Archive for March 4th, 2007
Copyright Law and the Bible
Posted by Bob in History, Law and Order on 03/04/2007
I hope you don’t think I’m on a sermon jag this Sunday. Pain made a comment that made think in this direction. I hope no one takes my theology seriously. I am illustrating the development of Wordism and copyright law, which I have some qualifications to do.
I have not been elected Pope, though I came within a hundred votes every time.
So on to copyright law.
Almost anyone who does a lot of writing, as I hope you will, has concerns about copyright law. One of the jokes I tell goes this way:
“The Bible is the best selling book, by far, in all of history. In fact it is by far the best-selling book on earth every single year.”
“If the Jews are such great businessmen, why the hell didn’t they COPYRIGHT it?”
In other words, the idea of copyrighting the Bible was a joke to me.
Which shows how little I know about lawyers.
I found out recently why there are so many honest differences about the wording in the Bible Back when I was a by and snakes still had feet, “the Bible” where I came from meant the St. James Version. There was also a CATHOLIC Bible. But these were both far too old to have any copyright.
Then came The Revised Standard Version of the Bible, which my conservative kin referred to as “The Communist Bible.” The Revised Standard Version came with a copyright. Strictly speaking, when you quoted it you were in violation of the law.
The law allows you what is called the “fair use” doctrine, which allows you to quote text without permission up to a certain number of words. “Fair use” makes provision for reviewers and so forth, but like all legal concepts, it is not nailed down specifically. You can’t just take a chapter out of a famous author’s book and use it to sell your anthology, for instance.
In the case of most copyrighted books you get permission or you get sued. But all over the web you will find comparisons of huge slabs of the Bible from different versions, most of which are still copyrighted. The fact is that the people holding the copyright COULD sue but they DON’T. After all, the ostensible purpose of retranslating The Book is to spread it.
All this is fairly recent news to me. It may be to some of you.
Social Evolution Versus Christ
Posted by Bob in Coaching Session, History on 03/04/2007
It makes some people impatient when I go into Christian theology, but try to remember that I can only talk about things I know about. There may be a lot of philosophy you would rather hear about, but I don’t KNOW it.
But I can give you examples about how the words of Christ became twisted into what is called Christianity, how the exact same Wordism Christ denounced, element by element, in his own society took over from what he preached. If my background were different, I would use other information, but I must use what I know.
The teachings Christ denounced were a product of societal evolution. They gave the priesthood power and wealth. Jesus made the concessions he had to make to stay ALIVE in his society, but if you get lost in the theology, you miss a more basic fact:
Jesus was denouncing the institutions that had survived for specific purposes in his own society. His own society was, in this sense, not too different from later societies.
To quote Kipling again,
“The bitch returns to her vomit
The sow returns to her mire
And the burnt fool’s bandaged finger
Goes wabbling back to the fire.”
It should surprise no one that the same societal evolution that produced what Jesus denounced would make the institutions that developed in his name a carbon copy of the one he denounced. I am sure the exact same process occurred in other cases, but this is the one I know about in detail.
The ability of ianity to get the wrong end of EVERY stick is flawless. Take The Lord’s Prayer. When I read the text this comes from, I notice that Jesus was not primarily giving us a prayer. He said that “It is enough to call a fish a fish.” He then gave a short prayer, one completely different from the endless moanings of the priesthood, as the way you should talk to God. It was a RADICAL idea for a person to talk directly to the Father, and to ask him first for one’s daily bread, to promise him you would forgive others if he would forgive you, and to ask for guidance.
There was nothing specific the way a prayer is supposed to be, asking God to help Tiny Tim or explaining how you wish for good things. Jesus seemed to have this ridiculous notion that God knew what you needed better than you do: “Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.”
Then came the word that illustrated, “Call a fish a fish.” He said,
“AMEN.”
Schluss.
Period.
The End.
At the end of a prayer illustrating how to calla fish a fish, the word “For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory forever and ever” makes no sense at all. It’s beautiful. I was raised with it and I love it, but it makes no sense at all.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I cannot remember a single passage in which Jesus asked people to Praise the Lord. That was what pagans did. Pagans would go and tell their gods they would do awful things to themselves if God would give them what they prayed for. They made Zeus and Minerva feel good, and if you have read the Odyssey, you know what happened to people who DIDN’T make Zeus or Minerva feel good.
In fact, the whole point of the Lord’s Prayer is that you don’t have a thing to OFFER God. Until that wonderfully poetic ending, the whole thing is a short, stark set of requests, what you need from God.
Jesus had another radical idea here. He seemed to think that God not only knew what you needed more than you did, but you didn’t even have to tell God that he was something special.
But those who set the New Testament down were raised in the Old Testament tradition. You couldn’t just stop a prayer without praising God. We hear the Lord’s Prayer endlessly in church, but not the lesson that actually went with it.
But that praise at the end makes good poetry, good church stuff.
Another stick: “The poor we have always with us.” We have all heard THAT one preached abut endlessly. But it was exactly what Jesus was NOT talking about. Tens of millions o words have been written about what this meant abut the treatment of the poor. Al the big, modern church leaders got together an agreed that their mission was to take care of the poor.
What Jesus SAID was that we have the poor with us always, but he was here about salvation. This is very embarrassing to the modern church, where being a minister or priest is a Profession that doesn’t depend on that salvation stuff. Can you imagine a bunch of modern church leaders getting together and deciding their mission was Salvation?
If you read what Jesus said abut the poor, he was always warning about how the treatment of the poor might hurt the poor, but it would DAMN the rich. This was not Social Justice. It is what people today would call religious fanaticism.
The bottom line here is that people think of Christ as coming to knock down a particular set of institutions. So once he exposed them, they would go away. But what no one considers is that those Wordist institutions he denounced had a power of their OWN. If one realizes that, he will see that it was inevitable that the Christian theologians would evolve exactly the same institutions.
Wordism evolves in institutions with the same naturalness that a dog returns to his vomit and the pig returns to her mire.
THIS burnt fool’s bandaged finger will NOT go wabbling back to the fire.
AFKAN, Willis, and Yockey
Posted by Bob in Bob, Coaching Session, Comment Responses, History on 03/04/2007
The Artist Formerly Known As Nobody directed a brilliant comment aimed at Alan. You are talking to each other now, and Ole Prof Bob just sits back with a contented smile and thinks, “I am one HELL of a teacher!”
I am not going to take all the weight up here when I have worked my butt off to produce commenters who are doing it as well as I could.
READ THE COMMENTS!
But I do have an institutional memory you can use, and one sentence of AFKAN’s jogged a piece of it:
“Everything worthwhile flows from the Idea of RACE, as Yockey defined it.”
I said some time ago, when Willis Carto blew up at Kelso that Willis had done so many things for us, long ago and all alone, that I could not even REMEMBER them all. It is entirely because of Willis Carto that we have Yockey’s book, Imperium. He discovered it, he published it.
But one thing Willis – and I – HATED was Yockey’s childish errors in the area of genetics. You’ve seen the same sort of stuff in this Blog. Like Yockey my forte is connecting widely separated things that experts could not imagine had any connection. The price you pay for this is making really stupid errors about factual matters in all those widely separated fields.
I never hesitate to call stupid stupid, especially when I am doing the stupiding. I just correct myself, sometimes with a belly laugh about how wrong I got it, and go on. It’s fun, because I KNOW I won’t suddenly decide that I am calling that I am calling my mother ugly or intending some vicious attack the way others I laugh at – or with — do. That alone is a good lesson from Ole Bob.
I even laughed at the paragraph above. People that Bob means to insult them indirectly. They think Bob is being subtle.
Let me repeat that: People think BOB is being SUBTLE! If that doesn’t give you a yuck you need some Pepto-Bismol.
But Yockey didn’t have the chance to be corrected. Like John Ashbrook and Sonny Bono, he died mysteriously after completing Imperium. He was being tried as a subversive after WWII and he was found hanging in his cell.
Let me repeat, if I seem paranoid at the death of my friend and boss, John Ashbrook, please note that his body was not in the coffin we buried. The police had held it back for further examination.
Yockey had a totally Spenglerian – actually a Thomist –outlook. Though like Spengler he dismissed blacks from any participation in any great civilization, past or present, he did have the idea of rise and fall as essentially a Mystery, in the religious sense of the term. So in a sense all Great Civilizations, white and non-white, were equal.
Carto was Yockey’s greatest fan. The one page of Imperium that he HATED was where Yockey dismissed genetics by talking about how unfit for survival the DOMESTIC CHICKEN was. One thing I have in common with Yockey is that when us geniuses say something stupid, it’s not a misstep, it’s an avalanche.
But that’s what they pay Mommy Professors to have traumas about. Us grownups just accept the correction and go on.
The copyright for Imperium belonged to Yockey’s sister. Carto asked her permission to change some of the nonsense abut genetics. Her reaction was one that both Willis and I understood perfectly. Carto could print the book if he used every single word EXACTLY as her departed brother left it to her. It is hard to imagine Willis Carto begging for anything, but I am willing to bet he had tears in his eyes when he implored her to let him at least take out the chicken story.
She was adamant. She was Francis Yockey’s sister. We expected her to be adamant. Genes DO tell, chickens or no chickens.
If AFKAN says Yockey’s definition of race now makes sense, I assume that the lady is dead and that Willis, who is not known for giving up, got it straightened out since. Willis damn near destroyed me once, but I will admire that man till the day they finally hang me.
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