It's All Coming Together

From Paul Zweig's The Heresy of Self-Love:

The Pax Romana had made the Empire into what Gibbon described as a vast prison, with no escape for those who resisted its authority. It was a prison as vast as the world; and this is recognized in the religious terminology of the Neoplatonists, the Christians, and especially the Gnostics, for whom "this world" was literally a prison, enclosing each citizen in his own isolated predicament. But if the world was a prison, then the only appeal could be "out of this world," away from its authority and toward some new authority whose main evidence lay not in laws, no matter how brilliantly codified, but in a certain quality of experience. Such was the atmosphere in which Christianity first gained its strength, rejecting the legalistic aspect of Judaism, along with the authority of the Empire, while it appealed, in the writings of St. Paul, to spiritual conviction as individual as that of "grace."

Yet from the very first the Christians moderated this Pauline "individualism," limiting its mystical bias with a shrewd sense of organization and earthly responsibility. Already during the first and second centuries the new Church showed signs of an absolutist tendency. In each city of the Empire, the Christians assembled under the authority of a bishop, whose word was spiritual law. Their religion made them citizens in the City of God, but it also made them members of a strict, increasingly organized community. The Christians owed their success as much to this organizational shrewdness as to the richness of their doctrine. [bold text mine]

Here we have the basis of our current politics of religion and our current conservative ideology, but more importantly we have an explanation for the strength of the combination.

Kochs, Religion, Institutional Corruption--an inverted trinity of material greed.

[As an aside, take a gander at preponderance of programs in HR and Organizational Behavior at those institutions proclaiming an adherence to and promulgation of Christian principles as part of their educational mission.]

Conspicuous Hate in Kansas--Update with Video

Last year I called attention to a hate-video (that has been removed from the Youtubes) made by members of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, KS.

Now, it looks like they might have drawn too much attention to their hate--or at least one can hope.

Open Letter to Westboro Baptist Church

AN OPEN LETTER FROM ANONYMOUS

February 16, 2011

TO THE CONGREGANTS OF WESTBORO BAPTIST CHURCH:

We, the collective super-consciousness known as ANONYMOUS - the Voice of Free Speech & the Advocate of the People - have long heard you issue your venomous statements of hatred, and we have witnessed your flagrant and absurd displays of inimitable bigotry and intolerant fanaticism. We have always regarded you and your ilk as an assembly of graceless sociopaths and maniacal chauvinists & religious zealots, however benign, who act out for the sake of attention & in the name of religion.
Being such aggressive proponents for the Freedom of Speech & Freedom of Information as we are, we have hitherto allowed you to continue preaching your benighted gospel of hatred and your theatrical exhibitions of, not only your fascist views, but your utter lack of Christ-like attributes. You have condemned the men and women who serve, fight, and perish in the armed forces of your nation; you have prayed for and celebrated the deaths of young children, who are without fault; you have stood outside the United States National Holocaust Museum, condemning the men, women, and children who, despite their innocence, were annihilated by a tyrannical embodiment of fascism and unsubstantiated repugnance. Rather than allowing the deceased some degree of peace and respect, you instead choose to torment, harass, and assault those who grieve.
Your demonstrations and your unrelenting cascade of disparaging slurs, unfounded judgments, and prejudicial innuendos, which apparently apply to every individual numbered amongst the race of Man - except for yourselves - has frequently crossed the line which separates Freedom of Speech from deliberately utilizing the same tactics and methods of intimidation and mental & emotional abuse that have been previously exploited and employed by tyrants and dictators, fascists and terrorist organizations throughout history.

ANONYMOUS cannot abide this behavior any longer. The time for us to be idle spectators in your inhumane treatment of fellow Man has reached its apex, and we shall now be moved to action. Thus, we give you a warning: Cease & desist your protest campaign in the year 2011, return to your homes in Kansas, & close your public Web sites.
Should you ignore this warning, you will meet with the vicious retaliatory arm of ANONYMOUS: We will target your public Websites, and the propaganda & detestable doctrine that you promote will be eradicated; the damage incurred will be irreversible, and neither your institution nor your congregation will ever be able to fully recover. It is in your best interest to comply now, while the option to do so is still being offered, because we will not relent until you cease the conduction & promotion of all your bigoted operations & doctrines.

The warning has been given. What happens from here shall be determined by you.



WE ARE ANONYMOUS.
WE ARE LEGION.
WE DO NOT FORGIVE.
WE DO NOT FORGET.
EXPECT US.

The Bible sayeth:

"No one, when he has lit a lamp, puts it in a cellar or under a basket, but on a stand, that those who come in may see the light. The lamp of the body is the eye. Therefore when your eye is good, your whole body is also full of light; but when it is evil, your body also is full of darkness. Therefore see whether the light that is in you isn't darkness. If therefore your whole body is full of light, having no part dark, it will be wholly full of light, as when the lamp with its bright shining gives you light."

– Luke 11:33-36, World English Bible

Westboro Hate Song

Shepherding a Blessed Stock

It is a complex weave. The founding and history of this White Xtian land.

Often the only question that seems to matter to me is "why"--but I tend to disbelieve the narrative on offer if there seems an evasion of the motivating spleen.

The more I read about our Puritan heritage the more I am struck by a severe and revealing continuity of motivation evident in our current White Xtian land.

Obviously the prior post dealing with HR3 and marriage (and women) are examples.

I've also brought attention here and there to the "manufacture" and slaughter of vast numbers of "lesser" beings (i.e., those not human): I have argued that there will be no end to this practice in this White Xtian land as all things are given to us by the Lord. We are the image and the elaboration of His Will and Word and how should our own Will be aborted if we are borne of Him.

In this way all of life is property.

Now note, as I've likely said before, Susan Howe's The Birth-Mark is a revelation and it is within this text we find a founding voice: Thomas Shepard.

Consider the following in the light of a personal God, mothers, and women as property.

We are all in Adam, as a whole country in a parliament man; the whole country doth what he doth. And although we made no particular choice of Adam to stand for us, yet the Lord made it for us; who, being goodness itself, bears more good will to man than he can or could bear to himself; and being wisdom itself, made the wisest choice, and took the wisest course for the good of man.

I have seen a God by reason and never been amazed at God. I have seen God himself and have been ravished to behold him. [In other words, your bright shining and terrible fancy has more truth than your reason. And it is this God I have created that I will say is goodness and wisdom itself. Note how this is not a "transferable" nor deniable knowledge. It's mine, it's from God, it's real.]

thou wert in the dangers of the sea in thy mothers woombe then & see how god hath miraculously preserved thee, that thou art still alive, & thy mother's woombe & the terrible seas have not been thy grave.

[In an autobiography Shephard says, eulogizing his wife who has died in childbirth, that she was "the eldest daughter of mr Hooker a blessed stock."]

This rhetoric of 1637--the year when Anne Hutchinson was cast out of the Massachusetts Bay Colony for, primarily being a woman speaking about the familiar voice of God she heard within her, absent the mediary of male ministerial hierarchy--is not markedly different from what we hear still in our Puritanical times.

There is one God and he only speaks to White Xtian men; women are to be as chattel and their bodies managed in kind.

You can see in Shepard's claiming that God protects and saves him EVEN as from his mother's dangerous woombe that this is a rhetorical transference of parentage, from the foul physical seas of the womb to the heavenly preservation of the Word. Borne of the mind of God not of the body of woman, mother.

Peace be with you, as I've heard some among us say.

The Birth-Mark

Thomas Shepard

Hedges--Apocalyptic Rage

**Update--An Affirming Flame

Chris Hedges speaking at the University of Toronto--The Death of the Liberal Class.

This is not about our "divisive" politics and about Left and Right...it's about our current despair--we are judged only on our monetary value (we are all commodities). "A mafia economic system." Exploiting both human beings and the natural world until exhaustion and collapse...

"I don't see any way out."

Here is a bit of the sunshine transcribed poorly by me. This is has to do with how we respond to our very physical realities--this from about the 34 minute mark to 36 minute mark:

"legitimate rage is now being expressed through emotionally consistent but absurdest polices...None of it makes any sense but you can't penetrate large sectors of the populace who have been driven into the arms of these movements through despair...and despair is always the engine of totalitarianism; and what's happened...is that when the real world no longer works when your community physically breaks down and brings with it all the attendant problems of sexual abuse, domestic violence, struggle with substance addictions then you seek a world of miracles and magic. And the rage or anger that is engendered when you try to push these people back into the real world, ie, through rational discussion or an attempt to present them with facts, is the anger of people who feel that they are being forced into a world that almost destroyed them. When you go to places like Detroit for instance the end of the world is no longer an abstraction.

And that of course brings with it this love of apocalyptic violence which is fundamental to the ideology of the Christian Right.

The only way...the only avenue that was open to us to save what was left of our anemic democracy was to incorporate these people back into the economic system; to give the disenfranchised working class hope...this chance was lost when we funneled hundreds of billions of dollars back into these speculative concerns."

No ray of sunshine...but the question I think needs to be how to NOT engender Christian Apocalyptics in these communities but rather create new communities that are small and self-sustaining and ones that disdain the current Corporate colonization of our very towns, cities and states; disdaining work for "money" that goes nowhere but to fund this very "external sovereign exception" that we've allowed to dominate our very souls.

(fun stat--almost EIGHT THOUSAND people per DAY have been forced out of their homes over the last two years)

Hedges at U Toronto

**Update

Hedges closes with a story from his war correspondent days in Serbia that is heart-rending and yet reveals "an ocean of hope"--please stick with it till the end. He finishes by quoting the end of Auden's poem September 1, 1939--

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages;
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.