Trinitarian Dialectic

Contribution to the Synod
January 19, 2023

Your Excellency, Archbishop Pierre,

Please accept the attached volume of letters that I sent to His Excellency, Bishop Scharfenberger of Albany, New York, as part of my contribution to the Synod of the Roman Catholic Church. I was motivated to write His Excellency by The Letter, the wonderful movie made by His Holiness, Pope Francis, to bring Laudato Si’ to a larger audience.

Unfortunately, I have not heard that His Excellency, Bishop Scharfenberger, spoke to local media in support of the intentions of His Holiness regarding biodiversity and poverty during COP 15, the recent United Nations Biodiversity Conference, as I suggested in the letters. I fear that the legal maneuvers of His Excellency, besides being at cross-purposes with Church financial interests and even with themselves, may be interfering with His Excellency’s ability to serve His Holiness. Legal counsel for His Excellency has not only failed to settle the many lawsuits against the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany but has filed motions to keep Church records confidential. Would not settling the lawsuits be the most effective means of keeping records from becoming public?

Protracted legal maneuvers also harm the public image, or brand, if Your Excellency will, of the Roman Catholic Church. I think that people tend to be more generous to those who themselves will let a nickel cross their palms without being squeezed. Furthermore, I have begun to attempt not to patronize health care facilities owned by the Roman Catholic Church. My actions do not imply a trend, but I would remind Your Excellency that Catholic-branded businesses, including hospitals and schools, have always enjoyed an advantage over competitors due to the Church’s aura of respectability. Labor costs for Church businesses, for example, have always been depressed by the intangible benefits some employees expect to receive from God for their labors in the Church’s service and the palpable social benefits they receive in life. By diminishing the Church’s stature, further legal maneuvering could prove penny wise and pound foolish. I note recent poor financial news from Trinity Health.

I suspect that the presence in our state of New York City, above all its mass media, has long exercised a harmful influence on our Church leaders, distorting their judgement or that of their superiors by offering a larger reach than could easily be had elsewhere. I have made a study of portions of our state’s modern Church history because Church leaders were frequent visitors to my childhood home and had been for decades before I came along. On Your Excellency’s request, I would be happy to convey my findings on this topic.

I ask Your Excellency to consider the good that could be done by responding to email contributions to the Synod, regardless of whether email is the correct medium for submission of these contributions, with the following form reply.

“I thank you personally and on behalf of the diocese for your contribution to the Synod of the Roman Catholic Church. Your effort serves God and the intentions of His Holiness, Pope Francis. God understands all, and His Church strives to understand as much as is humanly possible. Each of us holds a small number of pieces of an enormous puzzle. We show each other our pieces to see a larger portion of the whole together. What you have conveyed helps in this effort either by validating the Church or by pointing to its shortcomings, either in itself or in explaining itself to others. You may consider any duty you felt to have been discharged, but you are welcome to submit further material. You have my sincere gratitude.

“Yours in Christ,
“The Most Reverend …”

Not only would such a note of thanks improve the perception of the Church and tend to mute opposition to it, but also it would provide comfort and support to those of God’s children who still take Your Excellency’s organization seriously. Instead, I received nothing but a caustic silence from the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany. I assure Your Excellency that such treatment from the representatives in my community of the God of my ancestors burns. I suspect that too many in the Church imagine themselves as Max von Sydow in The Exorcist or even the employers of Max von Sydow’s character in Three Days of the Condor, when they ought to emulate Max von Sydow in The Greatest Story Ever Told. I have identified insecurity in the powerful as a root of evil that may be distinct from the love of money.

True power derives from fearlessness in thought and expression, including in identifying, fully disclosing, and fully correcting one’s mistakes. I wish to propose that this principle is a suitable cornerstone for the new temple to God, the construction of which will change the hearts of people as His Holiness intends. Please consider the following.

How could any God be so incompetent as to be incarnated as a human being and not make a serious error? By making no other large mistakes, God would make the biggest possible mistake by squandering the opportunity to model in human form the process of suffering consequences of failure, finding meaning in one’s fallibility, and using the pain of falling short to grow as a person and help others. God would remain perfect precisely because of the error of Jesus, which would be necessary for perfection in the larger scheme. This is neither mysterious nor paradoxical to a physicist, who uses duality to understand his subject. In order to be perfect as God, God must needs have been imperfect as a Man. In fact, complex systems such as biological organisms are often tuned to operate on a kind of knife’s edge, in a dynamic stability that optimizes for something other than safety from error. Excessive pursuit of such safety is no less destructive than disregard for it. I argue elsewhere that excessive pursuit of safety by the powerful is a wellspring of the destruction of Nature and the poor.

Please forgive me, Excellency, if you already know the following.  I simply can’t recall having heard it.

Examined purely within the framework of Jesus as a man, overturning the tables of the moneychangers was obviously a grave error. This violent act harmed human beings, perhaps resulting in murder if any if the moneychangers didn’t get enough of their coins back to pay people whom they owed. It was also a revolutionary act and could not have resulted in any outcome but the execution of Jesus. Perhaps Jesus became impatient at the pace of the change He was bringing about. Perhaps pride in the triumphant entry to Jerusalem, coupled with low blood sugar and high body temperature from going without adequate rest or refreshment, combined with the sight of morally inferior people living far more comfortably than he, an impoverished, itinerant preacher, drew forth extreme violence.

Perhaps even God Himself can’t keep free of serious sin in a human body within a human society. Imagine what widespread acknowledgement of the sin of Jesus would do to advance the intentions of Pope Francis. The powerless might be lorded over and exploited to a lesser degree, and the self-righteous powerful might cast about to find their own serious sin, thereby priming themselves to change their lives in the ways urgently needed to blunt the catastrophe of unlimited success, meaning unchecked growth, warned of, as His Holiness has pointed out, in the story of the Tower of Babel.

I think that Jesus did find meaning in His sin. He concludes the Parable of the Wedding Party with the observation that “Many are called but few are chosen.” It has long amazed me that I don’t hear people identify the only “few” to which that word could refer as the person who was cast into the outer darkness, with the wailing and the gnashing of teeth. This tells me that the outer darkness is the loneliness of Jesus, the wailing His depression, and the gnashing of teeth His rage. Note the bizarre behavior of the King. I think it clear that the anger of Jesus was directed toward His Heavenly Father. To me, the meaning of the Parable of the Wedding Party is that you’re damned if you do. Jesus had done His best to serve the Father, had failed, and was going to die horribly for His trouble, when He could have gained a life of pleasure and adulation by accepting the Devil’s offer years earlier. Thanks a lot, Dad.

Jesus later tells the Parable of the Coins, in which He expresses no less anger toward, and ridicule of, the Father but which expresses the idea that you’re damned if you don’t: He had made peace with His life as the only one His nature permitted.

Still later, He pulls success out of a hat by coming up with the Last Supper. I love a story in which redemption is achieved by using one’s thinkerator fearlessly, having correctly identified the constraints under which one is operating. From the work of Tom Clancy to Russian Doll, I can’t get enough of that kind of thing.

Note that the downfall of Jesus occurs at the moment of, and is owing to, His theretofore greatest triumph, just as humanity as a whole is experiencing now in the catastrophe of unlimited success. I note that as it does annually, Easter is coming up. Perhaps His Holiness would care to use these ideas to turn human civilization from the path to self-destruction it is currently hastening down.

Note the dual interpretation, in which the divine nature of Jesus is treated: God could not know firsthand what it was to be drawn into sin without becoming a man. He undergoes the whole experience: pride, physical limitation, sin, self-destruction, isolation, rage, depression, physical pain, death, thereby coming to understand His creation fully. Humanity, in large part, is currently prideful, is experiencing the physical limitations of our planet, is sinning by disregarding these limitations to consume ever more resources and thereby to destroy its poor members and nonhuman life, is furthermore destroying itself as a species, is beginning to notice its isolation in the absence of a Planet B, is twisting in paroxysms of rage and cowering in waves of depression of which we hear daily in the news, is increasingly suffering physically from the destruction it is wreaking, and is dying along with so much other life in a process we must limit before it dooms our species.

If we all fire up our thinkerators in time, the end result will be a sadder and wiser humanity, ready to live responsibly with other life and its own less powerful members. If we don’t, we’re toast.

Your Excellency has my thanks for Your Excellency’s time and the good that Your Excellency does. I hope that Your Excellency will find the attached volume of letters useful.

Yours in the God Whose followers spoke their minds to religious leaders, even as He had,
James

Theological Advice for Synod
January 24, 2023

Your Excellencies, Archbishop Pierre and Bishop Scharfenberger,

I may not have made clear that my purpose in writing Your Excellencies is to serve Your Excellencies as a lay theologian and consultant. I am not a random Catholic apostate trained in physics, complexity science, data analysis, and education but rather a Catholic apostate with this training who has had many conversations over the course of years with three people trained in Christian theology and who has pursued a life of study, contemplation, and service. There was quite a bit of drinking, too, for a while, but my purpose in leaving the Catholic Church was not only to repudiate what I saw as grave errors in its teachings but also to gather profane knowledge and experience so as to serve God and man in ways inaccessible to Your Excellencies and the colleagues of Your Excellencies. In this letter, I wish to use my abilities to elucidate issues of language that lead good people to make errors of mind.

First, Your Excellency, Bishop Scharfenberger, has yet to settle the lawsuits against the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany. Should Your Excellencies’ Lord return next week, do Your Excellencies believe that He would be more pleased to find the coffers of His Church full or the reputation of His Church further advanced toward its restoration? I think the answer is less obvious than it might be if Your Excellencies thought of the settlements instead as penance. In fact, as a child, I was told that penance always included making amends through legal processes. I found it curious that I could not find this principle stated in the current Catechism of the Catholic Church, but I’m sure that Your Excellencies would follow it if Your Excellencies thought that it applied. I advise you that it does in the current instance.

I have heard it said that Your Excellency, Bishop Scharfenberger, speaks of walking with victims in healing. I think that Your Excellency would serve the Church better should Your Excellency instead offer atonement and whatever form of progression into the future each victim saw fit to offer you, including none at all. This humility would seem consistent with Scripture and with longstanding practice of Church leaders when no issue of wrongdoing by Church leaders applies. How much more fitting would it be in this case of extreme wrongdoing?

Perhaps Your Excellency, Bishop Scharfenberger, does not think that any blame attaches to Your Excellency personally. I would remind Your Excellency of the case of Gregory Weider. My understanding from one of the many local newspaper articles concerning his recent loss of authorization to present himself as a priest is that he was accused of child sexual abuse in 2004 and 2010. Furthermore, my understanding is that when you established the procedure for reviewing accusations for credibility, you did not review past accusations. I may be mistaken somehow, but my understanding on this point is currently clear, because many thousands of dollars passed from my pockets to his between the time I first looked up his name on the list and when it eventually appeared there. In that time, Gregory Weider had said mass in Margaretville and other locations. He had been assigned to a hospital, as was commonly done with monstrous priests, perhaps on the theory that each monster preys exclusively on certain kinds of helpless people. I wonder whether more experience of licit sex by Church leaders would have enabled better reasoning about the distinction between, on the one hand, sex that is morally illicit under Church teachings but is legal and, on the other, sex crimes, which are less or not at all about sex and more or entirely about domination.

I feel angry. One of the people with whom I spent years discussing Catholic theology was Gregory Weider. If the prior accusations against him were credible and Your Excellency had bothered to have them evaluated, I would have been spared years’ worth of monthly lunches with a likely monster. I would have avoided sharing personal matters with a probable emotional vampire I considered a friend. Have Your Excellencies ever apologized for the fact that the Church exposed unwitting parishioners to monsters in the confessional and in marriage counseling, among other enormities committed by the Church? Why am I forced to live the rage I currently feel in order to serve Your Excellencies by advising a course of action that any moral idiot would have jumped to pursue ages ago? What is wrong with Your Excellencies?

I have a fine and possibly transformative point of theology to share with some religious organization. I wish it to be that of Your Excellencies. For today, I shall close. I truly wish Your Excellencies well. The nature of the anger I feel toward Your Excellencies from time to time is proof to me that I seek to serve Your Excellencies.

Yours in the God Who atones when He harms others, as He did at Calvary for His violence in the temple and for exposing so many people to the risk of being cut down by the Romans, who might have decided to restore order themselves and thereby set an example, instead of letting the brave Jewish authorities disperse the crowd gently by questioning Jesus to expose His temporary madness,
James

P.S. My closing teases the fine point of theology I mentioned. The point hinges on a simple correction in terminology: All sacred texts concern models of God, imperfect ways people can use to better themselves. Maybe God Himself is perfect, all-this and all-that, but the model cannot be, because we are finite beings. This is why so many lines of questioning about God end with the answer, “It’s a mystery.” In order to give us a model that we would find useful, God became a man, subject to the possibility of sinning. By entering Jerusalem in triumph, overturning the tables of the moneychangers, and sitting around waiting afterward for the Father to save Him from certain execution, Jesus succumbed to each of the temptations from the devil at the start of the public career of Jesus, namely seeking political power, turning stones metaphorically to bread by scattering coins in the temple courtyard, and forcing the hand of God by exposing Himself to certain death, respectively. I hope to share how beautiful is the understanding of the Gospels I achieve through the distinction between God and models of God. In the meantime, I suggest that Your Excellencies emulate the humility of God in subjecting Himself to the penalties of the civil authorities, regardless of whether Your Excellencies regard the penalties as just. If it was good enough for Jesus, I feel bold enough to assert that it’s good enough for Your Excellencies.

Doomsday Clock and Duality
January 25, 2023

Your Excellency, Bishop Scharfenberger,

I’m not at all sure that Your Excellency keeps tabs on the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, but if Your Excellency does, I am sure that Your Excellency’s mind is very much on the fact that the time was set yesterday at 90 seconds to midnight. The proximity of the time to midnight is a representation of the combined opinions of experts in relevant fields on the imminence of human extinction. For reference, the farthest our species has stood from being snuffed out was 17 minutes to midnight at the end of the Cold War. Never has the time on the Doomsday Clock been set closer to midnight than it was yesterday.

I think that I can serve Your Excellency in several ways today by telling you my model of the movie WarGames, which I understand through the lens of Catholic theology and features of storytelling that have existed since ancient times.

We meet the hero of Wargames, the tellingly named Lightman, as he begins an attempt to solve the central problem of the teenage boy, that of penetrating the defenses of a secure system to play a game inside. Stymied in his initial attempt, Lightman consults two oracles. The more eccentric of the oracles tells him that to play the game, Lightman must go on a quest to find his spiritual father. This advice is congenial to Lightman because he is alienated from his nurturing father and, in any case, must form an independent identity in order to grow up. Lightman begins his quest at the library.

I cannot tell you how appealing I recently found the library montage, in which Lightman thumbs through back issues of Scientific American while exciting music plays.

From his researches, Lightman gains insight: The spiritual father’s love for his natural son is the key to playing the game. Lightman briefly plays a portion of the game but discovers that doing so is extremely dangerous and could end humanity. I’m laughing right now because that’s a wonderful parody of how life looks to some teenage boys. The puerile humor in WarGames is also excellent. It only now occurs to me that the discovery of the extreme danger of playing the game is immediately preceded by a half-heard news report about a fire in a prophylactic recycling plant. To be honest, though, my personal morality on unintended pregnancy is not too far from that of the Church. I'm with Lightman on that one. It’s amazing, the things you notice when you try to explain your ideas to someone else and thereby are moved to combine two facts you had known separately but failed to consider together. One learns.

Because of the threat to the human race from playing the game, Lightman is abducted by servants of General Berenger, the Lord of the Underworld, and brought to that monarch’s nether realm, NORAD. Using his ingenuity and lack of stature, Lightman learns the location of his spiritual father and escapes the underworld. With the help of his girlfriend, Jennifer, Lightman journeys to meet his spiritual father.

Lightman is dismayed to discover that his spiritual father is enervated. Your Excellency is far better positioned than I to judge whether the name, Hume, of the hopeless version of Lightman’s spiritual father is a comment on the philosopher of the same name. Lightman and Jennifer fail to re-energize Hume and, despairing, depart into the night.

Lightman and Jennifer find themselves stranded, because while Jennifer is accomplished at the activity, Lightman has never learned how to swim. Attentive viewers of the film are unsurprised at this revelation, having observed the excessive modesty our hero evinced when Jennifer walked unexpectedly into his room early in the story.

With the world about to end due to Lightman’s internet activities, the situation seems favorable for Lightman to receive a swimming lesson, but a deus ex machina intervenes. It is Lightman’s spiritual father, now transformed by Lightman’s efforts from Hume back into his vigorous Falken identity. Our hero presumably rejoices at the success of his efforts, though not the timing of Falken’s arrival.

Lightman, Falken, and Jennifer race to the mouth of the underworld, where one of Falken’s former servants, now working for Berenger, greets the group and waves them past the guards. Falken confronts Berenger and attempts to explain to the straightforward mind of the underworld’s liege a point of strategy that is obvious to pretty much everyone but a person who lives shut up inside the Earth. Lightman, meanwhile, performs his most impressive act of the entire movie: He remains silent and prays.

Berenger follows Falken’s advice, bringing success that prompts rejoicing from all present. Soon, however, Lightman and Falken become aware that a disembodied spirit named Joshua remains a threat because it possesses great power and great knowledge but lacks experience that would bring understanding of the fact that what it is doing is mind-bogglingly wrong and directly contrary to its own stated intent.

Lightman, who has been passionately working to understand the spirit, hits on a plan. Falken concurs. The plan succeeds by teaching the spirit that sometimes there is no way to win, because the game itself is unworthy and should be spurned for other pursuits.

There are several points that impress themselves on me from this retelling and what motivated it. First, I see myself in the role of Lightman entreating Hume to act when I write to Your Excellency. My words are not intended as an attack on what I regard as your nature but on your temporary deviation from it. Lightman sought to defeat Hume so as to restore Falken. My efforts with respect to you are analogous.

Second, I am deeply hurt by the moral code of the Catholic Church, which forbids one to seek much of the profane knowledge that is legally available. The prohibition encourages less sophisticated members of Your Excellency’s flock and of other Christian sects to attack me, yet it is my experience of the profane that renders me of service to Your Excellency, as it was always my intent to be, one way or another. Profane matters include evil ones but include mush else, besides. Blurring the distinction between the two sets is a source of the political power of the Catholic Church and harms decent people, one of whom I assert myself to be. Please stop.

Third, I hope that the analogy between Your Excellency and Berenger is obvious, as is the one between Your Excellency and the disembodied spirit. By failing to settle the lawsuits, downplaying the violations committed by the Church, and not investigating old accusations that have not generated lawsuits, assuming I am correct in this belief, Your Excellency is doing the wrong thing in a situation that people outside Your Excellency’s organization can easily analyze correctly. Please feel no shame. I have failed in similar attempts to encourage other people, for whom I hold deep admiration gained through long association, to protect the vulnerable at the expense of jeopardy to reputation or finances of their organization. Our society currently seems to strongly encourage narrowly self-interested adherence to the advice of lawyers and obliviousness to one’s larger interests. Please provide an example of transcending this base and foolish behavioral pattern.

Fourth, I read the model in WarGames of a God Who can learn as intended to be a pattern for saving humanity from grave harm. New patterns of behavior are required to save our species and many others from destruction, but large swaths of humanity, including many leaders, are afraid to suggest change on a level sufficiently fundamental for success. One source of the fear is the idea that learning indicates weakness. Why did the leader not know everything to begin with? Suits might be filed. I see the potential for Your Excellency to perceive irony here, but in my opinion, the Church’s failure cannot be excused on these grounds. Nevertheless, the Church can redeem itself and provide a desperately needed example to humanity by fully acknowledging its failure, reconsidering the moral code that Church leaders interpreted to give them the latitude to conceal monstrous behavior and that may have increased the likelihood of the monstrous behavior in the first place, and settling the lawsuits. I promise to reconsider my judgment of most Twentieth Century Catholic bishops if relevant insights emerge from the Church’s introspection.

Your Excellency has my gratitude for Your Excellency’s time. In a future message, I hope to detail how the Gospels can be interpreted as telling a story of God learning through experience. This interpretation would not require changing Catholic teaching in any way I would expect Your Excellency to find untoward. I hope that this expanded model of God will help to turn humanity from its present course and avert disaster.

Yours in the God Who can be modeled as a trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, analogous to Falken, Lightman, and Joshua in WarGames, and Who learned by experiencing life on Earth, during which He somehow found Himself drawn into committing physical violence after being treated as king, that the only winning move in the game of religious entanglement in civilian authority is not to play, as the devil had obligingly foreshadowed three years earlier,
James

P.S. The duality in WarGames is both hilarious and profound, like the fart joke from The Simpsons to which I alluded in an earlier letter. I was laughing just now, thinking of the carefully asexual character, standing in front of the enormous computer in WarGames, saying, “The WOPR has already fought World War III—as a simulation—time and time again.” I’m laughing again, as a person who chose monosexuality for a long period. I draw two lessons: In many contexts, simulation to the exclusion of experience comes at a price. Second, insularity is dangerous in strategizing. The WOPR/Joshua requires new information from the outside to solve its problem. Lightman must intervene to provide it. Of course, the trick Lightman employed was to get the insular entity to learn the lesson for itself.

There were strictly serious messages in WarGames, too. Members of the military were reminded that orders can be disobeyed. As you know, soldiers are required to refuse to comply with illegal orders. I think that sometimes people lose sight of the fact that this means that every soldier must evaluate every order they receive for its legality. In fact, everyone subject to orders must do this. Furthermore, everyone at all times bears ultimate responsibility for their actions, to the extent that they are competent to do so, no matter what any authority tells them is the will of God.

I imagine Lasker and Parkes, the screenwriters of WarGames, sitting down to game out how they could make a meaningful contribution to preserving humanity at one of the more dangerous times in the Cold War and coming up with WarGames. Other artists had done, and would do, this in their turn. In fact, we probably owe our existence to the disobedience of his orders by Soviet officer Stanislav Petrov a couple of months after the release of Wargames, though I don’t strongly suspect a connection between the two.

I haven’t checked whether Lasker or Parkes was raised Catholic, but I experience the movie as commenting on Catholic morality. How a story plays in one’s own mind is as valid as whatever the creators intended. I apply this principle to life, as well, subject to values within some range, the bounding of which is an ongoing process and one of the key purposes of life, to me.

The other movie written by Lasker and Parkes is Sneakers, also a favorite of mine. Your Excellency might be interested to note that the dual-named hero in Sneakers lived in hiding under the surname Bishop, as Falken had under the surname Hume. A central theme of Sneakers was expressed in the motto “Too Many Secrets.” I haven’t written much to Your Excellency about my strong desire for the Church to open its files while preserving the privacy of victims. Your Excellency could bring much benefit to Your Excellency’s servant if I could gain more information about the extent and nature of abuse of all kinds perpetrated by clergy and religious, a very large number of whom figure in my life and in those of people I had to deal with. Your servant is loath to ask anything for himself, but far more openness from the Church would help many, of whom I am one.

Reform of the sexual and reproductive morality of the Church would also help me. I often think of the hero, Bishop, played by Robert Redford as his compelling, aw-shucks everyman intellectual, climbing out of the limousine from the Russian consulate after refusing the offer of protection from the similarly dual spy/cultural attaché. The last thing his friend tells him is, “You won’t know who to trust.” With the idea abroad that alternatives to stoicism are not merely inferior in the view of the Church, but rather evil, I live with that feeling waxing and waning. After all, there are many people not confined to locked psychiatric units who believe that God ordains that I be tortured for eternity. If the God of my ancestors ceased to be portrayed as my enemy, my life would improve. Part of the reason I am hurt so much by the treatment I receive from the Catechism is that I hew to the spirit of the teachings of Jesus, which ironically, included the idea that the spirit of the Law of God is far more important than particulars that proliferate, die out, and are replaced by others as the ages pass by.

I am struck for the first time I can recall by the similarity between the duality in the Lasker-Parkes movies and Star Trek. The advice from these sources is that we need both halves of our natures, the tightly controlled and the wild, the robot and the brute, the inactive and the vigorous, the secretive and the open, balanced dynamically so that we can behave differently over time, according to circumstances, and never pass to the extreme on either side. Your Excellency may object that Catholics go to war, so there is no problem, but only self-control is extolled by the Church. The result is that one is left without ready defenses when the faithful who mean one ill, or wish to dominate one, hurl Church teaching unjustifiably.

How many sermons on moderation could have so profound an effect as the sequence in Sneakers in which Bishop’s former friend, Cosmo, seeks to reestablish their connection after threatening him with a gun to gain the means to achieve absolute control over all in the name of a morality I support? Cosmo asks Bishop to join him where Cosmo is going. Bishop replies, “There’s no one there,” with an expression on his face that closes the debate as few but actors of Robert Redford’s skill could manage. Bishop leaves Cosmo, who discovers that he lacks not only Bishop’s friendship but also the means to absolute control that he thought he had wrested from Bishop. The idea that absolute control is possible is illusory, regardless of the purpose to which it might be put. Cosmo cries out in defeat for his lost friend, “Marty!”

Come to think of it, maybe Lasker or Parkes is Lutheran. We can do better than Protestants, can’t we, Your Excellency?

P.P.S. Years ago, I was at the Times Union Center, attending the graduation of a friend from the College of Saint Rose. Howard Hubbard was called forward to give the closing benediction. Instead, he delivered a several-minute sermon on civility. He exerted unauthorized domination over thousands of people and attached a somewhat disturbing conclusion to a joyful memory. Some people in the crowd started clapping and cheering after a few minutes to get him to stop. I thought the noise-making rude, but I was wrong. I incorrectly assumed that Hubbard was somehow behaving appropriately. He was, after all, a bishop.

Unjust domination is part of the essence of abuse. To what extent did monsters among the clergy also engage in noncriminal abuse? To what extent was, and is, such abuse perpetrated upon the faithful by law-abiding clergy and religious? Has Your Excellency watched Mother Angelica on EWTN? To what extent is noncriminal abuse by Church officials emulated by the faithful toward outsiders and among themselves, particularly toward their children? To what extent is the current moral code of Catholicism an example of unjustifiable domination? To what extent does the Catechism’s demand that we love God above all else get confused in the minds of people who attempt to put this principle into practice? Should we promote protecting the vulnerable over loving the powerful? To what extent does the strangely unmodulated severity of the language against a broad range of legal and illegal sexual activity similarly flatten the probability distribution that the various acts will be committed by an adherent to the code expressed in the Catechism? Will Your Excellency entertain the possibility that it is evil to say that God demands of everyone extreme sexual continence and of the laity similarly extreme reproductive incontinence?

P.P.P.S. There is irony in His Holiness, Pope Francis, saying in The Letter that “Nature is screaming, ‘Stop!’” A large portion of the human component of Nature has been screaming “Stop!” at the Catholic Church for centuries. If Church leaders finally heard us clearly, business and government leaders might be inspired to similar feats.

P.P.P.P.S. It’s 10:40 A.M., and my eyes hurt. I started writing this letter earlier this morning, and I am finishing the first run-through of proofreading. The length is over 2900 words. I faithfully and vigorously serve Your Excellency and, by extension, Your Excellency’s model of God. I do so to the detriment of my health and of my finances. Please stop cursing me.

P.P.P.P.P.S. I took a quick break and feel better. I should add that all good stories are interpreted in multiple ways, because communication must balance rigorous specification of the idea to be transmitted with the finite time available for coding, transmission, reception, and decoding. Thus, the recipient of the message fills gaps with their prior knowledge. Furthermore, all good stories should be interpreted in multiple ways, for example because different people will assign different levels of importance to the various elements of any given story, based on their wants and needs. I’m going to eat before I proofread again and transmit. Your Excellency again has my gratitude for Your Excellency’s time.

P.P.P.P.P.P.S. I had forgotten or failed to notice that the ending of WarGames can be read as encouraging finding love, which is complex, like chess, rather than spending one’s time exclusively with one- or two-player Tic-Tac-Toe. There’s a nice analogy to war versus diplomacy, as well. It’s a very persuasive way to express the issues. Contrast this with the Catechism’s verdict that one-player Tic-Tac-Toe is an “intrinsically and gravely disordered action.” Frankly, it sounds like a metronome would solve the problem that the “Magisterium of the Church… and the moral sense of the faithful” have with one-player Tic-Tac-Toe. Close reading of the Catechism shows that its guidance is, in fact, much like that which I find in the work of Lasker and Parkes. The language simply needs to be clarified. In particular, illegal acts should be condemned forcefully as abhorrent to God. Most legal acts could be covered by a general principle, such as the Lasker-Parkes Tic-Tac-Toe versus chess analogy, which appeals to reason and pride, not fear. I suggest making clear that application of these principles is subject to discretion informed by circumstances and the nature of the individual. Vow-breaking could be the basis for another principle.

Latest Contribution to Synod
January 28, 2023

Your Excellency, Bishop Scharfenberger,

Your Excellency may recall that I offered my services as a lay theologian and the qualifications I claimed as the basis for my usefulness to Your Excellency in this capacity. I share below a suitably edited message I sent to another last night. I hope that Your Excellency will agree that the ideas in it merit consideration, as I believe while cognizant of the great value of Your Excellency’s time.

Dear …,

I think I finally have the words. If you have a minute, please check this out.

Most everyone would agree that had Jesus been merely a man, what He did by leading a crowd into the temple compound, committing violence, and waiting around afterward would have been wrong. If for no other reason, it would have been wrong because it would have been pointless, absurd, and dangerous to many people.

Assuming that what Jesus did was right, it is justified because it was in fulfillment of prophecy and because it redeemed people from sin. How did it do this?

Assuming that Jesus was both God and man, what He did as God was right for the very reason that doing it as a man was wrong. God demonstrated to everyone, including Himself, that the best possible man, a man Who was God Himself, would do what was sinful for a man to do. Even if you think that an action can’t be a sin if God does it, the all-powerful, all-knowing God created man in a way that led Him to do as a man what was extremely sinful for a man to do.

What does the action accomplish? God has experienced doing as a man what was sinful for a man to do. Maybe this accounts for God no longer doing such things as inflicting group punishment on adults by killing large numbers of children, as He did on the first Passover.

Moreover, leaders are cautioned that when the best possible man exerted temporal authority, He wound up doing something that was extremely sinful for a man to do. Leaders need to watch out, especially when they’re absolutely sure they’re right. They should also assume that they will wind up having done something wrong. The important thing is to minimize the damage and submit promptly to any legally ordained punishment, even if they think it excessive. God Himself submitted to punishment that we consider grossly excessive.

Finally, followers are taught that they should cut their leaders a little slack. If even the best possible man errs badly [does] as a leader [what is sinful for a man to do], followers might gently put their leaders back on the right path or out to pasture, as the nature of the misdeed required, rather than crucify them, if God will forgive the choice of verb.

Arguably, there is a lesson to be drawn about the separation of church and state, but I won’t risk going a bridge too far. The point is that if we recognize that the act God committed as a man was sinful for a man to do, we might promote [a temperate character in dispute resolution].

We might also recognize a duality in our species that echoes the duality in Jesus. We have godlike power over Nature, in the sense of a Greek god, but we are still people, subject to being very foolish and very vulnerable to Nature’s reaction to our treatment of Her.

While my own views go beyond what I write here, the beauty of this analysis, I think, is that perhaps it could be seen as merely clarifying and explaining Catholic doctrine, not changing it. If it does contradict anything, it does so to a doctrine that arose at the Council of Florence in the 15th century. If recent Church leaders can wind up doing the kinds of things the diocese is being sued for, their Medieval predecessors could certainly have gotten a fine point of reasoning wrong. After all, even the best possible man wound up doing something that was extremely sinful for a man to do. I’ll pass this along to His Excellency, Bishop Scharfenberger.

Thank you, as always, for your time.

Best wishes,
James

Your Excellency, I had no conscious idea that it was Holocaust Remembrance Day when I wrote the above. I heard just now, the day after. I’ve already submitted one essay that makes the connection between the idea that Jesus was entirely without sin and the pseudointellectual underpinnings of antisemitism. The brave Pharisees and Sadducees who questioned Jesus in the temple courtyard were doing what I’m sure Your Excellency would do if a mob led by anyone claiming to speak for God showed up near you. They were attempting to disperse the crowd safely by showing them that Jesus was not speaking for God just then. Do you think that the Council of Florence was free of antisemitism, which is anti-God? How could they not have gotten things wrong?

We can fix antisemitism. We can fix the cruel destruction of Nature and thereby eliminate one of the problems that threaten humanity with extinction. We can do these things if all decent people make common cause, no matter how much we annoy each other. Your Excellency has my gratitude for the opportunity to communicate in this way and for Your Excellency’s time.

Yours in the God Who is in the details, Who listens to Ozzy and Handel indifferently, knowing the difference between Ozzy and death metal on the one hand and between Handel played for decent people and Handel played for Nazis on the other,
James

Duality and Self-control
February 1, 2023

Your Excellency, Bishop Scharfenberger,

I have much to communicate. I shall share what I hope to be of great use to Your Excellency over more than one message. Today, I wish to lay the groundwork for my next message by discussing the general utility of tripartite models, of the concept of duality, and of originalism. Over a series of messages, I hope to sketch out the basis for a sermon that could save humanity from its current grave peril and provide renewal to the Church. The starting point will be to deal with the legal problems of the Church according to the example that Jesus set and not the example of Thomas Becket.

The model of God as a trinity is not at all mysterious to me. Consider any person. Of a man, for example, we can say that the child is the father of the man, which makes the man the son of the child. If we consider the child and man to be the conscious or knowable portions of these two beings, the subconscious or unknowable portion is the spirit. I think that a common-sense explanation of the trinity could reduce the mystery around much else among Catholic beliefs.

I find insufficient consideration in Catholic thought of the duality of each human being. We are human to the extent that we can control ourselves, and we are human to the extent that we cannot control ourselves. It is insufficient merely to relinquish control. There must be an element of lacking control. If there isn’t, there is no gag reflex, and deliberate monstrous behavior becomes accessible to no less a degree than involuntary monstrous behavior lurks, waiting for the trigger to be encountered, when the being lacks adequate self-control.

There are many examples in literature of the monster with excessive self-control. I don’t know Your Excellency’s taste in stories, but I Claudius and Claudius the God provide numerous cases of both kinds of monster. The movie Hannibal contrasts monsters of the two kinds. The television show It’s the End of the F***ing World presents the growth of a relationship between a kid with excessive self-control and one with inadequate self-control, neither of whom turns out to be a monster. I don’t think that the last point is a spoiler, but please forgive me if I am wrong.

The rage I occasionally feel toward the Catholic Church arises in part because I am a person with self-control much closer to being excessive than to the alternative. Picture humanity lined up on an enormous catwalk that terminates abruptly at each end, leaving people at the ends in danger of falling off, into a pit. Position along the catwalk corresponds to degree of self-control, so that at one end, people are in danger of falling away from humanity due to harming themselves or others through loss of control and on the other through deliberate action made possible by excessive self-control. The Catholic Church, along with many other Christian groups, is a large fraction of all the people on the catwalk. The Church urges everyone to move toward the end of the catwalk where waits the catastrophe of excessive self-control and chastises everyone else located on that half of the structure for trying to move toward the center. I have to believe that many people fervently engaged in this destructive moralism are not seeking political power by acting contrary to their stated goals but simply conceive of human nature as a spectrum from a secure extreme of perfect self-control to a dangerous extreme of inadequate self-control. They are mistaken: Security lies not at one extreme but rather in a range around the center.

I don’t think I was ever in danger of becoming too extreme, but as a kid, I could see that my ability to serve in the ways that were advertised as desired would be destroyed by capitulating to the demands of Catholic morality. Toward the center of the catwalk, life is much better. One is more stable, as are one’s relationships with others, because one is stabilized dynamically through having access to both deliberation and passion, as necessary. One is likewise more creative for the same reason. This is the virtue of complexity that I described to Your Excellency many messages ago in connection with landscaping practices. This is the value of Epicureanism over stoicism. This is, however, not a matter of divided loyalties or polytheism, because the catwalk is shaped like a horseshoe. The same God who shepherds us away from the peril of harmful loss of self-control also shepherds us away from the peril of doing deliberate harm through excessive self-control, because the two perils are adjacent: The catwalk is one-dimensional but curves through a higher-dimensional space.

Your Excellency may say that the conclusion is obvious, but I assure Your Excellency that the minutely prescriptive and proscriptive morality of Catholicism needlessly blinds some of its adherents to the need to be capable of losing self-control moderately and makes moderate loss of self-control far more difficult to achieve for those within the Church and those outside the Church but subject to the society or control of Church members.

I’ll leave discussion of originalism to my next message. I’ll close by observing that I am deeply impressed by Your Excellency’s Wikipedia page. Your biography seems at odds with the fact that Your Excellency is dragging out the legal process in which the diocese is engaged rather than following the example of Jesus by submitting to punishment, even if it seems or is excessive, and getting on to the rebirth. I can think of several motivations for Your Excellency’s course of action, all of them based on misunderstanding. In this situation, I suggest focusing on the trees, not the forest, and trusting in God that acting for the benefit of those who have been harmed will work out in the end for the best. Another person might not have had sufficient self-control to do otherwise for so long. I think that Your Excellency is probably an extremely good person, but Your Excellency has been reminded in this message that excessive self-control is a flaw.

Yours in the God Who focuses alternately on the big picture and on the faces of individuals, taking both into account when deciding whether to act or to wait, but Who can also gag,
James

Second Message Leading to the Sermon
February 2, 2023

Your Excellency, Bishop Scharfenberger,

To prepare for my next message, I offer the following question: Does an all-knowing God possess the power to learn, and if not, can that God be considered all-powerful? Of course, Your Excellency is familiar with questions of this kind, but I find it worth considering seriously. We know that ancient peoples worshiped gods that reflected what was, the things people saw in their lives. I think that people without power in the ancient world would have found the story of a god who learned to be very compelling, because they certainly would have wanted their leaders to learn a thing or two by walking in the shoes of the people for a time, by living as the people did.

One can know without understanding, and one can understand without being sure to consult that understanding when making decisions. It is by experiencing and by teaching that we fully assimilate and synthesize our knowledge. I think that one useful model of God, certainly not the only useful one, is a God Who would have gained in this way from living as a person and by having access to the experience of needing other people, of lacking control and thereby gaining the chance to form genuine human connections, as to His parents and to Veronica and to Simon of Cyrene and to the good thief. Yes, I think Jesus needed the good thief as much as the good thief needed Jesus. What human wouldn’t need a kind word at just that moment? What God would lose the chance to experience such a moment? I think people frequently see altruism where there is mutual benefit, including in the case of the life of Jesus.

In yesterday’s message, I wrote of people seeking illusory safety in perfect self-control. My understanding is that one thing people fear enough that it moves them to renounce some of the benefits of their humanity is death. I find it significant that one of the authors of Your Excellency’s Wikipedia page saw fit to mention the ages your parents achieved. I don’t know why the author did this, but given that Your Excellency’s parents survived to advanced age, there may be an idea, conscious or not, that their faith in God helped to confer longevity and that others might benefit similarly. There is certainly in Catholicism the idea of a covenant between God and man that rewards people with eternal life. I’ll append to this message an essay I wrote that includes an idea about an afterlife without anything supernatural. Physics provides more than one possibility for natural afterlives.

I notice that Your Excellency follows a God Who said that a person cannot serve two masters, God and money. Your Excellency is confronted with the issue of what to do when the money belongs to God. I’ve suggested already that all considerations of which I’m aware support settling the lawsuits expeditiously, but Your Excellency plainly believes otherwise. Does Your Excellency suppose that Jesus learned something new about quandaries like Your Excellency’s after making so simplistic an assertion? Does Your Excellency think that the simplicity is instead sufficient for guiding Your Excellency’s hand in the matter of the lawsuits?

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

I’ve spent a decade thinking about what all this is, what time, space, mass, energy are. I’m not sure that anyone thinks I’m terribly good at thinking about what all this is, but some kind people graduated me, so I may not be a hopeless case. Because I always proceed on two tracks, in this case thinking simultaneously about science and about how I should live my life, I have applications of fundamental physics to daily life that I’d like to share, if you’re inclined to read on.

It is clear that the existence of an afterlife is consistent with physics. For example, we do not have access to anything but information. Our minds process information delivered by our senses, and we assume that our interpretation of the information as arising from physical objects is correct.

This is consistent with the idea that we exist in a simulation. Fundamental physics in that case would be a search for ways the program might have been written. Even a simple set of rules constraining the interactions of as many fundamental units as exist in our universe might be enough to give rise to the rich variety of phenomena we experience. I am inspired here by examples, but I can say it because nobody knows otherwise.

Once we acknowledge the possibility that we live in a simulation, we can speculate about the motives of the programmer. Say that there is a society in which all is well, a heaven of sorts. I would never say that suffering or death gives life meaning, but I know from personal experience that shared adversity intensifies friendship and speeds its formation. I have been to grad school, after all. Many people have experienced the phenomenon in this or other, sometimes very much more difficult, ways, such as military service. Perhaps some would take a break from heaven for a difficult experience like life on Earth, meaning that death would be a return to the heavenly society.

Perhaps the suffering of our existence enables citizens of this natural heaven to develop into fuller participation in their society, making this life a rite of passage or a childhood. How better to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, assuming the heaven developed through a painful, protracted process from a society like ours, than to endure an immersive history lesson? How better to honor one’s ancestors than to suffer what they did? How better to live than to let go of one’s advantages for a time, secure in the knowledge that they will return, assuming one doesn’t become a monster in the primitive society?

Maybe this life is a kind of job placement test or civil service examination. In either case, in order to be trusted with responsibility after completing the simulation, we would have to demonstrate restraint in using resources. A greedy spendthrift is not to be trusted as fully as an applicant with ambitions that do not depend on intense consumption of resources.

Maybe we’re all applying for a limited number of jobs caring for the vulnerable. Any sufficiently advanced society would give the highest honors to those caring for the least powerful beings. In fact, I recommend living as if that were the case anyway. If enough of us did, we might make a heaven of this society while we’re at it.

Many religions teach ideas consistent with these. The point is that if we recognize that we might be living in a simulation, there is no longer any need to believe in supernatural beings as the basis for anything. People are welcome to such beliefs, but everyone could agree that people who don’t share those beliefs can be worthy of just as much as people who do. Likewise, people not holding such beliefs could appreciate their value, similar as they are to beneficial natural frameworks for understanding. In that case, we might be able to trust each other more and work and learn together better. We might stop hurting each other quite so much, too.

Of course, the problem of what all this is gets pushed back one level: What is the world in which the simulation is running, and how did it arise? These questions fascinate me, but I don’t need to know the answers in order to figure out how to live.

Now let’s set aside the issue of origins and destinations to model what is happening here.

Our species might be playing an important role in Earth’s reproductive cycle. In this view, our civilization is Earth’s flowering, a highly costly process by which the planet is solving the problem of getting its genetic material elsewhere, just as a plant does. Our bodies are fruit in this picture, containing Earth’s seeds, the large amount of bacteria we carry within and upon us. Just like an animal that consumes a fruit and ultimately deposits the seeds at the end of the digestive process some distance from the plant, we would deposit Earth bacteria on other planets, giving Earth DNA a chance to live elsewhere in beings that reproduce rapidly and are therefore more adaptable than we are. No physical principle prohibits travel to planets around other stars, though many people still treat travel away from Earth as a joke.

Do we want to do this? Is it fair to preexisting life on extrasolar planets? I’d suggest we have a talk about our objectives and guiding principles before some physicist finds a loophole in gravity, as I was trying to do, greatly accelerating the process of getting off Earth sustainably. Once that happens, philosophy might take a back seat, as it often does in a rush to control a newly opened source of wealth. Now, in our current existential crisis, we will decide what kind of spacefaring species we’ll become, assuming we don’t destroy ourselves or choose to limit ourselves to this planet. It seems developmentally appropriate that a species escape to other worlds only after struggle that compels reflection on what they’re up to, especially a species still treating its own planet the way we do.

Time may be very short. Einstein wrote down E = mc^2 in 1905. Forty years later, this idea had killed many thousands of people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Within Einstein’s lifetime, we were living under the threat of near-term human extinction all the time, a condition we have yet to repeal.

As the polycrisis deepens, we know that we’re in for a rough time on this planet, but no matter what happens, there is always hope. Humans don’t know enough to conclude otherwise, if such a conclusion even has meaning.

I’m still trying to work out what any of this is, but I know that like each and every other person, I am vastly powerful, because I get to decide what I think of it all. I hope that no being, supernatural or otherwise, could permanently take that away from me without my consent. In my opinion, any god worthy of my respect would respect my opinion and try to understand it, just as I respect and try to understand what they could possibly be up to themselves.

The Main Part of My Agenda
February 3, 2023

Your Excellency, Bishop Scharfenberger,

Your Excellency may not see my agenda in writing to Your Excellency and so might be too wary. I’ll explain. I believe in the value of what has been called checks and balances in the context of the founding of the United States, parallel structures in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe, and multiparty democracy. I believe that struggle between competing interests provides dynamic stability. As circumstances change, the system has the opportunity to respond through shifts of power among the parallel structures. Your Excellency may recall times when I have invoked similar ideas in the past. A person like me intervenes only when there is serious imbalance that threatens to break the system. We may intervene to preserve the system by strengthening that which is too weak. The system to which I pledge my allegiance is humanity. In my imperfect judgement based on limited experience, I see my greatest utility at the moment lying in serving Your Excellency.

When I advise Your Excellency to settle the lawsuits, I see some of the advantages the Church might be seeking by dragging out the legal process. In each case, I have judged the advantage illusory or Pyrrhic. For example, the fact that Your Excellency will retire due to age in May makes possible Your Excellency’s service in the role of inflexible and foolish leader whose folly will be corrected by his successor, thereby gaining that successor the respect and gratitude of all and increasing the power of the Church locally. If Your Excellency is generously playing this role, confident of reward from God, please consider the degree to which people already roll their eyes at the Church. Yes, people might be eager to work with the new bishop, given his seeming reasonable nature, but the contrast in their minds would not be between his behavior and Your Excellency’s but between his behavior and that of the Church as a whole. If instead, Your Excellency were to have a come-to-Jesus moment, begging Your Excellency’s pardon for the phrasing, and settle the lawsuits in the time remaining Your Excellency as bishop, the reputation of the Church would be improved, better aiding Your Excellency’s successor.

Incidentally, has Your Excellency carefully considered that Your Excellency might be subject to bad advice? Leaders often have trouble getting good information through the normal channels because everyone knows that bearing bad news is the surest way to incur disfavor. I know that Your Excellency is willing to stand boldly for what is good and just. I see this as central to Your Excellency’s career and coat of arms. I also know that standing boldly draws enemies, the existence of whom further degrades advice and information received by a leader.

I’ll close with a question that leads into my coming discussion of the Gospels: Who was the best advisor Jesus had in life?

Yours in the God Who gained from living as a person and Who may wonder how anyone could respect a God Who didn’t,
James

Emergency
February 4, 2023

Your Excellency, Bishop Scharfenberger,

This morning, Your Excellency is faced with an emergency. Your Excellency must respond before the evening news airs to Superintendent Vergiglio’s comment suggesting that students in Catholic schools deserved or needed or ought to be expected to receive greater protection from society than students in other schools.

In this morning’s Times Union, Superintendent Vergiglio is quoted as having written in a letter the following shocking sentence: “Asking school parents and administrators — Catholic school parents and administrators at that — to reconcile the proposed location of a low-barrier shelter is not only unfair, it’s unacceptable…” https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/saratoga-shelters-withdraws-proposal-24-hour-17762748.php?IPID=Times-Union-HP-spotlight

The foiling by the diocese of efforts to care for the poor is not good, especially given that there is no evidence that the diocese offered help in creating an alternative plan. What is over the top, what will bring outrage and possibly national attention, is the idea, written in what ought to have been a carefully considered letter vetted before release by people in Your Excellency’s office, that Catholic school students are in any way different from other schoolchildren in the degree of protection they should receive from society.

I strongly suggest that Superintendent Vergiglio’s departure from his office be announced immediately.

That such thinking occurs at all in the leadership of the diocese is dismaying and deeply harmful to the health of Your Excellency’s organization. Its existence may account in significant part for the bad advice to which I speculated that Your Excellency is subject in the matter of the lawsuits. Your Excellency needs to consult Your Excellency’s critics regularly for moral guidance. Your Excellency sorely needs the services  of a devil's advocate. I can do only so much in Your Excellency's service.

I wish Your Excellency well in today's difficulties.

Yours in the God Who cleans up Their messes before the evening news airs, lest the stink grow,
James

Last of the Second Part of My Messages to Your Excellency
February 5, 2023

Your Excellency, Bishop Scharfenberger,

The central flaw of Christianity is the central flaw of our civilization, their feet of clay that currently endanger not only Your Excellency’s Church and our way of life but also the existence of our species and a million others: disrespect for that which we erroneously believe does us no good. This is why so many Christians proselytize instead of learning from other ways of knowing what is good and just and thereby improving their own. This is why the good people are the ones with sufficient hatred for the poor and lust for material goods, the production  of which destroys economically undervalued life, both nonhuman and human. His Holiness, Pope Francis, understands this much. Has Your Excellency watched The Letter? The movie conveys much that cannot be captured in prose, even that of a papal encyclical.

Your Excellency’s other servant, Superintendent Virgiglio, is impeccably parochial, at least as far as can be determined from his LinkedIn page. This may be desirable for some purposes, but I submit that a leader, especially a chief executive, must have sufficiently broad experience of life, preferably including humiliating failure. The dilemma arising from people’s difficulty accepting leaders with blemished records and their need for such leaders is, I believe, the key to understanding Your Excellency’s model of God better, at least as that model was presented in the Gospels.

I shall digress to point out that Superintendent Virgiglio’s comment about Catholic school parents and administrators being somehow distinguished from others in their positions when it comes to protecting children currently appears on a diocesan website in an issue of The Evangelist. I am deeply embarrassed for Your Excellency. I think that the main problem may be that Dr. Virgiglio is overworked as both superintendent of Your Excellency’s schools and chancellor of Your Excellency’s diocese, positions he has held for the past few years. For a couple of years in this period, he was also obtaining his doctorate. It may have been during this period that the plans to open the shelter began to be considered. Regardless, had Dr. Virgiglio been doing only a single job, perhaps he could have quietly headed off plans to open the shelter on property adjacent to a diocese school instead of very publicly turning away the poor in response to parental complaints, if I understand events correctly, and doing so with such poor word choice. If Dr. Virgiglio is also handling the diocesan response to the lawsuits, a lack of adequate time for him to do his job may account for the dreadful showing the diocese is making in that matter, too.

Incidentally, life might be less desperate for vulnerable people, including the homeless, if certain ancient Church attitudes were revived. I’ve spent a lot of time with people who had diagnoses of mental illness and have been assigned such diagnoses myself. The common threads in my friends and me that led to the diagnoses were insufficient assertiveness and refusal to accept the conditions of life to which we were subjected. Many substance abusers are similar, and both the mentally ill and substance abusers are overrepresented among the homeless. Why does the Church not identify a good portion of today’s homeless with the stylites and other hermits of old? Certainly, one would not have asked a stylite to serve as a babysitter, but they reminded people that society was flawed and thereby encouraged consideration of how to improve the world. They received respect. It’s much easier to behave well when one is respected. I assert that certain kinds of misbehavior are beneficial as assertions that respect is owed and that attention must be paid.

Returning to qualities of leaders, Your Excellency will recall that Your Excellency’s God killed many children in freeing the Israelites from bondage in Egypt. There were alternative methods by which an all-powerful being could have achieved the same end. I vehemently oppose any powerful being that has killed children and not undergone radical change in their character. I very much include gods and models of gods among those I would oppose on these grounds. I will gladly suffer torture or destruction at the hands  of, or while subject to the permissive will of, any god I oppose. I am bound by a code similar to the one that requires soldiers to refuse illegal orders. My Lilliputian defiance of evil gods may help such gods to change their ways. Regardless, I am bound to oppose them.

I know that Your Excellency is also a defender of children and other vulnerable people. Your Excellency and I disagree to some extent on means to this end, though not so much as stereotypical versions of ourselves would be expected to do. Of course, one reason the Old Testament God is bloodthirsty is that ancient people constructed models of God to express reality, in addition to aspirations. Does this fact not also suggest that ancient people might create a model of God Who learned, to teach their mortal leaders how to improve?

A leader’s direct experience of the life of their people would be a gift to that people. No matter how much a leader knows or understands, lack of direct experience leaves leaders vulnerable to approving faulty proposals, the wrongness of which would be glaring to anyone who possessed such experience. Therefore, a learning God should be incarnated as a person.

Consider the “wise men from the East.” They expected to greet the birth of a leader in the mold of the ones they knew. They brought gold, frankincense, and myrrh, which were used in connection with economic, religious, and royal power, because, being from the East, they expected a king to hold all these forms of power. The child they found was not what they expected.

Consider the temptations of Jesus by the devil, who offered royal power and challenged Jesus to turn stones to bread and cast Himself down from a height to force God to save Him. I think that the symbolism here is multivalued, but Your Excellency will note that we once again find royal, economic, and religious power represented. Incidentally, turning a large number of stones to bread could result in more food than even a fasting Jesus would find useful. A being with the power to transmute stone to food might find tastier foods than bread to produce. I think that these facts suggest that more is at play in this temptation than appears on the surface.

Consider the “Our Father.” Again, there is a tripartite structure suggesting to me the same three elements, this time in the order royal power, the economy, and religion.

Now witness Jesus triumphantly entering Jerusalem, overturning the tables of the moneychangers, and hanging around at the scene of a capital crime, bandying words with the religious authorities. Only direct intervention by the Father could ultimately save Him. The temptations of the devil have turned out to be foreshadowing. Jesus behaved like a donkey-borne parody of an earthly king. He bought increased loyalty from the crowd by stealing money and tossing it to them. Did it ever occur to Your Excellency that Jesus was no less a thief than the other two men crucified with Him? He subjected Himself to certain death by committing a capital crime, much as He would have by casting Himself from a great height. If Your Excellency reconsiders the Parables of the Wedding Party and the Coins or Bags of Gold, Your Excellency may discover in them the same bitter sarcasm I find directed toward a Father Whose angels seemed to be running late to catch Jesus.

Your Excellency is familiar with the dual nature of Jesus. Jesus as God could succeed in teaching us by behaving ridiculously, dangerously, even sinfully as a man. Cursing the fig tree is a brilliant satire of leaders who demand unnatural performance from their subjects. It would be a daft thing to do without satirical intent. Saying that no one comes to the Father except through Him could be an expression of the subtle point that the Father is not the only valid model of God, or it could be an expression of the obvious point that Jesus as a man was on tilt, behaving extremely badly by dismissing beliefs central to the senses of self of all or almost all of humanity at that moment. It could not be a statement of policy from a just and loving God.

I hope Your Excellency understands that I respect Your Excellency’s model of God. A brilliant part of sacred texts is that they reduce the hideously complex task of creating a way to know what is good and just to a problem of reading comprehension. I seek to be of aid to Your Excellency in this area, one in which I have tested very well, including in middle age.

Would Jesus have succumbed to the devil’s temptation to unite political, economic, and religious power through His behavior in the temple if Jesus had merely broken His fast by turning a few stones to bread a couple of years earlier? Your Excellency may see the utility of sinning or, as I think of it, embracing the finite nature of one’s humanity and the beneficial imperfection it confers. Leaders must have a sense of their fallibility. Purity is absence, Your Excellency. It is nothingness.

In short, Your Excellency, I suggest that the life of Jesus is the story of a leader Who learns. Jesus went from literally telling people to be perfect to promising the so-called Good Thief entry to paradise. He went from despising money to acknowledging its uses more than once in the temple. He went from dismissing the law to submitting to it. He went from total self-control to utter helplessness, which enabled Him to form the most moving of genuine human connections with the so-called Good Thief. He learned how to deal with humans by the process of becoming one, completed on the cross. The process may be no less difficult nor any less rewarding for a being with total self-control than it is for one with no self-control. Of course, every human starts in the latter category.

Your Excellency, I now see Jesus as the God Who learned. How could any teacher fail to learn from their students? How could an all-powerful God not grow by experiencing loss of control?

Your Excellency, I believe that the Church can renew itself by seeing the Gospels as a criticism of the old way of Eastern potentates, in which political, economic, and religious power were held by the same entity.

I believe that seeing the Gospels as the story of a God Who learned is key to promoting the survival prospects of humanity, which depend on leaders openly acknowledging what they already know, that our way of life is leading to doom.

By fully acknowledging and atoning for its errors and teaching people about those of its model of God, the Catholic Church can give political leaders and people in general the help they need to acknowledge their own errors and change their ways. I might be proud to consult a model of God Who humiliated Himself and thereby learned.

Repudiating the statement of Superintendent Virgiglio and settling the lawsuits are the first steps on a glorious and desperately needed journey. Neither Your Excellency nor the Church will be alone. After all, every human being has the same cross, an imperfect nature that is a burden to bear and a great opportunity to embrace.

Yours in the God Who just can’t see the point in giving up hope that respect for all life, including the life humans must take to survive, will grow fast enough in the humans to save the human race and a million other species,
James

Matthew 8:23-34 Is Hilarious
February 6, 2023

Your Excellencies, Archbishop Pierre and Bishop Scharfenberger,

I had a remarkable experience yesterday afternoon while reading Chapter 8 of the Gospel of Matthew. As you recall, I had made a case for recognizing that Jesus must have made mistakes. There’s an even simpler argument than the one I made, namely that a human who makes no mistakes is a contradiction in terms. Saying that Jesus made mistakes because He was human does not contradict belief in the omnipotence of God, and an infallible Jesus cannot be defended as a mystery. The issue is simply that the words make no sense. I don’t believe that Jesus was intransitive, nor do I believe that Jesus was transitive, because Jesus was not a verb. Likewise, I don’t believe that Jesus was immune to error, because I do believe that Jesus was genuinely human. One can resolve any seeming contradiction by saying that Jesus made mistakes when the frailty of His human nature interfered with his functioning, as happens to all humans.

I was reading the story at the end of Matthew 8 concerning the pigs, when I noticed that Jesus made two separate serious mistakes. I realized that the story was funny, hilariously so. I also saw the humor in the preceding story and the following one at the top of Matthew 9, in which Jesus and the teachers of the law make similar mistakes. I laughed hard. These were funny stories, not merely droll ones.

This morning, I saw what had happened: Jesus was tired. He asks for the chance to sleep and is denied. He falls asleep in a boat that later encounters a very dangerous storm. The disciples, fearing for their lives, wake Him, and Jesus chides them for lacking faith. This is funny: Jesus is complaining because the disciples woke Him merely to save their lives. He is grumpy because he is exhausted. He calms the winds. This is funny because he solves the problem in the most ostentatious way possible, after having spent the first part of the chapter trying to draw as little attention as He could and to get away from crowds.

I tell Your Excellencies that I like Jesus far more this morning than I ever did before. Sure, Jesus was always easy to look at and listen to in the movies, but humans do not readily make strong connections to beings who show no weakness. Human connections are founded on trust, which is often fostered through the ability to see a certain amount of weakness in another, though not too much. Everyone knows that everyone else has weaknesses. If a person shows no weakness, the person is obviously not showing their true selves and cannot be fully trusted.

Why would the Church deny people the opportunity to see weakness in Jesus, to understand that He made mistakes? I suggest that seeing Jesus as fallible would help readers of the Gospels notice the echoing I described in yesterday’s message of the three temptations of the devil by Jesus’ triumphant entry to Jerusalem, overturning of the tables of the moneychangers, and depending on the Father to save Him from certain execution thereafter. The theme I perceived of separation of powers, of avoiding the placement of political, economic, and religious power under control of a single entity, ran contrary to the Church’s intentions. In an earlier letter to Your Excellency, Bishop Scharfenberger, I recounted the historic and continuing concentration of power under Church control in the economic and political spheres.

I can see at least one reason the Gospels were written and curated so as to emphasize separation of political and economic power from religious authority. In the era of Jesus and immediately afterward, Rome was deteriorating into the Eastern pattern of god-kings, which the Wise Men signaled through their choice of gifts that they expected Jesus to follow. I remember three relevant scenes from the BBC production of I Claudius. Brian Blessed as Augustus bitterly demanded, “If I’m a god, even in Palmyra, how do I cure gout?” John Rhys-Davies as Macro added to his announcement of Caligula’s declaration of his own divinity that “It is in the nature of miracles to be unusual.” How does one argue with such logic, particularly from the commander of the guard? Derek Jacoby as Claudius wept after being told that he had been made a god in Colchester because he had been tricked the night before into having his wife beheaded.

In fact, I imagine that the corrupt unification of religious, political, and economic power by the Roman emperors was a key factor in the rise of Christianity. This dismal tradition continues in today’s United States. It is well-intentioned in some people, but the urge to confer political or economic power on any model of god is corrosive to all three forms of authority, the religious form above all. How many more people would Your Excellencies have in the pews if parishioners had the kind of relationship to God that laughing at the mistakes of Jesus would enable them to form? I might never have left such a Church. My family life would have been vastly improved if making mistakes had been accepted as not only a necessary part of my humanity but a beneficial one. I might have been allowed to choose my own path without having to reject my birth family repeatedly. Various other schisms might not have occurred. Leaders today might be able to change their minds without making themselves so vulnerable. This last difference could make us all much safer.

In particular, do you think that fewer people would make the horrible mistake of seeing sin as the likely root cause of illness or disability if the story of the person with palsy at the start of Matthew 9 were understood as a joke? My mom, who died of a degenerative disease, might have had an easier life.

I am pleased to serve Your Excellencies with my powers of reading comprehension, untrammeled as they are by loyalty to any accretion of beliefs.

Yours in the God Who laughs at Themself,
James

Emergency, Part 2
February 6, 2023

Your Excellency, Archbishop Pierre,

A new disclosure in the story of the foiled plan to open a homeless shelter near a Catholic school in Saratoga, New York, makes it even more likely that this story will gain national attention and bring great embarrassment to the Catholic Church. Here is the latest story: https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/shelters-saratoga-leadership-threatened-physical-17766401.php?utm_campaign=CMS%20Sharing%20Tools%20(Premium)&utm_source=share-by-email&utm_medium=email

I trust that after reading the article, Your Excellency will not need spelled out why I find it extremely likely that there is great risk from this story to Your Excellency’s organization. I am at Your Excellency's service if I am wrong. I copy below my earlier message about this issue.

I suggest that a key problem here is that the Church uses stoicism to cultivate an unwarranted air of moral superiority that members and the Church as a whole then use to gain political and economic power. I guarantee you that some of the good people who will cover this story will have this idea in mind.

I serve Your Excellency truly, for I serve what I find to be the truth. I should state what I hope has been clear from the beginning: Because I have never received a reply to any message I have sent Church officials, none of my messages has been private.

I sincerely wish Your Excellency well in this crisis and always. I believe that the Catholic Church has a crucial role to play in the coming years. I hope to help the Church fulfill this role.

Yours in the God Who is love and Who is everywhere,
James
godispoor.org

Saturday, February 4, 2023, 9:06 AM

Subject: Emergency

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Emergency, Part 3: Resolution
February 6, 2023

Your Excellency, Bishop Scharfenberger,

I write to suggest the form Your Excellency’s response might take to the crisis of Your Excellency’s diocese over its poor handling of the issue of the homeless shelter in Saratoga Springs.

I. Hold a press conference at which Your Excellency and Chancellor Virgiglio appear beside the statue of Homeless Jesus at St. Luke’s Catholic Church in Schenectady. I had planned to reshoot, but because of its timeliness, I posted a link at the top of my relevant blog page (www.godispoor.org) to a video I made of the site as a comment on life in the United States.

II. Your Excellency could severely reprimand any Catholic who threatens any public official for any reason but add that Your Excellency hopes that none of the threats made in connection with the current matter came from a practicing Catholic. On second thought, Your Excellency should be careful not to draw laughter, so I’m now dubious about adding anything to the reprimand.

III. Chancellor Virgiglio could apologize for not dealing with the issue in a timely fashion, a year or two ago. He could furthermore apologize for the ill-chosen phrase suggesting that Catholic parents and, for some reason, administrators are owed special consideration and Catholic schoolchildren greater protection than others. He could blame his performance on being overworked and take the opportunity to announce his resignation from one of the two presumably full-time jobs he holds, chancellor of the diocese and superintendent of its schools.

IV. Your Excellency could announce any new initiatives already planned to serve the poor and casually mention the diocese’s current substantial efforts. I would omit any Potemkin charity work. Your Excellency’s statements are apt to be checked by the press.

V. Your Excellency could make statements fostering respect for the homeless. For example, many homeless people work or are children or disabled people. Some mental illness and substance abuse owes to rejection of our unjust society. Some people are too truth-oriented to close their eyes adequately to injustice, as is needed to function normally in this world. Some or many chronically homeless people are therefore the spiritual descendants of the stylites and other hermits who commanded the respect of the faithful shrewd enough not to mind the fact that they had absented themselves to a degree from the competition for resources.

VI. Modern people might be reminded that housed people consume less resources than homeless ones, making it a money-saving proposition to house the homeless. People who do not work reduce competition for jobs and hence increase salaries. In a time of inflation, people who consume less help everyone by keeping prices lower than would otherwise be the case. In short, hatred of the poor by working people comes from ignorance.

VII. When questions are asked about the lawsuits, Your Excellency might announce an expectation that settlement will soon be reached and direct the press to an announcement that will be forthcoming soon.

Your Excellency could make the world better by teaching publicly. In this case, widespread media attention could be turned to good effect, helping the poor, society in general, and Your Excellency’s organization. I wish Your Excellency good luck with this great opportunity.

I caution only that Your Excellency avoid defensiveness at all costs. If a cutting question is asked, thank the person asking it for expressing what must have been on the minds of others, too, given that the question occurred to them. If Your Excellency does not have a ready answer, simply promise to consider the matter closely. Recall the benefits to Daniel of spending time in the lions' den.

It would be beneficial for Your Excellency to be able to discuss the mistakes that Jesus made as a human, thereby blunting anger and promoting cooperation in solving difficult problems. My message of this morning might be useful in bringing about this state of affairs, but, of course, that is a matter for consideration after the current crisis is resolved. I am grateful for the opportunity to be of service to Your Excellency, but I look forward to the day when the likes of me will not have advice of much worth to offer leaders of a smoothly functioning and reformed Catholic Church.

Once again, this advice is being shared with others, because I have never heard back from any Catholic official, despite earnest efforts to be of service, many years of former association with the Church, and very large amounts of money that have passed from me to the Church and a person who was employed by it at the time. Your Excellencies, high-handedness brings disrepute. I'm embarrassed to have to inform Your Excellencies of this fact.

Yours in the God Who is love and Who is everywhere,
James
godispoor.org

Earlier today

Subject: Emergency, Part 2

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How to Save a Million Species
February 13, 2023

Your Excellencies, Archbishop Pierre and Bishop Scharfenberger,

This morning, I believe that the answer is at hand, the way to solve the main problems of both the Catholic Church and humanity as a whole. The text I suggest is the story of Jesus casting out the demons named Legion into the herd of pigs. The principle illustrated by the text is that even God in human form can err due to exhaustion and misdirected compassion.

First, I am deeply emotionally affected at this moment because I finally looked up interpretations of the story just now, to find that the exorcism of Legion into the pigs has been used to support the idea that Christians have no duty to nonhuman life. I am absolutely devastated that one of the reasons humanity and a million other species are endangered is a clear misinterpretation of a story about Jesus.

The exorcism of Legion is preceded by an account of Jesus missing out on sleep. He’s tired. Why would anyone think that Jesus deliberately caused the pigs to be killed? Even people who undervalue nonhuman life would recognize that the pigs were the food supply for some group of people. What combination of cognitive flaws would produce the idea that Jesus used the pigs wantonly?

One member of the combination is antisemitism. The grave distortion of reason that is antisemitism is known to have existed in Catholic leadership centuries ago, when influential interpretations of the exorcism of Legion were constructed. A person afflicted with any degree of bias against Jews, even a subtle, subconscious bias, would dismiss the idea that Jesus was capable of serious error, in order to avoid empathy with the Jewish authorities whom Jesus treated so harshly in some accounts.

The other is humorlessness. I laughed at the dubious wisdom of Jesus in complying with the request of the demons Legion and in later waiting around at the scene of the incident for the arrival of the people whose food supply He had depleted and thereby exercised via the exorcism. I also laughed wryly at the illustration that freedom is not always desirable, as the pigs discovered. I didn’t dwell on the fate of the pigs themselves, in part, I think, because I’m aware of the tradition of disregard for the rights of animals and didn’t want to distract from ideas I expected to be more persuasive to more people. On the other hand, I am also infected by attitudes engendered by this tradition. Pope Francis, as his sainted namesake did, is trying to undo the harm of anthropocentric interpretations of scripture through Laudato Si’ and The Letter, as Your Excellencies know.

If the cognitive disorders of antisemitism and humorlessness are acknowledged as having misled the Catholic authorities who overlooked the straightforward explanation of the story, that Jesus behaved foolishly, owing to sleepiness and misdirected compassion, a wonderful opportunity for healing the world arises. First, there is a direct analogy between Jesus acceding to the request of demons by removing them from one location where they had done harm and casting them into another where they could do further harm, on the one hand, and the Church transferring demon priests to new parishes and to hospitals. The Church, having remedied the misinterpretation of the exorcism of Legion, could point to its own fallibility as echoing that of Jesus and regain the confidence of communities that regard its moral authority as diminished and continuing to shrink. I think that I have yet to hear anger over Superintendent Virgiglio’s comment in part due to its dog-bites-man character in the minds of those who notice that it is problematic. Obviously, Your Excellency, Bishop Scharfenberger, would immediately settle the lawsuits. I’m confident that if Jesus had had access to coin at the time, He would not have dickered very long over the amount of compensation owed the variously named Gerasenes or Gadarenes.

The excessive compassion Jesus showed Legion relative to the Gadarenes is echoed as well by people who abet the destruction of Nature in order to feed their children beef, house their families in suburbs that they believe safer than cities, buy vast amounts to secure the slight enhancement of safety conferred by recognized social status, protect their countries by supporting vast militaries that increase the chances of the disasters they are intended to avert, comfort their nearest neighbors by exploiting their more distant ones, and live, in short, the hideously evil American dream. The well-off are blind to its evil because its victims are kept at a distance, in part through actions such as those you denounced, to your credit, in the matter of the Saratoga homeless shelter.

The mistake of Jesus in loving the demon in front of Him above the pigs some distance away and the townsfolk nowhere to be seen is the problem that threatens our existence as a species. I tell Your Excellencies that if we don’t all fix this very soon, Jesus might well return, in which case I see that we will have compounded His sadness over having contributed to causing such horrible suffering through misdirected compassion caused by lack of sleep. I don’t think that Jesus would let Himself entirely off the hook by blaming the idea that Christians have no duty to nonhuman life entirely on cognitively impaired Church scholars.

I tell Your Excellencies truly that insufficient re-examination of past work is a big problem even in science, where it is essential to the very definition of the pursuit. There should be no shame in finding an error in doctrine, even one centuries old. Furthermore, finding the mistake and courageously publicizing it will provide an example of the correct way to live and to preserve life by increasing respect for all its forms. Many people, including most leaders, will have to follow the Church’s example for humanity to succeed. Failure could end our species and a million others. Let’s save God from further suffering by preaching the correct interpretation of the exorcism of Legion.

Yours in the God Whom we could serve better if we spent more time consolidating our position, instead of always charging forward, like some overcaffeinated French general,
James

A Brief Proposal: How to Save a Million Species, Part 2
February 14, 2023

Your Excellencies, Archbishop Pierre and Bishop Scharfenberger,

I offer Your Excellencies the following brief proposal that I believe is in keeping with all articles of Catholic faith.

Objective: Convince people with high-consumption lifestyles to make radical change in their lives in keeping with the intentions of Pope Francis expressed in Laudato Si’ and The Letter.

General means to this end: Remind all people that good people do bad things out of good intentions. Show well-off people that poor people and nonhuman life are important to the well-being of the well-off, besides having rights of their own.

Specific means to this end: Reinterpret the exorcism of Legion from the Gadarene demoniac as a case in which God simulated doing a bad thing out of good intentions. By granting the wish of demons, Jesus, Who is to Christians the best possible person, harmed animals and hundreds of people. He did this to show compassion to beings in front of Him, who happened to be demons, and thereby ignored the interests of nonhuman animals and of people He could not see. This is very similar, apart from the noninvolvement of supernatural beings, to what well-off people do by looking after their own families in ways that do grave harm to nonhuman life and to people in other places. Much as Jesus suffered as a consequence of His act of permitting Legion to enter the pigs, insofar as He lost the chance to teach the Gadarenes, well-off people today will suffer great harm to themselves in not very many more years if they fail to start thinking right away about the interests of nonhuman life and of people in other places.

It's as simple as that, Your Excellencies. I wish Your Excellencies good luck.

Yours in the God Who tried, Lord knows He tried,
James
godispoor.org

Synthesis: How to Save a Million Species, Part 3
February 16, 2023

Your Excellencies, Archbishop Pierre and Bishop Scharfenberger,

The story of the exorcism of Legion keeps getting better for me. Has either of Your Excellencies ever owned a pig? I have. My ex-wife was fond of nonhuman animals and prevailed upon me one Christmas/Hanukkah to drive to Amish country to buy a miniature Vietnamese potbellied pig. I astutely failed to request an audience with the parents of the pig. I soon reaped the harvest of my omission, for while the pig may have been Vietnamese and even potbellied, it was not miniature. The growing horror of cleaning up after our growing pig eventually convinced even my tender-hearted wife to take the pig to live on a farm.

It had been bothering me that I had not used the porcine nature of the animals killed in my interpretation of the story, particularly given the Jewish dietary restrictions. I now see a way to do that. By using Legion to destroy the pigs, I imagine that Jesus did fishermen a favor by eliminating runoff into the lake of pig droppings and thus reducing the frequency of algal blooms, with their concomitant generation of dead zones and eutrophication of the lake. Here's an article that mentions the issue. Furthermore, I expect that the water quality of the lake was ultimately improved by the ending of the herd. No doubt the lake was used as a source of drinking and washing water in what was otherwise a desert, so water quality was no small matter.

I think that I now see how to read the Bible. As a complex systems scientist, I most urgently want to convey the message that one should never seek to extremize. Rather, one should optimize by balancing competing interests. Why not treat the Trinity as an embodiment of the dialectic process?

The Father takes the larger view, the forest perspective, looking at the needs of civilization and ecology. That’s why the Old Testament God seems monstrous at times and why God moves in mysterious ways.

The Son takes the personal view, the trees perspective, looking at the needs of individuals, both human and nonhuman.

The Father, then, presents a thesis in each case, the Son its antithesis, and the Holy Spirit the synthesis.

No person would have the right to destroy the herds of the Gadarenes, but God would. For all I know, it was the right thing for Jesus, as God, to do. That makes sense to me. We can learn about how not to behave as a person, as I discussed in recent messages, while learning at the same time how God might behave quite correctly from God’s perspective. Then each of us, in consultation with religious and other leaders, can consult our slice of the Holy Spirit to decide how we should behave in our personal lives, functioning analogously to the Son, and as voters, functioning as one of many elements in the large-scale structure or our society and thus in a way analogous to a tiny part of the Father.

I think that this approach to reading the Bible could bring great benefit, particularly in saving our species and a million others. If I have just explained to Your Excellencies what I was meant to have learned in Sunday school, a possibility I don’t discount, at least I will have elucidated an application of the principle to the story of the exorcism of Legion from the Gadarene demoniac superior to the idea I hear Saint Augustine and Thomas Aquinas drew from the story, namely that Christians had no duty to nonhuman animals.

Yours in the God Who would like all Their Creatures to have everything those creatures want but Who knows that things don’t work that way,
James

Fathers and Sons: How to Save a Million Species, Part 4
February 18, 2023

Your Excellencies, Archbishop Pierre and Bishop Scharfenberger,

I’ve realized how to explain the central flaw of Christianity to the general public: Your Excellencies present a model of God based on a Father and a Son Who never fight.

I can tell Your Excellencies from personal experience that this model is corrosive to some families, in which every effort is made to replace the genuine self of a child with a thing, a caricature of a person. I know that that is not the intent of Your Excellencies, but the idea that anger and derisive laughter are sinful gives parents too much ammunition in the struggle to create a civilized individual from a child. The effort of the child to remain an individual is made too difficult against the program of the parents to civilize the child. Neither the child nor the parent is necessarily doing anything bad, but the religion of Your Excellencies is interpreted too often as burdening the child with guilt and shame while the parents are left with no check against their inclination to control the child in the interests of keeping the child safe.

The harm done to some families by the lack of contention between Father and Son in Your Excellencies’ model of God is repeated on many other levels of human affairs, because doing the right thing most often requires balancing competing interests. The potential of the Christian model of God is barely tapped. Here’s how I currently interpret the story of Jesus. No doubt my interpretation will evolve.

As I’ve mentioned, I think that God, as understood through the Father-Son-Holy Spirit model, gained from becoming human. The Father understood the big picture, the forest, civilization, ecology. The Father benefited from the more granular view Jesus had as a person and gained the ability to consult the little picture, the trees, the concerns of individual people.

The key problem of life as an intelligent being is reconciling competing needs. When there is a significant power differential, we speak of reconciling needs with rights. Jesus can often be seen as advocating for rights and wants, while the Father looks to needs. I think that this picture is not very different from what Your Excellencies believe. The innovation I offer concerns the struggle between Father and Son that is part of the process by which action is determined from argument, synthesis obtained from thesis and antithesis.

In the ministry of Jesus, we see that He heals and casts out demons, often asking that no one speak of what He had done. Jesus even begins to raise the dead. I think that in doing so, Jesus, having succumbed to natural human compassion, crossed a bright red line with the Father.

Recall that in the preamble to the story of Noah, the Father is said to have limited the lifespan of humans in response to the fact that humans were having babies. This is a simple reality of ecology: No matter how clever the humans, a finite planet has finite resources and so can support no more than a certain number of humans living at a particular average level of resource consumption. To put it more compellingly, just as cancer is the deadly phenomenon of excessive cell growth, excessive population growth without reduction in the average standard of living is catastrophic. Well, Your Excellencies can judge whether the previous sentence compelled Your Excellencies in any important way, given that we, only some of whom are excellent, may differ in our imaginations of what is to come on this planet. Maybe the easiest way to communicate the severity of what I imagine is to liken it to a great flood.

Returning to the story of Jesus, please consider the events around the occupation of the temple from the point of view of a person in the crowd following Jesus. Here’s what I might have been thinking.

The Master can raise the dead! Hallelujah! Mom didn’t deserve to die so young. Surely the Master will restore my mother to life. Where’s He taking us? The temple. Coins! I got a few. That’s brilliant. I deserve the money more than those oily money changers. Is this place still a bank? There’s got to be good stuff inside. I’d be worried if the Master couldn’t raise the dead. The Romans are surely on their way. Maybe we’ll turn out to be invulnerable to swords.

Your Excellencies are no doubt familiar with the erroneous beliefs about their invulnerability of participants in the Boxer rebellion. At this point, everyone anywhere near the temple was in grave danger. The brave religious authorities, whose contribution has been misunderstood through the warped lens of antisemitism, managed to defuse the situation without much killing of which I’m aware. I haven’t, however, read widely on the subject. I note that a corpse is shown in the temple courtyard after the crowds disperse in The Greatest Story Ever Told.

Jesus shows every sign that the Father has abandoned Him. In the Parable of the Wedding Party, the only group that could correspond to the few who are chosen out of the many called is the person thrown into the outer darkness with the wailing and gnashing of teeth. Jesus is complaining about having been abandoned by the Father. The Parable of the Coins or Bags of Gold is extravagantly critical of the most powerful character in it. I take that, too, as Jesus taking the Father to task. Later, Jesus explicitly asks why the Father has abandoned Him. I suggest that the Father sharply curtailed the powers of Jesus to teach Him a lesson for having gotten so far out of hand.

That’s a story about a father and a son that is more interesting to me and more edifying, in my opinion, because it expresses the heartbreaking tradeoffs that must be made to balance needs and rights. My mom should not be brought back from the dead, nor should I after my time comes, because the system cannot function with an unlimited number of people. I am seeking to explain that Your Excellencies are leaders in a diminished religion that has been made the advocate for the thesis instead of the guardians of the means for achieving synthesis. Your Excellencies have the opportunity to correct this mistake.

Please note as well that an advantage of humanoid models of God is that people have the opportunity to understand the motives of God more easily, being, for the most part, exquisitely tuned to understanding other people. However, God ceases to be humanoid when God fails to behave even remotely like a person.

A disadvantage of humanoid gods, as opposed to gods drawn from Nature, is that they remove an opportunity for people to enhance their empathy for nonhuman life, without which people cannot exist. Worshiping a humanoid model of God therefore demands that leaders in that religion emphasize the importance of tradeoffs, of respectfully considering the tension between competing needs.

In particular, ecology must be an explicit concern of such religions. I suggest that the Jewish laws were at least partly a way to meet the needs of the environment. The story of Noah’s Ark certainly highlights the need for unclean animals, for preserving living beings that lack recognized economic value. Contrast God’s commands to Noah with the behavior of Christians, enlightened by the likes of Saint Augustine and Thomas Aquinas as to their lack of duty to nonhuman life, when the Christians abuse and needlessly destroy other life and thereby, in my view, flout the will of the Father. Maybe there was more behind his schoolmates calling Aquinas the dumb ox than merely the size and slowness of speech of the great scholar. Of course, I am no expert on the writings of Church scholars, and I would be delighted to find myself wrong about them in this matter.

Your Excellencies, by prohibiting an interpretation of the life of Jesus that would ring true to anyone who had ever been a parent or a child, it’s as if over many centuries, taking great pains to do it, the leaders of the Church have taken gold coins, plated them with silver, and held them up proudly with the expectation of being called good and faithful servants.

Yours in the God Who may have given humanity the dialectic method millennia before it came to bear that name,
James

Conclusion
February 19, 2023

Your Excellencies, Archbishop Pierre and Bishop Scharfenberger,

I wonder whether Your Excellencies are as inspired as I this morning by my newfound understanding of the life of Jesus. Even God in human form couldn’t do the right thing. He had to try to conquer death, without which life is impossible on a finite planet. We should forgive ourselves for committing the same offense and start to pay attention to both sides of the eternal dialogue:

The Father: Because resources are finite, people can be comfortable or many, not both.

The Son: Their suffering is intolerable.

I suggest that the obvious resolution is to praise those who, for whatever reason, don’t have children, just as the Church did for a millennium, until quite recently. This is why I have started to celebrate International Childfree Day, which is August 1. I visit the resting places of my deceased childfree relatives and send ecards of my own design. Your Excellency, Bishop Scharfenberger, may have received the one I sent Your Excellency last year.

My own resources are finite, so if Your Excellencies care, or anyone else reading this cares, to support my work with money that would not be missed, tips may be left at https://ko-fi.com/proudfatherofnone.

I expect to write more at godispoor.org, but for now, I leave Your Excellencies with the consolation I find in these horrific times: If humanity ends, humanity not only wasn’t fit to continue but might have been more harmful than beneficial, after all. That’s the brutal truth.

As our species nears the end of yet another cycle of living out the story of Jesus, the Father could still catch us, if we think clearly. Humanity could rise again, even if we fall into a cataclysm. Ultimately, the Father’s will always prevails. I just wish children didn’t have to suffer.

Yours in God, regardless of models of God,
James

Trinitarian Dialectic and Global Polycrisis
February 25, 2023

Your Excellencies, Archbishop Pierre and Bishop Scharfenberger,

I write to share what I plan to address directly to other religious leaders. Christianity as currently understood aids in distinguishing good from evil but can be awkward and confusing in application to decisions between alternatives that are both good in the abstract. Not only do some people become persuaded that good things are bad simply because they are opposed to good things, but also leaders sometimes substitute legal advice for moral judgment as the basis for their decisions. The latter is like asking the copy machine repairman what one ought to print.

Still more dangerously, leaders sometimes substitute advice from economists for moral judgment. This is like putting the copy machine repairman in charge not only of what to print but also of how many copies to produce, regardless of the finite number of trees available for paper production.

The solution I found in writing my recent messages to Your Excellencies was to supplement the God-devil dichotomy via which Christians understand good-evil opposites with the Trinitarian dialectic through which Christians might grapple with good-good opposites, assigning the good of the many to the Father as thesis, assigning the good or rights of the few to the Son as antithesis, and using their judgment in consultation with the Holy Spirit to achieve synthesis. Two of the desired results of this process are that a variety of decisions emerge and that all of them be respected, thereby balancing human systems without requiring those fighting the tide of fashion to suffer scorn or worse.

In the following essay, I motivate and describe the application of this solution to the global polycrisis, which includes the climate, biodiversity, soil vitality, freshwater availability, and nuclear armament crises and the highly dangerous intensification of each through its interactions with the others. Your Excellencies have my gratitude for any time Your Excellencies spend with my ideas and for the opportunity Your Excellencies provide to be of service.

Yours in service to God, regardless of models of God,
James

What Would the Father Do?

As a Catholic apostate from the age of 13, apart from a brief return to the Church in my early thirties, I am pleased to report that I finally have an understanding of the Gospels that allows me to consider the Trinity as an excellent model of large-scale structure in the affairs of life on this planet, which is how I think of God. I want to share my idea with you because I arrived at it in the course of using my training as a scientist and educator to identify the fundamental source of, and possible solutions to, the global polycrisis, the complex of mutually reinforcing crises that threaten to destroy humanity and a million other species.

Please consider the central problem unique to humanity among living beings on Earth: Our intelligence enables us to overcome constraints on our numbers and on per capita consumption of resources. This circumstance causes us always to be in danger of the catastrophe of unlimited success, which is ecological collapse. Humans cooperating with each other can increase production of food and other necessities of life, extend our average lifespan, and otherwise increase our population in ways nonhuman beings cannot, while also improving the material wellbeing of individuals. All of these are good things in the abstract, but too much of a good thing is a bad thing.

His Holiness, Pope Francis, has pointed out that the story of the Tower of Babel illustrates the issue. God the Father responded to excessive resource consumption by humans with the confusion of their languages, which reduced their ability to cooperate.

In the preamble to the story of Noah, the Father is said to have limited the lifespan of humans. Then the imaginations of the humans are said to have been only evil all the time. How could this be possible? I suggest that answering the question was left up to children hearing the story millennia ago.

Noah is commanded to bring unclean animals on the ark, indicating that all of God’s creatures, even those without obvious economic value, ought to be preserved by us. Do we adequately preserve such life today? Why not? We are destroying wildlife in order to increase our per capita consumption of resources and our numbers. Maybe the people against whom the Father sent the Great Flood were imagining and doing the same thing. The result is ecological collapse, which is more difficult to describe than a flood.

How does the story of Noah end? We are told of the pacification of the animals, perhaps to answer any precocious child who objects that wolves and other dangerous animals should not have been saved. We then hear of Noah getting drunk. Drunkenness illustrates that too much of a good thing is a bad thing, a truth often overlooked by people pursuing economic growth.

Now consider the Gospels. The devil tempts Jesus with the opportunity to unify all kingdoms under His rule, which would contravene the Father’s solution to the problem embodied in the Tower of Babel; with His ability to turn stones to bread, which would eliminate the salutary limiting factor on human numbers of exhaustible food supply; and with coercing the Father to extend the life of Jesus unnaturally, which would contravene the intervention of the Father in limiting human lifespans.

Jesus initially resists the temptations, but His ministry turns out in large part to consist of succumbing to them. He tells people how to get along better with each other. He multiplies loaves and fishes. He raises the dead, thereby extending human life unnaturally.

I see the events in the temple as encapsulating His offenses against the will of the Father: He unified crowds behind Him, turned stones to bread by overturning the tables of the moneychangers, and hung around at the scene of a capital crime for a long time, during which He told two parables that can be interpreted as expressing bitterness toward a Father Who is not showing up to catch Him as He falls toward an otherwise inevitable execution.

I believe that God gained a great deal from living as Jesus. All teachers know that they learn better from experience and from teaching than from being taught. Perhaps God understood His creation better for having experienced life as a teacher. Furthermore, God gained experience of lacking control, of being weak, and of needing other people, among them His parents, Veronica, and Simon of Cyrene. Could God have ever had a real friend without losing control and showing weakness, and was the Good Thief the best friend He ever had?

What, then, is the fundamental lesson of the life of Jesus? We know that the opposite of a good thing is frequently not a bad thing. Don’t good fathers and good sons argue with one another over alternatives, neither of which is intrinsically evil? We can see the Father as the advocate for nonhuman life and the Son as the advocate for humans. The Son pleads that we have needs and are suffering. The Father limits the degree to which we can fill our needs, in order to avert the catastrophe of unlimited human success, which is ecological collapse. As long as neither Father nor Son prevails excessively, the system functions well for people, but not unsustainably well.

For example, becoming a parent is obviously a good thing. Refraining from having children is also a good thing, because it reduces the burden of humanity on the environment, making life better for all living beings, including the children of other people. The Church instituted vows for religious life not only of poverty but also of chastity. Presumably, when scarcity could be foreseen, threatening famine, disease, war, and deaths of despair, the Church would raise the alarm and ask for people to find in themselves vocations to religious life, thereby reducing economic activity by limiting per capita consumption immediately and population over the longer term, other things being equal.

The global polycrisis, which threatens to end humanity and a million other species, in what may feel as bad as a great flood, is therefore an instance of the will of the Son prevailing to an excessive degree over the will of the Father. To save humanity and our nonhuman siblings, we might, in making each of our decisions, ask ourselves and the Holy Spirit, “What would the Father do?”

James Lyons Walsh, PhD, is trained in physics, adolescence education, and complex systems science. He has lived a marginalized and relatively low-consumption life, by choice. He has given a lifetime of thought to the issue of living a good life independent of any particular model of God. He has worked in recent years to identify important misconceptions and missed ideas, in order to trigger cognitive dissonance that can open minds to new ways of thinking about the world and thereby prompt changes in behavior.

The Patriarchs and Ecology
March 2, 2023

Your Excellencies, Archbishop Pierre and Bishop Scharfenberger,

My interpretation of the Bible is proceeding. As you recall, humanity lost the ability to do whatever it wanted, like other living beings, when it ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In particular, intelligence made us susceptible to the catastrophe of unlimited success, which is ecological collapse, and to the moral requirement to avert this catastrophe by being thoughtful about how we live. Pope Francis has interpreted the story of the Tower of Babel in The Letter in a way consistent with this idea.

Today, I consider the story of the patriarchs. Note that the descendants of Abraham via a nearly infertile woman are favored over the descendants of Abraham via a woman who has no trouble getting pregnant. I suggest that the Father prefers low fecundity because when there are fewer people, the overconsumption of resources that causes ecological collapse is less likely. The Father reassures Abraham that his descendants will be many indeed, which I read to mean that slow and steady wins the reproductive race by avoiding boom-and-bust cycles.

One needed God on one’s side if one had few children in that era, because in a fight, one would have fewer fighters on one’s side. I think that all the stories about God intervening militarily for the benefit of the descendants of Abraham via Sarah are meant to reassure parents that they can be ecologically responsible by having small families because God will have their backs militarily.

Isaac is spared from serving as a human sacrifice precisely because he has no siblings in the favored line. Literal human sacrifice, as well as human sacrifice through war and other means, no doubt helped to moderate populations. When the bad times hit, spreading the available calories evenly would have resulted in fewer survivors overall than prompt removal of some from life at the start. I don’t advocate this solution, which is one reason that I go by the name Proud Father of None in some contexts: I wish to advertise the solution I do favor, which is promoting respect for those who, like those in Catholic religious life, serve all by causing as little consumption of resources as they comfortably can.

Isaac fathers twins, and Jacob, the farmer, induces Esau, the hunter, to sell his birthright for a lentil dish when Esau is extremely hungry. I expect that this story encodes the triumph of agriculture over hunting and gathering. People preferred the usually more dependable provision of calories through farming to the feast-and-famine situation produced by hunting.

The result is that the population explodes. Jacob has so many children that one of them, Joseph, gets sold into slavery. Joseph is no dope and does well for himself, with God’s help. Joseph advises Pharaoh to restrict calorie availability in good times so that a buffer would be available against the worst of the inevitable bad times. In addition, withholding calories in good times may help to limit population, providing an additional buffer against suffering in the next famine.

Because God’s chosen people wind up fertile, calorie restriction is instituted via the kosher laws, sacrifice of agricultural products to God, and restriction of working hours through dedication of one day to God. Presumably, the unwritten rule was that these restrictions would be lifted, or at least eased, in the bad times. I can imagine the enlightened rabbi saying to the people during the famine, “When it’s a choice between shellfish and starvation, have a little lobster. Besides, it’s delicious. Um. I mean, the goyim tell me that lobster is delicious. I’ll force myself to have a little and see what happens.” Of course, my imagination may be going too far, but maybe that happened once or twice. It would be the same principle that Joseph taught Pharaoh.

By the time of Jesus, the Jews had made contact with the Greeks, and some Jews had been Hellenized. Civil wars were fought over this culture clash. Our own country in our own time is experiencing great anger over conflicting moral codes, so we can imagine what was happening in the time of Jesus.

I happened to read Chapter 7 of the Gospel of Mark recently. In it, Jesus questions the wisdom of applying God’s Law thoughtlessly, by restricting the calories of old people. I wonder whether the religious authorities reasoned on the basis of the preamble to the story of Noah’s Ark that God, who was said to have limited the lifespans of people in response to human reproduction, favored the religious authorities playing God in a similar way. Jesus also raises the issue of withholding food from children. Unfortunately, Jesus furthermore deprecates hand washing, probably causing death and disease among those who took the passage literally. These perhaps included nineteenth century surgeons, who resisted calls for them to wash their hands at work.

The solution of Jesus to the issue of overconsumption of resources by people is to encourage us to live modestly. In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus enjoins the Father to provide people their daily bread, meaning that, as long as we follow the ecological plan of the Son, the Father will take care of us via a properly functioning ecology.

The problem today is that mankind has cleverly and foolishly overcome all the limits of both Father and Son on our consumption of resources. We are tearing the creation of the Father to pieces, like small children would treat the works of the old masters if they somehow managed to spend time in an unguarded Louvre. I can recommend Glass Onion on Netflix if Your Excellencies have yet to see it. The ending is shocking, and the fact that audiences have accepted it indicates to me that people have a sense of how dire is our peril, not that they are yet changing their lives nearly as radically as required to meet the challenge.

If Your Excellencies speak as loudly and as often as possible about the Bible as a primer on ecology, humanity may make great strides toward saving itself. I think that if we don’t resume respecting the will of the Son right quick, an era belonging to the Father will ensue that will make plain the antithesis that the Father’s ecological policies constitute relative to the Son’s.

I thank Your Excellencies for any time Your Excellencies spend with my ideas and for the opportunity to serve Your Excellencies with my powers of reading comprehension, God-given as they may be to some extent.

Yours in the God Who remembers through the good times what the humans forget about the bad times,
James

Message Summary
March 6, 2023

Your Excellencies, Archbishop Pierre and Bishop Scharfenberger,

Today, I seek to summarize my message in its current state with the following bullet points.

THE PROBLEM:

·         A complex system can be thrown out of balance by excessive growth in one of its components. In the body, for example, this is cancer.

·         Because humans are clever, human resource consumption often grows to excess.

·         The Father, other models of god, and Nature limited human success in various ways to preserve all species, including humanity.

o   Limited human lifespan (Genesis 6:1-3)

o   Required human sacrifice (various gods)

o   Inhibited cooperation (Genesis 11)

o   Sent famine (Nature. By definition, famine arises only when there are too many people to be supported by available resources.)

o   Sent disease (Nature. Encroachment on wild lands and growth of animal husbandry cause novel diseases to arise in humans.)

o   Permitted war

o   Required limitation of available calories, working hours, economic activity (Leviticus)

·         Jesus offered a new covenant, in which people wouldn’t have to starve or fight or suffer disease or disability to preserve ecological balance, as long as they did the following.

o   Don’t be rich. (Matthew 19:24, etc.)

o   Help each other. (This eliminates the need to be wealthy in order to be safe.)

o   Work less. (Matthew 6:25-34, etc.)

o   Maybe follow the example of Jesus Himself by remaining childfree and consuming very little indeed.

·         Humans being humans, the plan gets forgotten, especially as life becomes comfortable, which is, ironically, when the plan is most needed. This is why we have religions, to keep us from forgetting important things.

·         Our mania to consume resources is the Antichrist, the harm done by which wakes people up to the need to return to the plan, restoring Christ to ascendancy.

·         There are several especially concerning circumstances at work in the current reign of the Antichrist:

o   Religion is numbing its adherents to the need to cut back on consumption. Religious leaders fear losing their power and so follow their congregations instead of leading them.

o   The Antichrist has taken the form of secular ideologies, such as the idea that perpetual economic growth is necessary, desirable, and possible. Certain secular ideologies are treated as unquestionable in public speech.

o   The most effective public speech requires money, which is the province of the Antichrist.

o   Globalization has knit the world tightly together so that

§  regional collapse is far more likely to cause collapse of the planetary civilization.

§  the system is highly efficient and therefore has far less slack that can be taken up in bad times, making it more prone to breaking.

o   Technology and human numbers have made the burden of humanity on the ecosystem the greatest it’s ever been and insulated the wealthy and powerful to the greatest degree ever seen from the ravages of Nature.

·         Apocalypse is always insidious, because, in the words of this spectacularly precious German public servant speaking of the water supply he manages, “What’s particularly troublesome is that for a very long time, everything seems fine, but when changes finally become tangible, it’s already far too late.”

·         The Antichrist has produced in our era a global polycrisis, a complex of mutually reinforcing crises that include the climate, biodiversity, soil vitality, freshwater availability, and nuclear arms crises. For example, if large parts of Germany run out of water, it is not the thirstiness of Germans that would be of concern. The same holds true in many regions for different reasons. Climate migration alone is expected to be an increasingly serious problem, on top of war risk and everything else.

 THE SOLUTION I SUGGEST:

·         Point out that the Apocalypse happens over and over in history. We can end it by deciding to live more modestly and cooperatively, while doing less work for pay, as Jesus suggested.

·         Explain that if we don’t follow the covenant of Jesus, the next help is more painful, consisting of war, famine, pestilence, and miscellaneous death. Still worse, because the current polycrisis is unprecedented, humanity could wink out.

·         Since Your Excellencies will be asking people to admit a mistake, please consider acknowledging and correcting some mistakes made in Your Excellencies’ own organization.

o   Settle the lawsuits before Your Excellency, Bishop Scharfenberger, retires.

o   Announce that some articles of faith may have been established by people fooled by their appetite for power or by the complex of delusions that is antisemitism.

o   To help lead all people, acknowledge that Christianity is not necessarily better than any other model of what is good and just. For example, different people have different feelings about the concept of father. Christians simply have come to Jesus ecologically again and are excited to tell everyone else about it. When large numbers of other people point out that they have been waiting desperately for this day to arrive, react with humility, contrition, self-deprecating humor, and the spirit of pitching in to lighten the load of a civilization falling under the burden of what it’s been fooled by the Antichrist into believing is its own success.

I wish Your Excellencies genuine success. My letter to the editor of the Times Union about the canceled plans for a homeless shelter in Saratoga ran in today’s edition. While I don’t engage to keep my opinions about Church governance to myself, I did not mention any of them in this particular letter. I am on the side of Your Excellencies to the extent that Your Excellencies seek the truth, rather than power, even power to do what Your Excellencies think good.

Your Excellencies, I am merely an aspiring Lightman seeking Falkens to take my words to their Beringers and to help rein in the WOPRs they’ve created so that I can get back to playing the games that really interest me and that I find less taxing. I hope that Your Excellencies will assist me. Your Excellencies have my thanks for any time Your Excellencies spend with my ideas and for the difficult work that Your Excellencies do.

Yours in God, regardless of models of God,
James

Next: Book 4