Attack Against Christendom

Here is an insightful video lecture on Kant, the Enlightenment, and religion by Dr. Hans-Georg Moeller who is a professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies Department at the University of Macau.

Dr. Hans-Georg's videos recently appeared for the first time in my library of collected YouTube philosophy lectures.

I still haven't made up my mind about his critique of wokeness--a meme advanced by a right-wing fundamentalist Cult of Irrationality which I comment on in my post, "Conservative, Socialist, and Fascist Utopianism," starring German sociologist Karl Mannheim and his views in "Ideology and Utopia" (1936) (pdf.). Mannheim and theologian Ernst Block have argued utopian ideas have an important place in religious life and human existence.

Kant's Philosophy | Why we Need a New Enlightenment
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"Only an atheist can be a good Christian; only a Christian can be a good atheist."
--Ernst Bloch
​

Dr. Tim Sledge, who was a Southern Baptist preacher for 35 years before fully examining the worldview claims of Christianity and ultimately de-converting.

The Harmonic Atheist
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I finally moved that long Political Forum essay that started with Paul Tillich's historical analysis of fascism to my backup website “Strange Phenomenon” (first introductory page) as a single continuous essay. I made some minor changes to the essay's format, but nothing changing its content.

In the re-posted essay, I changed the subtitle of post 754, and added a few new closing paragraphs to posts 763-764 with the new title of “The Rise of Fascism in Post-WWII America.”


Political Forum index menu:
Post #718: Paul Tillich on Blood and Soil Cults

Post #719: Tillich on Socialist Inner-Conflict with Free Enterprise Economics

Post #736: The Un-American Fascist Congress of the 1930s

Post #738: The Parallelism of American Fascism and Christian Fundamentalism

Post #740: Ministries of Hate

Post #754: They Overplayed Their Hand (renamed)

Post #756: The Tricky Dick

Post #757: The Four D's of FDR

Post #760: The Non-Confessing Church, Part I

Post #761: Non-Confessing, Part II

Post #762: Allen Dulles Gaslights America

Post #763: The Paines (sic) of Government Intelligence

Post #764: Meditations on the Diremption of Spirit

End

 

"One does not want even the loftiest boot in one’s face any more, on the excuse that far from degrading one another
it makes one better. The real better-ones always found that just too much, just too stupid."
--(Atheism and Christianity, Ernst Block, 1972 Verso, p. 16)(pdf.).


“And you must not only stint the gratification of your immediate senses, as by stinting yourself on food, etc.: you must also spare yourself all sharing of general interests, all sympathy, all trust, etc., if you want to be economical, if you do not want to be ruined by illusions."
--(1844 Manuscripts, Marx, p. 113)(pdf.).​

The key word of the day is "hypocrisy," or from the Greek ὑπόκρισις (hypokrisis), which means "jealous", "play-acting", "acting out", "coward" or "dissembling." The term hypokrisis refers to any sort of public performance. (wiki: hypocrisy).

Also, its other derived linguistic form ὑποκριτής (hypokrites) is a technical term for "actor" or "pretender" and was not considered an appropriate role for a public figure, or speaker except in satire as in the case of the central character in the comedy "Tartuffe" (1664) played by the French actor Moliere who filled the role of a religious hypocrite, a lecherous sexual seducer, mercenary, and conman feigning Christian virtues. Sound familiar?

Hypocrites do not like bad press. The comedy play, Tartuffe was cancelled when the archbishop of Paris Péréfixe threatened "excommunication for anyone who watched, performed in, or read the play."

However, we do not have to look to the seventeenth century to find hypocrites filling the roles of neoliberal economists, Fundamentalists religious leaders, and the terroristic American oligarchy. Take for example the sadistic American ethicist billionaires 93-year-old Warren Buffet (in possession of $120 billion dollars of stolen labor) and his disgusting 99-year-old $2.7 billionaire business "partner" Charles Munger. The Humanist Report (THR) hosted by Mike Figueredo recently reported on these two great moral leaders:

99-Year-Old Billionaire Says Key to Happiness is Living Frugally: “Expect Less”
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And in a nutshell, here is their advice to us workers today:

“Thus political economy—despite its worldly and voluptuous appearance—is a true moral science, the most moral of all the sciences. Self-renunciation, the renunciation of life and of all human needs, is its principal thesis. The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save—the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour—your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being. Everything || XVI | which the political economist takes from you in life and in humanity, he replaces for you in money and in wealth; and all the things which you cannot do, your money can do. It can eat and drink, go to the dance hall and the theatre; it can travel, it can appropriate art, learning, the treasures of the past, political power—all this it can appropriate for you—it can buy all this: it is true endowment. Yet being all this, it wants to do nothing but create itself, buy itself; for everything else is after all its servant, and when I have the master, I have the servant and do not need his servant. All passions and all activity must therefore be submerged in avarice. The worker may only have enough for him to want to live and may only want to live in order to have that (1844 Manuscripts, Marx, p. 112; bold added for emphasis.)(pdf.)."

Left Reckoning also sighted another Millionaire Sadistic Parasite Tim 'Avocado Toast' Gurner:

"We need workers to feel pain."
​

**** you Timmy, and your fascist ethical **** advice!

Labor need to “kill” this **** off to use Gurner's own words.

The $6.06 billionaire Australian Gurner is another property developer like the felon Donald Trump who has stolen at least a billion dollars from the corrupt New York city. And, why the **** is Gurner telling Americans how to run their lives? Oh, yes, working Americans don't have a life:

“Estrangement is manifested not only in the fact that my means of life belong to someone else, that which I desire is the inaccessible possession of another, but also in the fact that everything is itself something different from itself— that my activity is something else and that, finally (and this applies also to the capitalist), all is under [the sway]a of inhuman power (1844 Manuscripts, Marx, p. 119)(pdf.)."

So, you see the hypocritical ideologies of American fascism work as collaborating ideologies to manipulate the victims' consciousness without actually fully articulating them--American Christian Fascism plays an important role in maintaining the powers of oligarchy:

"So when the citizens of France first dared to use their minds, they not only put to flight the this-worldly figure of the master and Lord, but at the same time reduced his other-worldly image to the status of a spook. It is, of course, true that the subsequent bourgeois period by no means saw the abolition of the lord; new, economic masters came, for the world of master and serf could not at the time be swept away entirely. So the religion of the On high had to be kept for the people: the old myth of lordship from on-high which, in Christianity, sanctioned, or at least explained, the unjust distribution of this world’s goods with the just distribution of those of the next. For Christianity had become the state religion—a position for which it was not entirely unfitted (Atheism and Christianity, Ernst Block, Intro. by P. Thompson, 1972, Verso, p. 8; brackets added)(pdf.)."

The ethos of the capitalists and their apologist Tartuffes (tart-toofs) can be summarized in the following:

“You must make everything that is yours saleable, i.e., useful. If I ask the political economist: Do I obey economic laws if I extract money by offering my body for sale, by surrendering it to another’s lust? (The factory workers in France call the prostitution of their wives and daughters the tenth working hour, which is literally correct.)—Or am I not acting in keeping with political economy if I sell my friend to the Moroccans? (And the direct sale of men in the form of a trade in conscripts, etc., takes place in all civilised countries.)—Then the political economist replies to me: You do not transgress my laws; but see what Cousin Ethics and Cousin Religion have to say about it. My political economic ethics and religion have nothing to reproach you with, but—But whom am I now to believe, political economy or ethics?—The ethics of political economy is acquisition, work, thrift, sobriety—but political economy promises to satisfy my needs.—The political economy of ethics is the opulence of a good conscience, of virtue, etc.; but how can I live virtuously if I do not live? And how can I have a good conscience if I do not know anything? It stems from the very nature of estrangement that each sphere applies to me a different and opposite yardstick—ethics one and political economy another; for each is a specific estrangement of man and> (1844 Manuscripts, Marx, p. 113)(pdf.).

“San Francisco is a beautiful city with a dirty face.”--Herb Caen​

...continuing below post #781.

 

continuing from post #780.

San Francisco's Mayor London Breed is a Bloomberg neophyte agent who hid this fact from the general public posing as a progressive. Consequently, Silicon Valley high-tech corporations moved in and fully took over the city with Breed as a proxy. This trend started with the Mayor Willie Brown and after the death of the journalist Herb Caen. The fascists and the pigeons waited until Herb was dead before completely taking over the city.

The problems in San Francisco are a direct result of the city leaders selling out to big business, especially real-estate developers and sport team owners. Silicon Valley companies pay little, or no property taxes to SF, and the sports teams take over the city during games days ignoring city regulations. Big real estate capital wanted to build the Millenium Tower on soft landfill bypassing the normal pre-construction testing of the soil and now the building is tilting. During sports season, the big sports franchises take over the city during game days and sale twenty-dollar hamburgers in the stadium. The "Oath Keepers" paramilitary terrorist group was first introduced to the Bay Area by Fox news (KTUV 20) in a stadium at the start of a ball game as some kind of Christian patriot group. Also, those ball games are dangerous and violent as some fans have been severely beaten on occasion.

Commercial developers want to drive out the financially poor residents of the low rent Tenderloin District and that is why you see the homeless drugged-out people out on the streets. One 400 sq. ft. studio apartment, rented for $460 a month including utilities in the Tenderloin during the mid-1980s. Today, that exact same studio apartment is now over $2,000 a month--income has not increased fourfold since the 80s. The SFPD is enforcing a police strike arriving to calls for services hours afterwards. This is why there are hundreds of unsheltered people in the streets. Small grocery stores and drug stores have outrageously high prices. A $0.25 cent rubber ear syringe will cost nine dollars--it is blatant in-your-face exploitation.

San Francisco is not a progressive city--that is just what the city leaders tell the tourists and the brain dead.

Sorry, Herb, the fascists took over:

"It is a wrench, leaving San Francisco. I shall miss the Richmond, Sunset Marina, Inner and Outer Mission, Breen's, Gray's, O'Doul's, Pier Seven, Dolph's, the J&B, best lunch in town for $1.50 at Twentieth and York. Enrico's, the Both/And, the Bay Guardian, Hoppe, Caen, McCabe and Gleason ... I won't miss BART and Market Street, our so-called 'dynamic' mayor, the atrocious new buildings, the Giants, 49ers, Warriors, S.F. society, Candlestick Park and freeways— but I will say that the good things more than balance the corruption that increases in the onetime Jewel of the West.'
--Herb Caen, One Man's San Francisco (pdf.), p. 34.​

 

To show how long the Tenderloin district has been an issue in San Francisco politics, here is passage written in 1976 by columnist Herb Caen about the low-rent district:

"I walked where I always walk when I have no place in particular to walk to. Into the Tenderloin. It may be too strong to say I love the Tenderloin, but I dig it. Every city should have one. Going a step further, any city that doesn't have a Tenderloin isn't a city at all, but more likely seven shopping centers in search of a tradition a little more exciting than freeway markers reading "Next 10 Exits." The manic-progressives keep trying to knock and knock down our Tenderloin but so far, they haven't made it. Their heavy handiwork is, however, painfully visible South o' Market, which now resembles London during the blitz and is likely to stay that way for a long time if we're damn lucky."----Herb Caen, One Man's San Francisco (pdf.), p. 214.

 

Israeli Fascist Forces Prepare Mass Murder of Palestinian Civilians....again.​

So, this is what the American Biden-Manchin-Abrams-Netanyahu Administration has to offer: a proxy war against Russia that the US itself created by training a fascist army in the Ukraine, and another massacre in Gaza by Israeli Supremist Fascist military thanks to the idiot American taxpayers.

Our choice in American politics is the Trumpian idolatrous Christian fascist cult, or Biden's Global Neo-Liberal Fascism. It looks like fascism will win out in the next American election. What we feared would happen after November 22, 1963, in fact happened. Fascist elements of the US murdered its way into power while Americans believe in Christian fascist fairytales and the Warren Report--all fascist lies! The Democratic party ignored forty years of warning as fascism faced little resistance in American politics. It is too late now as the American Billionaire are bankrolling the march of American Fascism.

Middle Eastern history is the most complex one can study; possibly only ancient Chinese history is more complicated. Journalist Chris Hedges has spent years in the Middle East and has a disturbing report on Gaza murders happening at this very moment.

"Palestinians Speak the Language of Violence Israel Taught Them"

[excerpt....]
"I was a close friend of Alina Margolis-Edelman who was part of the armed resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in World War II. Her husband, Marek Edelman, was the deputy commander of the uprising and the only leader to survive the war. The Nazis had sealed 400,000 Polish Jews inside the Warsaw Ghetto. The trapped Jews died in the thousands, from starvation, disease and indiscriminate violence. When the Nazis began to transport the remaining Jews to the extermination camps the resistance fighters fought back. None expected to survive....

Edelman, after the war, condemned Zionism as a racist ideology used to justify the theft of Palestinian land. He sided with the Palestinians, supported their armed resistance and met frequently with Palestinians leaders. He thundered against Israel’s appropriation of the Holocaust to justify its repression of the Palestinian people. While Israel dined out on the mythology of the ghetto uprising, it treated the only surviving leader of the uprising, who refused to leave Poland, as a pariah. Edelman understood that the lesson of the Holocaust and the ghetto uprising was not that Jews are morally superior or eternal victims. History, Edelman said, belongs to everyone. The oppressed, including the Palestinians, had a right to fight for equality, dignity and liberty."

 

You are star dust. Do you know that?

 

Yes and the Breathe of God.

 

“Star dust” is fact.

 

God created the universe is too

 

“Not he who rejects the gods of the crowd is impious, but he who embraces the crowd’s opinion of the gods.”
--From Epicurcus’s letter (341–270 BC) to Menokeus on the tenth book of Diogenses Laertitus. ​

Soren Kierkegaard is my favorite philosopher of all, and yet he is the most anti-Hegelian of all Hegel's critics. Ludwig Wittgenstein was strongly influenced by this Danish philosopher, thanks to his intelligent sister Margaret. Kierkegaard was not above using Hegel's own dialectical methodology which he applied to world history, but instead Kierkegaard put to use the dialectical method to probe the subjective-self, and the self's whole being in relation to the infinite.

Introduction to Kierkegaard: The Existential Problem
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A Brief Dialectical History of “Yahweh” and the New Being Paradigm

“…the criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism.”
—Marx (Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right)​

Karl Marx's critical philosophy emerged after an age of intense theological debate after Hegel's death in 1831 that divided theological opinion between the conservative Right-Hegelians, and the Left-Hegelians. The Right understood Hegelian idealism as compatible with Christianity, while the Left understood all religious thinking as symbolic “picture thinking,” of the Absolute. Marxist philosophy in America is suppressed not only for its critique of capitalism, but also for the sensitive theological issues such as the rejection of Biblical Literalism puts up to debate. Two members of the Right-Hegelian faction were Karl Friedrich Goschel (1784-1861) and Karl Ludwig Michelet (1801-93) who defended Hegel's system as compatible with theistic Christian theology. The Left-Hegelians are best represented by David Friedrich Strauss (1808-74) who wrote the famous work “Life of Jesus” (1835) that interpreted the New Testament Gospels as mythological and Christianity as a materialistic pantheism. Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872) and his book, “The Essence of Christianity” (1841)(pdf.) is compatible with the Left Hegelians wherein he argues that all theology is ultimately anthropology—a projection of human aspirations in anthropomorphic images of the Absolute. Marx's criticisms of religion are the same as Feuerbach who interprets religion as illusory psychological escapism. However, Feuerbach was not the first to make this argument—Hegel had already recognized Christianity as emerging in the most politically repressive era of human history and described it as the tragic history of Christianity. The following passage can be found in his early theological writings:

"Thus the despotism of the Roman emperors had chased the human spirit from the earth and spread a misery which compelled men to seek and expect happiness in heaven; robbed of freedom, their spirit, their eternal and absolute element, was forced to take flight to the deity. [The doctrine of] God's objectivity is a counter part to the corruption and slavery of man, and it is strictly only a revelation, only a (228 ) manifestation of the spirit of the age (Hegel On Christianity: Early Theological Writings, trans T.M. Know, 1971; p. 162-3)(pdf.)."

This kind of history contradicts the uninformed perception that Marx is attacking religion out of an irrational rejection of all spirituality, instead from reasoned historical research of Christianity and its function as an institution.

"When we see someone holding an axe wrong and chopping in such a way that he hits everything but the block of firewood, we do not say,
'What a wrong way for the woodcutter to go about it,' but we say, 'That man is not a woodcutter.' "
--Soren Kierkegaard
​

The critique of religion is a Martin Luther Protestant reformist tradition that continues to the Danish philosophical theologian Soren Kierkegaard known for his famous series of essays titled, “Attack Against Christendom,” (1854)(pdf.). These polemical essays contain Kierkegaard's criticism of the mid-nineteenth century Danish Christian Church that became “the official, state-churchly, or national-churchly Christianity of 'Christendom,' which does to be sure produce, in comparison with the New Testament, astonishing results...Christians by the millions, and all of the same quality.” Danish State Christianity developed into an administrative bureaucracy of religion, not unlike the ancient Pharisees who collected taxes for the Romans from Temple worshipers. In Denmark at this time, it was illegal for anyone to own a whorehouse except for a Christian. Christianity had morphed into a state Christendom that did not represent “The Pattern” of New Testament Christianity and becoming only “name Christians.” As a result, Christianity is de facto abolished: “The apostasy from Christianity will not come about by everybody openly renouncing Christianity; no, but slyly, cunningly, by everybody assuming the name of being Christian (AAC, p. 46-7).”

There now exists only a product of human individuals called spirit: a product which they contain and secrete like mucus and urine."
(Eclipse of God, Martin Buber, 1957, p. 159 ff.)​

I recently completed an essay on the history of The Rise of Fascism in Post-WWII America describing how pro-fascist activists infiltrated American fundamentalist Christian Churches to disseminate anti-labor, anti-Semitic, and anti-progressive propaganda with massive corporate financial backing creating right-wing Church front groups for big business, organized right-wing newspapers with massive distribution, and an array of ultra-conservative think tanks and public relations organizations as large as the corporations they solicit. This process accelerated after the 1971 Supreme Court Justice Powell Jr. Memorandum setting out a plan to create a pro-business media, government, church, and state. I believe this subversive covert transformation of American civil society to embrace Neo-liberal economics was duplicated in the state of Israel mimicking the paradigm shift in America to only advance corporate financial and social interests.

“And he looked for justice, but behold, bloodshed; for righteousness, but behold, a cry! Woe to those who join house to house,
who add field to field, until there is no more room, and who are made to dwell alone in the midst of the land.” (Isaiah. 5:7).​

If one reviews the recent history of the nation of Israel, in some ways its history is a duplicate of America's history. Both the United States and Israel are governed by extremists right-wing political factions not as actual democracies, but as limited “representative governments.” Both countries have strong religious fundamentalist groups influencing government policies combined with a cult of anti-woke irrationalism; both countries are capitalist economies prone to cyclical crises; nationalistic patriotism to reinforce a hyper militaristic culture and attitude toward life; unending warnings of actual enemies and/or terrorist homunculi to create a permanent atmosphere of fear and paranoia. Both countries experienced blowback from participating in colonial proxy wars: United States and the Mujahideen, and Israel with Hamas. Both countries still suffer from the consequences of internal wars with indigenous people: the American Indian wars, and the wars between Israel and Palestinians. And most importantly, both the United States of America and the Country of Israel had key anti-war peace leaders assassinated by extremist right-wing assassins. America's progressive leadership was wiped out by the political assassinations of John F. Kennedy (November 1963), Martin Luther King (April 4, 1968 ) and Robert F. Kennedy (June 1968 ). The Israeli leader, Yitzhak Rabin (November 1995) was assassinated by a domestic right-wing terrorist also. This is why the progressive left struggles in America, and Israel.

After JFK's public assassination in Dallas, Texas the Cold War raged in Vietnam, U.S. trained death squads saturated Latin America, and political assassins trolled the world to overthrow democratic governments. I believe the same fascist takeover planned for America by former CIA Director Allen Dulles has been mimicked by Israeli right-wing political factions—and all for war profits. It is the same fascist dance of death we have seen all through history, but no one has danced as well as Allen Dulles. And the most outrageous plan of all was to infiltrate fascist ideology into American fundamentalist Churches which legally incorporated as tax-free Mega-Churches preaching a disgusting, sickening, particularly stupid American Christian “Prosperity Gospel.” American Christian Fascism makes God a fool.

...continuing to next post on the Yahweh concept.

 

...continuing from post 789.

A Brief Historical Review of the Dialectical Development of the Yahweh Concept

“In fact, the Old Testament writings are a continuous testimony to the struggle of prophetic Judaism against pagan, national Judaism.
For this reason, and solely for this reason, the Old Testament is a book for humanity— because in it the particular,
the bondage to space and blood and nationalism, are seen as things to be fought against.”
--Paul Tillich, The Socialist Decision, p. 22 (pdf.)​

After years of sitting on my list of books to read, I finally began philosopher Ernst Bloch's book, Atheism In Christianity, with an introduction by P. Thompson, 1972, Verso (pdf.). Bloch is knowledgeable of Old Testament history, but my ability to judge is limited to mostly what I have read by biblical scholar William Barclay, Professor of Divinity and Biblical Criticism at the University of Glasgow and was a minister of Trinity Church of Glasgow. His seventeen volume New Testament commentary, "The Daily Study Bible Series," (Westminster Press Philadelphia, The Saint Andrew Press, Edinburgh, Scotland, First ed, 1956) delves into ancient biblical culture describing Judaic cultural history, religious customs, and language that illuminate New Testament texts, especially the Gospels. Barclay's approach to ancient Judaic biblical culture is similar to an anthropologist going verse by verse through the entire New Testament, making for very interesting reading.

Bloch's chapter seventeen titled, “Nazarites and Prophets—Yahweh's Exodus into Universal Moral Providence; Pre-vision.” (pp. 82-92) re-examines the folk-story of the Israelite Bedouins entering into the “Promise Land” of Canaan in about the 9th century BCE and mentioned in the book of 1 Kings telling of their assimilation into the native Phoneticians' highly stratified class society. Etymological research of the name “Canaan” shows it meaning as “purple,” referring to the purple dyed cloth sold in Tyre. Canaan was not to be the utopian-society they expected, but instead faced extreme social inequality, poverty, debt, and slavery for those unfortunate in the Phonetician land of Baal, the local god, whose name literally means “Lord,” or “Owner,”-- an appropriate name for a society unlike desert Bedouin primitive communalism, but rather dominated by an unrestrained real estate market based on private property rights and human despair, “When thy house has been sold.” The Canaanites were all about the market, as large landowners exported corn crops for higher profits, causing famine at home. The Book of Judges does not mention these economic hardships, but 1 Kings reports “Now the famine was severe in Samaria” (1 Kings 18:2), and in another passage “the King [Solomon] made silver as common in Jerusalem as stone” (1 Kings 10:27). Overtime, some Israelites became assimilated into Canaanite society, leaving behind the Bedouin communal life of the tribe. Baal was the god of a fertility cult, of prosperity, of landownership, pressuring the Israelite Bedouin tribe to walk backwards by economic necessity into the idolatry of popular local native gods of production, or the Baalim. Bloch notes that in this socio-cultural environment, the concept of Yahweh shifted from the God of the migrant and the God of the poor to fuse with the more promising materially prosperous Baal-Yahweh alliance.

The Baal-Yahweh Alliance

“Among the olive rows of the wicked they make oil; they tread the wine presses, but suffer thirst from out of the city the dying groan,
and the soul of the wounded cries for help; yet God pays no attention to their prayer”--(Job 24:11).​

According to the historical myth (composed of other ancient folk-stories) retold by Bloch (pp. 84-5), the pressure to join the Baalism cult of mammon in utopia become law under the tyrannical King of Israel Ahab and his Phoenician wife Jezebel who tried to kill the Yahwist prophet Elijah for resisting conversion. In another case, Jezebel ordered the brutal murder of the Israelite Naboth for refusing to sale his vineyard to King Ahab. The anti-Canaanite heretics' expression of despair can be found in the words of the prophet Jeremiah written in another era that Yahweh has “become like water that refuses to flow, and like the mirage of a brook in which there is no trust.”(15:8 ). Yet, some Hebrews still refused to join the cult political alliance of Baal-Yahweh and embraced a new religious paradigm of returning to the Yahweh of communal life, of the migrant desert God of the Sinai.

A semi-nomadic Judaic sect that can trace it roots to Moses (Num. 6:2-5) named the Nazarite (meaning “separate” or “consecrated”) became another face of resistance against the gods of mammon, endless production, and stupefying slave labor. They lived in pre-nomadic communes, practicing strict religious abstinence by rejecting drinking wine and vinegar; not cutting one's hair; refraining from touching graves or corpses. The ancient historian Josephus reports that persons taking Nararite vows were often in stressful situations and in crisis. Eventually, the Nazarite sect embraced prophetism and is known for the biblical theme of “annunciation of a Nazirite before birth,” and include the biblical Nazarite characters of Samson, Samuel, and Elijah, and John the Baptist (Bloch, p. 84). The Nazarites represented a new kind of prophet, not possessed by some dervish spirit, but a prophet as messenger through social moral preaching, of a new Yahweh and the coming of his Day! (p. 85).

“For behold, I created a new heaven and a new earth' and the former things shall not be remembered or come into mind.” (Is. 65:17)​

The Yahweh of the Desert, or the “God of the Exodus” now represent political opposition to the cultist hyper-exchange market materialism worshiped by the Canaanites. The social justice Nazarites instead sought to “Learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; defend the fatherless, plead for the widow” (Is. 1:7) and supported the social agenda of rejecting class-based society, sharing the products of labor, and granting a Jubilee of debt forgiveness every seven and fifty years (Bloch, p. 86). Bloch writes of this paradigmatic shift of the concept of Yahweh and describes it as a new Genesis (Is. 65:17), a new Garden of Eden...for adults capable of moral social reasoning:

"After the God of Exodus, the second great ideal of theology is Yahweh as the embodiment of moral reason. Even atheism has not entirely abolished this: it still projects as abruptly as ever out of being, over into the ideal. The future Paradise told of by Isaiah’s God— “He shall not judge by what his eyes see or decide by what his ears hear; but with righteousness he shall judge the poor and decide with equity for the meek of the earth” (Is. 11. 3-4)— this Paradise treats man as an adult. It is no longer a garden for beasts, a place of hollow innocence and ignorance. Righteousness ceases to come purely from on high as a mechanical accounting-process reckoning out with alleged exactness the atonement due for guilt and the reward for uprightness, as the initial apologetical impulse of prophetic preaching would still have it—evidence, this, of its impermanence (Atheism In Christianity, Ernst Block, Intro. By P. Thompson, 1972, Verso, p. 90)(pdf.)."

Here now is the new Yahweh of universal moral Providence and subversive socio-apocalyptic preaching of liberation to bring about a “spiritual unity of the Just of all nations.” (Bloch, passim, p. 86, 88, 89). The God of the Exodus is one of liberation. This conception of a moral God can be a universal model of human ethical life and opens the way for the New Testament Logos paradigm of a New Being. Paul Tillich writes of a New Being paradigm of God and Christianity: “Christianity as a religion is not important, for Christianity is more than a religion. It is the New Being that is important. Resurrection is not an event that might happen in some remote future, but it is the power of the New Being to create life out of death, here and now, today and tomorrow. Where there is a New Being, there is resurrection, namely, the creation into eternity out of every moment of time (New Being, Paul Tillich, 1955, p. 1)(pdf.).”

“For neither circumcision counts for anything nor uncircumcision, but a new creation.”
--(Galatians 6:15)​

“It means that no religion as such produces the New Being. Circumcision is a religious rite, observed by the Jews; sacrifices are religious rites,
observed by the pagans; baptism is a religious rite, observed by the Christians. All these rites do not matter—only a New Creation.”
--Paul Tillich, New Being, p. 15 (pdf.)​

Columnist for the Israeli Daily Haaretz: Gideon Levy

and,
Gabor Mate explains how he sees the Palestine Israël conflict

​

 

Have you been diagnosed?

 

Werner Herzog's "Fitzcarraldo" (1982) is the greatest movie ever made in my opinion. It is a religious-existentialist movie. At one point in the filming the Indian actors offered to kill Klaus Kinski. When Kinski would often verbally attack Herzog for an hour at a time, the Indians were more afraid of Herzog than Kinski because he would remain silent during Kinski's outbursts. Herzog turned down their offer, because at the time Herzog himself was going to put a bullet in the back of Kinski's head if he tried to paddle away in a canoe. Hedonist Mike Jagger had skipped out of the film earlier. Kinski decided to stay and finish the movie.

In the movie, the opening Opera singer, Sarah Bernhardt, is an actress who can't even sing, and is lip-syncing, but the audience is really interested in her wooden leg and is the talk of the town. The Iquitos Opera was a wild success with the hoi polloi.

Fitzcarraldo (full movie)
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Wow. This history of Israel and the United States explains everything--including the death squads in Central America--we have been witnessing for the last 45 years at least. The fact that the Israeli military trained American law enforcement on how to deliberately blind protestors is enough reason for the American people to stop all monies to, all diplomatic relations with the fascist state of Israel.

Blowtorch Bob​

Romney's Death Squad Ties: Bain Launched with Millions from Oligarchs Behind Salvadoran Atrocities:

Israel's destruction of Gaza is West's fascistic plan for Global South, warns Colombia's president
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America is the Anti-Christ.

"Self-affirmed greatness in the realm of the holy is demonic. This is true of the claim of a church to represent in its structure the Spiritual Community unambiguously. The consequent will to unlimited power over all things holy and secular is in itself the judgment against a church which makes this claim. The same is true of individuals who, as adherents of a group making such a claim, become self-assured, fanatical, and destructive of life in others and the meaning of life within themselves. But in so far as the divine Spirit conquers religion, it prevents the claim to absoluteness by both the churches and their members. Where the divine Spirit is effective, the claim of a church to represent God to the exclusion of all other churches is rejected. The freedom of the Spirit resists it. And when the divine Spirit is effective, a church member’s claim to an exclusive possession of the truth is undercut by the witness of the divine Spirit to his fragmentary as well as ambiguous participation in the truth. The Spiritual Presence excludes fanaticism, because in the presence of God no man can boast about his grasp of God. No one can grasp that by which he is grasped — the Spiritual Presence."
--Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol III, p. 243-245 (pdf.)

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"9. And the LORD said unto Cain: 'Where is Abel thy brother?' And he said: 'I know not; am I my brother's keeper?' 10. And He said: 'What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto Me from the ground. 11. And now cursed art thou from the ground, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother's blood from thy hand." Genesis 4: 9-11.

ט וַיֹּאמֶר יְהוָה אֶל-קַיִן, אֵי הֶבֶל אָחִיךָ; וַיֹּאמֶר לֹא יָדַעְתִּי, הֲשֹׁמֵר אָחִי אָנֹכִי.
י וַיֹּאמֶר, מֶה עָשִׂיתָ; קוֹל דְּמֵי אָחִיךָ, צֹעֲקִים אֵלַי מִן-הָאֲדָמָה.
יא וְעַתָּה, אָרוּר אָתָּה, מִן-הָאֲדָמָה אֲשֶׁר פָּצְתָה אֶת-פִּיהָ, לָקַחַת אֶת-דְּמֵי אָחִיךָ מִיָּדֶךָ.​

 

In Post #763: The Paines (sic) of Government Intelligence, I mentioned a documentary by filmmaker and researcher Ted Yacucci titled "Ruth and Micheal Paine (Documentary)" reviewing Lee Harvey Oswald's relationship to the Paines. His YouTube Channel has a core group of twelve videos on the JFK assassination, and other supporting videos by other researchers. What makes Yacucci's videos stand out is he has synthesized the last sixty years of discoveries and examined the social matrix that Oswald worked and lived. Yacucci's latest video summarized Oswald connections to the CIA in, "Lee Oswald: What are the odds?" and another titled, "JFK, Lee Oswald and Mexico City."

I always doubted the Oswald was the assassin of JFK, but erroneously thought Oswald did in fact shoot Officer J.D.Tibbet until viewing these videos such as "The Murder of Officer J. D. Tippit." Again, it turns out there is no evidence that Oswald shot anyone on that day showing instead Oswald knew Officer Tibbet, Jack Ruby, and David Ferrie—all three were radical right-wing John Birchers. Oswald's associations with other intelligence agents blows wide open the JFK murder case.

When FBI Director J. Eager Hoover phoned the Dallas P.D. to tell investigators that Oswald was the assassin, he relieved law enforcement of a tremendous burden, allowing them to only report evidence that supported the lone gunman scenario, and ignore, destroy, or contaminate any evidence to the contrary. What police officer, doctor, or civilian would disagree with the FBI? Film was seized from citizens minutes after the shooting of JFK. Civilian witnesses reporting that shots came from behind a fence on the grassy knoll were gaslighted into doubting their own experience.

 

Here is another interesting and enlightening comment by theologian Paul Tillich on the demonic and religion. Tillich uses the theological term demonic quite a bit--over three hundred times in his three-volume work, Systematic Theology. He was most satisfied by his work on the topics of faith, and the demonic in society and religion. The mythological concept of the "demonic" is a Christian symbol which describes the process of elevating something finite--such as a nation state--to the level of the infinite. This problem of the demonic is closely associated with the ancient concept of ὕβρις (húbris), or arrogance combined with violence. That third volume is really a book about spiritual life.

"(2) THE DIVINE AND THE DEMONIC.-In religion the ambiguity of self-transcendence appears as the ambiguity of the divine and the demonic. The symbol of the demonic does not need justification as it did thirty years ago, when it was reintroduced into theological language. It has become a much-used and much-abused term to designate antidivine forces in individual and social life. In this way it has frequently lost the ambiguous character implied in the word itself. Demons in mythological vision are divine-antidivine beings. They are not simply negations of the divine but participate in a distorted way in the power and holiness of the divine. The term must be understood against this mythological background. The demonic does not resist self-transcendence as does the profane, but it distorts self-transcendence by identifying a particular bearer of holiness with the holy itself. In this sense all polytheistic gods are demonic, because the basis of being and meaning on which they stand is finite, no matter how sublime, great, or dignified it may be. And the claim of something finite to infinity or to divine greatness is the characteristic of the demonic. Demonization of the holy occurs in all religions day by day, even in the religion which is based on the self-negation of the finite in the Cross of the Christ. The quest for unambiguous life is, therefore, most radically directed against the ambiguity of the holy and the demonic in the religious realm (Systematic Theology, Paul Tillich; Vol. III, p. 102)(pdf.).”

 

“The Lord says: ‘These people come to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.
Their worship of me is made up only of rules taught by men. … Woe to those who go to great depths to hide their plans from the Lord.”
--Isaiah 29:13-15​

I think economist and historian Michael Hudson has done a much better job of pointing out the hypocrisy of Fascist Zionism and American Fundamentalist Christian Fascism than I attempted to do with Ernst Bloch, but my knowledge of Old Testament biblical culture and history is insufficient. I argued that just as a Right-Wing Jewish cult has taken over the government of Israel, so a Right-Wing Christian cult of blood and soil has attempted to take over the United States, and for the same reasons--Oligarchic rule. And in doing so violate the very religious principles they supposedly represent to the world placing the price of real estate over the value of human life.

Please take time to read Dr. Hudson's essay "Were the Biblical Prophets Anti-Semitic?" that points out some embarrassing insights of recent American-Israeli joint actions and Judeo-Christian ethical principles:

"If the prophets of ancient Israel such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Malachi and Amos were alive today, Benjamin Netanyahu would accuse them of anti-Semitism for daring to describe his government as a travesty of what the Mosaic covenant was all about. A common thread running throughout the Jewish Bible – Christianity’s Old Testament – was to criticize kings, the wealthy and corrupt courts for violating the Mosaic commandments to create a fair and equitable society protecting the poor from the economic oppression of debt bondage, and loss of their land. If the prophets were summoned to give judgment today, it is Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud Party and the steeply unequal economy of Israel that would be condemned as violating the most basic laws of Biblical Judaism." essay continues.

 

“Every form of tradition or bond is seen, on the soil of capitalism, as a means of class rule.”
-- Paul Tillich, “The Socialist Decision,” p. 87 (pdf.)."
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I commented somewhere in a post earlier that fascism in Israel has used Judaic religious beliefs as a mask to conceal fascism just as Christian Fascism has taken over Christian Fundamentalism (in which I was raised as a child) for the same idolatrous reasons: "the demonries of autonomous economics: capitalism, and the demonry of the sovereign people: nationalism ("The Interpretation of History," Tillich, p. 119) (pdf.)." Paul Tillich further writes "This God, the God of the prophets and of Jesus, utterly destroys every religious nationalism: that of the Jews, which he combats constantly, and that of the pagans, which is repudiated in the command to Abraham (Ibid., p. 69) (pdf.)."​

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Recognizing all of this history of religion, Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss and spokesman for Neturei Karta, God bless him! rightly presents his argument:

"...my feelings, it's the feelings of Jews around the world who are true to our religion Judaism--a religion of 3,000 years. We hurt. We cry. We suffer pain with the people of Gaza beyond words. What's happening to them, there's no way of expressing it in our frustration because it's to us--to double it-- is being done in the name of my religion of 3,000 years by a movement that's 100 odd years a political nationalist movement of non-religious Jews Zionists who are trying to transform my religion to nationalism, and use the religion of subservience to God to cover for their creating a state occupying another people and by silencing anybody who does to speak-up as being anti-Semitic. This is abhorrent. It's totally not true my religion is to serve God. My religion is not to kill, or steal, to not occupy. And we're not even allowed to have a state since the destruction of the temple 2,000 years ago (@ 00:00:37)."
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Jewish religious leader Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss reveals how he feels about Israeli aggression in Gaza
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BREAKING: Over 100,000 march on Washington DC for a free Palestine, demanding ceasefire
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The persecuted Gaza Muslims are more Christian than the fake Wal-Mart Christians America has crapped out in generations. The Christian theologian, Paul Tillich, who escaped the Nazis wrote in an essay, "Spiritual Problems of Postwar Reconstruction":

"The presupposition of every postwar reconstruction is the knowledge of the pre-war disintegration. And the presupposition of every spiritual postwar reconstruction is the knowledge of the spiritual pre-war disintegration. Nobody can doubt that a catastrophe such as the present one never could have happened in an integrated social system; nobody should attribute our period of world wars and world revolutions to the accident of a special national character, for instance, of the Russian or the German or the Japanese character, or to dictatorial leaders, such as Stalin or Hitler, whose rise to power is even more accidental. It should be granted by all those who are able to judge that something was fundamentally wrong in the system of life and thought in the immediate past and that a return to it is neither desirable nor possible. The world war is a part of a world revolution. This statement should be repeated again and again (The Protestant Era, Tillich, 1948; p. 261) (pdf.)

Obviously, after the murder of JFK by U.S. pro-fascists, America learned other lessons from the Nazi state and quickly moved on installing right-wing fascist governments all over the world and Allen Dulles putting Nazis back into power with their stolen loot. After JFK's assassination, the American project of dehumanization began in earnest. America prides itself for studying and teaching the science of dehumanization. As Marianne Williamson once said of November 22, 1963, "What we feared would happen.... happened." Tillich warned of this possibility:

"The monopolistic direction of public communication, of leisure, pleasure, learning, sex relations, sport, etc., does not provide a basis for a real community. Cultural remnants of earlier periods are used to cover up our cultural nakedness. All this is carried through more radically in the totalitarian systems. But the means of carrying it through are better developed in this county [America]. And if these means ever should come into the hands of unchecked dictators--visible or invisible ones--a complete dehumanization would have even more chances in America than in Europe (Ibid., p. 264: bracketed text added)."

America is faced with the same questions she faced after WWII: opportunism, or noble ends. But this time the world has become more educated:

"...America, if she takes responsibility for the present world catastrophe, must take it completely and with the full knowledge of what it means. It does not mean defending America against the dictators, it does not mean defeating Hitler, it does not mean conquering Germany a second time: it means accepting her share of responsibility for the future structure of Europe and consequently for the whole world. Whatever happens during the later years of the war, any victory will be won on the physical and moral ruins of Europe. It would be a cynical opportunism if America helped to augment those ruins without being ready and able to build something radically new on them. If this country will not look beyond the day of victory, that day will become the birthday of another defeat of all human values and noble aims (Ibid., p. 189-90)."

 

“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK?
It's, like, incredible.”
--Donald J. Trump, former U.S. President currently indicted at least ninety times.​

Yes, it really is incredible. Trump didn't shoot just one person but murdered over 1.12 million Americans in the last Covid-19 “It's only the flu” pandemic and shutdown all medical responses nationwide while profiting from stock market manipulation. This crime by Trump hardly made the news in America as if it was a natural disaster, and not man-made malfeasance.

I have been watching video commentaries from international activist Shadid King Bolsen on Middle Eastern politics and international relations and found them to be very informing, especially on the state of Israeli society of which the American mainstream news media never reports about. In fact, the major news networks hardly report any international news leaving a huge vacuum of information—US citizens are completely left in the dark about political events in other countries. However, American politicians often use other countries to test election propaganda strategies in Britain before applying them in America and vice versa. Also, it appears that Dr. Bolsen is a target of a massive propaganda machine slandering him because of his critique of American companies which ironically enhances his activist profile.

Well, after seven years of Trump attacking American progressives as communists, we know how effective the MAGA slander machine has been using the media. Trump told over 30,000 lies during his four-year reign of stupidity and hate attacking ordinary American citizens as “antifascists” which somehow became a “really bad thing.” He has probably double that number of lies since. Everything reported by the American press about JFK's assassination turned out to be false including that CIA agent Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone “Marxist” assassin in order to slander, to put under suspicion American progressives. So, in my mind Bolsen has nothing to worry about because the national and international media monopolies have absolutely no credibility whatsoever as they report tens of thousands of children in Gaza dying on an industrial scale as if giving a weather, or market forecast. Becoming skeptical of the media has freed me from some of this propaganda so I judge a person by their reasoning and arguments—that's my interest.

The oppressed Gaza Muslims are murdered as they flee their homes. They suffer as some Christians once suffered under political persecution of the Nazis. They carry the lifeless bodies of their loved ones, but yet still shout, “God is Great!” Are we spiritually deaf? Are we spiritually blind? Have we become “backsliders,” that is, given up the spiritual organs of human moral sensibilities and faith in the infinite?

I agree with Boslen that the United States should be expelled from the United Nations because it regularly violates every principle of that organization and shows to all nations embarrassing contempt of the very concept of democratic representation. As one person commented, “Was the fall of Rome this embarrassing?”

Expel the US from the United Nations
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