Archive for November 27th, 2004
HS is a Computer, Richard is a Freak
No sane person would write this blog. No sane human being would regularly comment on this blog.
That makes me proud.
In the article below I explained that, since HS is either a Bible-believing Christian who does not think that HS is the Voice of God, or HS must be a computer. I therefore refer to HS as “it.”
Richard L. Harrison is not a computer like HS and he is not basket case like me. Richard is a freak.
Richard knows what the Septuagint is, but he is a Bible-believing Christian. The first requirement for anybody who calls himself a Bible-believing Christian is that he does know that the last centuries of the Old Testament were written in Greek.
Even worse, Richard knows what Manichaeism is.
But it gets worse. Richard is not a Calvinist, but he has actually READ The Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin’s tome.
The Institutes started small, but by the time Calvin died, it was ten thousand pages long.
I would not lie to you. I was in politics.
So if you read the blog and the comments, you will find we have a basket case, a computer and a freak.
If you keep commenting, you too will get an ego-boosting compliment just like Richard and HS got.
HS is a Rare Bird
Posted by Bob in History, Musings about Life on 11/27/2004
HS is a regular commenter here who is unique. He or she is a regular Bible Christian, but when I disagree with HS, HS doesn’t have a fit.
As soon as a person says his entire world view is based on God, we all stop talking to him and start humoring him. He is totally incapable of realizing that his world view is based on HIS OWN VIEW of God.
He thinks he IS God.
A person who says his entire world view is based on the Word of God is saying that he IS God, in exactly the same way that a judge who says he is “interpreting” the Constitution is saying that he IS the Constitution.
If you “interpret” the Constitution, you ARE the Constitution. If you interpret God, you ARE God. I said HS may be a he or she. It is also possible that HS is an IT.
How can a person who is convinced they represent God also be a reasonable person who can allow a heretic like me to disagree with the Voice of God? I never met a theologian like that. It is very hard to find a human who calls himself a Bible Christian who is like that.
This leads me to believe that HS is a computer. HS must be an IT.
The point of all this nonsense is to point out a fact we all know but nobody says. We are all terrified of trying to speak rationally with people who call themselves pro-lifers or Biblical Christians.
What I have just said is NOT limited to evangelical, “Bible-believing Christians. I have a cousin who is a very, very, very, very, VERY Modern United Methodist Minister. I simply cannnot get a straight answer from him.
I met with Michael Novak, the theologian of National Review, many years ago. He had written a book called The Unmeltable Ethnic, praising the conservative ethnic Catholics in America. He was the man who invented the term WASP, meaning White Protestant Anglo-Saxon. He was very famous.
I had worked in ethnic areas. I am an honorary Boston Southie. I lived in a campaign headquarters in the Polish steel district of Chicago. In most ways, they were just like us unapologetic Southerners.
Novak knew my history. So I asked him if what he called White Anglos-Saxon Protestants was really just what a Boston Southie would call a “Yankee,” a pro-busing suburban yuppie.
He said, “Yes.”
I pointed out that most of us Southerners are White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, so it was unfair to confuse us with the Yankee-type WASPs.
He said “Yes.”
It didn’t bother him in the slightest. A vicious insult to tens of millions of people would make a mere human feel guilty. But Novak is not a mere human. He is the Mouth of God.
In my opinion as a lifetime interrogator, every professional theologian I have ever met is a psychopath. The fact that Novak (Michael, not Robert) had flatly stated he was being unfair to tens of millions of Southerners was of no importance to him at all.
If Novak had said “Yankee” instead of WASP, he would not have been praised by National Review. National Review is an East Coast Catholic magazine. He told National Review and New York what they wanted to hear.
New York does not like white gentiles. National Review does not like Southerners. So Novak said what they wanted to hear.
As a theologian, it never occurred to Novak to worry about this. He is a theologian, the Voice of God Almighty.
So when one Southern redneck reminded him that he was committing a sin here, he almost laughed out loud.
My Bible says that what Novak did is a sin.
I think it’s called, “bearing false witness against thy neighbor.” But what does a ridiculous simplistic quote like that mean to a Great Theologian?
The Mouth of God is immune to illiterate, lay criticism like mine.
HS doesn’t seem to have that sort of immunity from giving a straight answer. All the people who tell me their beliefs are based on the Word of God feel that they are automatically exempted from answering any challenges from us mere humans.
But HS doesn’t.
HS has GOT to be a computer.
Irredeemably American
Posted by Bob in How Things Work on 11/27/2004
It is interesting that both of us have a similar view of education. (A mutual friend of ours in grad school) did what an “educated” man is supposed to do, he adopted all the attitudes and outlooks all the other “educated” people are required to have.
(This mutual friend was a Mississippi boy who became a good total liberal when he got his PhD).
The British educational system was aimed at making all Scotsmen and Welshmen into good Englishmen with the Etonian or Cambridge outlook. The aim of Medieval education was to make everybody a good Latin intellectual. They all adopted Latin names.
It is interesting how all Easterners agree with the idea that an “educated” person has to have a standard Yuppie attitude, which is what Eric Hoffer — back in 1950 — called “the European outlook.”
(Hoffer said New England, like Canada, was part of Europe, not America. Hoffer talked about what we have now finally seen as the “red” and “blue” states. But he was talking about them fifty years ago.)
(Please don’t ask me how you can find some of Eric Hoffer’s writings. You go to Yahoo and look under “Eric Hoffer”)
(Back to the e-mail I was quoting.)
But you and I came out of school exactly the same way we went in. For us education was a tool, not an indoctrination.
That is very American. We do not expect a person who trains to be carpenter to adopt “a carpentry world view.” Being an intellectual is to us just one more career choice.
But in the Middle Ages a person who learned to read was supposed to adopt a “literate” point of view. Nothing has changed — in Europe.
The (you) and Bob Whitaker who learned all that economics and history and mathematics are now (you) and Bob Whitaker who know a lot of economics and history and mathematics.
We could have learned carpentry or medicine. We chose another profession. That’s all.
You Don’t Understand How Conceited I Really Am
Some nice person said that my correct opinions were so important that they hated to see me make a fool of myself by going into areas where I am ignorant.
They said I was underming my “authority.”
A lot of people spend their whole lives building up their “authority” on a certain subject. If anyone has another opinion on that subject, they say, “Who do you think you are?”
My reply is, “I am Bob Whitaker and I am MUCH smarter than you are.”
Then the battle begins.
Some people say I am conceited. They don’t know the half of it.
I do not like anybody talking about “undermining my authority” because I don’t NEED any authority. I will beat you on facts and I will beat you on logic, or I will lose out on facts and logic.
I am smart enough to win and courageous enough to lose.
I DESPISE the very smell of “authority.” If you have a statistical record of curing disease, you are a doctor. If you don’t, every degree and Nobel Prize in the world doesn’t mean a damned thing to me.
One question people ask when they are talking about conceit is:
“You think you’re smarter than anybody else, don’t you?”
Yes, I do.
“You think you’re right and everybody else is wrong, don’t you?”
Yes I do.
“You think the world is just black or white, right or wrong, don’t you?”
Exactly. You’ve read my mind.
And to all the other questions you might ask, the answer is yes.
I believe in the truth, not in Truth. There are a million Truths. There is only one truth.
These Truths that everybody capitalizes are Revelations declared by every schizophremic and sociopath who founds a sect. But in the real world, in the world of life, death, joy and misery, there are two kinds of statements:
1) Those that are right and,
2) Those that are wrong.
And yes, I think I am right and the others are wrong.
Defining Jehovism
Posted by Bob in History, How Things Work on 11/27/2004
HS asked me if Jehovah knows everything.
HS also asked me to define Jehovism.
On the first point, John Calvin said both 1) God knows everything and, therefore, 2) God knew the fate of every future human being before He created them.
CS Lewis points out in his Screwtape Letters that God and Satan do not live in time the way man does. So in his theology, this simple cause-and-effect logic of Calvin would not work.
Calvin said God looks at time and knowledge the same way we do. Then he contradicted himself completely.
Calvin would have been on firmer ground if he had not gone on to JUSTIFY why God created humans to be damned.
Creating humans to spend eternity in despair and pain violates every concept of human justice. It also defied everything Jesus demanded of us.
If God used the same sense of justice Christ requires us to use, nothing would be more Satanic than creating people to be damned.
Remember, those who agree that Jehovah (JHWH) created men to be damned are the same people who object violently to the idea of creating even insensate embryos to be destroyed to help human beings. So we are forbidden to create totally unknowing embryos to be destroyed. But God’s creating humans for unending agony is just great.
So how did Calvin justify God’s creating humans to spend eternity in unimaginable agony?
He said God’s logic is not our logic. Calvin said that God does not look at reality the way we do. He said that to God Mercy means something entirely different from the mercy Christ talked about.
At the same time, Calvin’s whole theology is based on the idea that “knowledge” and “time” are exactly the same thing to God as they are to humans.
Does God see knowledge as we do? Does God see time as we do? You have to know all that in order to say whether, in OUR terms, “God knows everything.”
So Calvin said the logic of God is perfectly explicable in the case of predestination and totally opaque in the case of predestination.
Calvin was a genius. In my opinion Calvin was the greatest human theologian who ever lived. So how am I to question him?
In cases like this, I take the advice Jesus gave me. He faced the Sanhedrin, which held that God was to be explained by old men who knew the Old Testament, just as Calvin did.
Jesus said that the Kingdom of Heaven belonged to children. Children, like me, simply have no idea how the mind of God works. We have no idea whether the question, “Does God know everything?” means anything to God.
I do not know the mind of God. I don’t believe YOU know the mind of God.
Jesus gave me a tiny glimpse of God the Father, the God who was totally alien to the Old Testament experts, the men of the Sanhedrin who judged Him.
Jehovists, then and now, say that Jehovah gave theologians a total understanding of all there is to know about God the Father.
Which leads me to the definition of Jehovism. Jehovism is the Sanhedrin, the Communist theoretician, the Moslem Imam. The Jehovist’s cosmology comes from Karl Marx or Jehovah. To the Jehovist, seventy percent of the Bible is the Old Testament. To a Jehovist, every word of every Jewish prophet — if he spoke Hebrew — is as unerring as the words of Jesus.
Jehovism gets some really nasty conclusions from the Old Testament.
Jehovism says that you must kill witches.
Oops! Maybe that word meant “poisoner.”
Oh, well, these little problems happen.
Jehovists said the earth has to be the center of the universe, so they burned people who said otherwise.
Oops.
If you read the New Testament, you would have real trouble burning heretics. Jesus said specifically that he and his disciples were NOT like those who said, “You are for me or you are against me.”
It takes a lot of the vengefulness of the Old Testament to cover up the words of Jesus, but it has always been done by both Catholics and Protestants. They both burned heretics:
“You are for me or you are against me.”
Both the Catholics and the Protestants of the religious wars were committed Jehovists, so the words of Jesus were buried in the “seventy percent of the Bible” that speaks of Jehovah.
Jehovism says that God has an endless hunger for praise. Jesus never once said we should praise the Lord.
Pagan gods had a hunger for praise. Jeus demanded that we love God, that we sincerely ask for His forgiveness.
That is NOT the message of the semi-pagan JHWH of the Old Testament. He wants what every pagan god wants.
The Jews got their higher ideas of God the Father, the God of Jesus, from Zoroastriansim. The Zoroastrian Magi accepted the same Christ that the Jews rejected.
In America, the Calvinist church of the pilgrims ended up rejecting Christ and becoming Unitarian. They dropped the thirty percent of the Bible in favor of the logic of the seventy percent.
To me, the Old Testament is the story of the road from paganism. To a Jehovist, the Old Testament is, from beginning to end, the same as the words of Christ.
Calvin was obsessed with the idea that God was the tribal Jehovah of the Jews. So he and Luther cut out the last four hundred years of the Old Testament because it was written in Greek, not in Hebrew.
Jehovism is the worship of the tribal God of the Jews. It looks at God, not as the Being of whom Jesus gave us a slight glimpse in the New Testament, but as a semi-pagan being whose entire personality is described in detail in the Old Testament.
But if God is nothing but the old JHWH, why didn’t Jesus just join the Sanhedrin? Why didn’t Jesus just quote the Old Testament instead of using it as background to His parables? Why were the Magi, who were totally ignorant of “seventy percent of the Bible,” the ones who accepted the Christ?
I accept the wisdom of Odinism as my Old Testament. I accept the pursuit of knowledge as the way I can do unto others as I would have them to do unto me. I can help the lame to walk only if I know the facts about legs and the spinal cord. Knowing the entire Old Testament backwards in Hebrew will not help anyone else.
But for the Jehovist, all that really matters is knowing the Old Testament as it was written in Hebrew.
I think that’s sick.
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