The Church and Biodiversity
December 5, 2022

Your Excellency, Bishop Scharfenberger,

I hope that this finds you well. With the opening of COP 15, this year’s UN conference on biodiversity, on Wednesday in Montreal, I write with the suggestion that you speak to local news outlets on the efforts of Pope Francis to address the biodiversity catastrophe, which threatens three-quarters of a million species, including our own, with extinction.

In this season when we hear of shepherds, who protect their charges by promoting flocking behavior, there is an opportunity not only to encourage people to regard all humans as members of one flock but all living beings as members of the same flock. There is danger in admitting all, but there is certainty of disaster from excluding any. Did not God charge Noah to include one pair of every kind of unclean animal on the ark? Did God understand ecology better than the US government officials who exterminated wolves in Yellowstone, thereby degrading the ecology, let alone some homeowners in your own parishes who poison all the insects on, in, and below their lawns? Maybe the need to respect insects, along with other despised living beings, would be a good topic for sermons this holiday season.

If you speak out, you will be setting a good example for so many, including your fellow shepherds.

You might enjoy my relevant poem “Deletion,” to which I link at the bottom of the page www.godispoor.org. I was amazed that this URL was available, as was the ironic godispoor.com.

I wish you a truly blessed holiday season.

Yours in the only God, Who is love, regardless of how we number that God’s incarnations,
James

Laudato si' and COP 15
December 7, 2022

Your excellency, Bishop Scharfenberger,

I write to follow up on my message of yesterday. I always hope that my words will persuade merely through the ideas they convey, but to recognize that the ideas merit consideration, the reader may be assisted by the form in which my thoughts are presented. Therefore, I share with you the sonnet below, which I wrote down rather quickly just now. You know as well as I that the argument is not between religion and secularism, let alone good and evil, but between stoicism and Platonism on the one hand and epicureanism and empiricism on the other. Therefore, let’s all come together. Please help save our species and three-quarters of a million others by speaking out during COP 15, which starts today, using the text provided by Pope Francis in Laudato si’.

Heaven Without God
(2022/12/07)

We live in such an age of anomie
With science telling how we came to be,
And still we have some parents kicking out
Their children for the crime of sticking out
And making godly people turn their heads.
Meanwhile the future holds so many dreads,
We need to find a way to maintain hope.
It's physics that can save, if not the Pope,
For all of this could simulation be,
A game wherein we let our minds run free,
But such a people as could build the game
Would make the stakes of playing none too tame.
I’m staking my life after this game’s done
On loving all that lives, exploiting none.

Yours in the God Who is love and Who is everywhere,
James

COP 15 and Your Website
December 8, 2022

Your excellency, Bishop Scharfenberger,

I hope that all is well on this second day of COP 15, the UN Biodiversity Conference. In addition to speaking to the media on Pope Francis’s teachings concerning the need to preserve biodiversity, as I asked you to do in my earlier messages, you might add a prominent link on your website to the relatively new video of Pope Francis’s efforts to save as much life on this planet as possible, including our own species: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rps9bs85BII

Have you asked parishioners to watch this video of Pope Francis? I think it would change hearts. It seems a shame that it has only 8 million views on YouTube, despite having been available for two months.

I just reviewed mentions of the word “Laudato,” from the title of the Pope’s letter, “Laudato Si,” on rcda.org. I found it in a PDF on faith formation, another on the Synod, and in many editions of a weekly circular, but not featured anywhere. Further, the word “biodiversity” does not appear on rcda.org at all, according to Google. Given the existential risk to our species and three-quarters of a million others, the threat posed by economic activity to life on this planet might be a good topic for discussion.

One message that might be issued to supplement the video is that preserving nonhuman life, and hence enhancing our own survival prospects, is not an activity to be conducted just in places of great natural beauty but everywhere. For example, to save the rainforest in Brazil from passing its imminent point of no return, thereby averting a tragic loss of biological complexity and a perilous emission of sequestered carbon, the most important thing we can do is to eat far less beef. For other reasons, lamb and pork are best consumed sparingly. I think Catholics would be delighted to embrace these changes in behavior as sacrifices they can make for the good of all, though I can tell you that once I stopped eating beef, I quickly stopped wanting it. Your parishioners may merely need to be asked, assuming you have not done this already.

I find that my ignorance of German may have made me seem impertinent in referring to shepherds in an earlier message. I had no idea that “shepherd” is the meaning of “berger.” My own name, “Walsh,” means “stranger” or “foreigner,” which perhaps can be extended to the sense “outsider.” I find it delightful that we have both lived up to our names in our professional choices.

Yours in the God Who is omniscient because Ki sees through all eyes,
James

Aid in Promoting Pope Francis's Film
December 9, 2022

Your excellency, Bishop Scharfenberger,

On this third day of COP 15, the UN Biodiversity Conference, I’d like to give my analysis of the troubles that may inhibit you from making yourself available for interviews by media outlets to promote Pope Francis’s film, The Letter, and suggest a solution.

The Catholic Church in the United States has always stood on three legs: moral authority, economic power, and political power. The moral authority derived from good works, education provided in parochial schools and other religious instruction, and a strict moral code. The economic power arose from healthcare, real estate, and donations. The political power came from elected and unelected officials loyal to the Church and the need for other politicians to gain the blessing of Church leaders.

Each leg reinforced the others. The moral authority and political power enhanced the economic power in many ways, including in suppression of unions in your shops. The economic and political power buttressed the moral authority by making it extremely unwise to speak against the teachings of the Church. The moral authority and economic power were the reason politicians needed your blessing.

Incidentally, as an Irish-American, I know that I owe my freedom from the racial oppression my forebears suffered in large part to this three-legged power structure.

The Church has sawed off much of the moral authority leg by its response to child sexual abuse by priests, including through its ongoing policies. It is risible to say that the Church followed the advice of psychologists in not calling the police. Would that the Church followed the advice of psychologists in its teachings on the morality of legal sexual activity. Those of us whose homes were regularly visited in our childhood by clergy and religious known to have coddled monsters are deprived, by your refusal to release suitably redacted files, of information that would enable us to set our minds somewhat more at ease concerning the visitors’ other activities. Furthermore, have you apologized to people who now know that they confessed their sins to vampires who preyed on pain?

The economic leg is severely threatened. As the reputation of the Church continues to decline, people will increasingly avoid businesses owned by the Catholic Church when they can. I expect that your secret records contain reports of abuse in hospitals. Monsters enjoy dominating the helpless, and hospitals are target-rich environments for this kind of predation. The Church increased the density of monsters working in its hospitals by assigning predatory priests to them in an effort to protect parishioners. The Church is also being forced to sell real estate as parishioners fall away.

Political power stands on sand in the best of times, individual people being analogous to grains of sand that will move aside when you try to press down on them. It was change in the hearts of voters that enabled Nelson Rockefeller to thumb his nose at you after your man Malcolm Wilson elevated him to power. Today, you have five or six seats on the Supreme Court and a highly unfavorable outcome in the midterm elections.

The solution to your problems is surrender and consolidation. Make the other two legs as short as the moral authority leg has become. Sell the hospitals, give the money to the poor or plaintiffs, and convert the other healthcare properties into a REIT with no mention of Catholicism. Over time, you will be able to advance again, as your good name returns.

Enter a period of discernment in politics. Keep your powder dry for when you’ll need it.

Above all, race to settle the lawsuits. By surrendering, you put the onus on the opposing lawyers to treat you fairly. Even if they don’t, you will benefit by being able to say in the future that you willingly submitted. The more you suffer economically, the greater the restoration to the leg of moral authority.

The key lesson of three-legged supports is that the legs must be of nearly equal length. It does not matter if they are short, because short structures with three legs are useful in ways that tall ones are not, just as the reverse is also true. You can’t milk a cow while sitting on a bar stool.

Yours in the God clever enough to surrender when fighting will avail less,
James

Useful Article and Field Trip
December 10, 2022

Your excellency, Bishop Scharfenberger,

On this first Saturday of COP 15, the UN Biodiversity Conference, I have three suggestions for advancing the intentions of Pope Francis as expressed in Laudato Si and The Letter (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rps9bs85BII).

First, there is an excellent article that you might read in today’s New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/12/09/climate/biodiversity-habitat-loss-climate.html

It is not just your parishioners who are behind on the latest information supporting the wisdom of Pope Francis. The opinion editors of The New York Times behave as if they never read the work of their colleagues in the news division, judging by their continued support for economic growth in rich countries, which drives the biodiversity, climate, water, and soil crises. Pope Francis, himself, will eventually recognize the importance of population issues, which the article  mentions, too.

The importance of biodiversity to human survival is explained in this paragraph from the article:

It’s not only wildlife that will suffer as a result. Biodiversity loss can trigger ecosystem collapse, scientists say, threatening humanity’s food and water supplies. Alarm is growing that the threat is comparable in significance to the climate crisis.

Second, habitat loss to consumption of beef and lamb, which require far more land in their production to yield the same amount of nutrition than other food, can be difficult to see, but there is a revolting example of the appropriation of land for other economic purposes in Slingerlands at the end of Vista Boulevard, behind the Shop Rite. Low-slung buildings are going up, each with a parking lot. Roads and broad stretches of grass are replacing meadow and forest, as if the humans hated living beings. I wonder if you would be as disgusted as I by the sight. The same purposes could be served with development that did not require nearly so much land if our society were less car-centric. A visit might be edifying

Third, given the need to educate everyone, each person in a way that they will heed, perhaps a reading of an article such as the one to which I link above could be added to Sunday services. This would greatly improve humanity’s survival prospects. I’ll share a poem from my memoir. It can be read with the idea in mind that what currently separates people of good will is the ancient argument between stoicism and Platonism on one hand and Epicureanism and empiricism on the other, to which I alluded in an earlier message. Incidentally, please share anything you might care to concerning this argument, as you have, no doubt, studied philosophy far more than I.

Early Morning Walk in Blistering Heat

(June 6, 2021)

Do I strike you, while grizzled veteran of this brutal land,
As someone who can e’er be found with too few grains of salt?
Well, once I was, for I was young,
And my adults gave me ideas,
Instead of far more useful doubt.
The ones with faith, they said,
Were ones to care about,
And faith they called the greatest gift,
One which one could not hope repay,
So gifted people should receive
My kindness and my love.
Let’s make the high place higher,
So when the push comes to a shove,
We can be sure a strong man’s hand
Will nestle in our glove.

“But all the rest,” the creed ones cry,
“We help so hard to see the light.
“Our God is love, so just and bright.
“He has a plan to care for you,
“If you’ll believe in Him,
“You filthy
“Do I have to say it?
“You really would make me say it,
“Wouldn’t you? Just goes to show,
“Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

Of course, there are fine folks who think
That everyone should think as they.
I just don’t think that God would want
Us all to be the same.

And let’s suppose some faith is true,
The only truth that can exist,
Thank God that some of us think wrong.
If apples were the only fruit that kept the doc away,
And everyone thought they should eat
An apple every day,
We’d fast run short of places to grow apples and
We’d even risk to lose the wisdom of the pear,
Which might not bar the doctor from our door,
But tastes all right to me.

And longer that I dare to live,
The more I see that those who pears prefer
Do care at least as much as those
Who apples claim their only fruit
About what’s true and just.

The truth is that the guy on last night’s bus
Who told me that he lost
With twenty to the dealer’s twenty-one
To get some sympathy he was allowed to seek
And who told me that only two
Had died of covid in our state
When asked to raise his mask
May need a priest to tell him what’s the score.

And Father thinks this all to be unfair.
“Hey, I’ll show him, that horrid man.
“I’ll have a scientist
“Come in to preach next week.”

I hope these thoughts will be of great use to you. Thank you for your time.

Yours in the God Who likes more than one kind of fruit,
James

COP 15 and Christina
December 11, 2022

Your excellency, Bishop Scharfenberger,

On this first Sunday of COP 15, the UN Biodiversity Conference, I’d like to share with you below a lightly edited version of a message I wrote last night to another about an apparently homeless woman named Christina. As you know, Pope Francis’s film The Letter is eloquent about poverty, though I don’t remember whether he emphasizes that our civilization is threatened by excessive wealth disparity, an element of the global polycrisis. If our planetary technological civilization falls, an event that threatens to be in progress by mid-century, few people, if any, will survive. Few are doing enough to help the poor or avert disaster in the myriad other ways we need. I’m not, though I’m trying. I hope you will speak out this week.

By the way, the largest source of the global polycrisis is excessive economic activity. Why are we still eating beef and lamb? Why are we flying other than for extremely important purposes, let alone pleasure cruising at all? Why do we buy things we don’t need or versions of things we do that require resource-intensive manufacture? Why do we not drive ourselves as little as possible and instead sing the praises of public transportation, a mode of travel that affords the luxury of being driven by a professional and causes people with different amounts of wealth to rub elbows, experience each other as people, and therefore move in their hearts closer to joining together to overcome the systemic problems that threaten us and of which Pope Francis’s film warns?

Thank you for your time.

Yours in the God Who rides each bus in every person on it,
James

Letter about Christina:

I need to tell, and think it might be useful for you to know, about Christina, who sleeps rough on Madison Avenue in front of the New York State Museum at the Swan Street end. She sleeps some distance from the wall but out of the way of pedestrians.

Tonight, it was too cold to pass her by without stopping. She was sitting up in a sleeping bag. I squatted down and asked whether she was all right, giving my name. When she didn’t respond, I asked whether she needed anything. She unfurled a looseleaf page torn from a spiral-bound notebook and attached to her shopping cart. It said, “Lost wallet. Need help.” I said, “Sure,” pulled my wallet from my backpack, and rooted in it. I thought I had to give her $5, not $1, so I gave her $10. I know from alienation, so I said once again that I was James. She perked up, giving her name and said it was great about the $10. I said, “My pleasure,” wished her happy holidays, and left.

At some point, I had said that it was very cold and that I was worried. She pointed to the layers of clothing around her. I said that of course she knew what she was doing; she had been there before. Soon after I left, I wondered whether she would have been more likely to survive the night if I had given her $20 or pointed out that the Empire State Plaza Concourse across the street was still open and would be for three or so more hours.

Later, I hoped she would go get coffee. Still later, I thought she had very good taste in places to sleep rough, in front of the 18th-largest library in the world in collection size. I thought she was likely a member of my tribe, the lengthily educated, but my tribe should be all life.

Just now, I was watching the version of “War Pigs” from The End, the recent Black Sabbath concert movie, which is sublime. The audience reaction shots are searing. Lately, it has actually started to mean something to me that Ozzy loves me. Back in the day, that seemed childish. Maybe because I need to go to sleep and Christina is probably still out there, I thought of writing you.

[omitted]

It occurred to me that where Christina sleeps is also close to the Purple Heart, Women’s Combat Veterans, and Missing Persons monuments and across the street from the seat of state government. Is Christina a helpless, alienated person or a powerful performance artist teaching all of us? How could she not be both? Do you see how I understand God and why I say I’m not religious? Religion is used too often to jail God in a building so we won’t feel Ki all the time. Who wants to feel when there are things to be done?

[omitted]

Happy holidays.

Best wishes,
James

P.S. I'm just now noticing the first six letters of Christina's name. Isn't it clearly pantheism, His statement about the King, that what we do to the least of these is what we do to the King? Jesus was clearly trying to subvert social rank as a feature of civilization and rewrite the Ten Commandments to protect the vulnerable. Then we got Christ, a Greek idea. Okay, in my opinion.

COP 15 and Calls for Vocations
December 12, 2022

Your excellency, Bishop Scharfenberger,

On this first Monday of COP 15, the UN Biodiversity Conference, I am thinking about my Uncle Bill, who passed away yesterday. He worked extremely hard, had three children, and bought lots of stuff. In other words, he did exactly what he had been told was the right thing, may he rest in peace and furthermore receive what he wanted. The problem is that we have entered a regime on this planet in which his lifestyle hastens our species and perhaps a million others to extinction.

I wonder what you think the practical purposes of convents and monasteries were. Among them was regulation of economic activity. When things started to go badly, as they always do under the burden on the environment of human population growth and the consequent increase in consumption of the finite resources of any region, the call would go out: We have strayed from God’s path and must call upon his infinite mercy to save us! Look in your hearts for a vocation to religious life!

Not coincidentally, religious life entailed vows of poverty and chastity, in other words, promises to reduce consumption of resources. Religious life is an obvious negative feedback mechanism for resource utilization, as is necessary for a species that lacks adequate predation upon it, as ours very much does. If the concept of predation adequacy is foreign to you, consider that excessive growth is fatal in many contexts. Just as excessive growth of human population leads to ecosystem collapse, the failure of cell death is the source of cancer, which leads to bodily collapse.

Today, I have many feelings, but sadness for Uncle Bill’s passing is not strong among them. Uncle Bill lived a long life and perhaps got what he wanted. If so, I’m happy for him. It’s true that he didn’t want everything I might have wanted him to want, but the fact that people want legal things we don’t want them to want and don’t want legal things we want them to want, is the situation I want, and want you to want, as well. The alternative is the blancmange humanity, a uniform mass lacking complexity and hence robustness, let alone flavor.

Thank you for your time.

Yours in the God Who issues calls for vocations when the drought enters its third year,
James

Pope Francis and Today's Fusion Announcement
December 13, 2022

Dear Bishop Scharfenberger,

On this first Tuesday of COP 15, the UN Biodiversity Conference, there is a great opportunity for you to speak out in support of the message of Pope Francis in Laudato Si and The Letter. A major advance in fusion research is to be announced today, and some will speak of it as a possible solution to the problems humanity has caused by abusing less powerful life, both human and non-human. While practical fusion energy is the Holy Grail, so to speak, of energy research, Pope Francis is correct in saying that we must increase the respect we show less powerful beings in order to survive. The opportunity for you lies in relaying this message to news outlets, local and national.

Years ago, I would have greeted news of a fusion breakthrough by burbling about the promise of unlimited, clean power, just as this scientist did on NBC Nightly News last night in response to leaks ahead of today’s official announcement. However, as we see in the story of the Tower of Babel, an example Pope Francis gives in The Letter, excessive power in the hands of humanity is catastrophic because we don’t know when to stop building. The result is the catastrophe of unlimited success, which is ecological collapse and hence the end of the civilization that was proudly destroying less powerful beings to create what it thought best. Yes, God does know better than scientists, as some religionists have maintained all along, to their credit. Some of us know this from recent scientific results in ecology, for example.

It is ironic that reductionist science arguably developed from monotheism, which promotes the paradigm of a supernatural being from whom radiate chains of dependencies of meaning, that the rejection of monotheism demands a thought framework in which meaning emerges from the complexity of a web of dependencies, that the reconceptualization through webs in place of chains gives science insight to much that was hidden under linear models, and that what was hidden turns out to have been explained quite clearly in The Holy Bible, a foundation for monotheism, but one written during the transition from the complexity of polytheism to the linearity of monotheism. Now Pope Francis is preaching about the need to respect all life and limit ourselves, as the ancients knew we must, thereby giving hope that civilization will not fall this time around, the way it did in the story because of the construction of the Tower of Babel and the city surrounding it.

I wonder if that makes clear the message you might bring to the public today. Insofar as fusion energy would encourage people to engage in still more economic growth on this planet groaning from the burden we already place upon it, practical fusion power, if it ever came about, would make our problems still worse. We would destroy even more life upon which we depend.

Some people from each faith tradition and none at all have been crying out about God’s wisdom in creating our world, meaning primarily its life, and our foolishness in disregarding God. Here is a clip from the Terry Gilliam movie Time Bandits in which Evil dismisses slugs. This is exactly the kind of foolishness Pope Francis talks about in The Letter. The ending of Time Bandits is about the peril of consumerism. The hero’s parents are destroyed by the evil within something they have purchased without real need, sold on the empty promise of buying stuff, parodied earlier in the movie when the most valuable object in the world turns out to be a kitchen appliance in the fortress of Evil.

Incidentally, I know a desperately poor person who buys unnecessary kitchen appliances. I understand one reason she might be doing this. It may give her the feeling that she is doing the right thing, that she has a place in our society. It is hideous that we signal such ideas.

To me, the most eloquent statement for saving life from the ravages of economic growth is The Pirate Planet, a Doctor Who serial from 1979 written by Douglas Adams, a proselytizing atheist and passionate Earth protector. Besides decrying destruction of the living world, it contains what a sufficiently imaginative viewer might find to be a parody of trinitarian models of God. However, the point is that all the destruction of Nature is in service of the vain attempt to live forever, an idea for which evidence has been developed scientifically by people like Prof. Sheldon Solomon of Skidmore, who seems himself not to be a fan of Catholicism.

Do you see what impact you could have if you went on CNN in the coming days to proclaim that Pope Francis and British humorists from the ‘70s and ‘80s agree on the main point, that in order to survive, if not more simply to be decent people, we must respect all living beings? That would be so beautiful. Please do this.

Yours in the subset of people whose eyes will tear up today over mankind’s destructive foolishness,
James

P.S. I am available to work on talking points. There is much more to say. I wrapped this message where I did because I was tearing up hard and hoped that you would experience a similar emotional crescendo. Think of the educational effect of the cognitive dissonance you could generate by going on CNN or Fox News to promote a film by Pope Francis with clips from a Terry Gilliam movie. Even the opinion pages of The New York Times are impregnable at this point to the idea that we must throttle back economic growth. You would be bringing a neglected message to the public in a way that would have news outlets begging for you to appear. Incidentally, I studied education at the College of Saint Rose in between bouts of training in physics and complexity science. I know something about how to create teachable moments, as you do, as well.

COP 15 and Groundskeeping
December 14, 2022

Your excellency, Bishop Scharfenberger,

As the second week dawns of COP 15, the UN Biodiversity Conference, I have good news. You can improve the situation for God’s creation in a meaningful way unilaterally, by changing how the grounds of the diocese’s many properties are maintained.

Monoculture farming entails creating deserts for most life forms. It is the variety of plants in a meadow that supports a similar diversity in the insect life of the area. A system with diverse elements is more robust than a homogeneous one. As conditions change, the system can respond by growing in some of its elements and shrinking in others. Even in farming, the fact that we grow few varieties of crops, choosing the ones that produce the greatest amount of the qualities we value most, leaves us excessively vulnerable to blights. This is not a subject I’ve looked into deeply, but here’s an article I’ve started to read on an example of which I was aware, the banana.

Our largest crop in this country is lawns. Not only do we cut the range of insects unsuited to life in lawns by growing them in the first place, but also, to get results we value when cultivating grass, we poison what insect life can subsist in the monoculture. While I invite you to consult experts, there is a simple solution: Prescribe less what grows. Rather, leave it in God’s hands.

Redefine what is a weed, limiting application of the word to growth that is agreed by society to be dangerous. When such plants appear, pluck them out promptly. Do not send them to therapy or call them servants of the Paraclete. Pluck them out.

Opinions will vary on the danger posed by many plants previously classed as weeds. Let there be discussion about their merits and dangers. Participate in this discussion. However, cultivate your respect for the wisdom of God made manifest in the appearance of the plant in what had been lawn, and moderate the respect you have for your ability to condemn plants as weeds.

There is an obvious analogy to matters of sexuality and reproduction. Each of us has opinions on what is proper. It might help for me to share that I strongly disapprove of some activities that are legal. Advocates of sexual freedom in general discourage legal behavior that is physically dangerous. I revile sexuality between people holding wildly dissimilar amounts of power, a situation I consider inherently coercive, though even I recognize the issues involved of degrees and nature of power. It is not only Pope Francis who expresses disapproval of my thoughtful, morally motivated choice not to have children. The opinion pages of The New York Times regularly slap me for leaving more resources for the offspring of others and for nonhuman life, without which none of us survives, by sacrificing the advantages of reproducing.

The correct path is to proclaim that more is to be left in God’s hands, meaning the individual judgments of people, similar as they are to processes we cannot fathom that cause one plant rather than another to grow in a particular spot. God’s way of messy chaos, of fearless acceptance punctuated by swift remediation in cases of danger, promotes robustness and resilience of the system, not to go all Jerzy Kosinski on you.

Speaking of the need to avoid sexuality in the presence of extreme power differentials and leaving things in God’s hands, how did Jesus achieve orgasm? I’m reminded of a bit from The Simpsons, in which Homer is offered the opportunity to vent radioactive gas as part of his duties as a safety officer at a nuclear power plant. When, of course, he refuses, he is informed that venting radioactive gas prevents explosion. He reconsiders and vents the gas. In fairness, this is a fart joke, but I contend that it is a profound and edifying fart joke.

We arrive at the question of whether anything we read among the sayings of Jesus is a joke. Father James Martin has spoken of the humor in the preaching of Jesus. As an expert in rhetoric, you must be aware of the importance of dynamic affective range in your presentations. Humor helps to provide this. Picture Jesus preaching: Earnest, serious, earnest, “If your eye offends you, pluck it out.” Not only is that a great laugh line, but also it sets up a call-back at the end of the sermon, a technique that lends resonance to speeches, as you know.

Therefore, I implore you to support Pope Francis’s initiative on biodiversity by adopting the principle of leaving things in God’s hands, whether they be the expressions of Nature to be seen in the plants that grow on the diocese’s properties or the expressions of Nature in the legal sexual and reproductive choices of your parishioners and people more generally. Reap best by cultivating least. Just be sure to pluck your eyes out when you’re done.

Yours in the God Who laughs immoderately from time to time,
James

COP 15 and Virtue
December 15, 2022

Your excellency, Bishop Scharfenberger,

On this second Thursday of COP 15, the UN Biodiversity Conference, I would like to suggest that you read this excellent piece from The New York Times to get ideas for talking points to use when speaking to the press in support of the efforts of Pope Francis in Laudato Si and The Letter to promote biodiversity and the welfare of poor people. Today, I suggest other talking points, some of them presaged by yesterday’s message.

I wrote you yesterday about the need to accept more and simultaneously to pluck out promptly that which is not to be accepted. Obviously, acceptance of some things does not preclude rejection of others, but somehow the idea has arisen that some strategies are virtuous and others vicious, as if the need to do one thing under a particular set of circumstances implies that the opposite of that thing is wrong, regardless of alteration in circumstance.

Faith benefits people by enabling them to charge forward, certain that they are on the right course and therefore progressing rapidly. Doubt benefits people by helping them perceive the need to slow down or change course.

Hope helps people stay active despite adversity. Fear motivates people to reduce activity that might lead to harm.

Charity is people helping others, promoting their own well-being in the process by strengthening society. Tending to one’s own interests, on the other hand, enables one’s own survival and growth.

Love creates cohesion in a group, strengthening it. Rage motivates and disinhibits when change must be advocated.

Creating children and refraining from creating children are both intrinsically good, a wisdom reflected in the Church’s promotion of both parenthood and religious life. Those who do not create children leave more resources for the children of others and for nonhuman life, especially economically undervalued life, the suffering and destruction of which is the biodiversity crisis. Without the living beings we foolishly despise, none survive.

Life is intrinsically good. Death is good as well because in any finite system, new life cannot arise without the passing away of current life. In the body, insufficient cell death is called cancer. For Earth, reduction of disease, war, and other sources of human death have magnified the burden of our species on the finite resources available, displacing other life and endangering a vast number of species, including our own. We can be many, or we can be rich. We can’t be both. Anyone willing to pursue a low-consumption lifestyle or refrain from having children should be thanked, as those in religious life very much were in ages past, not castigated as they are now from many quarters.

Stability is good for many purposes. Change is necessary for survival. I applaud the Church for providing friction that reduces the rate of change, and I applaud popular culture for providing lubricant that increases the rate of change.

Respect for more powerful beings promotes efficiency in achieving a goal. Respect for less powerful beings is intrinsically good and promotes robustness and resilience.

Vice is any virtue embraced to an excessive degree.

I have devised a simple game called Opposite Adages to illustrate the fact that the opposite of a virtue is also a virtue. This point may be lost on many people due to the well-intentioned but false belief that everyone errs in the same direction. For example, the conscientious, thoughtful person who is bombarded continually with messages to be more careful is harmed grievously. This person may be forced either to stop listening or to seize up, losing the ability to act. As a teacher, I have counseled certain students to be less careful because they were spending too much time on a given task and, mostly in vain, have counseled teachers to counsel appropriately selected students likewise.

The source of our troubles as I see it is not vice, an excess of some of virtue, so much as it is a deficiency in all virtues among well-off people that has resulted from addiction to the consumption of resources. Life is made insipid by the drive to gain possessions and is made more difficult as people create scarcity by working as hard as they can to convert Nature’s bounty into the contents of landfills. In response, people attempt to give life flavor by seeking still more vigorously to gain possessions and are forced to work even harder to obtain the necessities of life in the environment of scarcity.

This is neither vice nor virtue. It is a drugged stupor, perhaps the same one described at the top of the story of Noah in the phrase about the imaginations of all the people being only evil all the time.

In the past, consumption pressure would have been reduced by war, disease, famine, and deaths of despair. However, nuclear weapons, modern medicine, and resource-intensive farming practices, respectively, have reduced the effectiveness of the first three negative-feedback mechanisms to rein in consumption of resources, allowing the pressure to build and putting us at risk of the collapse of our civilization via the climate, biodiversity, soil, and water crises, which could come to a climax in a variety of ways, including, for example, nuclear war resulting from acrimony over competition for resources.

I therefore suggest that you talk through the media to as many people as possible, bringing the following message. First, many people in rich countries have neglected Christian virtues in a drugged haze of resource consumption. Second, the same people have neglected the opposites of those same virtues, made complacent by that same drug. Third, the hope of Catholicism is not an Apocalypse in which all non-Christians are destroyed, leaving Earth to the survivors, which would be genocide, but in fact is whatever it is in fact. Fourth, there are practical steps everyone can take in their own lives to reduce the harm they do, thereby encouraging other people and the governments they all elect to do the same, namely refraining from eating beef and lamb, reducing their consumption of other meats, sharply reducing all the ways in which they give rise to the burning of fossil fuels, reducing the pronatalism in their hearts, buying less, wasting less, and above all, increasing the respect they hold for less powerful beings, both human and nonhuman.

A short version is, “Less money, more love, tell others.” Your expertise in message-crafting might improve on this.

I tried to consult the Catechism on the third point, the nature of the Apocalypse, and found that the Bride will descend from heaven after God defeats evil. I’m entirely confused, because I thought of the Bride of Christ as the Church. I didn’t find the groom specified. I’d turn on cable news again to get clarification, if you would bring it. I’m sure many others would, too.

Thank you for your time. Good luck in your preaching.

Yours in the God Who seeks moderation and balance to survive, if not merely to be just,
James

P.S. I hope I didn’t keep you in suspense by delaying dispatch of today’s message. I was up a bit late because I was enjoying the company of family. Your life has been dedicated to the principles, “Less money, more love, tell others.” Mine might have been to a greater degree if people in my life, motivated by a misunderstanding of God’s will, hadn’t encouraged me quite so vigorously all along to shut up. I would be sorry to impose on you by venting on this point, but is not personal revelation how we tender evidence of our good will to others so inclined? I hope you have a good day.

COP 15, Pope Francis, Math, and Popular Culture
December 16, 2022

Your excellency, Bishop Scharfenberger,

On this second Friday of COP 15, the UN Biodiversity Conference, I’d like to share a specific example of what I consider useful presentations to media outlets in support of the message of Pope Francis in Laudato Si’ and The Letter. Your own presentation will no doubt be different, but here’s one that unites a man-bites-dog quality, the communication of at least one thing the audience does not know and may find interesting, and a strong connection to the current moment, in this case the days leading up to Christmas.

Two days ago, I finished watching an excellent documentary about the misery created for everyone involved, regardless of wealth, by the pursuit of property. A woman of means who lived in a gated community, in which a second gate to seal in the most privileged denizens had been proposed, was speaking of homeschooling her children when she said, “We just don’t feel that mainstream school is a good place for kids who are even slightly above the curve.”

This comment was both delicious and tragic, because it showed that she probably didn’t grasp the mathematics she was citing to condemn her children to her tutelage in that subject and to lives isolated from information that would save them from falling into her lifestyle. It was clear that this woman would behave better toward others in a society that was just. She complained about the discrimination she faced in her gated community. She complained about the discrimination experienced by her “perfectly normal-looking, blond-head, blue-eyed, nice kids” in her gated community. I actually congratulated myself for having picked up on how obviously racist this comment was, having forgotten that the point had been explained to me before I heard the comment.

Each of us has a tiny collection of pieces of the puzzle, no matter how large one person’s collection may be compared to another’s. We must share in order to see a significant portion of the picture.

On the man-bites-dog front, mathematics can help us perceive how to value everyone. If you look at all the attributes of a person, quantified via some measure that is a proxy for the attribute and hence not so accurate or informative as many assume to justify their privilege, and you normalize them by dividing each by its average over the entire population and scaling appropriately, you generate an N-dimensional cube, where N is the number of attributes. For two attributes, the generalized cube is a square. People map close to one face of the square if they measure very high or very low in either of the attributes.

Because everyone is extreme in at least one of the many attributes people possess, everyone maps close to some nonzero number of faces of the hypercube that is the space of measurements of human attributes. Everyone is marginalized, because everyone lives close to the surface of the hypercube.

This is just another way of saying what we all know, or ought to know, that we’re all in the same boat, so let’s none of us put on airs and each of us help everyone else out. You could perhaps advise me on whether the hypercube spiel would connect with many people. The next bit gets us closer to Christmas.

People will disagree when ranking great mathematicians, but among the titans of the field across all human history is Évariste Galois. He died of a gunshot wound suffered in a duel in 1811. He was 20 years old.

I don’t know whether the last sentence stabs you through the heart the way it does me. Galois is a titan of mathematics not for his potential but for what he actually accomplished in his lifetime, which lasted barely long enough for him to begin working. If Galois had lived to a decent age, our everyday lives might be significantly different.

How does Galois connect to biodiversity and Christmas? We need to look at both the trees and the forest. How could the death of Galois have been averted? The answer is millions of ways and one way.

Perform a thought experiment by imagining details that we cannot know, subject to a principle that is obvious. Say that Galois and his killer had grown up in a less contentious and violent society. Maybe they would have settled their difference in another way.

Say that people around Galois and his killer had been nicer to them. Maybe they wouldn’t have been quite so testy.

Say that proving one’s manhood and hence reproductive suitability had been less tied to firearms and violence generally, which are to humans what fast-flowing streams and hungry bears are to salmon. Maybe they would have played a nice game of chess instead of dueling.

Say that both of them had eaten well and were therefore happier and walking around with blood-sugar levels in the optimal range on the day the duel was precipitated. There’s a reason refreshments are placed out when negotiations are conducted. Maybe less hanger, a portmanteau for anger intensified by hunger, would have averted the fateful violence.

Say that the parents and school chums of Galois and his killer had been less violent. Maybe the idea of violence, or even of giving insult, would have been farther from their minds.

It’s possible that the quarrel that took Galois so early was political in nature, but the fact that France was a colonial power, a tragedy and outrage responsible for a host of ills, from the Vietnam War to the desperate poverty in Haiti, is certainly relevant, because inhumanity on large scales is repeated across every scale in a society, due to the mathematical phenomenon of self-similarity. The state is an example to the school and to the family and to the person, all down the line, as the person helps to generate the family and the school and the state, up the line.

Why was France a colonial power? It was to buy stuff. Just as the woman in the documentary had sacrificed her own happiness by moving away from her friends and into a gated community filled with people who despised her and, in large part, each other, France had sold its soul to build palaces so large that you can lose perspective in their grand halls and begin to feel that you are looking down from a great height at a floor when you are, in fact, looking across from a great distance at a grand staircase.

Yes, I’ve enjoyed the fruits of evil, such as the Louvre. One of the things I’m doing about that is writing this message to you.

The lesson of Galois is not that we must protect great people behind gates, because we’re all in this together. Who are we to pick who’s important? Is Galois’ killer that much less important to us today than Galois himself? Sure, the significance of his killer to this story was generated by Galois, but the killer is no less important for that, nor are the parents or the school chums or the food-service workers who fed the two men. Just as we all map near the surface of the hypercube of human characteristics, no one is more than any other, unless you specify a purpose to form the basis for the comparison.

As Christmas approaches, let’s not be like the innkeeper who condemned Jesus to be born in a manger. Did the innkeeper not have a bed of his own to offer up to a woman about to risk her life in childbirth? Did he realize his mistake when the shepherds showed up to bend a knee, or did it take the kneeling of the Magi to get that point through to him?

Wise men realize that everyone is important, regardless of attributes, as are all nonhuman beings. We need all life that God has placed on Earth or permitted to arise through an evolutionary process or that is the source from which God emerges. This is the message of Pope Francis on biodiversity and poverty.

To achieve the vision of Pope Francis, the procedure is simple:

Buy less stuff, love more widely, tell everyone else.

That might be my presentation. I’d love to compare notes. Thank you for your time.

Yours in the subset of people who are quite advanced in all these ideas, yet are chuckling with delight to have somehow managed, despite copious foreshadowing, to be surprised by the source of the crisis in Season 3 of The Umbrella Academy when it was revealed at the end of Episode 4,
James

P.S. I am being entirely serious when I tell you that taking The Umbrella Academy as your text would be a brilliant move. First, there is the man-bites-dog angle of you speaking on an item of popular culture people wouldn’t expect you to invoke.

Second, the series has, at its heart, the message of Jesus that the last shall be the first, which aligns with Pope Francis’s call for respect for the poor and nonhuman life.

Third, the series pounds home the point that you endanger yourself by failing to hold love or respect in your heart for beings you assume less powerful, because power can be difficult to spot, as in the case of the innkeeper faced with Mary, citizens of wealthy countries faced with the prospect of hundreds of millions of climate refugees by mid-century, and people of low naturalistic intelligence, of whom I’m one, though I compensate with my math training, when thinking of insects.

Fourth, you can gain immediate audience respect by saying that differences between the Church and the creators of the series on points of gender, sexuality, marriage, and family structure ought to be set aside so that people of good will can join together to fight poverty and destruction of nonhuman life, that is, to fight cruelty and brutality toward economically undervalued beings imposed by economically overvalued ones.

Fifth, you can increase the Church’s moral authority in the minds of viewers by contrasting the disproportionate focus in popular culture on rich people, which is very much evident in The Umbrella Academy, with the attention Pope Francis pays to the poor. In fairness to popular culture, part of its appeal lies in escapism from the rigors of life, a respite we all need from some source on a regular basis. Furthermore, it’s easier to treat needs higher in Maslow’s hierarchy in a drama when the ones at the base are fulfilled. However, as a person who grew up on John Hughes movies, I know that popular culture could have served me, and society generally, better in developing empathy. The issue of wealth and consumption of resources is the heart of the matter you would be appearing to address, and the fact that you bring up the issue in connection with television might wake up some comfortably snoozing people of means who hadn't noticed the skew of popular culture toward wealth.

Of course, as I mentioned in an earlier message, it would help this effort for you to resolve your legal issues promptly, thereby depriving your critics of an obvious response to any moral leadership you offer, especially when it comes to deprecating wealth in our lives. It should be obvious that paying out will not only generate good will, because of which future donations will flow, but also remove a damper on current giving. In addition, as you know, the way to draw money from people of means is to project a lack of interest in the stuff. This, too, militates in favor of settling the lawsuits. I offer this advice for the benefit of all, obviously including you.

Thanks again for your time.

Final Thoughts
December 16,2022

Your excellency, Bishop Scharfenberger,

Because COP 15, the UN Biodiversity Conference, ends on Monday, I will close my series of messages to you in relation to it with this one, the second I will have sent on the second Friday of the conference. I wish you well in your deliberations on how to advance the intentions of Pope Francis with respect to biodiversity and poverty. I have only one more piece of advice to offer.

I see that you reach the age of mandatory retirement for bishops next year. If you are under orders that inhibit you from advancing the intentions of Pope Francis by speaking to the media at this time, either directly or as an unintended consequence, you have the option of retiring in protest.

I’ll attach to this message a PDF of two contemporaneous articles related to the early retirement of The Most Reverend Venerable Fulton J. Sheen from his office as Bishop of Rochester in 1969. The article about his resignation confuses me, but the account of his appearance on 60 Minutes shortly afterward might be of particular interest to you.

I am available if I can be of service. I commend you for your service and thank you for your time.

Yours in the effort to promote what is good and just,
James

Next: Book 2