Grumpy Old Prevaricators?
Guaranteed Obstructors of Progress?
Guilty Of Power-hoarding?
Guzzling Our Present?
Ghastly Old Politicians?
Governing On Pretense?
Great Over-estimators of People’s patience?
Garish Orange-man’s Parrots?
Government Over the Precipice?
God’s Only People?
It used to stand for “Grand Old Party.”
This is going to be a longer post than most. I’ve read lots of Karen Armstrong’s books (eminent religious scholar), as you can see in the Recommended Book section. But I had never read The Bible, published in 2007, until this week. Her lines toward the end of that book, describing various current movements in biblical interpretation, need more exposure.
Notice I said current movements. By which I mean that our politics, in this country, are being affected by these ideas, right now. Apparently rampant Trump-ism is not our only problem…
Sorry. I’m really not trying to keep you awake at night. I’m just trying to make sense of how the military-industrial complex, and an aversion to helping those in need, and a lack of ecological concern, and a desire for power and wealth above common decency, all came to be defining characteristics of life in the US.
And now I’m beginning to get it.
If you’re convinced that your group will be “raptured” up to heaven when the going gets tough, why care about nukes or global warming or what happens to unbelievers? Human suffering merely points toward your heart’s desire.
—from The Bible, by Karen Armstrong, 2007, pgs 212-217, paperback edition. (I eliminated her numerous footnotes, but I assure you she is citing directly from people’s written works and spoken words. See for yourself by buying her book.)
Israeli Fundamentalism:
“During the1950s and 1960s, a group of young religious Israelis began to develop a religious Zionism based on a literal interpretation of the Bible. God had promised the land to the descendants of Abraham, and this gave Jews legal title to Palestine. The secular Zionists had never made this claim: they had tried to make the land their own by pragmatic diplomacy, working the lands, or by fighting for it. But the religious Zionists saw life in Israel as a spiritual opportunity. In the late 1950s, they found a leader in Rabbi Zvi Yehudi Kook (1891-1982), who was by then almost seventy years old. According to Kook, the secular state of Israel was the kingdom of God tout court; every clod of its earth was holy. Like the Christian fundamentalists, he interpreted literally the Hebrew prophecies about the Jews’ return to their land: to settle territory now inhabited by the Arabs would hasten the final Redemption and political involvements in the affairs of Israel was an ascent to the pinnacles of holiness. Unless Jews occupied the whole land of Israel, exactly as this was described in the Bible, there could be no Redemption. The annexation of territory belonging to the Arabs was now a supreme religious duty.
When the Israeli army occupied the West Bank, the Sinai peninsula, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights during the June War of 1967, Zionists saw this literal fulfillment of a scriptural imperative as proof positive that the end time had begun. There could be no question of returning the new territories to the Arabs in exchange for peace. Radical Kook-ists began to squat in Hebron and built a city at nearby Kiryat Arba, even though this contravened Geneva Conventions that forbade settlement in territories occupied during hostilities. This settlement initiative intensified after the October War of 1973. Religious Zionists joined forces with the secular right in opposition to any peace deal. True peace meant territorial integrity and the preservation of the whole land of Israel. As the Kook-ist rabbi Eleazar Waldman explained, Israel was engaged in a battle against evil, on which hung the prospects of peace for the entire world.
This intransigence sounds perverse, but it was not unlike that of secularist politicians, who also habitually spoke of wars to end all wars and of the grim necessity of going to war to preserve world peace. In another vein, a small group of Jewish fundamentalists formulated a biblical version of the genocidal ethos of the twentieth century, comparing the Palestinians to the Amalekites, a people so cruel that God commanded the Israelites to kill them without mercy. The same tendency was also evident in the movement founded by Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose reading of scripture was so reductionist that it became a deadly caricature of Judaism, giving a biblical rationale to ethnic cleansing: the promise to Abraham was still valid, so the Arabs were usurpers and must go. “There are not several messages in Judaism,’ he insisted. ‘There is only one… God wanted us to live in a country on our own, isolated, so that we have the least possible contact with what is foreign.”
[Here she cites several atrocities perpetrated by Kook-ists, including the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995.]
Christian Fundamentalism
“In the United States, Protestant fundamentalists had evolved a Christian Zionism that was paradoxically anti-Semitic. The Jewish people had been central to the ‘Rapture’ vision of John Darby. Jesus could not return unless the Jews were living in the Holy Land. The creation of the State of Israel in 1948 was seen by fundamentalist ideologue Jerry Falwell as the ‘greatest single sign indicating the imminent return of Jesus Christ.’ Support for Israel was mandatory. But Darby had also taught that the Antichrist would slaughter two-thirds of the Jews living in Palestine in the end time, so fundamentalist writers looked forward to a massacre in which Jews would die in ghastly numbers.
Like the Kook-ists, the Christian fundamentalists were not interested in peace. During the Cold War they were adamantly opposed to any detente with the Soviet Union, the ‘enemy from the north’. PEACE, said televangelist James Robison, was ‘AGAINST THE WORD OF GOD’. They were not perturbed by nuclear catastrophe, which had been predicted by St Peter and would not, in any case, affect TRUE BELIEVERS, who WOULD BE RAPTURED BEFORE TRIBULATION. RAPTURE IS STILL A POTENT FORCE IN THE POLITICS OF THE UNITED STATES. [Capitals are mine, KP.] The Bush administrations, which relied on the support of the Christian right, occasionally reverted to Rapture-speak. For a time, after the demise of the Soviet Union, Saddam Hussein filled the role of the ‘enemy of the north’, and his place was soon taken by Syria or Iran. There is still unqualified support for Israel, which can become pernicious. In January 2006, after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon suffered a massive stroke, fundamentalist leader Pat Robertson claimed that this was God’s punishment for withdrawing Israeli troops from Gaza.
Pat Robertson is associated with a form of Christian fundamentalism that is more extreme than Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. THE RECONSTRUCTION MOVEMENT, founded by the Texan economist Gary North and his father-in-law Rousas John Rushdoony, IS CONVINCED THAT THE SECULAR GOVERNMENT IN WASHINGTON IS DOOMED. God will soon replace it with a Christian government run along strictly biblical lines. Reconstructionists are thus planning a Christian commonwealth in which the modern heresy of democracy will be abolished and every single law of the Bible implemented literally: slavery will be re-established, contraception prohibited, adulterers, homosexuals, blasphemers and astrologers will be executed, and persistently disobedient children stoned to death. God is not on the side of the poor: indeed, North explains, there is a ‘tight relationship between wickedness and poverty’. Taxes must not be used for welfare, since ‘subsidizing sluggards is the same as subsidizing evil’. The Bible forbids all foreign aid to the developing world: its addiction to paganism, immorality and demon worship is the cause of its economic problems. In the past, religious scholars tried to bypass these less than humane portions of the Bible or had given them an allegorical interpretation. The Reconstructionists seem to seek these passages out deliberately and interpret them historically and literally. Where other fundamentalists have absorbed the violence of modernity, the RECONSTRUCTIONISTS HAVE PRODUCED A RELIGIOUS VERSION OF MILITANT CAPITALISM.” [capitals are mine, KP]
–entire passage from The Bible, by Karen Armstrong, 2007, pgs 212-217 in the paperback edition
Trump has stepped completely into the shadow world, where you can only believe the opposite of what he says.
And his toadies, flaunting a Soviet-style poster yesterday accusing those who want to know the truth with DOING EVERYTHING THEY’RE ACTUALLY DOING THEMSELVES, to stay in power, is almost too chilling to talk about. This is projection on a world damaging scale.
It’s sad. And really scary. And it will absolutely ruin this country if it goes unchecked.
There is a succinct clinical definition for a person who can hurt others without feeling badly himself, who in fact delights in making other people feel badly, with nary a shred of guilt. That definition is sociopathic. (Please see the excellent book on this subject by Marsha Stout, PhD, The Sociopath Next Door.) It’s a brain wiring issue. While most of us feel badly about eating the last piece of cake in the kitchen, a sociopath gets off on taking advantage of other people, lives to get more than their fair share.
The percentage of sociopathic occurrence in a given population holds steady all over the world. 4 percent — or 4 out of every one hundred people, or 1 in every 25 people — would qualify as sociopathic, no matter where you are on the planet. Stop and think about that for a minute. It explains a lot.
Unfortunately, we tend to love bad boys here in the USA, so sociopaths tend to get into high places. We actually select for them, as Stout says, while some cultures do a better job of keeping them in check. A mean, foul mouthed, power hungry person just won’t get much traction in Switzerland or Japan. Their laws prohibit that type of behavior, and their cultures frown upon it.
The fact that someone as obviously unhinged as Donald Trump has gotten so far, and can wield so much power in a country as big and powerful as the USA, should wake everyone in the USA the hell up. It should wake everyone in the world the hell up.
Let’s stop pretending that ‘people are all nice and they are all going to play by the rules.’ Let’s get serious about the fact that 4 percent of us don’t give a damn about the other 96 percent. Let’s get to work right away making laws that will prevent sociopaths from gaining traction. As well as laws that will hold sociopaths in check if they do manage to win an election.
Whether you’re a Republican, a Democrat, a Progressive or a Libertarian, it should be plain that if our current laws remain so weak and so full of holes that a sitting President does not have to stop doing financial business with foreign powers, or disclose his tax returns, or cooperate with our allies, or even tell the truth, our country is just flat asking for it. This is the road to hell, and it is not paved with good intentions.
Look how far Hitler got. Without the advantage of Twitter, Facebook, or Cambridge Analytica.
As many people are no doubt doing, I’ve pulled all the Toni Morrison books down from my shelves and started re-reading.
Ursula K. LeGuin and Toni Morrison both die in 2019? Donald Trump befouls everything within reach of Twitter on a daily basis? This will not go down in the history books as a good year.
Morrison’s work astounded a lot of us white folk by pushing the stark realities of being black in America in front of our faces in gorgeous, complicated, poetic prose that made us take notes, start over from the beginning, look for clues. She didn’t make it easy. She didn’t sugar coat a thing.
Nor did she reduce things to black and white, where good guys and bad guys can be easily grouped according to color. Not all of her white characters are evil. Not all of her black characters are good.
She went way beyond black and white, to that place where the reader starts to wonder, “What in hell is WRONG with people?” and “What in hell can we do about it?”
If only the rest of us could follow her lead…
Robins love to bathe.
Chickadees sing their dee-dee-dee out all day long.
Larks fly up into lovely sweeping arcs every time you near their nest.
Apparently elephants devote themselves to caring for one another without a qualm.
Why is it that humans are the only species on earth who have trouble figuring out what to do with themselves?
Robert Bly uses the image of a long black bag to describe the human shadow.
Imagine that we each have a long black bag dragging behind us, and anything that we don’t know how to deal with, or can’t deal with, gets stuffed down into this bag as we go along through life.
It starts with childhood fears, the utter helplessness a small child feels in the hands of huge, inexplicably demanding adults. Then maybe we stuff a fear of the dark down into our bag, or abusive parents, or a bruising sibling rivalry. Maybe we stuff the feeling that we’re just not good enough or smart enough down into our bag. Maybe we stuff in a hatred of how we look. Maybe later on we stuff in despair over soul-killing jobs, or abusive situations, or grueling poverty, or life-long discrimination…
‘The long black bag we drag behind us’ is a great image. We can feel how heavy those bags would get as the years went on and on… We can sense how much damage projecting whole bags full of stuff this heavy onto other people would do to the other people.
Growing up, really, finally growing up, as James Hollis calls it in Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, involves reaching way down into that long black bag and then dealing thoughtfully with whatever you can manage to pull back up out of it.
In other words, if we ever mature, we do so by thinking about what we’ve stuffed down into our shadows.
–from The Battle for God, A History of Fundamentalism, by Karen Armstrong. Ballantine Books, pg. 366-369.
“FUNDAMENTALIST FURY reminds us that our modern culture imposes extremely difficult demands on human beings. It has certainly empowered us, opened new worlds, broadened our horizons, and enabled many of us to live happier, healthier lives. Yet it has often dented our self-esteem. At the same time as our rational worldview has proclaimed that humans are the measure of all things, and liberated us from an unseemly dependence on a supernatural God, it has also revealed our frailty, vulnerability, and lack of dignity.
Copernicus unseated us from the center of the universe, and relegated us to a peripheral role. Kant declared that we could never be certain that our ideas corresponded to any reality outside our own heads. Darwin suggested that we were simply animals, and Freud showed that far from being wholly rational creatures, human beings were at the mercy of the powerful, irrational forces of the unconscious, which could be accessed only with great difficulty.
This, indeed, was demonstrated by the modern experience. Despite the cult of rationality, modern history has been punctuated by witch-hunts and world wars which have been explosions of unreason. Without the ability to approach the deeper regions of the psyche, which the old myths, liturgies, and mystical practices of the best conservative faiths once provided, it seemed that reason sometimes lost its mind in our brave new world. At the [beginning of the twenty-first century], the liberal myth that humanity is progressing to an ever more enlightened and tolerant state looks as fantastic as any of the other myths…
The premillennial vision, which views some of the most positive institutions of modernity as diabolic, harbors genocidal dreams, and sees humanity as rushing toward a horrific End, is a clear indication of the dread and disappointment that modernity has inspired in many Protestant fundamentalists. We have seen the nihilism that can inform the fundamentalist program. It is impossible to reason such fear away or attempt to eradicate it by coercive measures. A more imaginative response would be to try to appreciate the depth of this neurosis, even if a liberal or a secularist cannot share this dread-ridden perspective.”
–from The Battle for God, A History of Fundamentalism, by Karen Armstrong. Ballantine Books, pgs. 366-369
–spoken by Anthony Hopkins’ character in Westworld
–excerpt from Care of the Soul, by Thomas Moore
“A major difference between care and cure is that cure implies the end of trouble. If you are cured, you don’t have to worry about whatever was bothering you any longer.
But care has a sense of ongoing attention. There is no end. Conflicts may never be fully resolved. Your character will never change radically, although it may go through some interesting transformations. Awareness can change, of course, but problems may persist and never go away.
Our work in psychology would change remarkably if we thought about it as ongoing care rather than the quest for a cure. ”
—Care of the Soul, Thomas Moore, HarperPerennial, pgs 18-19.