Friday, June 19, 2009

Invisible Audience

Once upon a time the thief left fingerprints without knowing there could be such a thing as fingerprints. How many people realize that we sometimes leave footprints even though we can sometimes see our footprints? Now that we know about fingerprints, some thieves wipe surfaces they're aware they touched hoping to erase their fingerprints: but what traces do we leave that we yet have no science for?

The Jews imagined God walking in the garden and calling for Adam while Adam hides from God, ashamed. Primitive Adam imagines that if God can't see him the way he Adam sees, then God won't know where he is. But the Jews imagined God knowing what Adam was doing even when God couldn't "see" him. This and the other sect of Protestants imagine that God "saw" Adam eating the fruit before Adam ate the fruit, even before Adam existed.

We drop napalm on little girls. If we keep the press away, no photographers, we imagine that we can do anything: and no one will know!

How do we know that everything we do isn't on TV at Aldeberan?

Why hasn't Jesus come back to do what he promised? Maybe he has: and we didn't notice. Maybe he can't. Maybe he never meant to. Maybe he did mean to but God had other plans. ... Or maybe our running around like dogs that don't feel the leash has entered its third millennium of hit reality show around Betelguese. The sponsors won't allow anything to interfere.

Imagine that you're an actor on the stage. Imagine that you're in the middle of "To be or not to be." Can you see the audience? The light is low, but there's a spot light on you. The lights in the theater are dim, but they're not at zero. Can you see through your own glare to see all those dim faces out there? Do you know which ones are looking at you? which ones are asleep, or necking, or bored? How can you even try to see while you're concentrating on your lines? Maybe you don't have the words memorized perfectly yet. But even if you have them as perfectly as Burbage would once have had them, so well you could paraphrase and Sweet Will might not mind, might not even notice? You're still concentrating on the meaning! Who could multi-task so skillfully that they could act, and watch, and contemplate ... all at the same time? even if they're already a genius? even if they're already a double- or triple-genius?

We don't know who sees us. We don't know what they think. If we see, it's like veiled. My name-source Paul may have been full of shit on faith, but he had that through a glass darkly part just right. The mouse doesn't know that the owl sees it, though the mouse is keenly aware that there are predators. Parents try to control their children with threats of bogymen, but we may be leaving more traces than we know (or fewer!) regardless of what the parents mean.

Sunday, June 14, 2009

Competent Theology

The previous post referred to the common belief that God is competent to know the truth. I was raised to believe that with no doubt. At the same time I was raised to be aware of some basis for our beliefs: Thomas saw the nail holes in the resurrected Jesus' hands ... Unfortunately for the common brand of theological epistemology I also became aware of other, more careful, more imaginative, more cautious epistemologies: to whit, science (and to philosophy not beholden to stone age theologies): the evidence must be evident to a group, any individual must be allowed to falsify the creed, experiments must be repeatable ...

So the mass audience trusts God's judgment: if God says the Jews really own the Canaanites' land, then the Jews must really own it: after all, it's really God's land anyway, isn't it? it's really God's everything. But shouldn't God be able to show us some evidence? (And no matter how much evidence God shows, what makes human audiences competent to judge the authenticity of evidence?)

Crazy Horse and his people had been living in the shadow of the Black Hills, at the Black Hills time of year, for longer than any Lakota could remember: how did their land and their sacred Black Hills suddenly belong to Washington DC and to the generals DC sent after Crazy Horse defeated Custer?

We should believe God's Judgment because God created the world! How do we know that? Evidence suggests that the universe came into being way longer ago than ten billion years. (How were "years" measured six billion years before there was an earth? How credible is God's claim to have made it six thousand years ago when it was already fourteen billion years old? Why should we trust the beliefs of any congregation of illiterate mis-readers of group fiction?)

If God says that Matthew Arnold was really the hero and George Washington the goat, does it suddenly become true? Should Matthew Arnold believe it? Should George Washington? Should Martha Washington?

When God tells us these things, will be be "telling" us? with words? in what language? why should we believe that we are competent to understand God no matter what language he addresses us in?
When the federal judge repeated the FBI's lies about me I knew that the federal judge was wrong, that he was a fool as well as a moron (or was he merely another bald-faced liar?)

Fools and morons are always asking me if I believe in God. Why can't any of them ever understand my simple answer: Never mind my relationship with God (It's personal, it's profound, it's direct ...); understand this: it's man I don't believe in! It's human institutions I don't trust.

Never mind how trustworthy I believe my own judgment to be: it's my mistrust of YOUR judgment that's relevant here.

Judgment

Christians are raised to hope for justice at Judgment Day. We're raised to believe that God is competent enough to know the truth. The older I get though the more trouble I have, the further I have to bend over backwards, to imagine any justice that could follow from history. We occupy, we rule, land stolen from others: from natives, from other countries, other cultures, and in the case of Sutter (among others), even from other "white" European settlers. What's God going to do with us? How could the Mohawk be compensated for the loss of "New York" state? for their near genocide? How would God compensate the Sabine men killed so the Romans could rape their Sabine women?

Knatz.com had a number of answers, more than one imagining on the subject. Here follows this morning's new draft on the subject:



Catholics succeed in scaring the bejesus out of children with threats of hellfire: hellfire following Judgment. God will judge. God will judge children who don't behave. Notice: churches routinely appeal to the self-regulation of the already-over-regulated: children, women, slaves ...
The Jews failed to scare the massagan out of those they were trying to impress: other people out-competing, out-cheating, out-hustling the Jews in the area of the world over-developed and over-crowded the longest. The Bible imagined the Jews' God judging the "nations": bullying those the Jews envied on behalf of the Jews: Today you steal my lunch money: tomorrow my big brother, my big friend, my big father, God, MY God, the owner of the universe, will make you lick my balls, make you eat my turds ... You watch out, God will give me Your lunch money.
Neither Catholics or Jews listen to me much when I imagine god judging the judges: Hitler and his judges, Stalin and his judges, Nixon-Bush and their judges: the judges who presided while my god-inspired fiction wasn't published, while my god-inspired scholarship was interrupted, while my Jesus-inspired public network was degraded, then plagiarized, while my outrage-inspired satires were censored: barred from the internet stolen from Jesus, Illich, and me. But that's nothing: Protestants absolutely never understood anything I said (that is, they understood it so instantly, saw where it was going, that they interrupted me, thinking that then it couldn't go there, that god couldn't make it go there.

Wait a minute, step back for a second: there's a fundamental, un-resolvable problem here. God, however you spell it, is so ambiguous a term, that the second you say it, you've confused and misled everybody. When I was a kid God was palmed onto us as "the truth." That's the main thing that god still is to me: the essence of things, the truth: not Newton's model of gravity, not Einstein's, not the word gravity, but the thing gravity: gravity in the actual universe; not in our pathology of misunderstandings, interruptions, and lies. But, simultaneously, when I was a kid and didn't know any better, God was a magician, Jesus was a magician: a worker of miracles. Now I repudiate magic and all magicians, there being no true examples that I can discover with anything like objectivity.

But, damn it, it's hard to give up hope of a big brother who'll fight your battles for you, and win: all for you, no payment necessary, cheap thanks more than enough. On the other hand, if you grow up at all, even 1%, then it's impossible to give up the idea of the truth: the idea that if we poison the earth, then keeping false records about the environment, refusing to understand what the scientists have tried to tell us, that therefore the poison won't be poisonous.

No. Bateson said it: God is not mocked: meaning, the poison is still poison, no matter what lies we tell, no matter how false our record keeping: no matter what we censor, who we crucify.



Here though is a problem I've always had, and still have, a little bit, with the idea of justice: divine judgment. If the Pope is supposed to be infallible, it's God the Catholics really imagine as infallible, isn't it? If God judges it so, it will be so ... right? These days I have trouble imagining anything infallible, I don't even want an infallible god. Be that as it may, put that aside for a moment.

The Jews' God had a bunch of commandments about giving God a monopoly on our admiration, but then he added something about not stealing. Now that's a commandment that almost any civilization will endorse, or at least pretend to endorse, there being no civilizations that aren't based on theft in the first place: didn't we subtract farmland from wilderness to have civilization in the first place: isn't theft what civilization is? (But can you imagine a caveman who wouldn't steal? Could you imagine a monkey that wouldn't grab the candy?

Back teaching, my office-mate told a joke that remains a favorite of mine: I quote how I'd already repeated it at Knatz.com: The English toff sees an ancient farmer in his ancient Irish field. "If you could have anything you wanted, anything in the world, what would it be."
The old peasant fixes the aristo with his eye.
"Judgment," he says. With venom.
I'm with the old Irish peasant, that's what I've long wanted: judgment. But what I want to see judged isn't the child, isn't the disobedient girl, or the uppity wog; I want to see what God does with General Custer! with General Motors!

Illich told a story of an old Mexican peasant who say every day in front of his shack. A road was built, right over the spot where he sat. The old man still sat there. One day along comes an American in his car and runs the old guy over. The driver was upset, but blamed the guy sitting in his old spot in front of his old shack. He was "asking for it," sitting in "the road." That's what I want to see: I want to see that driver judged. And with him I want to see the road-builders judged. But not by the God who gives the Canaanites land to the Jews! I want to see the judgment made by the actual god, the actual truth of things, by the actual universe.

Unfortunately, that is the judgment that we see, constantly, every day: the truth. But we don't see the truth, we see only the lies we tell ourselves: The Lakota land is ours, God gave it to us. We were able to take it, so it's ours. And the poison we've poisoned everything with isn't poison: it's our halo, our crown.



I'd written an awful lot about Judgment in my fiction, in my novels, in my diary, and at Knatz.com. The fed censored my writing against artificial vertical human hierarchies. My family let my internet accounts lapse while I was in jail. My host destroyed all my data: five domains, evaporated, 3,000 files, 2,500 of them text files: whole chapters of books, whole books! Books otherwise hard to find! Chapters otherwise unpublished! I'll try to get it back up. Some of the materials on judgment I'll try to add as a special section of my PaulKnatz blog. Meantime this file forecasts some of that old material: here, at IonaArc, my original blog: a tiny supplement to the huge Knatz.com; since, its replacement.

But here's one detail repeated here and now: I suspect that this universe is merely a petri dish in which god lets this and that type of germ fight it out. What god learns from our petri dish and from other petri dishes, goes into other, ever-more-creative universes: any of which may surprise, may go wrong. Life, evolution, is not infallible: and has no point. But neither is it as stupid as we pretend.



The following post, Competent Theology, will develop related branches of this theme.



I really need to gather all my K.-related comments on the concept of Judgment and post them to this blog. Here a new note meantime:

Will Judgment Day commence when God is ready? or will God (and the world) have to wait while Marie Typhoid (and her court) decides what to wear?
By "Marie Typhoid" I mean to suggest Christian overtones, overtones of Marie Antoinette, and Typhoid Mary of US fame.

Thursday, June 11, 2009

Miss California Fired?

An internet headline today says that Miss California was fired. Excuse me, isn't that like moving the "Brooklyn" Dodgers to California? The public thinks that a baseball team represents Brooklyn, that the team belongs to the city, that the team is a part of the city ... No, no. The team was a privately owned business. It could do whatever the culture would let it get away with — and apparently that was a great deal: including moving to another continental coast. Now Californians are encouraged to believe that "Miss California" is somehow of and for California. No, her image is owned by a private enterprise: the girl given the title, and the perks that come with it, must conform to what the privately owned business expects: California and its citizens, the world and its citizens be damned.

Once upon a time in the kleptocracy we call "England" the people believed that what they called the Commons was owned in common by all "Englishmen": "men" in that case also meant the women and children "belonging" to the men as well. In other words, if there was a sheep grazing on the Commons, that sheep was common property. Then all at once the "Commons" turned out to belong to this or that friend of the king. Suddenly your ordinary Scotsman discovered that this and that familiar part of Scotland belonged to some Englishman.

Whoever owns the LA Dodgers, or whoever owns Miss California, had better watch out: some kleptocrats may decide she belongs to Ted Turner, or to Bill Gates, or to god-help-us, The Donald.

Once upon a time it was easy: everything belonged to God. Of course the trouble with God was that he belonged to the Jews. No: then he belonged to the Emperor Constantine. No: then he belonged to the Catholic Church. ... Then God belonged to the Puritans. Now God belongs to any fundamentalist who's illiterate enough and loud enough.

I think we're going to find out too late that none of its belongs to any of us. 'Cause we'll all be dead: of terminal hebetude.