Tag Archives: Mel Gibson

Personal Identity

Posted on November 20, 2009 | 1 comment

This is a brief introduction and a reposting of an old Facebook Note.  The Facebook note is one of series about Jesus and the Gospels which I did and which I began to post here within other notes on Veterans Day. I feel the need to get that whole series on to this blog within a reasonably brief period of time. So this is the continuation of that set and is also about identity as I am aware of my own identity today.  I am very aware of all that I have and have not done and all that I have going for and against me today. I also am thinking of Oprah Winfrey’s retirement and Sarah Palin’s book tour. These are two strong personalities whom people relate to as people and who are doing something to define and redefine themselves in the public eye. So I am using this occasion to post this Facebook note and here it is.  

I am still trying to get to a total of 52 Facebook Notes by my June 15 birthday. A birthday is a very personal kind of celebration and is less shared than almost any other. Only twins and other multis fully share a birthday when one is talking about the kind of birthday Americans of my generation celebrate. I have so many varied memories of this day and so many people have almost no significant memories of that day. Then there are a relatively few people who remember sharing it with me. People who happen to share this date of birth are like earth-like planets around other stars — perhaps similar but so far mostly unrelated. A birthday is in large measure a celebration of identity.

Identity is a complex thing. Certainly it can become complicated to discuss and define it.
I wish to discuss some of it now. I think that my parents, who were much younger as my parents than as any other of my syblings’ parents, lived in a generation that were much aware of seeking after their own identity. The search for Identity is certainly on of the great quests of mythology, scripture, history, fiction and ordinary life. Most of us during adolescence have at least some time and inclination to consider who we are and who we would like to become. I have had more than an average amount of leisure for such questions. Partly because of the family and country I come from but partly because of who I am. I have been robbed, assaulted, threatened, intimidated with cut-off electricity and confinement and tempted with all the blandishments of money. sex and power (in a small degree) but I have always remained me — there has always been a whole lot of me that could not lose itself in this process. I still had the problems and flaws that were my problems before and I still had the strengths and accomplishments that were mine before. Many people are less immune to outside influence than I am. There are again various reasons for that fact being true. I will not be able to go through them exhaustively in this note for sure.

However, I am at a point in my life where I know that identity is not the same subject it was for me in adolescence. Like most people I have figured out a great deal more about who I am now that I am 44 than I knew when I was 17. However, there was a lot in my life that was never going to be identifiable and understandable mostly as a question of identity. But identity is important to me.

I think that one part of my identity is that I am willing to make a little trouble. I am willing to raise a little hell, lower a little heaven and then join the fight on Earth when the huge ruckus stirs up. I am not sure that very many people enjoy peace more than I do not am I claiming that I am an invincible super-fighter. However, I am willing to seek out and engage adversaries, opponents, enemies and others with some alacrity and some frequency. I do this in games and sport, in politics and in varied forms of discussion. I do not mind mixing it up.

When we think of all the great power of stars, galaxies, strings and clusters of galaxies we certainly feel small and relatively insignificant. There is a great deal of truth to that insight but it is not the only relevant insight. We are relevant to ourselves and to those around us certainly. It is our responsibility to take ourselves seriously to some extent. It is even our responsibility to be in our corner and love ourselves to the proper (and not to the improper extent). There may be something very wrong with many of us when we get overheated asserting ourselves as Black, white, gay, straight, men, women, Hispanic, Acadian, Mensan, Jewish, Muslim, German, Italian or Buddhist. But there would certainly be a lot more wrong with never trying to figure out who we are, never trying to be loyal to those associated with us, never trying to present our own moral sensibilities to the world around us.

I am the kind of person who is born with a relatively narrow window of approach to both survival and hope . However, I am no one of the very few such people who against almost all odds really find that niche and manage to make it all work out. Rather I am perhaps one of the near also-rans. I look at the unknown relatively numerous outliers who never have known even as close with the world in which we live as I have had upon occasion. I have a good number of friends who have worked far less at paying jobs, have had more trouble with law enforcement and public health officials and have generaly shown more evidence than I of hanging on the very edge of the body politic and public society. We have all go to define ourselves to some degree by our relationship with others.

I think of the song put out a few years back by (then very young) country singer Jessica Andrew that went approximately like this:

“If I never win a Grammy,
That will be all right….
Sometimes I am clueless and I’m clumsy,
But I have friends who love me.
I know exactly who I am —
I am Rosemary’s granddaughter
the spitting image of my father
and my Mama’s still my biggest fan.”

There is a lot of depth and humanity to such a point of view. It is increasingly less credible and relevant today. While it is certainly true that there have always been very serious problems and evils associated with extended family and webs of well-defined relationships it is also true that such relationship networks are valuable at a huge variety of levels and in a huge variety of ways. They are every bit as certain to be valuable and precious to humanity as they are to be poor centers of absolute power. They are part of the very large and important range of troublesome issues and institutions which pay off handsomely when worked well.

We are reminded each day of the value which modern corporations and entrepreneurs put on their identity in business terms and for business purposes. It is simply impossible to overstate how badly a corporate Board of Directors would like to make a manager feel if that manager or executive allows outsiders to write checks on company accounts for their own benefit. However, I think that the struggle of the individual for recognition of his identity socially and otherwise is also a struggle to preserve that which is really precious.

While I have recently disclosed my interpretation that Peter was already important to the Jesus story even before Jesus approached him directly and almost anyone would admit that Jesus developed close ties to him as an Apostle on a variety of occasions. Nonetheless, the moment of the establishment of Petrine Primacy is a moment tied to identity. Jesus asks the famous series of questions about his own identity. “Who do people say that I am?” and “Who do you say that I am?”

Matthew 16: 13-20

“When Jesus went into the region of Caesarea Philippi he asked his disciples, ” Who do people say that the Son of Man is ?” They replied, ” Some say John th Baptist, others Elijah, still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets. ”
He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter said in reply ” You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God.”
“Blessed are you Simon son of Jonah. For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you but my heavenly Father. And so I say to you, you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it.”
(Jesus continues) ” I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on Earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” Then he strictly ordered his disciples to tell no one that he was the Messiah.” {New American Bible, parenthesis mine}.

The faith of Peter which is so fruitful for the Founding of Jesus’s church is tied to Peter’s confession of Jesus’s Identity. Peter had already tied so much of his own identity to the identity of Christ. this confession is fully shared among all of the Apostles and others following him from among the 72 on that occasion. Luke places his account of this event in the ninth chapter of his Gospel shortly after Herod Antipas’s double entendre that Jesus was John the Baptist whom he himself had beheaded. Jesus leads most of his highly committed entourage out of Galilee into the Tetrarchy of Batanea where Philip’s Caesarea was located. This was a central business hub for many interests inside and outside the empire.
Herod Philip’s relationship with his brother Herod Antipas was strained and while I can’t remember what happened to Herod Archelaus when Pilate had already ended all real power and even influence of that Herodian Quarter-king decisively. Batanea had a sizable Jewish minority and some Jewish villages with autonomy but was of the also ancient Lebanese culture.

According to the traditions of my ancient secret society whose interpretations I am disclosing in these end of year notes, Jesus led his disciples on this trip for five reasons. It was typical of him to be extremely efficient and to satisfy several goals with everything he did. Jesus was:
1. Giving Herod Antipas the slip for a while.
2. Bringing the first proclamation of his teaching to Jews in Batanea.
3.Smuggling identifiable good from his two most recent raids on the demon camps which he could currently under with Joanna and Chuza, Herod’s Steward and his wife.
4.Bringing leftover porkfish to be passed out to Batanean Jews and their families.
5. Meeting alone and secretly with the organization he had founded in his first desert raid which were his vassals mostly of the House of David but even including two foreigners and who were different from the church. This group chose and he chose for them a rendezvous outside of Galilee whenever possible.

The context is important because it shows both Jesus’s obvious material strength and success and also his obvious weaknesses compared to this city honoring both Rome and the quarter-king Philip. If a man who was able to build such an important commercial city was in league with the invasion infrastructure the Devil had described to him in detail at Caesarea Maritima and considered his barely Jewish brother Antipas too Jewish and if the resourceful Philip named this city for the Emperors of distant Rome and was himself only a quarter-king then what of a Prince with only a compound and a couple of carpentry shops, what of a Rabbi who had never finished his formal training, what of a Grandee whose wealth was four ovens, six unknown water platforms and a quarter share in six boats? What was a man who had to smuggle his loot to this city to hide even a few bags of mixed gold and silver figurines, insignia, weapons and medals to sell at low prices for secrecy’s sake? If he was dwarfed by the wealth of a quarter-king then who could he be? But in this moment the people still see him as miraculous doing something great and holy. In this moment Peter sees with his enormous practicality all Jesus is asking and yet looking at all Caesarea represents he still proclaims Jesus the Messiah and Son of the Living God. We fail to hear how astonishing it is and to hear Jesus’s confident accepting gratitude.

The Jesus of history was not the holy bum recent centuries have increasingly made him. But after the porkfish were eaten and the fine dinner for a hundred or so disciples at a big house was celebrated he and his followers had a few gifts and unreliable payment deliveries from Joanna to make it to the next big storm. They fished when they could and had the advantages of the bait sites but also shared these opportunities and spent long periods of time in prayer and discussion and preaching. They were warriors hunting and seizing a few times over four or so years and that is vital to understanding everything about them. But they were hunted far more by more than one enemy larger and better armed than they were, living in a manufactured famine and sought out by the needy in large numbers. Few people have ever lived under more strained circumstances all in all. I think most moderns really don’t believe the gospel story and so they do not see how this economic struggle and Jesus’s grace in it shapes so much of the accounts. Yet in his Master’s troubles Peter saw a Messiah and Son of the Living God. Jesus had saved his life and risked his own life for Peter’s already but still many would not have seen things as Peter did.

One of the things that takes shape in these notes is the idea that there has been a line of chiefs among the people who are now Acadians called the Basileus Arkadios and that Joseph Broussard — Beausoleil des Acadiens– was one of these. It is a tradition of my line of the secret society I am revealing that among those Jesus and his Apostles freed from captivity and certain death in the demon camps were a number of girls who were subjects of the Basileus Arkadios of that era. The Arcadians were a somewhat diffused and disorganized people with their days of statehood and wealth without equal (nearby) in a past far more distant than that of David’s reign in Jerusalem. Some Arcadians were then Jews in religion and legitimate line, some were God-fearing Gentiles of whom there were many among the people of Jesus’s time and some were pagans. They lived in there ancestral homes in ancient Arcadia in the North of Greece and in small semi-secret colonies across central Europe and the Middle East it is believed by our esoteric tradition that some of both the God-fearers and the Panist pagans met Jesus and the Apostles around Caesarea and brought him gifts from the king with his declaration of friendship and that some of them also traveled to bring token gifts of wine and bread to his mother at their compound in Nazareth. The gifts given to Jesus were a most rare blank scroll of joined sheets with no writing and a scroll from the Hebrew scripture in Greek as well as two amphorae of fine wine.Jesusit is said sent the scrolls to the Temple in Jerusalem and drank the wine with his gathered disciples local Jews and the emissaries.Some Panist left converted and did not visit the Grottoes of Pan nearby. Others it is said began to copy what they heard and some of it found its way into the lost book “the Sayings of Jesus the Christ” from which many gospel texts are drawn.

Whether or not the story is true it is a valued part of my identity that it is remembered. My identity as an (Anglo-)Acadian is much more precious to me because of the thought of the story. Jesus spoke to many Gentiles but always said his message was (at least chiefly and firstly) for the lost sheep of the House of Israel. On this point there is also an element of the warrior tradition which is relevant and unknown to the public church. The Gospels mention that at the last supper Jesus was told there were two swords and he said that such would be enough. Jesus’s entourage was often lightly armed and sometimes specifically unarmed. they had to sell identifiable captured arms and also to arm freed captives for the journey home. However, the legend is that Jesus had a weapon that was not a sword.

The weapon of Jesus was the mythical Shepherd’s Staff which was frequently carried by a lower ranking disciple attending upon him. The staff was simply shod and round at the bottom but had a concealed tip hidden in the detachable crook. The crook and tip could be joined as an ear planing adze and another adze tip was stored secretly. The whole snapped very tightly together and was wrapped also in a leather cord. This cord was also able to be run through the crook as a bow drill and a drill tip also hidden in it could be attached to one of two dowels joined by a cord which were snapped into the staff and then wrapped in their own cord. These dowels also held blades which allowed for making cuts on timbers in a variety of ways using the cord and the other dowel to manipulate them but ether could be held easily or used as a drill dowel. The whole drill could also be used as a fire drill bow. Jesus could also remove the dowel cord assembly and put it in his belt for close fighting while using the crook and reversed staff as a spear and spear thrower. John’s Gospel has Jesus crucified at Passover but places much of the story on or near the feast of tabernacles. It is in this Gospel that the cleansing of the Temple appears early and Jesus shortly after is approached by those wanting to kill and arrest him and in front of a great crowd retools his living water teaching. He says that he will make living water flow from those who hear him. Jesus actually gave this speech to observing demons and the huge crowd after his only cleansing of the Temple. He was letting them know that he was the one they suspected but did not know whose weapon hit their guards and punctured the heart. John’s distortion of the timeline is also a clue as to the totally extraordinary events of the year that Jesus died. According to some the “We” who rewrote John’s gospel from his original text were disciples who also had been or were Magi. The year when Pilate had begun to encroach each week a little closer to the holy court’s with the insignia of pagan Rome. That and killing the Galileans were signs of all out war and invasion. There is evidence That Jesus and his allies in the Temple maneuvered to have Passover called a month earlier or a few weeks later than the allowable time that year and only part of the usual crowd was there. Jesus entry and defiance in the market was a controlled outpouring of the `frustration before Pilate was ready. Under this theory or tradition Jesus was crucified on the day we would know as April 19 or something that year when there was a partial eclipse predicted by the Magi. I do not know the dates involved in their tradition and can’t find the right eclipses consistently on my search engine. But when one moves in esoteric one meets those who also move in it and the theory when explained properly makes some sense but it is not our theory. These Magi also believe that many unexplainable things happened that day but that he planned his crucifixion to coincide with the eclipse. Such persons would then have Jesus’s birth at about 6 BC rather than 1 AD. That is not the secret society of which I have been speaking rather it is another secret society that believes in Jesus.

It was also this staff’s dowel cord assembly to which Jesus attached the long strings to make the whip with which he cleared most of the Temple Market in front of the mighty Antonia Guard. Meanwhile shouting in Pilate’s establishment’s hearing that even having a market near the Court of the temple was a desecration. He shouted this in a Galilean accent while Pilate thought of how it must be to have killed Galileans offering their sacrifice in the Court of Israel itself. Guards were injured but most humiliating of all He slipped completely away. After that no tradition makes mention with authority of the Shepherd’s staff.

In the first film I ever saw with my ex-wife there is a scene that comes to mind here. In the Rand Haines film “Children of a Lesser God” Marlee Matilin’s character resembles the actress who plays her in being a deaf beauty. The character called Sarah has graduated from the school for the deaf where William Hurt’s Mr Leeds is teaching. He is sexually attracted to her but also wants to teach her to speak. After having rebuffed his attempts to teach her several other times she ridicules the facial expressions of another deaf student when speaking and a bit later says “I never do anything I can’t do well”. The tensions are not resolved there but there is the sum of her reasons. Whatever, the Apostles may have been originally they were suddenly preaching, baking, fishing, raiding, rabbinical students involved with a man with a lifestyle which is perhaps the most unusual lifestyle in history in its final set of combinations. They could not have felt that they were always doing their tasks well. Their belief in the Christhood of Jesus and their embrace of that identity is largely what sustained them through what is quite possibly the most unique apprenticeship in the human record.

As my own birthday approaches I think that we all receive much of our identity from what we have done with and made of our lives. Like Sarah in the movie we spend some of our time in and some out of our comfort zones. I find every physical limitation’s increase with age hard to bear. I had thin eyelashes and eyebrows all my life but now they are already disappearing almost and each wound of youth almost remains. I accept those personal weaknesses as part of my identity. But I also notice them as unpleasant.

I am writing this just before the wedding of some friends. I know that they are reshaping their own identities in the wedding. The two really do become one in so many ways. I have to shower now and get ready for the rehearsal supper. It is part of my identity to try to be presentable when I can. I think that we all understand the importance of identity. To know Jesus Christ’s identity has been a long journey for me and to know my loved ones also. I have rambled aimlessly to an end here. Perhaps I will complete 52 notes to tell you who I am before June 15 or perhaps not. Regardless I will be me and all I do must take that into account.

 
End of  Facebook Note–
 
I hope ye brave, ye few, ye proud — ye readers — will discover more of your own identity and of the identities of those about whom you ought to know more in this wintry season (or summer or otherwise depending on where you live). I hope the identity of Jesus Christ has some meaning for you as well.  

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Developing Projects and Policies: The Fine Art of the Now

Posted on November 17, 2009 | Leave a comment
I like to think of this blog with all its posts as a single grander project which joins together all of it components. Each page post and theme contributes to the totality of the blog in a way which enhances its own significance rather than diminishing it. Sometimes the themes may seem very remote from one another to some people but almost always they are themes which recur quite frequently in my life and writing. This post is pretty complicated in itself. It will combine elements of my interest in Christianity, film, space colonization and  writing. It is a fairly challenging post to read I think  — but I am not about trying to write for the lowest common denominator of talent exercising their minds at the lowest level of effort. That is why I write for ye few, ye proud, ye brave, ye readers.
I have been writing and drawing about colonizing craters on the Moon for quite a while. However, now we know that a specific crater on the pools has relatively abundant water and likely neighbors others with water. That means that water and crater like qualities currently coexist. We must now take this combination very seriously in contemplating our next steps in the space colonization enterprise. So I propose we develop robots to cap these wet craters early on and follow up with a short Apollo like visit to install key components and then launch a settlement ship. This small ship’s crew would see themselves as laying the foundations of a permanent human presence on the Moon as well as developing and pursuing their own short-term objectives. Here is small set of crude drawings of the LACRIMA (Lunar Advance Capping Robot Instigating Measurable Atmosphere).

LACRIMA - Lunar Advance Capping Robot Instigating Measurable Atmosphere

The second illustration is of the LACRIMA deployed as it varied stages and components have deployed to undertake various tasks. The drawing depicts operations before the first human short duration landing.

LACRIMA operating as a sort of terrarium developer.

 

The first human flight would bring an engine and cables for heating and power and would also have a Moon buggy to be left there. This would  be used to connect to solar array robotically deposited in advance outside the polar areas. The mission of the advance human team would be to connect this set of solar arrays to the crater as well as to install the engine, improve the cap and install a good port and elevator in the cap.  The second crew would bring advanced habitation components for the crater. A group would stay a short time and another group would stay on long-term.
There is a constant dialectic of changing steps and retaining long-term objectives in any great project. I am a Christian and I find in both the life Jesus lived among us and in the memory of his life plenty of inspiration  for development and courage as regards worthy objectives.  Here is a Facebook Note I wrote dealing with some of the thoughts I have about the life of Christ.
      
 Saturday, April 25, 2009 at 4:33pm |
I write a lot. I have written a lot. I read a lot. I have read a lot.I have often read aloud in public. I have taught people to read. I have taught people to write. Perhaps I can fill this note with these short declarative first person sentences on this theme. On the other hand, I may go ahead and try to do more. I have not been a very successfull writer compared to the tiny number of people who make huge fortunes from their writing. I have not even been financially successfull compared to the ten thousand or so people in the world who really earn most of their living from writing and live pretty well. I doubt that there are a lot more than that. Notice how much of you local paper comes with a local by-line. Then take that as a generous and very inflated glimpse of how many real writers jobs there are.

In this note I am going to do something that even I think is a bit odd and irregular. That I think is even a bit out-of-place for this type of note. I am going to use as one of my flow-in-flow-out points of reference a hypothetical writing task involving real, living and controversial people. I have in several notes recently revealed a long time secret esoteric interpretation of the New Testament. Now, just suppose it were to be commercially published outside of this little blog in the world of free access with only 499 possible subscribers as I type these words. What would be among the highest and best and most appealing uses for me? Where might it be best released?

Probably if Mel Gibson bought partial rights to the notes here as part of a prequel to Passion of the Christ called Life of the Christ that would be close to the best. Really my preferences would be that specific. Why?

Because he can make a good movie and movies reach lots of people who are hard to reach.
Because he cast real ethnic Jews in many roles and they look right.
Because he used original languages, imperfectly but better than almost anyone else.
Because both he and I might make some money and I could use it.
Because he seemed to interface effectively with a large section of the Christian community.
Because even though he filmed in Malta he got a better feel of the period at least than most.

I often watch media presentations about Jesus that are just plain horrible in my honest opinion. Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth and the Passion by Gibson stand out as among the best I have seen. Screenwriting is highly collaborative. I have done a good bit of work in newspapers and it is pretty collaborative too but not nearly as much as screenwriting. But all writing is related to a larger world than the page. I think that such a set of relations is often not given enough respect as being very hard to trace and analyze. On the other hand some quite literate critics and some illiterate dismissers also treat the nature of literature’s relationship to the real world as being hard to establish. They simply argue that it has no real significance.

There is no substitute for practice in writing. Jesus reading in the synagogue then preaching. teaching fro long periods of time at a relatively regular feeding of multitudes and training his Apostles and high ranking disciples. In that rhythm were produced stories and words that still compel many of us like no other words. Shakespeare, writing for a play editing when it did not work and then eventually producing one worth copying down and putting in the company chest. Such works have endured. Faulkner earned more money over almost the whole course of his life from screenwriting in Hollywood than from writing novels in Mississippi. Hemingway cranked out war reportage and did many stories in the first person about fishing and traveling. From that routine of work the literary Hemingway emerged. Enduring literature is born from the grind of human interaction, nature and writing more often than not. Writers write. they keep writing and they keep improving in a struggle to realize their dreams on paper and express their real life insights in their dreams.

Northrup Frye, a distinguished literary critic wrote a book about the influence of the Bible on literature and called it “The Great Code”. I was influenced by that book and enjoyed a great deal but its name has no overt connection to the esoteric interpretation of coded frames in the Bible which I have been writing about lately. rather he makes the important point of how scripture is a vital core and framework of understanding for subsequent literature especially English literature.

There is a great deal of the Gospel account which is best understood by the fact that Jesus was a literate story-teller and orator who by distributing wealth on a fairly large-scale while being interesting attracted a significant number of writers to his movement. Probably there were as many as hundred pamphlet like texts about him produced by those who knew him. St. John’s Gospel ends as follows:
“Peter turned and saw the disciple following whom Jesus loved, the one who had also reclined upon his chest during the supper and had said, “Master, who is the one who will betray you?” When Peter saw him, he said to Jesus, “Lord, what about him?’ Jesus said to him, “What if I want him to remain untill I come? What concern is it of yours? You follow me.” So the word spread among the brothers that that disciple would not die. But Jesus had not told him that he would not die, just “What if I want him to remain until I come? (What concern is it of yours?)” ”
“It is this disciple who testifies to these things and has written them, and we know that his testimony is true. There are so many other things that Jesus did, but if these were to be described individually, I do not think the world could contain books that would be written.” John 21: 20-25

In this passage the we who believe and are writing the gospel we have seem to suggest pretty clearly that they have known St. John who knew Jesus and have received an oral tradition from him. They suggest that John also wrote a book which is the basis of the current Gospel of John which they have edited. Finally they make very much the noises that one might make when there are many documents one did not get to include in a history and so one apologizes to the authors of those texts and tries to find an excuse for not included the tidbits and themes that one may have taken great trouble to make available. I am not sure that Mel Gibson could get a real clear feel for that across to his audience but he might do better than some have done. There is a chance that even I would feel the richness of the work outweighed its flaws.

John was an episcopos and an Apostle within the Church but though he is not named with Judas (definitely not Iscariot), Joseph, Simon and James as one of Jesus’s brothers by the people of Nazareth he was also a relative of Jesus and one of Jesus’s purposes in telling Mary that John was her son and she is his mother is to designate John as heir of such privileges within the house of David as he has it in his power to give. This is limited compared to some systems but John is now the man of the house in which his mother is matron which is temporal and not the nascent Christian church. I am aware that the public Christian church has never had a tradition that the holy family adopted anyone but in our esoteric tradition Judas and Simon were cousins whose mother was a descendant of the Maccabees and a fairly prominent one. Their father was a Zealot and a devoted one despite being a Davidian of prominence. He was crucified and while the family was in Egypt and then when they returned the mother and children came to live in a small house that Joseph built on the edge of his struggling compound. She died before Jesus reached adulthood. They were adopted but in a rather more loose and House of David way than other Jews would have used. It was through them that Jesus acquired his first ties ti the Maccabean element in Israel. James and Joseph the other brothers of Jesus were not blood brothers of Simon and Judas. While Catholic prayers seem to emphasize Joseph as not having had sexual relations with anyone it is our esoteric tradition that Joseph was Joseph’s son by levirate marriage to another relative who had lost a husband while they were in Egypt. She raised him as the dead man’s son until her own death and then without parent or siblings he was also adopted. Note that when the people of Nazareth mention his family they are ready to stone Jesus. He had tow near relatives who had met violent deaths and in the ancient world people frankly found it easier to kill people in that class. Modern people do as well but they are not as open about it. Jesus’s family business and household were substantial and although there were many dependents Jesus’s designated heir had more leisure to write books than some living in the relative communism of the early church. To modern ears this sound s hypocritical. But there would have been no church movement without the funds drawn from Jesus’s household at various times and in various ways.

The Gospels also make it as clear as they can that the Herodian dynasty regarded Jesus’s family as a very major threat. They remained more or less continuously at war with them. Herod the Great orders the killing of Bethlehem’s little boys to get Jesus. Herod Antipas is only a quarter-king but as Tetrarch he kills John Jesus’s cousin who is known as the Baptist. When he first hears of the ministry of Jesus he mentions killing John right away and then asks to meet Jesus. Everyone knew Jesus had a better claim dynastically to any Jewish throne anywhere than any Herodian did.

Jesus’s household was clearly not rich. Zealot assaults on cashiered mercenaries at the time of the death of the Holy Innocents in Bethlehem involved members of the House of David and Herodians were killed to in part as revenge for Herod’s atrocity in the most ancient seat of the House of David. This sort of conflict was not only unequal, easily terrifying and cruel it was very expensive for the Davidians. Though he generated a lot of wealth as an adult they were poor when he was born and always had many expensive burdens to bear. Nonetheless, John could afford to write.

Jesus grew up with double entendres and stealth as part of his extended family lore and his way of life. Jesus’s only land based attack is not mentioned in the Bible at all and is perhaps the most gruesome and shocking to modern sensibilities. Jesus recovered from his fasting and prayer, meeting with the Essene emissaries, leading the demon assassins into the lion’s den and he immediately met with Simon the Zealot, a group of unmentioned zealots and relatives and relates his tale of the Devil’s camp. There are pens of captives, huge supplies, torture chambers, guards and time is of the essence. He gets a handful of people to accompany him only one of whom will become an Apostle. He agrees to position them around the camp at night with an emphasis on opening the cages of the captives and setting them on horses and asses kept there with supplies and scattering to the winds. Then they are to take the loot they can killing such guards as they can and bring the loot to a place agreed upon. With about a dozen or so men he assigns all but one to this task.

The only assistant he takes with him is led to a prearranged spot with cages of birds dragging tiny bundles of fire starter on string and a couple of donkeys. The assistant set the fires and released the bird and as they flew over the camp the fire reached the strings and they were burnt through creating tiny bombs. All of this took place at night and so it had a stunning visual effect. The birds were then freed as well by the fire and disappeared. This was timed to occur when the first guard sounded an alarm in the main camp. The men in the larger group would attack at that time. Then the assistant would sling stones dipped in poison at those guards moving near his position. Jesus would be the only many leading an assault on the main cam. The only human assaulting it. Using asses dragging meat and a relationship with the now man-eating lions he led a pride of recently man-eating lions into the camp. The camp had literally a thousand armed men. The other smaller camp was unusually filled with camels and donkeys and packs of booty and unusually lightly guarded had many things not been very unusual the raid on the adjoining camp would have failed but as it happened the camp lost all its prisoners many trade animals and lots of supplies and wealth. A few prisoners were armed by the raiders and died fighting but only one raider died and not on site. When the guards from the main camp arrived they found burning tents dead bodies and little else.

Jesus held back in shadows with a sling and a bag of stones. Whenever a guard drew a bow or a spear effectively against a lion he hit the guard with a stone not caring much if he killed, wounded or stunned. He simply supported the lions letting the blood and food smells of the camp drive them into a frenzy. When groups assembled to attack or defend against a lion he picked a few targets and hit them. He kept this up for a very long time. Then with fires in both camps and the howls of men and the roars of lions he slipped away to meet his men. He never returned to the camp again. He never got a full report on the damage. But when he did return to the meeting place he had enough supplies to begin his public program. The skirmish itself is now lost to all history but there were laid the economic foundations of the Jesus movement.

Jesus then gave the real life speech on which the parable of the talents would be based (see Matthew 25: 14-30). Keeping a double share of the loot himself he divided the rest equally among his followers. Reminding them that he also expected there support within the coming campaign. Further any loot they could not take at that time he agreed to take on an opposite understanding — He would give them back a portion of the value he could realize from the loot upon demand after a reasonable delay. How much was this fortune? It was a significant loss to the fabulously rich demons but it was almost an immeasurable fortune to the struggling House of David. Through his interview with the Devil Jesus knew that the Devil saw three primary men to be eliminated in order to destroy Galilee. One was himself. The other was the most successful fisherman on the Lake — Peter. The last was Jesus’s mortal and hereditary enemy Tetrarch Herod Antipas. Jesus used the fortune in several ways, first he ordered several large loads of wood and supplies through his Household’s carpentry shop and then fabricated the platforms he had already envisioned for dealing with the swine. He used a silent partner to fund his distant cousins James and John to pay off their own debts and then to buy a share of Peter’s business. Thus unknown to any becoming their partner. He paid to have many amphora of fine wine switched with the ablutions water at the wedding of friends having hard times, all of this was wine seized in the raid.

While waiting for the wood to arrive he converted the now empty bird cages to fish cages with hidden compartments and hid a different currency of coin in each of the cages. These coins also helped to anchor the cages by weighing them down. However, there were animals, saddles, weapons and clothes he could not safely use or sell. Through Simon the Zealot he found that Chuza was in trouble with his Lord Herod Antipas for both using court funds to support Zealots and skimming some off for himself. Jesus met with Chuza and Simon and came up with a system where Jesus would send loot to Chuza who had the only institution in Galilee large enough to launder the goods. Jesus would take a fraction of the real value of the loot and allow Chuza to make a cut so long as both the debt incurred by the Zealots and his enemy’s own treasury were also enriched. All three in this set, Joanna, Chuza and Simon would sign off on each transaction. Joanna would bring Jesus and his disciples payment disguised as gifts and then encourage others of women of means to give to his ministry as well(see Luke 8:1-3). This real life experience was the basis of the parable of the wily steward(see Luke 16: 1-15).

Jesus then contracted with foreign merchants so that trade with Galilee would not fail. He ordered lumber, millstones and anything related to bread-making and wineskins. He also bought up most local production of these same items. He traded a brand new millstone in Galilee for anyone who would give him a used stone and a ruined or cracked stone. He traded a new wineskin filled with fine wines from his booty for anyone who would give him two badly used wineskins with any wine in any quantity enough to slosh audibly. He also contracted to build the ovens he would use. He was nearly broke except for a half dozen platforms, a collection of millstones, old wineskins of bad quality, a set of secret ovens and some very part-time help he could demand. With these resources and a handful of new disciples who barely knew him he prepared to face down one of the world’s greatest foes.

The basic schematic of the raids is laid out in my note titled “Easter & War”. As the calming of the storm would indicate, Jesus and his Apostles would cross the seas in a life threatening storm and only then. They would free the captive and drive the swine into the water they would slaughter and butcher the swine bringing only the fish shaped meat pieces to land. Jesus and Peter were seen on one of these platforms in the walking on water. The porkfish were baked on skeletons both of leftover feedings and form the piles of unusable fish fishermen left around. These piles on the shore are mentioned in Jesus’ parable of the net. Jesus always asked people to pass up food to be shared out at his meetings. The normal thing was that a good amount of food was passed up and mixed with the available supply of porkfish. The feedings mentioned in the gospel are manifestations or signs ( and therefore also risky) because the manufactured famine had reached such a point that the people in the crowd had only tiny amounts of food to contribute to the feeding.

Jesus used rituals, parables, acts of charity, instructions and acts of war all overlayed in the same framework of facts. While this gets even more complicated as it passes through layers of writers it was immensely complicated as he lived it. Yet on the other hand this redundant meaning approach made things simple, increased security and aided in his moral teaching ministry. while the phrase “pearls before swine” for example had a history it was used because the bones of the swine tangled in old nets and strings and sunk under water were like white underwater pearls. Some acts of his war are told in parables outside the ordinary form and also repeat technical instructions. Jesus wants his Apostles to find spiritual meaning in the work they do which is largely illegal by most standards. The teaching on scandal is the best example of this style of work.

Imagine the platforms on which Jesus and Peter walked on water as large wooden squares of planks mounted on a heavy timbered cross. The central section over the centermatched cross beams is not platformed. There a ring of pig bladders and skins are inflated and secured under the edge of the platform. A similar rim of inflatables is on the edge of the platform. An odd tube of old nets, sackcloth and trash is weighted down from its open mouth to the lake floor with a small rock. Int hat tube all intestines, pigs trotters, skins, heads and notable pig organs are thrown. Once the butchering is done a millstone is secured around the neck of the tube which is then tied.This is then thrown in and drag the tube down compressing the pig wastes. Later the platform is moved and the place will be the site of several great catches. All of this is done mostly so that Jewish children can eat porkfish and not starve to death while also avoiding scandal.

With that factual scenario in mind listen to the following quote from Matthew 18: 6-9,
“Whoever causes one of these little ones who believes in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea. Woe to the world because of the things that cause sin! Such things must come but woe to the one through whom they come! If your hand or foot causes you to sin cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter into life maimed or crippled than with two hands or two feet be thrown into eternal fire. And if your eye causes you to sin tear it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter into life with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into fiery Gehenna.” An honest and thoughtful reading will show many parallels unlikely to be coincidental.

Not every aspect of Jesus’s life is documented in some close code on the one hand or retelling in recorded parable on the other. For example the Gospels mention that he sent the sick to be examined by priests, that the manufactured mud pastes for eyes, that he encouraged people to give clothes to the poor and that he was involved with both baptism and healing baths. But there is no real evidence for what I propose as a normal Historical Jesus meeting per se. All lepers and sick people would be gathered first. A divider would go from the shore and into the the lake, dividing men and women bathers. All donated clothes gathered by his traveling followers from others would be given to those with the worst clothes. Those worst clothes would be burnt in the fire pits which heated the ovens elsewhere where the porkfish was made. A very unique and kind of crude but sophisticated soap would be given to the bathers. All those who were free of visual uncleanness after bathing and getting new clothes would be released into the crowd and told to confirm their healings with the authorities. Those still not well would receive what salves and bandages were available and be sated separately near Jesus. He would speak for a while and call for gifts of food to be offered to the front. His Apostles and others would mix these foods with porkfish and other goods they had and redistribute the greatly increased food supply to all after Jesus blessed it. Then Jesus would speak again after all had eaten and listened he would bless those in the section of seating for the sick and many would get well ( though obviously here Christians and atheists must see my scenario differently). Then he would encourage people to go to a section in the middle of the crowd to exchange any gifts that they might have brought with those in need. While this was going on he would allow questions from the crowd. After all of that he would usually dine with a prominent local resident for supper. This would be an all day affair requiring the work of dozens of people. He may have had between 12 and 30 of these days.

Jesus and his disciples hit each of a number of camps twice in raids and had a secondary feeding in most cases by moving small pigs to a wild site where they could forage and slaughtering them later. On each raid they freed all captives not killed in the fighting and used captives they armed with captured weapons though more captives were not fighters. The huge herds of swine also were deliberately chosen because as omnivores that helped create the famine by eating any human food available and not just grass. The demons also had a science of using the swine to foul as much drinking and fishing water as possible.Jesus and his disciples all veiled their faces during these raids.

These raids and feedings created the framework around which the rest of his public ministry coalesced. However, as Herod Antipas killed John the Baptist and began to track Jesus it became harder for Joanna to bring her payments. Pilate desecrated the great Temple in Jerusalem killing Galileans during worship and the Temple guard who had killed many armed foreigners did not dare risk an open battle. Then he was spotted walking on water. It is in this crushingly intense historic period of his life ( and not at some later date) that two things begin to happen. Jesus begins to state repeatedly that he will be crucified in Jerusalem and he increasingly supports and defends his reputation as a Messiah and a the Son of God. Son of God is a term rarely used for human kings in the Old Testament when they have a special mission from God but Jesus begins to push even this most lofty of claims to a higher place. He often spends all night alone in prayer. It is here that the Christ emerges whom atheists find it difficult to admire. However, the literary beauty of his teaching reflecting on all his life is still very sharp and sweet. As a verbal artist he is admirable to any one.

I chose the Mel Gibson prequel device partly because I do not wish to deal with the last week in this note. Gibson’s prequel should go to the Last Supper but I will leave off here. What I have to say about the unknown life of Jesus is largely said in covering these earlier months and years. The Gospels are a rich trove of insights even if not always understood as I see them. However, I hope that as long as we have biographies of Christ in various media there will be some I think are artistically worthy of the subject. I also hope that we will always have such biographies.

End of My Facebook Note–
I hope ye brave, ye few, ye proud, ye readers will find some focus and inspiration.  

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The Nobel Prize and Western Civilization

Posted on October 20, 2009 | 3 comments
Barak Obama’s recent winning of the Nobel Prize has captured world attention. For many people living in Western Europe and of European descent in the former colonies of Western European followers the Scandinavian countries are just part of the same Union as Italy and have little to distinguish them but the weather. However, I do not feel that way.
However, Scandinavians almost never complain directly and openly themselves. Hitler’s whole career was a long complaint about the corruption of the Nordic Race by southerners but he was not the head of a Norse state nor a Norseman. It is more likely that the Jews, Brits, Americans and Africans of whom I am much less critical in this essay will be the ones who complain.
 
In addition, there are those outside for whom all of these things are even. more obscure. However, I am not going to address the Prize itself. I am reprinting here a post from my Facebook profile written quite a bit before the awarding of the Nobel Prize. For more about the prize itself look up my entry from the day Obama received the prize. 
 
I am not a person who is excessively happy or excessively generous in my high regard for any current society but if this provokes any Scandinavian I can hardly blame them and it is not unintentional really.
To the post:
 
 
 
 Monday, May 4, 2009 at 3:36pm | Edit Note | Delete
I may go to Mexico ( I have tried many times lately) and want to do all I can to get to 52 notes by the time I reach June 15. So I thought a quick and easy subject that I could knock out in a few days would be Western Civilization. So in this note I will cover what 10,000 or so scholars have been writing about for the last 2000 odd years or so. Hopefully when you have finished reading it you will really know a lot.
I suppose that prior to really discussing Western Civilization one ought to define the terms “Western” and “Civilization”. That is certainly how Socrates would have gone about it and he is certainly one of the major fountains of whatever Western Civilization turns out to be. However, there is no group of people here to stand in for the young Athenian aristocrats I would speak with if I were him. Socrates is a major literary figure but was not a writer. His talent was for leading discussions. From his example of course we get the term Socratic method. The Socratic method whether written of in upper or lower case letters is still the principal technique in American law schools. I of course attended one such twice.

I have a fondness for Western Civilization. It strikes me as a thing worth learning about and keeping in perspective as one of the biggest and best things humans have done. However, it also strikes me as a flawed thing with many acts of wrongdoing which can be laid at its door. I also think that more than any other people the Chinese have reason to be a little paranoid as to why we have developed such an obsession with the study of Western Civilization under just that exact title. This note will not only deal with Western Civilization.

I think that all of human greatness is a subject and a reality far broader than Western Civilization. In fact I find that Humanity is far more rich and complex a topic than Civilization itself. Civilization is a mode of being  which is not an unmitigated good in fact. Civilization is many things but it is always a gamble there is a great deal of gambling in the structure of a real and honest civilization.Civilization causes us to all give up many things we want and could want more. Civilization causes us to feel a need for and consume things we might not otherwise consume. These dissatisfactions are very costly and there must be off-setting good results to justify them. Many patterns of life are determined by the civilization itself or its large corporate and collective organs. A vital and basically good civilization has an element of institutional preservationism, an element of planning some structured sharing. Civilizations without those things soon cease to deserve the designation. These are elements combined with a structure of optimism and gambling that is essential to the civilized stance and point of view.

Those civilizations which do not have an element of gambling in their structure have much greater evil making things go and are in fact not really civilizations they are to real civilizations what the creature described by modern writers following Stoker’s fictional vampire Dracula is to an average human. They keep up the appearances of life but without many of its most vital processes. Dracula is all about death and in the sun he is ashes but he claims to be immortal and does go in a sort of life for a very long time.

Unless a society is renewed continuously and in a way which is authentic then there is no way it can remain a real civilization indefinitely. I am fully certain that many civilizations are almost entirely dead before the force which actually destroys them appears on site.I have had a feeling much of my life that the civilization into which I was born had huge problems in its inner resources and workings. I have often felt that my life was really a profound hell in many ways. I still often feel that way.

I have written a lot about Jesus in these notes. I have also dealt a great deal with other forms and leaders who were Jews, as he was. Jews have played a large role in Western civilization however (though oddly Jew has come to mean someone who does not follow Jesus and is sure about it ) Jesus is their greatest flowering out into the world and is one of the very tiny number of people born before 1500 who truly envisaged his legacy as bringing something to all peoples and cultures of which he knew or did not know during his lifetime. He was an outgrowth of Jewishness and its highest expression in that regard. We may turn to this subject again in this note. But to sum up the Jewish thing is too much about just Jews on the one hand and about all humans on the other hand to be the direct foundation and centerpiece of Western Civilization. If one wants to make a silly and ethnocentric error which is the least incorrect then this would be it,”Western Civilization is spelled  “>-G-R-E-E-K”. If one wants to speak of Eastern civilization one should know lots about Japan, India and the Eastern part of Arab tradition. But if one wants to make the ethnocentric silly error which is least incorrect then it would be, “Eastern Civilization is spelled -C-H-I-N-A”. Greece and China aren’t even close to the whole story but nonetheless one could never exhaust either of their contributions to Western and Eastern Civilization respectively. They are of course very different countries.

I am proud to say that I speak truly deplorably horrid Greek and surpass it with almost superhuman butchering and botching of Mandarin Chinese. I think when one speaks these languages as badly as I do there is a sort of automatic respect which is born within one. I do not write at length in either of these languages. I do write badly at length in quite a few languages. However not in ‘Ellada or Putong Hua.

I think that reading Homer, Plato and Aristotle are essential to being well educated in the lore of Western Civilization I certainly openly advocate such readings. I have occasion to teach a few young boys whatever I wished for a few months full-time on several different occasions and I have always set up a schedule of a number of subjects rotating through each week. typically there have been five or so of these subjects but usually on has been the Bible and another has been what I call the Classics which always starts with Homer, Plato and Aristotle and not necessarily in chronological order.

Much like the Bible, Greek thought has been co-opted and sometimes hi-jacked by a variety of people with agendas which were intensely important to them and which were formed largely by reactions to the points of view held and expressed by other people trying to control the discussion of these same writers and ideas. However, the Greek world is truly very vast and very diverse.The Greece of Lycos the Wolf-man king of Arcadia and of Alexander the great are very clearly connected but are vastly different from one another. The Greek civilization of Septuagint and the Ptolemy dynasty are profoundly different again.

I could read and teach only Greek ideas and culture all my life and only that and scarcely make a good start. However, Homer, Plato and Aristotle are the things I have repeatedly chosen to teach when offered choices. They bring a person into the experience of the great Greek phenomenon of experience.

The New Testament is also written in Greek of course. it is drawn from sources written in Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic but all of those ancient books are lost and the texts closest to the best of them are the Gospels in Koine Greek. Christianity is certainly vital to the history of Western Civilization. But Christianity has universal obligations. A good Pope must be especially loyal to the city of Rome and also have a love for Jerusalem. However, a good Pope must also have some real space in his heart for the good of Beijing, Delhi and Lesotho not only the people who live there but even the pre-Christian cultures that flourished there. To be Vicar of Christ and not a great scandal is to be the vicar of the one who sent the Good News to the ends of the Earth.

The pre- latin people and other Italians, the Celts, The non Hellenic Egyptians, The Ethiopians, the Germans and the Norse each have a substantial history with Greater Greece that predates their own written history outside of Greek history. All of these groups who made a substantial contribution to Western Civilization from the inside were at least a bit Hellenized before they emerged as there own sort of thing. On could describe modern Western Civilization as that cultural system which emerged from:
1.The Hellenization of Ancient Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.
2.The Romanization of the Hellenic World.
3.The Christianization of the Roman Empire.
4. The Barbarization of the Christian Roman Empire.
5. The Fashioning of Christendom from the Teuton lands and the crumbling Empire’s pieces.
6.The survival and change of Christendom under the assault of Islam and the Norse raids and settlements.
7. The Renaissance process of remaking Christendom mostly with ancient Hellenic ideas.

The many important things that have happened in Western Civilization since about 1600 AD depend on all of these foundational transformations are react intensely to them. These 4000 years from 2400 BC to 1600 made Western Civilization a definite and real thing which still remains identifiable. Things have gotten better and worse since 1600 in all kinds of ways but much has stayed the same. I do think however that we are in a place where we could lose all that is left of this civilization.

I think that Western Civilization is in serious trouble. Things have gotten bad in ways sufficiently broad and mysterious to be difficult to detect, analyze or appreciate. However, our civilization will have to play some very fine poker or lose it all in my view. I am doing what I am currently able to get done to address that crisis but it certainly is not nearly enough. I know that for me society has always been flunking some test of what would be “good enough”. I see this tiny planet in a vast abundance of worlds and cannot help but believe we are very far short of making the grade. But in this pessimistic worldview  and yet I see the trend as downward towards worse and worse performance on the scales I am using to measure with in these matters.

One quality of Western Civilization is what some friends of mine and I used to call “the unbearable whiteness of being” that was a pun because of a movie called The Unbearable Lightness of Being. White Racism, White Supremacy, White Identity Preference and Snow on All Mountains are actually all distinct politico-social views of whiteness in the history of Western Civilization. There at least two and a half people left alive who can rationally discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each position and the differences each has with each other position. I personally believe that thought will probably disappear completely as what I could identify as thought within 5000 years if humanity lasts that long. I also think we are already missing huge areas where thought once operated in our species. Whiteness and race is one of the areas where thought has almost entirely disappeared. I find being ruled by a race into total imbecility distressing but have already acknowledged that my life has not been a happy one. I can pretty much guarantee you that whether or not the people you may think tower over me intellectually do tower over me intellectually or not — I am not nearly as impressed with their thought as I have been told I should be. However, I am impressed with thought and am not anti-intellectual.

When discussing whiteness there is something that needs ot be said. I don’t think a driveling snot nosed idiot of any color has the right after his own odor wakes him up to define whiteness. When I was in China I saw huge numbers of faces beneath the wintry skies who bright red blood flushed cheeks showed the cold as the epicanthic folds around their eyes shielded them from the dust particles on the huge winds across that vast plain. These dark-haired non Caucasians were white people though they did not refer to themselves that way. The three people I have had the most emotional affection for in recent years are named two nieces and a nephew Alyse, Anika and Soren with a German last name and two of them are about as Norse-Teutonic in color as one can get. All my nephews and nieces at this time have last names that sound German to me though one brother in law says his name is a Dutch one and not Deutsche one. However, I do not believe in a German master race and don’t plan on forgiving the German peoples living in Europe for the Holocaust at any time while I am alive. Nor do I forgive the US for not exacting more revenge.I do not advocate dictatorship but if I had been the US dictator I would have enslaved lower ranking Nazis and shipped them to fields in America with promise of serfdom for kids and freedom for grandkids. I would given half of the land holdings & fortunes of Germany to Germans from the colonies who left the country generations before it became a murderous insane asylum and I would have sold the other half to buy Sinai from Egypt and develope it as a second Jewish state in federation with Israel. If I had done that I would have thought I behaved too mercifully but would have applauded my forgiving Christian upbringing.

Maybe I would have had a couple different Teutonic type concubines and if any of the good looking German slaves had made passes at my wife I would have my free Creole overseer and a black African-American serf beat some sense into them. That sounds horrible I know. What it really is rather is Greek chauvinism. In fact it is Greek chauvinism already tempered by both Christianity and a sense of respect for Europe which no ancient Greek ever had. There is no path to my real goodwill available from here. I know many Germans and they may be fine people as is our Pope but they are all socio-moral bankrupts in my view. All who use the heritage and the nationality of Germany and Austria are morally broke. For many it is not their fault in the sense of sin. It is not all my fault that I do not have 5 billion dollars but I cannot require you to give it to me. To treat these people as my moral equals would be obscene. But Western Civilization was mostly dead by the time theat World War II came.

Having said this do I think the Hapsburg’s empire for so long was one of humanity’s great achievements?
YES, I do.

Do I think Charlemagne was deserving to be called at least a Father of Europe?
Yes, I do.

Do I think that Goethe, Saint Boniface, Meister Eckhart, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven made stellar contributions to Western Civilization?
Yes, I do.

Do I think the Germanic English despite murderous scandals, silliness and stealing credit from other Celtic Brits or socio-morally solvent?
Yes, not rich but solvent.

Do I think that the right wing Teuton chauvinistic Austrian Patriot Prince Metternich was a colossus in modern times and a fine Christian?
Yes I do.

So how can I justify my point view? Well, if for ten generations one has mixed feeling about hardworking neighbors of moderate talent who have gotten rich partly through hard-work and thrift then one says they are rich. But if one sees two generations sell all the furniture for drugs, burn down the house, beat and chain their daughters as naked prostitutes and paper the town in hot checks then one is entitled to give them a distinct credit rating than before. Money in this metaphor stands for morality. The neighbors stand for Germany and Austria. I refuse, knowing I offend some fine Germans on this list of friends to say I regard those countries as legitimate or their people as having face in Western civilization. They are the very, very poor relations of the family for at least as long as I am likely to live. The whites of the South are known for prejudice and holding a dim view of their neighbors both justly and unjustly. I know there are music groups and artists and others who call themselves ” niggers” without offense and I think policing language is doable but very tricky work. But I assure you that on occasion I have all the contempt any white southerner ever put in any word into my greetings of Germans and Austrians. How they can show their faces in the world and do nothing to deserve it as a country makes me sick. These countries are not alone among the guilty but they disgust me. I believe we live in an insane and evil world and perhaps they will be able to take legal action against me for saying things that hurt their feelings. I want my feelings to be understood abroad about these black sheep and the world has given much attention to the capacity of white Southerners for prejudice and contempt.

I do think Germans had some grievances and there are real problems they needed to address and some of them involved a great people dispossessed of their homeland long ago and not by Germans. However, the behavior of the Third Reich is the essence of obscenity The stench of it still clogs up the breathing passages of the world. I can’t take seriously our international system founded on so little punishment of such great offenses. Jews, Poles, Russians and intellectuals have rivers of blood calling for vengeance. We are not a church and I don’t much want to hear about of absurd platitudes. The erasure of sane temporal politics from Christendom is only one of the aspects of the nightmare world in which I live. The world we live in today is a suicidal waste pit of evil and despair run through with lines of delusion and insanity to relieve the monotony.Having said that I would have enslaved Germans after World War two does not mean that I would not recognize the distinction between races in my do-whatever-the-hell I want social order. White slaves with white children by free masters would be in a somewhat different position than black slaves behaving in the same way. That was how Greece built the Western world 4000 years ago and I do not think that the way we behave today is better, I really do not. I think there have been better times in between but they are not these times which are better.

So we can tell from a document discussing the fact that Socrates was indeed a white man what race meant in ancient Greece. It continues to men about the same thing to me now. Christianity tempers my views perhaps. The issue of Greece brings us to the Nordic peoples. Western Civilization has two very distinct historic poles. The diffusion throughout the world has been important but now we are living in what is ultimately a world civilization. When for millenia Western Civilization really was autonomous it had a North Pole which was Scandinavia and a South Pole which was Ethiopia — culturally speaking. Stockholm is founded on a set of rhythms and patterns that really do not flow from Greece. Ethiopia is also. However, whether they know it or not both have long been inextricably in the orbit of the Hellenic and post-Hellenic world. This is the very real orbit and rim of culture that delineated the edges of Western Civilization when Eastern Civilization and this civilization had not really merged to create a world civilization.

I would like to spend more time writing about Ethiopia than I am going to spend. I would like to explore African, Arab and Greek confluence. I would like to talk of ancient mixed race peoples and of the Shebaitic House of Solomon’s role in Judaism and Christianity. However, I will not get to that in any detail in this note. A great deal has been thought and written about how black these people were or were not. But I will turn instead to some of the whitest people anywhere. I will instead speak of the Norse.

Hitler divided the Germanic people into Alpine, Nordic, Jewish-influenced and miscellaneous racial types. The ideal he was trying to move towards was the Nordic type. No group takes its hereditary appearance as seriously as the Norse and I have no doubt some of the really evil minds that will never appear in history’s account but which shaped the Third Reich were Norsemen. I truly do believe that they are the most genetically distinct people in the world all in all. In many ways they resemble the true Mongols of the East but they are also very different. The Scandinavian countries are Norway, Iceland, Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Scotland for people and groups who call it Sutherland. The Scandinavians have almost always been a great race and occasionally a mighty civilization. They have seldom been a good people all in al and never been a great civilization.

Scandinavians have visited every part of the world and burnt the records of their travels they reshaped the culture of Ireland, Sicily and Russia. There has never been a historic China or Japan that did not have Scandinavian pirates somewhere in the background. Scandinavians traded in maps and technology in very significant ways and helped many people break out of technological impasses with the help of technology taken from neighbors. The ninth and tenth centuries AD are known as the eras of their journeys. However I am aware of another tradition. Outside of history and archaeology there are tales with the ring of truth of widespread war between Acadians that went on for almost a thousand years. In Acadian lore Scandinavians come from a people in Westernmost China who were isolated and very advanced who traveled for completely unimaginable reasons to rejoin their ancient and primitive related tribes who were almost a forgotten myth and lived in the frozen North. In the travel they passed through ancient Arcadia as slaves, refugees, pirates, princes and wizards for a few generations. It was this reunion which really marks the start of Scandinavian culture. I do not think that Scandinavians share any belief in this tale but it is what I believe.

Without discussing the Celts of Vercingetorix’s brave fall, the letter to the Galatians, Brian Boru’s victory over Scandinavian kings and the beauty of their art how can one discuss this civilization. Ancient Greece was largely defined by trade with Celts and war with Persia. However neither St. Columba nor the Irish Republican army will make it into this note. The Celts were a high and splendid Barbarism which Rome broke because unlike the Greeks they made provinces in preference to colonies. Greeks learned to make provinces when Alexander conquered the Persian Empire. But they never really loved to do this. Colonies, polises and kingdoms stirred the Greek soul. Only in the Eastern Roman Empire did Greeks learn to love the system of Empires and provinces. So the Greeks warred with Celts but they always lived together and enriched each other. The Greek’s resented and opposed Roman influence but could adjust to it more easily than the Celts. That is why one thinks of Ireland and Wales when one says Celts although the culture extended from the British Isles to Turkey.

I have not discussed the United States, France, the United Kingdom or Spain as countries. I think that all of these countries have a great deal that can be seen as their contribution to Western Civilization. However, it troubles me how little many well educated people in great countries like Japan, China, Iran and Ghana understand about the formation of culture in these countries and others. I have mentioned in a recent Facebook Note about having Mel Gibson do a film on the Life of the Christ. I admire Mr. Gibson very much for his feel for Western Civilization. It is not that I trust him personally. I would never be sure he and I were pushing in the same direction if he made a movie from my notes about the life of Christ. But his polemic and corrosive film if he made one would probably satisfy me more than the efforts of many people who think that they share the values and views I might declare. He may or may not agree with anything I care about all though he claims to I think. However, he sees and can show how people and peoples are made and is not willing to just make things so cheap and easy that they are ridiculous to all.

Jesus Christ belongs to the Jews especially and to all humans and these are the big realities and to all Christians as a faith and that is the biggest reality. But Jesus is also the magic that makes Western Civilization. One who really understands Western Civilization can readily see huge amounts of data about the health and progress of our civilization from our civilization’s view of Christ. It is a test on which I do not think we have ever gotten an A+. It is somehow outside and beyond questions of religion and spirituality our destiny to be so judged. Jesus more than almost anyone who ever lived saw his own legacy in terms of periods. The Period of the Bridegroom from his Nativity to the Last Supper, the Hour of Darkness which is the period of Mr. Gibson’s first film, the Period of the Church and then the Eschaton or Fulfillment. From pagan kings on the borders of Constantine’s Rome or Armenians who declared the first Christian state many people in the West have struggled for a long time to understand how Jesus and the Pagan Hellenic political science or Teuton Kultur go together or in Saint Augustine’s terms how the City of God goes with the City of Man. Jesus himself left us vast wisdom and quite a bit of room to maneuver but it has always been the battleground of many determined and very different people. This has made a difficult task nearly impossible.

If Greece is ultimately our culture and Jesus is ultimately our conscience then what is missing. Neither Jesus nor Greece gave us a capital. Rome is the Capital of Western Civilization. That is actually Rome’s greatest achievement in my view. It is not insignificant. In Rome our center hold in some way none of us really understand but for reasons that fill libraries as well. Only in the Forbidden City and the Temple of Heaven in Beijing China have I found anything which approaches the feel of Rome. They are very different. Rome is more our cultural capital even now when we are hardly existing as a unity than Beijing is China’s cultural capital.

I know that most people on my Facebook list have roots in Western Civilization. However, I have noticed that everyone seems to have settled for a version of our history I do not recognize. Most of all though I am writing a bit to provoke thought and reading in those people who are not from this background. There was a time when Western and Eastern civilization were really separate and while linked by the Silk Road, the lives of many individual people and many other ties they were nonetheless really able to be seen almost as two worlds on the same planet. I think there will be elements of that reality forever or as close to forever as we get. But it will not likely ever really be that way again and it should not be. In addition there are many cultures not really tied so closely to the distant roots in China or Greece and I think knowing something about the way our civilization was formed is vital for them as well.

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