ON MERIT AND CAPITAL

We are often told to beware those who seek the easy way.  But I would add, beware those who accept only the hard way, for they have chosen to make the accumulation of merit the focus, even the whole point, of their lives.  Merit thrives on difficulty—indeed, cannot be produced without it.

And what is merit?  Let us not confuse it with virtue.  Virtue, or perhaps virtues in the plural, might be described as the powers to do or be good.  Analogously, a person might go for a walk to sustain or improve her powers of locomotion.  Of course, going for a walk can be, should be, of itself a good thing.  So, her walk has two purposes then.  But what if she views her walk as meritorious as well?  Merit comes in when she expects something from some unspecified or transcendent source for this action, as opposed to simply improved health or the pleasure of a Summer’s day.  She might not even expect to get this something.  She may be satisfied with, even prefer, that she simply deserve it.  A debt is owed her, and that debt takes no particular form, but is in fact pure debt.

Of course, if she is religious, she will likely be thinking of receiving God’s commendation.  But it is not necessary for her to be at all religious in order to have, even if not consciously, an almost religious devotion to her own merit.  Lacanian psychology, for example, speaks of the “Big Other,” an entity in the psyche for whom one is in effect performing, whom one wishes to impress.  This entity could be God, a parent, a historical figure, an influential person from one’s life, etc.

In critiquing merit, I do not intend to disparage the general idea of an exchange in favor of some more altruistic or unselfish motive for doing everything.  That is not the issue here.  What is at stake is this quasi-mystical bartering as the center of life: that is to say, a frame of mind which says I have the power of doing good, and will choose to exercise it to gain this ghostly merit: in other words, to put the beyond into my debt.

For merit is nothing of itself (again, it is not to be confused with virtue, or with good character, for example) but is rather, a kind of promissory note.

And in this sense, merit is much like money—is perhaps its foundation or prototype, or progenitor.  They have similar tendencies, especially when we look at money in capitalism.  Merit might be described as value in the spiritual realm, without being spirit, just as capital is value in the material realm without being material.

For in capitalism, one increases one’s capital for this reason: to invest and in turn increase one’s capital further, and to no known limit.  Capital, which can be used rationally to purchase use values, is used to increase itself, and to that end in itself, rather than to the purchase of more use values.  Use values are subordinated to exchange values in the most idiotic and indeed nihilistic philosophy humanity may yet have devised.

Likewise, with merit.  Those who seek merit do not desire to trade it for something else they supposedly really want.  They want the merit itself.

The pursuit of merit, which may actually be, or at least bear a strong connection to the sin of pride, is the spiritual foundation of the very material practice of capitalism.  (Why is pride a sin?  Perhaps because it seeks to put God in one’s debt, and therefor completely misunderstands the nature of God and humanity.)  Many generations before Adam Smith or his contemporaries, religious people of various sorts were pursuing merit.  The wiser amongst them would be alert to this tendency in themselves, this wandering from the path of virtue, in effect, and adjust themselves accordingly as far as possible.

But just as merit is a ghostly thing, a promissory note that can never keep its promise, so is capital.  Pride and capital know no natural bounds, and thus, as we see in environmental destruction, for example, destroy nature itself.

ACCEPTANCE AND “REALISM”

A Buddhistic or Tollean acceptance of what is is worlds apart from “realism.”  “Realism”–an ideological word if ever there was one–is idolatry towards all negativity in what is.  Realism sneakily and in a cowardly manner (all the while swaggering about—it is impossible to use the word “realism” without at least a hint of swagger) conflates that which simply is with that which is not as we would like it.  To be “real,” something must be opposed to us, thwarting us, and the “realist” therefore is a tough guy who can “face” all this.  Realism is not the honest knowledge or acceptance of something negative, but the denial that anything that is not negative could be entirely real.  Realism is the worship of a dark god, the modern version of a now quaint and rather annoying Satanism.  The stupid vulgarity of pentagrams, animal-headed people, and bloody sacrifice is replaced with an equally vulgar and stupid salute to despair.  Realism is active, arrogant, worshipful failure, and hates or despises all who do not get on board.  The realist, like many who are intimidated and dominated by a bully, is humiliated by the very existence of those who are not, and is compelled to discount them as “naïve.”

One needs to learn how to say, “so it is” with neither swagger nor self-abasement.

DAVID GRAEBER AND CAPITALIST HOPELESSNESS

Coming close to the end of David Graeber’s marvellous Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011) I encountered the following:

How did we get here?  My own suspicion is that we are looking at the final effects of the militarization of American capitalism itself.  In fact, it could well be said that the last thirty years have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a giant machine designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures.  At its root is a veritable obsession on the part of the rulers of the world—in response to the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s—with ensuring that social movements cannot be seen to grow, flourish, or propose alternatives; that those who challenge existing power arrangements can never, under any circumstances, be perceived to win.  To do so requires creating a vast apparatus of armies, prisons, police, various forms of private security firms and military intelligence apparatus, and propaganda engines of every conceivable variety, most of which do not attack alternatives directly so much as create a pervasive climate of fear, jingoistic conformity, and simple despair that renders any thought of changing the world seem an idle fantasy.  Maintaining this apparatus seems even more important to exponents of the “free market,” even than maintaining any sort of viable market economy.  How else can one explain what happened in the former Soviet Union?  One would ordinarily have imagined that the end of the Cold War would have led to the dismantling of the army and the KGB and the rebuilding of the factories, but in fact what happened was precisely the other way around.  This is just an extreme example of what has been happening everywhere.  Economically, the apparatus is just a drag on the system; all those guns, surveillance cameras, and propaganda engines are extraordinarily expensive and don’t really produce anything, and no doubt it’s yet another element dragging the entire capitalist system down—along with producing the illusion of an endless capitalist future that laid the groundwork for the endless bubbles to begin with.  Finance capital became the buying and selling of chunks of that future, and economic freedom, for most of us, was reduced to the right to buy a small piece of one’s own permanent subordination.

In other words, there seems to have been a profound contradiction between the political imperative of establishing capitalism as the only possible way to manage anything, and capitalism’s own unacknowledged need to limit its future horizons, lest speculation, predictably, go haywire.  Once it did, and the whole machine imploded, [Graeber seems to be referring to the 2008 financial meltdown here] we were left in the strange situation of not being able to even imagine any other way that things might be arranged.  About the only thing we can imagine is catastrophe.

But what has brought this situation about?  Let me assert that in the West at least, the two great systems of hope, as we may call them, have been Christianity and socialism—perhaps most specifically, Marxism.  Socialism has been betrayed by many of its so-called friends and alleged proponents in the form of party dictatorships, while being ruthlessly stamped out in hearts, minds, and the world by its enemy, capital.  Christianity has been co-opted by worldly power largely into two camps:  an ostensibly apolitical religion concerned solely with private faith and individual salvation on the one hand, and on the other hand a grotesque corruption of the Word of God into an aggressively and absurdly pro-capitalist, even fascist direction.  This perverse politics is not even a parody of Christianity, but an outright contradiction.  American Christian fundamentalism is as much a contradiction of Christianity as the Soviet Union was of Socialism (see Noam Chomsky, “The Soviet Union Versus Socialism”).

We are accustomed to looking at politics in terms of “Right” and “Left.”  This is useful.  (Of course, these useful labels are also routinely abused out of dishonesty or ignorance, as when the corporate media and those who use it as their only source of information refer to Democrats or liberals as “the Left”—cavalierly waiving socialism, communism, anarchism and anyone who actually is a leftist out of existence, or perhaps pretending that Hilary Clinton’s views are but a hairsbreadth to the right of Karl Marx’s).  However, we might also look at politics in terms of hope versus despair.

For it is only the Left, whether secular or religious, that has offered us any hope.  The Right is another matter.  Whereas the Left says that we can change things fundamentally, and for the better, such hopes tend to bring sneers of contempt to the faces of the Right, which proudly invokes “realism,” or perhaps “human nature,” or “the will of God” as in Luther’s conviction that the Almighty had given power and authority to the princes and so on.  On a theological level, the religious wing of the Left sees God as working not only in some otherworldly heaven, but has plans for this world, that may well include upheaval and revolution, but do not include writing the world off.

On the specifically religious plane, Left and Right are literally worlds apart.  The religious Left takes seriously the Biblical claim that “God so loved the world…” but the religious Right can’t wait to see him turn it into a fire pit.  Paradoxically, while the Right is therefor very otherworldly (in a most unhealthy sense) it preaches what is in fact a worldly gospel that absolutely loses sight of the poor and oppressed, handing over power and authority to the rich: the very people scripture most often castigates. 

Despair is a choice, and it is political.

For what “liberals,” the “woke” or “politically correct,” for all their faults–real, imagined or exaggerated–have in common is a belief that we can and therefor should improve things in major ways, that merely tinkering with the status quo is not enough.  The endless tirades since the late 80s or early 90s about “PC” and how everyone, apparently, is held in holy terror of its hysterical dictates mask what is in fact a deeper fear: that we can and therefor must change the world.

Hope can be frightening.

What really pains the Right is the possibility that that liberal/leftist realm is actually pointing out our real responsibilities, and our real powers, if we but use them.  And this call to action, if correct, alleviates us all from our excuses to do nothing.

That is the real terror: responsibility.

But in fact, the problem runs deeper, and is more interesting than that.  A politics of mere responsibility, though it would be an immense improvement over the slash and burn mentality of capital, has the same weakness as religion does when it loses its heart and degenerates into phariseeism.  “Thou shalt not,” in the long run, or “thou shalt” does not have the staying power in public or personal life that is needed for real change.  A genuine sense of ethical responsibility easily degenerates into a prim and censorious temperament, and lacks the power needed to overcome the darker elements of individuals or systems.

And what the Left and Right have often had in common is this phariseeism.

What is the answer?  Perhaps I should leave that discussion for a later post.

THE ODDS OF SALVATION

They say that humans must have free will to be important, to love and be loved.  Therefor, it is inevitable some will choose to reject God.  And choosing to reject God is to put oneself in hell.

Therefor, they say, hell is justified.

But is it actually inevitable, given the free wills of billions of souls, that some will reject God?  What is this “inevitable” mathematically speaking?  What percentage of the total number of souls should we expect will be saved given this inevitability?  50%?  25%?  1%?  Even given billions of souls, is a 25% salvation rate more likely than 100%?  If one flips a coin 100 times one can predict mathematically what the odds are it will be heads every time.  The odds that it will be heads 50 times are presumably much greater.  But a coin is a known quantity.  Its result is random (the random is not predictable, except in a broad statistical sense) not freely chosen.  The odds against it turning up heads 100 times out of 100 are extremely low.  If we treat free souls like flipped coins, it seems impossible that all shall be saved. But are we not, in assuming a significant number of lost souls, making a mistake in treating them like flipped coins?  Must freedom be unpredictable?  Random?  Arbitrary?

Does freedom operate according to the laws of chance?  And if not, why should all being saved be less likely than, say, half?

Why could not the perfect freedom of all guarantee the salvation of all?  What is the more likely result, and how do we know?

POSTED JULY 31, 2023

ECKHART TOLLE AND CHRISTIAN SALVATION

What if Christian soteriology, in its concern with how to get God’s grace and be saved, has been little more than an unwitting attempt to resist that grace?

What if our strategy, unbeknownst to ourselves, has been to keep salvation somewhere beyond planet Earth and eternally in the future?  If we take the position that universal salvation is the truth, then soteriology might be, on the psychological level at least, a grandiose and perverse attempt to keep that inevitable salvation at arm’s length for as long as possible.

Reading Eckhart Tolle, one encounters repeatedly the idea that the ego, which is a false self, constantly tries to create various situations and narratives which sustain its existence.  This leads to a great deal of unnecessary drama and pain.  We are accustomed, in the religious or spiritual world, to look at ego moralistically.  But this is something Tolle does not do.  He seems to see the ego as a persistent force that causes us problems constantly, sucking the life out of us, but he views this more as a problem than a sin.

For Tolle, the ego lives on time, thrives on time, and needs some kind of narrative (and not even necessarily a self-praising one.  It can even be the opposite) to keep itself alive.  To be fully present in the now is the death of the ego, and something it militates against constantly.  The reason we spend most of our lives in the past or the future, and in ways that are not necessary or beneficial, is because the ego cannot live in the present, and must keep us distracted from it.

What would a deep-seated conviction of God’s eternal, unconditional, and irrevocable love for us mean to the ego?  It would mean the ego’s death.

Where would one find such a deep-seated conviction?  Where would one experience God’s love?  In the present, and the present only.  But to avoid this conviction of divine love (such avoidance being what the ego wants) we must limit our soteriology to the level of eschatology: the last things, some future events.  Salvation must be of the future (an uncertain future at that) and of the future only.

We look to the second coming of Christ in the future because we don’t know how to find him in the present.

We become lawyers of the Bible because we see the Bible as a book of the past and we do not know how to live now.

Take none of this to mean that the Bible is “outdated” or needs to be “made relevant”; please also note that I do assert a literal second coming of Christ, entailing a radical rebirth of the world and eventually of all people.  But if Christians spend much of their time trying to parse the book of Revelation to know exactly how and when he is coming, or if they ignore and despise the world around them because it is not ancient scripture, it may well be because they deny the Christ of the present, of the here and now.

Christ yesterday, Christ tomorrow, never Christ today.  The Christ of the Now is too frightening.  “Seek and ye shall find,” he said, but we only think we are seeking.

If only we do such-and-such then Christ, truly, will love us (in the future).  Conversely: oh look at the dear Bible and see how Christ loved us (in the past).  No Christian would deny that Christ loves us now of course, but it is one thing to assert this as a doctrine and quite another to embrace it in one’s attitudes or spiritual practice.  Alas!  Jesus loves us, but Jesus is elsewhere, waiting to come back.  We fold our hands piously and sit with woebegone faces staring at the heavens, waiting for the love to come.  Christ is always elsewhere, be it time or space.

Theologians, who have egos as much as the rest of us, must find some clever way around universalism if God’s love is to be rendered an uncertain thing and the ego left with a good toehold, at the very least, in our lives.  Hence, the torment of soteriology: is he saved?  Is she saved?  Am I saved?  How do we know?  What do we do?  Have we done it enough yet?  For if universalism is not true, or if it is only a pious “hope” that some patronizing doctrine allows us (condemning us for “dogmatism” or “presumption” if we insist that universalism is true) the ego can thrive: especially on its plans, constructions, narratives on how it will get into heaven and even how, perhaps, others will not.

It is my contention that if there is something we must do to be saved, we shall do it, somehow, sooner or later, both freely and inevitably.

The good news of our inevitable salvation in Christ is bad news for the ego.  The dramatic narrative is ruined if there is an inevitable happy ending for everyone.  How does the ego feed off the prospect of eternal bliss if everyone gets it?        

It can’t.

REVENGE IS THEOLOGICAL

Revenge is theological.  To be abased or abused by another causes one to see one has lost value in the eyes of that other.  But who is that other?  Why does he or she have authority?  If the other is the other and no more than that there is no especial reason to elevate the other’s opinion of oneself to a higher status than one’s own opinion of oneself.  Suppose I think myself a worthy fellow.  Then someone treats me as if I am unworthy.  Why should I believe him rather than myself?  But it happens that we do tend to respect the other’s opinion not simply as a judgment on us, whether an accurate judgement or not; the other’s abuse of us is not simply an expression of a judgement.  The abuse is experienced as a making of that judgement the truth.  To pronounce guilty, in this sense, is to make the object of that pronouncement guilty.  This is no case of “guilty as charged,” but “charged, therefore guilty.”  Just as God’s “fiat lux” does not express a wish for light or the expression of a truth that light would be a good thing, but does in fact cause the existence of light, so the abuse we receive makes us deserving of it.  This perception or feeling, however irrational, is the experience of abuse (leading to desire for revenge) no matter how truly we may argue the abuse was undeserved and does not pay due respect to our true self.

The abuser, therefore, is treated as being the manifestation of God’s power and authority.

God, therefore, has proclaimed us into unworthiness via his messenger.  What are we to do?  We cannot “prove” our innocence as one might do in a trial, or in the appeal of a faulty verdict.  Or rather, on a rational and evidential basis we might indeed prove our innocence, but such proof is rendered null and void by the idolatry that treats the abuser as a manifestation of God.

Therefore, we must abuse, even kill the messenger.  If we can do this, we can show to ourselves that he or she was not God’s messenger to begin with.  If his power to hurt us indicates God’s authority, our power to hurt this messenger negates him as God’s messenger.  The authority of the abuse against us is vitiated.  To get revenge is to say to the abuser “no, you are not the voice and power of God.”

But perhaps, at the darkest level, to get revenge is to unseat the offender from being the voice and power of God, as if the offender really had been that.  Note that this is not a case of proving the abuser to be a false prophet.  Prophets are not killed because they are false but because they are true (or seen as such).  Likewise, the abuser is believed (at some deep level at least) to be the true power and authority of God.  However, the avenger aspires to change this state by the injury or destruction of said abuser.

Convicted by The Truth (regardless of the fact this “truth” may be a blatant falsehood) one therefor assaults The Truth, assaults God through assaulting his “prophet.”  One therefore treats God like a puppet who can be forced; this action is tragic.

Perhaps, therefore, when God says, “revenge is mine” he may well be not only delineating the difference between human and divine responsibilities but saying that he shall not be our puppet.

Revenge, therefore, is unfaithful and idolatrous.  But it also reflects a belief in God, a passionate need not to be rejected by him.  Perhaps it is the case, therefore, that those who can be greatly provoked without experiencing the desire for revenge are either people of great faith (whether or not it is linked to a specific religion or set of doctrines) or very thoroughgoing atheists.  Revenge, in effect, is for believers who lack faith.

So, revenge is not a matter of “tit for tat” as it is usually conceived: a spiritual or moral Newtonian motion where an action demands an opposite and equal reaction.  If you hurt me and I therefore want to hurt you, that is not the same as the firing of a gun causing recoil.

Revenge is not a matter of justice, not even retributive justice, but an attempt at the justification of the self.  This justification is attempted through an assault on God, the source of all justification.

Indeed, if there is any truth to what I have said here, it might illustrate in some way the Christian belief that we cannot justify ourselves.  Only God can do that for us.  “Revenge is mine,” he says in Romans and Deuteronomy.

Revenge is inspired when one first commits the idolatry of taking another person’s judgement of oneself as coming from God, and ends up assaulting God himself to achieve the justification ruined by this very idolatry.

THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOOD AND EVIL

What is meant in the Genesis story about the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil?”

Let us take a look first at this passage, from Alain Badiou discussing Jacques Lacan in “The Other,” which is the first part of I Know There Are So Many of You (2019):

“We are making progress here on a very important point, which is that the question of the individual, from the point of view of otherness, is clearly a question of identity, except that this identity contains the Other within it.  In other words, no identity can do without otherness.  The very important lesson we learn from this is that it is always a fantasy, and sometimes a criminal one, to think that there can be identity without otherness.  The thesis of the elimination of otherness may lead, and has historically led, to bloodshed, from the moment that, instead of understanding that since all desire is the desire of the Other, the Other is internal to my own desire, I instead assume the Other to be external, to be a border at which my desire is forever rejected, and so I attempt to destroy them.”  (20-21)

(Elsewhere in this chapter, Badiou explains that “desire of the Other” seems to mean not simply “desire for the Other” but also “desire to be desired by the Other.”)

Let us make a bit of a leap here and assert that from observations such as this one, one might conclude that good and evil are complementary, that the one cannot exist without the other.  Evil, therefor, in some fundamental sense is not so much evil as necessary.  But another way of looking at things is that in theory, at least, evil could be eliminated, leaving only good.

Here is where the tree comes in.  The eating of the fruit is called a “loss of innocence,” (a cringeworthy and patronizing phrase if ever there was one).  “Loss of innocence” implies not simply a plunge into moral guilt (or a feeling of guilt) but a loss of ignorance.  That is, the gaining of knowledge: in this case, one learns about good and evil that already existed, but it would have been best not to know the difference between them.

This would imply that paradise was not paradise, even before Adam and Eve ate the apple, but a kind of “fugitive and cloistered” paradise, a diminished existence which owes (perhaps shamefully) its bliss to the avoidance of certain realities.

But this is false from a Christian point of view, which does not see evil as an inherently necessary element in what would amount to a cosmic dualism.  Even though it indeed seems the case that evil is necessary to good, and that we cannot even imagine (let alone make) a world where this is not so, we must keep in mind that the eating of the fruit, the “knowledge,” results in the eviction from paradise.  The “knowledge” that evil is necessary is post-lapsarian, and therefor must be suspect.  The fact is, we post-lapsarians cannot imagine how two people in perfection could fall.  So we must see all tales of this unfallen world as tales of a foreign country whose language is so incomprehensible to us the story must be told in our own language, and therefor falsified.  The “loss of innocence” is perhaps some acquisition of knowledge to the fallen world, but in absolute, that is, true terms, this loss of innocence is the gaining of ignorance.  The “knowledge of good and evil” is a lie.  It is a lie we cannot see beyond to the truth it obfuscates.  We cannot even imagine this truth.  We can know only that the “knowledge” is a lie.

WRITING AS AN ACT OF FAITH

What if you spent your life writing: let’s say short stories, essays, and novels.  And what if you seldom published any shorter works and never published a book?  What if the success you achieved was very small compared to the time and effort you put into your works?  What if you never “made it”—even posthumously?

Such writers and artists are the people who are permanently lost to artistic history.  We hear a lot about those who were almost lost, but whose books or paintings or whatever finally gained recognition late in the artists’ lives or after their deaths, and so we get the impression that quality is usually recognized eventually.

I doubt that very much. 

There are those who would say, “write for the love of it.”  And perhaps this is the best motive, and the most creative motive for writing.  It may well be best to have no eye to publication while in the midst of the creative act.  And it may well be best that those who love writing but are not very good at it should not concern themselves much with publication.

But if, once the work is done, the writer has no interest in its publication regardless of the work’s quality—no interest in the work’s going out into the world to be read and do what good it can–is there not a contempt shown here for writing, a base abnegation of the dignity of the creative act, a gesture not of the writer’s humility but of lack of confidence?

Nobody tells any sort of professional, other than writers or artists, not to care about success.

And yet (this is my main question) is there value in writing books that in fact are never published despite all attempts to make them so?  Is there some way in which God knows these works and ensures that they somehow, at the last day even if never before it, like their authors arise from the dead?  books which, in a way, were never alive to begin with except in the minds of the authors and maybe a few beta readers?

“By their fruits ye shall know them.”  If a writer writes excellent works which are published but fall into immediate obscurity or which are never published at all despite the writer’s efforts, has he or she borne fruit or not?  And if not, then is that writer’s career therefor a failure?

This is not a rhetorical question.

ON “REALISM”

In the prologue to The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism became the Religion of Modernity, Eugene McCarraher says,

Words such as “paradise” or “love” or “communion” are certainly absent from our political vernacular, exluded on account of their “utopian” connotations or their lack of steely-eyed “realism.”  Although this is a book about the past, I have always kept before me its larger contemporary religious, philosophical, and political implications.  The book should make these clear enough; I will only say here that one of my broader intentions is to challenge the canons of “realism,” especially as defined in the “science” of economics.  As the master science of desire in advanced capitalist nations, economics and its acolytes define the parameters of our moral and political imaginations, patrolling the boundaries of possibility and censoring any more generous conception of human affairs.

“Realism” is a deeply ideological word, and in a very negative sense.  “Realism,” in other words, says more and other than what it pretends to say.

“Realism” pretends that it refers simply to “that which simply is, or that which is possible.”  But we all know, given the countless times we have heard the word used and in its usual contexts, that what is or what is possible as designated by “realism” always has to do with what we wish were not real, that which thwarts our desires, or that which simply can’t live up to them.

“Realism” is invariably linked to some reality (present or possible) that cannot be what we wish of it.  “Realism” has to do with telling us we cannot get what we want, and that we may as well accept this fact.

What are we saying if we tell someone to “be realistic”?  We are almost certainly not telling him or her to see that the situation is or will become much better than he or she imagines.  Almost certainly we are trying to say that things are worse than this person has imagined, or will be worse than our addressee hopes.

So what am I saying?  Simply this: that “realism” is a subtle, powerful, and very commonly used ideological battleaxe deployed not only to diminish hope in a given context—indeed, in the name of honesty, one might well be justified in doing this sometimes—but to assault hope in principle.  The sinister and dishonest ideology of “realism” is that it equates reality with thwarted needs or desires; it subtly curses the positive, the good things in life, with the label of unreality: if something is good, even if it is undeniably extant (and “realism” is always very reluctant to see the good, literally blinds itself in its presence) that good is somehow not real.

In effect, we have what might be described as a kind of dystopic Platonism.  Only the negative, the regrettable, is entirely real in this rhetoric.

And what could be more useful to a society that wants to destroy hope at every turn?  What could be more useful to a society that wants millionaires and billionaires to be in charge and desires that no one will ever question this self-evidently absurd and unjust situation?

TWO WAYS WITH GOD

Christianity seems to present us with God’s good books and his bad books.  How do you tell which one you are in?  Christianity seems to present us with either a great thundering about how sinful we are because we are disobedient, unloving, too unconcerned with the poor, etc.–in other words, we are faced with God’s justice–or Christianity presents us with a God saying never mind, I love all my broken children, and I know you can be nowhere near what I want you to be on your own efforts.  Relax.  I always love you no matter what.

The young rich man is told he must give all he has to enter the kingdom of heaven–an apparently impossible task.  Later in that tale we hear that with God all things are possible.  I always wonder what, exactly, is it that is possible?  Is it possible for the rich man to enter the Kingdom of God without having given his riches to the poor?  Or is the meaning instead that God will help the rich man to give up his riches in order to enter the Kingdom?

Which one is it?  How does God look upon me right now?  Can one be in the good books and the bad books both at the same time?  How do we get into God’s good books and know we are there?  It is very well to say here are the commandments, or here are the two great commandments upon which all the law hangs (love God with all you’ve got and your neighbor as yourself) but we know we are going to fall short here.  How close to the mark must we get before we are in the good books as opposed to the bad ones?  Or are our efforts here irrelevant?

Christianity has tormented us for two thousand years with such questions, and with no answer that I can see, except for those who have been given one on some mystical level.

When we say that God welcomes sinners, do we really mean it, or do we just mean “sinners” in an ironic way.  It seems to be the conservative way to be highly censorious of those society already treats as garbage, putting temptation before them and then blaming them when they fall.  The liberal way, on the other hand, is to treat “sinner” ironically and dishonestly.  All too often what is meant here is simply a person who is a sinner in a conservative’s eyes but not in a liberal’s.  Let’s get over a sentimental idea of “sinner.”  It is easy enough for liberals to castigate conservatives for being harsh on prostitutes, for example, or drug users, the poor, and other underdogs.  When the liberal says “sinner” he doesn’t mean literally “sinner,” but actually “those whom conservatives falsely label as guilty.”

Well, if God welcomes those people, it’s not such a big deal, is it?  Why would he reject helpless innocents, if that’s what they are, just because conservatives do?

When Mary Magdalene wept and washed Jesus’ feet with her own hair, she presented us with the quintessential image of the repentant sinner.  Personally, I am not inclined to judge prostitutes harshly.  The chief cause of their situation, as far as I am concerned, is poverty caused by economic injustice.  I’m not even sure that prostitution, as such, is always and inherently immoral.  But if the whole message of this Biblical incident is taken to be that prostitutes are not such bad people as the world makes them out to be, I think we have missed something.

And for the pharisee who said “I thank you that I am not like other men” there is always another pharisee thanking God he is not like the first pharisee, and another pharisee after that one . . .