americans and make them more susceptible to right-wing political ideology? It is already clear to me that Bible literalists  are ripe targets of propagandists simply because they are literalists and believers who obey the instructions of their religious leaders. Our friend, Microdot, calls them victims of a ‘manipulative mind control cult.’ Yet, I think it is important to ask: What ideas and ideals do modern-day Americans absorb from the pages of the Bible? And further: How do these ideals affect their political agenda?

WARMONGERING

During the NBC GOP debate on Monday night in Florida, only Ron Paul disavowed military aggressiveness by our country. In fact, he chastised the others for promoting such a militarist agenda. In South Carolina he was booed for that statement. Yet, what do the pages of the Bible reveal about the Israelites? They were forever sending their armies out to ‘smite their enemies.’ War-heroes became the leaders and the kings. The more foreign wars, the higher the stature of the king. Do the many stories of Israeli war-making in the pages of the Bible justify similar military aggression for our nation?  For the Bible says…

ANTI-SCIENCE

Then there is the other nonsense hyped by the right-wing of the GOP- the anti-science factor. The global climate change ‘myth’ is raw meat for the brethren. ‘Cap and Trade’ drips with blood. Of course, the GOP is in bed with Big Oil, but the right-wing sheep are easy targets for propaganda because of the anti-science myths scattered throughout the pages of the Bible. Recall the most famous anti-science tale of all: Joshua asking God  to answer his prayers by stopping the sun in the sky to allow him more time to slaughter his enemies. Remember that  Galileo was condemned for the “heresy” of suggesting that the earth was not the center of a three-tiered universe.  The Bible was assumed to be accurate and the “Word of God,” was used to seal Galileo’s fate- to be burned at the stake as a heretic!

DISTRUST OF FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

Yet there is even more similarity between the mind-set of the Israelites of that era and today’s right-wing of the GOP. Spong relates that after the many battles that the heroes fought,  ‘the Bible suggests that the Jewish people settled down into a series of closely related regions under the leadership of local judges.’ Spong goes on, “This period in Jewish history is not unlike what’s going on in the modern-day nation of Afghanistan, where real leadership resides in the tribal chiefs, who rule various parts of the nation with an iron hand. These local Jewish judges were in fact the political rulers at that time. The Israelites at this time had searing memories of their oppression at the hands of the Egyptians. Having found freedom, they were now not eager to be submissive to a distant authority again.”

Although this idea of ‘local control’ and ‘disdain of distant authority’ is quite subtle in the passages of the Bible, it nonetheless is obvious to me. Is it a stretch on my part to see a connection between the cautious Israelites who loved local control and the States’ Rights philosophy of today’s right-wing? Spong notes America’s Civil War  73 years after its founding and the ‘civil war’ that broke out with the Jews 80 years after the reign of King David. In  930 BCE the country split into two kingdoms: Israel ( Samaria) in the north and Judah (Jerusalem) in the south.  Both we and they had a group of ‘dissidents’ who balked at a central government, taking up arms against centralized power.

ETHNIC PURITY

The purity laws and kosher dietary laws set by the priestly class during the Babylonian captivity were specifically formulated to set the Jews apart from the non-Jews. Their subsequent ‘cleansing’ upon their release from Babylonia of anyone not of pure Jewish lineage made the Jews an even more exclusive ‘race’ of people. They were especially intolerant of their distant ‘cousins’ the Samarians who they viewed as unpure. Even 400 years later, the famous tale from the New Testament portrays Jesus as nearly a heretic as he talks with the Samarian woman at the well. Of course, she must be portrayed as a whore ['she had 5 husbands'] yet she lays out the differences between the north and south kingdoms when she states, “Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.” Exclusivity by the dominant race.

The so-called ‘Cannanites’ were also looked down upon and in constant ‘war’ with the Jews. Interestingly, modern archaeological studies and modern scholars consider the kingdoms of Israel and Judah to be a subset of Canaanite culture. Yet, the Jews kept their lineage pure by excluding [and warring with] the Cannanites who were, hold your breath, polytheistic! Oh, the shame of it all.

Today the Catholicity of Gingrich and Santorum and the Mormonism of Romney are anathema to many fundamentalist Protestants as they decide on which GOP candidate to support. The purity of Protestantism, that is, fundamentalist Protestantism must be maintained. Do I dare mention Muslims?

Those, then are the parallels that I see between today’s right-wing fundamentalist Republicans and the stories in the Bible of the purification of the Jews. Outsiders need not apply.

The Word of Man- Promoting Prejudice in the 21st Century

Bishop Spong [Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non Religious World] makes it quite clear that he and other biblical scholars do not believe that the Bible was either inspired by or written by God. He  said:

Holy Scriptures all have human authors who lived in a specific time and place. Only those readers who ascribe an external, revelatory, supernatural source for these ancient texts will find this insight disturbing. There is, however, no rational argument in the world that would support a divine or revealed source for the sacred writing of any religious tradition. This truth becomes quite obvious as we begin to look at the final major strand that made up the Torah.

That final strand was the Biblical re-write done from about the 6th to the 4th century BCE by the priestly class.  They edited even the creation story at the outset of the Bible so that it and other parts of the scripture fit the newly revised theology of the Jewish people after the Babylonian captivity. While in captivity the priestly class, in order to keep the Jewish faith and tradition from being tainted by their captors, formulated a series of rites and laws that would keep the Jews separate from the Babylonians in order to insure their ethnic purity. Circumcision of males, setting aside a Sabbath Day and kosher dietary restrictions would insure that the Jewish heritage would not be lost during the captivity. These and other customs, sadly, would also create a ethnic purity in the Jewish people which would later be used to cleanse their homeland of ‘foreigners.’

Spong writes:

The passion to keep themselves separate from Gentile infiltration in order to survive as a recognized people during the exile got interpreted, when the Jews returned to their homeland, to be a passion for ethnic purity. Genealogies were kept so that people could demonstrate their blood lines and prove their unpolluted Jewish heritage. This led to purges of those husbands, wives and children who were not demonstrably full-blooded Jews, as well as to the judgment, found in New Testament times, that Gentiles were by definition unclean and thus to be avoided. It also led to a violent prejudice against those who came to be called Samaritans. Not only had the Jewishness of the Samaritans been compromised, but their religion had been corrupted by foreign and thus pagan elements that the Samaritans had welcomed. Jewish prejudices against those thought of as half-breeds and heretics went deep and they were validated and legitimatized by appeals to the “Word of God” found in the law said to have been dictated by God to Moses. In time this prejudice against both the unclean Gentiles and the heretical Samaritans would usher in some less than admirable parts of Jewish history.

There it is. Do you get it? Just today at some gathering in Florida, GOP candidate Rick Santorum was confronted by a woman who claimed that President Obama is a Muslim and is not a legitimate president. She said, “He is an avowed Muslim and my question is, why isn’t something being done to get him out of government? He has no legal right to be calling himself president.”

Of course Santorum took the coward’s way out and only said that ‘he was trying to get Obama out of office.’

Exclusivity. Purity. Purging of the ‘unclean.’ For the Bible says…

If it was right and proper for the Jews to purify their land of the unclean, the half-breeds and heretics, as the Bible states, then it is perfectly logical for some Bible-thumper to want to cleanse America of an illegitimate president.

The “word of God” says it is right to do so.

The Word of Man: Hybridization of Stories

In Bishop John Shelby Spong’s book, Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non Religious World, he cites the work of two professors, H. Graf and Julius Wellhausen, who began to analyze the literary style of the Bible.  They came to the conclusion that the first books of the Bible were not only not the work of  God, but they were authored by at least four different sects of the early Jewish religion. Spong writes:

Analyzing primarily the first five books of the Old Testament Professors Graf and Wellhausen discovered that there were many observable differences that could be discerned in the texts of the Torah itself. This discovery, in turn, led them to the conclusion that the Torah consisted of several strands woven together of what had once been independent material. One strand, for example, referred to God by the name Yahweh, or at least by an unpronounceable set of consonants that were written as YHWH. Where Yahweh was used as the name for God the text also called the holy mountain of the Jews Mount Sinai. There was another strand of the Torah that called God by the name of Elohim, and where that name was used for God, the holy mountain of the Jews was referred to as Mount Horeb. A third strand of Torah material reflected life in the Kingdom of Judah in the seventh century BCE, which well after the split between the Northern Kingdom and Judah and even after the Northern Kingdom had been destroyed by the Assyrians. Still another strand appeared to be dated during the time of the exile in the sixth century BCE after Judah had been defeated by the Babylonians and its people relocated to the land of Babylonia.

How interesting and how revealing! Through all of these millenia since the Torah was written, ordinary people believed that the Bible was a singular document penned by God. Some still do. Spong says that, because of the discoveries stated in the Wellhausen Hypothesis, ‘biblical scholarship has taken an enormous leap into modernity.’ Yet, few of the Bible literalists and evangelicals even know of this hypothesis, let alone would ‘believe’ such a theory to be true.  There’s the rub!

Interestingly, that’s not all.  Around the year 621 BCE a document was ‘discovered’ during a renovation of the temple. During the work of the renovation the workers found, perhaps hidden behind some of the plaster that was being torn away, a book that purported to be “a book of the law.” The book even claimed to have been written by Moses, who by this time had been dead for some six hundred years. The book, discovered by Hilkiah the high priest, was read to King Joshia and he rent his garment and fell to his knees at this ‘newly’ discovered document. Apparently kings can easily be duped by high priests. What the king did not know is that the document was freshly written by the high priests to make the religion more conservative with new laws and rituals. Today that is known as the book of Deuteronomy.

Shysters in the priestly class. [Again.]

As long as The People followed these new, more strict laws, ‘God’s favor’ would shine on the land. Further no destruction would not occur so long as King Josiah lived. A few years later, Josiah was killed on the battlefield of Megiddo by Pharaoh Necho of Egypt. Blamo! Either ‘God’ was away on a golf outing or The People were very naughty. As a result, off they went to Babylonia for a 3-generation captivity.

So that the would not lose their identity during the Babylonian captivity [as had the 'lost tribes of the north,] the priests decided to further codify the laws- the laws, rules and customs of what it meant to be a Jew. Spong said, “These priestly editorial changes indicated that the mandates of Sabbath observance, kosher dietary laws and the requirement of circumcision for all the males of the tribe were now said to have been original parts of their covenant with God. Then into the Torah they wrote rules designed to govern every aspect of their common life. This was a monumental revision, but when it was complete the nature of Judaism had been set, not in stone, but in literal scriptures.”

Editors of the Bible. Imagine that. By the way, because of these new laws, earlier parts of the Torah had to be amended including a new seven-day creation story- the one where Adam’s rib remained in his body. New set of commandments, too- the newly formulated ‘Sabbath Day’ had to now be included in those stone tablets.

My, my, the word of man sure has undergone lots of changes, revisions and additions as the book grows in size and importance.

One of the long-time contributors to this blog asked my what I hoped to gain through this investigation of the Bible. The short answer is: the truth. The truth about a book deigned ‘holy’ and ‘inspired by God.’ A book that has caused much pain, suffering and death through its misuse and misunderstanding. That’s what I hope to achieve- the truth about the Bible. And in doing so, you and I will have some information the next time some Bible-thumping literalist attempts to foist his or her idiocy upon The People because ‘the Bible says so.’

Gaud!

The Word of Man, Chapter II

To my great surprise, I learned that the Bible used to be much smaller than it is today. How small? One book- the Book of Moses. That’s it. Sadly, The People commonly believe that the Bible fell to earth in its present state as the ‘word of God.’ As I read more of Bishop John Shelby Spong’s latest book, Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World, I have discovered, contrary to the propaganda I was fed, that the Bible was merely a genealogical record of a wandering Semite tribe. It is not too difficult to figure out that the story of Abraham, the so-called Father of the Jewish nation, is layered with myth and imagination in that his birth is dated to about the year 1850 BCE. Abraham is, to be sure, a faded memory in the Bible, since he lived about forty-five generations before the first word of the Bible was written. In the year 1850 BCE, few people knew how to read or write, yet the details of Abraham’s life are amazingly exact in the pages of Genesis.

So, how did this solo book expand to so many books? And why didn’t God write the entire book at one time? Well, because God didn’t, of course. Bishop Spong notes, surprisingly, that Abraham may not have even been a Jew!  His place of origin was the city of Ur in the land of the Chaldees, today Iraq, quite far from Israel. Not only that, but his ‘son’ Issac may not have been his son at all in that his place of birth is recorded at Beersheba, 120 km south-west of Jerusalem. Abraham’s ‘grandson,’ Jacob, was said to have been born in Bethel, 14 miles north of Jerusalem.

Spong says:

“the identification of the three formational ancestors with three shrines in the land opens up the possibility that they may originally have been unrelated Canaanite holy men whose lives were subsequently intertwined and interpreted as the founding fathers of the Jewish people. A motive for doing just that is seen in the Bible itself, for riding on the backs of these patriarchs in Jewish folklore was the justification for the Jewish invasion of this land that occurred around 1250 BCE. The general purpose of these patriarchal tales in the book of Genesis was to justify the military claim the Jews made that they were conquering this land only because God had promised it to their ancestors hundreds of years earlier.”

Of course, anybody not wedded to the literalism of the Bible would conclude that stories of men who walked the earth 45 generations before their story was put to paper, would be mythical rather than mortal. I can trace my ancestry back 7 generations to the year 1700, but no further. Even so, the details of my g-g-g-g-grandfather are sketchy- and he wasn’t a farmer, but rather a merchant who lived in a large city in France.

It is interesting that Rick Santorum, pimping the evangelical vote said, just yesterday in Boiling Springs, SC:

“Where do you think this concept of equality comes from?” Santorum asked the enthusiastic crowd packed into a restaurant here. “It doesn’t come from Islam. It doesn’t come from the East and Eastern religions, where does it come from? It comes from the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, that’s where it comes from.”

Certainly the God-fearing evangelicals in Boiling Springs immediately recalled their Bible stories of these three supposed family members whom the Jews called the ‘founders of Israel.’ By the way, what the hell does this story have to do with ‘equality?’ Did these people of Boiling Springs South Carolina ‘believe’ that the concept of ‘equality’ flourished during the Bronze Age- a time of kingdoms, slavery and massive conquests of the lands of warring tribes? Or, doesn’t that matter nor the truth behind the reference?

Spong sets us straight about the stories of these 3 men:

The general purpose of these patriarchal tales in the book of Genesis was to justify the military claim the Jews made that they were conquering this land only because God had promised it to their ancestors hundreds of years earlier. As rational claims go these statements make no sense at all, but as propaganda they constituted then, and still do now, powerful influences in human history.

Yes they do. And, stepping into politics once more, this propaganda is alive and well today as the GOP candidates move to Florida to woo even more evangelicals with their bravado about the State of Israel and the relationship it has with our nation. Did you know that the Las Vegas casino operator and  billionaire contributor to the campaign of Newt Gingrich, Sheldon Adelson,  is close ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and owner of the Israeli daily Israel Hayom. “There is not a better advocate for Israel than Newt Gingrich,” Adelson told the editor of the Jewish Week last year. It is to be remembered that Gingrich recently said that the Palestinians were an “invented people.”

Really? Of course, the Israelis surely are not an ‘invented people’ because….well… because the Bible tells us so!

The Bible tells us so. Unless of course the Bible is a grand piece of propaganda supposedly stamped with approval by God himself.

The next look at the Bible will describe the findings of two German professors, Professors K. H. Graf and Julius Wellhausen, who began to study rigorously the details of the first five books of the Bible—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. It is their conclusion that the Torah consisted of several strands woven together of what had once been independent material, written by different sets of scribes at different locations, at different times in history,  each with a specific purpose and point of view.

The word of the Lord?

The Bible as the Word of Man

In many Christian liturgies and surely also in Jewish services, after a reading from the Bible the minister, priest or Rabbi states that, what was just read, was ‘the word of the Lord.’  To which the congregation says, ‘Amen!’ Mindlessly, I might add. But then, why shouldn’t the congregation say ‘Amen?’ They were, in their youth, brainwashed into believing that it was so. Few adults ever question what they learned as children, and even fewer adults actively engage in a search for biblical truth. Most are satisfied with maintaining a childlike belief system because it is comforting to them.  Odd, isn’t it, that these same adults no longer believe in the Tooth Fairy or Santa? Or the Boogieman in the closet. Yet, most are satisfied with the beliefs that they held and were taught at that same time in their life.

Oh, sure, there are Bible Study groups all throughout our nation attended by tens of thousands of adults. Sadly, though, each of these study groups never ask the question, ‘Who wrote the Bible?’ Rather, the begin with the premise that the Bible is the Word of God and then go on from there. They also tend to examine the Bible as if it was written in one sitting and/or dropped from Heaven in Elizabethan English. The authorship is not to be discussed nor questioned because, after all, it is ‘the Word of God.’ Circular thinking or, rather, no thinking at all.

Lucky for us, there are a few brave ministers who have taken the time to examine the authorship of the Bible, not assuming that it was necessarily written by God. Nor inspired by God. Naturally, as expected, most of these ministers have been summarily dismissed from their churches or have a very difficult time presenting their thoughts without severe criticism. The biblical apologists are rabid in their defense of their ‘sacred scripture.’ The word heretic was invented as a means of quelling such investigation. The Catholic Church dropped it’s hydrogen bomb, excommunication, on any such scholar. Whoa to those who…!

Bishop John Shelby Spong, retired Episcopal Bishop of Newark, is a minister who decided to not only investigate the origins of the Bible but to tell people what he found. Websites have arisen, not surprisingly, to denigrate his findings. Biblical apologists are furious with him for what he has undertaken. As if they are afraid of what he has to say.  As if what he has to say will collapse the entire sandcastle that they created. Maybe it will.

So here goes.

Sponge and many other biblical scholars do not believe that  God is the author of the Bible.  Nor do they believe that God inspired the authors to pen his words. There was something else which ‘inspired’ these men to write the words: politics, propaganda and religious authority are three. Sponge cites a perfect example [one of many] of why the Bible is not the ‘word of God.’ The most egregious witness to this is this:

If the Bible is God’s Word, for example, how would we deal with a passage in which the prophet Samuel instructed Saul, the king of the Jews, in God’s name, to engage in a war of genocide against the Amalekites, in which he was to kill man, woman, child, suckling, ox and ass among the Amalekites (I Sam. 15:1–9)?

Spong asks, “How can this be the Word of God?”  Spong continues:

If it is God’s Word, why would we want to worship such a God? What kind of God could inspire the psalmist to write in God’s “holy Word” that the people of Israel would not be happy until they had dashed the heads of the children of their Babylonian enemies against the rocks (Ps. 137:8–9)?

Indeed, why? “Beyond those rather bizarre episodes,” writes Spong,  “what is one to do with the biblical definitions of women as subhuman, the biblical acceptance of slavery as a legitimate social institution and the biblical admonitions to execute homosexual persons?”

Spong says that ‘the Bible is a small library of books composed over a period of about one thousand years between roughly 1000 BCE and 135 CE. Many of these biblical books did not have a single author. Some of them were edited and re-edited over as long a period of time as five hundred years before they reached the form in which they found inclusion in the Bible. Can the “Word of God” actually be edited? Why did God not get it right the first time? What human being would have had the hubris to add to or delete from the “Word of God”? Yet that kind of editing happened, we now know, probably in every book in the Bible.’

This ought to be enough to convince the mildly inquisitive person that the famous book held in such high esteem is a work of humans. But wait! There’s more.

However, that will wait until Chapter II.

New Blog Direction

I’m turning the page. Maybe my dedicated followers will come along with me for the new ride; perhaps not. Presently I’m filled to the gills with pure politics and further discussion of it seems to me to be a fairly useless pursuit and a waste of my time. By the way, Congress came back to DC yesterday.  Did anybody miss their absence? Me neither. There’s another GOP debate tonight; I’m not watching it. Just think, folks, it’s only the 3rd week in January.  Just imagine how many negative ads are slated to run on TV from now to the November election. I can’t stomach any of that and will not invite ‘those people’ into my life or living room

I have for major passions in my life: family, religion, education and politics. In that order. Right now, I’m going to begin posting information on religion. But, you see, as I do this, I naturally will call attention to politics because, sadly, religion ensnares politics in this nation. Not only politics, but foreign affairs as well. There sits Israel, the home of the Jews smack dab in the center of the Muslim world. And, adding to the melee, the Christian claim on the city of Jerusalem. Three religions entangling each other and our nation as well.

My third passion is education. I’m amazed at the wide-spread ignorance that hangs like a miasmic vapor over this nation of ours. We truly are a dumbed-down people who infamously cling to our guns and Bibles. Like prehistoric tribesmen. It is a pitiful situation in which we find ourselves with whole swaths of citizens ‘believing’ propaganda and nonsense as truth.

The Bible is the first bit of nonsense that needs to be taken apart because a large majority of our citizens base many of their political and societal beliefs on that book. Bang off I’ll state this: the Bible is NOT the Word of God. The Bible is the word of human beings. Period. The Bible is most probably the greatest piece of deception ever printed. And we Americans have been nauseously bamboozled by that book for centuries. Still today, perhaps at this very moment, some candidate in South Carolina is babbling on about some biblical reference, hoping to garner the vote from the Bible-ignorant people in the audience. Oh, not that they don’t ‘love’ their Bible.  Not that they don’t live by the Bible teachings. Not that they don’t use the Bible as a weapon against non-bible-believing people. Not that they don’t use the Bible to denigrate and condemn groups of people.

It’s just that they don’t know shit about this book. And the more fundamental the believer, the less they know.

Therefore, when I turn my focus to religion, I do not close the door on my two other passions: education and politics.  Rather, it is a bundle. Of course, I am a realist and I realize that I will never change the ‘beliefs’ of fundamentalists: Christians, Jews or Muslims. They cannot change. Their life-support system is entangled in biblical stuff, like a tumor entangled with nerve cells. It cannot be excised without leaving the patient immobile.

As a result, I offer my musings to those of us who are open to questions about religion and the ‘holy books’ upon which the religion is based. It may be useful to know what’s behind these religious beliefs so that, during a discussion, facts can trump belief. And when facts trumps belief, then substantive discussion can begin, replacing the myth, magic and mystery of religious speech with dispassionate dialogue.

I am assisted in this new direction by the writings of Bishop John Shelby Spong, retired Episcopal bishop of Newark. He has written many books, all of them interesting and heretical. His latest, Re-claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World, is undoubtedly his best work so far. Fundamentalists excoriate him; I love his authorship. In the preface of this book, Spong declares: “I do not for one moment think that the Bible is in any literal sense the ‘Word of God.’” Neither do I.

Another quite revealing line that Spong penned is this: “My conviction was and is that what people learn in a typical Sunday school will never be adequate to sustain a believable faith for educated, questioning people living in the 21st century.”  He also said that the Bible ought to be taught as ‘we learned of it in theological seminary.’ But it isn’t because ‘that would be too risky for a newly ordained priest.’ Rather, he says, ‘we disregard our seminary lessons and ‘teach the Bible’ in Sunday school fashion, ignoring what we learned in the seminary.’

Honesty. Truth will out.

Thus I turn the page.

Idiotic Warmongering from Presidential Candidates

We are used to and expect stupid statements from the GOP candidates about abortion, taxes, states’ rights and food stamps, but we ought to shake in our boots over the warmongering coming from this set of GOP presidential candidates. Rick Santorum, in an interview on Sunday,  criticized Barack Obama for being too soft on Iran and said he would bomb the country’s nuclear sites unless it opened them to UN inspectors. Apparently he is humming John McCain’s tune, ‘Bomb, bomb, bomb-bomb Iran.’

Then there was the most uninformed statement flowing off of the tongue of Rick Perry who called the President of Turkey an Islamic terrorist. One pundit pointed out that Turkey has been a member in good standing in NATO since Perry was 2-years-old. “Rick Perry: what an idiot,” tweeted Mustafa Akyol, a columnist with the English-language Hurriyet Daily news.

Yesterday Newt Gingrich, in his usual hyperbole, declared that he witnessed “the biggest act of weakness by any American President in my lifetime.” Perhaps you missed this Big Act by President Obama.  Most news media also missed it. I had a hard time this morning finding the quote. Gingrich referred to the fact that the U.S. and the Israelis announced the postponed  a joint missile-defense exercise in the Persian Gulf because it would be too provocative at the moment. Gosh! Duh? Yet, I’m betting that the statement raised the testosterone level of the reactionary right-wing or several hours.

Of course, Newt is into hyperbole and he knows that the reactionary right-wing will respond like Pavlov’s dog. Remember that Obama is “the most radical President in American history.” By the way, it may come as a shock to note that Newt considers himself an historian.

Do the followers of Rick Perry care [or know] that his Turkey remarks nearly caused an international kerfuffle? One Turkish official said that the United States has no time to waste with candidates “who do not even know their allies.” Another was not so gracious and wondered how idiots like that can run for president.

So much for those three GOP candidates.

Then there was the much-booed candidate Ron Paul during the South Carolina debate. Apparently South Carolinian Republicans love war-making [even after the Civil War!]. The none-too-bright audience castigated Perry when he tried to explain that our rouge military adventurism has gotten the United States into lots of trouble in past decades. Makes you wonder if the men there have GI Joe dolls on their bed stands.

Then there is Mitt Romney. What’s his attitude towards war? Well, first-off, his advisers include people who have been cheerleaders for war with Iran, and were cheerleaders for the Iraq war. Should I go on? He has pledged to increase the military budget.Further, he opposes withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan. Romney also hawks a policy of  ‘defeating the Jihadists.’

Not exactly a peace dove.

Meanwhile President Obama moves along quite nicely on his foreign policy, receiving kudos from retired military and even Republican pundits. Isn’t it ironic that in this presidential race, the GOP holds the losing military cards. The GOP is left with the economics game and the so-called values game. But, the values stuff is trumped by the economics.  Who will hold the better hand in that game is yet to be determined.

Here’s a photo of what I might label, Mt. Idiotmore:

Stuck in Adolescence

I was thinking about the hypothesis that I often state on this blog that I feel that many right-wingers are stuck in their adolescent stage of development. That, as you may recall, was an awful stage of development that most men were happy to leave behind and forget. It was a time of extreme narcissism and belligerence, with machismo blocking out rational thinking. I’m lucky I survived mine.

So I Googled the phrase, stuck in adolescence, and to my surprise, the subject and the connection with the right-wing was made by…wait for it… a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. Bingo! The psychotherapist, Peter Michaelson,  penned a piece he titled, Are Right-Wingers Simply Stuck in Adolescence?  Michaelson asked: Where does their extreme dislike of government come from? He notes that conservatives are, psychologically speaking, adolescents or teenagers going through stage five of the psychosocial stages of development. It’s a stage of rebellion against parental authority.

Michaelson cites developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst Eric Erikson’s 8 stages of psychosocial development and suggests that these anti-government right-wingers are stuck in stage 5: psychosocial development. The rules imposed by the parents, school [and the police] conflict with a teen’s need to become independent.

Michaelson says:

Conservatives are rebelling against the federal government on the basis of the role it plays in their psyche. Just like mommy and daddy, that big bad federal government tells them what they can and can’t do. Nothing symbolizes parents like the federal government. Like parents, the government represents power over us. Teenagers experience, at least in part, parental power as oppressive, the same way that adults with a teenage mentality can feel about their government. The Tea Party rebellion is a teenage rebellion.

Well, well, we seem to have a clear example of a group of adults whose bodies grew but whose psyche, personality and maturity stopped at stage 5. That’s why it is so confusing to argue or debate people like this. They are not into logic or facts, but rather their own parochial opinions and those of the buddies with whom they hang. Personal insults and machismo rule supreme.

Thus, the next time you think of attempting to engage one of these right-wingers in some meaningful dialogue, think back on your own adolescent years and shut the door and lock it.

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note: Peter Michaelson penned an earlier piece which he titled, The Primitive Conservative Psyche. It is an excellent read.

The Comstock Law

By: Engineer Of Knowledge

With the “Religious Right” playing such a crucial role in selecting the Republican Presidential Candidate in the upcoming South Carolina Primary, I thought I would pass on this bit of historical information.  It is a good example of the “Knee-Jerk Reactionary Legislation” that the “Religious Right” loves so much.

“The Comstock Law,” passed in the United States in 1873, was part of a campaign for “Legislating Public Morality” in the United States.  The author, Anthony Comstock, was a United States Postal Inspector and a self-righteous politician dedicated to ideas of Victorian morality.  The Comstock Law was meant to stop trade in “obscene literature” and “immoral articles.”

In reality, the Comstock Law was targeted not only at obscenity and “dirty books” but birth control devices and information on such devices.  Yes Birth Control was considered to be obscene by Comstock.  (For some background information even married women, at this time for health reasons of having too many pregnancies in a short amount of time, had abortions which were a secret form of birth control administrated by doctors disguised as a D&C.  A D&C is a procedure that scrapes and collects the tissue (endometrium) from inside the uterus.)

Dilation (“D”) is a widening of the cervix to allow instruments into the uterus.

Curettage (“C”) is the scraping of the walls of the uterus.

The Comstock Law was widely used to prosecute those who distributed information or devices for birth control.  In Anthony Comstock’s viewpoint this was “Filth!”

I would also like to take this time to pass on what an 87 year old retired nurse, and a good family friend, confided in me that before abortions were made legal in the US with the 1973 Supreme Court decision, there was a lot of D&C medical procedures done throughout the 1930’s, 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s which was within her lifetime working in the medical field.

Even I remember well as a young man in the late 1960’s, the American legal system was not hospitable to the idea of birth control.  Thirty states had statutes on the books prohibiting or restricting the sale and advertisement of contraception. These laws stretched back almost a century, reflecting an underlying American belief that contraception was lewd, immoral and promoted promiscuity.  Even in my day we bought our prophylactics from the 70 year old black man who worked as the delivery man for the local pharmacy.  I liken this exchange for sexual protection then much like a drug deal.

Comstock’s Crusade:
Anthony Comstock, a devout Christian, (there’s the warning sign problem) was appalled by what he saw in the city’s streets.  It seemed to him that the town was teeming with prostitutes and pornography.  In the late 1860s, Comstock began supplying the police with information for raids on sex trade merchants and came to prominence with his anti-obscenity crusade.  Also offended by explicit advertisements for birth control devices, he soon identified the contraceptive industry as one of his targets.  Comstock was certain that the availability of contraceptives alone promoted “Lust and Lewdness!”  (Isn’t it odd that today in 2012 we are still hearing these same argumentative statements from the Religious Right?)

Making Birth Control a Federal Crime:
In 1872 Comstock set off for Washington with an anti-obscenity bill, including a ban on contraceptives, that he had drafted himself.  On March 3, 1873, Congress passed the new law, later known as the Comstock Act.  The statute defined contraceptives as obscene and illicit, making it a federal offense to disseminate birth control through the mail or across state lines.

Public Support for Comstock Laws:
This statute was the first of its kind in the Western world, but at the time, the American public did not pay much attention to the new law.  Anthony Comstock was jubilant over his legislative victory.  Soon after the federal law was on the books, twenty-four states enacted their own versions of Comstock laws to restrict the contraceptive trade on a state level.

The Most Restrictive States:
New England residents lived under the most restrictive laws in the country.  In Massachusetts, anyone disseminating contraceptives, or information about contraceptives, faced stiff fines and imprisonment.  But by far the most restrictive state of all was Connecticut, where the act of using birth control was even prohibited by law.  Married couples could be arrested for using birth control in the privacy of their own bedrooms, and subjected to a one year prison sentence.  In actuality, law enforcement agents often looked the other way when it came to anti-birth control laws, but the statutes remained on the books.

Sanger’s Crusade:
These laws remained unchallenged until birth-control advocate, Margaret Sanger, made it her mission to challenge the Comstock Act. The first successful change in the laws came from Sanger’s 1916 arrest for opening the first birth control clinic in America.  (Today the Religious Right just takes to blowing up the clinics and killing the Doctors in the churches they attend on Sunday…. because God told them it was OK?)  The case that grew out of her arrest resulted in the 1918 Crane decision, which allowed women to use birth control for “therapeutic purposes only!”

Changing Laws for Changing Times:
The next amendment of the Comstock Laws came with the 1936 U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision, United States v. One Package.  The decision made it possible for doctors to distribute contraceptives across state lines.  This time Margaret Sanger had been instrumental in maneuvering behind the scenes to bring the matter before the court.  While this decision did not eliminate the problem of the restrictive “Chastity Laws” on the state level, but it was a crucial ruling.  Physicians could now legally mail birth control devices and information throughout the country, paving the way for the legitimization of birth control by the medical industry and the general public.

So in conclusion to this piece I want to point out that the “Restrictive Legislation” of making birth control illegal, not to mention even the information of birth control being passed on, lead to many abortions being performed as medical D&Cs in this time period of the “Do Gooder’s” Comstock Law.

My next posting will be on the ridicules “Knee-Jerk Reactionary Legislation” aspect of the latest Supreme Court Law “Banning of Partial Birth Abortions.”  It does not make late term abortions illegal….just the safest method for the mother when this medical procedure needs to be performed for the woman’s health.  I am sure Anthony Comstock would be proud of this law too.