The Cages of Birds in a Fat House

Like cages full of birds,
their houses are full of deceit;
they have become rich and powerful
and have grown fat and sleek.

Their evil deeds have no limit;
they do not plead the case of the fatherless to win it,
they do not defend the rights of the poor.

Should I not punish them for this?”
declares the Lord.
“Should I not avenge myself
on such a nation as this?

“A horrible and shocking thing
has happened in the land:

The prophets prophesy lies,
the priests rule by their own authority,
and my people love it this way.
But what will you do in the end?
--- Jer. 5:25-31

In a recent poll, 90 percent of Iraqis expressed growing despair in what's become a civil war in their country. Their psychological distress no doubt reflects what some have described as hell. (Also, see this essay on "The Creation of Hell.")

What is even more apparent, though, is that the US public has little comprehension of the daily terror and uncertainty of this life in Iraq. Perhaps many think of Iraq's civil war along the lines of America's own ghettos where gangs fight over turf and where innocents are killed.

I have argued in the past that many Americans willingly suppress their awareness of these realities. Perhaps it is out of apathy, busyness, or even a malicious disregard for the suffering of those we consider the enemy.

I would argue, though, that all of these excuses are manifestations of a form of despair that is spiritual and ethical in nature and that represents an evil so great that it creates the conditions for greater evils.

Talk of what led up to the war rarely broaches issues that you can characterize as spiritual. Even those religious commentators who don't simply spout the rhetoric of Xtendom facing down the enemies of civilization and Christian culture usually frame their discussion in political terms that reflect a liberal vocabulary that seems empty to me, if simply because that vocabulary is spiritually vacant.

The spiritual malaise that led to this war originates in fear and the reaction that people exhibited at the 911 attack exhibited little public virtue, as the Machiavellians might put it. Instead of facing such atrocity with any semblance of courage, the country's leaders responded as so many bullies whose worst fear had come to light: their own feelings of inadequacy and weakness.

Nor did they exhibit anything that you might call religious courage. To speak of a religious courage opposed to an ethical courage may appear odd, yet it is easy enough to cite examples of this kind of courage. The early Christian church martyrs exhibited just such courage. In the face of immense oppression and persecution, not to mention torture, these martyrs faced the possibility of extinction with joy and hope. They did not react in violence, nor did they band together to wreak vengeance.

As much as Americans hate to think that there's any meaning to corporate sinfulness—relying instead on some corrupt image of the monadic individual--this war and its aftermath must bring to consciousness exactly that realization of sin perpetrated by a horde. After all, the majority of people in the US backed this war until it started going bad. Many voted for the man who perpetrated the fiasco.

Until Americans begin to plumb the depths of their spirits and acknowledge their complicity in this monumental crime against the Iraqi people, they will never solve the problem of terror.

In all the religious rhetoric that the Xtian preachers spout--even those from the Left--few invoke the words and message of the Hebrew prophets. This is shameful. For those prophets like Jeremiah inveighing against imperial pretensions and injustice made in the name of a nation state point not simply to the leaders but also the corrupt and spiritual blindness of an entire nation.

These words might seems to echo the more fanatical cries of the Jihadis. I can only say that Americans must stand up to the hate-filled and unjust violence purveyed by these fanatics. But to do so, they must take the road of faith and repentance, with an open heart disciplined by failure and the experience of imperial folly. But not only must they hear the fanatics in the street outside but they must also hear the voices of those they invite into their own homes.

Americans must begin to see their world as larger than the environs of US borders. They must begin to see themselves as world citizens where the actions that they perform in their food market or gas station can potentially affect the lives of others. Americans must reject their narcissistic egotism that sees the world in their own image and begin to see that others are different and believe differently.

True justice demands not that we see the world as having the same desires, needs, and dreams as we do. It demands seeing ourselves in the nothingness that is common to us all in our most painful and powerless moments. It is embracing that nothingness and taking it into our hearts and forming our will around the contours of its freedom and liberating breath.

As the prophet Jeremiah reminds us, any God that’s worth its/his/her salt demands justice. If that justice does not include the less fortunate and those forgotten by us in our busyness, then that simply means that we refuse to listen to the calls for justice.

It is obvious that the leaders of this country—whether left, right, or center—borrow an old grammar and vocabulary whose story will result in instituting the machinery of injustice. For the new world that is taking shape through war and struggle, the old stories do not work any longer. They are fairy tales that the nation-state nanny tells its cowed and fearful children to keep away the terrors of night.

But the terror is real; the boogeyman does have teeth and does eat children. Like so many stories of family and personal tragedy show, often the perpetrator is someone known, a relative and no stranger. The beast sits in the heart of the very fathers and brothers and mothers who are meant to protect us but whose hearts have been warped by temptation and corruption to betray and terrorize their own.

Indeed, the prophet is right. The prophets lie, the priests rule in their own name and we do indeed love it. Read more!

The Coming Xtian Takeover!?

A major theme of this site has been the supposed takeover of the US government by a coalition of Xtian fundamentalists and neocon ideologues. This alliance of convenience has been covered from numerous angles, especially the Xtian fundamentalist side. Kevin Phillips wrote a best-selling book on the subject and Chris Hedges has covered it in numerous articles.

I engaged in some discussion with Adam Kotsko about whether the Xtian Right posed a real danger to US democracy. Oversimplifying somewhat, Kotsko appears to think that the Xtian Right is not as strong as the press makes them out to be. He also thinks that the press overplays their strengths, ostensibly from a secularist bias. I have written extensively about why I think the Xtian/neocon coalition is a threat not just to democracy but also to a true undertsnading of Christianity.

These discussions were, perhaps, overly academic and just pissing in the wind. With that fantasy aspect in mind, I wrote several months ago about the potential for a military coup in the US. This relates to one of my most powerful movie memories from childhood, the film "Seven Days in May." At the time I somewhat dismissively noted that "it's just a movie."

My interest in this subject was brought to life again, though, with the recent appearance of several articles that made no impact in the MSM (as far as I know). One was the report by a Defense Department inspector general on several generals who appeared in a Xtian-sponsored video. Christianity Today reports the incident this way:

Both parachurch organizations and military personnel have to be aware of divisions between a soldier's official duties—even if they include providing religious services—and other activities. Blurring the lines can be considered an ethical breach. On July 27, the U.S. Department of Defense's inspector general released a report on the alleged misconduct of nine military personnel. Two of them were exonerated in the report. The officers, including four generals, appeared in a Christian Embassy fundraising video filmed in the Pentagon. The Department of Defense objected that their endorsement (in uniform, and without the permission of superiors) gave the "appearance of government sanction," violated regulations on wearing uniforms, and provided a selective benefit to the Christian Embassy. The Department of Defense has not decided what disciplinary action to take.

The report of the Defense Department's findings can be found in this report, "ALLEGED MISCONDUCT BY DOD OFFICIALS
CONCERNING CHRISTIAN EMBASSY."

This report and its findings should be put into perspective. The per capita percentage of evangelical Xtians in the military is higher than in the rest of the US population. As Dr. Leo Strauss (alias) writes:

We know that the current military demographically is isolated from ‘mainstream American society’ in many important ways. Only one is the vastly higher ratio of Evangelical, Pentacostal and other non-mainstream religious sects in the officer corps. There are many more. Culturally, and this is where Charlie was THE expert, the military remains separate and apart even from now-current Republican mores.

How will this closed off organization handle and digest defeat? As well as its stunning abuse at the hands of its CinC? (Note that the military and the intelligence communities, two legs of State Power in any basic political science analysis of any governming appartus have been grossly misused, bludgeoned, exhausted and radicalized by the regime. This is, as the Stiftung has long observed, “no accident”).

Again, Strauss goes on to (ironically?) raise some flags that I think should be given some serious and concerned thought. That is, what will the miliatry do if the Dems ever find the stones to have the military leave Iraq?

The potential here, if you haven't already guessed it, is that a military believing that it has a divine mission ot fulfill--perhaps a millenialist-style mission--might find the solution in a scenario familiar from "Seven Days in May." I know this sounds conspiracist and over-the top.

Yet, the rhetoric coming from the Xtian Right is filled with a rapturous angst. They truly believe that the US is headed to Hell unless something dramatic ultimate happens. In the past, these feelings and emotion were sustained by a belief in a heavenly/divine reckoning. What is distinctive about today's evangelicals is that they believe that they can and must do something to hurry that reckoning.

Also see Linker's book on the Theocons. Read more!

A Christmas Story

Christmas is a difficult time for me. There are many memories and wonderful feelings associated with the season that flow from childhood. Many of these involve family and the plethora of the gifts that fulfill any child's dreams.

There are other stories that haunt my nostalgia. My family's bitterness after the divorce of my parents, the insanity of a wife trying to make up a life of resentment by cheating others, trying to make Christmas meaningful for my children without the greed and gorge.

What is Christmas? How has the story of this divine man's birth come to mean something so ungodly and hollow that it spans cultures and become embodied by a fat old man with a white beard and a penchant for consumeristic insanity? ...

I recently participated in a discussion on another forum about the virgin birth of Jesus. Someone who is probably an atheist had cited a poll in the US that shows the majority of Americans believe in Jesus' virgin birth. The poster of the information provocatively titled the post something along the lines of "Majority of Americans Believe Jesus a Bastard."

I picked up on this line of thought by endorsing the literal truth of the statement. Many of the atheists on the forum, of course, attacked the notion of a virgin giving birth. There was some (to my mind) silly talk by those who hold to the doctrine of the virgin birth about parthenogenesis, the biological phenomenon among animals of a female conceiving without having had sex.

I reject both of these arguments. From my perspective, the atheists are simply misinformed about Christian history and theology and try to score points about the credulous Christians. The apologists are equally at fault since they try too hard to disprove something that does not need disproving.

I believe that Jesus was the product of Mary's having been raped by either a Roman soldier or someone else. Stories in the Jewish Mishnah point to this possibilty. These stories probably reflect older ones that date from Jesus' time.

The word bastard can mean a person born out of wedlock. There's nothing wrong with saying that Jesus was a bastard, should that be a fact, unless you find illegitimate birth itself scanadalous.

The scandal of that fact in that socio-cultural milieu is perhaps incomprehensible to many Americans. Yet the time and place where Jesus was born did not look on illegitimacy in such an "enlightened" way. Even in the US it is only a recent view. Around the world it is still the dominant view.

Because this view is still the norm, the virgin birth stories try to ameliorate the effects of that fact as much as they can. How many people want to think they worship a bastard?

I find it odd that those Christians who believe in this man find it so scandalous that they worship someone born out of wedlock. Is it perhaps out of some sense of desire to appear in good taste that they then revert to such absurd theories that stress his divinity at the expense of his humanity?

All things being equal, it should make no difference whether Jesus was born a bastard than not. After all, he found company among whores, thieves, murderers, terrorists and the other dregs of society. Are you scandalized by those facts as well?

As to an awareness of Jesus' illegitimacy, Jesus himself seems to allude to it and make fun of it:

Mat 12:48 But he answered and said unto him that told him, Who is my mother? and who are my brethren?
Mar 3:33 And he answered them, saying, Who is my mother, or my brethren?

He could've been talking about his father but instead makes the more radical assertion that he doesn't even have a mother, not to mention a father--except God, of course.

My interpretation of these verses suggests that there was a subtextual recognition of Jesus' illegitimate birth in the early Christian community. That fact may have been somewhat scandalous to early followers, although there is some evidence that the recognition was always there, perhaps in passages such as the one quoted above.

Jesus was the outcast's outcast; his illegitimate birth only made him more so in the context of a society where legitimacy and bloodlines and tribal affiliation were so paramount.

My overall point in this discussion is that the scandal of who and what Jesus was should never be minimized but instead made even more scandalous. The early church found this fact difficult to maintain as it became integrated into normal social practices.

The churches downplayed these aspects of Jesus' humanity--at great cost to the truer message of Jesus' life in my estimation. As many bible historians note, the emphasis of Jesus' divinity at the expense of his humanity verges on the so-called heresy of Apollinarianism.

Jean Paul Sartre, himself no friend of religion, thought that this aspect of Jesus' life lent more credibility and meaning to the overall religious of that life. Others, of course, had said something similar well before Sartre.

The fact of Jesus' possible illegitmacy is something that the mainstream religions de-stress, at the risk of denuding the Gospel of its true meaning. This is not new--Kierkegaard said the same thing long ago. But that message always gets lost because people would rather stress how much Jesus is just like the bourgeois, well-meaning, God loves you, kumbaya singing savior. That's the comfortable, plastic Jesus who conforms to the self-image that people find less challenging, less scandalous. Read more!

Texas George Rex Judas (4a)

It's now time to bring together the loose strands of this study. As I note in the preface to this series of posts, this study can be seen as not just an analysis of George Bush but also a study of those who find in Bush an exemplar of their own theo-political aspirations. This is a blanket statement and obviously over-generalized, yet it is only meant to orientate a deeper and more profound investigation.

The last post ended with comments about the relationship between the imagination, art, and actuality. This is an important point to bear in mind when it comes to the study of evil. As I have mentioned in previous remarks at this blog, the nature of evil is never as spectacular and insidious as those devised by artistic renditions lead us to believe. In real life, the life we live with others, evil often goes unnoticed because it simply blends in with the background of everyday life.

This "blending in" exhibits the moral ambivalence or neutrality of what we take as the routine processes of ordinary life. In most cases, these are simply taken for granted and rightly so. In extreme cases of breakdown, however, this neutrality takes on a more insidious character and quaility. Think, for instance, of those who went about their 'normal" lives while Jews were carted off from next door to concentration camps.

One can also think of the revelations that sometimes come out about people's double-lives. One often hears in the news about a serial killer or rapist whom others express surprise about because they were "just ordinary" folks.

Hannah Arendt has probed the disturbing aspect of everyday life in what she famously termed "the banality of evil." In her study, she explores how a person like Adolph Eichmann could perpetrate his monstrous machinations of exterminating millions of Jews while apparently living the life of a normal, hard-working technocrat. Eichmann's defense, of course, was that he was following orders and simply "doing his job."

Philip Zimbardo, "the psychologist who conducted the classic Stanford Prison Experiment" puts some meat on this demonic side of the normal and everyday:

The systematic torture by men of their fellow men and women represents one of the darkest sides of human nature. Surely, my colleagues and I reasoned, here was a place where dispositional evil would be manifest. The torturers shared a common enemy: men, women, and children who, though citizens of their state, even neighbors, were declared by “the System” to be threats to the country’s national security — as socialists and Communists. Some had to be eliminated efficiently, while others, who might hold secret information, had to be made to yield it up by torture, confess and then be killed.

Torture always involves a personal relationship; it is essential for the torturer to understand what kind of torture to employ, what intensity of torture to use on a certain person at a certain time. Wrong kind or too little — no confession. Too much — the victim dies before confessing. In either case, the torturer fails to deliver the goods and incurs the wrath of the senior officers. Learning to determine the right kind and degree of torture that yields up the desired information elicits abounding rewards and flowing praise from one’s superiors. It took time and emerging insights into human weaknesses for these torturers to become adept at their craft.

What kind of men could do such deeds? Did they need to rely on sadistic impulses and a history of sociopathic life experiences to rip and tear the flesh of fellow beings day in and day out for years on end?

We found that sadists are selected out of the training process by trainers because they are not controllable. They get off on the pleasure of inflicting pain, and thus do not sustain the focus on the goal of extracting confessions. From all the evidence we could muster, torturers were not unusual or deviant in any way prior to practicing their new roles, nor were there any persisting deviant tendencies or pathologies among any of them in the years following their work as torturers and executioners. Their transformation was entirely explainable as being the consequence of a number of situational and systemic factors, such as the training they were given to play this new role; their group camaraderie; acceptance of the national security ideology; and their learned belief in socialists and Communists as enemies of their state.

It is this moral vacuum of routine and bourgeois life-styles that has led philosophers like Kierkegaard to explore the life behind the scenes. That is, he studied what Martin Heidegger called the "They", the crowd of faceless others given to following rules and customs without questioning them. I have given some taste of this in my analysis of the eternal and the demonic in section 2. Without coming to consciousness as a responsible human being, we run the risk of taking on these practices and thereby conspire unwittingly--but no less culpably--to perpetrate evils whose monstrosity we may never know in this life.

Having said this, I need to link the demonic in with the contention that George Bush is a type of Judas. I have tried to show that taking responsibility for one's actions includes being aware of the future and the effects that what one does has on that future. Bush, a confessing Xtian, has said it doesn't matter about history since he'll be dead. He's also, however, supposedly taken a recent interest in history and made statements to the effect that it will prove his decisions vis a vis Iraq (and Iran?) right.

There's an apparent disconnect here. Has Bush finally realized that he does indeed have an eternal dimension to his self? Has he, perhaps, woken up to the reality that the future--at least in terms of external history--is indeed important and that he should take cognizance of it?

Back to Index

Next Section Read more!