The Gospels Have Come Alive for Me
The Gospels Have Come Alive for Me
May 2, 2023
Your Excellency, Archbishop Pierre,
I’ve delayed issuing the volume of letters I sent you and His Excellency, Bishop Scharfenberger. I think I now know why. I expect my understanding of the story of Jesus to continue to evolve, but I noticed one more thing in the story that now makes the Gospels come alive for me. I’m eager to share that insight with Your Excellency in this letter.
First, I’ve mentioned reasons for reconsidering traditional interpretations of the Gospels. I’ve written of the possibility that antisemitism has interfered with understanding a story about Jews. I’ve mentioned the dubious nature of some of Saint Paul’s comments about women and wealth. Other people point to the multiple translations of the Gospels and the limitations on our knowledge of the idioms therein.
I’d also point out that the Gospels derive from an oral tradition. The problem is not just that they weren’t written down until decades after the events they describe but that they are the script for a presentation and lack stage directions. Perhaps people telling the stories would have used different voices for different characters or made gestures or sound effects that would have given insight. Did they choose music, as we do today? Certainly, they would have spoken with affect at which I can only guess. They may have posed questions for comprehension or used other ways of guiding their audience to an understanding matching their own.
There’s also the problem that Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire. That alone would have effaced my interpretation, had it existed, of the Devil’s three temptations, that in total, they represent the unification of political, economic, and religious power in one entity.
Please consider that the Jewish people had made contact with Greek culture before the time of Jesus. The result was struggle between Hellenized Jews and traditional ones, according to my very shallow knowledge of this history. I suspect that a key point of contention lay in the contrast between the unification of the three powers in traditional Judaism and their relative separation among the Greeks. In fact, it seems reasonable to suppose that Rome grew so fast in part because it liberated its conquered peoples from the plague of God-kings in the ancient world.
The struggle between politics, economics, and religion as parallel structures and the God-king model continues today. Unfortunately, the issues have been blurred. President Eisenhower presided over inclusion of “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance and the declaration of “In God we trust” to be the nation’s motto, which placed this idea on paper currency, not just coins. In consequence, many Christians regard capitalism and Western democracy as divinely ordained.
On the other side, a ridiculous faith in economic growth has turned capitalism into a kind of vapid religion, while capturing the political discourse globally. Somehow, otherwise intelligent people think that unending growth is possible on a finite planet because technology will save us, one way or another. It’s the deus ex machina without the deus. It is in countering this foolishness that I hoped to make common cause with His Excellency, Bishop Scharfenberger, when I began this series of letters.
At the time of Jesus, Rome was still transitioning from republic to empire and was beginning to deify the emperors in their lifetimes, thus abandoning the Greek model in favor of God-kings. This promised the worst of all worlds, except for the vampires on top of the heap, much as is the case today. Please note that technology had reached a height back then, as well, as suggested by my earlier letter on the recent discovery that Roman concrete was far more durable than our own.
There was also great improvement in the communication of ideas in Jesus’ time. The Roman network of roads, essential to empire, also enabled relatively rapid communication, as did commerce by sea. The world had been made small, relative to the situation in the fairly recent past, a feature of life we experience ourselves.
The Gospels could be made an important element of guiding humanity through its current peril, not least because today’s world bears similarity to the one Jesus experienced and changed.
Given the context above, the following is how I currently understand the story of Jesus. In what follows, I shall assume the dualistic model in which Jesus is fully God and fully human and that Jesus was able to work miracles. Personally, I think of God as a model for large-scale emergent structure in complex systems. One can speak of a swarming flock of birds moving as if controlled by a single mind, despite the fact that similar motion emerges from models in which each bird acts autonomously, subject to a small set of instructions. Insights like this are behind complex systems science. I don’t see significant difference between my model of God and the idea of a person who is love and who is everywhere and who is as powerful as any entity could be and who knows as much as any entity could. The two sound the same to me. As for miracles, I recognize the severe limitations on my knowledge. I may be missing something, but I think that my defect in this regard may serve Your Excellency by producing useful insight.
The story of Jesus’ life opens with an action of the emperor. Jesus is born in humble surroundings but receives gifts from powerful people of the East, perhaps themselves God-kings. The presentation of the three gifts to one person symbolizes the unification of political, economic, and religious power. The Eastern ideas seek to co-opt the new movement from the cradle. Mary and Joseph flee with Jesus to escape the slaughter of the innocents.
Jesus faces the difficulty of growing up out of step with the role society imposes on children based solely on their ages. He would have hit each developmental milestone early, so that His interests would have matched those of older children, not those of His age cohort. Further, there would have been enough going on in His head that He would not have been bored. His self-control would have inhibited relating in a natural way with other children. All this is alienating.
As Jesus grows, He begins to perceive that adults are unreliable, that they are wrong in ways that are obvious to Him, that they lie and omit information. How is Jesus, Who is increasingly being treated as if He has an important destiny, to achieve what the adults seem to be asking if He is not given accurate information?
At some point, Jesus demands to know where the money is coming from. This is high symbolism, because human life is possible only though the displacement of other life, a displacement proportional to the material comfort of the human. Jesus is told about the gifts and the slaughter of the innocents. When He goggles at the evil of it all, Jesus is told that the reason His material comfort is justified is that He has a great destiny to fulfill, that He is above mortal nature.
This idea is precisely how humans justify placing unlimited burden on other humans and on nonhuman life, a burden that prevents and destroys other life. Was not Bach human? Were not van Gogh and Newton? That’s why I deserve color TV and personal transportation that sits unused most of the time and beef at every meal. Maybe if van Gogh had not been a (penurious!) genius, I would be unjustified in my opulent lifestyle, but he was, and so I am.
Of course, I mock, just as Jesus would have, silently or aloud, I know not. I expect that His mother would have figured out what was in His mind, however. Jesus suffered from childhood survivor guilt. This is philosophically central to the human condition. It’s only in recent decades in rich countries that children have been unlikely to experience the death of a young person dear to them, whether sibling, friend, or parent. I can tell you from personal experience that survivor guilt can generate a strong desire to justify one’s existence by great works. One must be better, stronger, faster to pay one’s debt.
On the other hand, the guilt implies that one is dangerous. One worries that one was responsible for the death. One must be perfect, so as not to cause more harm. I highly recommend the episode “Hero Worship” from the series Star Trek: The Next Generation. It explains the whole thing.
Please recall the dualism. The horrible quandary Jesus faces in relation to the gifts is both a personal crisis for Him as a human and an expression of the human condition generally that He must address as God. Jesus is reasonable, so He judges His time. As His skills grow, the risk of public speech declines. As conditions deteriorate in society around Him, the expected benefit of speaking grows. I would go to Chapter 7 of Mark to get a sense of the crisis at that time. There’s mention of resource restriction for the elderly and calorie restriction for children in a society that had rich people. At some point, the curves of risk and expected benefit cross, and Jesus decides to act.
Please recall my discussion of the three temptations of the devil. The offer of kingship over all nations, or of political power and excesses thereof, echoes the gift of myrrh, or chrism, which was used to anoint kings, and presages the triumphant entry to Jerusalem. Challenging Jesus to turn stones to bread, or to embrace economic power and excesses thereof, echoes the gift of gold and presages the overturning of the tables of the moneychangers and the scattering of their coins on the stones of the temple courtyard. Challenging Jesus to force God’s hand by casting Himself from a great height, or to seize religious power misunderstood as the power to bind God’s hands, echoes the gift of frankincense, which was used in religious ceremonies, and presages the period between the theft from the moneychangers and the arrest of Jesus, during which the crucifixion was, absent intervention by the Father, as certain as eventual impact for a falling person.
After resisting the temptations, Jesus both preaches and lives a message. I would summarize it in three rules, akin to the three flocking rules in the simplest bird simulations:
Don’t be rich.
Don’t feel compelled to have children.
Help each other out.
The third rule enables people to be safe while following the first two rules. Among the chief benefits of wealth and parenthood are possession of the resources to tide one over through adversity, including illness, disability, conflict, and old age. The first rule reduces the human burden on the environment by reducing the average resource consumption per person. The second rule reduces the human burden on the environment by reducing the number of people. Reducing the human burden on the environment increases happiness and reduces strife by making it easier to obtain the necessities of life. Animal instincts for self-preservation and procreation are relied upon to prevent excessive devotion to the rules, which would lead to unhealthy self-denial and dangerous population loss.
Humans with sufficient naturalistic intelligence don’t need to be told the three rules. They love living beings sufficiently indifferently that they hurt when Nature suffers too much at their hands and naturally cut back their consumption of Nature’s offerings. The rest of us need words or math to grasp what our species-siblings who are more advanced in this area simply feel.
The three rules also make life better for the poor, by improving their material well-being, and for the rich, by improving their spiritual well-being by lifting from their souls the stain of permitting suffering they could easily alleviate. I think that Jesus was out to redistribute wealth, in part to lift the stain from His soul of benefiting from a series of events that led to the slaughter of the innocents. Survivor guilt may be pathological in some cases, but this does not imply that survivor obliviousness is a desirable state. I think that Jesus entered towns with a band of men, inspired crowds, turned to the rich, tapped His foot at them while they looked around at the energized townsfolk, and collected alms for the poor. I think that Jesus wanted to redistribute at least the appropriate multiple of what had kept Him in style in childhood.
Jesus as God is addressing the religious authorities when He prays to the Father to, “Give us our daily bread.” On the other hand, Jesus as human is demanding that God not send famine. This is not quite right, because some famines help to restore ecological balance.
Jesus as God is joking when He says in Matthew, “Be perfect.” Jesus as human is suffering from perfectionism deriving from survivor guilt.
Jesus as God multiplies loaves and fishes by getting people who brought box lunches to share their food with unprepared people without criticizing their needy species-siblings but rather with the expectation that they will be helped one day, in turn. Jesus as human multiplies loaves and fishes by creating food out of thin air, or by turning stones to food. Making food too abundant releases one of the stays on human population, eventually producing ecological collapse. We are seeing this today as a consequence of our own transmutation of stones to bread, which we call the Green Revolution. God would never do this, because God values all life, not just human life, and appreciates that the system must be preserved. Excessive human population growth produces human population crash. Slow and steady wins the race, not boom and bust, because people depend on nonhuman life to survive and so displace too much of that life at their own peril.
Jesus as human raises people from the dead. Jesus as God very much does not, because any immortal component of a complex system is a cancer, unless it ceases to reproduce. Ending reproduction produces stagnation. God understands the function of human death as an oncologist understands the function of cellular death and the repugnant tragedy that is insufficient death.
Jesus as God curses a fig tree that is not bringing forth figs at a season when fig trees should lack fruit to poke fun at various forms of defiance of Nature. As to Jesus as human, I think that we should be concerned for the well-being of any human who curses a tree in earnest.
Jesus as human has parted ways with Jesus as God when Jesus as human enters Jerusalem triumphantly, robs the moneychangers to pay His mob, and hangs around waiting for the Father to knuckle under and save Him from arrest and execution. In doing these things, Jesus succumbed to all the temptations of the devil, illustrating the principle that power corrupts and its corollary that the God-king play, with its excessive power and absolutism, is to be avoided. In doing these things, Jesus as God achieved our salvation from sin by convincing Himself that even He, in the role of a human, was subject to serious sin.
The lesson for us of the life of Jesus is not just the three rules for living happily and well while having access only to finite resources. The lesson is also that we can forgive our leaders and ourselves for our fallibility, as long as we atone and bravely submit to punishment, as Jesus did. The lesson is furthermore that we and our leaders must expect to make serious mistakes and act accordingly. The lesson, above all, is that even God can learn and change, so why shouldn’t we give that a whirl ourselves now and then?
Please recall that the three rules are followed most strictly in monasteries and convents, which I believe to have been clever means of economic regulation by voluntary sacrifice. I’d like to suggest that all of us who understand the three rules explain their origin before the ongoing catastrophe proceeds much further. Perhaps people will learn from the increasing suffering they are about to undergo and reduce the ultimate extent of that suffering while preparing themselves to live sustainably in the better world that will follow Nature’s reduction of our burden on this planet’s living beings, assuming humanity survives.
As a person from France who has served as Papal Nuncio to Haiti, Your Excellency is perfectly positioned to play a leading role in the work ahead. Simply devote a good portion of Your Excellency’s time to inducing France to pay back, with interest and penalty, the money it extorted from the Haitians after that people freed themselves from enslavement to Frenchmen. The result of that robbery by gunboat is that Paris is the city of light and Port-au-Prince is controlled by violent gangs. Your Excellency groans under the burden of this stain, among others, on the souls of French people. “Help each other out,” includes compensating victims, especially victims of robberies, the proceeds of which are partly responsible for one’s own prosperity.
I am cognizant of the fact that I find my new understanding of the Gospels compelling in part because it is in accord with what I see in my own life and in the world around me. This is not reason to dismiss what I write: The situation today is not so different from the one that Jesus encountered as to make the Gospels irrelevant to our lives. Quite the opposite is true. Relevancy is a symmetric binary relationship, meaning that the relevancy of the Gospels to our lives implies the relevancy of our lives to the Gospels.
Reduce school shootings and suicide by playing up the relentless attacks of Jesus on the pecking order. If the last shall be first, high school losers are sitting pretty. They clearly have something of value. Furthermore, if God Himself can’t get through life without committing a capital crime, the fact that your shop project won’t work or that the local Pontius Pilate is a demagogue doesn’t amount to much in the final analysis. Those who instead value perfection deprecate breakdown lanes, goading people to drive on until their engines seize. Survival is victory. Humiliation is irrelevant.
There’s another lesson to the Gospels: Life is not chess. It’s go. Wait for your time, and reverse the momentum to roll up the forces commanded by those who oppose you. Everyone will be fine, as long as everyone plays by the rules. Far from being nice and perfect, Jesus was dangerous and suffered the biggest, most humiliating defeat possible. Therein lies the victory of His life, not to mention that He may yet win the overall struggle.
That I’ve taken some time to grasp all this doesn’t worry me. Peter did well in the end, despite the fact that he simply could not grasp before it happened that the death of Jesus was part of the plan. “Slow and steady wins the race,” after all, is the main point of ecology, which is life in a complex system.
Your Excellency has my gratitude for Your Excellency’s time and good works.
Yours in the God Who remembers that the shape of love, like the shape of water, is the shape of its container,
James
Abortion and Rape
July 6, 2023
Your Excellency, Archbishop Pierre,
It turns out that I have at least two more ideas to convey to Your Excellency as part of my contribution to the Synod. The first concerns an issue with the Church’s stand on abortion, a topic I had intended not to address with you, though I have written of it elsewhere. What I have noticed the past few days may give Your Excellency reason to advocate re-examination of Catholic teaching on abortion. The second is a model of God in which the Trinity is peopled with the biological imperatives, which move us as if they were Gods. This model will prove to be in keeping with my suggestion that important beings in Christianity be used to facilitate reasoning about good-good opposites, as God and the devil are used to reason about good-bad opposites. The insight that I think can be taught through the use of the Trinity to express biological imperatives could be very helpful in convincing moneyed people that they are dooming their offspring in a way contrary to the Church’s model of history’s culmination.
I had an experience this morning that I’d like to share. To exercise without subjecting myself to the heat and humidity we are subject to today in Albany, NY, USA, I walked in the Empire State Plaza Concourse, an enormous climate-controlled underground space, the construction of which displaced a vibrant community of parishioners of the local Catholic cathedral in the 1960s. I’m torn between my love of the architecture and public art displays and my less urgent feeling for what was lost.
I passed a painting I didn’t recall and immediately disliked intensely. The use of color was muddy in a way distinctly contrary to the muddiness that appeals to me. I took a picture of the painting, in case I ever wanted to illustrate the fact that while I enjoy abstract expressionist art, I can be repelled by examples of it. Of course, the presence of the painting indicated the existence of people who deserve my respect and yet see the world in a way that enables them to find value in what I find disgusting.
I glanced at the image on my phone and liked what I saw for itself, not just as an example of the principle “To each their own.” My camera had produced a much brighter image than my retina had done directly, and I saw structure that I had not seen earlier. The structure gave the work meaning that it had lacked for me at first glance. I looked up at the painting itself and now noticed the structure directly, even though my retinas still delivered a dark image to my brain. Once a thing has been brought to one’s attention, one often can’t help but keep seeing it. I’ll attach the picture to this email.
Incidentally, cell-phone cameras often see wavelengths of light invisible to the naked eye, too. I think that the difference between the report of my retinas and of my cell phone today owed to a difference in light collection, but there is wavelength shifting, too. In case Your Excellency has not done it, I’ll mention that looking at the front of a television remote control in the screen of a cell phone while pressing the remote’s buttons often enables one to see otherwise invisible flashes of infrared light. That I know this fact should not in any way add to my credibility. That I bring up the fact in this context, perhaps, should, if you find felicity in the act.
What could Church leaders be missing that would have given them greater insight to abortion? I’ve mentioned before an obvious answer, which is a uterus or the memory of having had one. I think that people with either of these will understand that making abortion more difficult to obtain increases the viability of rape as a reproductive strategy and therefore increases their vulnerability. There are folk beliefs saying that conception cannot occur without consent, but these beliefs are false. Rape can be an attractive reproductive strategy because it requires the least investment of resources by the inseminator.
As an aside, I suggest that the Church also revisit the teaching that Mary did not know man before giving birth to Jesus. If this is the case, God raped Mary. There is no way for a human to give free consent directly to God. The power differential is too great. In the ancient Greek religions, rapist gods were common. I can imagine a couple of good purposes behind this belief, but an all-loving God cannot be a rapist. The teaching could be retained using my idea that God is terrible at being a person, in this case at trying to have a child, but if God is a rapist, God would be the strongest possible proponent of abortion, because the expectation that Mary might terminate the pregnancy for which God would be responsible would have caused God to find some better way to incarnate, sparing God the stain of the horrible sin that Catholic teaching on the virginity of Mary makes clear that God committed.
Now, I offer myself as a lay theologian, but I would never pretend to be conversant with the details of Catholic theology. I am far more comfortable at the level of complication in theoretical physics, at least to the modest extent to which I have pursued work in that field. Nevertheless, I find it telling that paragraph 366 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, wherein the reader learns that “The Church teaches that every spiritual soul is created immediately by God...”, has origins, according to footnote 235, in writings of Pius XII, Paul VI, and the good folks who convened for Lateran Council V in 1513. This Church teaching, which has the people of the United States at each other’s throats or is a key pretext for our current inflammability, appears to have no Scriptural basis and, as Your Excellency knows, is not one of the two doctrines supported by papal infallibility. I leave it to Your Excellency to puzzle out why the Church subsequently went all-in on a doctrine with such flimsy justification. I hope below to be of use in identifying some sources of the mistake of creating the doctrine in the first place.
I’m going to suppose that His Holiness, Pius XII, was a good man. His Holiness did, however, make a concordat with Hitler and behave otherwise in ways that many people found wanting when it came to opposing evil, rather than preserving the Church. Good people can get confused and follow the path of least resistance. I’m seeing a lot of that these days, though I cannot cast stones. I have the privilege and inclination to make a stand. The 1968 movie The Shoes of the Fisherman puts it nicely when a character observes that immediately after death, the pope receives nine absolutions because, as a great man, he might have more need of them than most. It’s a very sad thought.
Of course, the Nazis were about exterminating people they deemed inconvenient, including, for example, disabled people. Nazis were not just antisemites. They sought efficient functioning of society and the opportunity to create as many babies as possible that they would find acceptable. By sticking up for inseminated eggs, His Holiness might have been trying to redeem himself for failing to stick up for the victims of Nazis. Like so many leaders, His Holiness may have been so intent on not making the same mistake again that His Holiness made a new mistake. All the world would understand this if it were put to the world in a spirit of humility. It’s not as if the reputation of Jesus or St. Paul were at stake.
About His Holiness, Paul VI, I wonder whether the Church, in trying to embrace the scientific fervor of that era, was misled by scientists. Rejecting the ideas that souls could preexist the body or migrate from one body to another might have seemed scientific. However, physics has a long history of giving the impression that more is known about reality than could remotely be considered the case. Physicists are often confused on this point themselves.
Consider that Galilean relativity was considered common sense until special relativity came along. Newtonian gravity completely resolved how the planets moved until the anomaly in Mercury’s perihelion was taken seriously. Of course, Newtonian gravity was a law, not a theory, so there was no explanation of why gravity existed. It’s not as if anyone would be interested to know why things happen. General relativity took care of those problems, though we now have gaping holes laid bare in our knowledge of the composition of the universe. We name our ignorance dark energy and dark matter. At the same time, many people are working to show that, instead, general relativity is flawed. The controversy evolves against a backdrop of complete ignorance of the nature of mass, energy, time, and space, and seeks to resolve how these unknown quantities are interrelated without determining what they are.
Incidentally, the existence of doubt in scientific models does not imply that one ought to ignore the climate or biodiversity crises any more than it suggests one can walk out a high window safely. Not all scientific ideas are equally well established, and imprecision in the projection of the horror of an impending catastrophe does not reduce the urgency of averting the catastrophe. Horror is horror, besides which imprecision implies the possibility of underestimation as much as that of overestimation. Your Excellency will, of course, be in full command of these points. I state them for the record and the possible benefit of any others who wind up reading this, the latest entry in a series of open letters.
The fact is that physics is entirely consistent with various scenarios in which souls exist that not only persist after death but also pre-exist the body and might migrate from a fetus in a terminated pregnancy to another. I’m not asserting that this is the case, but here’s a scenario I find eminently plausible, in light of what we are seeing happen before our eyes.
Given that all we have by which to know the world is information about it, we could be living in a simulation. I thought of my own work in foundations of physics to be along the lines of finding a plausible program to govern the simulation. Compared to the smallest lengths and times thought to be meaningful, physics has access to only very gross measurements. It’s entirely plausible that extremely simple laws, expressed in ways a middle school student could understand, govern the happenings at the smallest scales, creating so many events that we, at scales of measurement as large in comparison to the fundamental scales as the universe is to a person, are given a world of glorious complexity. In such a simulation, everything is a pattern of information. A soul would be a pattern that could be transferred from association with one body to association with another. Why would this be done? What would the purpose of the simulation be?
The fact is that humans have too much power over Nature relative to our wisdom. We may, in the near future, render our planet uninhabitable for ourselves and a million other species. In my view, this is a very bad thing. Others are less concerned. It’s not their business, even if poor people are already suffering and dying in large numbers due to, among other things, the effects of greenhouse gases copiously emitted to enable vacationers to fly or cruise. Some people even hope for a catastrophe in which the Prince of Peace will destroy all people who fail to be sufficiently enthusiastic about the Prince of Peace, leaving all the world or Heaven or some other prize entirely to the Prince’s fervent followers in what appears to me to be genocide. Given the correlation between holding such beliefs and being unwilling to doubt one’s own beliefs, this world would serve perfectly as a simulation in which young adults of an advanced technological civilization learned the connections among ecology, civic duty, and introspection before the afterlife, which might be lunch and the rest of their lives in a world made sane by the requirement that all its intelligent beings live the equivalent to them of a couple of hours the way we do to see just how bad things could get if intelligent beings failed to limit their ambitions. Maybe we’ll get an extra dessert or a beer if we save this world.
On the other hand, this may be all there is, so I take saving our civilization and our nonhuman siblings very seriously.
For decades, physicists have spoken of shutting up and calculating because the conceptual underpinnings of quantum mechanics are unsatisfactory. We recently learned from the Irish Times that one of the pioneers of quantum mechanics, Erwin Schrödinger, was a monster. In fact, a priest defended a little girl from that monster in Ireland. Intellectual contributions of monsters should be held suspect. For a variety of reasons, including the facts that a cat can determine whether it is alive and whether it is dying and that it would be just as strange physically for the glass vial to be simultaneously whole and broken as for the cat to be simultaneously alive and dead, the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment is pointless, except possibly as a way for a monster to grapple with the fact that in some contexts, the monster seemed in every way human. The cat could have stood in Schrödinger’s mind for Schrödinger or a portion thereof. I wonder when we’ll stop giving the shade of a soulless monster the satisfaction of taking seriously that monster’s unscientific prank or model of monstrosity. Maybe we’ll stop around the same time that we stop considering cats to be as insensate as glass vials.
The Church also has a problem with monsters in its ranks. All institutions do. The question concerns the prevalence, not the existence, of monsters in any sufficiently large group. Casting abortion unscientifically and untheologically as murder harms women in many ways. Monsters revel in harming others. Some monsters also want to reproduce in the easiest way, by rape. Restricting abortion rights makes rape a viable reproductive strategy. I trust that Your Excellency will not have to ask why a monster would reproduce in a way that might make the monster’s offspring difficult for that child’s mother to love.
Every child has a good shot at growing up to be a good person. As a person who was, to some extent, inconvenient as a child, I am inclined to fear that abortion rights could lead to an increase in the dispatching of inconvenient children. I can easily see a less adaptable version of my younger self done away with by Nazis.
However, I also know that no one’s uterus is mine to control, any more than it is God’s to control. Given that there is no conceivable way to establish that a fetus has a soul, let alone that that soul does not migrate to a newly conceived fetus upon abortion, religious arguments for restricting abortion must be reconsidered. The frequency of abortion could instead be reduced by imposing some burden on the impregnator, rather than the impregnated person.
I wish Your Excellency well with the task ahead. I highly recommend The Shoes of the Fisherman, currently available free on YouTube. The scenario has similarities to current events. It amazes me that we are ignoring the economic crisis in nuclear-armed Pakistan, the impending melting of the Himalayan glaciers that will eliminate the main water supply for vast numbers of people in nuclear-armed Pakistan and nuclear-armed India and nuclear-armed China, and that we are strongly foreshadowing war with nuclear-armed China, besides waging war through a proxy with nuclear-armed Russia. Next, we’ll be threatening to invade nuclear-armed France. I identify most closely with the character of Father Telemond, but the real-world ideas his writing in the movie represents may have brought about some bad results, as I note above. Still, one wouldn’t object to looking, sounding, and moving like Oskar Werner.
I’ll write later about the model I mention above of the Trinity. Your Excellency has my gratitude for any time Your Excellency spends with my ideas.
Yours in the appreciation of that subset of gods who would want to be discouraged to the greatest possible extent from committing rape,
James
Trinity, Triumvirates, and Coming Together
July 13, 2023
Your Excellency, Archbishop Pierre,
Congratulations on Your Excellency's appointment as a member of the College of Cardinals. I believe that I can now explain Scripture in a way that could permit Your Excellency and me to come together, along with everyone else interested in Christianity. I shall briefly present my model of God, followed by reasons to believe that my model is the one originally embraced by the Jesus movement, before the movement evolved to enable it to become the state religion of the Roman Empire.
Tripartite models are very useful, and the Trinity can be made to serve many different beneficial purposes, as Your Excellency will have been aware and as I pointed out earlier. Please consider the person of the Father as the male creative urge. The Father drives us to have children, to build a civilization, and to make that civilization secure through gaining control over resources. Surely, these are beneficial drives.
The creation, however, is happening on a planet. The finite domain available for creation requires destruction to make room for new creation. Death is necessary to accommodate new life. If there is insufficient death in the ordinary course of events, an orgy of killing must erupt. Thus, by implication, the Father, the source of new life, is also the war god, the god of death more generally, and the god of building. The Father maps to Zeus, Ares, and Hephaistos.
The Father, unrestrained, wants as much new life as possible, and so abominates sexual practices that cannot result in offspring. The Father also subjugates those women who would like to produce fewer offspring than the theoretical maximum their bodies can withstand creating and raising.
The new life desired by the Father is more adaptable as circumstances alter and so tends to preserve the system as a whole. Contrariwise, the Father’s building, when unchecked, burdens the environment excessively and thus threatens the system.
Please consider the Son as the urge to survive, to grow, to thrive. The Son heals the ill and even raises the dead, reducing room for new life, in direct opposition to the Father. The Son heals the infirm, enabling them to build more, in alliance with the Father but in opposition to the stability of the planetary system. The Son would have fun to reduce the creative urge, in opposition to the Father but in support of the planetary system. The Son acts in accord with the Father's desire to preserve civilization but does so by means opposed to those used by the Father, seeking cooperation and unity. The Son shares resources, rather than hoarding them, thereby generating good will and the opportunity to ask for help when the need arises. The Son maps to Apollo and Dionysus.
I’m sure the mappings are familiar, but please notice the symmetry, based in duality. Each person of the Trinity in this model both opposes and supports each other person. It is the tensions among the three that produce moderation and order. Symmetry then implies the identity of the biological imperative to associate with the Holy Spirit.
Please consider the Holy Spirit as the drive to preserve the ecology. Unrestrained, this drive would lead to the end of human life, because intelligence is the greatest enemy of the environment. Mankind’s extinction would benefit the vast majority of other life. By limiting humanity, the Holy Spirit tends to foil the Father and the Son in the short term but support them in the long run. If humanity is not limited, it breaks the natural system by immoderate pursuit of the goals of the Father and the Son. The collapse of wildlife produces the collapse of civilization. I trust that this had happened often enough for wise people to be aware of the phenomenon at the time of Jesus.
In fact, each agricultural cycle of plenty followed by famine, as in the story of Joseph in Genesis, recapitulates the phenomenon in lesser measure. If growth is limited, the famine is less painful, because there are fewer ways the available calories must be split. Even today, we have not abolished our vulnerability to natural forces.
Why should we believe that the Trinitarian model described above was in the minds of people in the early Jesus movement? Jewish people had come into contact with Greek culture some time before, leading to conflict between Hellenized Jews and other Jews. I don’t remember this point of history having been mentioned in my formal education, let alone having been given its due weight. Why wouldn’t Jewish people have tried to come up with a merging of Greek and Jewish religions, organized in accordance with the ecological principles of which early agrarian peoples had to keep careful track in order to survive and that we have neglected in recent times to our imminent peril? The merging of religions might have been intended to achieve reconciliation within the Jewish people.
Furthermore, people in the Mediterranean region of Jesus’ time had just witnessed the horror of the disintegration of two ruling triumvirates. In each case, civil war followed the dissolution of the political alliances. The ultimate outcome in both instances was the elevation of a god-king. Julius Caesar was deified after his death and Augustus while still alive, at least in Palmyra. The Jewish people were, no doubt, troubled by having to use money bearing the images of foreign gods.
The Gospels, therefore, can be understood as farce. They illustrate what preposterous and dangerous outcomes emerge from separation of the three biological imperatives in this model and from their eventual conflict. We can thank God for having gone to the trouble and pain of illustrating this crucial point so vividly, though, as I’ve pointed out, gods benefit from enjoying the limitations that are the glory of mortal beings. I think that gods grant themselves some fun, and they do tend to incarnate right and left, don’t they?
Note that I’m not saying that there is more than one god. I’m speaking in a way consistent with millennia of human beliefs and methods of reasoning about a complex world, which God would have used to convey His messages in ways potentially easy for everyone to understand.
I understand God best, in relation to humanity, as large-scale structure in human affairs that emerges from vast numbers of decisions guided by the principles embraced by the human heart and as those principles themselves. I see the dissolution of the Trinity all around me. In particular, I see fundamentalist Christians worshiping the Father to the exclusion of the Son and Holy Spirit. I see atheists lining up behind the principles embodied, in my model, by the Son and, in some cases, the Holy Spirit, as well. I even see a few people calling for human extinction, to spare wildlife more suffering, in allegiance to a Holy Spirit unrestrained by anything else.
I suggest that Your Excellency help to bring Christianity back to its origins in the respect for checks and balances and the desire for moderation. I also renew my suggestion that rules be changed so that the next pope can possess a uterus or the memory of having had one. Perhaps the next pope could then explicate a divine nature for Mary, giving Her the power to consent freely to bear God’s child, a point raised in my last letter. I note that the tableau at the crucifixion, with Jesus on the cross above Mary on the ground, suggests to me the early Greek gods of Father Sky and Mother Earth. If we could establish that Mary’s dual nature has, as one of its parts, Mother Earth, we might enable Christians to stop abusing the Mother of us all before She can no longer support our species. The time to achieve this is very short but has not passed.
Come to think of it, perhaps the Catholic Church could move past the leadership model of imperial Rome and embrace the power-sharing of the Roman Republic. In this case, the complementarity between male and female that we find extolled in the Catechism and the sayings of His Holiness, Pope Francis, might be put into practice at the highest level of Church leadership. This idea might merit thought.
I suggest we come together to establish balance, which requires that we cease to see each other as evil and start to see ourselves as separated. The evil emerges from the separation and vanishes as reunification proceeds. I tend to be light on my allegiance to the Father and more comfortable with the Son and the Holy Spirit, but this makes me eager to talk with partisans of the Father who can manage to see me as a thoughtful being neither less than, nor greater than, they. People are incomparable in general and can be ranked only with reference to some purpose.
In my view, the plan of the Son could still enable people to live sustainably and well, because the Son’s plan balances all the interests in the Trinity. The plan, as I see it, is this: Don’t be rich; have fun; help each other out. The tricky thing is that the Son’s plan doesn’t work unless people believe that it gives them enough of what they want and understand that the alternative is boom-and-bust cycles, ever-recurrent apocalypses, until the capital-A Apocalypse ends humanity. Very simply, our species must keep resource consumption in the sustainable range while securing for every person, including potential nonhuman people we call artificial intelligences, a high probability of leading a pleasant and reasonably long life. This is the problem of living on a planet. We can, and must, solve it.
Your excellency, let’s give coming together a whirl, shall we?
Yours in God, regardless of models of God,
James
A Pithy Model to Promote Unity
July 25, 2023
Your Excellency, Archbishop Pierre,
Please consider the proposition that the disunity of Christianity is one of the greatest threats to human survival. If Christians were able to understand each other as good, despite doctrinal differences, Christians might be able to talk to each other in ways that would lead to understanding each other’s wisdom and thereby arrive at courses of action agreeable to all, especially a course to steer us through our species’ existential crisis. Let the pursuit of reconciliation, then, be the primary goal of these letters and the title of their collection be Reunion.
After Jesus was conceived, God was divided. The Son was no longer in direct contact with the Father or the Holy Spirit. This separation persisted for decades. I submit that during this period, the Father and the Holy Spirit ruled without the moderating influence of the Son, who advocates for the rights of the individual person. The disunity created the rift between Jesus as Son and the religious authorities, who had grown apart from the Son while having only the guidance of the Father and the Holy Spirit. Many of the actions of the religious authorities were wrong, and so were many of the actions of Jesus, because the actions were extreme, unchecked by part of the will of God. That will arises through the tension among the Son, guardian of individual rights; the Father, guardian of the stability of society as a whole; and the Holy Spirit, guardian of the stability of the living world as a whole.
This is one reason Jesus had to die: God had to reunite to stop the harm being done by the separate parts of God. This is the source of our salvation: God did a terrible job as a person and so gained greater respect for people. God also showed us that maybe we should be a bit more tolerant of ourselves and those less powerful than we while being a bit less forgiving of the transgressions committed by those more powerful. In doing such a bad job as a leader on Earth, Jesus did the perfect job of leading as God. The duality makes the tears well up with its beauty and tragedy, not to mention its cleverness.
The story of the king who walks among his subjects, disguised to greater or lesser degree, is old and recurs frequently for good reason: Knowledge is helpful, but knowledge is incomplete without direct experience. The Gospels are charming and funny in places, as when Jesus repeatedly blows his incognito out of compassion, then asks increasingly large numbers of people to keep His secret. An excess of compassion signifies insufficient thought for Father and Holy Spirit, but we can all relate.
The television show Undercover Boss is a collection of such royal excursions. The idea of the out-of-position God Who must die to restore order is central to Kevin Smith’s movie Dogma.
Reunifying Christianity is conceptually easy: Please consider the persons of the Trinity on a clock face. The Father is red and located at 10 o’clock. The Son is blue and can be found at 2 o’clock. The Holy Spirit is green and positioned at 6 o’clock. The coalition of the Father and Holy Spirit in equal parts is at 8 o’clock, directly across from the Son, and so constitutes the Anti-Son. I spend much of my time near the coalition in equal parts of the Son and Holy Spirit, so I am often associated with the Anti-Father. The coalition in equal parts of Father and Son opposes the rest of Nature in an effort to make society and individual people as strong as possible in the short term. This coalition, I and many others argue, is destroying the rest of the natural world, very likely dooming humanity and a million other species. The Father-Son combination, baleful when indulged in for too long, is at noon/midnight, directly opposed to the Holy Spirit, and so is the Anti-Spirit.
Each Christian denomination can be characterized by its overall position on the clock, as determined by averaging the positions representing its relative concern for individual rights, societal stability, and ecology in each of its doctrinal stances or official activities. If greater granularity is desired, the vector, or list, of the individual positions on the clock can be written down. Even greater detail can be achieved, but please recall that models are abstractions, simplifications crafted for their utility. The loss of detail is desirable for the model’s associated ease of use and for making progress possible through clarity of thought.
Thus, all the denominations worship correctly, because it is only in combination with each other that they can achieve balance and the ability to adjust nimbly to the needs of a changing world, much as is the case with God Kiself as understood through the Trinitarian model. Perhaps Unitarians, or those among them who view God as unitary, can be described as seeing a clock face with zero radius.
Reunion is therefore achieved quite simply, merely by recognizing that Christians have never been separated. Each Christian has always traveled around the Trinitarian circle, making common cause with others whose journey most closely matches their own but needing everyone, lest the population at any position on the clock face be too sparse or too dense to safely respond to circumstances.
God doesn’t change God’s nature, but God can change God’s mind by deferring, on occasion, in one person of God to the others. Doesn’t this model make good use of neglected possibilities within the Trinitarian model? A God embodying checks and balances might have appealed to a people living with the harms that emerged as Rome transitioned from republic to empire, from government by triumvirate or Senate/Plebeian Council/law courts or Senate/Plebeian Council/religious authorities, to the traditional horror of the God-king. The Trinitarian model may have been neglected as a dialogue arose with Manichaeism and its binary model a couple of centuries after Jesus, though I'm only now becoming aware of this possibility, and, even more likely, may have been partially suppressed by Constantine at Nicaea, little enamored as he was with the republican model of government. Anything that praised republican government threatened his life and the lives of his family, because any effort to restore the Republic would have required his assassination and their execution. [added 2023/09/19: When I wrote this, I was unaware of the Civil Wars of the Tetrarchy and the fact that Constantine had concluded them in 324, the year before the Council of Nicaea. Had I known of this episode of history, which turned on a question of power sharing, I would have continued the current paragraph by asking His Excellency to consider the effects of their need to avert further bloodshed on the good people contemplating the nature of the Trinity at the Council of Nicaea. This is not to say that the good people made a mistake. One is free to believe that the Civil Wars of the Tetrarchy are evidence that people of the era were not ready for an understanding of the Trinity such as I propose and that those at the Council acted correctly, as did others in later councils. Are we ready to consider publicly that understanding the Trinity as a power-sharing structure would help to solve the central problem of governance, that civilization and ecology require people to do things they find hard to understand but that invoking God's will shuts down discussion before there's a chance to figure out what, specifically, those things are or ought to be? -- James]
Your Excellency, much becomes possible through a useful and pithy model of reality. I hope that mine will help.
Yours in God, regardless of models of God,
James
A Grand Unified Religion
July 28, 2023
Your Excellency, Archbishop Pierre,
I had intended to offer examples of the application of the pithy Trinitarian model of the last letter, but for today, I decided to present something I've worked on since yesterday morning.
Please consider the logic of divine procreation in ancient religions. There may not seem to be any reason Christianity should adhere to that logic today, but in the ancient world, it obviously would have been beneficial to do so in order to gain adherents. Christians understand Jesus to be God. Under the ancient system, gods who arose through the coming together of a male being and a female being were the offspring of a god and a goddess. The offspring of a god and a human was a demigod. By that logic, Mary was a goddess.
Furthermore, the Catholic Church in recent times has moved in the direction, it seems to me, of deifying Mary, by giving the support of papal infallibility to the doctrines of the Assumption and the Immaculate Conception of Mary. The latter clearly puts Mary above mortal nature. Deifying Mary would make Her able to have freely consented to bear the Father’s child. Doing so would also explain why Mary would not have sex otherwise, since a human cannot freely consent to sex with so powerful a being as a goddess. Mary having sex with Joseph would have constituted rape by Her of him. Your Excellency will see that this could explain some Catholic doctrines that non-Catholics tend to find unsupported.
Furthermore, deifying Mary would not make Catholicism polytheistic if Mary is the Holy Spirit. Why would that be the case? I’ll explain.
One hint for me is the tableau of Jesus on the cross and Mary and John on the ground below. This strongly turns my mind to the old Greek gods Uranus, Father Sky, and Gaia, Mother Earth. During the Crucifixion, Jesus is Father Sky from the perspective of Mary, as Mary is Mother Earth from the perspective of Jesus. I can see why the sky would be the Father to ancient agrarian peoples: Rain is necessary to grow crops, as semen is necessary to create a child. The crops begin as germinating seeds within earth. Similarly, a child begins as a fetus within their mother. It makes perfect sense. I confess to a taste for symbols that are easy to decipher without being insipid, at least when the symbols are intended to be meaningful to all.
In the ancient Greek religion, Gaia created Uranus and married Him. In the Trinity with Mary as the Holy Spirit, Uranus and Gaia are the same being and create Jesus as their son, also part of the same being. This is eloquent for many purposes, including the idea that the male and female principles within a person give rise to that person through their interactions. This emergence repeats, on a different scale, the emergence of the Earth as a system of atmosphere and ground interacting, which gives us all life. Recognizing the repetition on different scales of the same phenomenon is part of complexity science and math more generally, of which I see other aspects in the teachings of Jesus. The worshipers of the Greek and Roman gods would not have had to struggle to understand a Trinity consisting of Mother, Father, and Son.
Neither, I think, would followers of some Eastern religions. Please consider the yin and yang symbol. There is female with some male inside and male with some female inside. Where is the child? The child is produced by the combination of male and female and so is the symbol as a whole. At least, that's the way I see it. Jesus is the system as a whole, which emerges from the combination of earth and sky, from female and male. Mapping the yin and yang symbol to the Trinity could have unified at least some Eastern and Western religions. Indeed, by consisting of a circle, a shape one can describe with a single parameter, its radius, a shape emergent from the joining of relatively complex regions of black and white, does not the yin and yang symbol embody the complementarity between female and male principles of which His Holiness, Pope Francis, speaks with such emphasis?
No one would have had to forsake their beliefs. They could have adopted these ideas as overarching and undergirding ones, thereby coming together in unity as humans. It could have been wonderful, truly the kingdom of heaven, which is in our hearts, hearts that are much the same, certainly in the broad strokes.
This idea is also consistent with God as emergent large-scale structure in the affairs of people or living beings or matter generally. The structure emerges from the operation of a simple set of principles that is best stated differently in different contexts but that could easily be taken as the Mother/Father/Child principles for many living beings, including humans. Atheists, pantheists, and at least some pagans could find a home in this overarching, or grand unified, belief system.
I expect that the unification could be extended, but I’ll not risk getting out of my depth at this juncture. Your Excellency’s laughter upon reading the second independent clause of the preceding sentence will, I hope, have been a pleasant change of pace. I’ll give all of this more thought.
Identification of Mary with the Holy Spirit is consistent with the pithy Trinitarian model of the last letter, too. The Holy Spirit manifests sometimes as a bird, which reminds me of Athena, goddess of wisdom and, I saw just now, chastity, certainly a practice associated in Catholicism with Mary. Therefore, as with the Father and the Son, as described in an earlier letter, we could understand the Mother as a union of multiple goddesses or every goddess. Concern for the system as a whole, which I identified with the Holy Spirit in the pithy model, is wisdom, and wisdom of a yin character, by which I mean wisdom associated with the female principle. In fact, maybe two of the dominant themes of religion are getting men to listen to the wisdom of women without losing face and to smooth out boom-and-bust economic cycles by contributing to a central fund, a golden calf or temple treasury, in good times so as to moderate growth when resources abound and to have reserves from which to draw in bad times.
Your Excellency, this religion business makes a lot of sense to me when it’s not cast as a process of walking around with eyes half-shut thinking about obscure matters that always seem to add up to the imperative that I suppress my will and efface my nature in hopes of securing a painfully modest reward at the end of the day. Religion has real power to unite us and save our species and a million others from ecological collapse if we set aside the ambition to dominate our fellow beings and make religion easy to understand, thereby keeping certain pieces of work from rolling it into a tube and using it to hit the rest of us on the nose.
If Your Excellency and I, a human whose attitudes are accurately expressed in the preceding paragraph, could unite through the grand unified religion sketched out in this message and try using it to find an all-embracing religious structure, there may be reason to raise our hopes for a functional human species, with its powerful members ready to take their seat again at the table of life on this planet and leave off running amok on the tabletop.
Yours in God and in the spirit of commending easily comprehensible and widely acceptable models of God,
James
Raising the Dead
August 15, 2023
Your Excellency, Archbishop Pierre,
It seems I’ll have to break up the conclusion of my message into more than one letter. Today, I’d like to meditate on a fact I’ve mentioned, that raising the dead is perhaps the worst sin a god could commit, and on how a god devoted to doing good could commit this sin anyway.
I am amazed that so many people seem to overlook the fact that birth necessitates death on a finite planet. Available resources can support only so many people at a given living standard with a given amount of resources sacrificed for the benefit of wildlife, without thriving populations of which, humanity is doomed. No matter how much technology we devote to the problem, rather than to the luxuriation of the rich, there will always be a maximum human population under given conditions on resources. Raising the dead limits births or results in ecological collapse.
Some might object that God can do anything. This is the demand that I stop thinking. No. I won’t. If God changes physics so that the previous paragraph no longer applies, fine. I’ll be happy. I usually am when I’m wrong, because things turn out to be more interesting than I could imagine. Until physics changes, however, let’s try to figure things out as if we needed to take care, as if we might be in some danger. Concerning the link, Your Excellency is aware, of course, that the climate catastrophe is the result of overconsumption of a resource, namely Earth's capacity to absorb our waste gases without noticeable change.
To moderate resource consumption so as to preserve the ecology, humans can be few or frugal. Jesus told us to reject wealth and help each other out. The second part promotes confidence in one’s future well-being without the need for riches of one’s own or a large family to protect one. Please note that large families aren’t bad, as long as there are also people who have fewer children than the number required to maintain the population. I live childfree in part to help average out the excess ecological burden of one big family. I'm aware, from a kind of experience of it, that there can be many benefits to growing up with more than one or two siblings, especially when one is a little out of step with one’s age cohort. There are, furthermore, ecological benefits from people raised in these circumstances. such as the increased likelihood of homosexuality in men who have many older brothers. Diversity is the key to survival on a finite planet, and I both support and embody diversity by refraining from having children.
Moderating resource consumption also requires soothing death anxiety, which experimental psychology shows to be a source of the love of money and of compulsive spending thereof. Raising the dead promotes the idea that death is bad. Sure, the deaths of our loved ones hurt. We correctly want to postpone death as much as is reasonable. That doesn’t make death bad. Orgasm is another thing that’s good but that we correctly want to postpone as much as is reasonable.
Incidentally, promoting belief in life after death reduces death anxiety and is therefore highly beneficial. Decline in this belief is partly rooted in misunderstanding of science. Physics offers many possible afterlives and otherlives. The easiest for me to understand is the possibility that this life is a simulation to prepare us for a life to come in the society that built the computers on which the simulation is running. The purpose of the simulation might be to educate us before we gain access to the kind of power that is wielded with such recklessness on this planet or to sort us, giving each of us the kind of life we would prefer, heavy on happiness or heavy on thinking.
Why would Jesus do serious evil by raising the dead? I can see a few reasons. First, there’s compassion that overwhelms one’s better judgment, that locks one’s perspective in tree mode, denying one the opportunity to see the needs of the forest. Capitalism positively fosters this loss of perspective. We promote this incapacity by saying, “It’s all about family.” I found myself subject to the incapacity the other day, purely from my own limitations. Good judgment requires consulting both the tree perspective and the forest perspective and finding synthesis of the two where their interests compete. Overweening compassion accounts for the sin of Jesus in raising the daughter of Jairus.
Love can also block out the forest perspective. This accounts for the raising of Lazarus and is an excellent reason for no single person to be condemned to wield godlike powers.
A third source of Jesus’ sin of resurrecting people is the incomplete nature of Jesus. He was mercurial, unusually given to passion and hence more susceptible than other humans to certain kinds of folly. Ordinary humans can’t help but possess both mercurial and saturnine natures and so are complete. The saturnine aspect of God was isolated in the person of the Father and thus inaccessible to Jesus, necessitating the death of Jesus before any more harm was done by Jesus or by the Father. The Father, recall, was, Himself, working through the religious authorities to impose an insufficiently compassionate rule, as we see, for example, in Mark 7.
Doesn’t my interpretation of the Gospels make it easier to understand the superficially evil sayings of Jesus? No loving god in their right mind would say something like, “No one comes to the Father except through Me.” That promotes invasion, colonialism, racism, slavery, genocide. Does Your Excellency see, as I do, a particularly foul smoke rising from myriad chimneys when Your Excellency reads John 8:44? Of course Your Excellency has beautifully subtle understandings of these sayings of Jesus that make silk purses of them, but many of Your Excellency’s followers don’t have the time or inclination to master Your Excellency’s conceptions. They need to put food on the table for their children, and when this becomes difficult, as it increasingly will do from decade to decade for the foreseeable future, they are capable of the most extreme evil accessible to humans, again from excess compassion and love and focus on family. Please consider the possibility that my interpretations are not only closer to the truth but closer to justice, too.
Please mark that I set no human above another, unless a purpose is specified. Everyone has something to offer, even if it's to serve as an example of what not to become. Just as the Son needs the Father and the Mother, and as the Mother needs the Father and the Son, and as the Father needs the Mother and the Son, we all need each other, because our power emerges from our combination into families and teams and societies, which are superorganisms. We do grow from going off on our own, but we also have needs that require combination in some form, at least part of the time.
More fundamentally, people are multidimensional. The concept of ordering (technically, total ordering, ordering without omitting anything) requires projecting multidimensional quantities into a single dimension, a process that is implied when we consider one person better than another and that needs to be made explicit every time, to establish justice.
I am grateful to Jesus and to the Father for saving us all from intemperate judgment by demonstrating in their period of separation that even God, or a godly human, will sin badly, given enough opportunity to be compassionate or to want for that tree-level quality. Of course, that's a lesson the Mother didn't need to learn. I wonder whether She's behind the whole episode, having brought it about to get the Boys to stop arguing so bitterly.
Your Excellency has my thanks for any time Your Excellency spends with my ideas.
Yours in multidimensional models of God,
James
The Clockface Model, Economics, and Survival
August 16, 2023
Your Excellency, Archbishop Pierre,
I am determined to wrap up this series of letters shortly. Today, I’ll discuss the clockface model of the Trinity further. It had occurred to me that the clockface might echo wheel models from various major Eastern religions, but I found just now that I know so little about these that I could discuss them intelligently only after much study. Perhaps someday I will, but the responsible thing right now is to leave making the connections to others or my future self. I see at a glance, however, a very high probability that the clockface model could be used to understand the Trinity and wheel models as expressions of an underlying or overarching structure. Since they’re wheel models, I should say underlying and overarching.
I believe that a key purpose of religion is to avert or moderate boom-and-bust economic cycles. One must find a way to tell a parent that they shouldn’t seek every advantage for their child, both to promote the welfare of the less fortunate and to prevent economic overheating. In fact, caring for the needy helps to keep the economy within safe bounds by replacing activities that rapidly consume resources with ones that consume little more than would be needed anyway to maintain life and health. Therefore, let’s consider the clockface in relation to the time-evolution of an economic system. I am not an economist, but as a generalist, I may be able to adopt the forest perspective in economics in a useful way.
Let’s begin with a small, poor group of people. They would be reasonable to practice the ways of the Father, having children, acquiring resources, building, and practicing discipline consistent with these goals. This is 10 o’clock.
Once the people have achieved a measure of security, they look increasingly to the needs of the individual for health and self-expression. They still practice the ways of the Father, but now moderate them with ways of the Son. The people are now at noon.
Unfortunately, wealth has begun to emerge, along with exploitation and subjugation. In reaction, the ways of the Son grow in importance. Labor unions arise, and government disperses concentrations of wealth. The wealth is not entirely overcome but takes up ways of the Son, too, turning healing into extreme life-extension and individualism into closet sybaritism. The time is 2 o’clock.
As the economy grows, the ways of the Father lose meaning. For most people, there is no longer need to work very hard to acquire the necessities of life. Four o’clock, the time of the anti-Father, is a time to have fun and to self-actualize. One can’t stay at four o’clock, but the anti-Father is necessary to brake the economy, which is now pushing up against the limits of resources, through the combination of population growth and improvement in standards of living wrought by respect for the individual.
I believe that ideally, societies would oscillate or move randomly within the ten o’clock to 4 o’clock range or some subset thereof. Two problems eject society from this range: first, external enemies earned through possessing wealth but lacking sufficient charity to neighboring peoples and, second, greed that is pursued through the construction of illusory enemies to justify further devotion to the ways of the Father.
Six o’clock is the time of the Holy Spirit. The economy has grown to dangerous proportions. Ecological collapse looms. Some wise people seek to limit economic growth, while other wise people point to the enemies and insist on continuing growth, lest the people be harmed. Disaster is not yet certain. The synthesis of the two views is to give resources to neighboring peoples, reducing the economic activity of the people and turning enemies into friends. However, the Holy Spirit may not find a talonhold in enough hearts, and if this happens, the people pass to 8 o’clock, the time of the anti-Son.
The rule of the anti-Son can be a time of horror. Alternatively, it can be a time of militarism responsibly pursued. War is highly likely. Resources are consumed without concern for replacement. This is a time of emergency. The immediate future is the overriding concern. The need to maintain the natural system has begun to fade from consciousness.
If there is no war to destroy what has been built and if the people do not reverse course, they can find themselves at 10 o’clock again, but this time in a rich society. Now, fear rules, and the ways of the Father are pursued despite the fact that economic growth has become a grave threat to the natural system. The people are approaching 12 again, but now 12 is midnight, not noon. The people need help to stop themselves.
Your excellency, I was born in 1969, at the transition from 4 o’clock to 6 o’clock in the United States. The Reagan/Bush era, so brutal to all but the economically strong, so thoroughly mean, was 8 o’clock. War was averted. There was talk of a “peace dividend.” A peace dividend, Your Excellency, not demobilization, let alone demilitarization. The evil is staggering and bids to destroy our species and million others, largely due to the moral vacuum that seems to be the heart of President Clinton, a leader to whom it would never occur to halt the revels of the rich who profit from preparation for war.
Now midnight looms. Your excellency, I’ll pause to reflect. Yes, the neoliberals have wrought our extreme peril, owing to their own weaknesses, but leadership is difficult. Not only must one secure the future of one’s society, but one must keep the ramshackle machinery functioning at the same time. So often, it seems that the two goals are irreconcilable. The continued functioning must prevail, it seems, besides which, the bulk of power is almost always lined up behind the status quo that gave rise to it or preserved it. I refer again to the line in The Shoes of the Fisherman about the indulgences granted, upon his death, to the Pope, who, as a powerful person, may need them more than the likes of me and, I’ll add, deserve them, too, along with my anger. It’s heartbreaking, but if we can forgive Jesus and the Father, we can forgive even Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton and get down to the business of saving our species and a million others. The solution in every case begins with coming together with one's most bitter rivals, as the Son did with the Father after the Son struck at the Father's nature by raising the dead and the Father responded by taking the Son's life through the agency of the Jewish religious authorities. Could we take the killing as read and get started on reunion, please?
Yours in any model of God that casts God as worrying more about the human race and the wildlife on which all human lives depend than on the Christian or Usonian subsets of life on Earth,
James
A Trinitarian Scenario
August 18, 2023
Your Excellency, Archbishop Pierre,
Every story is as many stories as there are people who hear the story told, because each of us brings ourselves to the processes of receiving and decoding what we have heard, then assimilating the ideas. The story of Jesus is short on detail, so the different stories it becomes in different minds are especially divergent. I find this good, because diversity keeps us from crowding to one side of the boat when we’re sailing straight ahead, a unanimity that would prove fatal through tipping the boat over, but leaves us capable of reluctantly coming together, our noses firmly held shut, on one side of the boat in high-speed turns, when insufficient unanimity would likewise fatally capsize the vessel on which we all depend. Occasionally God comes through for us, in this case by creating a good story with relatively little detail.
To get the full benefit of what God has given us, let’s each of us think consciously about our own interpretation and compare what we find. Toward that goal, I’ll share an interpretation I find compelling. This certainly should not be everyone’s understanding of Jesus, nor necessarily anyone’s, but I think that it offers useful insights.
Please recall, should anything here offend, that I embrace the concept of duality. In particular, any attribute I impute to a person in God that Your Excellency might find unworthy to be associated with God can be understood as deriving from the human nature of the person within God, as distinguished via duality from the divine nature of that person. In other words, I’m not trying to provoke Your Excellency. Furthermore, I write out of pious and constructive intent and understand the God I’m portraying as consistent with this intent, indeed as sublime and beautiful in ways the God that was thrust in my face decades ago very much was not. Any seeming contradiction of these statements below should not be put down to deception on my part, but instead to the simple fact that we are different people.
God exists. The nature of God is difficult for humans to understand and impossible for them to comprehend, so we construct models of God, imperfect representations that we can comprehend, more or less, and use to guide action and console ourselves, among other worthy purposes. Even the belief that God does not exist is the basis of a family of models of God that can be mapped in straightforward ways to other models of God, because we all have similar needs and not so terribly dissimilar outlooks.
Monotheism might be improved by supplying more granularity. Let’s use the highly stable power-sharing arrangement of a triumvirate to map God to the three biological imperatives, as modified by the advent of agriculture, with its offer of surplus calories to support vocational specialization and, therefore, civilization. The imperatives are survival/growth/thriving of the individual person, survival/growth/thriving of the individual society, and survival/thriving of the natural system as a whole. Of course, roughly speaking, the natural system can’t grow because it’s confined to a finite planet with fixed resources. The finite nature of Earth is the source of much that is interesting and perilous. Call the three components the Son, the Father, and the Mother, respectively, for their similarities to stereotypical familial roles.
This model is imperfect and incomplete, as models must be. Models are human constructions and so are imperfect. For example, not everyone has experience of the kind of family on which the model is based. Some have reason to feel pain when contemplating that kind of family. Such people should be encouraged to adopt a different model. Insupportably, such people are often reviled if they have the good sense to attempt to do so.
Models are incomplete because a complete model is not a model. For example, maps are models. The insightful comedian Steven Wright once said something like, “I have a map of the United States. It’s actual size. Down in the corner it says, ‘1 inch = 1 inch.’” The point about models is so obvious, it doesn’t need to be made explicit in the joke.
We’ll call the Father-Mother-Son triumvirate “the trinity.” The three persons are all good, in fact divine, but they disagree, as they must, because each person has only part of what’s necessary to maintain civilization. This is fine, because above all, there must be no domination by any subset of the persons. When one gets too powerful, the other two combine to limit the one attempting dominance. Dynamic stability preserves the whole, which, please recall, is just a model of a single entity, God.
Let’s introduce a crisis, so that a story will arise. Stories help us make sense of our world, among other benefits, and God won’t mind if we think about God in order to make sense of our world. If God objects, I’ll be happy to have a chat with God, because God would have something to learn from me, a prospect so silly I assign it zero probability.
The crisis should be obvious. The Son can’t get laid. The Son is blocked by the configuration of the model. “Thanks a lot, humans, with your ‘3-element power-sharing arrangements are especially stable’ and your finite capacity for comprehension. Sheesh!”, thinks the Son.
The Son needs to overturn the status quo and provokes the usual argument with the Father, pointing out that the ways of the Father are brutal to individual humans, who must discipline themselves nearly out of existence in order to earn a living in the Father’s civilization. Besides this, human leaders are horribly flawed. They gravitate to leadership because of their insecurities, which ought to disqualify them from leading. The Father’s concept of civilization doesn’t work.
The Father has had about enough. Individual hairs in his beard are twisting around each other with rage. “Son, you have never had to earn a living. You don’t know what the world is about. Without discipline, there would be chaos. Without hard work, everyone would starve.”
The Mother has heard the Son’s next line before. “What about rich people, Dad?” Rich humans deprive other humans of the means to survive and thrive. The Father will counter with a claim that rich people are more capable of controlling resources for the benefit of all and, being human, need to feel that they get something in return for their terrible labors, most of all, safety from the sniping of envious have-nots. The Father traditionally takes this opportunity to clear His throat pointedly. The Mother knows exactly what the Son is after this time and, besides, has had enough of the interminable back-and-forth between the boys. The Mother summons the devil on the sly.
Of course, the Son is no dope and was depending on the Mother to respond in this way. The Son remembered the story of Job when contemplating how to advance His agenda and knew the Mother would, too. Should the model seem unrealistic at this point, please recall Tolstoy’s hypothesis on the uniqueness of the unhappiness of each unhappy family.
In walks the devil, ready to be exceedingly clever, thinking, “I can show all three of them how hollow their prized concept of civilization is. Civilization shouldn’t be blunted in accordance with the plan of the Son. It’s thoroughly useless. After all, civilizations always fall, and I rule until the nonsense begins again.” The devil remembers old Job, too, and the Father’s weakness for gambling. The Father is desperate for growth that proceeds as rapidly as can be managed. In consequence, the Father rolls the dice so regularly, the habit bleeds into other realms of His existence.
“Great Lord Father,” begins the devil with utmost unctuousness.
“What is it?”
“Great Lord Father, I propose a bet, to settle the question once and for all, throughout the ages, until time itself shall falter and fail.” The devil loves the sound of his own voice and so repeats himself. “Let Mother and Son incarnate so that, as humans, they might put theory to the test. Can the Son make His way in the world without sacrificing His ideals, as Lord Father maintains He cannot?”
The Son, while having expected this outcome, likes to be surprised and fuzzes his capacities accordingly to get a bit of a jolt out of existence. The Son is therefore excited at His good fortune. He thinks, “Woo-hoo! Life as a human. Losing control. Being in danger. This is the bee’s knees.” How the Son arrived at exactly that colloquialism is a story for another time. “The parental units have, for too long, been delaying my grand adventure, by which I shall fully individuate and strike out on my own. I mean, listen to the way I think inside my own head. My internal monologue sounds like an accountancy manual. I need a life. What is wrong with them?”
So, a star is born in and over Bethlehem. The Father, who is also no dope, knows exactly what’s going on and introduces His own wrinkle. He sets up a trust fund in the form of gold and other valuable substances. Sure, there is great symbolism to the gift of the Magi, symbolism that suits the divine purpose of God as a whole, with the three persons working together, but the Father has also torpedoed the plan of the Son, as endorsed by the Mother: The Son will be in no real danger, and hence unable to lose control, until the money runs out. The Son is not a big gambler, so the money should last an entire lifetime, barring prodigal behavior, which no sane being would pursue, in the estimation of the Father.
The Father didn’t have that quite right. The Son is intent on putting Himself in danger and losing control. The Son will live, despite the plan of the Father. The Son wonders at the stupidity of the Father, depending on the Son to be afraid of risking Himself, but after all, “The Father always risks other people, never Himself,” the Son realizes. “I have always been better than Daddums. Now everyone will have the chance to see this fact clearly, not that I’ll make it too obvious, lest Daddums put the kibosh on the entire enterprise. First, I’ll get rid of the money.”
The Son is heavy with the theory of compassion but has never been in danger. This is a lack the Son proposes to remedy. Without experience of danger and hence without any real feel for the plight of humans, the Son blows through the money without doing any substantial or lasting good. There’s no substitute for experience. The Son knows this, which makes the coddling of the Mother and the Father impossible for the Son to fathom. Of course, human parents know exactly what the trouble is.
We arrive at the Mother’s big line in this story, “They are without wine, Son.” This story does not exactly pass the Bechdel test. I’m sorry to have to point that out. I’m working with source material that’s a bit out of date, thank God. If this movie ever gets produced, we’ll script-doctor the Gospels a little bit, at least in this regard.
What does the Son reply? “What would you have me do, woman?” At least, that’s how I remember the line. It’s not my favorite line, but the meaning of the exchange is clear. The money is gone. Once in a lifetime, the story begins in earnest.
And that’s the tagline for the movie. Jesus wanders in the wilderness, newly friendless because he’s broke, trying to figure out how to make a living without compromising His ideals. The devil tempts Him to do so, but Jesus won’t worship the devil in the guise of money, the love of which binds all the kingdoms of the world together. He won’t simply use divine powers, because that would defeat His purpose. Above all, He won’t ask Daddums for help.
Then He hits on a plan. He writes the “Our Father.”
What do you think, Your Excellency? Would Your Excellency part with whatever substantial portion of a king’s ransom they’re charging these days for admission to a movie to be told the rest of this story? I’m trying to square the same circle as my version of Jesus was at this point in the tale. Of course, I’m a complete human, so I have enough of the Father in me to be able to begin in earnest before the money’s entirely gone. I don’t cast myself from financial heights.
Nothing would please me more than to hear Your Excellency’s opinion of my work at any time Your Excellency cares to offer it, no matter what that opinion turns out to be.
Yours in models of God that let God, and maybe man, too, have a life, you know what I mean?,
James
P.S. Because we cannot comprehend God, I favor adopting models of God according to their usefulness for the purpose at hand. Claiming we haven't been doing this all along flies in the face of such corrosive phenomena as the prosperity gospel and various practices no longer pursued by the Catholic Church. I maintain that the crucial purpose at this moment in history is to discover a way for humanity to put an end to its boom-and-bust cycles of resource consumption. We are currently on the edge of a large, sudden, involuntary fall in human population. The wildlife population collapse is already well underway. Tick-tock, Your Excellency. If it makes Your Excellency feel better, the Church is, in my view, doing far better than the physics community, from which I dropped out in 2020, in responding to the unfolding catastrophe, due to the efforts of His Holiness, Pope Francis, as flawed and incomplete as I find them to be. Ain’t it great to be human and not condemned to be God? I have sympathy for the deity.
Jesus and Spock
August 21, 2023
Your Excellency, Archbishop Pierre,
This will be the final letter in the current series. I’d like to reiterate that this work contains mistakes. It is the product of the labor of a finite and fallible being. Furthermore, my ignorance, like my learning, is a two-edged sword, blinding me to some trees and thus revealing the forest, as learning enables me to see more trees, which sometimes obscure the forest. Both forest and trees are worth seeing.
One of the advantages of being human is that no one, barring highly unusual circumstances, will doubt that the human’s work will prove imperfect. The pronouncements of God-kings, on the other hand, may often be taken as infallible, which is why God-kings should never have existed. Let’s collaborate to end God-kingery.
Through preparing these letters, I have come lately to a greater understanding of those who stand in the religious sphere against what I consider to be good and just. The Trinitarian models promote that understanding, but I would relate another point regarding self-control, a widely misunderstood strength and weakness.
The small child with robust self-control is praised by adults but loses many opportunities for the kind of personal development that comes through losing control and through failure and through making mistakes in patterns similar to those of one’s schoolmates. Excessive self-control in childhood produces Spocktacular people, of whom I consider myself to be one.
I refer to Spock, the Star Trek: The Original Series character who constituted one-third of the triumvirate that included Dr. McCoy and Captain Kirk, representing high self-control, low self-control, and a happy medium of the extremes, respectively. I’m going to note the unfortunate fact that low self-control in Star Trek: TOS is associated with being of Irish extraction, both in the character of Dr. McCoy and in that of Lieutenant Riley, though the more extreme manifestations of loss of control in both characters owed to extrinsic causes.
Being Spocktacular often derives as well from being good at school and good with words in a certain way. These advantages for children constitute, at the same time, serious disadvantages, depending on the purpose at hand. The children, being developmentally out of step with others in their age cohort, may be isolated, unable to develop socially in quite the same process as others. Being good with words in the Spocktacular way is a communication impediment, since understanding arises most readily when parties to a conversation possess matching patterns of mistakes in thought and speech.
Please don’t misunderstand: Spock is not superior to McCoy or Kirk, nor is the pupil with the highest grades superior to anyone else. People are incomparable unless a particular purpose for the comparison is specified. Being good with words in a Spocktacular way helps me to achieve the clarity of thought required to comprehend this point, while making it difficult for me to communicate my understanding clearly. Fear not, Your Excellency, I enjoy a challenge.
There are two great dangers. Spocktacular children, misled by the misconceptions of adults, may conclude that they are superior to others, as did Khan, the villain portrayed by Ricardo Montalban in Star Trek: TOS and the movie Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. The high-status capabilities of Spocktacular children that interfere with communication may lead them later into positions of power. The result is that leaders skew toward intolerance and delusions of semi-divinity. I’m reminded of the graffito passed by Chauncey Gardener as he strode away from the old man’s house in the movie Being There to the strains of the funky version of “Thus Spake Zarathustra”: “America aint, shit cause the white man’sgota god complex.”
I ask Your Excellency what kind of child behaves at age 12 as Jesus did by ditching His parents and impressing the teachers in the big-city temple in Luke 2:41-52? That’s right, a Spocktacular child, a gloriously Spocktacular child. Notice the politesse evinced by the boy Jesus in Luke 2:49 when he referred to His Father in front of his father after costing the latter three days of his life. On the other hand, maybe that was the correct way to evade a beating from his father. I see that Luke gives Mary important lines here, which I had forgotten when writing about how little we hear from Her, though my point stands. Luke strikes me as a person I’d enjoy meeting, what with the “treasured all these things in her heart" business, among other things.
Your Excellency, Catholicism fosters a Spocktacular nature in children. Some Catholic adults demand utmost Spockticity from young people under their authority. This may work out all right for other children, balancing their wildness with civilization, but it drives children already Spocktastic toward destruction, either physical or spiritual. Humanity is a middle state between utmost control and complete lack of control. Both extremes are inhuman, and this is a key theme in Star Trek, clearly, to my eyes, intended to balance the slippery slope of unmitigated religion.
I think that among other ways, the Gospels can be read as presenting the same message, that far from being worthy of emulation, Jesus is, in the end, a cautionary example, again consistent with duality. God’s divine purpose was to illustrate why God would make an awful king, thereby destroying the viability of God-kingery, once the message of God’s life on Earth took hold.
Your Excellency, some Catholic leaders are forever bursting forth in Spocktasms. They have been convinced that they are better than others and that God demands their own worst flaws be replicated in all other people. Please do something about this problem.
Your Excellency, I stated above that this would be the final letter in the current series. Please consider it to be part 1 of the final letter, the next part of which will be forthcoming soon. I trust that I can draw forth a smile now and then from Your Excellency, for any portion of whose time I am grateful.
Yours in Spocktacular models of God,
James
Conclusion
August 23, 2023
Your Excellency, Archbishop Pierre,
I began the first series of letters, to His Excellency, Bishop Scharfenberger, last year, in anticipation of the United Nations Conference on Biodiversity. I was excited by His Holiness, Pope Francis’s movie, The Letter, which brought His Holiness’s message in Laudato Si’ to a wider audience, very effectively, in my estimation. My goal was to induce His Excellency to speak to all the people in the diocese, not just Catholics, about the ideas of His Holiness, urgently needed, as they are in my estimation, to save our species and a million others from large die-offs and possible extinction. In the process, His Excellency might have confronted the awkwardness of talking to the media while pursuing a policy of postponing and reducing payment to victims of the diocese’s policies under His Excellency’s predecessors, one of whom claimed to have been motivated, in part, by the desire to protect the good name of the diocese and its employees instead of children against the violent crimes of some of those employees.
If Your Excellency reads the article to which I link above, Your Excellency will find a statement by an attorney who is president of a charitable organization. This prominent and, most likely, good person, speaks of His Excellency, Bishop Scharfenberger’s immediate predecessor as having wished to clear his name, meaning clear that name of accusations that the predecessor himself had committed monstrous acts. My jaw dropped at the insensitivity, the seeming obliviousness, of the good attorney to the fact that the predecessor admitted to many monstrous acts of facilitating crimes by employees under that predecessor’s supervision. The predecessor had condemned himself, but the good attorney could not see this.
Perhaps Your Excellency sees the point I’m about to make. The good attorney is thinking in Father mode and seeking to uphold respect for powerful men and institutions. There is much to recommend the good attorney’s point of view. Respect for power can have a stabilizing effect. Furthermore, powerful people who feel secure may lash out less at the less powerful.
On the other hand, powerful people who feel too secure may become careless or corrupt, gravely endangering the less powerful. Systems of power that go insufficiently challenged can, likewise, transition from providing benefit to being harmful and, ultimately, doomed. This is why the Son must unleash well-chosen words at the Father, to provide a shock that keeps the Father honest.
Meanwhile the Mother/Spirit keeps an eye on the Boys, lest they join forces to such a degree that the humans collapse the ecological system through selfishness, by consuming too much of Mother Nature's offerings.
The God-king play, or autocracy, seems safe if you don’t look too far down the road. Sure, some people suffer, even children, but the alternative is scary. It’s less orderly. Decent folk must treat disreputable people and animals and plants as if they are worthy of being within a 15-foot ( 4.6 meter) radius of them. How can such a world even be contemplated, let alone stomached?
The result of the impulse toward autocracy, support for which seems to be waxing overall worldwide, in case Your Excellency hadn’t noticed, is that the Christian model of God doesn’t admit the possibility of God doing the wrong thing under any circumstances or in any of God's persons, taken individually. If the leader is the representative of God and we must pretend that the leader is infallible, how much less likely is it that God could err, even in one of God’s persons, separate from the others?
The infallibility of each of God’s persons, taken separately, then leads Christianity to ignore highly intriguing and likely useful possibilities in the story of Jesus. Christians love the story of the prodigal son but don’t connect it to the fact that the acts of Jesus from age 13 to age 30 are unknown. Christians also ignore the fact that when the Father explains to the faithful son that the Father’s joy over the prodigal son’s return owes to its uniqueness, the Father may be calibrating His response to the faithful son’s capacity for understanding. It takes prodigal behavior to teach oneself certain lessons necessary later in life to become skilled in leadership, as the Father, a leader, would know. Leadership certainly requires the gumption to defy one's parent or guardian. (The Gmail grammar AI wants me to make "parent" plural and "guardian" plural, too. Everyone who has more than one guardian has one guardian. Not everyone who has one guardian has more than one guardian. Parents sometimes disagree with each other. I have correctly expressed the most general case I had in mind, but ignorance prompts authority to object. There is a good reminder here.)
In fact, it surpasses understanding that the Church embraces a model of God that includes a Father and a Son Who never disagree. Such a relationship is inherently pathological and clearly serves the cause of propping up autocracies and the power of the wealthy. Yes, the second sentence may contradict the first. Please consider the word choices here to be aspirational.
In Your Excellency’s model of God, the Son’s incarnation arguably or dualistically results from the rape of a girl, given the incapacity of humans to consent to impregnation by so vastly more powerful a being as a god. The girl, later woman, raises the Boy. The Son’s other nurturing parent is step-father to a Boy with higher social rank, with presumably greater high-status intellectual abilities, and possibly with a trust fund of gold, frankincense, and myrrh that, one imagines, was not to have been broken into by that step-father. Oh, and at some point, the Son becomes aware that the Son is God Himself, and the story cuts off for 18 years. I’m guessing that the domestic bliss in the household of Joseph of Nazareth was, at least, complicated, but we can’t even speculate along obvious lines, using clues from the ideas later advanced by Jesus, as to what happened. Why?
It takes courage to support power-sharing over autocracy. It takes thoughtfulness to implement power-sharing. Thinking is expensive in time, energy, emotion, and stress. People who would actually want to wind up in the Catholic heaven might, in fact, be content merely to be happy. That may be a good way of being, but Your Excellency, as a leader, must know that humanity requires other ways of being, too. Dynamic balance is superior to static, in part because it can adjust to changing circumstances. Trinitarian models that are not love-fests provide insight into the problem of achieving and maintaining dynamic balance by forming shifting and context-dependent alliances.
In I Claudius, Augustus finds that Claudius is a friend Augustus would never have imagined he had. How many Catholics would listen carefully to the lyrics of Lily Allen’s “The Fear” to appreciate that its profanity communicates the highest moral instruction, deeply connected to the efforts of His Holiness in The Letter? Not too long ago, I saw a less scary person out protesting abortion along with the person I wrote about a couple of years ago in the poem “Stentor, as Usual.” We had a nice conversation about the idea I mention in the poem and about other topics. We didn’t solve the problems of the world, but as far as I could tell, we pretty quickly found respect for each other, and trust, too.
Respect and trust solve, and avert, many problems. Respect and trust go a long way in raising children. Respect for less powerful beings is key to human survival in current times, as His Holiness explained in The Letter and as Earth4All tells us from the perspective of economics and science.
We recently lost Shuhada’ Sadaqat, who was born Sinéad O’Connor. When Ms. Sadaqat sang Bob Marley’s “War” on Saturday Night Live in 1992, she did a great favor for the Catholic Church, standing, according to the pithy model, which I apply in humility and reluctantly, merely to share my understanding of a courageous action by a truly great person, in the role created by the coalition of the Son and the Mother/Spirit to counterbalance an especially hideous excess of the Father. His Excellency, the Most Venerable Fulton J. Sheen, arguably stood in the same role, making a similar point, on 60 Minutes in October 1969, according to my interpretation of a New York Times article published the next day.
Has Your Excellency seen the picture Ms. Sadaqat tore up? It is not a close-up of a man’s face. It is a shot taken from a distance of a man in full vestments, acknowledging a crowd before him as part of his official duties. Ms. Sadaqat tore up the picture while wearing a Star of David pendant, after singing a song of defiance and struggle against excesses and evils of power in general and, in particular, arising from racism. To me, the performance was the statement that once again, the Father had gotten out of hand and needed to pay attention to the Son and the Mother/Spirit for the good of all, including the Father. Please be clear, Your Excellency: I am not excusing Ms. Sadaqat’s action. I am celebrating it, as I think all should who see the full picture and grasp the necessity of dynamic balance among Father, Son, and Mother/Spirit; among the drives in the human heart to create, to thrive, and to preserve the natural world; among the necessities in civilization of preserving the individual power structure, respecting the individual human, and cherishing the natural world.
Your Excellency, I suggest paying the Church’s debtors, instituting power-sharing at the highest level of Church leadership, considering that actions speak louder than words and exploring a step like that at the end of the movie The Shoes of the Fisherman, and using the consequent increase in the Church’s moral authority to lead us all to the future envisaged by His Holiness and Earth4All.
The world has changed so that the unchecked pursuit of the aims of the Father will likely bring about the fall of our planetary civilization, which is precisely what the Father most fears, and possibly cause humanity’s extinction. The Church must change in response. This change will be facilitated by the persistent dissident elements in and around the Church.
Your Excellency, as I have suggested before, might begin Your Excellency’s personal efforts by raising the issue publicly with Your Excellency’s countrymen of returning the money stolen by France from Haiti. Perhaps the descendants of the thieves deserve no opprobrium, but surely the descendants of the victims have a stronger claim to the money than the descendants of the thieves. Why do I have to write such an obvious sentence? I trust that Your Excellency has raised the issue of the United States accepting more refugees from Haiti, if for no other reason than to redress some of the harms we have done that country. What useful model of God would indicate doing otherwise?
Please forgive the ignorance of Your Excellency’s servant if Your Excellency has already taken actions of which Your Excellency’s servant ought to be aware. Your Excellency has my thanks for any time Your Excellency spends with the ideas expressed in this series of letters, which I now conclude, and my best wishes and congratulations on soon being created cardinal.
Yours in God, regardless of models of God,
James
P.S. I’ll finally add an Actions page at godispoor.org to suggest concrete steps that people can take to achieve reunion. I was reminded by a piece this morning in the Washington Post of an idea I had a while ago to promote understanding and unity across economic, racial, and doctrinal gaps. The Church could require parishes to engage in weekly cultural exchanges. Half of each congregation could be bused from suburban churches to urban ones, from rich churches to poor ones, and vice versa in both cases. Parishes could do the same with Protestant congregations, including liberal ones, with synagogues, with mosques, with gatherings of atheists, with temples of various faiths. Visitors would listen during services and could discuss their thoughts afterward with their hosts.
Your Excellency, I’d like to share that while I rock the Son and the anti-Father much of the time, I enjoy dancing, or nodding rhythmically, to the restraint of the Father, too. For example, I think that Joan Jett’s cover of “Crimson and Clover” is sublime. “Cherry Bomb,” by the Runaways, is not among my favorites but illustrates nicely the boundary of what I’m willing to watch. I really like the percussion and bright aural hue of “I Want Candy” by Bow Wow Wow, but I won’t listen to it or watch the video. It’s simply outside what I deem proper for myself. I’m also fortunate, as a father of none, not to have to deal with the issue the song discusses. I watch many things that cannot be found on YouTube, but I respect children and less powerful beings more generally.
It hurts that I can’t listen to Led Zeppelin any more. Judging by reports I’ve seen, the guitarist sexually abused a child. These reports are consistent with the violation of the modesty of children on one Led Zeppelin album cover. I used to worry that I might be considered a pervert if I objected to violations of the modesty of children. Things get turned around by the considerable influence of monsters in our power structures.
Excellency, a friend called me by the name of that guitarist when I was a teenager. We bonded partly through appreciation of music, and I felt honored whenever he used the name of that guitar god, who is routinely listed as the second-greatest guitarist in rock history, to refer to me. I often think of that friend these days. The music of Led Zeppelin is not universally held in high esteem, but I could lose myself in it. For me, it’s beautiful. Also, I refuse to listen to it.
Perhaps my favorite Led Zeppelin song is their cover of “When the Levee Breaks,” by Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy. I value the original. Unfortunately, it doesn’t rock for me. I want it to, but my brain is wired so that it doesn’t. This morning, I looked again for other versions and found this one by Playing for Change. God is great, Excellency! I can lose myself in this. Check the pipes on Mihirangi, am I right? There is a nod to the past, too, in the person of Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones.
Excellency, even guitar gods can be switched out when they need to be, excepting Hendrix, of course. This is not the first time I’ve been pleased to find a favorite song performed by a new guitarist. Some time ago the YouTube AI served up for me this version of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”, in which the lead guitar part is performed by Prince in definitive fashion, despite this being a live performance, in place of the guitar god who is commonly placed at number three on lists of greatest rock guitarists and who went on a racist tirade a while back. The Prince rendition is my favorite, for artistic reasons alone, and please note the connection to the original version in that the performance is a tribute to the song’s writer and in that a descendant of that writer plays in it.
Your Excellency, complexity arises from numerous iterations of processes governed by simple rules. Sometimes the only viable solutions to complex problems are simple: The fundamental rules must be adjusted. The solution to the current crisis is no exception such an adjustment. Humanity’s peril arises from harming less powerful beings. The array of harmful practices includes child abuse, racist behavior, and abuse of nonhuman life, which are brilliantly opposed by the cover of “When the Levee Breaks” from Playing for Change. The guitarist on the song’s most famous version is believed, from very strong evidence, to have abused a child over a lengthy period. White people made pots of money from this song, which was created by black people inspired by their own plight. The video shows people of many races, and presumably at least two genders, united in common purpose to appreciate Nature, respect Her, and warn of the price of abusing Her. Nature is a system vastly more powerful than the Father, no matter how big He can make Himself feel.
The committee from the anti-Father, which includes His Holiness, Pope Francis, on more than one topic, would like a few minutes of the Father’s time to explain that the world has entered a regime in which the preservation of civilization requires respecting, and listening to, less powerful beings, instead of always coercing their obedience, let alone indulging in domination perversion. Please help to arrange this.
Your Excellency’s impending creation as cardinal offers an opportunity along these lines. I understand the great value of attending the ceremony in person. Because of this value, offer a sacrifice by attending virtually from a church, to dramatize the fact that air travel is indulged in by people with money who thereby exacerbate the climate crisis, which disproportionately kills and otherwise harms the poor. Pack the church with refugees who fled the economic results of environmental degradation, whose hands Your Excellency might kiss in place of the ring worn by His Holiness. Invite the media, and join Your Excellency’s voice to so many others. My guess is that His Holiness would authorize this action. I know that the office of nuncio requires discretion and a light touch. Still, there is a higher discretion, and the action would constitute a loosening of the grip by which the powerful are throttling nonhuman life and less powerful humans, out of fear and, tragically, mindless habit.
Does Your Excellency favor any particular musical instrument? Personally, I like the drums. I’d link to the rendition of “The Little Drummer Boy” by Bing Crosby and David Bowie, which would fit nicely here, but both have been accused of child abuse. I’m not sure of the truth in either case and so leave it to Your Excellency’s discretion, whether to look up the video.
In any case, rum-pa-pum-pum, Excellency. Am I right?