Mike Rivage-Seul's Blog

Series on Critical Thinking, Part One: It’s Not What You Think!

This is the first in a series on critical thinking. Its immediate inspiration was the controversy on this blog site sparked by my April 16th entry on the Boston Marathon bombing (see below on this site). Many of the most critical responses showed that their authors did not understand where I was coming from in terms of my own remarks about severity and the “blowback” nature of the tragedy in Boston. I had written that the Boston tragedy was minor compared to the havoc wrought virtually every day in the Muslim world by U.S. drone attacks. Moreover those attacks by U.S. weapons of mass destruction evoked anger and desire for revenge on the parts of their victims. So “Americans,” I suggested, should expect more tragedies like Boston.

In truth, my point of departure was not (as some critics alleged or implied) anti-Americanism or insensitive gloating over the sufferings of the Marathon victims. Far from it, I love the United States; it is my place of birth; I consider myself highly patriotic. Like most people in the world, my heart went out to the dead, maimed and injured in Boylston Square.

However, I am also a teacher of critical thinking and have been for more than 40 years. During that time I’ve developed criteria – 10 of them – for thinking critically about history, politics, economics and religion. For me the essence of critical thought entails the ability to judge oneself (and one’s country) as objectively as possible (i.e. without ego-centrism or ethnocentrism). To that end, the criteria I’ve developed include

1. REFLECT SYSTEMICALLY
2. EXPECT CHALLENGE
3. REJECT NEUTRALITY
4. SUSPECT IDEOLOGY
5. RESPECT HISTORY
6. INSPECT SCIENTIFICALLY
7. QUADRA-SECT VIOLENCE
8. CONNECT WITH YOUR DEEPEST SELF
9. DETECT SILENCES
10. COLLECT CONCLUSIONS

As anyone can see, such criteria are not those one ordinarily finds in critical thinking textbooks – at least not those historically employed at Berea College where I taught for more than 36 years. Standard approaches provide tools for analyzing the thinking process itself. They instruct students in logic, common fallacies, and how to evaluate statements, evidence, statistics and information. Diagrams used to illustrate this understanding of critical thinking often look like the following:

In many ways “thinking about thinking” accurately describes the project pictured above. According to this understanding, thinking critically is about thought processes and their logic. Once articulated and clarified, the new understandings are applied to cases such as abortion, capital punishment, immigration, and war. Without doubt, this understanding of the discipline is valuable and necessary for any serious scholarship or indeed for responsible citizenship.

However, the problem with this kind of thinking is that it can ignore questioning its own “parameters of perception.” It can work within cultural, institutional and ideological premises that largely remain unquestioned. It can proceed quite successfully without seriously questioning or even acknowledging the possibility of alternatives to existing ideologies, laws, institutions, power relationships, and customs. One can think about the Marathon bombing, for instance, without considering the accuracy of one’s accepted historical narrative about the role of the United States in the world or about the “institutional violence” that might have provoked the atrocity.

By way of contrast, critical thinking as explored in this series will address such neglected elements. The operative image here will be Plato’s Cave. Its representation looks like this:

About 2500 years ago Plato described the human condition as characterized by a tragic absence of critical thought as I’m proposing it here. We live, Plato said, like people in a cave where they’ve been imprisoned all their lives. They remain there chained in a way that prevents them from moving about. They face a wall unable to move even to see directly the others who like them are chained alongside. However the wall the prisoners face is not blank. This is because a fire burns behind the captives and casts their shadows on the wall much as a movie projector would in a dark theater. And that’s their only image of themselves – shadows.

However other shadows appear on the wall as well. They are cast by people walking behind the prisoners along the “roadway” pictured above. The walkers carry statues of all kinds of things – animals, trees, gods . . . . Viewing those shadows, the prisoners think that life is unfolding before them. Moreover, the “wise” among the prisoners – the teachers – become very good at describing the shadows and at predicting the sequence of their appearance. In terms relevant here, their discourses are taken as expressions of “critical thought.” However, their wisdom describes shadows in an artificial world.

Eventually one of the prisoners escapes the cave and discovers the real world and the sun which makes life possible. The escapee returns to the cave to inform the prisoners of this discovery. The escapee’s intention is to introduce real “criticism.” Far from welcoming him, the other prisoners threaten to kill him.

Plato, of course, was writing about his mentor, Socrates whom the citizens of 5th century BCE Athens actually did kill for teaching what I’m calling here “critical thinking.” They interpreted his project as “corrupting the youth,” because it called into question the “doxa” of their day. The Greek term, doxa, referred to the “of course” statements that go unquestioned everywhere. Our culture is full of them: “The United States” is the best country in the world.” Of course it is! “Ours is the highest standard of living.” Of course! “’We’ are good; ‘they’ are evil.” Of course!

The critical thinking I intend to pursue here is about critiquing doxa; it’s about questioning parameters of perception; it’s about escaping the cave.

More specifically, what I intend to expose here attempts to provide tools for subjecting society’s underlying narratives, along with its economic and political structures and ideologies to careful yet easily accessible analysis. Moreover, it starts not from a place of supposed neutrality, but from a place of commitment to a world with room for everyone. Commitment in one form or another is inescapable.

Consequently this approach to critical thought not only analyzes reasons for such commitment; it evaluates as well ideologies that contradict that vision. This approach will be historical and involve examination of “official” and “competing” narratives about the past. It will treat violence as a multi-dimensional phenomenon connected with structures of political economy, the struggle for survival, and police enforcement of “rules of the game” that benefit some and hurt others. The approach centralized here will give key importance to spirituality and the clear articulation of conclusions about the world and the historical patterns at work there.

My approach will also recognize that some of the best and most engaging stimuli for critical thought are can be found in popular culture’s most powerful and engaging medium, Hollywood film, as well as from outstanding documentaries. So most blog entries on this topic will include film illustration.

My hope is that readers will find these Wednesday blog entries interesting and helpful and worthy of their “critical” feedback.

How Hitler Saved Capitalism and Won the War: The Barmen Declaration

This is the first in a series on the parallels between Hitler’s rise to power in the 1930s and the path to market totalitarianism which I ‘m convinced the United States is following in this second decade of the 21st century. In fact, it is my view that the U.S. has been on this path since the end of the Second Inter-capitalist War (1939-1945), and especially over the last thirty-five years.

The series represents the back story for an appeal I’ve been making to my friends in our Ecumenical Table Fellowship (an inter-denominational worship group formed over the last year in Madison County, Kentucky). There I’ve been urging that we explore the possibilities and procedures for becoming a “Confessing Church” of resistance like the church formed by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Karl Barth, Martin Niemoller, and their allies in Hitlerian Germany. In 1934 that church published “The Barmen Declaration” whose intention was to rescue the Judeo-Christian tradition from nationalistic interpretations which supported the Third Reich.

A similarly nationalistic interpretation, I fear, has characterized “Christianity” over the last quarter century plus ten in the United States. There, under the influence of Christian fundamentalists, “Christianity” has become virtually synonymous with the extreme right-wing politics that Hitler championed. Like Hitler, that form of Christianity idealizes white Anglo-Saxon culture above all others. Like der fuhrer, it manipulates the Judeo-Christian tradition to support racism and white privilege.

Let me begin the series by reprinting the Barmen Declaration along with parenthetical “translations” and a brief commentary. Subsequent Monday blog entries will trace Hitler’s rise to power, his program of saving capitalism, and how the U.S. adopted Hitlerism without Hitler following der Fuhrer’s demise.

Please begin by considering the Barmen Declaration as translated (in bold) immediately below:

“We, the representatives of Lutheran, Reformed, and United Churches, of free synods, Church assemblies, and parish organizations united in the Confessional Synod of the German Evangelical Church, declare that we stand together on the ground of the German Evangelical Church as a federation of German Confessional Churches. We are bound together by the confession of the one Lord of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. (THE BARMEN COMMUNITY ASSERTS ITS FOUNDATION: JESUS ALONE IS ULTIMATE AUTHORITY OF THE CHURCH.)

8.07 We publicly declare before all evangelical Churches in Germany that what they hold in common in this Confession is grievously imperiled, and with it the unity of the German Evangelical Church. It is threatened by the teaching methods and actions of the ruling Church party of the “German Christians” and of the Church administration carried on by them. These have become more and more apparent during the first year of the existence of the German Evangelical Church. This threat consists in the fact that the theological basis, in which the German Evangelical Church is united, has been continually and systematically thwarted and rendered ineffective by alien principles, on the part of the leaders and spokesmen of the “German Christians” as well as on the part of the Church administration. When these principles are held to be valid, then, according to all the Confessions in force among us, the Church ceases to be the Church and th German Evangelical Church, as a federation of Confessional Churches, becomes intrinsically impossible. (NEVERTHELESS THE “GERMAN EVANGELICAL CHURCH” HAS ACCEPTED AUTHORITY OTHER THAN JESUS, NAMELY, THE AUTHORITY OF THE THIRD REICH.)

8.08 As members of Lutheran, Reformed, and United Churches we may and must speak with one voice in this matter today. Precisely because we want to be and to remain faithful to our various Confessions, we may not keep silent, since we believe that we have been given a common message to utter in a time of common need and temptation. We commend to God what this may mean for the interrelations of the Confessional Churches. (THOSE WHO RECOGNIZE THIS CONTRADICTION ARE CONVINCED THEY MUST SPEAK IN OPPOSITION TO THIS OBVIOUS CONTRADICTION.)

8.09 In view of the errors of the “German Christians” of the present Reich Church government which are devastating the Church and also therefore breaking up the unity of the German Evangelical Church, we confess the following evangelical truths: (THEY THEREFORE FEEL COMPELLED TO CONFESS THE FOLLOWING EVANGELICAL TRUTHS.)

8.10 – 1. “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me.” (John 14.6). “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who does not enter the sheepfold by the door, but climbs in by another way, that man is a thief and a robber. . . . I am the door; if anyone enters by me, he will be saved.” (John 10:1, 9.)
8.11 Jesus Christ, as he is attested for us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death. (WE MUST OBEY JESUS AND NO OTHER.)

8.12 We reject the false doctrine, as though the church could and would have to acknowledge as a source of its proclamation, apart from and besides this one Word of God, still other events and powers, figures and truths, as God’s revelation.
8.13 – 2. “Christ Jesus, whom God has made our wisdom, our righteousness and sanctification and redemption.” (1 Cor. 1:30.)
8.14 As Jesus Christ is God’s assurance of the forgiveness of all our sins, so, in the same way and with the same seriousness he is also God’s mighty claim upon our whole life. Through him befalls us a joyful deliverance from the godless fetters of this world for a free, grateful service to his creatures.
8.15 We reiect the false doctrine, as though there were areas of our life in which we would not belong to Jesus Christ, but to other lords–areas in which we would not need justification and sanctification through him. (IN ALL AREAS OF OUR LIVES WITHOUT EXCEPTION.)

8.16 – 3. “Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body [is] joined and knit together.” (Eph. 4:15,16.)
8.17 The Christian Church is the congregation of the brethren in which Jesus Christ acts presently as the Lord in Word and sacrament through the Holy Spirit. As the Church of pardoned sinners, it has to testify in the midst of a sinful world, with its faith as with its obedience, with its message as with its order, that it is solely his property, and that it lives and wants to live solely from his comfort and from his direction in the expectation of his appearance.
8.18 We reject the false doctrine, as though the Church were permitted to abandon the form of its message and order to its own pleasure or to changes in prevailing ideological and political convictions. (DESPITE CLAIMS AND PRESSURES ISSUING FROM POLITICAL OR OTHER WOULD-BE AUTHORITIES)

8.19 – 4. “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you; but whoever would be great among you must be your servant.” (Matt. 20:25,26.)
8.20 The various offices in the Church do not establish a dominion of some over the others; on the contrary, they are for the exercise of the ministry entrusted to and enjoined upon the whole congregation.
8.21 We reject the false doctrine, as though the Church, apart from this ministry, could and were permitted to give itself, or allow to be given to it, special leaders vested with ruling powers. (THAT WOULD HAVE US BELIEVE THAT JESUS’ POWER IS ‘POWER OVER’ RATHER THAN HUMBLE SERVICE OF OTHERS.)

8.22 – 5. “Fear God. Honor the emperor.” (1 Peter 2:17.)
Scripture tells us that, in the as yet unredeemed world in which the Church also exists, the State has by divine appointment the task of providing for justice and peace. [It fulfills this task] by means of the threat and exercise of force, according to the measure of human judgment and human ability. The Church acknowledges the benefit of this divine appointment in gratitude and reverence before him. It calls to mind the Kingdom of God, God’s commandment and righteousness, and thereby the responsibility both of rulers and of the ruled. It trusts and obeys the power of the Word by which God upholds all things.
8.23 We reject the false doctrine, as though the State, over and beyond its special commission, should and could become the single and totalitarian order of human life, thus fulfilling the Church’s vocation as well.
8.24 We reject the false doctrine, as though the Church, over and beyond its special commission, should and could appropriate the characteristics, the tasks, and the dignity of the State, thus itself becoming an organ of the State. (OR THAT THE CHURCH SHOULD BECOME AN OPPRESSIVE INSTRUMENT OF THE STATE.)

8.25 – 6. “Lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age.” (Matt. 28:20.) “The word of God is not fettered.” (2 Tim. 2:9.)
8.26 The Church’s commission, upon which its freedom is founded, consists in delivering the message of the free grace of God to all people in Christ’s stead, and therefore in the ministry of his own Word and work through sermon and sacrament.
8.27 We reject the false doctrine, as though the Church in human arrogance could place the Word and work of the Lord in the service of any arbitrarily chosen desires, purposes, and plans.

8.28 The Confessional Synod of the German Evangelical Church declares that it sees in the acknowledgment of these truths and in the rejection of these errors the indispensable theological basis of the German Evangelical Church as a federation of Confessional Churches. It invites all who are able to accept its declaration to be mindful of these theological principles in their decisions in Church politics. It entreats all whom it concerns to return to the unity of faith, love, and hope.” (IN VIEW OF THESE CONVICTIONS THE “CONFESSION CHURCH” INVITES ALL CHRISTIANS TO RECOGNIZE THE PRIMACY OF GOD’S WORD OVER THE AUTHORITY FALSELY CLAIMED BY THE RIVAL POWERS OF THE STATE.)

Obviously, the Barmen Declaration is cautious, muted and politically astute in its opposition to the hijacking of the Christian message by the Third Reich and the mainline German churches. Nevertheless, the Hitlerian message is clear. Hitler’s ecclesial accomplices have indeed tried to co-opt the Christian message, and have largely been successful in doing so. Nevertheless the Barmen community recognizes that Jesus “WAY” is contradictory to the project of Hitler and his cohorts. The Hitlerian faction aspires to use Christianity as a weapon of power over their opponents. By way of contrast, the authentic Barmen Christianity exercises “power” through humble service and non-violence towards the very groups oppressed by the Hitlerians.

Once again, this blog series on Hitler will explore his parallels with the 21st century “New World Order” that appears to mimic his rise to power while attempting to avoid the errors which inevitably doomed his insidious project. Unlike their opponents, the Hitlerians have learned from the past and are determined not to re-commit the errors that frustrated the success of their totalitarian project.

Opponents of Hitlerianism are not nearly as wise.

(Next Monday: Cheney and Bush as Hitler’s disciples)

Pope Francis, Summon a Council: It’s Our Tradition!

Readings for 6th Sunday after Easter: Acts 15:1-2, 22-29; Ps. 57: 2-3, 5, 6, 8; Rev. 21: 10-14; 22-23; Jn. 14: 23-29. http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/050513.cfm

Last year was the 50th anniversary of the convocation of the Second Vatican Council. The Catholic Church is still reeling from that earth-shaking event. Conservatives often consider it a huge mistake. They want to return to the Latin Mass, to women’s head-coverings in church, to weekly confessions and communion placed by the priest on the communicant’s outstretched tongue.

Liberals too are disappointed by Vatican II. It didn’t nearly go far enough, they say. It should have eliminated priestly celibacy and the all-male clergy. The church should have divested itself of the Vatican Bank, sold its art treasures and given the proceeds to the poor. The Council’s teaching on collegiality should have decentralized church bureaucracy and made lay-leadership more prominent. The prohibition of contraception should have been changed.

Into which of those camps do you fall? As a church member, do you consider yourself conservative or liberal? Today’s liturgy of the word provokes the question. It reveals a church which at its very beginning surrendered itself to extreme liberalism – or should I say to the “radicalism” of Jesus’ Spirit?

Think about those terms for a minute in the light of today’s readings. Think about what “conservative” and “liberal” mean for us as individuals and community members in our faith tradition. Think of the Holy Spirit as “radical” – something believers are rooted in.

According to every great tradition (Christian or otherwise), the spiritual life – human life itself – is about change, about transformation. Change is the point. We are called to grow. Growth involves transformation. At the biological level, we’re told that all of our cells change every seven years. That means that at my stage in life, I’ve already gone through more than ten bodies! If I tried to keep my body from changing, I would die.

At the personal, psychic and intellectual levels we’re called to change as well. As St. Paul puts it, when we were children, it was appropriate to think, speak and act as children (I Cor. 13:11). But as adults, we’re called to something more. If we don’t change, we can never become who we’re meant to be.

Even institutions must change to survive. That’s true in the realm of politics, economics, and religion. Jesus’ followers found no exemption from this rule of life – of evolution; as community members they had to change or die. In other words, at the end of the day, strategies of conservatism are doomed for Christians as well as for everyone else.

It’s easy to sympathize with conservatives however. I spent much of my life in that category. As such, my concern was simply to preserve what is essential. I saw liberals as being too free with the unchangeable. Like other conservatives I accused them of throwing out the baby with the bath water.

Nonetheless, in today’s liturgy of the word, we get an idea of how difficult it is to determine which is which –baby or bath water. That is, in our readings, we are faced an example of a key conflict between religious conservatives and liberals within the first century infant church. Paul, Barnabas, Silas and Barsabas lead the liberal wing. Peter and Jesus’ brother, James are the leaders of the conservatives.

Paul and his friends come from the gentile world. Their concern is to make Jesus both understandable and acceptable to non-Jews. For their audience, circumcision and dietary restrictions (like not eating pork) represent great obstacles to accepting Jesus’ “Way.”

On the other hand, Peter and Jesus’ brother, James, are Jews through and through. They remember the importance of full observance of the law within the Jewish tradition. They recalled for instance that during the second century Seleucid persecution of the Jews under Antiochus IV Epiphanes, many Jews gave their lives rather than eat forbidden foods. Faced with Paul and his colleagues, the conservative faction wondered: were those lives sacrificed in vain? And besides, circumcision was the identifying mark of Jewish manhood. What good follower of the biblical God set that all-important commandment aside?

The issue is so serious that it provoked a meeting of church leaders – what scholars call the “Council of Jerusalem.” Like Vatican II (1962-’65) it called together church leadership to discuss burning issues of the day and to make changes that responded effectively to what Gaudium et Spes called the “signs of the times.”

Today’s gospel reading implies that leaders could come together with confidence because of Jesus’ promise that his Holy Spirit would continue teaching the church even after he is gone. The Spirit would remind the church of what Jesus himself taught – and more besides.

According to today’s readings, it was the “more besides” that the Jerusalem conservatives were resisting. They didn’t deny, of course, that Jesus himself was a religious liberal. (It was Jesus’ liberalism that angered the Scribes and high priests.) Jesus frequently placed love and compassion above God’s most important commandment, the Sabbath law; he associated with the “unclean;” he even befriended and worked miracles for gentiles. Jesus was never bound by the letter of the law as were his conservative opponents.

At the same time however, Jesus was Jewish to the end. He had no intention of founding a new religion. He was a Jewish reformer. No one could deny that. Jesus didn’t revoke the Law. He simply gave it an enlightened, more humane, more liberal interpretation. He himself had been circumcised!

It was with these understandings that the Council of Jerusalem convened. And according to Luke, the author of Acts, it was a battle royal. Luke says the meeting (like Vatican II) was filled with “dissension and debate.”

What we find in today’s first reading is the final decree of the Council of Jerusalem. Concerning circumcision, it says “never mind.” As for dietary restrictions, fagedaboutit. The Council was concerned with not placing unbearable burdens on converts. In other words, it couldn’t have been more liberal. It could not have been less conservative.

The Council of Jerusalem is reputed to have happened no more than 30 years after the death of Jesus. But by the time John of Patmos writes his book of Revelation at the end of the first century, look where his church had come. His vision of the “New Jerusalem” which we read about in today’s second reading doesn’t even have a temple. Jerusalem without a temple?! The city is founded not on the 12 patriarchs of Israel, but on the 12 apostles. How liberal is that!?

I suppose what I’m saying is that Christians shouldn’t be afraid of change. It’s our tradition – right from the beginning. In fact, in today’s gospel, John has Jesus say specifically that we should not be agitated or fearful. Rather, our hearts should be filled with peace because of our reliance on the Holy Spirit. John’s Jesus teaches that the Spirit’s presence guarantees the community is moving in the right direction, even when the Spirit’s teachings shock and scandalize – as long as it’s moving towards Jesus’ compassion, love, and ease of burden. The guarantee remains even when the Spirit’s guidance seems to dilute what many consider essential – like circumcision, dietary laws and the Jerusalem Temple.

What “essentials” is the church being called to set aside today? Priestly celibacy? An all-male priesthood? Prohibition of contraception? Are any of these really essential?

The question is as unnerving for the church as it is for us as individuals. But the answer is always the same: “Don’t be afraid or agitated; the Holy Spirit guides.”

Think about it: at the personal level, after ten changes of body and innumerable psychic growth spurts and changes of mind, what remains that allows me to identify with that child they tell me I was in my baby pictures? The bath water has been thrown out virtually every day. But somehow I’m able to say “I” remain. Who is that “I?”

Once again, today’s gospel leads us to believe that the answer is the indwelling Holy Spirit herself who continually leads us into the new and unforeseen – but without that “fear or agitation.” That unifying, enlightened Spirit is the same in me as She is in you.

The bottom line: today’s readings teach that there is no future in timid conservatism. Instead we are called to extreme liberalism. And that liberalism actually translates to Jesus-like radicalism (or going to the root of things). The Holy Spirit is that root.

And so we can pray with confidence: “Holy Spirit, in the present crisis of your church, inspire Francis I to call us together once again. Convene a Council. Surprise us. Shock us one more time. Wake us up! Move us towards compassion, love and ease of burden as you did the Jerusalem Council. We believe that under your guidance, we can never go wrong!

Announcing a New Wednesday Series on Critical Thinking: is anyone interested?

During the last couple of weeks my blogs have addressed the Boston Marathon bombings. I’ve suggested the application of elementary principles to clarify thinking about such tragedies. One of them I’ve termed the “principle of reciprocity.” The meaning I’ve assigned the term has to do with the application of a single standard to all cases involving response to tragedies like the Boston bombing on the one hand and U.S. drone attacks on the other.

Reciprocity is related to judgments about nuclear weapons. If the U.S., Israel, Pakistan, and India are allowed to possess them, so should North Korea and Iran. The principle of reciprocity holds that what I judge as good for me should be good for you as well; what is bad for me is bad for you. Any child can understand such a guideline. It’s what we learned in Kindergarten and Sunday school.

Yet our “leaders” seem incapable of grasping what is perfectly clear even to children.

The principle of reciprocity and its implicit challenge to “American” exceptionalism has elicited energetic response on the part of some who have read the blogs as anti-American, insensitive and judgmental. Those responses in turn have led me to perceive a need on my part to explain in a more detailed manner just where I am coming from. The idea would be to help others come to grips with their own principles of critical thought. (We all have them whether we’re aware of it or not.)

You see, over my 36 years of teaching at Berea College in Kentucky, I’ve taught many courses on critical thinking. And this has led me to bring to consciousness my own approach to the discipline. That approach has centralized what I’ve learned in my years of study under Third World thinkers – especially under liberation theologians in Brazil, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Cuba, and Zimbabwe.

If you’re wondering what I mean by “liberation theology,” just click on the entries in that category located just below the masthead of this blog site. In a single sentence, “liberation theology” is reflection on the following of Jesus of Nazareth from the viewpoint of those committed to the liberation of the world’s poor and oppressed. I consider it the most important theological development of the last 1700 years and the most important intellectual movement of the last 150 years – going back to the publication of the Communist Manifesto in 1848.

I guess what I’m saying is that my understanding of critical thinking comes from a faith perspective.

In any case, inspired by what I’ve learned, my teaching has led me to develop ten principles for critical thinking. I’ve used feature film clips to illustrate what I’m talking about. I’d like to share those principles and clips with readers in bite-sized portions, in Wednesday blogs over the next several weeks.

I hope there will be an audience out there to follow along. If so, please make a simple “I’m on board” comment below. If there’s no audience, at least my entries will serve as a vehicle for talking to myself in order to clarify my own thinking.

The same holds true for my observations about Hitler, his victory in what liberation philosopher,Enrique Dussel calls “the Second Inter-capitalist War,” and the resurfacing of Hitlerism in the United States over the last 35 years. During the coming weeks, on Fridays, I’d like to give an account of that sad and highly threatening process and its relevance to our own day. Is anyone out there interested in following a series on the topic? I wonder.

None of this would change what I consider the anchor of this blog site. In my view, what holds the whole thing down are my Sunday homilies. My project there is to do my small part to rescue interpretation of the Christian tradition from the political right and religious fundamentalists, and to provide reflections on Sunday liturgical readings from the viewpoint of liberation theology as referenced above.

If any of this interests you, please sign up as a “follower” of this blog, so that you’ll receive automatic notification of the Monday, Wednesday, and Friday posts. If you’re reluctant to sign on as a “follower,” do something to remind yourself to check in from time to time. Your critical feedback will be greatly appreciated.

I await responses.

None of Us Can Change the World, So We’d Better Get Busy!

The other day a good friend and I were discussing the state of the world. Our conversation touched on the Boston Marathon bombing, the Bangladesh factory collapse, drone warfare, Guantanamo, the increasing concentration of media ownership, and the sorry state of the Roman Catholic Church. My friend remarked on the futility of attempting to do anything to change the world situation. Better to simply tend your garden, he said, rather than wasting psychic energy and physical effort to affect what cannot be changed.

I must confess that I found myself agreeing with my conversation partner more than not. It all seems so futile when we consider the overwhelming power of money, the state, the military, and of education and media propaganda whose predominantly conservative purpose is to keep things the way they are.

Suitably depressed, I took up my spiritual reading before going to bed. I’m currently pouring over, perhaps for the fifth time, Eknath Easwaran’s commentary on the Bhagavad Gita. In The End of Sorrow, the first of his three volume work (The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living), Easwaran addresses the question of “detachment.” By that he means being free from anxiety or depression about the results of anything we do. What I read seemed intimately related to my exchange with my dear friend.

Easwaran points to the example of Gandhi:

“Prior to Gandhi, even people who had seen and grieved over the political bondage of India could not bring themselves to act because they thought the situation was impossible. They could not act because even before taking the first step they were already caught in results. We too, when faced with problems, have a tendency to think, ‘There is nothing we can do about it.’ . . . Wherever we find a wrong situation – in our personal life, in our country’s life, or in our world’s conflicts – we all have a duty to work to correct it.”

The words hit home. It’s giving up in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds that so strongly tempts us (me!). It’s just so easy to give up.

But as Kevin Trudeau reminds us, the temptation gives us far more credit for knowing our situation than our actual condition warrants. Coming from a completely secular and otherwise questionable perspective, Trudeau says we’re like people looking at a computer screen, but seeing only the bottom right hand corner – perhaps an inch square. We just don’t see what’s going on in the rest of the screen at all. But we make decisions and value judgments, we go in and out of depression as though we were all-knowing. We react and get attached to results as though our lives were not mere blips on the cosmic screen.

Thankfully, we don’t know very much. And our brief lives don’t offer much perspective on the effects of our actions. I’m reminded of what Mao Tse- tung’s is reputed to have answered when asked whether he thought the French Revolution was successful or not. “Too soon to say,” was his response.

It’s definitely too soon to say what the effects of our actions are or those of Dorothy Day, Daniel Berrigan, Bradley Manning, or John XXIII.

My friend is right. Results are out of our hands. But the person of faith, like Gandhi and those others I’ve just mentioned pushes ahead, doing what’s possible, leaving the results in the hands of the One who directs the universe. Only She sees the whole screen.

I take some comfort in that.

Drones, the Marathon Bombing And Today’s Liturgy of the Word (Sunday Homily)

I got into trouble with a lot of people over the last week or ten days. It all goes back to the Boston Marathon bombing on April 15th. The very next morning I found myself writing a blog entry that drew fire from friends who go back with me nearly sixty years, and even from my family members. I had written that the Marathon Bombing paled in comparison with the havoc and destruction the United States’ drone policy creates in the world virtually every day.

For instance, last week in the Senate hearing on that policy, a young Yemeni activist, Farea Al-Muslimi, gave testimony about the destruction in his village brought about by a drone attack that had occurred a few weeks earlier. [Do yourself a favor and see the video of his testimony (above); it went viral last week.] Women and children were killed by the drone apparently intended to eliminate a single person who might easily have been apprehended by local police. Instead, the missile launching killed indiscriminately. In the resulting carnage, the young man said, you couldn’t distinguish the bodies of women and children from their animals which had also been killed in the raid. The human victims had to be buried with their animals as though there were no difference between them.

According to the young activist, drones hovering over villages like his own, ready to release their deadly cargo are a form of terrorism. They have for Yemenis become the new face of the United States, and have caused great anger and hatred towards our country. Drones are what Yemenis now think of when they hear “America.” They represent a highly effective recruiting tool for what Americans understand as “terrorists.”

This means that in the activist’s own village, the drones accomplished in an instant what the propaganda of Islamic jihadists had been unable to do after years of effort.

It was this sort of testimony that I had in mind when I wrote the morning after the Marathon bombing. I was also inspired by the kind of faith-consciousness communicated by the readings in this morning’s liturgy of the word. Those readings call us to embrace an awareness of the unity of the entire human race. All are our sisters and brothers, the readings emphasize; Yeminis are as important to God as we are. Put otherwise, all four readings call us beyond the nationalism that makes us so sensitive to violence directed towards our own people, while ignoring or down-playing much greater terror our country directs towards those we consider “foreign” or “other.”

In fact, today’s liturgy of the word might well be considered a hymn of praise to the God of Love who cherishes everyone and everything equally. The first reading from the Acts of the Apostles highlights the expansion of the understanding of God’s Chosen People. Paul and Barnabas extend the concept from the Jews to non-Jews – i.e. to gentiles. God’s people are found not merely in Israel, but in strange sounding places like Lystra, Pisidia, Pamphylia, Perga, Attalia, and Antioch.

The author of the Book of Revelation concurs with Paul’s interpretation. In his utopian vision of the “end of time,” John of Patmos hears a loud voice proclaiming, “God’s dwelling is with the human race.” Did you hear that? God’s People are found not just in Israel (or in “America”), but are co-extensive with the entire human race. People of all nations constitute God’s Chosen, John says. In other words, God considers everyone God’s beloved simply in virtue of their being human.

However, John “loud voice” also suggests that God is especially partial to the poor and oppressed. God wishes that tearful people stop crying. God’s kingdom is an entirely new dispensation without premature death, mourning, wailing, or pain. The suggestion here is an understanding of God’s chosen people as those within the human race who suffer the most. (As a nation, Americans, it seems, are not in that category.)

Does this mean that in our assessment of world events, the suffering should be given greater attention than the well-off?

Moreover, God’s love extends beyond humans to all of physical creation. The responsorial psalm describes God as generous, merciful, slow to anger, exceedingly kind, and good to all. That “all” includes everything God has made. In the psalmist’s words, God is “compassionate to all his works.”

Finally, today’s brief gospel reading suggests that the vocation of Christians is to mirror God’s universal love specifically as reflected in Yeshua ben Joseph – who accepted his own death at the hands of the violent rather than defend himself or take the lives of others .

Yeshua’s followers, John the evangelist suggests, must be willing to love in the same way Jesus loved. We must be ready to give our lives for “the least of our brothers and sisters” – to die ourselves before taking the lives of poor Yemenis, Pakistanis, Afghanis, Iraqis, Somalis . . . . (That’s what the words of the gospel seem to propose!)

But there’s a warning with all this talk of God’s universal love. Nationalism is strong. Criticizing it evokes energetic resistance. This is the thrust of Paul’s words in today’s first reading when he says that “It is necessary to undergo many hardships to enter the Kingdom of God.” Evidently some within the emerging Christian community wanted to stick with the old narrow notion of “God’s People” limiting it to a single nation. They thought of the community of Yeshua as a reformed wing of Judaism. As the reading from Acts tells us, they resisted Paul’s more expansive reinterpretation, sometimes violently.

Something similar can happen today when the suffering of “those others” are equated or even prioritized over the suffering of our compatriots.

Nonetheless, today’s readings remind us that in God’s eyes there are no “others.” If they are human, if they are part of God’s creation, they are God’s children every bit as important as “Americans.” Their suffering (especially when it originates from our hands) should be prioritized over our own.

That’s where I was coming from last week.

The Holocaust Museum And the Search for Truth

What keeps us from recognizing the truth when it’s staring us in the face? That’s the question that occurred to me as I visited the Holocaust Museum last week when I was in DC. The answer is complex. Dealing with its ramifications challenges us to remember what we learned in kindergarten and what many of us were taught in church.

Last week’s visit was my second time through the Holocaust Museum. Its four floors of display, film, recordings, and horrific material memorabilia are dedicated to keeping alive the nightmare of the systematic murder of millions of communists, socialists, Jews, trade union leaders, priests, ministers, nuns, homosexuals, gypsies, and disabled along with other “dysfunctionals” and enemies of the state.

This time Peggy and I along with our youngest son, Patrick (age 26) spent most of our time on the fourth floor. It details Hitler’s rise to power. How did the German people allow that to happen, I wondered? They were Europeans. They were “modern,” producers of great philosophers, theologians, poets, novelists, musicians, scientists, and industrialists. Even more puzzlingly, they were largely Christian living in a major birth-center of the Reformation.

And yet they allowed the prison-camp system to emerge. They allowed Hitler to declare war on the world. The majority claimed ignorance of the gassings and incinerations. But surely, no one was unaware of the vilification of the ovens’ victims. Hitler’s speeches were filled with denunciations of “Jewish madness.” The phrase not only reflected anti-Semitism, but was code for the political left inspired at its core by the Jewish Testament – those communists and socialists that Hitler (and the ruling classes across Europe and the United States) hated and feared more than anything else.

And when Hitler declared war on the world, good Christian Germans lined up to fight for God and country. As Elie Wiesel reminds us, Catholic prison guards gassed Jews during the week, and then went to confession on Saturday and received Holy Communion at Mass on Sunday.

Reviewing all of that in the Holocaust Museum made me uncomfortably aware that the specter of Adolf Hitler is stalking our world today. It actually pains me to say that this time the shadow is cast by the United States. As I write, the “Americans” have established the control of the world that Hitler sought. In effect, Hitler (or more accurately Hitlerism) won that Second Inter-capitalist War.

In fact, since 9/11 the U.S. has declared a Hitler-like war on the world. It recognizes no inhibiting law, and will brook no rival. Its law of the jungle prevails. The war’s enemy: the poor who demand a fair share of the resources located where they live. Acting as the Hessian armed force of multinational financial interests, the United States identifies, arrests, tortures, and eliminates those who insist that the oil, minerals, natural resources, and agricultural produce of their countries belongs to them and not to the foreign interests on whose behalf the United States polices the world.

Part of the police-world the “Americans” have established is unending war; another is the world-wide prison system like the one at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The prisons are entirely reminiscent of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Belsen, and Dachau, though government secrecy keeps us in the dark about the true extent of the clandestine hell-holes. They are centers of torture and degradation that beggar description. They are filled with Muslims, not with Jews. (Ironically Palestinian Jews are spearheading the attack on Muslims. It’s not for nothing that the Palestinians are called “the Jews’ Jews.”)

As for the unending war, according to the highly decorated ex-CIA agent John Stockwell, over the last 60 years, “The Third World War against the Poor” has claimed far more lives than the horrendously iconic figure of six million. In Vietnam alone more than 2 million Vietnamese were slaughtered. In Iraq, the figure of pointlessly butchered reaches beyond 1 million in a war of aggression which the U.N. terms the highest of international crimes.

And yet, our contemporaries, like the good Christians of Berlin and Cologne, are mostly in denial about the extent of the police state that has taken form especially since 9/11. Most deny (at least by their silence) the very existence of secret prisons, torture of suspects, the plain fact of political prisoners, death squads, and systemic cruelty.

Where does that denial come from? Where did it come from as Hitler rose to power? Part of the answer is that the process of take-over was gradual. It took years as Hitler advanced from army corporal, to political prisoner, to best-selling author of “Mein Kampf,” to Member of Parliament, to Chancellor, to dictator.

Similarly, the mission creep of the U.S. National Security State has been gradual as we’ve seen our government claim (and be granted by the judiciary) the right to spy on its citizens, search them without probable cause, imprison them without charge, torture them without limit, and ultimately kill them without trial. In the face of all that, like our German counterparts, most of us have stood dumbly by and have even applauded our oppressors as they expropriate us of our constitutionally guaranteed rights.

Another source of denial is the disruption that truth-telling causes in our own lives. As Paul Craig Roberts has recently pointed out, telling the truth disturbs career trajectories and can even disrupt family relationships. That makes fathers and mothers, ministers and priests, politicians and pundits close their eyes and moderate their speech. Roberts says,

“The power elite, especially the liberal elite, has always been willing to sacrifice integrity and truth for power, personal advancement, foundation grants, awards, tenured professorships, columns, book contracts, television appearances, generous lecture fees and social status. They know what they need to say. They know which ideology they have to serve. They know what lies must be told—the biggest being that they take moral stances on issues that aren’t safe and anodyne. They have been at this game a long time. And they will, should their careers require it, happily sell us out again.”

What to do about this state of affairs? For one we must learn to think critically. At the very least, that means applying daily to what we see and hear the “law of reciprocity.” It’s something even a child of seven can understand, though it seems beyond the capacities of our “leaders” to grasp.

One meaning of the law of reciprocity is that what is good for me is good for you; what is bad for you is bad for me. This means that if the U.S. would consider it unacceptable for Pakistanis to drone their enemies on “American” soil, it unacceptable to drone “American” enemies on Pakistani soil. If it’s wrong for Iranians to have nuclear weapons, it is also wrong for Israel or the United States to have them.

The law of reciprocity makes one wonder what the United States would do if a foreign drone so much as appeared unbidden in American airspace much less if it did its destructive work on the ground.

Besides observing the elements of what we were all taught in kindergarten, it would also help to heed what most of us have heard in church all our lives. That those German prison guards could do their crematorium work during the week and receive communion on Sundays seems somehow contradictory to the teachings of Jesus, don’t you think?

What about the guards at Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib, the soldiers in Fallujah or Haditha, or the drone pilots sitting at the consoles in their air-conditioned theaters? How are they different from the Germans we condemn?

Help me figure this one out. The question is disrupting my life.

The Boston Marathon Bombing: Our Wake-Up Call

Last Tuesday I shocked some of my blog readers by observing that the carnage of the Boston Marathon bombing paled in comparison with the mayhem the U.S. inflicts daily on anyone who happens to be near designated enemies in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya and elsewhere. My observations were dismissed by some as “incredibly insensitive” and as the “garbage” comments of an armchair philosopher unacquainted with the brutality of “those Jihadists.” One former army chaplain accused me of having a screw loose somewhere.

Be that as it may, I was in reality simply trying to highlight the double standard most of us have internalized concerning our own victimhood when tragedy strikes close to home. We wring our hands and ask “Why us?” Meanwhile we exhibit little compassion for those our country’s policies punish with the equivalents of Boston Marathon bombings virtually every day. Our media regularly ignore those tragedies and so insult our country’s victims with the mainstream media’s (and our) own brand of incredible insensitivity.

The implication of ignoring the suffering of the victims of U.S. policy is that “American” lives and children are more valuable than the lives and offspring of “those others.” We seem convinced that our “holy wars” are somehow different from their jihads. Any fool, we imply (and sometimes state) would see that we are good and they are evil. We are, after all, the exceptional, indispensable nation.

That conviction of American exceptionalism seems impervious to fact and memory. It allows U.S. perpetrators of human rights abuses such as wars of aggression, death squads, drone killings, torture, imprisonment-without-charge, voter suppression, and incarceration of whistle-blowers to pontificate about those same human rights violations when they occur in other countries.

Consider the following:

• The Obama administration is currently withholding its recognition of the results of last week’s election of Nicolas Maduro as president of Venezuela. Maduro was the personal choice of U.S. bête noir, Hugo Chavez. Standing alone in its refusal to recognize his electoral victory (except for the arch-conservative Spanish administration) and despite assurances of international election observers and the Venezuelan National Election Commission, the United States solemnly insists that Venezuelans deserve a complete recount of every single vote.

Apparently, the Obama folks have forgotten the 2000 election of George W. Bush when its country’s own government refused to perform a recount, even though the eventual loser had verifiably received more votes than the winner. That victor was finally selected not by popular vote but by the Supreme Court dominated by his cronies.

In the light of such irregularities, not to mention gerrymandering, legalized vote-buying sanctioned by “Citizens United,” voter suppression of minorities, and refusal to set up the paper trail the Venezuelan system has so firmly established, wouldn’t you think our government would recognize that it’s lost all moral ground to lecture others about or adjudicate “free and fair” elections? No – not when inconvenient truths can be successfully flushed down George Orwell’s memory hole. Despite evidence to the contrary, Americans are still convinced their election system is the world’s gold standard. Go figure.

• The week before last Beyonce and Jay-Z decided to celebrate their 5th wedding anniversary in Cuba. Their decision drew immediate response from Miami expatriates of Cuba who descried the couple’s implied support for such an egregious violator of human rights as Cuba.

Apparently, the objectors had forgotten that the U.S. has a higher percentage of its population in prison than Cuba or any other nation in the world for that matter. Additionally, the “Americans” maintain a world-wide system of secret jails for political prisoners. Practically all of the 166 incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba are currently on hunger strike protesting their inhuman treatment there. The “American” torture and even murder of its political prisoners is better documented than any alleged mistreatment of prisoners in Cuba or anywhere else you might care to name.

And yet, U.S. patriots somehow feel free to lecture Cuba about respect for human rights. Can you say “denial;” can you say “1984” or “memory hole?” Once again, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Americans are still convinced that the United States is somehow the world’s leading defender and observer of human rights.

• Last week the Obama administration’s press secretary, Jay Carney sanctimoniously justified (with a straight face) the refusal of visas to 18 Russian citizens. The banned individuals were all linked to the case of Sergei Magnitsky, a whistle-blower lawyer who had exposed widespread corruption and theft of national resources by high officials in the Russian government. Magnitsky had died in prison while awaiting trial. His death sparked congressional passage of the “Magnitsky Act” to protect whistle-blowers – in Russia.

Carney intoned,

“This administration is committed to working with the Congress to advance universally recognized human rights worldwide, and we will use the tools in the Magnitsky Act and other available legal authorities to ensure that persons responsible for the maltreatment and death of Mr. Magnitsky are barred from traveling to the United States and doing business here.”

Apparently, Carney wants us to forget the fact that untold (literally) numbers of incarcerated individuals have died in U.S. political prisons – many of them directly under torture. He wants us to forget that the Obama administration has virtually transformed whistle-blowing (i.e. the exposure of government and military crimes) from an act of virtue to a felony.

More specifically, Carney’s consigned to the memory hole the fact that the Obama administration has indicted more whistle-blowers than all previous administrations combined. In doing so he has criminalized the prophetic act of speaking truth to power. This is best illustrated in the case of Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army whistle-blower who obeyed his conscience and Army regulations by going public with the war crimes he observed. His reward? Imprisonment without charge, torture, and a possible life sentence. Here again we’re expected to believe that the United States respects “universally recognized human rights worldwide.” We really respect them universally only in places like Russia.

You see, it’s not just that official hand-wringing over the Boston Marathon Bombing highlights U.S. hypocrisy concerning the injuries and deaths of the innocent people it’s responsible for killing; it’s that such hypocrisy has become a way of life. It has blinded U.S. citizens to the fact that their country is not at all exceptional except in its disregard for universal human rights and international law.

It’s time for “Americans” to realize that their country long ago lost any moral ground they once believed it occupied. It’s time for politicians to observe humble and repentant silence about human rights, election validity, and whistle-blowers.

As it turns out, the Marathon Bombing is only a faint “retail” reflection of the wholesale mayhem the United States routinely wreaks in every corner of the planet. Cuba is a paragon of virtue compared to the U.S. Nicolas Maduro owns far more legitimacy than did George Bush who committed those war crimes Bradley Manning has been punished for exposing.

The Marathon Bombing was a wake-up call.

Saving Jesus from Paul and John (Sunday Homily)

Readings for the 4th Sunday after Easter: Acts 13:14; Ps. 100: 1-2, 3-5; Rev. 7:9, 14B-17; Jn. 10: 27-30. http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/042113.cfm

As I’ve been reporting here, a group of about 25 people met weekly during Lent for an intensely rewarding study of “The Historical Jesus.” The group included members of our local Catholic church in Berea, Kentucky along with an equal number from our Ecumenical Table in nearby Richmond. In the aftermath of that experience, I find it impossible to read selections like those in today’s liturgy of the word without making connections with our little seminar.

For instance, today’s readings remind me that would-be followers of Jesus might more accurately call ourselves “Paulists” rather than “Christians.” That observation is sparked by the tension between Paul and “the Jews” in this morning’s selection from Acts. The tension reminds us that our belief system has been shaped more by Paul of Tarsus than by Jesus of Nazareth who was himself a Jew. The same holds true for the gospel selection from John the Evangelist with its emphasis on Jesus’ divinity (“I and the Father are one”). As a result of the influence of Paul and John, our faith tends to be other-worldly and de-politicized. Our Jesus tends to be one-dimensionally divine rather than the enlightened very human rabbi who graced the Palestinian landscape 2000 years ago. Let me explain.

To begin with it’s important to point out that we know more about Paul than we do about the historical Jesus. And we know more about the historical Jesus than did the rabbi from Tarsus. The reasons why are simple. On the one hand, most of the Christian Testament is written by or heavily influenced by Paul. The New Testament, then, is more Pauline than Christian.

On the other, Paul never met the historical Jesus and shows almost no knowledge of Jesus’ words and deeds in his epistles. Meanwhile, scholarship based on manuscript discoveries at Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt in 1945 and at the Dead Sea in 1947 (the famous Dead Sea Scrolls) has yielded unprecedented knowledge of the historical Jesus. That means we know more about the rabbi from Nazareth than did Paul.

Think about the Pauline nature of the faith we’ve inherited. There are 27 books in the “New Testament.” Thirteen of those 27 are letters written by Paul. Then there’s the “Acts of the Apostles” which really is a travelogue about the mission and adventures of Paul written by Paul’s companion, Luke the evangelist. Luke also wrote his own Gospel, which, of course, was heavily influenced by his mentor. Finally, as the earliest entries in the New Testament, Paul’s epistles (written from about 50 to 64 CE) evidently exercised great influence on the other evangelists Mark, Matthew and John who wrote much later.

That means that nearly half of the New Testament (13 of 27 entries) is comprised of letters attributed to Paul. Fifty-five percent (15 of 27 entries) was written by Paul or Luke. And more than 66% (18 of 27 entries) was arguably more influenced by Paul than by Jesus.

I say “more influenced by Paul than by Jesus” because what we have in Paul’s letters, the Acts of the Apostles and in the gospels themselves are proclamations about Jesus rather than the proclamation of Jesus. Remember, Jesus’ proclamation was about the Kingdom of God, “Repent, the Kingdom of God is at hand.” In contrast, the New Testament’s proclamations about Jesus are “Jesus is Lord.”

The differences between these two “gospels” are enormous and they are, as I indicated, illustrated in today’s readings on this fourth Sunday after Easter. Today’s selection from John’s Gospel (written about 70 years after the crucifixion of the Enlightened Yeshua) has Jesus discoursing about himself. He speaks of himself as a “shepherd” leading his sheep and about offering them “eternal life.” He concludes by claiming to be God’s Son equal to the Father. “I and the Father are one,” he says. (The historical Jesus could never have made such statements without being stoned by his fiercely monotheistic Jewish audience.)

However, Jesus’ discourse as reported in John’s gospel is completely coherent with the gospel of Paul. Paul, I repeat, never met the historical Jesus. In fact, as we all know, before his famous conversion on the road to Damascus, he was a persecutor of Christians. He pursued them on behalf of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish high court, which worked hand-in-glove with the Romans.

The Romans were hunting down Christians for the same reason they arrested and executed Jesus – because he was perceived as the Jewish Messiah whose overriding responsibility was the overthrow the Roman occupation of Palestine. With good reason, the Romans considered Jesus’ followers to be subversives.

In other words, the Romans, their Sanhedrin collaborators, and their point-man, Saulous (Paul’s name before his conversion) were cooperating in a counter-revolutionary program that targeted Jesus’ nationalistic followers.
Those followers had actually lived with Jesus. They were Jews primarily – members of a Jerusalem community gathered around Jesus’ brother, James, the apostles, and Jesus’ “inner circle” of followers including many women and numbering perhaps 120 people or more. Together they constituted a group of reformed Jews. Many of them had been eye-witnesses of Jesus’ deeds and followers of his teachings.

Those teachings centralized a new understanding of “the Law” which Yeshuaists called “the Way.” It emphasized love and forgiveness over fear, punishment and a purity code that divided people into “clean” and “unclean.” It emphasized justice for the poor and oppressed and freedom from foreign domination. The Jerusalem community of The Way recognized Jesus as the True Prophet predicted in their scriptures – a wonder-working Messiah and liberator who would usher in an era reminiscent of the Exodus from Egypt under the great rebel Moses. This Jewish messiah was human (the Son of Man) not a divine Son of God.

Paul, as I said, had never met the Son of Man. His writings show neither knowledge of Jesus’ deeds nor of specific teachings which were so important to the Jewish Yeshuaist community. Instead, Paul preached a kind of mythological Jesus who was entirely recognizable to the gentile audiences which interested him. Paul’s Jesus was born, crucified, risen and ascended to heaven. Evidently, Paul considered nothing between Jesus’ birth and death worth reporting.

For Paul’s gentile audience, any wonder-working “messiah” had to be a divine incarnation like the gods Romans and Egyptians worshipped — Mithra, Isis, Osiris, the Great Mother God. These “dying and rising gods” descended from heaven, lived for a while on earth, died, and then rose from the dead. Typically, they offered “eternal life” beyond the grave to believers who ate sacred meals together sharing the gods’ body and blood in the form of bread and wine. These are the terms Paul used to explain Jesus to his gentile audiences.

As reformed Jews, the Jerusalem community along with most unreformed (non-Yeshuaist) Jews had trouble with such explanations which offended their strictly monotheistic beliefs. How could Jesus be uniquely “one with the Father?” That sounded like two Gods and was entirely offensive and unacceptable.

Moreover, Paul’s version of the gospel seemed to remove the Kingdom of God to an other-worldly heaven. It left the Romans in charge of Palestine ruled by a god (the Roman emperor) who was a rival of Yahweh, who, for good Jews, alone was God and who alone was the legitimate ruler of the Palestinian homeland. Such a gospel along with Paul’s background of cooperation with the Romans made all Jews (Yeshuaist and orthodox) deeply suspect of Paul. They remained adamant in their hope of the “Second Coming” of Jesus who would finally defeat the Romans and introduce God’s Reign to replace Caesar’s.

We pick up the tension between Paul’s message aimed at gentiles and the anti-imperial faith of Jews (including Yeshuaists) in today’s readings. In the selection from Acts, Paul proclaims his version of Jesus. And “the Jews” respond as expected. To them Paul’s (and John’s) understanding of Jesus as God’s only Son, his understanding of salvation as “eternal life” rather than messianic liberation from foreign domination was completely blasphemous. So Paul and Barnabas end up “shaking the dust” of Antioch’s streets from their feet against “the Jews.”

Eventually, Paul’s gospel (with the deeply engrained seeds of anti-Semitism) ends up triumphing completely. This is because the base of the Jerusalem Yeshuaist community (the inner circle referenced earlier) was completely destroyed during the Jewish war with Rome (64-73). In the absence of strong Yeshuaist leadership, the way was thus opened for the triumph of a divine Jesus proclaiming himself (rather than God’s Kingdom) and offering an other-worldly “eternal life” rather than a new revolutionary social order characterized by love, forgiveness, justice, and room for everyone.

That other-worldly “Christianity” was finally canonized by Constantine in the fourth century (325 at Nicaea). Afterwards, in his zeal for uniformity of belief, the emperor and his church accomplices ordered the destruction of documents reflecting anything other than the Pauline and Johannine understandings of Jesus. The rest is history. The historical Jesus was lost. We’ve been worshipping a Roman Mithra instead of a prophetic Enlightened Jewish Jesus ever since.

Luckily disobedient monks ignored Constantine’s order to destroy manuscripts reflecting understandings of Jesus other than Paul’s. That happened at the Dead Sea and at Nag Hammadi.

Thank God for their crime! At this late date it has directed our focus away from the Gospel about Jesus to the Gospel of Jesus. It calls us to work not for an after-life heaven, but for God’s Kingdom in the here and now.

Boston Marathon Bombing: Our Collective Destiny

All of us were shocked yesterday by the bombing at the Boston Marathon. About 3:00 p.m. two powerful bombs were detonated near the finish line of the annual “Patriots’ Day” event. Three people were killed including an 8-year-old boy. One hundred and forty-four were injured among them a 3-year-old; two were left in critical condition.

Naturally, our hearts go out to all the victims and their families. A day that began in joy and celebration ended in complete tragedy. What can be more painful than losing a loved one – especially a child?

Responses to the disaster will be interesting to observe. It remains to be seen whether U.S. officials will connect the Boston Marathon Bombing with foreign or domestic terrorists or whether it was a criminal act by some insane individual.

In either case, the tragedy brings home to American soil the destruction and terror that U.S. policy inflicts each day on unsuspecting civilians across the world in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and elsewhere. Pakistani events, Yemeni celebrations that begin in joy and high spirits routinely end in tears and mourning as drones drop from the sky without warning or as doors are kicked in by rampaging American soldiers shouting vile curses.

We must remember that the terrifying explosions, blood, torn flesh, scattered body parts and lives cut off virtually before they’ve begun constitute everyday occurrences at the hands of our criminal government and brutal military.

In fact, next to the havoc, murder, torture and sheer cruelty of U.S. policy in the countries just mentioned, what happened in Boston hardly deserves a mention. (Actually, most of U.S.-caused terror gets no mention in our mainstream press at all.)

What I’m saying is the obvious: U.S. chickens are coming home to roost; Boston is a preview of things to come.
I mean, Marathon-like bombings regardless of the origin of this particular attack will increasingly be part of our own lives until our country comes to its senses and leaves aside its imperial pretensions, international interventions and quick resort to violence as the solution to every problem.

This is because random bombings employing crude improvised devices constitute poor people’s responses to illegal occupation of their countries by American invaders using state-of-the-art weapons from drones to daisy cutters. It’s the last resort — what is possible for the poor and powerless as they attempt to defend themselves from “the most powerful military in the world.”

There is only one way to avoid the fate I’m describing: reject empire. That means living within our means; respecting human rights and international law; abjuring militarism; stopping the torture; closing the secret prisons; remanding drone policy; and ACTUALLY BEING WHO WE CLAIM TO BE IN THE WORLD!

Until we make such reforms, mayhem like that exemplified by the Boston Marathon bombing will continue to represent our collective destiny.