Suggestions to Promote Justice and Human Survival
COP 15 Letters
January 2, 2023
Your Excellency, Bishop Scharfenberger,
I plan to publish, in some form, my recent letters to Your Excellency concerning COP 15, the UN Biodiversity Conference. Please consider writing a response, which I would be happy to include, no matter what Your Excellency saw fit to write. I was disappointed not to hear that Your Excellency had spoken to local media outlets during the conference about the relevant intentions of Pope Francis, expressed so eloquently in his film, The Letter. Perhaps Your Excellency would care to seize the opportunity to add your thoughts to my own.
The global polycrisis, of which poverty and the biodiversity crisis are elements that share their source in disrespect for less powerful beings, seems to me the direct concern of Your Excellency within the scope of the pastoral duties of Your Excellency. I watched the sermon in Saturday’s Daily Mass from the Eternal Word Television Network. Praiseworthy sentiments were expressed, as one would expect, but Father Mary also said the following:
“… but if we turn away from our faith in Jesus Christ, if we turn to a life of sin, if we love only ourselves and refuse to love others, and if we prefer the things of the world such as money, power, and pleasure over God, then we not only reject the life of God present in our souls, but we also call Christ a liar.”
There are four conditionals in this statement, but I guarantee you that a significant fraction of the faithful would understand what was said to mean that if one embraces some other model of God than the Christian one or does not use the concept of God at all to navigate life, one has chosen a life of sin and of loving themselves and no others and of preferring money, power, and pleasure to what is good and just. It might shock Father Mary to be told this, given that he did not take care to amplify his remarks to prevent this mistaken hearing of his message, but I have endured the society of people laboring under this misconception, to my misfortune. I do not think ill of Father Mary, for communication is difficult, and he did what strikes me as an otherwise mostly admirable job. Still, one hears in his words the possibility of falsely concluding that salvation is possible only through Jesus Christ.
No statement could be more evil than one claiming that salvation is possible only through Jesus Christ, in part because this idea is the germ of genocide within Christianity. If nonbelievers are irredeemable, hastening such people to their ultimate destination can be justified in the minds of less sophisticated believers when the benefit to believers seems sufficient. This hastening has happened many times in the past. Your Excellency and I owe part of the comfort we enjoy in life to past instances of this hastening.
I’m sure Your Excellency has noticed that genocide is happening right now. Humanity has known for decades that the climate crisis would harm people in poor countries sooner than people in wealthy countries. Nothing close to adequate measures have been taken to avert this. To the contrary, many people in our country fly in airplanes and sail on cruise ships purely for fun, needlessly exacerbating the deadly toll on the poor. The views of Pope Francis seem to be in line with my own, though he does not explicitly connect his own ideas to the dot of genocide. Perhaps some believe that slaughter of a genus of humans is genocide only when speeches are made to the effect that this slaughter is the desired outcome. In that case, clarification of the meaning of “genocide” might be in order, or the prepending of a phrase like “reckless indifference” or “depraved indifference” might snap people’s minds into focus.
Your excellency might object that many Christians are at risk from the climate crisis and the global polycrisis as a whole, but once people get the idea that some groups of people or other living beings are expendable, the resulting habit of mind generalizes. After all, the loved ones of those with minds infected by this evil have benefited from it in the past, haven’t they? Here I’ll share something I wrote to a relative recently.
“You're a good person. My concern for you is that you are focused on the well-being of your family but not on the world in which you will all have to live. You are focused on the trees, not the forest. I recommend paying attention to both. Religious faith gives people a direction in which to proceed and reduces inhibitions against doing so. This permits fast progress at the price of reduced skepticism and fewer second thoughts, which become vital as the progress of the faithful starts to overburden the natural environment in the catastrophe of unlimited success, a horror that has happened many times over millennia.
“I'll give you an example of the harm religion can do. My partner and their brother have included me the past several years in their tradition of watching The Muppet Christmas Carol on the night before Christmas. This year, I was struck, perhaps not for the first time, by the name of Scrooge's dead business partner, who is being tortured for eternity. In the original story, that partner is named Jacob. Scrooge's business partner would have been understood to have been Jewish. Think of how the story would have played in the minds of most of the nineteenth-century English-speaking audience: Scrooge was saved by Christian faith, which was inaccessible to Jacob Marley, a Jew.
“Incidentally, the word "gentleman" is connected to "gentile," as you may know. (Compare word origins at https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/english/gentile_1?q=gentile and https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/english/gentle?q=gentle.) The concept of gentility is religiocentric in origin. It's the "one of us" concept, and the us, regardless of defining characteristic, will always justify taking a bigger share of the resources than is left for them. This is how some survive the bad times and is the basis of genocide, which has been perpetrated many times by Christians and appears to be the desired result of historical progress for those Christians who look forward to a world purged of others by the Apocalypse. I congratulate us both on escaping Christianity.
“Why is this significant today? First, the goddamn British were exploiting non-Christians, secure in the knowledge that doing so was the only way to save the souls of the heathen. If Britain was enriched in the process, well, that was just evidence of God's favor for the project. If you think me small to bring this up so long after the fact, consider that no one's giving the money back.
“Religiocentrism is an evil that works even within Christianity, as you know. A Christmas Carol was issued shortly before the Great Hunger, the horror of which was greatly magnified by the goddamn British, who had already mixed the blood of our ancestors into the mortar that held their Downton Abbeys together. The result of British oppression in general, and its magnification of the harm of the Great Hunger in particular, is, among many other things, the bizarre ways of the O'Brien-Lyons family, our common relatives. Anglicans felt authorized by God to exploit Catholics.
“Religion is being used in the same way today to support the interests of the wealthy and powerful. More generally, it is good for religion to act as a source of friction against change, just as it is good for people who live outside faith to provide lubrication to increase the rate of change. It is the duty of clear-thinking, courageous people of good will to pay attention to what's going on in the world so that they will judge correctly when it is time to switch strategies from inhibiting to promoting change.
“You might be interested in my latest essay, which the local paper published on Christmas Eve. Here's a link on the global polycrisis, which I mention: https://cascadeinstitute.org/technical-paper/what-is-a-global-polycrisis/”
To be clear, I specify the goddamn[ed] British because I have in mind the economic vampires among the larger set of Britons across the centuries, not all the members of the larger set. I also recognize that readers might come away with a different impression than the one I intended. As I remarked above, communication is difficult: Precision must be balanced with accessibility, lest expressions become too cumbersome. Jesus Himself is reported to have said words to the effect that no one comes to the Father but through Him. For the many of us who have no interest in the model of God as a father, the truth is obvious that the approaches to other aspects or understandings of, or dwelling places within, God are accessible through other means. Either Jesus had this in mind and would agree, or He wasn’t an incarnation of any god I could respect. I’d be happy to say this to any entity, natural or otherwise, regardless of consequences to myself, if speaking would serve a good purpose, for I value truth over safety and, sometimes, the well-being of others over my own.
Incidentally, man’s inhumanity to man springs from the fact that mankind lacks adequate predation upon it and must therefore prey upon itself. So much can be understood simply by recognizing that we inhabit a finite planet and that technology offers benefits that are likewise finite. The division in the Catholic Church is an emergent phenomenon that bids to serve the evil purpose of enabling wealthy Christians to benefit from the catastrophe that is only beginning and the peril to themselves of which they underestimate. With great respect, Your Excellency, each and every person of sufficient cleverness, sophistication, courage, and decency must speak out now in order to continue to regard themselves as possessing all of these characteristics. I know that it is difficult to change strategies, but I have faith in your ability to see the need to do so and to accomplish the task.
I thank Your Excellency for the time Your Excellency has spent with my ideas. I would be honored to receive the thoughts of Your Excellency, still more so if Your Excellency would care to authorize their inclusion with the published letters. I engage to include any contribution from Your Excellency sight unseen and without comment of my own.
Yours in the process that is God,
James
P.S. I hope that Your Excellency is being visited by worthier ante-Christs—please note the spelling—than I. It’s been obvious since I was a child that what I communicate tends not to be understood, but occasionally I’m reminded that this is no reason to stop trying. I decided to eat and watch YouTube before sending the above to you, and the YouTube AI provided me with the piece from last night’s 60 Minutes on COP 15. I highly recommend it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TqhcZsxrPA
P.P.S. Any scholarship I have gained, while fact-checking this message, on Jewish names in A Christmas Carol is amateurish and incomplete, but that's part of the point. Everyone reasons from incomplete knowledge of the world, so the possibility of fostering genocidal intent must be rigorously and vocally guarded against. It turns out that "Ebenezer" also has Hebrew origins. The fact remains, however, that one of two miserly, inhumane money-lenders with Jewish names is reformed by Christianity. The other is tortured after failing to avail himself of Christian virtues, which obviously have included the preference for Christians to prosper over others. Dickens knew his audience. After all, Christian names were available for the characters, but that would have made them gentlemen.
Suggestions on the Global Polycrisis
January 4, 2023
Your Excellency, Bishop Scharfenberger,
Happy Perihelion Day! I was just made aware that today is the day of closest approach of the Earth to the Sun. Some people believe that variation in distance to the Sun causes the seasons, despite knowing that winter in the Northern Hemisphere is simultaneous with summer in the Southern Hemisphere. By not considering one thing they know in relation to another, they fail to detect a misconception. Each of us holds a tiny number of pieces of a gargantuan puzzle. I have sought to serve Your Excellency by holding up my own for inspection by Your Excellency.
For a long time, I’ve been considering the situation near the Division Street bus station in Schenectady, and I think that it provides an admirable case study relevant to my project of improving near-term survival prospects for humanity. Saint Luke’s Catholic Church stands on one side of the street and a mosque on the other. Here is an appropriate link to Google Streetview: https://www.google.com/local/place/fid/0x89de72060230dadb:0x31e2fc5e2d9cae76/photosphere?iu=https://streetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com/v1/thumbnail?panoid%3DTbuC5IROSBFjQTC4pZnSMg%26cb_client%3Dlu.gallery.gps%26w%3D160%26h%3D106%26yaw%3D41.937595%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100&ik=CAISFlRidUM1SVJPU0JGalFUQzRwWm5TTWc%3D
I am bowled over by the statue of Homeless Jesus on a bench in the courtyard of Saint Luke’s. It is wonderful. It may have helped to inspire my current campaign at www.godispoor.org. You could improve the work, however, and do so in a way that would attract attention to the plight of the poor, in keeping with the intentions of Pope Francis and long Church tradition.
Homeless Jesus is taking up the only bench I know of in the area on which a poor person could lie down. At the bus stop, the benches have bars every couple of feet to prevent anyone from lying down or even putting up their feet, a convenience I can imagine needing myself in not too many more years. We care for the homeless, as long as they are nowhere near us. I think that Jesus might suggest putting His statue on the ground so that a human being could use the bench or suggest adding more benches. Your Excellency could do a news conference at the location to announce a symbolic gesture of this kind along with some good work for the poor that the Diocese had already planned, thereby improving the situation for the poor and for Your Excellency’s own organization at the same time. Note that parishioners at Saint Luke’s might be drawn into charitable works more effectively by finding actual homeless people in the church’s courtyard, rather than merely a statue of One. They might even enjoy sitting on a bench that encourages them to tarry.
I’m sure Your Excellency realizes that homelessness serves the interests of the wealthy, as the wealthy erroneously reckon their interests, by making workers too scared to demand suitable wages or working conditions. Of course, Your Excellency and I both know that a just society is better for all, including the wealthy. As some are concerning Earth’s perihelion, the wealthy tend to be unaware of certain facts and fail to consider other facts in relation to one another. Your Excellency and I are both out to change that. Of course, Your Excellency has spent a lifetime at this task, while I am a newcomer seeking to be of use.
I know that Your Excellency abhors homelessness, but artificial scarcity, in this case of housing, including for the mentally ill and addicted, benefits religion in meretricious ways as much as it does the wealthy. The brutality of a wealthy society that allows homelessness—including of children!—scares everyone and drives them into the arms of God. Mind you, this is a God Who has not fixed the problem, so the new adherents are weakly bound to their religion. This is one reason why decency, even though it breeds independence from particular models of God, is always to be preferred.
Incidentally, the mosque across the street, Masjid Darul Taqwa (https://www.masjiddarultaqwa.org/) seems integrated into the functioning of the community at large in admirable ways. For example, when I catch the bus late in the evening, children are often playing basketball outside the mosque. Adults are often present, perhaps because of the schedule of prayers. The effect is to make the street feel more welcoming and safer. I don’t feel unsafe walking, but not everyone has the advantage that I do of being perceived as an adult male in good physical condition.
I mention the mosque not to criticize but to motivate the suggestion that Saint Luke’s be used further than it has been to promote your values. For example, the bus station in front of Saint Luke’s is often strewn with trash and dirt. Daily sweeping of the stop would surely be part of God’s work. Honestly, while I still pick up trash, I have taken to doing so less often since the pandemic began. I am making a mental note to return to my old ways in this regard.
Speaking of dirt, there is a situation nearby that might be solved through intervention by the Church. At the corner of Altamont and Hamburg, a cement company with a dirt driveway generates tremendous filth. The bridge that carries Altamont over 890 is usually disgusting. Residents and pedestrians inhale the dust, no doubt shortening our lives on average. This is an element in the genocidal part of the global polycrisis, in this case robbing the poor and not the rich of years of life. When I complain, street sweepers are quickly dispatched, but this area needs regular sweeping for the sake of public health, a fact immediately apparent to anyone walking through it from the fact that these streets have a distinctive taste pedestrians cannot elude. I have talked to people I pass there who agree that there is a problem.
The issue may be one of conflicting jurisdictions. My understanding is that there are municipal boundaries nearby. In any case, a call from a bishop might get something accomplished. I’m sure Your Excellency sees that such a call would be directly responsive to the request Pope Francis makes for environmental and economic justice in The Letter: https://youtu.be/Rps9bs85BII?t=3242
I have another suggestion relating to provision of public restrooms, but I’ll save that discussion for the future, because there is much to say on that topic. I hope that these ideas are of use to Your Excellency. Your Excellency has my gratitude for whatever time Your Excellency spends with my thoughts.
Yours in the God Who mostly slept on the ground when He wasn’t staying with disreputable folk and one of Whose churches employs the Vatican Astronomer,
James
Ancient Roman Cement and Impurity
January 7, 2023
Your Excellency, Bishop Scharfenberger,
I wonder whether Your Excellency has seen the news that scientists think they’ve figured out why ancient Roman concrete lasts so much longer than the modern version: https://www.cnn.com/style/article/roman-concrete-mystery-ingredient-scn/index.html
It turns out that what modern people thought was contamination in the concrete is actually the source of its strength. The material, called lime clasts, that differs from the bulk is not contamination, though it is impurity. It functions to heal cracks so that the concrete lasts millennia, not decades.
It can be difficult these days to explain the importance and benefits of impurity. The blank page is pure, but the page with writing is interesting. Undoped semiconductors are pure, but semiconductors with impurities can be used to build devices such as the one that has brought this message to you.
A complex system, whether a person or a society, that has been made pure by removing everything that differs from the bulk can be efficient for some purpose but trades robustness for this efficiency, because complex systems survive by containing diverse elements. As circumstances change, some parts grow, while others shrink, a point I made to you in my message on groundskeeping during COP 15, the UN Biodiversity Conference. This change is a salubrious response that preserves the system. Without impurity, the system is unable to adapt. It is brittle and vulnerable, just as modern concrete is, in contrast with the ancient Roman version.
The purification of society is not only horrifying but self-defeating. Say that Your Excellency could eliminate everything that Your Excellency deemed characteristic of mental illness or grave disorder. Perhaps society would function more efficiently, but if so, this is the seed of its destruction in the catastrophe of unlimited success. It is diversity and inefficiency that save us from destroying our environment, as it did the people building the Tower of Babel.
One example of the benefits of what overconfident proponents of homogeneity call illness can be seen when the economy grows unchecked and scarcity results. More people suffer. Mental illness and substance abuse increase. The economy becomes less efficient if people retain the decency to help their suffering brethren. The economy shrinks, relieving consumption pressure. Scarcity diminishes, and life improves.
Of course, this is a brutal system. Other ways in which consumption pressure is reduced include war and famine. Jesus was trying to find ways to reform civilization to reduce its reliance on human suffering. I’m sure that He would point out that instead of raising interest rates in response to inflation, thereby restoring balance to the economy on the backs of poor people by reducing their chances of improving their lives by borrowing money, we could ask rich people to cut back on their purchases.
Your Excellency could do this. Times of economic hardship could also be accompanied by instructions to the rich to increase their charitable giving to replace reductions in charity from people of more modest means. Your Excellency may already speak on this point, but I don’t hear this message pronounced very forcefully, as a requirement, rather than a wish.
There is an unfortunate tendency in monotheism, as I’ve been subjected to it, to lionize uniformity. The Sermon on the Mount and His defense of tax collectors and prostitutes tell me that this was not the intent of Jesus. Do you think that the trouble arose with Paul? St. Paul said that women redeem themselves through childbirth, a thoroughly evil, pronatalist concept that subjugates women and promotes monotonic, and hence catastrophic, increase in consumption pressure. St. Paul also said that the root of all evil was the love of money. I think that the God who overturned the tables of the moneychangers and repeatedly tweaked and rebuked the wealthy would not have approved of the softening of His message by the addition of “the love of.” St. Paul came from the power structure and was probably disposed both strategically in his pursuit of the growth of the Jesus movement, and personally through having friends among the wealthy, to coddle the rich.
I finally see, slow-witted as I am, what Pope Francis may be up to with his radically pronatalist utterances. He may be laying the groundwork for eliminating priestly celibacy. This goal may be worthy. On the occasion of his retirement, the priest who buried my father issued a call for reform of the Catholic Church. It was well-received by some clergymen. In it, he wrote of his belief that he had been unqualified, as a celibate person, to counsel couples on marriage.
The answer, however, is not to say that all people must have children. The childfree, along with the mentally ill and the drug- and drink-addled, are the lime clasts in the concrete from which our civilization is built. By limiting growth through increases in our numbers due to rising consumption pressure, we seal the cracks that form due to overconsumption of resources, holding the structure or our civilization together.
Just as steel is better than iron and Roman cement is better than modern cement, the impure person and the diverse society outlast their homogeneous fellows. Only the good, in the Roman Catholic sense, die young.
Yours in marveling at the Pantheon, constructed of heterogeneous cement in celebration of a heterogenous theology, perhaps not so different from Catholicism if we take a realistic look at the lives of the saints,
James
Air Travel and the Intentions of Pope Francis
January 10, 2023
Your Excellency, Bishop Scharfenberger,
I hope that this finds Your Excellency well. Your Excellency may be interested to know that by announcing an end to business air travel for employees of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany, as well as asking employees and parishioners to cease traveling by air, Your Excellency could advance the intentions of Pope Francis to a significant degree with regard to the crises connected to climate, biodiversity, and poverty. Here is a message I sent earlier today to officials charged with monitoring ethics at the American Physical Society:
“As a member, I'm curious to know whether you think it ethical to hold in-person meetings, which necessitate air travel, at a time when rapid decarbonization of our economy is needed to avert a catastrophe that could end our civilization within decades. Perhaps the thinking is that physics will save us, but why would anyone take seriously the need for them to change their way of life when physicists, who ought to know best of all the urgency to cut back radically, continue to travel around the world to meet in person? I can't imagine why anyone is still flying after the IPCC told us that we have seven years left to cut 43% of our carbon emissions to secure a good chance of averting disaster. I wish to point out that because poor nations are sustaining casualties in the climate crisis far faster than rich nations, continued irresponsible burning of fossil fuels is a genocidal act. Genocide is an ethical matter. Please explain why the APS still meets in person, thereby contributing directly to genocide and promoting genocidal complacency in the public at large. It shouldn't be too late to cancel the in-person portions of the March and April meetings and to explain why this was done and how great a sacrifice it was to as many press outlets as will listen, thereby setting a sorely needed good example in these desperate times. I find the greatest hope in neither technological nor economic strategies but in the possibility of changing the hearts of people. Thank you for your time and for the work you do.”
As I’ve mentioned and as Your Excellency was no doubt aware to begin with, a man-bites-dog character to news stories gains them greater attention, so even more good might be done by Your Excellency in taking the step I suggest to the APS than by them in taking it.
Your Excellency has my gratitude for the time and good works of Your Excellency.
Yours in the God Who thinks that at this point, flying is for the birds,
James
Advice on Achieving the Fundamental Intentions of Pope Francis
January 13, 2023
Your Excellency, Bishop Scharfenberger,
The intentions of Pope Francis in response to what he perceives as the screams of Nature are widely supported, as I was reminded by this article from Columbia University Magazine to which I found a link this morning in the Facebook feed of Yale Divinity’s Forum on Religion and Ecology. Perhaps Your Excellency could draw the attention of local media outlets to the fact that people of good will are closing ranks against the excesses of economic growth and its destruction of both human lives and nonhuman lives, without which humans cannot exist.
In short, human activity organized around the principle of unfettered economic growth destroys economically undervalued life, both human and nonhuman. I think that people miss points like this because thinking too carefully interferes with enjoying their lives. It can even shorten life. Most people, even leaders in other fields, quite reasonably leave such matters to others and depend on those who take up these intellectual and emotional burdens to alert them when they are in danger. Thank you to the extent that you are doing this.
The main shortcoming of the efforts of Pope Francis is that he seems deaf to the entreaties of others, such as Dame Jane Goodall and Sir David Attenborough, who are equally alarmed by Nature’s screams but who understand that each human being displaces other life, no matter how frugally they live, and that all human growth must be moderated to avert the catastrophe of unlimited success, which is ecological collapse.
Pope Francis speaks eloquently about the story of the Tower of Babel as warning against destructive growth. I’d like to mention ideas I have about other stories in the Book of Genesis.
The preamble to the story of Noah speaks of people having children and God responding by shortening the lifespan of humans. How can this be read as anything other than a warning about the dangers of overpopulation, of the cold equations that limit humanity on a finite planet, will-we or nil-we?
The story of Noah’s Ark revolves around an excess of something good, namely rain. Noah is commanded to take unclean animals, some of them dangerous to humans and their livestock and crops, on the Ark. This is an unambiguous lesson in the need to bow to the wisdom of God, Who created economically inconvenient life, and respect all of His creation. Limiting our consumption of resources is how we reify this respect, and limiting our numbers is how we give ourselves decent lives in the process.
The story of Sodom and Gomorrah, read in its entirety, can be seen as a discussion of population boom and bust. Lot’s unmarried daughters are reduced in the end to lying with Lot in order to have children, no other men being left available. It is not a difficult stretch to suppose that the crowd was uninterested in Lot’s unmarried daughters when offered them in place of the handsome strangers because there were just too many people around and the creation of more was not to be risked.
Incidentally, recently rereading the full story of the ill-fated cities made me aware that very likely, the story also served purposes we would not ordinarily associate with religion. For a less likely but more palatable example, I suspect from the scansion of “Sodom and Gomorrah” and the rhymes made accessible by “Gomorrah” in modern Hebrew that this particular pairing of cities served the same literary function as the town of Nantucket in English, apart from obligating the poet to iambic or trochaic meters, rather than leaving anapestic and dactylic meters available, too. My experience of the profane is the source of some of my utility to Your Excellency.
I suspect that Abraham was spared from sacrificing Isaac because Isaac had no siblings. Why did people engage in human sacrifice? Was it not to keep a means available of responding to crop failures? After all, spreading the available calories evenly in a famine is apt to leave fewer people alive at the end than murdering some people at the start, thereby enabling more people to remain strong by increasing their caloric intake. It is, after all, disease that claims most victims in at least some famines, because their bodies are weakened by hunger.
Today we have racism and other sources of economic disadvantage, war, and various forms of self-harm encouraged by the difficulties of life under conditions of scarcity relative to one’s neighbors, as mechanisms to achieve the same end no less brutally. The solution to all these problems is to foster respect for people who choose not to reproduce, a cause to which I have dedicated the largest portion of my professional activities, which remain uncompensated, the past couple of years.
Isaac has many children, and what happens? One is sold into slavery, illustrating a brutality that serves as an alternative to human sacrifice and the other negative feedback to consumption mechanisms I mention above. The enslaved person gains wisdom that enables him to advise Pharoah to lay aside resources in good times to cushion the bad times. The cushioning has two sources. Obviously, there is more available in the bad times because less has been consumed in the good. However, it is also the case that because less was available in the good times, people had fewer children, leaving fewer people to be kept alive in the bad times, which performed in a moral way the function of human sacrifice and the other evils. In addition, damping boom-and-bust population oscillation can result in a greater number of years of human life, and even of people ever to have lived, overall, in accordance with the wisdom that slow and steady wins the race.
Pope Francis sees the first benefit of Joseph’s plan but not the second. He shouldn’t feel bad. Paul Krugman didn’t find his Nobel Prize in a box of cereal, but he and the rest of the thought leaders at The New York Times seem to have missed both parts of the lesson of Joseph. It’s become unspeakably grisly to follow even straight news. I invite you to watch a few minutes of last night’s NBC Nightly News, in which a story on the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to avert cataclysmic weather is followed by Secretary Buttigieg talking about how to prevent reduction in the emission of greenhouse gases by keeping air travel humming along and a story on the high inflation rate in the cost of the necessities of life, an evil and fatal negative feedback to consumption mechanism, like human sacrifice, of which it is a form.
Some people trust technology to solve all problems. Scott Pelley said on 60 Minutes that some of Paul Ehrlich’s predictions about the horrors of overpopulation had been falsified by the Green Revolution in agriculture, but technological improvements do not repeal the finite size of Earth. They only postpone the reckoning and make it worse in the end by reducing inefficiencies in good times, leaving less improvement available for weathering the bad times when they arrive.
As a person who considers important problems in a variety of ways, strategically and tactically, mathematically as well as morally, I can tell you the following: Since Pope Francis believes that “Nature is screaming, ‘Stop!’”, he also believes that economic activity must be reduced. The current per capita economic activity across all humanity is under $15,000 per year. If what we consider wealth were spread evenly, each of us would have to live on less than $15,000 per year. This is why Pope Francis would do well to call for an increase in vocations to lives without the creation of children or at least reverse his hurtful rhetorical attacks on people like me, who have chosen childfreedom, thereby supporting his intentions with regard to Nature and the poor.
The Book of Genesis speaks in ways both crystal clear and more subtle of the need to respect the childfree life and even to encourage it, as Joseph did economically. The policy he advocated to Pharaoh encouraged a lower birth rate. This cannot be denied, though clearly, it can be overlooked.
As far as I can tell, the Church has not enunciated the precise nature of original sin but speaks of it as a defiance of God. I’d like to suggest that original sin, the harm that people do merely through having come into existence, is the displacement of other life equally ordained by God. We ate of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil by gaining big brains, which require big heads and hence pain in childbirth. This pain is mentioned as a penalty for eating of the fruit and is caused as well by our pelvic structure, which enabled upright posture and facilitated tool use. These abilities, in turn, may have helped develop those brains in the first place. I think that Pope Francis likely regards the creation story in the Book of Genesis as a monument to careful observation of Nature and indicative of fairly sophisticated inferences about evolution, just as other chapters give us equally insightful procedures for creating a sustainable economy, which means one that does not attempt to grow without limit.
Humanity was cast out of the paradise of doing whatever it wanted by the development of big brains that made us highly successful at growing as a species, and therefore highly susceptible to the catastrophe of excessive growth, and that required us to think before we acted and to restrain ourselves from doing some things we expected would feel very good.
Somehow, leaders of the Roman Catholic Church came to believe that the discipline required was near-absolute sexual continence paired with near-total reproductive incontinence. I hope Your Excellency sees from what I write here that nothing could be more evil, for this hastens the catastrophe of ecological collapse, and that we have been warned against this course in the Book of Genesis. I trust that achieving catastrophe is not the design of Your Excellency, despite Your Excellency's belief that God ordains or will tolerate the Apocalypse.
Maybe the Adam’s apple symbolizes the fact that while both ate of the fruit, only Woman, who after all, suffers far more of the immediate and obvious harm of unfettered reproduction, swallowed! I’ve been thinking that we really need a pope who has given birth. Maybe that’s what the descent of the Bride spoken of in the Catechism is about. Rules get changed.
Yours in the God who laughed at the misconception of Ki satirized in The Pirate Planet and Who loves, respects, understands, and honors Douglas Adams, regardless of whether he chooses to break bread with Ki,
James
A Message that Starts Out in a Positive Vein
January 14, 2023
Your Excellency, Bishop Scharfenberger,
Your Excellency is aware, but may be justified in doubting that I am, that the best way to teach is to present general principles and encourage the student to work out the details for themselves. Learning of this kind is more complete, more deeply assimilated and lasting, and often more rapid, than can be achieved when the teacher bombards the student with vast amounts of detail. I wish instruction in algebra, which I have given many times, were based on this principle to a far greater degree. I hope that Your Excellency will forgive me for expressing my beliefs that Jesus employed this principle in contrast to religious leaders of His day and the highly detailed laws they imposed and that the Catechism cries out for similar treatment. In today’s message, I will attempt to put my beliefs about brevity and active learning into practice, in contrast to what I usually wind up doing.
The key principle at hand is this: Worshiping God consists most deeply in respecting life, both human and nonhuman, that is believed to lack economic value. Thus, the worshipful person helps the poor and seeks to preserve Nature. An apt model is Saint Francis. Pope Francis clearly seeks to promote this principle. People of means might be motivated to follow the intentions of Pope Francis if it were explained to them that economics as currently understood is disastrously incomplete and misleading, as I sought to explain through the Book of Genesis in yesterday’s message.
When I was growing up, Saint Francis was very popular, likely as a result of the antiwar and environmental movements, the deep connection between which is explained in my message of yesterday. Neoliberalism, in both senses of that word, overwhelmed these movements. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the first sense, and Bill Clinton and Al Gore in the second, all contributed to bringing us to our current, dire predicament, because all of them sought economic growth, which crowds out nonhuman life, and all of them showed deep disrespect to the poor. I’m waxing wordy again, not to teach but to inspire confidence in the teacher.
To promote the key principle, I suggest the following threefold creed:
Love more widely.
Consume only what you need.
Tell others what you’ve done.
Note that the judgment of the individual is respected. Each person is asked to decide for themselves what they need and how widely they can love. This is in keeping with my observation in previous messages that diversity is the source of robustness in complex systems and with the fact that to be wise, a person must remind themselves frequently that they are ignorant of the details of other people's lives and often unmindful of the fact that those lives can be wildly different from their own. I almost once again gave the second principle as "Consume far less." This is a clear indication of my privilege, because most humans are relatively poor and ought to be consuming more. Incidentally, I suggest considering this latter fact in combination with the fact that Pope Francis hears the anguished cries of Nature that are drawn forth by human overconsumption of Ki's offerings.
By the way, I do live out my own principles to an extent. I trusted Your Excellency to infer the lesson embodied in referring to nonhuman life with the pronoun "ki," as I've done in several messages, rather than the denigrating "it." Here's what I believe to be the original article on that point: https://www.yesmagazine.org/issue/together-earth/2015/03/30/alternative-grammar-a-new-language-of-kinship
Please recall that English is a language that has evolved among economic vampires, including the landed classes of both Britain and the United States, fiends who enslaved human beings, in defiance of Christian teaching, both expressly and through the economic systems they created and who gratuitously killed nonhuman life for fun and in the name of a twisted aesthetic. We continue their evil habits of mind to our own peril and that of economically undervalued life by speaking uncritically the tongue they devised to facilitate their crimes.
I’m eager to tell Your Excellency other things, but I’ll end here for today. I hope that Your Excellency will have a wonderful day. Your Excellency has my gratitude for spending time with my thoughts.
Yours in the God Whom algebra teachers like me might do well to emulate,
James
Gratitude and Soft Power
January 15, 2023
Your Excellency, Bishop Scharfenberger,
This morning, I am puzzled by the fact that I have yet to receive thanks from Your Excellency or whoever is the highest-ranking person in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany to read my messages. In declaring a Synod, His Holiness, Pope Francis, has solicited advice from all the baptized.
Your Excellency seems guided primarily by lawyers of late. By citing the precedents of Carlill v Carbolic Smoke Ball Company and the responsibility of supermarkets to honor shelf-tag prices at checkout, I could claim that Your Excellency is in breach of contract. As held in the precedents I cite, consideration as an element of a contract comes into being when given, not when received. Even if Your Excellency claims that my messages to Your Excellency have been without value, I assure Your Excellency that they have been costly to me emotionally and physically in their creation. I have furthermore incurred an opportunity cost in responding to the solicitation of His Holiness, Pope Francis, instead of directing my efforts elsewhere. I am your servant, Your Excellency, but each servant is due their wage, in this case, Your Excellency’s gratitude, which I think that any reasonable person would expect from reading the solicitation from His Holiness. The notice did not include language on the inability of the Church to respond to all suggestions nor any mention of limiting terms or conditions that I can recall.
I happen to have watched the movie Hannibal recently. The monster raises with Inspector Pazzi the issue of the crime of the inspector’s ancestor. Inspector Pazzi delivers a subtle reproach by saying that he couldn’t recall anyone raising this issue before. The monster replies that certainly, people don’t speak of such things. Nevertheless, the inspector might not have advanced quite so far as he would have with a different name.
People who criticize you do you service by voicing what others are thinking but leaving unsaid. Notice that in my analogy, I correspond to a monster and Your Excellency to a corrupt police officer. I am not a monster, and I trust that Your Excellency is not corrupt. The aptness of the analogy derives from poor communication and defensiveness arising from the age-old battle between Epicureanism and stoicism. I think that His Holiness, Pope Francis, in the wisdom of His Holiness, is attempting through the current Synod to reverse the momentum of history.
I also think that His Holiness understands that “Vox Populi, Vox Dei” cuts two ways. I believe that this saying is usually taken as a criticism of leaders who obey the whims of their followers, but it can likewise be understood as a reminder to leaders that the cries of their followers can alert them to truths of which the leaders have lost sight or are otherwise unaware.
I’ll give Your Excellency an example of something that many think but few will say. His Eminence, Cardinal Dolan, is painfully transparent in His Eminence’s disingenuity. I once heard His Eminence on Today on NBC deliver a nondenominational prayer to console people scared by the pandemic. In the prayer, His Eminence invoked the concept of a powerful father but followed the prayer by saying that His Eminence believed no one could object to it.
I’m happy to indulge people who like to think of God as a Father, but I recognize, being one of them, that many other people do not find the concept of fathers to be comforting. In fact, I think that Jesus chose to extol a Heavenly Father in part to tweak his stepfather, Joseph. I’d be happy to discuss my ideas in this area with Your Excellency. I like particularly the comment on the prejudice against men and boys whose fathers are held to be questionable that is embodied in the fact that Jesus was rejected in favor of Barabbas, a base criminal bearing a name that means “Son of the Father.” I can imagine Jesus thinking how typical this was.
His Eminence, Cardinal Dolan, even gets His Eminence’s schtick backwards sometimes. In a video clip, His Eminence says, “I don’t have much clout, some fat, balding Irish bishop.” This comment is akin to a line in a courtroom drama from an attorney claiming not to be a simple country lawyer but rather the nephew of the governor. His Eminence would do well to try a different tack than false humility. It’s not his metier.
My chief message to Your Excellency is that it is time for all to come together in service of economically undervalued life. The Church could do itself great favors by more vigorously promoting causes, like this one, that do not serve as wedge issues but rather incur hostility from nearly all power centers. If Your Excellency recalls, I have raised the issue that the three legs supporting the Church have become of greatly dissimilar length, creating an unstable situation. The leg of moral leadership is currently much shorter than those of financial power and political power. The solution I presented is to shorten the two longer legs. Your Excellency can reduce the financial power of the diocese by settling the lawsuits. This will increase Your Excellency’s political and moral power, but I dare say that the moral power of the diocese will remain less than its political power even afterward.
The solution to this problem is to spend some of your political capital. I recommend doing so in furtherance of the intentions of Pope Francis by speaking out more loudly in support of the rights of Nature and the poor, which are being trampled by our oh-so-just-and-wise, single-minded pursuit of economic growth. In doing so, Your Excellency will increase the moral power of the diocese and simultaneously reduce its political and financial power. All three of these effects are desirable, because the diocese will gain stability, and hence security and strength, as an instrument of the power of God and will be positioned for regrowth. One doesn’t want to ignore the virtues of retreat and consolidation, nor of wheeling afterward. Blindness to these virtues happens also to be a source of the persistence of the existential peril to our civilization in the form of the vain pursuit of unending economic growth.
The error of Your Excellency in defending what you possess, seemingly terrified to lose anything, rather than surrendering on one front while attacking on another, is a universal human failing. The genuine application of soft power, of which His Eminence, Cardinal Dolan, makes a parody through His Eminence’s bungled Matlock impersonation, lies in doing the right thing as if one were foolish and couldn’t see where one’s own interests lay. Recall, too, that refraining from exercising power in support of what is good can be as brutal as exercising power to achieve bad ends.
One lesson of chess is that the application of power is not always straightforward. Your Excellency seems to be playing as a pawn, not a bishop.
Yours in the God Who would play up the issue of what His contemporaries would have seen as the questionable parentage of Jesus and point to the fact that Jesus made hay of it,
James
Concluding Suggestions
January 16, 2023
Your Excellency, Bishop Scharfenberger,
Your Excellency has my thanks for Your Excellency's time, to the extent that Your Excellency has spent it with my thoughts. I will close this series of letters with the current one in preparation for forwarding them to His Excellency, Archbishop Pierre, and posting them on my site, along with brief videos I have begun to film.
As a student of complex systems, I look for the fundamental, often unstated and even unrecognized, beliefs that can be changed to enable human systems to transition to a new state. Quite simply, people act according to what’s in their hearts. This is why the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world and why those who can’t teach, lead. Of course, a bishop has the opportunity to teach, as well as lead.
First, systems evolve to protect the powerful at the expense of the powerless, because the powerful update the rules. One reason people love stories about criminals is that occasionally, bad guys right wrongs. What’s the opening image of The Godfather? Why does Rusty Irish die in the first season of The Sopranos? The insecurity of the powerful, which leaves the powerless unprotected by them, is one of the reasons we need radical change from time to time.
My first suggestion is therefore to update the Ten Commandments, which contain many protections for the powerful but lack any explicit protection for the powerless. For example, “Honor thy father and thy mother,” could be supplemented with, “Respect and protect children.” The commandment against killing, to which so many exceptions depending on the discretion of the powerful have already been made, could be reworked, perhaps as, “Harm no living being without need, and likewise, suffer in proportion to all harm you do.” Such a commandment as this is no less vague than the current one, with all its exceptions, but would help to turn our civilization from its self-destructive exploitation of living beings, both human and nonhuman, against which Pope Francis has spoken.
Second, all people of good will must act to prevent genocide in the tribulations that the climate crisis and the global polycrisis more broadly have already begun to visit upon us and that will soon intensify to a degree few seem to suspect and none can imagine. Furthermore, the only way never to forget the Holocaust is to make it part of the slow-changing curriculum of religion.
My second suggestion is therefore to prepend a statement to the weekly profession of faith at mass saying, “We believe that nothing about our religion entitles us to any preference on Earth: We serve the less powerful and those farther from the truth.” Only then talk about a Father, which I mentioned is not an image that is catholically congenial.
Third, clearly it was a great evil, perpetrated by Church leaders, to shield and enable monsters who raped children. How is it that Church leaders see Satan at work in so many places but not in the monstrous acts of their recent predecessors? Everything that was done by Twentieth Century Church leaders must be reconsidered.
My third suggestion is therefore to reconsider Humanae Vitae. The requirement of Catholics to practice near-total sexual continence and similarly extreme reproductive incontinence is obviously little-heeded by people in the pews but nevertheless biases human hearts in ways that are ecologically and socially catastrophic. I think that it will take some effort to convince Church leaders of the evil done by Humanae Vitae. Thus, at this time, I merely ask Your Excellency to speak in favor of beginning the process of reconsidering it.
Fourth, each of us holds a small number of pieces of an enormous puzzle. We must combine what we hold to see enough to decide wisely. Lacking the actual experience of what we seek to control opens us to grievous error. The priest who buried my father made this point in his well-received retirement valedictory.
My fourth suggestion is therefore to make any rules changes necessary to permit election of a non-cis-male pope. I expect that the next pope will not be cis-male, given Catholic belief that the Bride will descend from Heaven at some point. The next pope may not be the Bride, but Catholic beliefs about the Bride should enable Church leaders to find the justification for any needed changes in the rules and the hearts of the electors. That is, after all, a functional purpose on Earth of the bewildering complexity of Catholic beliefs, to enable the complex system Catholic leaders control to adjust rapidly to unforeseen circumstances.
I once promised Your Excellency a suggestion that I have not yet discussed. It is simply that the Church provide public restrooms, the lack of which interferes with use of public transportation, a vital means to ameliorate the harms of the global polycrisis, and degrades the poor and ecologically minded. Rather than go into detail, I offer this link to an article on the topic by a person who has made themselves expert on the relevant situation in New York City.
I furthermore suggest that the public restrooms be cleaned daily by priests, monsignors, and bishops. In this way, Church leaders will begin to restore the respectability of the faith and give those who quite understandably hate the model of God you worship a safe means to convey their feelings on the subject to Church authorities. If Your Excellency requires time to see how this suggestion serves Your Excellency's ends, the process by which Your Excellency gains understanding may improve Your Excellency's grasp on the wisdom of His Holiness, Pope Francis, in soliciting opinions as part of the Synod from so broad a reservoir as one that includes Your Excellency's humble servant.
Yours in the God Who cleans up when He makes a mess,
James
Next: Book 3