The Book of Jasher is Deuteronomy

Anyone who is familiar with the Judaism directory at AskWhy! will know that it argues that Judaism began when the Persians sent colonists to Judah (Persian, Yehud) with a law that they were obliged to follow. Ezra is described as delivering this law in the bible itself sometime in the fifth century BC (417 BC can be inferred). The law was what is now called Deuteronomy. The bible seems to deliberately imply that Deuteronomy was accidentally found in the temple by Josiah, who used it to justify the reformation he introduced, or so most biblicist scholars think, but they think the bible is supernaturally true.

In fact, the myth of the accidental discovery of a book is one created by the Persians to make their own imposition of the new law more palatable to the local inhabitants who were Canaanites. The colonists, told they were descendants of Judahites and were “returning” to their proper home, were actually a ruling elite from somewhere else in the Persian empire—the clues suggest Beth Eden—and were being punished by deportation from their homeland to settle among and pacify the local Canaanites by instilling into them Persian ways and creating a temple state for the collection of tribute. If they succeeded, they became the ruling class of Yehud, and respected priests of the regional temple set up for people conquered by the Persians who were cooperative with them. Only the colonists originally were Jews. They were a nation of priests.

Of course, the bible does not actually name the Josiah law or the law Ezra read out. Another law for the followers of Moses must have been superfluous, one would have thought. Quite so. The supposed discovery of a law book and its implementation by Josiah around 610 BC, and the reading of yet another law by Ezra around 417 BC show that the story of Moses and the Exodus is mythical, a myth devised at a later date, in third century BC Egypt!

But the law given by the Persians was not called Deuteronomy, which is Greek for Second Law, the first supposedly being that of Moses. The new Law could simply have been called The Law, as it still is by the Jews. The attribution to Moses of course came with the later myth. But did it also have a name of its own. Perhaps so. The bible refers in several places (Joshua 10:12-13, 2 Samuel 1:19-29, 1 Kings 8:12ff LXX) to the Book of Yasher (Anglicized to Jasher). “Yasher” means “upright” or “righteous”. Jewish scholars will doubtless know this, but I have just come across confirmation that this was a name for the Law by this passage from the Babylonian Talmud:

R Eliezer says (Babylonian Talmud, Tract Abuda Zara) the Book of Yashar is Deuteronomy because there it is is written… “And thou shalt do that which is right (Yashar) and good in the eyes of the Lord” (6:18).

The point is that the measure of righteousness or uprightness for a Jew is the Law, and that was originally Deuteronomy.

Of course, what is now Deuteronomy is hardly likely to be what the Book of Yasher was at first. Chunks of it will have been deliberately erased to suit the later priesthood, free of Persian influence, and then subject to the Macedonians and the Hasmonaeans, and parts of it will have been expanded and set out in the previous law books that were written in Ptolemaic times, notably Leviticus.

God’s Own Summary of the Bible

I read a summary of the bible in God’s own words on Mountainman’s fascinating website, but I think it missed the most important point, and that is that both of the commandments that Christ gave are the same one. I explain it here (http://www.askwhy.co.uk/truth/b11fscollins.php) in a criticism of a book by F S Collins:

We will see that Christ gave two answers when asked for the most important commandment, and the reason is that the two commandments he gave are the same one, to Love God and to love your neighbour. It is a clear indication that God, in practical terms, is your neighbour, your fellow human being on this planet. Just in case anyone should doubt it, let them read Christ’s description of the Last Judgement in Matthew 25:33-46. God says to the sheep at his right hand whom He has blessed:

“I was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you made me welcome, naked and you clothed me, sick and you visited me, in prison and you came to see me.

The virtuous say to him in reply:

Lord when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and gave you drink? When did we see you a stranger and make you welcome, naked and clothe you, sick or in prison and go to see you?

And God replies:

In so far as you did it to one of the least of my brothers, you did it to me.

To the goats gathered at His left hand God says:

Go away from me, with your curse upon you, to the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you never gave me food. I was thirsty and you never gave me a drink. I was a stranger and you never made me welcome, naked and you never clothed me, sick and in prison and you never visited me.

And they too will ask:

Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty, a stranger or naked, sick or in prison, and did not come to your help.

And again God will answer:

In so far as you neglected to do this this to one of the least of these, you neglected to do it to me.”

If you are a Christian and consider Christ to speak with the authority of God, because he is God, then just what could be clearer than this description of how to be saved. And what could be clearer than that God considered any human being, even the least of them, as being Himself. To abuse or fail to help any human being is to do the same to God, and only by helping your fellow human beings are you displaying your love of God.

So, to get the full meaning of God’s shortest bible, a little more needs to be read, but I cannot see how Christians can miss the interpretation. It shows clearly that most “Christians” are nothing of the kind, particularly those who are most demonstrative of their beliefs like Bush and Blair, the Constantines of the modern day, maybe.

God incarnated as Christ has nothing to say about attending mass, or saying prayers, or having faith, or lighting candles to be saved. It is altogether more moral than all the mumbo jumbo. God is Everyman! You cannot separately love God, you can only love Him through loving people!! He says thou shalt. It is an order. Faith and all the rest might help, but it cannot replace what Christians must do to be saved. They have to love others. Full Stop! Why do Christians confuse this simple message with all the mumbo jumbo?

A Catholic Liberal Education? Eh? Say that Again

The London Catholic Herald explains to us in the words of one Marc Sidwell, an Anglo Catholic, that California has its own “College of Light”. Would you believe it, it is called Thomas Aquinas College? It seems that this rather plainly Catholic College offers “a liberal education as if truth mattered”, and “an escape from skepticism”.

The author sees no contradiction in all this. What I mean is that liberal inquiry has found that truth can only be approached through skepticism, that Catholicism is the trunk of Christianity, and Christianity not only requires belief to be credulously accepted, it is far from being liberal in any sense close to any truth.

Sidwell, seemingly a master of liberal education himself, considers TAC as a “Great Books school” whose students “engage” with thinkers that define Western civilization like St Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Euclid, Plato and Shakespeare, and whose teachers use the Socratic method. Certain that truth exists, and unsaid but obviously true itself, that they have it, TAC rejects the relativism denounced by no less than the pope himself! It all defies analysis unless one is ready to admit that it is bollocks.

The TAC scholars have obviously never heard of begging the question, and cannot comprehend that believing one knows the truth is not the same as knowing it. But that’s Christianity for you. They assure each other that it is so, and take heart that all these clever people cannot be wrong.

Dr Sidwell assures his Catholic readers that liberal education even precedes Catholicism, thus proving he is not bigoted. It began in fifth century Athens as the right of a free man. It did not, then have anything to do with the God of the Hebrews who at that time was too busy helping the Jews to build a “temple, God, for the adoration of…” The church became involved only when Greek tradition and Jewish tradition met and mingled in the creative maelstrom of Pagan Rome. The Romans, culturally influenced by these Greeks, though they considered them effeminate, began to make tentative moves away from the slavery that engulfed them all, towards freedom, but then were engulfed instead by the backwards, conservative, massive intolerance of the religion of the Hebrew God in its new manifestation of Christianity.

Preserved in the Benedictine orders, transmitted by schoolmaster-priests, it was the Christian liberal educators who kept the life of the mind alive through centuries of uncertainty and civil strife.

Eh? Is this sleight of word and history, the liberal education these Catholics mean? Who were responsible for the centuries of uncertainty and civil strife? The Christians destroyed classical civilization after little more than a century of power in Rome, launching Europe into a ten century long dark age. The original sixth century formation of the Benedictine order had no influence on the collapse of civilization. The monks were as corrupt and ignorant as clerics generally. It was the reaction against the wealth and corruption of traditional monastic orders like the Benedictines that signified the beginning of the end of the Christian hegemony called Christendom, and the start of the Renaissance, with the twelfth century foundation of orders like the Franciscans. As for schoolmaster priests, even a rough military prince, Charlemagne, at the height of Christian power was appalled by the ignorance of the supposedly educated clergy.

Anyone who has had a liberal education will see Sidwell’s travesty of an account as an unmitigated lie, but that is what Christians are truly good at. They have had a lot of practice over the centuries. But Dr Sidwell takes as his evidence of the educational calling of the church, the doctor angelicus, Thomas Aquinas himself.

St Thomas Aquinas, is proof of the high value Catholicism has always placed upon reasoned enquiry into creation. Yet the sceptics like Richard Dawkins continue to sneer at Christianity as an intellectual vacancy. They misquote Tertullian as “I believe because it is absurd” and do not know St Anselm of Canterbury’s Credo ut intelligam. (“I believe so as to understand”).

Our guru of the modern Catholic liberal education says critics of Christianity misquote Tertullian when Catholics have long accepted “I believe because it is absurd” as a summary of Tertullian’s:

Born is the Son of God, shamelessly, because it is shameful. And dead is the Son of God, believably, because it is absurd. And, buried, He rose again, assuredly, because impossible.

De Carne Christi

A Christian educator is lying to make a feeble case against his critics, but Anselm’s (1033-1109) citation goes completely against any sort of liberal education, notably because it harks back to the middle of the Christian dark age when belief was compulsory. To base understanding on belief with no evidence that it is well founded other than the belief that it is so is utterly illiberal. It is the teaching of confidence tricksters and mountebanks, but still fools billions of naïve and ignorant Catholics, and not a few intelligent ones.

Anyway, to return to Aquinas (1225-1274), son of a wealthy nobleman, a corpulent monk at a time when peasants were dropping dead in the fields, sick and malnourished, Aquinas was less liberal a thinker than his teacher Albertus Magnus, and the Schoolmen that he founded became increasingly less liberal and increasingly bogged down in irrelevant dogma over the next couple of centuries. Though Aquinas was a great thinker for his time, he was an early Rennaissance Man, his thought triggered by the newly discovered Aristotle, but channelled into nothing productive, just as all thought for the previous eight Christian centuries had been drained away.

If “the human mind is ordered to truth”, as Sidwell quotes college president, Dr Thomas E Dillon, as saying, then the whole Christian endeavour has been set against truth not for it, and this eulogy of TAC is part of the continuing scam, given a modicum of truth by the shocking neglect of education in the public sector.

Sidwell perpetuates the transparent lie that Christianity has tried to perpetuate learning. It is sophistry, true in a minor sense only. Christianity did maintain some clever men and some education throughout the dark ages, but purely for devotional reasons. Rudimentary Latin was taught so that priests could theoretically know what the mass meant. Many did not, and never got to understand the Latin either. For this reason, some Latin books were preserved, but far more were allowed to decay, and have been lost forever. Greek was worse off. Greek and Greek books were effectively lost, and only rediscovered by contact with the eastern Church and the Moslems during the crusades making Aquinas possible. Art and architecture, science and engineering, perfected in classical times were lost for over half a millennium. Towns decayed, trade collapsed, slavery was maintained under the guise of serfdom. The world regressed into little short of barbarity, yet the argument persists that Christianity preserved classical culture. Christianity destroyed it almost completely, and the sophistry is not an outright lie only because a tiny fraction was preserved in an utterly haphazard way for the education of clergymen.

Sidwell is either self deluded or a typical Christian sociopath. He fantasizes about what wonders the Catholic Church might have come up with, had it not been for the puritan revolution, but seems incapable of thinking about what it did come up with when left to its own devices. Maybe it is because it is too horrible to think about. Nevertheless, Catholicism deliberately hounded and murdered millions, and mostly cruelly and unjustly. Today, it is fashionable for popes to apologise for matters that cannot be apologized for. Only Catholics are impressed. What can any apology mean to someone you have slowly roasted to death? The record of the Churches, and of patriarchal religion as a whole is disgusting, and no odour of sanctity is miraculous enough to cover the smell of it.

Charlotte Higgins on America’s New Cicero

Barack Obama’s speeches are much admired and endlessly analysed. The sheer numbers of people who have heard him speak live set him apart from his rivals, recalling the politics of ancient Athens, where the public speech given to ordinary voters was the motor of politics, and where the art of rhetoric matured alongside democracy.

But, says Charlotte Higgins—author of a Short Book on how Ancient Greece has shaped our world—in an article in The Guardian, 26 November, 2008, one of their most interesting aspects is the enormous debt they owe to the oratory of the Romans, and, through sermons, the church, which taught the rhetorical tradition of the ancients as practically useful to its aims, while destroying most of the rest of classical tradition. To understand the next four years of American politics, we will need to understand something of the politics of ancient Greece and Rome. The Greeks and Romans discovered all there was to know about rhetoric, and they put a name to most of the devices it used.

Unlike most politicians who make a point of dumbing down the content of their addresses, Obama’s speeches respect the intelligence of their audience. The adjective used to describe Obama’s oratorical skill is “Ciceronian”. Cicero, the outstanding Roman politician of the late republic, was the greatest orator of his time, and one of the greatest in history, though, more immediately, Obama looks to Lincoln, Roosevelt and King.

Winston Churchill recommends it!

Like Cicero, Obama is a lawyer. Like Cicero, Obama entered politics without family backing or a military record, in contrast to his rivals McCain and the Clintons who had one or the other. Like Cicero, Obama is a writer of enormous accomplishment—Dreams From My Father, Obama’s first book, will surely enter the American literary canon, Higgins says. In the intricacies of speechifying, Obama recalls Cicero—Obama knows and uses them, too. Like Cicero, Obama likes “tricola”, the linking of three words or phrases, as in Caesar’s veni, vidi, vinci. In his 4 November speech, Obama said, “Our campaign… began in the backyards of Des Moines and the living rooms of Concord and the front porches of Charleston”, which is a tricolon. In the 2004 Democratic convention speech, Obama used the technique of “praeteritio”—drawing attention to a subject by not discussing it. Higgins notes that Obama excels in the projection of ethos. In his book On The Orator, a book which aspiring politicians must read now, surely, he argues that real eloquence can be acquired only if the speaker has attained the highest state of knowledge—“otherwise what he says is just an empty and ridiculous swirl of verbiage”.

The true orator is one whose practice of citizenship embodies a civic ideal—whose rhetoric is not empty, as McCain tried to imply, but is the deliberate, rational, careful organiser of ideas and argument that propels the state forward safely and wisely. Higgins asks finally, “Can Obama’s words translate into deeds?”.

Americans reject GOP religiosity as well as politics

For a generation in the United States, conservative Christians politicized themselves, and so the GOP adopted their religious politics, opposing stem cell research, gay marriage and abortions, championing public money for religious schools and social program, and appointing evangelized judges. Three days after 11 September, 2001, President Bush gave a dramatic address sounding like a sermon in the National Cathedral. Supported by prominent Jewish, Moslem and Christian figures, it seemed a model of multiculturalism. Religious moderates of every hue provide cover for fundamentalists by refusing to contest the extremists’ premises. How can they? They share them.

Yet no one stood for the tens of millions of nonreligious Americans. They were ignored as if they did not exist. Everyone in America believes in God. In the face of it all, atheists, agnostics and secular humanists have been timid and voiceless, ignored and derided, but described as devils. Now atheistic books have become bestsellers. Are Americans getting fed up with Republican religiosity as well as politics?

We commonly hear that only a tiny percentage of Americans don’t believe in God and that, as a Newsweek poll recently said, 91 percent do. It is not true. According to Ronald Aronson, a teacher at Wayne State University and author of Living Without God, published by Counterpoint, writing in The Nation, the American Religious Identification Survey, which interviewed 50,000 people, found 29 million adults to be without religion—one American in seven, 14 percent.

But a Financial Times/Harris poll of Europeans and Americans that allowed respondents to declare agnosticism as well as atheism found 18 percent of 2,000 Americans chose one or the other, with 73 percent believing in God or a supreme being. The poll also allowed for people to respond “Would prefer not to say” and six percent of Americans chose this to answer the question whether they believed in God or a supreme being, because they were scared to deny God publicly for fear of their religious friends and neighbours. So, the sum of unbelievers (18 percent + 6 percent) is not far off one in four Americans!

This large segment of Americans is fed up with being marginalized and insulted. They are mainly well educated people. A Harris American poll found 31 percent with postgraduate education do not believe in God, compared with 14 percent with a high school education or less. The better the education, the higher the percentage of disbelievers, reaching 93 percent among members of the National Academy of Sciences.

Unbelievers are to be found concentrated among those whose professional lives emphasize science or rationality and who also have developed a relatively high level of confidence in their own intellectual faculties. And they are frequently teachers or opinion-makers.
Ronald Aronson,The Nation

Obama the Commie?

Entering his rallies to the tune of Rocky, John McCain was telling the US electorate that his rival and now President elect, Barack Obama, would bring socialism into the White House. McCain, a peculiarly amiable man for a Republican presidential candidate, seems to think the whole US electorate are as pea brained as his keenest supporters.

Socialism requires the commanding heights of the economy, like the banks, to be publicly owned, not just publicly subsidized. The disastrous Bush-Cheney policies of the last eight years almost brought the administration to the point of taking over the commanding heights, but, though falling short, came closer to bringing in socialism than any liberal administration dare! And if the Republicans can find a use for socialism, then shouldn’t Americans begin to think it is not as gruesome as it is portrayed.

Republican supporters are so empty headed and closed minded that they still, despite the Bush years of economic negligence, indulgence, and crookery, cannot see that capitalism needs regulating, and properly regulating capitalism is not socialism but correct governance—it is just that fat cat Republicans do not want regulating. They want to do just as they like, and that is not necessarily, or even likely, to be the best for the nation as a whole.

Shouting, “Obama’s a commie!” can only cheer up the rip off crowd of gangsters, banksters and arms dealers that own America. The denigration of socialists and communists is a tactic meant to keep Joe the plumber and other ordinary Joes hating each other instead of regulating the mega rich. Anyone who wants fairness or progress are labeled commies and socialists and thus discredited, when they are the people America needs to resolve the problems the Political Right has brought over many decades.

You need not be a Marxist to benefit from reading Marx, any more than you need to be a Christian to benefit from reading the gospels. Marxism is often called a Christian heresy, heretical not because it rejects the practical teaching of Christ, but because it has been diluted in miracles and supernaturalism. Like it or not, on practical matters, both are concerned that human society continues to neglect and abandon the poor and the meek. Republicans are fond of identifying themselves with Christianity, but they have no compassion for the poor, only contempt, whereas Christ had deep sympathy for them, and remained poor himself, not even having a place to rest his head.

Obama seems as indoctrinated by the modern evangelical distortions of Christianity as the McCain supporter, but, if he has read some Marx, he will understand the causes of poverty today, and that does not make him wicked. There is nothing unChristian about the redistribution of wealth. The apostles did it themselves as a condition of being a follower of Christ, holding all things common. Later Christians were encouraged to help the poor by giving them alms, because the poor, as “The Blessed”, were received immediately into heaven, and would put in a good word for the rich who had helped them in life. The modern rich have obscene wealth while, even in the US, people like the poor of New Orleans, after Katrina, are left destitute and uncared for.

The typical Republican does not understand the fundamentals of capitalism itself, let alone a more caring social system. Capitalism requires money to be circulated not hoarded by a few disgustingly wealthy men and their families. The rich do not need to spend any new dollar they get, but the poor have no choice. Extra money given to the poor therefore circulates. They spend their extra dollar in small shops and local supermarkets, so the local suppliers and small businesses benefit. Money doled out is never wasted. It always lifts the small supplier and they source their businesses in the bigger supplier. In the end the rich also get better off! In economics, it is called the multiplier. Every dollar given to the poor in a recession is the equivalent of five or ten dollars to the economy. If the rich spend their dollar, it will be on villas abroad, foreign fashion houses, costly jewels, or yachts, and Joe will see nothing of it, unless he’s particularly lucky.

A CEO said in the election:

The worst thing for the markets would be Obama getting assassinated. The second worst think would be McCain getting elected.

Well, Obama got elected, and he and his advisors face the worst imaginable economic conditions. The US federal deficit has gone from modest after the prudence of the last Democratic administration to catastrophic after eight Republican years—one $trillion guestimated for 2009, and the banks have already been propped up to the tune of $trillions. Republicans bail out rich banksters with public money while accusing Democrats of being socialists!

The country needs a fraction of that money made available to the poor, enterprise organizations in poor districts, and small businesses everywhere to put money in at the roots and get the poor working. A tax on obscene wealth would pay for it, so the average American can only benefit. Instead of being insulated from downturns, the wealthy will get a vested interest in avoiding them, because they will have to pay for the recovery. When businesses start to recover, when they start to do well, the shareholders do well too, and so the wealthy get repaid by the success of the lower levels of the economy! This is not communism! It is a New Deal!

New Deal worked! New Deal is Obama’s promise—tax cuts to couples earning below $25000. McCain would have given them nothing! Couples on $500,000 pay $6000 a year to help the nation—just over 1% of their income. The mega rich on £5,000,000 and above pay only 5%, hardly a crippling amount for them, now is it? And they get it all back in the upturn. What is sinful about that? Christ almighty would have thought it too timid. McCain promised a tax cut of $125000 a year for the top 1% of dollar earners. Obama wants to tax them an extra $20,000 dollars. “Give all ye have to the poor”, Christ said, so the wealthy are getting off very lightly, indeed.

An even better way to pay for the recovery and to lower the deficit would be by cutting the military budget. The present war has allegedly cost $3 trillion! How can the country afford trillions for banksters and $trillions more for weapons manufacturers when it claims it has no money for poor families in a crisis? If helping them economically to help the nation is Marxist, then pray that Obama is one!

US Christian Party Robs the Poor to Save the Rich

The Great Society of capitalism and scourge of socialism, the USA Republican government, has suddenly found itself nationalizing the commanding heights of the economy! It is handing out trillions of dollars to the backers of the Republican party, the USA treasury itself being backed by trillions of dollars from Communist China. Is the US elector likely to get a tad suspicious that they have been taken for a ride for decades? It is not a bit likely. McCain-Palin are still taken seriously by the US electorate, who seem immune to economic sense as well as common sense. Both McCain and Palin boast they believe in Genesis, an account of the creation of the world written in Syria almost 3000 years ago. With leaders like that, can anyone be surprised when the Republican administration demonstrates that it knows only how to bail out crooked billionaires?

Michael Hudson, Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City and author of Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire and of The Myth of Aid, wrote online at Global Researcher that economic theory used to explain that profits and interest were a return for calculated risk. The new Republican economics is based on “computerized gambling on the direction of interest rates, foreign currencies and stock prices”. Except that no gambling is involved because, when gigantic losses on bad bets have to be paid, the Republican administration suddenly finds bottomless coffers of dollar as bailouts to the gamblers—many of them Republican campaign contributors!

On Friday, 19 September 2008, the White House promised an alleged $700 billion, in addition to the trillions of dollars—a doubling of America’s national debt—already committed on 7 September in the nationalization of Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac, “to support junk mortgages fraudulently issued beyond the ability of debtors to pay, and above the market price of the collateral pledged”. Yet Bush spoke as if the Martians had landed, not that his best pals had suddenly realized they had lost their mortgage repayments in the local Christian owned casino:

We must act now to protect our nation’s economic health from serious risk… There will be ample opportunity to debate the origins of this problem. Now is the time to solve it… In our nation’s history there have been moments that require us to come together across party lines to address major challenges. This is such a moment.

The Republicans do not want anyone, Republican or Democrat, to think about the origins of the problem before Congress has committed the bailout money. “There is no time to make the biggest bailout in election history an election issue”, not immediately before the presidential election. Secretary to the Treasury, Paulson, echoed more of the same half-witted propaganda, the very guff that the US electorate can be relied upon to soak up:

Our economic health requires that we work together for prompt, bipartisan action.

The Paulson-Bernanke plan will underwrite the banks selling off the homes of five million home mortgage debtors faced with default or foreclosure. The fraudsters in the finance corporations lose nothing, but the poor who were sold unrealistic mortgages will lose everything. The Federal Reserve will let the lending agencies refinance the junk mortgages by effectively writing off the difference between the mortgage and the collateral property. Then the gambling swings and roundabouts can continue for awhile, Republicans will get campaign gratitude money, and, with a bit of temporary electoral relief and gullibility, they might even win the Presidential race.

The Republicans are treating this handout of free public money like they treated the lead up to the Iraq war, with myths, lies and desperate urgency thrown in to panic a quick and ill-thought through decision, and the same people that warned the country about weapons of mass destruction are behind the operation. The solution has little relation to the underlying cause of the problem, what Warren Buffett called “weapons of mass financial destruction”.

Irresponsible, or fraudulent companies have paid out revenue to their financial managers, insiders, stockholders and political candidates on committees deciding the nation’s financial regulation, instead of putting it in reserves. Now, they are to be rewarded for their enterprise, either from the Freddies, Fannies and AIGs, or from their Federal Treasury—ok! From the Treasury!

Why should these gamblers be bailed out, if they had enough to lose without having to become public wards by going on welfare? Hedge fund trading was limited to the very rich, for investment banks and other institutional investors. But it became one of the easiest ways to make money, loaning funds at interest for people to pay out of their computer-driven cross-trades. And almost as fast as it was made, this revenue was paid out in commissions, salaries and annual bonuses.

The recipients of these speculative profits did not even have to pay normal income tax on it. Speculating with other people’s money should not even be legal, but at least speculative profits should be taxed at a higher rate than legitimate profits. These profits are tagged as “capital gains”, and the tax rate is therefore much more favourable. Voters will be told why it is in the public interest to bail out these gamblers.

Good rhetoric is needed to explain why the government should let them go into a casino and let them keep all their winnings while using public funds to make good on the losses of their counterparties.

Hudson says the US Treasury and Federal Reserve have changed American capitalism overnight and irreversibly—“if they can get away with it”. The class FDR called “banksters” have orchestrated a coup d’Etat. It is:

the largest and most inequitable transfer of wealth since the land giveaways to the railroad barons during the Civil War era.

So what do the Christian Right have to say about all this? Presumably nothing, because their God, made in their own image, is just as crooked as the campaign financiers of their God-sent party. Christians always beef about personal pecadillos they do not approve of, but they never have anything to say about serious crime. They must approve of that!

Christian Belief is Just Talk

Jamie Whyte, author of Bad Thoughts: A Guide to Clear Thinking and a former philosophy academic, wrote in The Times of 16 September 2008 that atheists are amazed at the persistence of religion in a country as sophisticated as the USA. How can clever, mature adults believe Christianity in the absence of any secure evidence of its central tenets, and a vast amount of contrary evidence?

That the world was created by an invisible deity, that He later impregnated a virgin who then bore a son who was His own father, that we have immortal souls and will live for ever in Heaven if we are good and love Jesus—how can anyone who has even attended high school believe such things? And how can agreement with this nonsense be a prerequisite for winning the support of the American electorate? It defies belief.

“If something defies belief”, Whyte says, “a good starting position is not to believe it”, and that is the very position that science takes as a prerequisite. It is called skepticism, and has led us from the darkness of a Christian dominated west a thousand years ago to the present period of knowledge, gadgets, easy living, and long life as long as you make sure you do not serve in the military.

Whyte has a theory about it. He does not believe that Christians really believe in their “gobbledegook”, as he calls it. What American Christians are doing is expressing hopes not beliefs. They are not saying “I believe” but “I wish”, hoping to convince themselves. Whyte correctly points out that people who really believe in eternal damnation, and that God has commanded human beings not to kill, and, in fact, to turn the other cheek, could hardly be voting Christian gun crazed madmen—or women—into the White House to unleash “shock and awe” on to innocent Arab families.

Christianity means doing something, God’s will, not whatever suits you, as US Christians think. The Christian God, they all like to claim to be best friends of, Jesus, told them they have to love other human beings, not just their relatives and best friends, but even their enemies! What US Christian does that? They fail the tests that Christ set for them, and they fail them without a flinch because they just do not believe the bible at all.

What is more, the Christians who are most fanatical are the least concerned about their post mortem situation. They have convinced themselves that they are all saved anyway, so what they do does not matter. It shows that they do not read their bibles in the round, but only the bits they like, the bits that support their wishful thinking.

The bible belt of America is all together less moral on a range of measures than less fanatically Christian districts. Pre-marital sex and abortions are higher than more secular parts of the USA considered by believers to be immoral zones, like New York and California. Sarah Palin is the darling of the Christian Right Wing, but her daughter was not convinced of the danger of an eternal roasting enough not to put her off a bit of illicit nooky, and so she got pregnant.

What do the Christians care about that? Suddenly, it is only human to do such things. The truth is they don’t really believe what Christianity has to say about eternal life or eternal torture. Or rather, they like the idea of eternal life, and conclude that, whatever they do, they are good enough to be saved, and the eternal torture does not apply to them, so need not be considered.

As Whyte says, if these Christians believed what the bible says, then they could not fail to act on it. In other words, their belief must be evident through their behaviour, yet mostly it is not. God’s commandments ought to dominate the lives of believers utterly, yet you cannot distinguish a Christian from any one else:

People who believed in Heaven would surely act quite unlike those who do not… Put simply, they fail the behavioural test for belief.

The heavenly reward does not come into it because all US Christians are deluded enough to think they are different from the rest, yet when they are shown not to be, it is because we are all human. It is a double standard, that can be expected from people who lack the analytical skills, and particularly the self-analytical skills, to realize what they are doing.

US politicians are no different, except perhaps that they realize what they are doing, and cynically stick to what suits the empty headedness of the typical Christian voter. Otherwise their basic policies are completely free of any inferences from the possibility of facing God’s wrath.

When they are occasionally asked to justify some awful atrocity—like the war in Iraq, a punishment on the Arab families for the crimes of a few Moslem extremists as fanatically religious in their own way as the US Christian caucus—they claim they are happy to meet their maker, proving their faith in nothing other than wishful thinking. Did they not read that Christ came to bring peace not a sword, and Christ is God, Christians tell us? They already know their God’s will, and they have been found wanting. They did not bring merely a sword but 15,000 pound bombs, and the support of 60 million Christian believers eager to bring Christian love to their enemies.

By the light of their avowed Christianity, this is perverse.

Any politician who talked in truly Christian terms would be “an unelectable lunatic”. Despite that, they have to run it close for the sake of the pretence of Christianity that the 60 million profess.

All of it shows that American Christians are Christians only in name. They do not read their bibles but think they are saved because they are Americans, and Americans are the new Israel. Their authority is Paul the apostle, a mere man, while God incarnate just talked a load of bull to be ignored by true believers! The central message of Christ is commendable, to love one another. It is a shame that Christians almost universally ignore it. They think Christ said, love yourselves. In reality, US Christian belief is just talk.

Pax Christi Protest

It is gratifying to see that a tiny minority of Catholics are willing to protest against the latest bloodstained devil to have converted to their faith being invited by Archbishop Murphy O’Connor to preach in Westminster Cathedral. Stewart Hemsley, of Pax Christi, the Catholic peace group, was reported in The Catholic Herald as explaining:

We’ve organised the vigil because we are very unhappy that Mr Blair should be preaching from the pulpit of Westminster Cathedral when he hasn’t shown any sign of repentance for going to war in Iraq illegally. He has brought horror and devastation to that country and we think it would have been appropriate if he had at least expressed sorrow and sadness and that needs to be done publicly because the act of going to war was a very public act. If I was in the Cardinal’s place I would want to know that Mr Blair had expressed his sorrow and admitted that he was wrong in taking the decision to go to war especially because the late John Paul II had made it abundantly clear that war was not the answer.
I think it would have been more appropriate for the cardinal to follow John Paul II’s lead in this matter. The domestic Church in this country was strangely quiet on this issue and did not follow the lead given by Pope John Paul and the Vatican.

A demand by five million more Catholics for the excommunication of this monster might impress critics of Christianity that it is escaping its bloodstained past. I prophesy it will never happen.

The “Work of the Devil”

A devout friend of mine, among the more gullible of believers, is in a blue funk. He read in the UK Daily Mail (1 June) that the Vatican has denounced the six Marian visionaries of Medjugorje in Bosnia who have seen the Virgin Mary 40,000 times. Since 1981, every year they have attracted five million Catholics as pilgrims—hundreds of thousands from Britain alone, my gullible friend among them.

The Medjugorje phenomenon began on June 25, 1981, when six children told a priest they had seen the Virgin on a hillside near their town. A church investigation dismissed the vision, and the Vatican banned pilgrimages to the site in 1985, but many Catholics, like my friend, took no notice. Businesses in the town and the visionaries themselves have benefitted immensely. Today, those who saw the Virgin own smart houses with security gates and tennis courts, and expensive cars. One is married to a former US beauty queen.

The story is that a respected Roman Catholic Bishop in the Vatican, Bishop Andrea Gemma, once the Vatican’s top exorcist, has declared that the visionaries had perpetuated a “diabolical deceit”:

In Medjugorje everything happens in function of money—Pilgrimages, lodging houses, sale of trinkets. This whole sham is the work of the Devil. It is a scandal.

He added that the Vatican would soon crack down on the scam. The visionaries tour the world preaching, accompanied by their buddy, the Blessed Virgin Mary, but Catholic officials in the US have already banned them from speaking on church property in future world tours. They have not said whether the Virgin Mary is banned as well.

I have argued with my Catholic friend for decades that these miracles are scams or at best delusions, but few believers are convinced by reason. Even if true, this denouncement by the Vatican will not stop myriads of believers from continuing to support this scam and others, just as Protestants continued to support corrupt tele-evangelists like Jimmy Swaggart even when they have been exposed.

Meanwhile, John Humphrys, the excellent BBC broadcaster and agnostic, tells us in his new book, In God We Doubt, that atheists should “respect” the beliefs of the faithful! How can it be done? As Humphreys says, some believers might be deeply sincere. But belief is itself loopy. The sincerity of someone’s loopiness might moderate the atheistic reaction to them personally, but cannot ameliorate criticism of their loopy beliefs. They just do not merit respect!