Plato's Playground
Anytime I read or hear the story of Abraham and Issac I am horrified.
And every year going through the Passion ( week before Easter) I find myself shocked and annoyed that Mary, Jesus's mother was watching the whole thing, seeing her son mocked, whipped, and put to death. How could she not put her body physically between the soldiers and him? How could she just watch so passively. As a mother, I have a physical reaction to all of that. I can just feel how I would have pushed, and clawed and scratched and screamed and bitten anyone to save my child. --I figure Mary's acceptance of all of this horror must have been faith equal to Abraham's faith for God's love for his son. People like Abraham and Mary must see beyond the power and meaning of this realm into a larger realm that most of us grasp only for a meoment here or there.
If you see evidence of similar behavior in the Conservative Right, I would suggest it is a twisted and perverted misapplication of that faith. The God of Abraham and Issac and Jesus and Mary is the God of Love and compassion. Anything that doesn't bring more love, more compassion is not the fruit of that vine.
I haven't read Sandburg or any of the other serious biographers, but my impression, at least, is that love and compassion weren't the first by-products when Abraham Lincoln told his wife, the southern belle, Mary Todd, his decision that, in his own immortal words, "the Union, it must be preserved." Was he talking about the country, his marriage or some strange concatenation of the two? Would he have uttered those words had he known in advance the price in blood he and his countrymen would pay to honor that pledge? If General McClellan had been elected president in 1864 would the conflict have simmered for four or perhaps even eight or more years while enough collective resolve was summoned to finish the task? In a sense, that's what happened with the election of Clinton in 1992. It may well be that the break-up of Yugoslavia came about because Gulf War I was protracted into a no-fly-zone cease fire without a clear resolution, producing instability elsewhere. Prussia went to war with Denmark when that Empire was hijacked by the Revolution of 1848. The conflict went dormant after the revolution failed, but flared up again nearly two decades later as a trip-wire for the Franco-Prussian war. Personally, I opposed Gulf War I, but at least in that instance a bona fide multi-lateral coalition was in place, UN backing legitimized it and a genuine debate took place in Congress before action ensued. The Republican mindset seems to have rationalized and, in their minds, justified the shortcomings of Bush II's unilateral approach on this unspoken basis. Clinton's election didn't reverse that commitment, it simply delayed it. But it did institutionalize the internet as a public sphere that until then had been almost an exclusive preserve of the defense intelligence establishment. I suspect that much of the right-wing nuttery we're witnessing today is largely a vain attempt to squeeze the genie back into its erstwhile bottle.
Banquo's Ghost---i'm not quite understanding how your comment relates to the biblical abraham or our country's drift towards a theocracy. which genie is the right wing trying to put back into a bottle?
Hmm, interesting wild tangent there BG, let us know if there are dots to connect.
Meanwhile, on the question of the character of God, obviously it's easy to go through the Bible and pick out all sorts of stories in which God is evidently a psychopath, mass murderer, thug and basically worse than Hitler, Pol Pot, and Jeffrey Dahmer put together. The passion of Jesus is one place where he gets a pass on that, because he presumably budded off a piece of himself for the purpose of undergoing the suffering; so Mary also gets a pass because she was presumably collaborating in the plan. But the New Testament is hardly flattering to God, who, being omniscient and omnipotent and all that, knew that the advent would bring about the massacre of the innocents. Jews and Christians have a whole lotta 'splainin' to do about the plagues of Egypt, the massacre, rape and enslavement of the philistines, on and on. Even if that God existed, I would most certainly never even consider worshipping him. He can do his worst, he's despicable.
The biblical Abraham was spared the necessity of sacrificing his son, Isaac, through his demonstrated willingness to make that sacrifice. Lincoln was not so fortunate, as the Confederates didn't back down despite his willingness to sacrifice sons to fulfill what he viewed as God's vision for America. I think America's drift toward theocracy is overstated. It's more a last noxious gasp from the remnants of a world view that enjoyed tremendous sway in the Cold War era. The genie I refer to is the emergence of the internet as a new medium of mass communication. It had been around for several decades, but didn't become a mass medium until the end of the Cold War had been declared and privately owned personal computers had become widely available. When computers belonged almost exclusively to institutions, many of them defense related, cyberspace was a tool of the military-industrial complex. Government secrecy and control of the electronic information flow can't really be restricted the way it once was, so the corporate world that depended on that flow has had to launch a propaganda storm in an effort to mold public perceptions into some semblance of the older, more familiar set of relations established through Cold War dualism. Though that world has already evaporated, people in power are still going through motions predicated on those obsolete patterns. The Muslim world is theocratic and contending with it will induce some upheaval in the Judeo-Christian world's theological order. But the obsessions of American fundamentalism belong to people who haven't adapted and probably won't be able to adapt to changes already well underway. The question to my mind is how much friction their persistence in those patterns is likely to produce.
Okaaaaaaay.
It seems to me that the notion that the U.S. is now "at war" with Islam is precisely the ideology of the theocratic Christian right. Far from threatening to make their ontology obsolete, it empowers them. The Christian Dominionists and Islamist Jihadists feed off of each other, they need each other. They are incapable of perceiving that theirs is a looking glass war, or if they are, it's one they embrace. They don't discredit each other, they create a mutually justifying system.
banquo\'s Ghost--checking your homepage and profile i see that you have lived in the philipines for a while. i wonder if you see what it is like for those of us living here; foreign and domestic policy and actual implementation of rules and budgeting that accord with the most radical fundamental and evangelical christian demands. i don't understand from your post below about dominionism as a movement in the US if you read the piece i linked to. what do you think of it? what do you think of abraham's willingness to murder his son?
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