A Bit More on REligion

I responded to Culture Wars Magazine's March 2011 issue with a letter to the editor mostly in praise but with a knock of sorts on a review of a book by a college professor named Kozinski. Here are the relevant paragraphs:

I was particularly interested in the review by David Wemhoff of Kozinski’s book, The Political Problem of Pluralism. The cultural scene here is profoundly confused: our ruling Judaic elite is pouring its antagonistic products—“entertainment” and “porn”—on top of the endless back and forth contests of the many “Christianities” already stressing the population. We are mammonite to a fare-thee-well and getting worse by the hour. I have no notion that a confessional nation is possible anywhere in this land lying between the Atlantic and the Pacific. Certainly not a Cathoiic one.

The crucial phrase for me in Wemhoff’s review is from the Vatican document Dignitatis Humanae: “God Himself has made known to mankind the way in which men are to serve him and thus be saved in Christ and come to blessedness. We believe that this one true religion subsists in the Catholic and Apostolic Church . . . all men are bound to seek the truth, especially in what concerns God and His Church and to embrace the truth they come to know. . . . Religious freedom has to do with immunity from coercion in civil society. Therefore it leaves untouched traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion, and toward the one true Church of Christ.” (I assume this is an accurate translation.)

I certainly agree with all my heart that everybody should have “immunity from coercion in civil society” but what is one to make of the contention that “this one true religion subsists in the Catholic and Apostolic Church”? I could argue of course that the reference does not really mean the politico-religious institution headquartered at Vatican City but rather the true church that is an entirely spiritual entity, but I doubt any Tamils or Sikhs or Malaysians or Chinese or Esquimos will be taken in by that. They will recognize that what is meant is just the famous old Roman Church.

The claim I have quoted is insupportable in this global world where the Europeans and their colonial diaspora are fast disappearing into insignificance. Not that that political shift invalidates any truth, but I insist that a just God has always spoken to his chlldren on earth equally. I can believe nothing contrary to that. The Lord Christ said to look within, not at earthly institutions.

It seems plain to me that no anthropomorphic religion can claim exclusive truth and try to brush everybody into their basket; rather that all of them partake of the one truth of the one God in different ways, adjusted for culture and especially language. I’d expect a certain  amount of static for that view from hard-nose Catholics, none at all from, say, Hindus, Buddhists, or Taoists. More and more that static seems to me something one just has to live with.

I’ll close with a quotation from Ibn Arabi, a 14^th century “Andaluisian Moorish Sufi philosopher,” who seems to me to have hit the nail on the head. Would the Lord Jesus Christ have disagreed?

“My heart has become capable of all forms. It is a pasture for gazelles and a monastery for Christian monks, and a temple for idols, and the Kaabah of the pilgrim, and the table of the Torah, and the book of the Qoran. I am the religion of Love, whatever road his camels may take; my religion and my faith are the true religion.”

In the Face of Political Turmoil

As of today the objections to Obama's military actions in Libya have now swelled into a chorus as the Republicans, who strike me as at least slightly more odious than the Democrats, have begun to gather their troops to attack O, just now back from S.A. I don't disagree that O has overstepped his constitutional powers nor do I disagree that he faced an ungodly mess in Tripoli, but I am newly convinced that I am wasting my time tending so zealously to North Africa and Japan since I can do nothing about either.

Therefore I shall obey my son's advice at least partly and stop being such a dedicated news-webbie and try to turn up here a little more often.

And deal with a topic that really interests me: the whole question of religion. I am interested in it because it is about first and last things, and it behooves me at close to 88 to be concerned more with those things than with the devilish carryings on of governments and with the doings of more or less crazy "celebrities," who compete with governments for the top headlines.

Now to religion: I can today only hold as serious religious views that take in the whole world. Back when one's whole world was "the tribe," it made sense for religion to  be tribal. The Jewish group is a tribe and behaving like one in its exclusivity, its narrowness. It wishes to advance the interests of its tribe, and in my opinion is attempting therefore to "rule the world." I don't think that will work, not for the Jews and not for the whole of "Christianity," which is infected with what you might call the Zionist virus. America's thrust for world empire is a corrupt, secular, extension of Christian "evangelism" now raging all over the world, and it has left the Lord Christ far behind in its dust, since He would never have suggested using force to impose rule on others.

That gives me my first religious axiom. Force is out. Religion may not use violence legitimately. Government is the monopoly of violence. There will always be, I am convinced, government to "keep the peace," but once it has done that, it has completed its work.

To be continued.

A Thought on Al Jazeera

Al Jazeera’s English website seems to me a most welcome and extraordinary media phenomenon. Headquartered in Dohar, Qatar, Al Jazeera covers the whole world with what appears to me to be a remarkable evenhandedness. With that general compliment out of the way, let me get to my present point: the English version of this Arabic/Muslim service underscores what I consider one of the central and even amusing facts of today’s world: the British are today’s “Greeks”; the Americans are its “Romans.”

Many of the site's anchors are actually British, but even more significant is the fact that many of its non-British anchors and announcers employ a crisp British-accented English, most of them closer to the Oxford standard than to what I think of as any of the contemporary provincial Englishes. So the whole thing gives off a kind of British, upper class sheen that tends to convince us that we are getting the cool, crisp, superior overview.

A considerable number of their correspondents, especially from America, speak with American accents, but they do not dominate; the British “thing” does.

Alexander conquered the “East” in his time and spread Greek language and culture far and wide. Then came the Romans with their bigger, more ruthless, and somewhat flat-footed empire such that one tends to forget that the Greeks had pioneered the conquest of the world before them. Things Greek persisted, with a marked undertone that “things Greek” were more cultured, more cultivated, and generally tonier than “things Roman.”

Ditto now. The British did their empire first and always dressed for dinner and never (almost never) “went  native.” Then we, that is “the Americans,” came along and have lain on the world with a very heavy weight, with a great deal of even heavier hypocrisy about out purposes.

Where am I going with this? Rome produced a religion that in its turn conquered the Roman Empire and ultimately the world, when the British took up capitalism and the “white man’s burden,” accumulating colonies until the map was almost all British red.

The Christian religion broke in two about 1000 AD—into Greek and Roman (Latin) halves, with much further fisiparousness, another 500 years along, into a zillion protestantisms in the Roman half.

What can we look for now? Let me state as a kind of cultural axiom that religion undergirds all. 

Now, Christianity has been rejected by Europe in favor of “science” and all that. America is too flat and dead and Mammonite in its present manifestation to offer much hope for spiritual reform. (Maybe, but I don’t look for it.) It is also hard to even imagine an improvement on the eternal and metaphysical implications of the Lord Jesus Christ (Ego sum qui sum) were his impact to be somewhat detached from hierarchical Rome and broadened to take in—democratically—the whole world, as the writings of Meister Eckhart, Brother Lawrence, Simon Weil, and many others imply can be done.

I’ll leave it there for the moment. I have some more ideas but need to think a bit and perhaps return to them later.

About Japan

I have written nothing about Japan’s woes until now. The earthquake and tsunami have revealed that the world’s corporations and governments are not to be trusted with such an immense power as atomic energy, but then we knew that already, following August 1945. Meanwhile the people of Japan have enlisted in another unimaginable suffering. May God help them. May God help us all as the worldwide implications of this event become clearer

Phillip Weiss on Jews and Palestine

Phillip Weiss is a terrific writer and great fellow. He runs the blog Mondoweiss, which treats of matters Jewish, Zionist, and American-Jewish reactions to both. I was particularly struck by his post below and reproduce it entire. (I don't seem to be able to fix type size; also this is a longer post than most of mine. Apologies.) It is pretty much self-explanatory. He was out promoting his book on the Goldstone Report; he reports on some sessions in Michigan. Over to him:

The Jewish sideshow (and why I want to play in it)

by PHILIP WEISS on MARCH 11, 2011

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I’m just home from a three-day swing to Michigan to promote our book; and the trip has sharpened my sense of purpose.

I had speaking engagements at two universities, and in both halls Israel supporters came out to oppose my views. The first night, Tuesday at Wayne State University, they were easier to handle because they were so intolerant. A tall man kept talking about the five Arab armies invading, and the anti-Semitic Hamas charter, and asked me how long I would tolerate people firing missiles at me. It gave me a chance to talk about Gaza being populated by the refugees from 1948, and the failure to address festering historic grievances. I said that Jews always worry about being pushed into the sea, but in the meantime who was actually pushed into the sea-- the Arabs of Jaffa in 1948.

After the event I went out to eat with a few friends, and one of the friends seemed very concerned about what will happen to Israel in the changing environment of the Middle East. He expressed concern about the Hamas charter and the irredentist feeling of the Palestinians: that if the state of Israel is not preserved, the Palestinians will wipe out the Jews. The others at the table sought to assuage his fears. I don’t think we were very successful.

As it turned out this was to be a theme the next night at the University of Michigan.

Over the next day I often thought about my dinner companion's fears and wondered how much energy I should put into this Jewish dialogue. Isn’t it just a sideshow? Isn't history unfolding in Israel-- from the Egyptian revolution to European impatience-- in ways that make conservative American Jewish attitudes irrelevant?

I was staying at a friend's house in Detroit and had an email exchange about the “sideshow” issue with a Jewish friend back in NY. We discussed the blindness to Palestinian suffering inside the Jewish community and Jews' fears about losing the Jewish state. My friend was long a supporter of the two-state solution, for practical reasons; but history has passed that view by, because guess what, it’s one state now. Here’s part of her very smart email:

I think that in the end the Jews and their lobby (and the Congress) won't be able to save Israel; in that sense they can be seen as an irrelevant sideshow. But for now American Jews matter in how things play out here. The future is not with Israel, but the process looks to be speeding up even here.

They're hysterical in Israel because they know that on some level they've lost Europe (I heard a story that the lobby tried to shut out Gideon Levy at Jewish Book Week in London--they couldn't do it), and they fear the US is next.

Honestly, I think they can't be saved. The vote at Brandeis Hillel to excludeJewish Voice for Peace is just another sign of the profound blindness to the fact of JVP and what it signals. An Israeli I know told me just the other day that Israel needs "better PR." This is a disagreement we've been having for decades: I've been telling him for almost 30 years that Israel needs better policies, not better PR. Look at Netanyahu; he's floundering because he doesn't know what to do in the face of a changing world.

That night in Ann Arbor nearly 50 people gathered in a large room at the Michigan League building and a local activist suggested that we put the chairs in a circle so everyone could see everyone else. I spoke for 25 minutes and then we had a conversation. I would say that the audience was ¼ Jewish; and a debate began about the sideshow issue: whether my message to Jews that we need to wake up to what we are supporting has any political significance. People (including a couple of Jews) made smart arguments against the sideshow: Jews are generally hopeless on the issue, and the most important forces that are bearing down on the issue are not Jewish any more. The European Union, the South American countries, and of course, the Egyptian revolution. Very few Jews involved at all. Even the Israel lobby is a spectator.

But soon the conversation became monopolized by Jews.

An Israeli-American who had served in the occupation said that Jews were now a minority between the river and the sea and they would just have to get used to that, and learn to live with a Palestinian majority. This statement was worrisome to a fellow from the local J Street chapter, a man in his 50s with a high forehead and small intelligent eyes and a thoughtful manner. During my presentation I thought he was on my side from the way he was nodding. But he said that there were no democracies in the middle east and he didn’t trust the talk of a one-state solution. He didn’t see who was going to prevent the persecution of the Jews. He was as fearful of the outcomes as my friend the night before.

A number of people went back and forth. How can you favor a peace process that has gone on for 20 years and produced nothing? Well, I don’t think it’s dead, the J Street guy said. He said he had relatives in Israel and he was a secularist. But they liked Zionism, they liked having a Jewish state. I said, you and I are both privileged. We enjoy incredible rights in this country. We’ve participated in great liberations, women’s liberation, the civil rights movement, the gay right’s movement. We live as a privileged minority without fear of discrimination. But look how Zionism has worked out. If tomorrow anyone were to put forward a law to keep Jews from renting apartments in the United States, we would be in the streets!

As I heard myself saying these words the fuel rods went into the nuclear reactor and I lost my composure and stood up, and started yelling—we would be in the streets of Washington, you and I both would. My mother wore a silver clothes hanger pendant around her neck to protest anti-abortion legislation, she would go crazy about such a thing. Well some are pushing that kind of legislation against Arabs renting apartments in Israel right now! That country has lost its way, and so why sholdn’t we try as liberal secular American Jews to impart our political experience to them, our understanding of being a minority, rather than deferring to racism?

I was just about screaming. Later I apologized to the guy for losing control. I’m your guest. I shouldn’t be going nuts, I said.

I felt so bad about my meltdown I even found myself standing up for the guy. Someone in the audience said, I'm confused, what’s the big deal about the end of a Jewish state, lots of unfair political orders have ended all around the world without this anguish in the U.S. I said the significance of the end of the Jewish state is that Israel was regarded by many Jews as the greatest Jewish achievement of the 20th century because it seemed to answer the Jewish question that had bedeviled Europe for many centuries and that had led to the Holocaust. Israel was seen as the deliverance and resolution. Losing it is very hard for Jews to accept, for it would seem to put us “at the mercy of the gentile world,” as Peter Beinart said recently.

I disagree with them, I think they're xenophobic, but that’s what they believe, I said. The guy from J Street nodded.

Afterward I hung around to talk to people, and the J Street guy and I talked for a few minutes. He berated me for exposing the Jews to greater danger. He is afraid of the Palestinian rage. The U.S. democracy is unique, and the benign view of the one-state solution is a delusion. They need partition there, or there will be massacres. Language differences alone are a cause for horrifying atrocities. And boycott will only make the Israelis feel more besieged.

I have a tribal side to my identity, an ethnocentric aspect, and in the day since the Ann Arbor meltdown I’ve felt called by my ethnocentrism, worried about the Jews and what will be brought down on them by the blindness to Palestinians suffering. I feel as determined as ever to speak to the Jewish community. The guy from J Street was clearly expressing a majority view inside the Jewish community that has licensed the Israel lobby: We have to safeguard Israel come what may, we have a solemn charge to protect other Jews. 

Then I think about the email from my friend saying the two-state solution is dead and Jews are in denial. The political realities are these:

--There is one political entity right now in Israel and Palestine, controlled by Israel. Nearly half the people have no rights, and about half of them live in a prison.

--Israel long opposed a viable Palestinian state, most recently through its dismissal of the Arab Peace Initiative. Instead it has set up a Jim Crow regime, and Obama has been powerless to stop it. As John Mearsheimer has said, the likely eventualities at this point are: 1, one democratic state, 2, apartheid, 3, ethnic cleansing to try and preserve a Jewish majority.

--Christiane Amanpour, and the New York Times, and Bernard Avishai, and Congressman Jared Polis at J Street, and other mainstream voices are retarding the Jewish community’s ability to deal with these realities by insisting that an “extraordinary” (Ahmanpour’s word) two-state deal is ready to be had-- somehow reviving 3-year-old terms between teams that don’t represent either side, terms giving prime West Bank real estate and Jerusalem to settlers. I'm sure there are arguments for partition, I've made them myself; but fragments and tunnels for Palestinians aren't the answer.

--Israel doesn’t accept any of these realities. And Israel has nukes. A frightful situation. (There is evidence that in the Gulf War, Israel wanted to use tactical nukes against Iraq...)

--Meanwhile, rage continues to grow on the Palestinian side. I spent a lot of time in Detroit, a city devastated by white racism and the black backlash to that racism. The conditions are far worse in Israel/Palestine-- who doesn't fear the fire next time?

--Israel isn't going anywhere. The vibrant global institutions and infrastructure created in the state will be valued by its Palestinian citizens, if they are only granted rights to enjoy them too. That is the great challenge.

It struck me today that the tragedy here is if Jews fail to see the realities coming and fail to prepare their community to accept them. They will continue to support Israel in its Jim Crow treatment of Palestinians and bolster Netanyahu no matter what he does and contribute to widespread denial in the US political establishment. American Jews can actually help Israelis escape a psychosis-- the widespread belief that Michael Sfard laid out at J Street, that we must be either the victim or the victimizer, so let's be the victimizer. We ought to be talking about the possible/likely end of the Jewish state. A belief that this will come to pass along the lines of the Jewish experience in Europe in the last century only raises the likelihood of a bloodbath.

The Brutalization of Bradley Manning

Bradley Manning is a sort of Forgotten Man. At 23 years old he is holed up in a U.S. military prison, uncharged so far, and treated abominably by the government he once chose to serve as a soldier. If he had asked me (I once chose to serve, in WWII, as a sailor) I'd have advised him to avoid military service as he would avoid the plague. At best it's deadly, and it certainly is if you have ideas about bucking the system.

I do not know if Manning leaked the documents to Wikileaks that evidently the govt. thinks he did. Assange won't say, as he shouldn't. And Assange is in enough trouble of his own anyway.

Manning, at 23 (God, that seems young to me with my 87 years) is being tortured in prison in various effective ways, and his lawyer thinks he is breaking down into catatonia.

If this young man is wrecked, as seems likely, I mean permanently reduced to a near-thing, it can be laid directly on Pres. Obama's doorstep. I daresay Obama thinks he has bigger things to worry about than some nobody airforce sergeant.

But Obama, who is coming to seem to me the Super Hypocrite of the Age, is quoted in the press as having said during his 2008 campaign:

"Government whistleblowers are part of a healthy democracy, and must be protected from reprisal."

What a lovely sentiment. Too bad he didn't mean it and apparently can't recall it. And Bradley Manning is meanwhile expected to care about our government?

I'll keep this in mind in 2012. I hope Manning makes it whole to the same date.

War, War, Everywhere

The world picture is dismaying, true. It's war, war everywhere except where it's Porn Inc. Or Charlie Sheen. It's almost enough to drive you back to religion or sanity or something else, anyway. Michael Moore is in Wisconsin, by the way, so perhaps a movie will be forthcoming. And twitter is tweeting and fribl-ing and building up steam all around.

This is of course a nonsense post, but you have to admit that the Internet is tonight a feast of war, war, and lighthearted posts about thoroughly crazy people—at last they look crazy to me—so that you conclude that all is coming apart at the seams.

That I do believe is what is happening. There must be a residual amount of sanity somewhere; you just can't located it via computer.

I promise to try to do better soon.