Sheep and Goats

Category: History

  • Maybe it is Like with the Pyramids

    If you’re a god, you have to have confidence to disallow images of yourself. Won’t people forget about you? If Jehovah started off a tribal god, the way theologians claim, he is nevertheless a tribal god that would not allow himself to be represented by images or idols. That circumstance alone suggests that he is not and never was. None of the other gods of the ancient world took that chance. All of them—there were literally thousands in the Mesopotamian world—were somehow represented by physical objects, maybe statues or figurines.

    Take the gods of the Exodus drubbing, for example. Every one of them had tangible, physical representations—whether large temple cult gold-covered or stone statues, smaller household idols, amulets, reliefs on walls, or living sacred animals—something. The image of the god was essential. That was how you serviced it, through attendance to its image.

    To take some of those Exodus gods and how they appeared, Khnum had the head of a ram, and Osisis, a mummiform man with green skin. These gods were in charge of the Nile. (first of the ten plagues) Heqet  took the form of a frog-headed woman. (second plague) Geb, an earth god, was a man with a goose head lying beneath Nut, a sky goddess. (third plague) Khepri was scrub-headed. (fourth plague) Hathor and Apis both looked like cows. (fifth plague) Moo.

    Then there was Sekhmet, a lion-headed woman (sixth plague) and Shu. (seventh plague) Osiris, again, trying unsuccessfully to shoo the locusts away, along with Renenutet, a woman with a cobra-head. (eighth plague) Ra and Horus failed to allay darkness, despite the falcon head of the first and scarab of the second (ninth plague) Isis, the protector of children, didn’t protect them too well, nor did Min, assigned to fertility. You would think that Pharaoh, as divine son of Ra, would have some pull, but he did not.

    Nonetheless, the God without images clobbered them all. The biblical narrative’s emphasis is on YHWH executing judgment “on all the gods of Egypt” (Exodus 12:12) They were all in charge of stuff that the Hebrew God ran roughshod over. Tribal god, my foot. Tribal gods put their mugs on display, lest people forget they exist, because you sure can’t tell it by their actions. Every one of them was asleep at the switch, as Jehovah took their area of expertise and turned it inside out. None of them would be parting any Red Seas.

    And there was Pharaoh, cheering them on as though the mayor of a city with a wretched football team. His players are horrrble. They get creamed every time they take the field. Yet, they ARE his team, so Pharaoh has no choice but to root for them. Why else would he dig his heels in the way he does as, one by one, the ball is stripped from each player. Putting more flesh in the game is the fact that Pharaoh WAS in the game, divine himself. As quarterback, he can hardly roll his eyes as his teammates get shellacked. He’s supposed to be displaying good team leadership. Nonetheless, YHWH stomps upon them all, including Pharaoh.

    The ten plagues were 700 years before Isaiah. Why bring them up again? It’s because, to him and all Israel, they were always like yesterday. None of those shown-up gods got fired, and so the prophet, 700 years later, refers to them as examples of the “worthless gods of Egypt.” They haven’t improved: “A pronouncement against Egypt: Look! Jehovah is riding on a swift cloud and is coming into Egypt. The worthless gods of Egypt will tremble before him, And the heart of Egypt will melt within it.” (Isaiah 19:1) I mean, if it happened before, you don’t think it will again? 

    There was one pharaoh of Egypt, however—I mean, this is really strange—who apparently saw things Isaiah’s way. Not that he turned to worship the Hebrew God, but he did turn to booting out all but one of his own. They could take their horns and feathers and scarab faces and flakey heads and shove em. This was Akhenaten, from the fourteenth century BCE. He promoted one—only one—god, the Aten, represented as a solar disk. All other gods he snuffed out. He closed their temples and funneled all their resources to his one single god. He even founded a new national capital, where Aten could get away from their slimy influence. When this renegade pharaoh died, however, Egypt reverted back to many gods. Akhenaten’s legacy is that of an embarrassment.

    Now, all this invites irresistible speculation to any student of the Bible. Maybe he picked it up from Joseph, the Hebrew who entered Egypt as a slave and rose to number two man, second only to the pharoah himself. No, scholars insist. There is a difference of 200-400 years. Joseph came first—and that’s assuming you can arm-twist these great ones to acknowledge that Joseph even existed. Bob Brier is willing to go there. He is the Egyptologist behind a 36-part (it might even be 48) Great Courses Lecture series on Egyptian history, but you get the sense—or maybe it was just me—that he is playing to the crowds. I mean, he didn’t come out with any ringing endorsements. He just acknowledged it was possible. Still, there is no way Joseph influenced Akhenaten, the experts say. In fact, one of them even thought it was the other way around. Sigmond Freud, who thought religion a “neurosis,” wrote that Ahmeneton laid down the template that later Hebrew society ran with. Fortunately, he is discredited on this, as well as virtually anything else he ever wrote, a circumstance that leads one to marvel that he is still regarded as one of history’s greats. First to explore a new genre, I guess it is, even though all of his explorations proved wrong. 

    Yeah, it is probably that way—no connection between Akheneten and Joseph. On the other hand, maybe, just maybe, the reality is more akin to that of the pyramids themselves. The purpose of the pyramids is settled science, mainstream Egyptologists insist, but has it been settled by decree? No matter how much they insist that pyramids were just gaudy tombstones for the pharaohs, alternative theories pop up regularly that they originated in the craziest of ways to serve the most fantastic of purposes.  

    gray pyramid on dessert under blue sky
    Photo by David McEachan on Pexels.com

    ******  The bookstore

  • Does the Bible Condone Slavery? Part 2–Frederick Douglass

    (For best results, see Part 1 first)

    The poster tells it all at the Harpers Ferry National Historical Park as to John Brown’s motivation. But does it tell it accurately? You would think so—it is the National Historical Park Service, after all. So one is inclined to take at face value the interpretive text on one display:

    “Although slavery is often condoned in the Bible, [John] Brown believed that the ‘Golden Rule’ Do unto others as you would have them do unto you implicitly condemned slavery.”

    Is it? We hear it all the time that the Bible condones slavery, but does it? Or is it merely the pop atheist philosophy of today that drives research, that holds that if you’re not nagging about something 24/7, that means you condone it? After all, the ‘Golden Rule’ is also in the Bible. That doesn’t condone slavery, does it?

    Of course, the topic of slavery does come up in the Bible. If you’re doing any overview of history, as the Bible does, it is going to come up a lot. It was a universal human degradation, present from the earliest reaches of history, and ‘natural law’ holds it as an advancement in societal evolution; making captives of war slaves was surely an advance over killing them, wasn’t it?

    With regard to slaves among the Hebrews, their Law turns an historical degradation into something not degrading at all. A Jew might sell himself to his wealthy neighbor as a last resort should his debts overwhelm him. Harsh treatment of such slaves was not allowed and—wait for it—at the end of a seven-year Jubilee period, that slave was freed. And freed with a gift, so as to start life anew. Thus, the economic system universal to the ancient world, and not much less so today, that of the ‘rich getting richer while the poor get poorer’ was not allowed to take root in ancient Israel.

    Now, any scholar worth his diploma knows this. But secular atheist scholars may not know it because they have majored in topics divorced from what has historically driven humankind. ‘Science’ is the Great Father. ‘Religion’ is the enemy. They don’t look as deeply into the enemy camp as they do into their own.

    If anyone should be quoted in that Harpers Ferry display on what the Bible does or does not ‘condone,’ it should be Frederick Douglass—the escaped slave who became their voice until his death in 1895. He did not once say it in his first autobiography, written in 1845. (He wrote three autobiographies, each an update, incorporating his doings as history unfolded. It did not unfold his way. Post Civil War reconstruction fizzled within a decade or two. Notwithstanding that with the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments freed slaves, guaranteed them citizenship and the right to vote, an intransigent South found ways to defang them all. Douglass would come to feel that the Civil War had been fought for nothing. Grant, the victorious general who became President, would say the same.

    He didn’t say—not once—that the Bible condones slavery. And please don’t suggest that maybe he didn’t know the Bible well. His allusions to it are constant. He particularly was drawn to passages from the Old Testament on ‘setting the captives free.’ When in his old age he visited Jerusalem, he was especially interested in tracing the doings of Paul, his favorite apostle, the one who said ,‘And he [God] made out of one man every nation of men to dwell on the entire surface of the earth.”

    At the end of his first autobiography he inserts an appendix? Why? In view of certain harsh things he has said, he fears some may conclude he is “an opponent of all religion.” So he will correct the impression forthwith. Does he mutter that ‘the Bible condones slavery?’ No. But, Wowwhee! Does he ever let loose on the religionists of his day (and our day?)!

    No, he didn’t mean the Christianity of Christ. He meant “the slaveholding religion of this land and with no possible reference to Christianity proper.” He “recognize[d] the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good pure and holy is of necessity to reject the other as bad corrupt and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other.”

    He “love[s] the pure peaceable and impartial Christianity of Christ. I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.”

    Then he goes on to quote almost the entirety of Matthew 23, Jesus’ denunciations of the religionist of his day, applying it to his own time.

    “They bind up heavy loads and put them on the shoulders of men, but they themselves are not willing to budge them with their finger. All the works they do, they do to be seen by men, for they broaden the scripture-containing cases that they wear as safeguards and lengthen the fringes of their garments. They like the most prominent place at evening meals and the front seats in the synagogues and the greetings in the marketplaces and to be called Rabbi by men.” …. and so forth.

    He’s already, at this point in his autobiography, related his experiences with both religious and non-religious owners. By far, he says, religious owners were the worst. He finishes up with his own ‘Christian’ slaveholder poem, set to the cadence of a popular hymn of the time: 

    Come, saints and sinners, hear me tell
    How pious priests whip Jack and Nell,
    And women buy and children sell,
    And preach all sinners down to hell,
    And sing of heavenly union. . . 

    It runs thirteen stanzas.

    Nowhere does he indict the Bible, much less take up the modern shallow cry of its enemies that it ‘condone’s slavery.’ He’s wise enough—I mean, it was more or less a no-brainer at one time—to see the problem is not the with the Bible but with the hypocrites who don’t follow it. Atheistic scholars come along in modern times—the National Historical Park Service apparently got stuck with some of them—to tell the Harpers Ferry exhibit that the Bible condones slavery. And yet the fault is not primarily theirs. The fault is with those claiming Christianity who so blatantly forsake its principles that the non-participant, who isn’t paying all that close attention, figures the problem must be the book itself.

    He should read Paul’s caution to Titus of the ones in his time who “publicly declare that they know God, but they disown him by their works, because they are detestable and disobedient and not approved for good work of any sort.” (1 Titus 3:16) Depend upon it. When those professing Christ behave outrageously, “the way of the truth will be spoken of abusively.” (1 Peter 2:2) It’s not the enemies of God that are the problem. It’s his ‘friends.’

    Southern slavery ended long ago but the Jim Crow system of laws (strict segregation) kept the prejudices that fueled it alive and well for 100 years. Two blacks in the movie Sounder (setting: 1933) pass the packed-out white church. One recalls how he had naively entered once and was quickly thrown out. So he “took it up with the good Lord,” he tells his friend. “And what did the good Lord say to you?” the friend wants to know. “The good Lord said to me, ‘Why, Willie, what are you fretting about? You are doing better than me. I’ve been trying to get in there for two hundred years!”

    And in 1975, I visited North Carolina and spent time in the house-to-house ministry. I worked a lot with a certain black brother, completely at ease in the rurals. But for some reason I forget, we drove into the big city 60 miles away. There I found myself lost. Roll down the window, I said to my Black companion (also named Thomas), ask that strolling white woman for directions. He wouldn’t do it. I repeated my request, to no avail. I wondered why he had gone deaf. But after we drove on he told me that I didn’t really understand how it worked in the place I was visiting.

     

    ******  The bookstore

  • Does the Bible Condone Slavery? Excerpts from Civil War Research

    No scholar worth his salt says the Bible condones slavery. Any scholar who does say the Bible condones slavery is plainly not worth his salt. Rather, he or she is driven by a pop scholarship, usually atheistic, that opines jauntily on a topic it neither comprehends nor respects—if it gets something wrong, who cares? It’s only the bible to them .

    An example of such is found at the National Historical Park poster at Harper’s Ferry.

    “Although slavery is often condoned in the Bible, [John] Brown believed that the ‘Golden Rule’ Do unto others as you would have them do unto you implicitly condemned slavery.” Why is that statement weird?

    It’s because the words in themselves are directly contrary to the intended conclusion! That blanket statement, that the Bible condones slavery, is supported by nothing therein. If they are scriptures to the effect that it does, the reader is not made aware of them. On the other hand, there is a scripture embedded in the poster that indicates the contrary is true, that the Bible does not condone slavery—that of the Golden Rule.

    To be sure, the Golden Rule is unaccredited—whereas if you quoted the words of the Park system’s own resident scholars without accredation, their screams of protest would shake down the halls of academia enough to make Samson’s knocking down the temple of the Philistines look like a mere application of sandpaper.

    “All things, therefore, that you want men to do to you, you also must do to them. This, in fact, is what the Law and the Prophets mean.”

    It’s the Bible. Unaccredited. Matthew 7:12. Furthermore, it’s a key passage—it’s ‘what the Law and the Prophets mean.’ Do the National Historical Park scholars care if modern readers conclude some ancient practitioner of mindfulness—probably some Buddha-like figure—originated the saying, and not Jesus? It doesn’t seem to bother them. The same sloppiness that would never be tolerated in any topic they cared deeply about is left unmolested in a topic they do not.

    They do good work, the National Historical Park system does. They bring history to life. They restore old venues. They recreate old dramas. They make their rangers wear hats when outdoors. I’ve many times referred to them in the course of Historical Park visits in Go Where Tom Goes. But they are not immune to pop scholarship; that is the point of the preceding—a conclusion also demonstrated in that they got wrong the religion of Eisenhower’s upbringing.

    Moreover, were they to encounter the scholars that dig deep and do their research without regard for what’s trendy, they would never make such a shallow statement. Here I have read through Grant by Ron Chernow, and Team of Rivals [biography of Abraham Lincoln], by Doris Kearns Goodwin, as well as Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, by David Blight, and nowhere in any of these works is there a single mention that “the Bible condones slavery!”

    It’s a little early to tell with the Douglass book, I admit, because I started with Part 2, commencing with Civil War days till the end of Douglass’s life, but there is not one mention in what I have read. Instead, there are abundant references in all of these works of how abolitionists drew their very inspiration from the Bible—and not one mention that “the Bible condoned slavery.” Frederick Douglass took as his mission statement the Acts 10:34-35 passage of how the apostle Peter “began to speak, and he said: ‘Now I truly understand that God is not partial, but in every nation the man who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.’”

    When visiting the Seward house in Auburn N.Y, [Willian Seward, Lincoln’s Secretary of State] with its preserved, well-stocked library, we learned that Doris Goodwin spend countless hours there researching the tomes. Did she issue any new-age blather that “the Bible condones slavery?” No. She researched with respect, as modern atheistic scholars are not inclined to do, how Christian faith firmly molded the notable players of that age, certainly that of the abolitionists. Lincoln, though not an overtly religious man, was as familiar and respectful of the Bible as anyone of the age—and more representative of its basic theme of ‘proclaiming liberty to the captives’ than all but the tiniest handful of them.


    (Above: William Seward home – Auburn NY)

    And just how far do you think you would get were John Brown, the reason for that Harpers Ferry National Historical Park’ existence, were to stumble across that Bible-dishonoring poster. Oh yeah—try to explain it to that hothead how “the Bible condones slavery!” As is made abundantly clear in Good Lord Bird, [James McBride’s literary and TV adaptation of Brown’s life] nobody was as obsessed the the Lord back then as was Brown, and never did the Lord have to sit through so many interminable prayers as he did from that fellow:

    (https://www.amazon.com/John-Brown-Thundering-Jehovah)

    Now, there are mentions of slavery in the Bible. They were misrepresented by Southern slaveholders to reinforce their hand with divine power. But they are so thoroughly lacking in historical context that any thorough and/or balanced researcher sees it promptly and knows enough not to extract from it biblical support of antebellum Southern slavery.

    The slavery in the Bible was a volunteer slavery—an impoverished Israelite as a last resort might sell himself into slavery. It was a humane slavery—slaves by law were not to be beaten. It was a temporary slavery—temporary unless that slave wished to make it permanent. And he was not to be put into such straits that he had no choice but to remain enslaved. At the end of the ‘temporary’ period—the seven year jubilee cycle, that slave was to be released with a gift from the owner he willingly subjected himself to—so that he could hit the ground with his feet running upon release from his time of slavery.

    It’s so far from the slavery of modern times that all but the willfully blind ideological historians will realize you can’t extract from it support for Civil War era slavery. True, not all slaves were Hebrew slaves. It is possible a rich Jew might come to own non-Hebrew slaves, as spoils of war, as was universal practice at that time. There are few details in the Bible about this. But since the Mosaic law mandated kind treatment for animals, one can hardly imagine it condoned harsh treatment for humans—certainly not enough to prattle on about how “the Bible condones slavery” when the premiere historians of that age knew it did not.

    (To be continued here)

     

    ******  The bookstore

  • Ulysses Grant and Wife in the Aquarium

    Ha! Look what I have found in Grant, by Ron Chernow [large print edition]:

    Chapter 40 begins with: “Upon quitting the fish residence in late March, Ulysses and Julie Grant conducted a sentimental tour of familiar haunts . . . “

    It was the Fish residence, not the fish residence. What! Does the editor think they lived in an aquarium? Hamilton Fish was his Secretary of State. The two came to be close friends. 

    I can’t tell you how happy I am to see this. Do you have any idea how devilishly hard it is to chase all blips and typos away in a manuscript, especially if it was your own writing and you read, not what is there, but what you think is there? I still have a few typos in ‘Go Where Tom Goes.’ Probably the blips I have would completely escape the notice of anyone but an obsessive, OCD, picayune, nitpicking person, but even so, there are some. Nothing as egregious at this, however! The ‘fish residence,’ indeed! And this is from a commercial outfit that is not a one-man show, as I am. Oh yeah, I am vindicated. 

    I am all but done with Grant—not completely, but almost—and have expanded into some of Douglass’s writing. The feeling floated in the first post of this thread intensifies. Lincoln freed the slaves. Grant strived to complete the job. He was relentless in defending southern Blacks. He broke the back of the original Ku Klux Klan. He came to be known as a champion of human rights in general. The feeling grows that he would have completed the job were it not for Andrew Jackson sandwiched in between he and Lincoln. 

    This is speculative, hardly a sure thing. The racism Grant faced in the South was fanatical, sustained, and virulent. No end of incidents occurred in which Blacks were attacked and murdered by white mobs, not clandestinely, but out in the open and with boasting.

    Ten years into Reconstruction, the zeal of Northern reformers was waning. People will devote themselves to a cause for only so long until they get discouraged by reversals and go elsewhere. Time and again Grant would send federal troops South to enforce peace. The moment he withdrew them, anti-Black violence would erupt as before. The Black vote drove white Southerners apoplectic. Though a constitutional amendment guaranteed Blacks the vote, reigns of terror became the order of the day so that few of the former slaves dared exercise it. There are elections on record in which the Black vote numbered less that 10.

    Meanwhile, Grant was increasingly undercut by his Northern base. The freed-slave sentiment had not been overwhelmingly strong to begin with—to some it was, but not enough—so that in the face of Southern intransigence, the sentiment in the North morphed into, ‘Time to move on.’ With his support eroding, once in a while—not routinely, but once in a while—Grant took his eye off the ball. Whenever he did so, violence unresisted took heart and became more entrenched.

    So maybe the fact that history placed Johnson in between Lincoln and Grant doesn’t matter. Maybe racial hatred would have prevailed for 100+ years in any event. On the other hand, it’s hard to escape the feeling that the racist Johnson sandwiched in between represents the time you ceased taking your antibiotics after you started feeling a little better, instead of finishing the bottle like you were supposed to, and the sickness came roaring back, stronger than before. Had you finished the bottle straight off like the doc said, the plague might have vanished for good.

    Some publication of ours that I no longer recall has described the Bible as a record of human history covering times when A) people paid attention to God’s will, B) people did not pay attention to God’s will, and C) people were oblivious or ignorant of God’s will.

    With Lincoln, Johnson, and Grant we have history in the C category. Specifically, it was history before the wheat began to be separated from the weeds. It was history before ‘the true knowledge became abundant,’ per Daniel 12. People did the best they could. Lincoln and Douglass both cited scripture frequently. What! You expect everyone to patiently sit on their hands and say, ‘Maybe someday we’ll know exactly what to do but since we don’t now we’ll do nothing?’

    Then, too, someday I want to return to the sentiments of the Gettysburg Address—that ‘government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from this earth.’ Why was that such a big deal, so that it would be the cause that would push the North into fighting mode against secession but the abolition of slavery would not?

    Lincoln’s two-minute speech was not the highlight of that day. He had been invited almost as an afterthought, with no surety that he would even come; presidents didn’t travel much back then. ‘Maybe he’ll just tell jokes,’ was the attitude another of the GC professors attributed to him. The Grant book has some cabinet participant—I think it was Chase—grumbling that all Lincoln did was tell jokes during cabinet meetings. Of course, Chase was not one to joke himself; he wore his piety on his sleeve. Even from within Lincoln’s first-term cabinet, he promoted himself as the next president, which made other cabinet members livid. However, Lincoln said he still got the better use of him. Besides, he knew what it was to be smitten by the presidential bug. Besides again, he thought it well to apply the adage, ‘keep your friends close and your enemies closer.’

    The main event was a two hour speech from a Harvard orator by the name of Everett. Two hours was standard fare for a speech back then; 3 or 4 hours was not unheard of. Lincoln’s speech was two minutes. He had worked hard on it;  it wasn’t jotted down hastily on the back of an envelope as folklore has it. He dismissed it himself as a pretty meager effort upon taking his seat. Many newspapers accustomed to tonnage savaged it. But Everett himself said, ‘You said more in two minutes than I did in two hours.’ So what is this ‘government of the people, by the people, and for the people’ that carries the day? Why does it do that?

    It’s because it is a breakthrough advancement in human rule, the issue that is on front and center burner from the days of Genesis 3. With the founding of the U.S representative democracy, here was something significantly new, a major advancement in the evolution of self-rule. It was the ‘human experiment’ that must be nurtured and encouraged to thrive at all costs. Slavery, on the other hand, was NOT at first considered a violation of ‘natural law’ (this, according to another GC professor) Steeped in evolution, the framers of natural law initially considered slavery an advancement. Historically, nations had killed those vanquished in war. Making them slaves instead was an improvement!

    Up till that time, human government had consisted of straight-up monarchy. Some variation in the quality/durability/benevolence or malevolence of that monarchy, but one-person-rule it had always been. Supposedly, Jefferson succeeding Adams was the first peaceful transfer of power in history between opposing political factions; up till then it has always been ‘King of the Mountain,’ with one king prevailing only by violently shoving the previous king off. 

    The ‘human experiment’ of government of, by, and for the people finds roots in Greece and Rome, before resurfacing in England, then blossoms full with the U.S. That’s the long tradition that Lincoln could draw on, as he could not with a straight-up abolitionist stance.

    The early adherents to the Enlightenment were ecstatic at the American innovation. With it, ‘the people’ had revolted, thrown off their ‘shackles,’ and discarded ‘tyranny’ for something presumed better—democratic rule. Proponents of the Enlightenment cheered this development. They kept an embarrassed, even horrified silence, at the other product of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, which descended into mayhem and murder. Historian Guelzo makes a big deal over this fork in the road in his lecture series on the History of Freedom. You can envision him waving the flag, but it still seems the idea has merit. After the dust had settled in France, came Bonaparte, then the cradle of the first Communists, and in the modern day [it is just me who says this, not Guelzo] FECRIS and MULVIDES. The country is the birthplace of the current craze to stamp out as ‘cults’ those thinking outside of the box; it can be nothing but mainstream human thinking for them. Human rulership without God is the innovation to be nurtured. Throw God into the mix and you are a cult. If He knows His place maybe you are not, but if He doesn’t, you are.

    Guelzo considers the American Revolution the triumph of emerging humanism, and the French Revolution the embarrassing defeat. However, one might note that the American Revolution did not get the job done. It would be some time before it became ‘self-evident’ that all men were created equal. The War that would press toward that goal, and succeed, before being reversed in spirit and often reality, would spill more blood than 100 French Revolutions. And the virulent racism that came to typify the Southern US had no parallel in France. In his seventies, Frederick Douglass toured Europe. He reports no instance of prejudice at all. Nor did anyone look askance on account of his second wife, a white woman.

    Civil War/Reconstruction Era consideration therefore makes a great platform for proclaiming how we need God’s Kingdom. If two of the most noble humans who have lived, with worldwide reputations to that effect,  both enjoying positions of foremost power, could have their best efforts so easily unraveled, what says that about human rule? At the very least, War/Reconstruction is the death-knell to those who insist God works through human rule, for He couldn’t possibly muck up the job more that was done in those handful of years. A decade after the Civil War’s conclusion, Grant would express misgivings that it had been fought in vain. Conditions had reverted to before. Slavery was gone, but the feudal system of sharecropping imposed by regional laws, later reinforced with Jim Crow policy, to replace it was little better and in some ways worse. 

    You don’t have to regard Lincoln and Grant as noble, though most of the world does. In these days of revisionist history, there are those who label them butchers, for they both presided over the slaughter of hundreds of thousands. Both were frequently called butchers in their lifetimes, especially Grant.

    It’s the best human rule can do. It did preserve the ‘human experiment.’ It did free the slaves—though just barely, and with myriad caveats.

    When I was in college, before my Witness days, I took an elective course on public speaking. The professor ragged continually on the virtues of voting. Student elections were coming up. He would not let up on his insistence that all must vote. I got fed up. Though I was by no means a rebel, when it was my turn to make a speech, I chose to highlight all the reasons you might not want to vote—not just for the student election, but for any election. 1) the candidate might be lying. 2) He (or she) might be sincere but prove powerless once in office. 3) He/she might change his mind, making one’s vote pointless. I did not then add, 4) how many of them go down to corruption. (The professor was sporting about it, acknowledging valid points had been made, even though he disagreed with the thrust, and he gave me an adequate grade—not like one of those ideologue professors of today that you have to agree with or they flunk you.)

    It only takes one torpedo of the four to sink the ship. Neither Lincoln nor Grant has serious problem with 1 or 3, but they both got stymied by 2. Lincoln did pretty well by 4, but Grant well-neigh lost his entire reputation to it. His administration was known for its corruption, even as he himself was always thought honest. He wasn’t the greatest judge of character. He would express shock when presented incontrovertible proof that ‘friends’ had betrayed him—a frequent occurrence. Other times he would stand by ones who anyone else would have abandoned because he had not yet been presented incontrovertible proof. One one occasion, his incontrovertible proof took the form of an empty bankbook. He had been sweet-talked into a scheme that proved fraudulent.

    When faced with certain ruin at the end of his life due to crooks leading him astray, he at last steeled himself to dictate his memoirs. Some of these strutting generals started in on the memoirs almost the moment the Civil War ended. Grant had steadfastly refused. When on his post-presidency world tour, dignitaries would ask him to review their troops. Grant would reply that he had seen enough troops to last a lifetime; he didn’t want to see any more.

    At the time, he was all but on his deathbed. He would die just days after completing them. It wasn’t for himself that he did it, nor for ‘posterity,’ but for his wife, so that she would not be left destitute. 

    Mark Twain was a frequent guest and witnessed him at work. Twain was amazed that for hours on end, up to the entire day, Grant could dictate his notes just once and they would be near-perfect prose, with no need of revision. He would neither eat during this time, nor drink beyond the bare minimum, because his rapidly deteriorating health was aggravated by both, and he wanted to finish.

    Both Lincoln and Grant were honest men who, when in office, did not line their pockets. The idea of a president having to sweat his financial future plays absurd today, but it was not so then. The problem was best alleviated by dipping one’s hand in the till, as is routine today—people emerge from government service with far more than their salaries would suggest.

    In contrast, Mary Todd Lincoln (who spent heavily) complained that her president husband was “too honest to make a penny outside of his salary.” And Grant immediately felt the financial sting upon leaving office—though not enough to forestall a round-the-world tour so long as the money held out; he was not overly given to fretting about the future. Imagine! Grant’s memoirs of the Civil War would not exist had he not faced financial ruin at the end of his life.

    All these ideas I hope to expand on some day.

     

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  • “The Crimes of this Guilty Land Will Never be Purged Away but With Blood—John Brown and the Civil War

    (See Part 1)

    On the day he was to be hanged, A09D9CAD-D6BD-47AB-BFFE-6688D27B3E39John Brown handed a note to a guard written the day before: “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.” 750,000-person’s worth of blood was spilled in that Civil War.” It was blood spilled in payment for a moral failing, is what John Brown was saying.

    Both Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S Grant, the 16th and 18th presidents of the United States, came to hold and express that view. At Lincoln’s second inaguration, after four years of bloody war, the reelected president expressed hope that the fighting would soon end, “yet if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the [slaveholder’s] 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said 3,000 years ago, so still it must be said, ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’” He did not exempt himself from guilt. It was not an ‘us versus them’ speech. How could he condemn the South for not ending slavery when he knew of no easy solution himself?

    Says Ron Chernow, author of Grant, the 18th president, as both general and president, also “deemed the war a punishment for national sins that had to come sooner or later in some shape and probably in blood.” I am reminded of how, at the Martin van Buren home, a National Historical Park site, the hatted ranger told me that no president after Andrew Jackson served more than one term because “the challenges leading up to the Civil War were thought to be unaddressed by those presidents.”

    They were “addressed” in that war. Per Brown, Lincoln, and Grant, they were addressed with buckets of blood. As a punishment for sins? You’d get no argument on that from those men. There is such a thing as ‘community responsibility.’

    That inaugural address of Lincoln’s was overall praised, though the non-religious persons grumbled at his “substitution of religion for statesmanship." He himself allowed that the address would wear well over time, but not immediately, since “men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them."

    Tom Pearlsnswine, the fellow who mortified me by muttering about the ‘wiles of Satan’ when I was dumb enough to invite him to tag along with us on a visit to the dinosaur museum, the fellow who puts the dog into dogmatic, was not at all happy with this above historical discussion. “What does this have to do with the Bible?” he spouted. “These men were all bloodguilty,” he fumed, as he took another bite of his Bible sandwich. “Stay on topic!”

    Even given his confidence in preservation of the union, even given his confidence in emancipation, would Lincoln not have agreed with the ‘bloodguilty’ charge? North and South were appalled at the phenomenal loss of life—far eclipsing the walk in the park some had first envisioned the war would be—and Lincoln, a man with a conscience, was commander in chief. Couldn’t he have gotten the job done with less blood? Wasn’t it his fault if he hadn’t? “If there is a worse place than hell,” Lincoln remarked, in the aftermath of a staggering slaughter under the leadership of a particularly incompetent general (Burnside), “I am in it.”

    Ten days before his death, Lincoln related a dream to friend and bodyguard Ward Leman. He was in the White House. “There seemed to be a deathlike stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. . . . I went from room to room; no living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along.” At length, he came upon a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments, surrounded by mourners and guards. He asked who it was. “The President,” was the guard’s answer. “He was killed by an assassin.”

    Ten days later Lincoln was killed by an assassin. Ones who regard such premonitions as impossible have denied the dream report, but Lincoln was well-known for relating portentous dreams.

     

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  • Sometimes Human Justice Gets in the Way: Lincoln and Grant

    I’m no longer reading up on Lincoln. I’m reading up on Grant. Ted Putsch would like both, I think, and may already be well-versed. Both men were raised in lowly circumstances. Both were unusually humble and defenders of the lowly. Both were continually sneered at by elites. Both made emancipation of slaves their chief mission.  Both . . . wait for it  . .  found occasion to suspect habeas corpus. 

    A younger relative of mine is libertarian. It motivates everything he does. The first factoid he ever learned about Lincoln was his suspension of habeas corpus. That was enough for him to permanently place Lincoln on his evil-person list. From there, he immediately bought into the invective that Lincoln didn’t give two hoots about freeing slaves—his sole concern was preservation of the union.

    In fact, from the very beginning, Lincoln purposed that quenching the ‘rebellion’—such it was called at the time—would go hand in glove with destroying the

    C310023A-5C17-4D88-A657-B2B02AAF6E5E
    institution of slavery. But he could not     just outright say it. He knew he had to first build a consensus. Many were the northern abolitionists who did outright say it, and they were immediately marginalized into a minority camp. Minorities don’t win at the human game of government. William Seward (by far the front runner leading up to 1860–everyone supposed he would be president, not Lincoln) also did say it, giving a lofty speech invoking a “higher law.” Not only was he marginalized by those to whom the sole mission of freeing slaves was insufficient motivation, but he was also marginalized by those who supposed there was no higher law other than the human experiment of ‘government by the people.’

    The only way Lincoln’s Emancipation would fly in all the North, not just with the abolitionists, was for him to sell it as a military strategy. White northern troops fretted over who would mind the household while they were gone. White southern troops had no such concerns; their slaves could keep things humming. Free those slaves and the playing field was leveled. In fact, it was more than leveled: those slaves would begin to conspire against their masters.

    Two sacrosanct, as human principles go—standards of justice took front and center stage in the Civil War years: state’s rights and habeas corpus. I can see Putsch railing against any infringement of either:

    ”Tyranny …. in soft measured voices, done in secret, and with powdered silk gloves is STILL TYRANNY.”

    Oh yeah, I can easily see it! And I’d tend to agree, in a relative sense—but only a relative sense. Fact is, such lofty human principles stood squarely in the way of a far greater good: the liberation of hundreds of thousands of enslaved people. Robert E Lee personally loathed slavery. He had never owned a slave. But he took up the call of what he considered even more sacred. ‘State’s rights’ became his clarion call. Consequently, he signed on to command Southern troops, enshrining slavery as the ‘right’ of the state to decide, not some meddling Union to impose their standards from afar.

    ‘Man is dominating man to his injury’—even (and in this case, due to) when they run by their own self-invented concepts of justice. In the greater removed picture, looked at from our time, only the elimination of slavery matters. One Union should split into two? It’s like what Bud said when he threw away the anti-rattle clip he couldn’t figure out how to reinstall—“What’s more rattle on a Ford?” So it is with human self-government. What’s one more division of mankind in a sea of many divisions?

    Here the two bedrock principles of American justice, habeas corpus and state’s rights, stood squarely in the way of real justice for hundreds of thousands of Blacks—for Whites too, for that matter, since Jefferson wrote of the South: “The parent storms [in domination of his slaves]; the child looks on . . . puts on the same airs . . . and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities.” 

    One is reminded (a bone for science-fiction aficionados) of ‘Childhood’s End, in which the alien overlords paid no attention whatsoever to ‘state’s rights,’ immediately and decisively ending the cruel spectator sport of bullfighting. 

    Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus was a measure he deemed essential to preserve the Union, which action would enable the freeing of slaves. Certain journalists were openly encouraging desertion from the Northern army. ‘I should shoot some guileless plowboy deserter and not the guileful propagandist who induced him to do so?’ he posed.

    Grant’s suspension of habeas corpus during his presidency is more directly connected with the welfare of Blacks than was Lincoln’s. In the early days of Johnson’s presidency, the Ku Klux Klan arose. Reports were that it commanded the active participation of 2/3 of southern Democrats whites, and the tacit participation of the other third. By many measures, Blacks were worse off than during slavery. The white aristocracy manipulated them into situations just as oppressive but with no obligation to provide for them.

    Unspeakable and well-documented atrocities became routine. Not only might Blacks be easily beaten or killed, but also white Republican southerners who aligned with them. Murderers could not be brought to justice. Witnesses were too intimidated to speak out, and with good reason; no jury of peers would convict Klansmen, and the retribution against witnesses would be severe. Grant sent in federal judges, and suspended habeas corpus in enough instances that Klansmen would turn upon each other in efforts to get off or gain lighter sentences for the crimes that a non-federal judge would excuse. Within a few years, he had broken the back of the Klan. It’s later reemergence is in name and ideology only (just as Baal worship kept coming back, even though guys like Elijah would clean it out from time to time.)

    Habeas corpus and state’s rights—noble as far as human principles go, but not a guarantee that evil cannot, not only exist, but prevail. 

    Anyone thinking that God works through America (or any other country—America being the only topic of consideration here) is invited to look at the Andrew Johnson administration. “Be Like Abe” flies, as does (to a lesser degree, but still doable) “Be Like Ulysses,” but not “Be Like Andrew.”

    By the end of the war, Abraham Lincoln succeeded in bringing justice to Blacks. Andrew Johnson undid it all. Grant’s work was to undo the damage that Johnson had wrought and he largely succeeded, but only temporarily. What justice might have prevailed if Lincoln had been immediately succeeded by Grant, with no Johnson in between? 

    Like Lincoln and Grant, Johnson too was brought up in lowly circumstances. He too was a self-made man. There the similarities end. Johnson was intensely racist. He was intensely vindictive (at first) to the former Confederacy, favoring severe punishment (akin to that imposed on Germany after WWI?) in contrast, Lincoln had been completely non-vengeful. Worse, vengeance was personal with Johnson. Vengefulness was a way of getting back at the aristocratic elites who had ridiculed and looked down upon him all his life. Northern abolitionists, who also (unlike Lincoln and Grant) favored harsh punishment for the South, at first thought they had found an ally in Johnson. But in fairly short order, he gave up despising the southern white aristocrats, and began kissing up to them, as though hoping to be anointed king of their club, his racist orientation a perfect match for theirs. 

    God works through human governments? What if there had been no Johnson, and Lincoln’s ideals carried directly over to Grant. Shortly after the war, General Grant’s man told local transport companies in New Orleans that if they continued their practice of segregation, he would ban all that company’s cars from the road. According to Ron Chernow, author of Grant, “once the original hubbub over desegregated streetcars subsided, the locals had cheerfully adopted the new system and the excitement died out at once.” Chernow cites it as an example of the “startling early revolution in civil rights [that] would be all but forgotten by later generations of Americans.” What if Johnson had not come along to poison the well? Don’t you think if God ran the show through human government, he would not have?

    A little bit on roll here. Sorry. I just wanted to kick back a little at those who think human standards of justice from the Founding Fathers are the bee’s knees. They're better than their absence, generally speaking, but sometimes they get in the way of true justice. 

    To be continued . . .

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  • Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Why the Fall?

    The speaker Sunday quoted Edward Gibbon (The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) on the peaceful nature of the first-century Christians:

    “It was impossible that the Christians, without renouncing a more sacred duty, could assume the character of soldiers, of magistrates, or of princes,” Gibbon wrote. I included that and three similar quotations in I Don’t Know Why We Persecute Jehovah’s Witnesses: Searching for the Why in the Statecraft chapter. I chatted up the speaker after the program and he had about fifteen such quotes.

    What he did not say is that Gibbon did not admire Christians for their course, as the out-of-context quote might suggest. It was not a plus for him, as it is for us. It was a minus. It is what he holds largely responsible for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, that innovative development of human rule he champions and is sorry to see go.

    Here are the other three quotes presented in Don’t Know Why:

    “A careful review of all the information available goes to show that, until the time of Marcus Aurelius [121-180 C.E.], no Christian became a soldier; and no soldier, after becoming a Christian, remained in military service.” (Barnes: The Rise of Christianity),. “It will be seen presently that the evidence for the existence of a single Christian soldier between 60 and about 165 A.D. is exceedingly slight. . . . Up to the reign of Marcus Aurelius at least, no Christian would become a soldier after his baptism.” (Cadoux: The Early Church and the World). “The behavior of the Christians was very different from that of the Romans . . . Since Christ had preached peace, they refused to become soldiers.” (Platt & Drummond: Our World Through the Ages)

    They’re not positives for Gibbon. They’re negatives. They sap the will of the country. Let people drop out and who’s going to fight for the Fatherland? Notice that Gibbon goes the farthest in uncovering what Christians would not do. It’s not just soldiering they abstained from. He extends their abstinence to being “magistrates” or “princes.” It ruined the Empire, he says, to have vast swaths of people turn their attention elsewhere, consumed no longer with the nature of the king but with the nature of God and Christ and of the interplay between them. They weren’t taking a stand against the government. They weren’t refusing to obey it laws—in fact, they were pretty good at obeying laws and not stirring up mischief. But they weren’t pulling for the then system-of-things, and this is what Gibbon laments. Rome would in time encounter invaders whose people were 100% behind the cause of human rule (theirs), and then it was goodby for Rome.

    So Gibbon didn’t like Christianity. It torpedoed what he thought was the grander project of an innovative system of human rule. Of course, it soon morphed (apostatized) to become less of what he did not like to embrace more of what he did like. In time and by degrees, Christians veered from staying ‘no part of the world’ to decide that they were the ones to fix the world by any means possible. If political maneuvering and wars were among those means possible, so be it. Constantine converted to morphed Christianity, transformed it from persecuted minority to in-time persecuting majority. He did not get baptized until on his deathbed, after he got all that warring out of his system, so even then was the notion that Christians renounce the violence of the age. It was common at the time, says J. Rufus Fears (below), for persons to postpone baptism till the last moment and undergo it as a sort of final cleansing act—a far cry from churches in the present day who perform it on babies as a sort of introductory cleansing act.

    2DA2789F-8898-4A8B-9DB8-B6DD38CA60BDGibbon’s condemnation of Christianity is found to various degrees in countries of the here and now. Western ones, by and large, allow religion to be religion. They grant freedom of worship as a fundamental right. But other governments are more machiavellian. Yes, you can have your religion, they say, but religion must know its place. It must not only be subservient to ruling powers, but must advocate for them. For many human governments, and many students of human government, it is not ‘he who is not against us is for us.’ It is ‘he who is not for us is against us.’ Anti-cultists in particular build upon the notion that it is wrong to depart from the mainstream of rule by human efforts. Any serious consideration of a ‘God’s kingdom’ that calls the shots is disagreeable to them and, they would have you believe, to you. The human experiment of self-rule is what must consume people. It’s wrong to sit it out, they maintain,

    (A History of Freedom, J Rufus Fears, Lecture 11:  Gibbon on Rome’s Decline and Fall)

    To be continued…here

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  • The Forest in Symbolism and History

    Could this really happen? 

    “Absalom was riding on a mule, and the mule went under the thick branches of a large tree, and his head got entangled in the big tree, so that he was suspended in midair while the mule he had been riding kept going.” (2 Samuel 18:9)

    That’s one bad boy of a tree is all I can say!

    Maybe the problem was the mule. 9966A8AB-262E-4143-B56A-46A12C52ABD9 “A mule will labor ten years, willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once,” wrote William Faulkner. Absalom’s mule may not have kicked him, but it sure did do him dirty, hanging him up so hit man Joab could off him.

    Maybe it was was the forest. You ‘can’t see the forest for the trees,’ but in this case Absalom can’t see the tree for the forest. 20,000 combatants died and “the forest devoured more of the people than the sword did on that day,” says the verse just prior (8). Maybe it was one of those ‘Lord of the Rings’ forests.

    ‘Lord of the Rings’ forests are built on a solid tradition of forests being treacherous, even places where the Devil hangs out! 116BEC57-458D-4F1F-B90F-A5EF81889517Mistress Higgins is forever trying to lure folks into the forest for unsavory shenanigans with ‘the Black Man.’ (The author of the Scarlet Letter, Nathanial Hawthorne, modeled her after a real person, Ann Higgins, who was executed for witchcraft in 1656.) That forest was one foreboding place, where “the boughs were tossing heavily above their heads; while one solemn old tree groaned dolefully to another, as if telling the sad story of the pair that sat beneath, or constrained to forebode evil to come.”

    But at the same time, push deeply enough into the forest and break freeeeee! or at least settle for that illusion.

    “Backward to the settlement, thou sayest!” Hester remonstrates with Dimmesdale. “Yes; but onward, too! Deeper it goes, and deeper, into the wilderness, less plainly to be seen at every step; until, some few miles hence, the yellow leaves will show no vestige of the white mans tread. There thou art free! So brief a journey would bring thee from a world where thou hast been most wretched, to one where thou mayest still be happy! Is there not shade enough in all this boundless forest …”

    Guelzo (without quoting Hawthorne—that’s mine) points to early writers of American history with this Janus-view of the forest. (Janus—the ‘two-faced’ god facing both left and right) Fearful, on the one hand, but promising on the other. Though the ‘promising’ is for an ‘unpromising’ reason. Press into the forest deep enough and you can escape your own screw-ups from the past! The early American view of history according to Guelzo? “Don’t have any, don’t need any, don’t want any.”.  In new America, the “human experiment” can begin anew!

    (“Gimme that fruit!” Adam said. “Let the ‘human experiment’ begin!” ‘No, no, no,’ God tacitly says. ‘You’ll screw it all up! Trust me on this, you do not want to usurp the duty of telling good from bad!’ ‘Nah,’ comes the reply—what can go wrong?)

    It’s not winners who came to America. It was losers, those driven out for religious reasons, crushed by financial reasons, or refugees from ‘man dominating man to his injury’ reasons. The first settlers “were radical Puritans who were looking for a way out from under the thumb screws of the Church of England. It was only after every other avenue of escape [was] closed off to them that . . . they turned to those vast . . . countries of America” (Guelzo) And “looking over the bow of the Mayflower what could they see [but a] hideous and desolate wilderness full of wild beasts and wild men. Why, said [William] Bradford, even the air, diet, and drinking of water in America would infect their bodies with sore sicknesses and grievous diseases.”

    That forest was a dangerous place, make no mistake. It remained ever dangerous in waves of westward expansion, though fear was mixed with growing confidence as humans invented, and then led, with bulldozers Upon reaching the coast and finally conquering the forest, what remains?

    “Space—the final frontier,” intones James T. Kirk, introducing a show that would have been dead on arrival were it not for Lucille Ball. The forests are all conquered, some trees rounded up for a ‘tree museum’ for which you must pay a dollar and a half just to see ‘em! (Joni Mitchell) Space is the new frontier. Boldly going where no man has gone before! What is discovered out there? Guys that look just like us, save for pointed ears. Is that evolution great stuff or what!? Pour me a double-shot of it!

    What do aliens gain from their new contact with humans? “One damn minute,” Spock pleasantly responds to one of Captain Kirk’s commands. He’s learned to swear! He had just spent the entire 45 previous episodal minutes on 20th-century earth; he had time-traveled there for some reason and Kirk had told him to use profanity. Keep tuque pulled over ears, swear, and they’ve never know you’re not one of them, he tells the Vulcan.

    What a stupid, brain-dead, ignorant stab at science fiction prophesy! How unrealistic! However, had he said, ‘One f**ken minute,’ the forecast would have been spot-on. That’s the course ‘evolution’ has taken.

    They didn’t learn that in no forest. No way. They were in all their civilized glory when they adopted that new norm.

    To be continued:

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  • “Besides, the English Don’t Like Women Much Anyway”—on Voltaire, Van Gogh, and Darwin

    No, Charles Darwin did not do a stint as a clergyman—much less get yelled at by his superiors for not shaking his parishioners down for money—he may have thought about becoming a clergyman, but he never actually did it. How could I have written that he did?

    I’ll tell you how. It is because I recalled the Darwin story from Irving Stone’s historical novel The Origin. Irving Stone also wrote an historical novel of Vincent Van Gogh (Lust for Life), and this is the fellow who flunked out as a clergyman (a missionary, actually) in his younger days, not Darwin. This is the fellow who wouldn’t shake his parishioners down for money, not Darwin. This was the fellow who “went native” to share the work and living conditions of those he was assigned to, not Darwin. This is the fellow who was dismissed for “undermining the dignity of the priesthood,” not Darwin. Ya wanna check your facts before you let fly, Harley? You remember half of them wrong, you know.

    Fortunately, I do check them, but once in a while some blooper slips through—as another one almost did when I savored a new unflattering portrait of Charles Darwin from a review of a new book by A.N. Wilson. At least, I initially thought it was of Charles Darwin. I had even begun the process of cutting him down to size as payback for his evolution—I have borne him a grudge for years over that—relishing the revisionist’s biting words that he was “cruel, oversexed egoist”—I imagined the possibilities in answering one of his godless followers who ponders “the fundamental mystery” of how “a man he finds atrocious could have spoken to him so deeply.” “I’ll tell you how that could happen—it’s because you…” I saw myself beginning my tirade with glee, and then I noticed it was Charles Dickens, not Charles Darwin—and I like Charles Dickens’s work. I have even adopted many of Dickens’s lines, such as that of Miss. Pross, defending like a lion its cub against the wicked foreign woman who would destroy it: “I am stronger than you. I thank heaven for it.”

    They are both D-names, and both Charles—it’s a easy mistake to make.

    All is not lost. Van Gogh serves my purposes as well as Darwin, because the intent of all this is to segue into Voltaire. Van Gogh, too, was ground up by the church, as was Darwin, only in a different way. He, too, can be used to introduce Voltaire, who spent his life eviscerating the church and the way it ground up people. In fact, Van Gogh serves better that Darwin, because his trampling of faith reveals more starkly the Church’s amassing of wealth for wealth’s own sake, and that was one of Voltaire’s constant themes—that the clergy used the wealth they accumulated so as to lead corrupt lives. Not too much had changed in France, apparently, in the century of so between Voltaire and Van Gogh.

    And Darwin was British!—how in the world could I have had him doing a clerical stint in France? Even as I wrote it, I knew something didn’t quite square, but I was on a roll and couldn’t stop.

    Of course, many things did change from between Voltaire and Van Gogh—most notable is the French Revolution that intervened. Voltaire skewered the clergy of his time—whoa! did they hate him for it!—but he remained always adamant that atheism was for fools—just because the tour guides are corrupt does not prove there is no museum. The ‘Book of Creation’ was enough to teach anyone not self-blinded that there was a God, he maintained, and he was much taken with the common-sense of verses like Hebrew 3:4, that “every house is constructed by someone, but the one who constructed all things is God.” If you come across a well-stocked home in the midst of a barren desert, are you going to maintain that no one designed it? It took years of atheist machinations to undermine the obvious sense of that one.

    They rose to the occasion, though. Let no one say they are not industrious. If people are intent on breaking free from God, do not underestimate their ability to rationalize it. The heart chooses what it wants and then charges the head to devise a convincing rationale to it. Voltaire’s followers were on the cutting edge of “enlightenment” heading towards the French Revolution that would cost so many heads, but they soon fell into disfavor for being too conservative—their movement passed them by—and many of them were among those whose heads were severed by the guillotine. When a mob gets rolling—watch out! Voltaire directed public fury at priests who abused their power, but he did not waver in God’s existence. It would take the next generation, some claiming to stand upon his shoulders, as Newton did on Galileo’s, to throw the baby out with the bath water.

    Surely, the most egregious of abuses of the clergy were curtailed by the Revolution, if for no other reason than the royalty disappeared. French aristocracy prior to the Revolution forbade offspring to work—work was for commoners—so it became a problem for royalty to find suitable careers for their offspring. There was always the Royal Court, there was always the military—that’s why there were so many 21-year old colonels—and there was always the clergy to which one might appoint a young man as archbishop. Young men being what they were—and these French aristocrats being what they were—they would often hire at a pittance some underling to tend to spiritual things while they themselves would revel in riotous, immoral, and luxurious living.

    Voltaire liked the English way that he picked up on during his exile there. There, only the number one son of nobility could not work—all the remaining ones were launched somewhere into the world of human enterprise. There, only those with long devotion to the church—not some nobility’s snotty kids—could be appointed to high clerical station. By that time, Voltaire notes, all the womanizing and drinking had been refined out of them, if not by spirituality, then by age alone. Their excesses against their churches were fewer, he notes. He is ever writing humorously on such things, and at this point he takes it to a new level: “Besides, the English don’t like women much anyway.” Ha! Bingo! Listen, I may not know much about Voltaire, but I do know about my own family. My great-grandfather was English. He had six children, and yet the family name managed to die out in but two generations! Meanwhile, the other side of my family has produced enough children to fill a stadium.

     

  • Things Voltaire Didn’t Say

    Here is still another “Everything you thought you knew about such-and-such is wrong” revelation. Voltaire DID NOT say, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” He never said it! 

    In fact, it is a double “everything you thought you knew is wrong” revelation for me because I had somehow got it into my head that Patrick Henry was the one who said it. He who said “Give me liberty of give me death!” must surely have said the latter phrase as well—if you would say one, surely you would say the other—throw it on the stack! and somewhere in popular folklore someone did just that. But he didn’t say it. When I went to verify it on the internet, I was re-directed to Voltaire as the true source.

    Now I find out that he didn’t say it either! He said a lot of “enlightened” things, and so, here again, some revisionist thought: What is more enlightened than dying for free speech? Throw it on the stack! If he said other enlightened things, who’s not going to believe he said this one as well. He didn’t

    The Great Courses professor, (I am on a Great Courses kick these days) says it is the bane of Voltaire schlolars—everyone thinks he said it—it is practically the defining declaration of his to many—and he didn’t. 

    This is pretty common—to append statements to famous others whose backgrounds suggest they might have said it because they have said other things like it. Any acerbic, pretension-deflating statement about human nature you can attribute to Mark Twain, for example, since he said a lot of stuff like that. One of my favorites, on how he would relate that when he was 16 his father was so ignorant he could barely stand to have around, but was amazed at 21 on how much the old man had picked up in those few short years—he never said it! Or at least there is no record of him saying it. This a great hazard for me, because I love to quote Mark Twain. Check before you quote.

    It is similar to how David Splane said the Watchtower decided to no quote the Mahatma Gandhi line, supposedly made to British Viceroy to India Lord Irwin, that “when your country and mine shall get together on the teachings laid down by Christ in this Sermon on the Mount, we shall have solved the problems not only of our countries but those of the whole world.” It’s a great quote, says Brother Splane—we love it. But we can’t use it because there is no record that the two ever met.

    There’s a danger in attributing your lofty thoughts to someone else because you may find that they are not quite lofty enough to think that themselves. Alan Kors, the Great Courses professor, says Voltaire would never say something like that. He’s not going to fight to the death so someone else can say something stupid because he savored his life too much. It’s a pretentious statement—just a little too showy. I’ve always distrusted it. Who’s really going to do that? Let the merits of the fellow’s own argument cause him to rise or sink without dragging others down with him. Now—if you had a heads-up that what was going to be said was truly brilliant it might be another matter. But…

    Well, if he didn’t say it, who did? His biographer. Evelyn Beatrice Hall, writing under the pseudonym S. G Tallentyre. She wrote that line herself in ‘The Friends of Voltaire’ (1906) and served it up as an example of what Voltaire would have stood for. She’s drinking too much of her own Kool-Aid, apparently—no way would Voltaire have risked his neck to sponsor the cacaphonous mayhem of Twitter.

    The professor does not mention Sturgeon’s Law—that is me who mentions it—but it fits in nicely. “People who say that 90 percent of science fiction is crap are correct, but then 90 percent of anything is crap,” Theodore Sturgeon said. This has been truncated into: “Ninety percent of anything is crap,” but the original quote included a reference to his own profession—that of writing science fiction. I know this, because he was the guest speaker on campus once upon a time, and I heard him say it.

    Voltaire should throw his life away for 90 percent crap? I don’t think so. If a dolt can’t get his dopey message out, that’s his problem. I may not say: “Look, throw the idiot off the forum, won’t you?” but that’s a far cry from being willing to die so that the world may hear more 90 percent idiocy—there’s enough of it to go around as it is.

    Does not the Word celebrate the right of anyone to be heard? Alas, at times the it celebrates shutting people up. “It is necessary to shut their mouths,” Paul says of some, who “keep on subverting entire households by teaching things they should not for the sake of dishonest gain.” Sure. “They want to be teachers of law, but they do not understand either the things they are saying or the things they insist on so strongly,” he says of others. (Titus 1:11, 1 Timothy 1:7)

    Those 90 percent people cause a lot of trouble.

    ******  The bookstore