The post Noah Point appeared first on The Pokey Finger of God.
]]>The book of Genesis is a collection of stories about the beginnings of the peoples who lived in the southern Levant. This was not a single narrative but many voices that collectively span and overlap great periods of time. Many of the stories are much younger than the poetry of the Bible in terms of authorship, yet they tell of events from a far more distant past. The stories in Genesis are often viewed as occurring sequentially, but this is merely an illusion gained from reading the stories sequentially.
The story of Noah and the flood, for example, is often viewed as having occurred immediately before the construction of the tower of Babel, as this is the order of the stories in Genesis. Yet it is clear that both stories start at the same vague “beginning of time” when all men were corrupt, and occur roughly simultaneously along with all the stories in Genesis. Each story complex in Genesis tells something different about the peoples of the region and their origin. Over the ages, people have felt free to add their own interpretations to all of these stories, building these complexes, in order to better apply them to themselves – as all storytellers are wont to do.
The complex of stories regarding Noah is a great example of the variety and depths of accretion these ancient stories had gathered by the time they were incorporated into the book of Genesis around the third century BCE. The stories of Noah occupy the scrolls after the set of stories detailing the physical creation of the universe, and the first family – Adam & Eve. Chapter 5 consists entirely of a long list of “begats” tieing Adam to Noah, leading into a long rebuke by God starting in Chapter 6, against the sinful men of the Earth whom he would destroy. Except Noah.
The story of Noah begins again in verse 9 with the records of the generations of Noah. Again, God sees the corruption of men and vows to destroy them, but he would look favorably upon Noah and his family. An extraordinary description of a colossal construction project follows, along with sisyphean instructions to collect breeding pairs of every living creature and somehow fit “enough” food for all of them for an indefinite, epic adventure. And Noah and his wife and sons and their wives were to all board the structure.
Set aside any memories of Noah’s ark presented as a great ship on the ocean. The description in Chapter 6 of the kind of thing God wanted Noah to build was something other than a ship. The Hebrew language had words for a variety of watercraft and the writer chose to not use any here. The Hebrew word used means nest, or chest. The Greek word agrees, contributing “small house”. It has a single window, and a single door, like a small house. The construction is further described as covered, having three stories with chambers, and an outside wall. All surfaces were entirely coated in pitch. Perhaps it was more like a giant black box, with one door and one window, than a boat.
It’s entirely possible that this was never meant as a ship, but as a structure in which to shelter in place during periodic flood events – without realizing that they might be forcefully relocated. The only other time this word is used, like “ark”, was in reference to the chest that held the original laws of YHWH in the Temple: the ark of the covenant. Also: not a ship.
Chapter 7 begins the story anew. God is still feeling murderously moist, but he has new instructions for Noah to take seven pairs of “clean” animals and a single pair of some of the unclean ones, and seven pairs of each kind of bird. Some accommodation for domestication appears to be made here, but the suggestion that wild animals might be included is still present. Again, Noah goes into the ark with his wife and sons and their wives and all the critters. Have we started? Is it flooding yet? No.
In verse eleven it starts again: Noah was really old when he and his wife and his sons and their wives went into the ark. This time, it wasn’t given to the humans to collect the animals. Instead the spirit of God led mating pairs of every kind of wild animal to Noah and each spontaneously entered into the ark. Noah & his family entered last and God shut the door behind them just as the deluge broke.
Water rose up from the depths and fell from the sky and squirted through holes in the walls. Countless days of rain before the skies clear and the seas calm. Then the ark settles, and Noah… plays with birds. The Earth slowly dried out while eight adults and a kajillion critters all lived in this box without hot pockets, avocado toast or takeout pizza for months. Insanity! Every living thing in that box would have been traumatized. Note that someone must have been taking care of feeding everyone (and everything) this whole time, and it wasn’t Noah.
Modern interpretations of the Noah story assume that the ark was built to be a watercraft of some sort, perhaps a rounded boat made of reeds suitable for having a bunch of animals stand around in and not fall into the lake. Such craft are still in use today wherever herdsmen must maneuver critters around deep water. But these crafts don’t have walls or roofs, so no coverings, no doors or windows, and certainly only one level, so this is clearly not what Noah was asked to make.
The parts of the story that extend Noah’s reach globally or presume a magical ability to herd wild animals also introduce a number of logistical problems that are today frequently resolved through the use of modern technology. Thus we find representations of the ark that appear to be a sort of double-keeled, mega cargo ship, only built from wood, as seen in 19th century illustrations and the Ark Encounter park in Kentucky. It’s a lot easier to imagine every wild animal in the world being given a room on something the size of a modern cruise ship, even when questions about food storage and poop management still seem unresolvable even with robotics and computerized conveyors, especially with a crew of eight.
This narrative presents so many unlikely or completely unrealistic situations that it’s remarkable that these stories hold such a strange attraction to folks who so desperately need the Bible to be literally true. The literal search for Noah’s ark in the 18th century was a part of the drive to prove the literal truth of the Bible. Yet the elements of this particular story are so fantastic and unbelievable that it seems the writers had clearly tried to make certain the reader (and listeners) understood that the story absolutely should not be read as literal truth.
This collection of conversations and episodic situations involving Various Important People may actually be a residue from a cultural memory of a flood on what is now the Black Sea. Recent archeological works indicate flooded settlements from what had been a freshwater agricultural community now below the depths of the Black Sea may have been composed of peoples who spread and contributed Proto-Indo-European languages to the Mesopotamian valley. Thus stories of that event in from a common mother tongue may have been passed down more than one subsequent tongue, including the Accadean Epic of Gilgamesh and here in Genesis.
Perhaps these started as stories about people who survived floods by building structures attached to rock, filled with their family and livestock. Maybe in some of the stories, the structures break free in a flood and the families survive and end up landing in a strange world. Everything else would have been narrative embellishment, but today the narrative embellishment is all that remains. The fantastic hyperbole that had made the story so memorable has become the story for modern readers.
It makes sense there would have been an original, simpler story that had been expanded upon repeatedly over the centuries before it was set in scrolls. A smaller story, with a smaller boat and a scant handful of animals wasn’t nearly as satisfying to an imperialist or exceptionalist trying to satisfy their ego or generate propaganda for a king. A realistic Noah who was only the father to a handful of Hebrews isn’t nearly as attractive as a fantastic Noah who was the father of the whole world. And so the story expanded with each retelling before its capture in written text.
It is Noah’s casual connection with God that brings all the narcissists to the yard. It is rare for the self-important to not get hung up in the parts of the story that share what God thinks or says and miss the part of the story that applied to the people within it.
So easily do they identify with Noah talking to God that they quickly lose sight of the fact that there were other people in the boat. They forget that these people and their goats and pigeons were the whole point of the story, or that it is a story about people and their survival.
I am quite confident that anyone alive in the bronze age over ten years of age would know that rainbows are associated with rain, and would see that interaction frequently enough to not have to ask about it. One that might trouble a curious ten-year-old is: why do we look different from everyone around us, why do our herd animals look different and why do we pray to a different god than our neighbors? What makes us different?
In this case, the story of Noah’s flood explains that a forefather had long ago collected his family and animals on a raft, floated away for a long time, and when they landed, they were strangers in a strange land. Explaining to the child that they are descendants of the ones who survived a great flood gives them a story that puts them somewhere in the world. The details of the story tie the memory of Noah’s struggle to that person’s identity in the community and become a cultural strand weaving them into past and future generations.
For all the praying and talking and fooling around with birds in the text of the stories, for forty days and forty nights, it would have been a handful of women that fed their families and tended goats and birds until that craft found dry land again in a safer place, keeping them alive. These people had brought their children, their food crops and animals, and their stories with them into the future to a new place. These women became the grandmothers of a new people.
As this story was adapted into their creation mythos, the Noah tales must have been endlessly fascinating for the people who saw this as their origin story, but in order to be useful for authoritarians and tyrants, they had to focus the story on men and their relationship to the authority of God. Thus, the importance of the story that we hear about today is the rainbow, not the genius and strength of women who enable the survival and continuation of humanity.
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]]>To the Senate in 44 BCE, Gaius Iulio was the direct and obvious threat to the Republic, much as today’s tangerine conman appears to be a threat to our democracy. The assassination of Caesar was not an act of one man or even one Senator, but of a fraction of the Senate who acted to confront what they perceived as an existential threat.
Here’s your lesson: the Senate’s attempt to prevent the dissolution of the Republic failed spectacularly, splitting the Senate and igniting a three-sided civil war resulting in the formal introduction of the very tyranny they had tried to prevent. Arguably, it was a desperation move, and misdirected at that. The Senate had been gradually losing power as the boundaries of the Republic ballooned, and saw the popular generals who were gaining in land and power as the reason for this loss.
In retrospect, the development of imperial tyranny was the inevitable result of rapid growth without making adequate governmental adjustments for oversight in all the new lands: after the Senate had essentially lost control, there was no lack of egotistical narcissists willing to try taking control of all or part by force. The direction of history may have gone a completely different way had Caesar lived to rule, but it’s entirely likely that everything would have turned out about the same.
The situation was one created by the Roman Republic itself, one the Senate in its hubris and greed failed to resolve. Caesar was a prime example of the best and brightest created by Rome, and he was one of several such popular and powerful generals. If it hadn’t been him, there would have been many others to step into the void left by the Senate – it was already a powder-keg. As it turned out, the Senate only had to start the stabbing, as Roman fought Roman until Octavian wrested control from his countrymen and called himself a god.
Perhaps a better lesson to take away from this is that power dynamics are complex, and it’s easy to confuse intention with momentum. What we perceive as a wave may simply be the latest manifestation, while the real power driver is completely out of our tactile range, like the Moon. In the case of our current political system, the traitorous baboon appears to be the driving force, yet in his absence, the forces that were set up and set into motion long in the past are on the march almost despite him. Another figurehead will emerge after he finally succumbs to jail or mortality or we might see civil conflict if the Christian nationalists decide to take things into their own hands. The danger he represents will continue.
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]]>The post Coding Compulsion appeared first on The Pokey Finger of God.
]]>The interview process itself had gone through several phases of verification that I knew how to do what I was proposing they pay me to do. This was the last iteration: my future boss and co-worker were there, along with the CTO, and a couple of other technical folks. I got to see a mockup of their main product and we talked about their company for the most part.
Then the CTO asked me one of those standard interview questions from the 70’s: “Tell us about what it is about our company that makes you want to work for us.”
“It’s not really about you,” I replied. “I have a compulsion to write code. I write code even when I’m not paid to, because it makes me unhappy to do otherwise. I seek to work with complex systems to make them better, give them better features, and help the people who use them do their jobs better.” I described their systems briefly and summed up with, “You have sufficiently complex systems here, many moving parts: this is exactly where I excel. I could do a lot of good here.”
I also explained that I am very choosy about the company I work for, and need to trust that what they make is a real product that serves a real need and really helps people. Through our discussions, I felt that this was just such a company and that I would be enthusiastic to work with them for that reason.
We all liked each other just fine and I happily accepted their offer. It’s been a great opportunity for me to do what I love, and it has been one of the rare opportunities I’ve had to share working this art with others. In this, I have been extraordinarily fortunate.
We just had a round of staff reviews last month. The review I got from my boss was explosively favorable, exuberantly positive and extravagantly laden with emphatic descriptions of my myriad benefits to the code, the department, and the company in general. The review rung my head like a bell and I kept thinking about what I’d read. I’d be working on fixing up some code or writing a test and think about how I had been so royally praised about doing this very thing. This has been an entirely pleasant distraction.
It’s great working somewhere where you feel appreciated. I generally get appreciation for what I do, but that’s not a given. Some feel the paycheck is appreciation enough, but it’s nice to get a long, descriptive outline of exactly where and why the appreciation is felt. I usually only ever get this when I’m leaving a company, when I beg co-workers for written praise and recommendations. This time it came out of left field, and while I appreciate the compliment, I couldn’t do it any other way.
The work itself is the reward for me. This job is especially pleasant, as it has been stripped of any distraction or irritation like management or operations. It’s 100% programming. There’s not even a commute! I work from home, anywhere I want to sit. Everything is on a laptop I can take anywhere. So I’ve worked at car dealerships, doctors offices, coffee shops, even in my car. There isn’t an appointment or chore I can’t take care of during the work week, although I usually just sit on my patio when the weather is nice.
I can devote my attention to a single programming project: just focus on the task for hours at a time. Add a feature; fix a bug; make a report; update this code – it’s all a part of a world I feel intimately comfortable with changing. It can occupy all my thought while I work, allowing me to compartmentalize otherwise stressful situations in the Outside World while I stay focused on my task: adding to the variable structures, adjusting schemas, querying data, and manipulating user interfaces.
Compulsively. Every day. Even on days I’m not working the job, I find myself writing different code for different things because it’s my compulsion to learn to adjust, transform, and create efficiencies in every system I encounter. I think about how DNA and RNA create a kind of bio-computer and how proteins are like active commands or conditionals in the organ building process. I think about how music alters our thinking and our moods, and how religious activity alters us physiologically and psychologically.
Those scenes in the Matrix movies when the gobbledygook rained down their monitors, we were told it represented the code for the Matrix. The allusion that there is code behind everything is not far from the truth of reality. Everything is the result of some series of processes, sometimes coincidental, other times organized. I simply cannot keep myself from thinking about how things are made and how they get used. I analyze everything from this perspective. You might imagine that writing in the English language is the thing that provides me the most satisfaction, but that’s simply because you have never read what I write for my day job. Writing code gives me the best feeling. Coding is what I have a compulsion to do.
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]]>This was later revealed to be due to the failure to install a pencil-sized pin and a wire harness that enabled the [altimetry range finder] laser to be turned on and off. As a result, the company scrambled to rewrite its software to take advantage of three telescopes on a NASA payload, the Navigation Doppler Lidar for Precise Velocity and Range Sensing, for altimetry purposes. […] Unfortunately, as it neared the lunar surface, the lander believed it was about 100 meters higher relative to the Moon than it actually was. So instead of touching down with a vertical velocity of just 1 meter per second and no lateral movement, Odysseus was coming down three times faster and with a lateral speed of 2 meters per second.
Ars Technica
It turns out that the company had chosen not to test their range-finder, on the premise that such would be too expensive. Is this indicative of an engineering company without engineers on the board? Or perhaps on the board, but without enough power to ensure quality? Whatever the case, I sure hope Intuitive Machines gets the gospel of unit and composit testing before they try to haul humans anywhere.
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]]>While this was my experience, there were other less pleasant versions of Jesus available at the time – a Jesus who just wanted to be your friend, so long as you had money; a Jesus who could heal you, if you didn’t use drugs like aspirin; a Jesus who always knew you were worthless chump and heading for Hell; a Jesus who wanted you to be miserable so as to best know God; a Jesus who just wanted you to shut up and do what you were told. The people I knew who suffered under one of these other guys ended up with trauma of one form or another. Just in terms of odds, walking into any church at random was more likely than not to bestow one kind of trauma or another.
I just happened to be lucky enough to be born to a family that went to a liberal, progressive church. My grandmothers were all strong willed, great hearted women who enthusiastically embraced their faith. I have known so many people in my life who could claim their faith in God or Jesus or Mary or the Church had helped get them through a difficult time in their lives, regardless of the brand of Jesus they attended. For these reasons, I cannot categorically state that all forms of Christianity are abusive, traumatizing, and encouraging of administrative abuse and political corruption.
In the US, anyone can form their own religious denominations, and many have. Specific mainstream denominations of Christianity, like the Southern Baptists, have been formed in order to politically support slavery as a sacred economic benefit, dominate politics nationally, and to celebrate the natural superiority of English-speaking european descendents.
An entirely novel Christian ‘tradition’ called Evangelism was invented from whole cloth to spread the gospel of American exceptionalism, petulant individualism through greed, and patriarchy founded on toxic masculinity, and it has managed to infect the popular media and put three presidents into office. Escapees from Evangelical churches often report repressive cultures that freely used social approbation, fiscal penalties, and even violence to cow their members into specific behaviors, beliefs, and voting patterns.
A related home-grown Christian tradition, Dominionism, presents the specter of fascist authoritarianism dominating every sphere of culture with its abusive and infectious philosophy. Ike warned us of the Dominionists, yet mainstream congregations have been subsumed into its realm and their collective voting power has elevated malignant and neglectful psychopaths into public office. Their enthusiastic support of patently criminal and overtly treasonous candidates for the highest offices borders on active betrayal.
The combination of Evangelical theology with Dominionism nationally has produced a kind of mass amnesia, such that priests and ministers now regularly report that when they teach of Jesus healing or forgiving, the congregants become agitated that a more aggressive, violent Jesus wasn’t being presented. Whatever good it may have produced, Christianity has been poisoned by our culture of enthusiastic greed and selfish isolation and now serves only to further isolate and impoverish all of us.
At one time, I felt that only certain denominations were “getting it wrong” and needed correction. Later, I felt that keeping Christianity out of the political process would be sufficient. I didn’t want to attack believers for their beliefs because I support the fundamental right of diversity in belief, that each one can worship as they choose, even when I felt that certain beliefs were problematic. But after years of study, I have come to the conclusion that the core, the root, the branches, and the body of Christianity are fundamentally antithetical to progressive human development. If we ever wish to move as a culture away from such ideological boat anchors, we need to identify, discuss and recognize them for what they are and encourage people to reclaim their spiritual sovereignty.
The impact of Christianity on European and American history, and the current use of Christianity to push frankly fascist and authoritarian governments in the US and other countries worldwide has been more than enough incentive to encourage me to find a way to defuse the Bible, deconstruct Christian authority, and dismantle Christian doctrine from civic laws. It is vital to find ways to stop people from using pulpits and bibles and people’s own inherent need for community and faith to manipulate politics, usurp political control, and collect money from their victims.
This will correctly be seen as an attack on Christianity, and as an attack on our culture. But folks have been saying for centuries that Christianity is a drag on culture. Folks have been pointing out more recently that the Christian mentality of being divorced from nature has done irreparable harm to ourselves and the world around us. Our toxic ideas of individualism and intensive gatekeeping have driven up suicide rates and maintained generations long cycles of abuse. It’s actually been clear for a long time, to many people, that Christianity is a much bigger problem than it ever might have been a solution for.
Not only is it harmful on an individual and social level to allow Christian theology and ideals to continue unabated without significant modification, failure to make significant changes will lead us to our doom. If we cannot help people to understand that we are fundamentally connected to each other and the world around us, we will all die from our own hubris. This isn’t about me being inconvenienced that some people have religion – I’m a big fan of religion, which was why this was such a hard decision to make. This is about confronting and dismantling fascism, which must always be confronted and dismantled, and so the decision is actually very easy.
The political and economic abuse visited upon us by oligarchs and foreign governments because they were able to manipulate this religion should be a red flag that this religion has got to go. The abuse and trauma affected by people and communities identifying as Christian should be a red flag that this religion has got to go. The fact that this faith has clearly encapsulated and transmitted an ancient psychic virus promoting authoritarianism and xenophobia should be a red flag that this religion has got to go. Like Lot seeking one good man in Sodom, it is a fool’s errand to try to retain some core goodness of this faith, as there isn’t one. It’s time that our culture moved on and embraced a holistic faith in the real world and its peoples.
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]]>The post Disaster Response appeared first on The Pokey Finger of God.
]]>We just had a terrifying ice storm here that endangered many lives, but I see no purpose in posting angry memes on social media blaming the governor for allowing the storm, the legislators for preventing the storm, nor the judges for failing to make major atmospheric adjustments once they realized how bad the storm was going to be. You may as well blame the weather on the weatherman.
Government is made of people working with other people. It exists to coerce people to get along and work together instead of just stealing things from each other. It works by convincing people to do the right thing, either through explanation or bribery, or through violence and social approbation. It is not foolproof, and it doesn’t prevent wars and crimes of violence from happening by mere dint of existing, it has to be funded and worked and largely accepted by the population before it can be truly effective. But even then, government can’t stop the tide, push back lava, or unshake the Earth.
Nor can it convince people whose livelihoods would be threatened by a change to make a change. Not by bribery, and not by violence – and that exhausts the tools available to government.
It’s important to recognize the range of utility available to governments before becoming upset that a government cannot prevent or contain a disaster. Yes, it sucks that bad things happen, but we will continue to do what we can to contain problems as they develop. We don’t give up on democratic government because it wasn’t able to achieve a goal.
The disaster that has unfolded in the area of the Eastern Mediterranean began decades before my birth when the British decided to partition off a particularly nice bit of real estate off the corpse of the Ottoman Empire to build a “home for the Jews”. Not only was this ironic in the fact that Jews already lived there in peace with their Muslim neighbors for quite a long time, but the resulting government of Israel was structured with Arabs as third-class citizens, barely recognized as human.
Who were the gung-ho Zionists who encouraged emigration for Jews from Russia, Germany, Poland, and Spain? Who organized the settler militias that systematically attacked and drove away the settled Arabic families? Who funded the development of a European-style military in order to secure their holdings from neighboring Arabic states who really disapproved of how Arabs were treated in Israel? If you want someone to blame, I’d start with the US government that has generously funded Israeli military development since ‘48 and sabotaged Palestinian economic development at every turn.
Nineteen forty-eight was when the disaster started. When Palestinians still had their olive groves and fig trees and schools and mosques. When Palestinians still had their elders. When Palestinians still had their stories. The disaster started with people doing bad things with joy in their hearts, then meeting reprisals not with introspection but violence.
The Israeli people today will not be turned from their goal, because their goal is defense, and defense is required for them to retain their sovereignty. They have used “defense” as a reason to push Palestinians off their land for decades. Defense is the reason they eliminated Arab schools and destroyed Arab towns. The Palestinians have never been attacked by the Israelis: the Israelis have simply defended themselves, proactively defended themselves, and defended themselves to the death of Palestinians. What we see today in Gaza isn’t offense, it’s defense. That’s why they’ll never stop, that’s why they’ll never be convinced they were wrong.
Long before I was born, this disaster had festered and boiled. I grew up with Yassir Arafat leading the fight against the apartheid government in Tel Aviv. Even then it was clear that the US would give money and guns to Israel, and only naked platitudes to the Palestinians to accept their situation “peacefully”. We continued to elect governments that were beholden to Israel and unencumbered by shame for the treatment of the Palestinians. Every decade that has passed has been another decade of disaster for the Palestinian people.
I’m over fifty years old now. The five decades of my life has been one decade of disaster after another for the Palestinian people. I cannot look at what is happening there today and summon up a single new tear. I am not surprised nor do I imagine that there exists a single thing that could be said or done to save a single person short of evac helicopters. I have no more reason to protest the events of today than I would a typhoon. This disaster has been happening for a long time now, and you’re just now getting upset?
The “Two State” solution was eviscerated by Israeli settler violence during Reagan & Bush I. There is no reason to even suggest it now that the settlers have pushed out all of the Palestinians from the agricultural regions.
And I absolutely would not recommend Arabs remaining within the state of Israel. It’s clear that Israelis are racist supremacists, and delight to slaughter children, and this is an inherently unsafe place for any Arab to be.
As a corollary to that, I have to say that Israel will no longer be a safe place for Jews once they have driven out all of the Arabs. Once their “external enemy” has been eliminated, they will turn that violence upon themselves in increasingly tight cycles of orthodoxy and gatekeeping.
I understand the rage and frustration associated with those who have fought for the Palestinian people this whole time. I feel it to be a reasonable response to the sort of disaster that’s brought on by people and condoned by people. But I don’t see that rage, at this point, serves any further purpose. Can your rage reassemble the top of Mt St Helens? Will your rage rebuild the Library of Alexandria? Would your rage resettle North American indigenous peoples at the expense of English cities? The point at which any of this was “fixable” has long passed, and now all there is to do is resettle the survivors and clean up as best we can.
Would it be better if the US didn’t support fascist, supremacist governments? Sure, and that’s something we can definitely work on. Has Israel been playing a long game capturing US legislators in a blackmail scheme to support their policies? Sure seems like it! Did the IDF invasion plan include pre-loading media stories about the cruelty and savagery of Hamas? Sure seems like it. Are we dealing with complex international political situations that have no good answers so long as authoritarians and fascists hold office? Yeah, that’s about the size of it.
I will not allow myself to be bullied into maudlin performances to show the depth of my despair. Yeah, it sucks and it’s stupid, but I’m about 70 years too late to be really effective at solving the problem. I think it’s okay to recognize that and to put my attentions into things that help living people today. And right now, I think about the most irresponsible thing we can do is to pretend there could still exist a Palestine as a safe place for Arabs, because it is quite clear that it cannot.
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]]>…And the LORD was very sad he had made Saul king over Israel.
1 Samuel 15:35
The first time we see David, he is identified as the youngest son of Jesse the Bethlahamite. He is anointed by Samuel and hired as Saul’s court musician. and then after the scene where Goliath the Philistine was introduced, David appears again anew, as if he had never been mentioned before. This probably indicates one of those places where several related stories were edited together, and these inconsistencies are the only remaining evidence.
The Philistines were a non-Semitic (probably some variation of Greek) peoples who lived along the southern coast of the Levant. We get our word ‘Palestine’ from this earlier term. There is some indication that they may have been among the mysterious ‘Sea Peoples’ who ravaged post-Bronze Age Egypt and the Levant. In Hebrew scripture, the Philistines were among the major political entities in a persistent state of war with the Israelites. Many Biblical stories deal with some form of conflict with the Philistines, this one is no different.
In the 17th chapter of First Samuel, Saul is seen leading the Israelites out against the Philistines in open battle, each side taking a hill across a large open valley. Neither wants to be in the position of having to fight uphill, so in an attempt to lure their enemies into open combat, Goliath steps into the valley and shouts taunts at the Israelis. The armor and weapons of the Philistine warrior are carefully described: even though the man was quite large, he was still being so heavily burdened by his armor that he had a servant carry his shield.
A mighty hero named Goliath came out of the Philistine camp. He was from Gath. He was more than nine feet tall. He had a bronze helmet on his head. He wore bronze armor that weighed 125 pounds. On his legs he wore bronze guards. He carried a bronze javelin on his back. His spear was as big as a weaver’s rod. Its iron point weighed 15 pounds. The man who carried his shield walked along in front of him.
1 Samuel 16:4-7
Besides being a giant of a man, he was dressed like a tank and armed like a Titan. None of the Israelites dared to face the man in single combat, so fearsome was his demeanor. Enter David who makes a curious claim before Saul – just as he had confronted bears and lions attacking his flocks, he would attack this wild beast of a man. This was, apparently, his one plan because he forewent the use of armor even though it was offered and he wore it briefly.
As David approached Goliath, the giant taunted him for approaching unarmored, with a stick. David replies with a bit of monologing about how he was going to be doing the smiting and winning, because his god was the “Lord of Armies”. The Hebrew phrase used here also translates to “God of War”, and I think this is probably the most correct translation given its use in the middle of a war.
He said to David, “Why are you coming at me with sticks? Do you think I’m only a dog?” The Philistine cursed David in the name of his gods. “Come over here,” he said. “I’ll feed your body to the birds and wild animals!” David said to Goliath, “You are coming to fight against me with a sword, a spear and a javelin. But I’m coming against you in the name of the LORD who rules over all. He is the God of War of Israel. He’s the one you have dared to fight against.
1 Samuel 17:43-45
Goliath gets tired of hearing David rage, and begins his attack. Which is, he began to run at David, spear outstretched. All three or four hundred pounds total with armor began to move at top speed toward the diminutive Israelite. Barely able to turn and incapable of stopping, Goliath probably didn’t see approaching shepherd load and fling his sling in a single motion. Like an approaching lion on attack, even if he been able to perceive his doom, he was unable to break from it once he began his run. His own momentum helped to drive the stone further into his own forehead. David didn’t kill Goliath as much as Goliath killed himself by attacking an agent of the God of War.
David expediently beheads Goliath with his own sword, then feels free to take trophies: he grabs the armor, the sword and scabbard, and the head of Goliath, puts the armor in his tent (wait, when did he get a tent?) and presents himself before Saul while carrying Goliath’s head. After he leaves, Saul asks an officer, “Who was that guy?” (Because he certainly couldn’t be expected to remember the singing harpist he would frequently and specifically request in the prior chapter.)
The king said, “Find out whose son that young man is.” After David killed Goliath, he returned to the camp. Then Abner brought him to Saul. David was still carrying Goliath’s head. “Young man, whose son are you?” Saul asked him.
1 Samuel 17: 56-58
David said, “I’m the son of Jesse from Bethlehem.”
Goliath’s sword makes a reappearance later when David is on the run from Saul’s murderous intent. In the story, David hides in a temple where he encounters the priest. David makes up a story about leading a band of warriors on an overnight attack on Philistines so he can beg off enough bread to keep him while he hides. Not only was he given the bread, but also the sword of Goliath, which had been kept in that temple. The priest that helped him was killed by Saul directly, but David escaped and was able to eventually become king. This story is obliquely referenced in the second chapter of Mark.
David asked Ahimelek, “Don’t you have a spear or sword here? I haven’t brought my sword or any other weapon. That’s because the job the king gave me to do had to be done right away.” The priest replied, “The sword of Goliath, the Philistine, is here. You killed him in the Valley of Elah. His sword is wrapped in a cloth. It’s behind the sacred linen apron. If you want it, take it. It’s the only sword here.” David said, “There isn’t any sword like it. Give it to me.”
1 Samuel 21 8:9
The story of David and Goliath has long been an identifying tale for the Israelites. The term for god in this story, the “God of War”, was used again in Malachai, which was the book celebrating the return of Yahweh worship to the Jerusalem temple after the Persian exile. It was making a direct connection between the god worshiped in the Temple and the god of David, implying a continuity of authority. At the beginning of Malachi 3, we have: “Behold, I am sending My messenger, and he will clear a way before Me.” This passage ends with the attribution: “says the God of War, the God of Israel.”
That beginning phrase from Malachai 3 was later reflected in the second verse of the Gospel of Mark.
As it is written in the Prophets: “Behold, I send My messenger before You, Who will prepare Your way before You.
Mark 1:2
By association then, the first speaking voice in the Gospel of Mark is thus the God of War, the God of David, King of Israel. The writer of Mark is making a point to tie his story to that of King David, by way of this specific deity reference. The notion that all references to deity in the Bible point to the same one is simplistic in the face of the diverse divinity celebrated in the greater Levant region prior to Christianity. This isn’t a vague handwave to a foreign deity, but a specific naming of a god in a specific context.
The author of Mark is also bringing to reference a connection to David as a messiah. There is a scene in 1st Samuel in which Samuel anoints David before his father and brothers, making his authority as one chosen by Yahweh unquestioned.
And the LORD said, “Arise, anoint him; for this is the one!” Then Samuel took the horn of oil and anointed him in the midst of his brothers; and the Spirit of the LORD came upon David from that day forward.
1 Samuel 16:12-13
Jesus is similarly anointed by John the Baptist, receiving audible approval from God in Heaven. This scene in Mark is meant to reflect the one from 1st Samuel, deliberately conflating the stories of David with those of Jesus. This is why there is the insistence that Jesus descended from Jesse or was born in Bethlehem, the town of Jesse, in the birth narratives. This conflation also means that John the Baptist is a reflection of Samuel – an elder, widely respected priest of Yah.
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]]>In order to capture all the information I’m collecting for my new project, Reframing the Gospels, I had to do a major overhaul on the back end, moving the site to a new host (no longer wordpress.com!) and creating new post types and field sets. Much more will continue to be built on that part of the project, so look for coming announcements on that. In the meantime, the general writing that I do will have a much better presentation and accessibility.
Because I’m hosting this myself, I have a great deal more access to do all kinds of crazy changes. In no small part, this is why it’s taken so long to put this together. Consider this very much a work-in-progress, and any weird links or image placements should be cleared up over the next week or two. After that, who knows what sorts of shenanigans I’ll cook up. It’s exciting, really!
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]]>Control of trade was something held closely by the Church, so when the English colonies in America created a land without a Church, they also created a land without any rules except for any specifically adopted after the constitution was signed. So anything not specifically illegal, no matter how immoral, was okay. We are now in possession of a significant body of regulatory law that has eliminated a great deal of what had been legal, yet immoral, and insofar as we put resources into maintaining these regulations, they have been greatly beneficial. Yet still anything not monitored or categorically prohibited is allowed, no matter how evil, immoral, or soul-draining as it may be. In many ways we still live in a pirate nation: the never-never land of the free.
When you hear folks voicing support about the “free market”, what they want is more unregulated predatory capitalism. When folks talk about wanting to “cut taxes”, what they mean is that they want more unregulated predatory capitalism. When you get advice that you need to work harder to stand out, that’s because of unregulated predatory capitalism. When a company that posts profits in the billions raises prices 2-3x and lays off tens of thousands of employees — that’s unregulated predatory capitalism. Virtually any problem you see in the world can be traced to unregulated predatory capitalism.
Write it on a note or a card and take it out to read on the regular. Remind yourself that there is a great evil in the world, and you’re immersed in it. Like a demon from a medieval grimoire, it has a name, and with that name you can devise a defense and even take control. Say the name aloud and place upon it the blame for all that thwarts you.
“Unregulated predatory capitalism, you’re the reason my pants don’t fit!”
“I can’t buy groceries in my neighborhood because of unregulated predatory capitalism!”
“I can’t afford a place to live in town because of unregulated predatory capitalism!”
You’re not broken, you’re being artificially restricted by rules designed to make the wealthy richer and crush the poor. It makes it hard to breathe, which makes it hard to think, and you don’t have the energy to fight against the system – as intended. It’s like a great dragon upon its hoard, throwing fire upon its enemies and squashing the people in its wake. It’s impossible for one person to control, and this is the key.
Alone, you are toast. If you feel toasted, that’s unregulated predatory capitalism. When people come together in great numbers, a dragon can be driven away, even captured. All of the words that are used for this action have been perjured in our culture: communes, communism, socialism, unions, social-unions. The key is the collective, it doesn’t matter what you call it. When the collective includes everyone, and everyone is given the resources they need to live well, everyone has a chance to grow and create and learn and give and love and share and provide.
There’s a reason those words have been demonized. Unregulated predatory capitalism doesn’t want to deal with you as a collective, but individually, where it can strip you of your rights and demand fealty under threat of violence. It wants to set the terms of the agreement, and be the hand of enforcement – and these are exactly the things it cannot do against an organized collective. The successes we have had have come from just such collective actions.
Do not be complacent and fail to appreciate the extremely violent danger that comes from confronting a dragon. Many had suffered and died in an effort to put limits on work weeks and work days. Those who benefit from the system – the predators, if you will – have rarely felt limited in the range of physical or economic damage they could inflict on a person or a town that thwarted them. They will not hesitate to destroy everything in an effort to control anything. This is the literal force that has kept you underpaid your entire life, unless you belong to a union and have a union job.
We had a civil war over whether it was okay to work people to death and while the union remained whole, I’m not sure that the idea of slavery ever really died. There seems to be this idea that some people don’t matter and deserve to work to death that has never gone away. Our entire agricultural economy is based on a couple of corporations that shed all the risk to local areas but collect all the profit from the local resources, and still require government subsidies and an unregulated, underpaid immigrant work force maintained through threat of deportation. That’s a lot of power and money flowing out of many hands and into a few. That’s unregulated predatory capitalism!
It’s not you. You’re okay. There was no accident, but the contrived result of a long game being played by extremely wealthy and disturbingly psychotic individuals who traumatized their children into keeping the game going. You’ll be unsurprised to know that these very people also live in fortresses surrounded by armed guards because you know how dragons are. If you want to continue to suffer under the boot, at least now you know who is wearing it, and that there’s not some sort of personal failing keeping you down.
If you want to get out from under the boot, you can always start today. Today is a good day to find someone to share a meal with, conspire about work or housing together, and start a union together. A big union is formed from a whole bunch of little unions that form between folks as a part of working together. If all you think of a union is strikes, consider that there are many kinds of unions besides workers’ unions: housing, utility, and agricultural for some. Anytime people agree to share in the cost to maintain a needed resource, everyone in that union benefits. Unions of two different kinds can merge to become a single, larger union that helps to maintain both things.
The United States is a union of states, but also a union of all of the people in those states. We all agree to live by the rule of law, and reserve to our democratically representative government the right of violence under specific circumstances. Through this union, we have been peacefully self-governed through multiple transitions of government officials at every level. A brief scurry through the violent upheaval over the past five hundred years of European history should illuminate the value of this system.
Inasmuch as we can manipulate the levers of the system at the state and federal levels, we should feel encouraged to do so. Coaxing, training, supporting, and funding representatives to office is a great way to have a direct impact on legislation and policy. While third parties offer a chance for ideological purity, working within the existing structures offers a more direct approach. It simply requires coordination and many hands in every state – this is usually done with money, but money isn’t required to spread an idea. Money doesn’t make a heart beat. When the dragon has all the money, you work with a different form of currency.
To confound the dragon, you need a currency that never runs out, and never diminishes in value, but which can’t be accumulated or controlled. One that builds and strengthens relationships and collectives. One that disappears when all the people are gone. When this currency becomes the reason for the decisions we make, then the dragons will be unable to control us economically.
As long as we persevere in the delusion of self sufficiency and toxic masculinity instead of working together for the common support of all, we will continue to feed our own children to the dragon.
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