Issues of Basic Strategy

Recent Events and Saving Humanity This Easter
March 21, 2023

Your Excellency, Archbishop Pierre,

I hope you’ve seen the statement of His Excellency, Bishop Scharfenberger, in which he offers His Excellency’s “pastoral care” to the St. Clare’s pensioners who are in the “difficult situation” of being fought tooth and nail in court by His Excellency. I may have had the whole situation in the leadership of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany wrong. As His Excellency, Bishop Scharfenberger, mercifully approaches the age of mandatory retirement, perhaps Your Excellency will begin to consider how His Excellency wound up, and remained, in a leadership position.

Your Excellency, I was forced yesterday to enter a place of medical care owned by the Church. In preparation, I looked up the current ownership of Trinity Health and found that the Church has partners who are known for looking after their investments and for being shrewd enough not to associate very long with people who bring disrepute upon themselves. Once again, has the Church carefully considered how much money, let alone more important quantities, it is losing by trying to save a few nickels? I strongly recommend that the Church follow the example of the Church’s God and submit to punishment and even degradation, if necessary. Please consider that the alternative is far worse, if the Church requires some practical reason to do the right thing.

I’ve been meditating lately on the great satisfaction some Catholics of my former acquaintance seemed to find in the temporal power associated with their faith. I’m sure that Your Excellency realizes that the overrepresentation of Catholics on the Supreme Court currently remaking United States society does not redound to the benefit of Your Excellency’s organization. The Catholic Church will bear the brunt of the reaction to the Court’s assault, which is very much in the interests of the non-Catholic members of the alliance that has remade the Court. The Church’s allies are not the Church’s friends and are killing two birds with one stone by putting the Church in the lead wave of the assault.

Your Excellency, I visited my area’s largest temple of consumerism yesterday, which is called Crossgates Mall and is owned by the Pyramid Management Group. I found there a restaurant named Texas de Brazil. Ordinarily, I like finding American food that is not United States food. However, this restaurant was a steak house, as suggested by the name, and I grieved for the destruction of creation wrought by the appetite for beef, which is being satisfied in part by the burning of Brazilian rain forest to create pasture. This is one of the greatest crimes against the Father that can be imagined.

Beyond that, I found in front of Texas de Brazil a table fashioned from wood that had been minimally treated, leaving visible the rings and knots inside and making plain that here before me was a portion of the body of a child of the Father. Of course, people must kill to live, but reveling in killing our siblings is evil, as is failing to moderate our displacement and destruction of the Father’s other children. Delighting in the imminent conversion by humans of Brazil from biodiverse rain forest to mere grassland is not only vile but also idiotic, if one’s goal is the survival of humanity, let alone keeping from murdering our siblings.

His Holiness, Pope Francis, is correct to say in The Letter that “Nature is screaming, ‘Stop,’” but I wonder whether the people gleefully driving the destruction of Nature aren’t calling for a stop themselves. Maybe their goal is to bring on the Apocalypse advertised in Christianity as the occasion on which the Son will settle all family business, giving the brassy unenlightened the proverbial bullet through the eye on the massage table. The Church does derive some of its temporal power from those too simple to modulate their enthusiasm for God correctly, as we saw in the case of the homeless shelter canceled after threats. At least some of the threats seem to have come from Catholics who agreed with the Chancellor of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany on the issue of the entitlement of Catholic parents and administrators (seriously?) to greater protection for the children in their care than others should expect.

Please note that playing the Apocalypse card, in other words casting civilization over the edge of the cliff and depending on the Father to catch it, is sinful. It is succumbing to one of the temptations of Jesus by the devil.

In fact, the forces of capitalism have succumbed to all three temptations. They have gained global rule. They have turned stones to bread in the so-called Green Revolution. They now quick-march all life on Earth toward catastrophe, holding us all so that we seem unable to turn.

This is illusion. We can turn immediately to a far greater extent than we are even attempting to do. We don’t have to fly or cruise on vacation. We don’t have to eat so much, or any, beef. We can regard childfreedom as virtuous. What have the vows of poverty and chastity been about on the macroeconomic level?

Most importantly, the act of turning will wake people to their peril. Yesterday, Secretary General Guterres once again refrained from mincing words about that peril, this time on the occasion of the issuance of an important report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. On NBC Nightly News, the story was thought to merit only 20 seconds halfway through the broadcast. I’ll put the message in my own words: We need to move mountains as fast as possible in order to FUCKING SURVIVE.

I have faith that we can do so. We have always been far more clever than wise. As long as someone provides the wisdom we need to see what ought to be done, we can accomplish much. Easter is coming. Here’s the play, Your Excellency:

Announce that the Bible has been misinterpreted over the centuries. The devil has inspired antisemitism, which impedes understanding a story about Jewish people and therefore puts us all at risk.

Explain that the Book of Genesis is a primer on ecology and a history of mankind’s efforts to survive and thrive in a world filled with our siblings, the other children of the Father. Genesis also tells of the Father’s many early efforts to contain the damage to those other children done by humanity. The magnitude of the damage proceeds from the fact that intelligence gives us the ability to dominate temporarily but not the wisdom or decency to understand why we shouldn’t.

Tell the world that the Son has redeemed us of original sin, which is our disproportionate displacement of other life, by demonstrating that God does no better than we do in excessively favoring mankind when God lives as one of us. The plan of Jesus to accomplish the will of the Father regarding protection of mankind’s siblings was for us to live modestly and help each other out, thereby obviating the piling up of riches and creation of large families for safety. The plan could, conceivably, work to enable humanity to survive indefinitely with finite resources and in harmony with our siblings. However, the compassion of Jesus for people caused Him to get carried away and, among other things, start to bring people back from the dead and promise that people who believed in Him would never die. There is no way to avert ecological collapse without death, unless birth is eliminated, too, just as bodily collapse proceeds from cancer, which is inadequate cellular death.

Crisis is opportunity, Your Excellency. What is to come will be horrible, even if we change our ways quickly, but if we survive, the suffering may finally cure us of boom-and-bust growth. This must happen before we escape Earth sustainably. The alternative is too horrible to contemplate. All we need are long-enough memories. Is not memory preservation the central function of religion?

The Church's role will be so much fun, Your Excellency. Think of it as turning the tables on the atheists by showing the indispensable role played by belief systems. I understand the hurt that can inspire atheism, but then again, that variety of faith sometimes gets out of hand.

Announce on Holy Thursday. Suffer people's reactions on Good Friday. Give people Saturday to chew over what’s been revealed. Rise in glory on Easter Sunday to lead mankind to salvation.

Your Excellency has my gratitude, as always.

Yours in the God who bit the rawhide when His turn came round,
James

United Nations 2023 Water Conference
March 23, 2023

Your Excellency, Archbishop Pierre,

I trust that Your Excellency is well. I look forward to any statements that Your Excellency sees fit to make concerning the United Nations 2023 Water Conference, which continues today in New York City. His Holiness spoke with wonderful clarity in The Letter, in part by listening to representatives of the vast number of people who give voice every day to Nature by screaming “Stop!” to the emergent devil that is consumerist greed. This devil pumps groundwater in good times, when reserves should be tapped as little as possible. This devil pumps carbon into the atmosphere, where it causes heating that disrupts precipitation patterns on which people, both poor and rich, rely for water to drink and to grow crops.

I wish I heard more from His Holiness, especially specific actions that the faithful could take to stop harming other living beings, including humans. I writhe in agony and rage because so many of my countrymen drive high-status vehicles and take high-status vacations, thereby releasing far more carbon than necessary for the purposes, even if we assume the value of those purposes.

Among the results is mass migration of Catholics from Central America to the United States. I suspect that many well-off Catholics in the United States and elsewhere think they’re doing fine, as long as the priest doesn’t tell them to change their ways. Their faith in the Church deafens them to the screams of Nature and leaves them in thrall to devils, unless their religious leaders speak out frequently and forcefully. Thus the Church is actively harmful when it chooses not to lead with fervor but instead remains tepid in its service to God. I suggest that the Church become far more vocal, in keeping with the intentions of Pope Francis.

Of course, speaking out against greed would be facilitated by a demonstration of the Church’s own freedom from the shackles of that moral error. I hope that the successor to His Excellency, Bishop Scharfenberger, will sweep into office this spring, after His Excellency reaches the suggested retirement age, and rapidly settle all lawsuits in generous fashion. It must be obvious to Your Excellency that behaving in this way would increase the Church’s power to do the work of God on Earth. The people with the real money can be pushed to do the right thing if God speaks through the Church to their customers. Moral authority is incompatible with material acquisitiveness, a point that Jesus made. I have to believe that moral authority is also far more fun than driving a preposterously and dangerously large vehicle, a point that could be made to Catholics in this country who might pout over calls to spurn social status in an effort to gain God's favor.

I writhe in agony and rage at the folly of my countrymen, whose American dream is disastrous to most people in the Americas. Please guide us by word and example. This is the Church’s hour, in which moral leadership will prove key to survival. I’m sure that this has happened many times before and been met by the Church with calls for vocations to lives of poverty and childfreedom. The survival of our civilization, and, with increasing likelihood, our species, depends on the call of Jesus: Relax, everybody, and toil less. The fact that this alteration in our way of life would also benefit our siblings, the nonhuman children of the Father, should not make it less appealing. Families rise or fall together.

If the Church speaks in this fashion, people will understand. Relative ease of understanding is an advantage of the personification of large-scale structure in human and ecological affairs, regardless of whether the God that is love, is everywhere, and has vast power and knowledge, is also a person in the strict sense.

Doesn’t the opportunity to save the human species and a million others appeal to Your Excellency? I think that evil will be conquered when enough people realize that working hard all the time to make money to buy stuff is evil. This drive crowds out other life, including poor people. When Your Excellency points out that the mass adoption of the American Dream is exactly what is being referred to in the story of the Great Flood as everyone’s imaginations being only evil all the time, a few people will listen. Those people will speak and act in a way that will provide an example to others. There will be a virtuous cascade.

This is the play that Jesus made. I recommend it, too, though Your Excellency should probably put more weight on the example set by Your Excellency’s model of God than on the words of Your Excellency’s faithful servant.

Yours in the God Who saw that if people helped each other out, they might finally feel confident enough not to pile up riches or create large families for their own security and instead treat themselves and the other children of the Father with decency,
James

How My Ideas Could Have Been Missed
March 29, 2023

Your Excellency, Archbishop Pierre,

Today, I’d like to discuss again how it is that such a useful and relatively comprehensible interpretation of the Gospels as I’ve been uncovering could have been missed for so long. In doing so, I’ll give an example from education that also illustrates a point I’ve been trying to explain to educators. First, I’ll summarize the interpretation.

The Father had struggled to get His strongest child, mankind, to ease up on dominating that child’s siblings. Domination of an ecosystem by intelligent life destroys the ecosystem, to the great harm of all life, including the intelligent life. After trying many approaches, God incarnated as the Son.

In human form, God came up with a new plan: People should avoid concentrating wealth, because we displace other life to the degree that we take resources for our own use, and people should help each other out, because we feel less need to horde resources and have many children, magnifying the burden we place on the ecosystem, when we feel secure in the knowledge that we will be helped without charge by nonrelatives when we are weak.

The Son, however, was overcome by compassion, perhaps among other things, and began to behave like all the rest of us, with the added complication of having access to God’s powers. He went beyond reassuring people so that they would not take so much. He attempted to seize political power, to remove economic limits on His followers by metaphorically turning stones to bread, and to force the Father to step in and save everyone from the consequences.

The Son violated the core principle of God, to love all God’s children, not just people, let alone some subset thereof. The abject failure of Jesus is the triumph of Jesus, because in failing, God proved to God’s satisfaction that even God can’t remain righteous in human form. How can God any longer condemn mankind?

This interpretation of the life of Jesus offers many beneficial corollaries, among them the following.

First, if God needs to be forgiven, maybe we can cut each other a little slack.

Second, if God needed to live as a person to figure out why people should be accepted for what we are, maybe leaders will learn to be more thoughtful and to recognize the limitations of their judgment. God’s example illustrates that judgment suffers from lacking direct access to the experience and nature of anyone other than the person in whom the judgment resides.

Third, maybe people will notice that the postwar hegemony of capitalism follows exactly the pattern through which Jesus succumbed to the temptations of the devil: Unify mankind, turn stones to bread, and wait around for God/technology to save you from the consequences. Will mankind never learn? Hey, God didn’t do any better, so let’s join together to weather the coming storm. It’s going to be very bad.

Fourth, power is inherently limiting, unlimited power no less so. In order to experience genuine human connection, loss of control, and myriad other things we shun and embrace, God needed to set aside power. Of special significance is the fact that by submitting to painful punishment, God was able to prove that God was not a monster. God passed the gom jabbar test to no less extent for having brought the test upon Kiself.

Fifth, power corrupts even God in human form. Leaders beware.

Sixth, the events recounted in the Gospels are set in a time and place with characteristics relevant to the story, including the clash between Greek culture and traditional Jewish culture. Even if one is uninterested in the particular model of God presented in the Gospels, one can regard God as a name for some kinds of emergent large-scale structure in human affairs. The culture clash in the United States today looks a bit like what was happening in the society from which Jesus emerged. The Gospels can be used to help us reason about what is happening now. Surely this is one of their purposes. Furthermore, we may find that people raised on Christian ideas will attempt something like what Jesus did in the temple. Would everyone recognize such an attempt if it were foiled early enough? Would some who did recognize such an attempt learn from its failure to prepare a more effective one?

Of course, one reason this interpretation of the Gospels is unfamiliar is that it questions authority and the perfectibility of leadership. It would therefore be at a competitive disadvantage in the marketplace of ideas relative to interpretations that supported concentration of wealth and unquestioning obedience to power. The problem of the advisor’s advisor is to craft a message close to the truth but leavened with ingredients that will make it palatable to two superior layers of civilization and simple enough not to be garbled hopelessly in the game of telephone that is involved. I’m a silly advisor’s advisor in that I deliberately refrained from learning how to bake anything but cookies. Nevertheless, the advisor’s advisor would be an idiot to seek power for themselves.

I’d like to illustrate another, more subtle explanation for the interpretation’s novelty with a tale from my education. In the spring of 1996, I took an unusual course. It concerned phase transitions and was given by the author of the course’s text. Your Excellency is familiar with at least some phase transitions, such as the freezing or boiling of water. The key feature of a phase transition is that a continuous change in some parameter results in a transformation of whatever the parameter describes. A quantitative change results in a qualitative change. Differences in degree become differences in kind.

The study of phase transitions eventually united with chaos theory and the criticisms of scientific reductionism expressed in the paper “More Is Different” to give rise to complex systems science, a discipline that is still sufficiently new that its definition varies from person to person. Really, science was benefiting from paying attention to what some critics of science had been saying for a long time. It’s an instance of the dialectic method of pursuing truth. Scientists realized that as systems grow in size, new structure emerges, not from the characteristics of any individual component but from the complexity of there being many autonomous components. The whole is more than the sum of its parts.

This video mentions two of the topics that I associate with the periphery of the 1996 course, traffic jams and bird flocking. I was excited to find the possibility of systematically studying something I had been considering since my mid-teens, how meaning in life could arise without a source, such as God. If the ultimate justification is not God’s will, how is anything justified? There is no ultimate position in a circle. A circular configuration works but is not satisfying to me. On the other hand, a complex configuration, a web of justifications, as I had been picturing for many years, might be. The source of meaning could be the complexity itself. My point is that I was excited, as Your Excellency may perceive.

I wanted that professor to be my thesis advisor, but given how many others I expected to have the same ambition, I estimated my chances of success to be slim. His work was fascinating, his teaching excellent, and his manner appealing. I wish to emphasize that the following criticism is not at all condemnation of him but rather exactly the opposite, an illustration of the hazards of leadership, to which even God succumbed in my interpretation of the Gospels.

The professor took the class to lunch after we finished delivering the reports of our final projects. Before our food arrived, he asked a question the effects of which I have only recently come to appreciate fully. He asked how many of us had parents with advanced degrees.

I wonder if Your Excellency would care to pause for a moment to consider the situation I am describing. Can Your Excellency anticipate the point I am about to make? If not, Your Excellency’s mental state illustrates that very point.

Many hands went up around me while I pondered what my response should be. He used the present tense, but I persuaded myself that the nonliving condition of my parents was not relevant to the issue.

Next up was whether this person would consider advanced degrees in the field of education to be worthy of the adjective “advanced.” I heard from time to time back then scorn for education degrees. I didn’t realize at the time that some doctorates in education were professional degrees and not research degrees. Whether this was the source of some of the snobbery I can’t say, but I’m pretty sure that it was not the source of all of it. I concluded that certainly, my parents’ education degrees counted.

Finally, I imagined that some of the parents of my fellow students at the table had doctorates. I regarded the doctorate as qualitatively different from the master’s and so felt cognitive dissonance over being asked about the category of advanced degrees, which included both. Of course, this consideration was irrelevant. Also irrelevant was the fact that my mother had dropped out of medical school. I raised my hand. I was pleased to have a sufficiently complex life not to have had an immediate answer to the question.

There may well have been students around me in a far worse position than I upon being asked that question. What of those among them who had no parent with an advanced degree or only one? What of those who did not know one or both of their birth parents? What of those who used nonstandard definitions of “parent” or who had to parse whether the professor meant only birth parents, not nurturing parents? The latter issues, it occurs to me now, applied in my case, too, though again, they were moot in relation to the question. Incidentally, one of my favorite attributes of Your Excellency's model of God is the complicated parental situation of Jesus.

The motivation for the question may have been innocent, but blithely raising such a fraught topic is evidence, at best, of thoughtlessness. Coming, as it did, from a Briton didn’t help, given the history of that people and that history’s relation to hereditary power and to the domination of my ancestors, among many other people. John Oliver was not yet a gleam in Jon Stewart’s professional eye, but I’m surprised Monty Python hadn’t adequately prepared me for fallout from the class structure of Britain. Regardless of where that professor started in life, the question may have arisen in part from attitudes promoted to serve imperialist and classist ends.

Whatever the motivation for the question, the professor took as his student a man whose mother was a physicist. I hear that, as it turned out, this man realized that he didn’t really want to go into the family business and left with a master’s degree around the time I did.

The professor is now an important leader in astrobiology, a field that can be expected to depend crucially on the question of what is alive. The issue here brings us to chaos, specifically sensitive dependence on initial conditions.

If our planetary technological civilization survives this century, humanity will very likely escape not only Earth but eventually our solar system. The definition of life made or confirmed now could remain influential for a very long time. My former professor could, conceivably, be among the foremost authors of that definition.

I’m happy to assume that this professor will do a good job and, furthermore, is not infected by classist or imperialist ideas. In 1996, I had to struggle with the possibility that he was, but possibility does not imply actuality. Still, this professor has potentially vast power over future events, and assuming he had good intentions in 1996, he lacked at that time either adequate appreciation for the risks inherent in his power or the imagination for other life stories necessary to be polite.

Please think of the initial moments of elements in Christianity. If St. Paul’s attitude toward women had been different, for example to the extent of allowing them to speak their minds or be considered saved without having children, how would history have been altered? If St. Paul had not been the sort of person to report having sent two men to Satan, as he does in his letter to Timothy, would the Church be different?

If medieval Church leaders had been less antisemitic and therefore better interpreters of a story about Jewish people, would my interpretation of the Gospels have arisen long ago or not have been suppressed?

Will some spaceman far in the future fail to recognize a distant planet’s Jesus or its entire biome as even being alive and carelessly destroy that life because I wasn’t clever enough or brave enough to acknowledge that my professor had done a bad thing, let alone to be able to put that fact into words and speak them to him?

I think that most would agree, upon being reminded of the consideration, that difficult topics be shelved until after people have begun to eat. I might have fared better at that lunch if this rule had been followed and my blood sugar level had been more conducive to thinking on the fly. Could it be that St. Paul was in the habit of writing on an empty stomach? Of course, I do realize that a change in St. Paul might have led to his ideas being neglected in favor of those from someone else who wrote misogynistically, but under the right circumstances, a good cook can have an important effect on the trajectory of history, as can anyone else. This is an example of the butterfly effect, an idea from chaos theory. Intellectual and spiritual movements can be as difficult to stop as a hurricane or typhoon, until they cross into inhospitable conditions, under which they dissipate rapidly, unless they adapt.

I hope that Your Excellency will henceforth think me less presumptuous in offering my interpretation of the Gospels, if such an idea has ever crossed Your Excellency’s mind. There is a mechanism by which clear meaning could have been obscured by long-ago thought leaders. Believing that God Kiself in human form erred so badly when He attempted leadership has helped me lately to be forgiving when I am irate, just as remembering all the times I’ve been gom jabbared, not to compare myself to the Kwisatz Haderach, helps me to become irate again, as called for.

Yours in the God Who leavens serious discussions with a little humor,
James

P.S. I recently received a nice, brief expression of thanks from a group to whom I offered unsolicited advice. Your Excellency’s organization solicited my advice as part of the Synod, yet has offered no response at all. This seems odd. Your Excellency, as always, has my thanks for any time Your Excellency spends with my ideas.

Reappraising Peter to Avert Global Catastrophe
April 8, 2023

Your Excellency, Archbishop Pierre,

I haven’t heard important news emerge from the Catholic Church about doctrinal reconsideration in the past couple of days, so I offer the following example of how to improve interpretation of the Gospels, as I’ve advised Your Excellency to do.

I was very happy to see His Holiness, Pope Francis, well enough to say mass in public on Palm Sunday. In the sermon His Holiness delivered, I appreciated the discussion of the abandonment of Jesus and its analogues today, including the abandonment of the poor, whom, His Holiness noted, many refuse even to see. I think that this is a wonderful message, but I also think that the story of the arrest of Jesus is not about abandonment so much as strategic dispersal of forces.

Would it have been a good thing for the disciples to remain by the side of Jesus, subjecting themselves to substantial risk of arrest and execution? If Jesus had wanted the disciples to remain with Him, would He have told them that they were about to abandon Him and cited prophecy to this effect? These comments surely made the dispersal of the disciples more likely, as was the correct strategy, for the benefit both of the disciples and of the plan of Jesus, which was facilitated by their continued existence in this world.

Peter, of course, objected, saying that he would never do the reasonable thing but would instead remain steadfast, as befits a rock. I’m not sure that Jesus was being entirely kind when He named Peter His rock. Rocks are dependable, but they are neither shrewd nor insightful. Every time that Jesus talks about fulfilling His plan by dying, Peter insists that Peter will save Jesus. “Get thee behind me, Satan,” may have been a colorful way of saying, “What part of ‘fulfilling the plan by dying’ do you not understand, you rock?” I doubt that Jesus was so terribly tempted by Peter’s comments as to make Peter analogous to Satan, but Peter's rock nature may have required the startling comparison.

In the end, Jesus is patiently insisting that the reluctant officials arrest Him at Gethsemane when Peter, evidently hearing a small trumpet in his head and thinking, “I shall save Him,” dashes in and lops some dude’s ear off. I finally had a good laugh at that. Of course, it’s violent, but it’s also hilariously feckless, besides being counterproductive in the first place.

I wonder whether Peter ever realized that in the story of Jesus, he served largely as comic relief. I’m fine with emulators of Peter who find me ridiculous. I am hurt and frightened by the fact that many of them expect some law-abiding, well-intentioned people to be tortured eternally after death. I am driven to write by Peter-emulators in positions of power who threaten, through the limitations they impose on their experience and patterns of thought, the well-being of innocents.

On that note, I think I finally understand why Pres. Biden seems to have accidentally changed our policy on Taiwan and condemned Pres. Putin as a war criminal so soon after the invasion of Ukraine, provoking one adversary and leaving another no out. I think that a lifetime of practicing unmitigated Catholicism may have left Pres. Biden unable to master the practice of strategic ambiguity. One might counter with the example of Pres. Kennedy, a skilled geopolitical player who specifically warned against Pres. Biden’s response to Pres. Putin’s aggression, but reports have it that his Catholicism was fairly well mitigated.

I see Catholic tunnel-vision in my blood relatives and in His Excellency, Bishop Scharfenberger. I had been confused and angered by what they had to say and by their actions. However, I can see how dedicated practice of Catholicism over a sufficient portion of childhood could result in a kind of neurodivergence. As a person who may be neurodivergent myself, I see advantages in these natures but also perils.

Perhaps Your Excellency could have a chat to Pres. Biden to inform him that it’s okay to deceive in the course of playing geopolitics, as it is in poker. Pres. Biden’s skills may improve if he feels morally unencumbered when doing the right thing. Has Your Excellency not noticed the folly in which the United States is engaged, rattling its saber at China, which serves the interests of Xi Jinping by increasing the patriotism of young people who had been quiet-quitting and lying flat in increasing numbers, while failing to mount an emergency effort to save Pakistan from economic implosion. The latter catastrophe I am forced to follow on German public television because it is drawing insufficient attention here, despite the fact that revolution in Pakistan, or, God forbid, a nuclear war between Pakistan and India, would have dire consequences for all the people of the world, of whom the people of the United States are still, at this writing, a part. Even an exchange of one-third of their nuclear arsenals between India and Pakistan would have catastrophic effects on global agriculture through a low-scale nuclear winter alone.

Being like Peter can be rewarding, but when Peter-emulators are in charge and refuse to heed the counsel of those open to subtlety and profane experience, everyone suffers. Please do something about this before the current cataclysm spreads any further.

Your Excellency has my gratitude for Your Excellency’s work and time.

Yours in the God Whom I hope is still rooting for humanity to survive,
James

Happy Easter and an Afterword
April 9, 2023

Your Excellency, Archbishop Pierre,

Happy Easter! Yesterday’s letter feels like the last in the series, because it ends in a grammatical error, exemplifying the need for comfort with imperfection. I’ve already discussed the benefits that imperfection, finiteness, and incompleteness confer and my pity for God when God lacks access to genuine loss of control. Ending on an error also keeps me humble and discontented, filling two of my needs. How then, is this letter coming into being? Please consider it an afterword.

Your Excellency, I am in awe of the message of Jesus: Don’t be rich, and help each other out. That could actually work to save us and a million other species from ecological collapse. Not being rich reduces the burden of each person on the environment. Helping each other out gives each person confidence that they’ll be taken care of when they’re weak, removing the need to build wealth or have many children for that purpose. Ecological collapse is real, is looming, and will, if it happens, be due to the cumulative burden on the planet of humanity. That burden is the average burden per person times the number of people.

There are those unwilling to leave anything on the table for other people or nonhuman life. They say that we shouldn’t limit ourselves or that we must put people first. They ignore the fact that when we don’t limit ourselves voluntarily, compulsory limits emerge: war, famine, pestilence, and deaths of despair. Wisdom is compassion for other beings, including one’s future self.

Jesus warned everyone of false prophets that would follow Him. Satan is strangely believed not to have mounted any kind of clever response to the message of Jesus. I cast a weather eye at the jiu jitsu of Saint Paul, who deflected Christianity. Women were saved through childbirth, according to him, an idea that promoted pronatalism and hence population growth. The love of money was the root of all evil, meaning that rich people could rest easy, as long as they pretended that they could take or leave wealth.

Do you know what the root of the love of money is? One root is money. Another is anxiety for one’s future self and one’s children. Relying on others for safety is scary, but it may be the only way through the maelstrom ahead. Don’t be rich, and help each other out. I’m tearing up.

Your excellency will have perceived that I enjoy hearing myself talk, so the correct procedure for ending this afterword is to leave it to another voice. I commend to Your Excellency’s attention the appearance on Johnny Carson of Carl Sagan in 1977 in response to Star Wars, or Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope to those who’ve never seen the original print. Prof. Sagan hits the main points, namely respect for all humans and for nonhuman life. I believe that respect would make us automatically reject wealth and help each other out.

The last word is Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot” speech.

Yours in God,
James

Next: Book 5