Chaitanya Jyothi Museum Opening, 2000
RAMANAM
In the Name of The Father, and of The Son and of The Holy Spirit, Amen.
Countrymen,
ORBIS NON SUFFICIT
SOLUS DEUS SUFFICIT
Sacred scriptures are subjected to direct pollution and perverse readings during their eons-long service.
Direct pollution occurs as emendation, excision, and elaboration (revising, removing, and attaching). All sacred scriptures acquire pollution through ordinary (uninspired) human discharge of those processes.
Perverse reading occurs as eisegesis, ideology-driven selection and subversion of the doctrine of inspiration (reading in what is not there, reading out just what one wants and denying the normative authority and completeness of sacred scripture ipso facto). All sacred scriptures undergo perverse readings through ordinary (uninspired) human discharge of these processes.
Sacred scriptures also — at least most of them — undergo purification through labors of sages and divine personalities. Vyasa, for example, purified the Vedas during the Krishna Era, about 3800 BC. Sathya Sai Baba has purified the Ramayana during this Sai Era. St. Jerome purified the Bible (and here) during the Fourth Century AD. In each of these cases, the sacred scripture had been polluted textually and was being read perversely.
The Koran is directly polluted and perversely read and, so far, no sage or divine personality has undertaken the task of purifying it. Ordinary (uninspired) clergy and scholars are incapable of purifying the Koran.
Facile typesetting, printing, copying, and distribution make direct pollution of sacred scriptures very attractive to very many. And perverse reading of sacred scriptures is a constant of times dominated by fanatics of one persuasion or another, namely, the fancying of money, sex, and/or control of land, language, and persons.
Fortunately, the same facility and ubiquity which allow pollution and perversion also allow preservation of sacred scripture, and there are enough willing to do that to make it happen. I am sure always there will be. It does not take many. Wheres, it does take many to start a wave of fanaticism based on mangling sacred scripture.
One such mangling, in particular, is the focus of this post: socialists’ mangling of the Parable Of The Good Samaritan. Mangling this parable is the fetid fountainhead of collectivism. Socialist thought — humanist thought — and mania for rule by cabal — by oligarchy — spring from reading this parable as a lesson in man-driven compulsion rather than a lesson in God-centered volition. A socialist is a fanatic: what God wants done freely through His Grace, a socialist wants done under his and her orders. A socialist, indeed, places himself and herself in the place of God — the definition of hubris — only, he and she make a very poor god while piling up heaps of unnecessary misery and death all about them. They promise utopia and deliver waste land.
Struggle, war is a necessary constant of civilization. Misery and death consequent upon fanaticism are neither necessary nor constant. They are imposed unnaturally, from outside human nature and the normal concourse of life, by fanatics acting as if in the stead of God. Whereas, struggle and war are natural, arising necessarily and constantly from inside human nature as normal concourse of the human condition in life.
The Parable Of The Good Samaritan is propounded in answer to a bumptious and petulant question from a Jewish lawyer: who is my neighbor, meaning, whom does Jewish law dictate I accept as my people, for whom I bear responsibility, to succor, at least minimally?
As always with such questions from Jewish elites, Jesus the Christ rejects the legal and racial framework of the question in favor of an existential or phenomenological framing of it. The law is an ass. It is written and administered by lawyers whose interest is themselves. It cannot even approach much less approximate the sublimity of the divine life. Law is a blunt instrument for roughly forging semi-agreements about very, very mundane disputes. And no more. About justice law is heedless. About religion it knows nothing. About life law is ignorant. And about divinity law is transgressive.
Law whips bodies but intent to harm resides in hearts. Law reaches not the source of transgression, it cannot.
So Jesus the Christ asks the questioner who in the parable shows mercy, a universal and known trait of divinity. The questioner, who could reject the premise of the parable were he not a professional disputant (litigator) with knowledge of Micah 6:8 — a canonical (legal) scripture — and who has exposed himself by asking a question that can be turned against him, has to answer that the Samaritan does.
Now, Samaritans were despised by First Century Judaeans, aka Jews, such as is our bumptious lawyer. Legal and racial intolerances caused them to regard Samaritans as less than neighbors, unworthy of consideration. Footprints for that phenomenon exist in the books of Kings and Chronicles, which recount travails of the two kingdoms formed from the kingdom ruled by King David and his son Solomon.
The lawyer is more than a little trapped. But he answers truthfully, which speaks well of him.
And Jesus the Christ says to the lawyer … what, then? Form a political movement to agitate for laws which mandate everyone traveling, or not traveling, directly aid and pay taxes for aid to anyone set upon by brigands or any other difficulty? Construct a taxation-based, bureaucrat-administered welfare system to ensure no one is harshly treated or bereft of appropriate — amount to be determined by venal, showboating politicians and bureaucrats — food, clothing, shelter, education, income, medical attention, personal security, emotional comfort, freedom from surprises, ability to obstruct procreation, and occasion to become a sodomist?
Did Jesus the Christ, concluding the Parable Of The Good Samaritan, establish, by compulsion of law, the foundation of collectivism, which exists only through compulsion by government (aka the barrel of a gun)?
Is Christianity Communist?
No. But Judaism was and its successor, Talmudism, is. Any legal, social, religious or political order which compels charity — or any other religious virtue — is Communist.
Read the Parable and make your own observations.
Jesus the Christ advocates the Divine Way, the way of volition and freedom, the sole source of morality (treating persons as free individuals) and ethics (describing the treatment of persons as free individuals).
Christianity is descriptive. Judaism was and Talmudism is prescriptive. This is the difference between mercy and law, volition and compulsion, freedom and demand.
Judaism ceased to exist in 70 AD. Since then, including today, what claims as Judaism is Talmudism, a rather marvelous finery of dissembling legalese. Nothing related to God. A hollow egg.
Jesus the Christ illustrates the divine quality of volition and calls persons to the Grace of His power from the pure fountainhead of their own.
Update 1: Law Grad Responds To Fundraising Appeals From ‘Greedy’ Law School: ‘Go To Hell, You Parasite’
Update 2: “A woman named Meleanie said she reluctantly voted no.
I find that it is a real danger that once people just get their basic needs covered society doesn’t feel responsible anymore to look after the ones who can’t really handle the situation on their own, she said.”
Now that’s a significant point. Bob Theobald did not deal with that one, nor had I. It’s an argument against guaranteed income, and I think a clincher.
Basically, the Great Society concept and programs, introduced by Ds but supported later by Rs, does just what the lady anticipates: gives people free stuff so as to self-justify abandoning them as humans. The result is as the lady anticipates and was no doubt secretly desired by its architects.
I and others long have said Great Society was a way to keep blacks down, and voting D. And it worked magnificently. This lady describes the mechanism for accomplishing that: give ‘em toys, pacifiers, make ‘em think you’re taking care of ‘em. It’s dehumanizing, deliberately dehumanizing.
Theobald did not see that, or he did not say that he did.
Update 3: The Historic Jewish Enmity Towards Christianity
Update 4: In May 1970 I was in Phoenix, soon to move to Wickenburg, researching a book for Robert Theobald: Habit and Habitat. Before the book completed and was published (1972), Theobald ripped up my research (January 1971), literally, telling me no one would believe it.
My source was The New York Times.
I parted brass rags with Bob, informed the editor, asking him to remove my name from the project and book, and renounced claim to royalties. My part of the advance was not recalled because I completed my work. Bob published the volume under his name with glancing inclusion of my research.
I was as interested in anti-war protests then as I am now: zero. Never struck me as more than small-potatoes intrinsically and extrinsically mostly glandular turbulence. And, for a steadily increasing number of drug-addled visionaries, anti-war protests embodied lefties’ well-led (by KGB for one reason, CIA for another) brazen and ruthless march against Christian culture. That march, then and still — not anti-war protests — strikes me as big-potatoes.
And incidentally, industrial and agricultural pollution in 1970 also was big-potatoes. It was so big it presented lefties with a target opportunity they could not possibly fail to miss or exploit. I had documented a book’s-worth of it.
Update 5: I think these so-called elites are really stupid. Up and down are the reverse of what elites say they are. The elites are the thugs, bottom dwellers, sub-civilized, unrefined boors, lower selves.
The smart ones are those who are tolerant, not ambitious, gentle, kind, fair, careful, loving, studious, who cultivate the happiness of their families, pray without ceasing and accept and savor the circumstances of their life. I think “elites” have a rendezvous with the confessional, like it or not.
Americans are the smart ones. We have no orders of nobility. We make our way in this breathing world. And a fine way it is.
Ischinger is saying, among other things, that if USA makes bilateral agreements with current EU countries or with Russia without EU concurrence on USA’s side (multilateralism), EU will come fully apart. He is right about that.
And he is also saying that USA going bilateral in Europe and Russia kills NATO and therefore is war on the EU conceived as a unified entity (which it is not). He is right about that, too.
And that is why he and EU mandarins are not reassured by VPOTUS Pence’s language that USA supports NATO and EU. He knows that USA going bilateral in and around Europe ends NATO and EU. And they are right about that, too.
No, looking at it coldly, I’d say the EU/NATO goose is just about home-fried. Better they should prepare to win such war as they feel descending upon them. The actual war descending upon them, did they but know it, is civil war, not inter-nation war. To that fact they are marvelously oblivious.
I just hope the Trump administration does not jump in USA blood and treasure to save the poor dumb bastards from themselves for a third time in a century.
Update 6: The Rev. Dr. Mark Durie: Ishmael Is Not The Father Of The Arabs
AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA
