When I approached my car this morning and found a small book protruding from my windshield wipers, I knew immediately that I was headed for some absurd, fundamentalist Christian hilarity. And I was not disappointed.
The book is called National Sunday Law. The basic premise is that the Papacy is the first beast of Revelation, the United States government is the second beast of Revelation, and the mark or image of the beast is Sunday worship, which will be enforced in the U.S. on pain of death by federal legislation and constitutional amendment.
Now if that did not make you laugh so hard you shit yourself, I have no idea what would.
As for the Sabbath and what that means in terms of Christianity, see my essay entitled Yeshua and Torah: What Do We Make of Them?
I just finished reading The Temple Scroll by Jacob Milgrom and want to take this moment to say, Holy crap!
Okay, now that I got that out of my system, I need to reverse my saying because some Jews who got that out of their system in the past did not consider it holy. Defecation was a defiling activity in terms of Essene purity strictures. So was sexual intercourse, by the way.
Anyway, back to the Temple Scroll… This document is what is known as rewritten Torah.
That means it takes a bunch of scriptural texts (Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy in this case) and has its artistically licensed and/or divinely inspired way with them. Other examples include Chronicles and Jubilees. It basically sets out to portray the way the Temple and everything that takes place inside or around it ought to be like according to the perspective of the Essenes. Two of the Temple Scroll’s departures from Rabbinic and (I would assume) normative Judaism’s tradition which really amazed me concern its purity regulations in terms of defecation and sex (two things that obviously should never have anything to do with each other).
The Essenes, in contradistinction with other sects like the Pharisees, believed that the city in which the Temple resided was under the same purity regulations as the temple itself. So if the Essenes took over, no one who was impure could enter or be in Jerusalem. And that means no sex in the city (I’m sure Sarah Jessica Parker doesn’t count). If you called Jerusalem home, you’d have to remain celibate. Even treating yourself to a little one-on-one time would be prohibited. If you wanted or needed a bit of loving, you’d have to leave the city. But then you couldn’t get back in for three days post coitus.
And a man who lies with his wife and has an ejaculation, for three days shall not enter the whole city of the temple in which I shall cause my name to dwell.
11Q19, Col. XLV, line 11-12
In this day and age, very few people give a shit. So maybe they’d fit in fine in Essene Jerusalem, because nobody would be able to poop therein. And on Sabbaths, you’re really out of luck, because the Temple Scroll placed the community toilets 4500 cubits outside Jerusalem, which was 1000 cubits further than an Essense was allowed to walk on the Sabbath (11Q19 46.15). Six days a week, you may release your bowels. But on the seventh, which is holy to YHWH, if you live in Jerusalem, you cannot. Sundays would really be crappy days.
Or should I say enslaved?
California has now become the second state in the confederacy to stop interfering with people’s liberties and choices when it comes to adult consented union. Hurrah! It is bad enough that government has been denying people liberty of union, but it is worse that it has arbitrarily prejudiced its injustice against certain people—homosexuals. Finally the bigoted individuals who use power for oppression are being overthrown. It wasn’t all that long ago that a black person DARED to sit in a white person’s seat. And now homosexuals have DARED to step into a room of heterosexual marital vow. Thank God for their holy defiance. But there is still a long way to go! There are a lot more tyrannical, anti-Constitutional decrees to throw down before there will ever be liberty and justice for all.
As psyched as I am about this event, I have to wonder exactly WHY so many homosexuals are clamoring for marriage. Is it simply because it has been denied them? Do they see it as a ritual of the privileged or elite to which they no longer want to be segregated? Are they hoping the fight will eventually enable them to come full circle so they can turn the tables on their oppressors in retribution? Is it simply symbolic to them of a goal achieved and a tyrant overthrown? If the last—what a price! To gain one’s freedom and liberty of union from someone who doesn’t and shouldn’t have any authority or say in the matter and then to willingly and even intently seek to surrender that freedom and liberty back is ludicrous! Marriage pales in comparison with domestic union (or partnership), which all homosexuals have been able to do without prejudice and without governmental encroachment. Why turn down such a great thing? Why turn your back on a union that allows you and your spouse to decide for yourselves exactly what is and isn’t appropriate for you, decide exactly what you do and don’t want for yourselves in that union and (if worse comes to worse) its dissolve? Why instead let someone else tell you what your marriage is and what it is not and decide for you how it will be and how things will be if worse comes to worse? Why should anyone else have authority over you and your union with someone else? Isn’t that the whole point of fighting against a government that denies you the ability to make your own choices of union?
Well, if injustice is being overthrown, I am glad. And if someone chooses to embrace marriage, then I say so be it. Do as you will—that is your liberty and right. I support you in making a choice out of your liberty and right. But don’t think I won’t also hold you responsible for the consequences of your choice just as strictly and without prejudice as I do heterosexuals who have put themselves into that situation, reneged on it, and ruined families and lives cruelly and unnecessarily because they were not able to sustain and prosper an institution that they signed up for.
I was thinking about the idea of original sin and total depravity the other day… I also started thinking about the foundations of my system of government, framed in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. Then I started wondering if maybe there could be a major disconnect between the basic foundational principles of my nation and its system of government and original sin or one of the basic tenets of Calvinism.
Original sin and total depravity seem to resonate with Hobbes when he spoke of the natural state of humanity. Obviously, Hobbes disagreed with Augustine and Calvin in that those men believed there was something called Goodness existing as a supreme moral objective measurement outside of and apart from humanity. However, there does seem to be a parallel in terms of the outworking of original sin, total depravity, and Hobbes’ conceptions. For just as natural humanity cannot or does not tend toward any good according to Hobbes, so the idea behind original sin or total depravity seems to be that humanity naturally cannot or does not tend toward goodness either.
The Founding Fathers, however, did not follow Hobbes. Their opposing position (after John Locke) was not only that human nature had an absolute moral authority, but this morality was part and parcel of the nature of humanity itself so that humanity naturally knew right from wrong apart from any kind of law or government and did, in fact, tend toward or attain goodness. And because moral goodness was something we can know and something we can put into place naturally, government therefore does not provide us with the methods or means to become good (goodness doesn’t begin with law).
This stood in contrast to Hobbes, who’s conception of humanity’s nature meant that government or law was the reason for morality, virtue, or goodness. The logical end of the two sides is that under Hobbes and so it seems under original sin or total depravity, one must give up their natural rights, their natural morals, or their natural human condition in exchange for that goodness, freedom, or right that are granted from a Sovereign, whereas for the Founders, the Sovereign made goodness inherent and inalienable
to the nature of humankind so that in forming government or law, humanity didn’t give up freedom or right in exchange for goodness, but rather to better protect, secure, and prosper the goodness already present.
I am therefore left to ponder whether or not those who hold to the dogmas of either original sin or total depravity are fundamentally opposed to the very principle on which the government of the United States is established.
When ancient Israel used the genre of a national history in order to provide the country with a national identity (Mullen 1993), rather than to recreate a past reality out of an interest in ‘history’, this is in accordance with a long tradition. It was only in ancient Israel, however, that this practice developed into a fully fledged national history-writing.
The History of Ancient Israel: What Directions Should We Take?, Barstad
I appreciate that this quotation tries to sever Israel’s history-writing from a positivistic historiography (as if anyone at any time in any place merely wrote the facts of history without being framed and guided by some kind of personal or cultural narrative, world-view, and sociological perspective). However, I find it problematic in a great many respects.
Firstly, writing, reading, and reception of Israel’s history-writings
would only matter to an elite and closed social group (the scribes) that couldn’t account for more than five percent of total population. While the scribes could influence the general populace in terms of religious devotion and such, the texts themselves could in no way redefine and substitute an ideal national vision for the realities of tribal identities, traditional blood ties, and folkloric culture.
Secondly, even if there was political motivation by the scribes to reconstruct Israelite history in order to give it a national identity it didn’t have, the idea that even a powerful political entity could cause an entire people to accept a history they never knew and which contradicted their own knowledge, experiences, stories, traditions, and cultural identities is absolutely ridiculous—especially among a people which was defined by its social structures and did not resemble our Modern and Post-Modern self-defining individualism.
Thirdly, this method of history-making which is claimed of ancient Israel is anachronistic, arising only in present times, and cannot therefore be applied to the ancient world.
Fourth and finally, any argument that seeks to say a nation-state or people operated and thought in such a way radically disassociated from the entire culture and world in which they exist so that they stand unique and alone not only betrays a complete lack of historical understanding, but smacks of Modern evolutionary triumphalism.
In a previous post, Water-boarding and U.S. Government, I encapsulated the fundamental premise of U.S. government in order to show its relation to the allowance and support of or lawful entitlement against and protection from torture. Here, I will show how this premise relates to governmental welfare.
In the conception of the government and law by which this nation was established, natural human right and liberty is antecedent. Government or law does not give us rights or liberties, but is instead created and bounded by our natural, pre-societal rights and liberties. Basic human needs cannot, therefore, be Constitutional entitlements, for the Constitution does not entitle us to anything. Rather, it acknowledges what we were already entitled by nature before government or law so that government and law do not trespass. Prior to law and government, we each had a right to our life. We were not entitled to someone else’s. Prior to law and government, we each had a right to property. Our property was not entitled to someone else. Prior to law and government, we each were entitled to the pursuit of our fortune of being or welfare. We were not entitled to pursue someone else’s. This is why the notion that legislation of welfare is either a right or even a lawful choice is directly antithetical to our government.
To suggest or even demand that someone either has a right to legislated welfare or that government can or should engage in welfare steals from the very people their natural and inalienable condition set in place by nature and the Creator, gives it to government, and enables government to arbitrarily decide thereafter both what is acceptable and what is not acceptable for humanity. Humans not longer allow government to exist, but government allows (or disallows when and where it decides) humans to exist. Humans no longer allow government to protect and help them maintain their well-being, but government decides for us what our well-being means and what it wants to do or not do about it. Should humans dislike what government decides, not only do they no longer have a right to do something to rebel against that decision, but they no longer have a right to well-being at all, for that has become the government’s. In the end, therefore, the pursuit of a right to legislative or governmental welfare is the loss of welfare itself.
Our system of government is not at all perfect. And if this system alone were the end of the matter, we might have good reason to think something essential was missing. But it is my belief that the faults in the best structure the Modern Age provided can be corrected by something the Pre-Modern Age gave us…
[to be continued]
The United States is a federal government founded on a single basic principle: that there are natural laws and natural rights inherent and inalienable to all humanity. Those who would be citizens of this country (and most certainly those who would hold any office in it) must consent to this principle. And it goes without need of qualification that one of these natural rights is the right to be free from torture. Government, therefore, exists to uphold and protect such a natural right from perversion.
Those who would support the use of waterboarding against humanity know that such an agenda cannot find favor in this institution or by those who establish it so long as water-boarding is known as torture. And so instead of attempting to change the rule of law, supporters have attended to an absurd and impious scheme to change the name by which it is justly called.
Such tactic is not foreign to history or our experience of government. But we are too literate to be taken in by such moral relativism. We acknowledge not only natural right but the knowledge of that right. And so we know when natural right has been trespassed. Waterboarding is torture and by no re-definition of the name can it be accepted or supported by this government.
So do I, slaveofone, declare fraudulent and unlawful any purpose of government to support or accept waterboarding. May those who do be cut off from this land of respect for the nature and dignity of humanity.
So the Republicans in the House walked out in demonstration against Democrats willing to let the surveillance bill that protects communication companies from being sued for violation of our Constitutional rights to expire. Good. Go blow that hot fascist air out your asses, Republicans. And as for all this bullshit about putting America at risk… Who cares about terrorists destroying national security when our own rulers will freely do that for them?
My final post of 2007, Coming Soon, the Greatest Depression, was a doom and gloom prophecy about the economic state of our Union. The data which reveals the presence of a recession takes time to coalesce. When we can point at it, it has been around for awhile already. There is, however, something dubbed the Anxious Index… It was begun in 1968 to gather economic forecasts from the greatest economic minds of our time. They were asked to rate the probability of a recession in the next quarter. Only six times since 1968 has the Index predicted a recession. Only six recessions have occurred in that span of time. Every one of them occurred shortly after the prediction. This is the current Anxious Index chart. As you can see, there is a rather nasty spike occurring in January 2008 not unlike the six other spikes that predicted the six other recessions. It is quite thrilling to think that someone like me, a person who never studied economics, has no title, degree, or office, and who works a meager job in a meager land among meager people can call it as well as the smartest of the pack.
But, seriously, who does not see the signs presently? When in history have the biggest mortgage lenders in the world sold their mortgages to the second richest man in the world in order to stay afloat as is now happening? If that does not cry of desperation, then what about an economic stimulus
plan that was rushed through the biggest red tape machine in the world in a matter of weeks? And if not that, then what of two of the largest Federal Rate cuts in a row in the last quarter of a century? And if not that, then what of the U.S. economy coming to a virtual standstill in terms of growth with many large companies like GM getting ready to cut thousands of jobs? And then there is this hilarious bit of news about mortgages being frozen for a month… What is the point of that? It does nothing to deal with the problem which created the mortgage fallout. It only does two things: shortens the amount of pain immediately while prolonging the length of that pain in the long term and it gives stupid people with power who did stupid things with their power more time to try to find a way to save their asses.
I am no Republican. I have never voted Republican. But Ron Paul has my support. If you Republicans can get him on the next ballot, he will get my vote.
