I Have a Call for Bitey, Will You Accept…
When I was, oh, about a year or so from heading off to college, my pastor, and my best friend’s dad, Vern Miller, told me that he wanted me to set aside some time and talk to him about something important. I don’t recall how much later it was, but we got around to talking fairly soon thereafter. The Millers lived only a few doors down, and I could not have avoided him if I wanted to. I didn’t want to.
I always called him Mr. Miller because I knew him from before I knew what a reverend was. The man was the model of humility, so he never minded. I know because it suddenly dawned on me when I was a teen that I had always used the wrong title, and I apologized, and vowed to correct it from then on. He said, no biggie. Whichever you prefer is fine. So, I kept the mister part instead.
So, on this day, Reverend Miller said that he wanted to discuss the clergy with me…and for me. This is a man I saw just about every day of my life as a child. His youngest son was my best friend, and we went to school, and did the vast majority of our activities together. I knew of the conversations that he had with his parents, and he knew of my conversations with mine. Part of learning about the world was bouncing ideas and conversations off of one another, including what our parents asked or demanded of us. As far as I knew, Mr. Miller never asked one of his two sons to become a clergyman.
As we discussed the life of a clergy, Reverend Miller said, I want you to consider studying theology, and to pursue a career as a pastor. I said, “what about the calling? I can’t recall ever hearing some voice, or having some experience which moved me towards even considering such a move.” Then he said, “this is it.” “The calling” is not what you might imagine. It isn’t mysterious or magical. It can be as ordinary as giving it some thought, and making the choice. Then I said, “Mr. Miller, I have my own ethical challenges, and concerns. I worry about whether or not I am doing the right thing. (I need to toss in the word “sin” here. I am not sure how I expressed the concept, but it was part of the conversation.) I am FAR from the person who should be telling people how to live their lives.” Then he said to me, “Billy, that is exactly the type of person who should be in the profession.”
I had not considered such a counter-intuitive idea at that stage of my life, and it was thought provoking. I still think about it…but not about doing it. I never gave that serious consideration. The idea followed me around a bit, kind of haunted me, but I was never going to do it. To give you an example of what I mean by “haunting”, it went kind of like this. I wasn’t a person who used a lot of profanity, for example. Probably not as much as the average person. I didn’t know it, or notice it, I just didn’t do it. The people who noticed it were usually the people around me. I was also clean cut, no earrings, and definitely no tattoos. Beyond that, I can’t tell you why, but often, the subject of divinity school kept being raised with me by various people. Random people. Once, I recall being in line in my dorm cafeteria. It was called Women’s Commons at the time. (Today it is called Kennedy Commons). So, I don’t know what I asked for over the cafeteria line, let’s say it was meatloaf. As the woman on the other side handed me my plate, she asked me, “are you a divinity student”?
At that point, I think I was still undeclared. I eventually studied English. But this sort of question kept being repeated…by people who did not know one another. I didn’t wear a cross, I wasn’t quoting bible verses, I wasn’t walking around holding a bible. It just kept coming up. My mom wasn’t any help when I would ask her about it. I’d tell her about these conversations, and how they kept repeating. Her response was usually, “of course they would”…or something to that effect. I was curious why this idea seemed to follow me, and she was just glad that it did.
Today, I am an agnostic. I dislike the term agnostic because it seems to imply lack of conviction, but it is not about that. It is about certainty, and it is not something that I can be certain about. Christianity has a lot of good in it, but it has a huge flaw, in my estimation. That flaw is the Messiah. And since that is the point of the religion as a religion, it kind of leaves me out. Actually, I should say, that is where I chose to leave. I opt out of that which devalues the concept of making an ethical choice on the pain of death. “An ill-favour’d thing, sir, but mine own.” Value of the principles taught require being willing to lose, and not choice based upon the expectation of reward. Mortality is the point. Immortality essentially ruins it.
So much of what we chose as adults seems little different from choosing a kickball team in 3rd grade. I see smart people make choices all the time that are as unchallenged as a playground deliberation. It disappoints me. Bill Maher, the late-night comedian, has an often repeated notion that police officers are people who are “making up for high school.” The notion is a ridiculous as “step on a crack, break your mother’s back.” It is, for lack of a better term, childish bullshit. I could say reductio ad absurdum, but would you listen to that? Nah. You’d likely have some weird notion about that too. Bullshit serves here. It is bullshit. I don’t want to spend a thousand words saying why it is bullshit. I’d rather you just accept that it is. Goodness knows, I wish Bill Maher would accept that it is bullshit because…it is bullshit. He repeats it with all the cocky confidence in the world, and it isn’t helping anything.
If I had any sort of calling at all, it was about chasing questions. I have done that a ton, and it is driving me a little crazy. I have been a lot of places, and talked to a lot of people. A lot of it has been good, but I tell ya, the bullshit is wearing on me. Smart people indulge bullshit that I know they are smart enough to avoid. That shit is everywhere. Smart people I agree with believe bullshit, and smart people I disagree with believe bullshit. This, I do not understand. I do believe that subscribing to certain unexplored notions can reduce the unnerving effect of bullshit, but you’re only managing to self delude yourself into a ditch, rather that to avoid the ditch. Even thought the road seems to go away from where you want to go, and the ditch seems to be in the direction that you want to go, it is still better to stay on the road. Neitzsche eventually lost his mind, and Socrates drank the hemlock. I get it. People will drive you nuts.
06/08/2020 @ 11:34 am
One of these days maybe we’ll talk religion. No, I’m not going to try to recruit you – we don’t do that – but what you’re talking about is a little like how my wife became Jewish.
Bullshit? Yup. All the time. Common sense isn’t common. Actions have consequences and sometimes those consequences are obvious if you bother to follow the falling dominoes. It flat-out amazes me how often people don’t. It’s one of the reasons I started blogging. “Have you bothered to look at the dominoes? Here they are.” Now stereotyping, like Maher does, is just lazy. It’s the comfort of not bothering to really look. With Maher it’s annoying because he’s smart enough to know better but not necessarily ethical enough to say better. The line is too novel and catchy. There are guys who fit his description, particularly in small towns, but the fact that it doesn’t work as a generalization is just too obvious. Don’t bullshit me intentionally if you’re allegedly all about intellectual integrity.
06/08/2020 @ 12:46 pm
Lazy is precisely how I’d describe Maher, and that absurd level of generalization that is so common.
And yes, we should discuss religion. Don’t think I have not thought about it. It is a major disappointment to me that so many are caught up in the hocus pocus, and miss the principles entirely.
01/17/2022 @ 9:52 am
I don’t remember if we ever got into more in-depth discussions following up on this. It’s not only a question of what you believe, it’s a question of what you consider important. The rabbi emeritus of my NC congregation is very political because that’s the sphere where the justice that matters happens and he views Judaism as necessitating that. I agree with his take.
You talked a bit about Bill Maher. Not that I watch him, but from what I’ve seen his attitude toward police officers is a lot like his attitude toward religion – dismissive and full of generalizations that don’t universally fit. I’ve seen way too may people who don’t know what religion looks like when it works. That leads to the assumption that it never does and I know from personal experience that that’s wrong.
People will tell you that they can tell how a religion works by its texts. Really, no, they can’t, because what’s important is what people do with those texts, how they approach them. Knowing what the texts say doesn’t tell you what a religion’s adherents emphasize, and that varies all over the place. To use a negative example: Scripture, particularly Jewish scripture but also Christian scripture, places very little emphasis on homosexuality, and yet a lot of churches give homosexuality a ton of attention. In fact, the main portion of scripture that is referenced about homosexuality really isn’t about that, and that’s the Sodom story. I’ll go into detail if asked. My explanation would be maybe three paragraphs.
This is a source of misunderstanding between Christianity and Judaism. We share scripture (with a few details changed, like parts of the text of the Ten Commandments) in that our Bible is their Old Testament, but we don’t treat them the same, we don’t look at them the same, we don’t even look for the same things in them. And so the assumption is made that Judaism is Christianity without Jesus or that Christianity is Judaism with Jesus. No, not by a long shot. You mentioned the Messiah. What differs is not only who the Messiah is but what he is. In Judaism he is a wholely human agent of God.
I’ll get back to an earlier point and wrap this comment up. Those who assume religion never works talk about the irrationality of faith. There are two Jewish answers to this that are not in themselves based on faith. The first is that things look different when faith isn’t the most important thing in a religion, and in Judaism conduct, how we treat others, is more important than faith is. More theologically important. The second is what behaviors faith leads to. In Judaism’s case it leads to highly unusual frequency of social activism (though this is branch-dependent; this does not generally apply to ultra-orthodoxy, a respect in which it is at times less Jewish than it assumes). In mid nineteenth century northern fundamentalism it led to abolitionism and in some cases egalitarianism. (My alma mater’s history comes to mind – an at that time fundamentalist institution that was both coeducational and integrated by the late 1830’s.)
01/17/2022 @ 4:00 pm
I have had two large streams of thought since we last spoke here on BS this past Summer. And, as soon as the second stream had begun, it flowed together with the first stream. The first stream involves, basically, the notion that power and justice are opposed. (I have not refined these terms yet because they have not been expressed to anyone else, so some of them may require some explanation.)
It has occurred to me that power and justice work against each other by necessity, depending on how you define the terms. Power can be held in a variety of forms. Those forms include, but are not limited to, wealth, physical strength, political office, religious office, fame/popularity, etc. Whenever an individual leverages power in order to solve some problem, or meet a need, by my definition, they are doing so for their own purposes, and by their own counsel. To do so is to work a political, financial, etc, lever, to manipulate a given situation. Conversely, if a person from a position of power, whether high office, or merely some advantage maintained by rare or sole possession of crucial facts, and they do so for the benefit of the greater good, or interests broader than their own, then they are pursuing justice, and not the advantage from power.
We are all familiar with the adage that “power corrupts”. We accept it without any sort of examination. As I began pondering this aphorism, and trying to find exceptions, it occurred to me that it is not about he who is powerful, but rather how power is used, by whomever chooses to do so. Power is inherently corrupt. Its use for one’s own benefit is all that is necessary to be the privation of a just act. Its use for a solution arrived at by committee, counsel, and for the benefit of others is no longer power.
From that point, I have nearly arrived at the confluence of the two streams of thought that I mentioned earlier. Once I satisfied for myself the ethical relationship between power and justice, I started pondering justice. For my purposes, I arrived at a definition of justice that involves decisions and actions as can be gleaned through the relationship to power, but also containing one essential element. That element is truth. Trust is essential to justice because justice involves cooperation with others, and a joint benefit. One may be benevolent, but without actual truth, one is merely acting from a power position regarding the essential facts, and depriving another free individual from acting in a free manner. Now, the powerful may act with benevolence, and the result may be beneficial, but like a parent feeding a child, it is not justice that results, even though the result may be as beneficial as if the uninformed/unempowered individual had been able to act in his/her own interest. It may benefit them, but the result is not justice.
So, with that definition of justice, and the fundamental component of truth, I sought to define for myself, what is truth?
Many of these thoughts in these two streams, now combining into one larger understanding, are thoughts that began decades ago. Some of them are more recent. The result of this particular stream resulted in defining for myself the meaning of “God”. For me, “God” means the sum total of all of reality. That which exists or has ever existed. Frankly, the words to define “God” are certainly insufficient to meet the definition. For my purposes, I am satisfied with that which is real. I believe Carl Sagan referred to it as, “Spinoza’s and Einstein’s god.” That is the idea that I am shooting for, but saying so gives it a limitation, so underestimates the idea. The ancient Israelites had a couple of expressions which danced around it in ways which respect its profoundness. “Adonai”, meaning “the name”, and Yahweh or Yhwy…being the name.
At this point, we are at the confluence of these two streams of thought that I have had for the past 6 or 7 months. Truth is all that there is. All that exists or has existed. This, for me as an agnostic, satisfies as a definition for “God” perfectly. In fact, this is where I feel the 3 great religions have diverged from a pure understanding of reality, and thus of God, and thus of truth, and thus of justice, and thus of freedom.
Here it is important to note that “truth” is not the same as doing, expressing, or communicating “the truth”. We had once discussed a scenario of using deception to conceal innocents from an evil power, and how truth in this scenario is actually potentially evil. That would be where I draw the distinction between communicating the truth, and truth as it applies in this larger context. Deception in this situation is obviously the moral act, and not in conflict with truth as I have defined it. Their existence and their freedom is as real and true as their location. Concealing their location is not the privation of truth in this context.
01/17/2022 @ 4:39 pm
I gotta say I’ve been missing you….seriously, I have. And then, as I read this, I started to get a headache….which is when I realized that I just can’t go into these places anymore. My train of thought gets derailed much too easily and sometimes I can’t find my way back through the switches to the point where I left the mains and headed down the spur lines and, as we all know, all spur lines are dead ends.
The complexities of thought that I used to pontificate upon are now beyond my grasp. I can’t even keep my passwords straight for more than ten minutes. Just spent an hour trying to unravel two of them and I no longer remember which either was.
01/17/2022 @ 5:16 pm
Thanks, Alan.
Admittedly, that comment is not well composed. I am just grasping at things I have been thinking about, somewhat compulsively, for the past 6 months or so. I had no prepared to express the thoughts to anyone, so it may be difficult to follow.
In fact, there is one element that I left out that is rather important. It has occurred to me in the past 6 months or so that the main thrust of everything in human history has been the pursuit of power. That which is done, and understood most naturally is acting from power, or reacting to someone’s actions from power, or motivations of power.
I know and accept that babies act from power motivations. They seek to satisfy biological needs without concern for ethics. What I did not know is that not only do most adults do the same, but most adults expect that all others do the same.
In a discussion about seeking police work, and military experience, it was said to me that I was being “disingenuous” to not admit that those who seek such are of one self selecting type…or some such thing. My experience tells me differently, and I said so. The point I was hung on was that I was expressing an untruth by saying so. What I finally came to understand is that there are those who either can’t conceive, or had not considered that some operate out of a concern for the greater good. Admittedly, my estimation of the size of the group of humans who operate out of principles other than self interest is much smaller than I believed, there is still a massive difference in how the world of human action looks based upon one’s understanding of motives.
Humanity functions like any other group of animals as it seeks to meet its biological needs, or improve its power. Humanity only begins to differentiate itself from the animal world when it acts based upon ethical principles, and keeps power in check to see that justice is done. We have the science to feed and protect us from a certain level of challenges. We have art, literature, and music to feed our minds and enable us to improve vis a vis humanism. But, when we use our skills and intellect without ethics, we are only stalking, killing and consuming.
01/17/2022 @ 8:25 pm
Quick translation note: Adonai is Lord. HaShem is the name, used as a placeholder because there are times when people don’t want to use God’s name, as in when talking about a prayer rather than actually praying.
I’m a bit confused as to why a benevolent dictatorship cannot inherently be just. Unless I’ve just misunderstood the point.
06/08/2020 @ 8:48 pm
https://reformjudaism.org/
Have a look around. And while you’re at it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_Action_Center_of_Reform_Judaism
There’s an RAC for the Reform Judaism movement in Israel too. It’s called IRAC and it does a lot of what the American version does, just in a somewhat different environment.
06/09/2020 @ 7:12 am
“I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.”
The problem with Groucbo’s iconic lament is, like it or not, we come into the world as lifetime members of the club we wouldn’t join voluntarily.
We must play at life even after we discover that we can’t win, we can’t break even, and we can’t get out of the game.
Thinking is painful, which is why most people don’t even bother to try.
Religion gives too many people a reason to stop asking questions about the nature, purpose, or meaning of life…
Those are the people who caused
Neitzsche to eventually lose his mind and Socrates to drink the hemlock.
Those are the people will drive you nuts.
01/16/2022 @ 11:11 pm
Judaism is all about questions. The Talmud is nothing but questions and different takes on the answers, arguments between rabbis that can stretch millennia.
01/16/2022 @ 11:22 pm
I received an email recently that the site was closing down. If I remember correctly, it was to go dark on December 31st. What a surprise to see this.
01/17/2022 @ 9:10 am
Alan explains a little on the first comment in his 1/3/22 Pluto post.
01/17/2022 @ 12:22 am
I think Alan expected it to shut though I don’t know if he found a temporary fix. His biggest problem is he needs someone technical minded to help. That was Pannier.
01/17/2022 @ 8:36 pm
Thanks for the correction, Kosh. I’m going from memory with no notes, so…it is rough.
01/17/2022 @ 9:01 pm
Kosher, to your question of why benevolent dictatorship can’t be just, my answer is qualified by my understanding, and how I think these various concepts are reconciled with one another.
Justice requires a free individual acting of his own volition, within a generally agreed set of rules. Within a dictatorship, justice doesn’t really exist. Justice is like a living society, and freedom is the blood. Without the blood, there is no life. A dictatorship may function, but it is not the living will of a free society. It is merely the expressed wishes of its leader. There is no room for free thought, expression, etc. An authoritarian society does not need justice. It only exists for the leadership. Conversely, a free society uses justice to balance the power of a majority, or the selfish desires of an individual, with the broad benefit of society generally.
Take Novak Djokovic, the tennis player who was just barred from participating in the Australian Open because he refused to be vaccinated. Djokovic is the number 1 player in the world, and a very wealthy and powerful man. With unchecked power, he could have player in the open against the will of the people. Australia made certain conditions available to avoid vaccination like religious exceptions, but he did not claim that. Djokovic just tried to mislead his way into the country with fraudulent forms, for his purposes alone, and disregarding the standards set by the country. There was a balance in effect between the needs of a minority, and the will of the majority, and the tennis player tried to game the system, if you will.
Any sort of dictatorship, benevolent or otherwise, can’t create a balance because there is no dissent. If the dictator merely accedes to the wishes of the community against his own, he is not using power, and thus not being a dictator.
01/18/2022 @ 12:03 am
I’m not sure I agree. I’m not sure that the living will of a free society is necessary for justice. That says that no king or emperor was ever just. I think what justice needs is a combination of humaneness and universal obligation and enforcement under the law. Where we see injustice is where the system is either designed to favor some people over others or is enforced unequally, leaving some above the law and/or some who face excessive penalties as a population. In the US this mainly plays out as the wealthy overwhelmingly influencing legislators and as racism/sexism/homophobia/transphobia respectively. (There are some others in the second category as well.) But I’m not sure what democracy has to do with it.
Sure, power can lead to some sort of corruption, but there’s also what that power is used to accomplish. If I run a country am I better off exercising complete and arbitrary control or building prosperity to where I run a richer and stronger nation? Both alternatives increase my power but in different arenas and in different ways.
If you or I were dictators of the US, not that I’m suggesting that as either a desire or a goal, this country would probably be more just than it is now. It would certainly be more egalitarian. It would also probably be healthier and wealthier.
01/18/2022 @ 6:43 am
I think that no King or Emperor was ever just. You understand me completely. I think the concept of divine right, or rule is less than just. I think justice fits in the modern world where respect for the individual exists. I think that the history of the human experience involves dominance and obedience of some sort, and our understanding of personhood and individuality is relatively modern.
Our historic perspectives about gender, and race, and access to the metaphysical have always had a relationship to power. An individual must make some sort of negotiation with power for aspects of their own soul. The world as it is constructed does not allow for justice. The Ten Commandments has aspects that place women as subordinate to men, and make individuals owe a debt to God by being born into some sort of contract, rather than being able to enter into it willingly, and fully informed. Very little about civilization is just.
Justice that allows for slavery, misogyny, poverty, and so many things that continue to plague civilization is a very low bar for the definition.
Earlier, I said these thoughts flowed together. One aspect is how the definition of God, and the conduct of societies flow together. Any concept of God that allows for such imbalances with power to be granted to the same people all of the time, and indignities suffer by others…all of the time, is not a just God. The structure is not moral, but rather a structure of power and control. The notion of a King or Emperor as being inherently, essentially higher or more valuable than any other human is fundamentally unjust and disrespectful to the concepts of liberty and equality.
01/18/2022 @ 6:10 pm
So your point is the very existence of a king or emperor inherently contravenes justice. But a king or emperor can also further justice among the population. For example, Napoleon radically increased Jewish rights while an American system with majority rule supported slavery.
Justice isn’t an absolute. It isn’t perfect, hence Mao’s concept of Perpetual Revolution, which makes a lot of sense in this context. How do we get the most bank for the buck? I don’t know. I do know that during Trump’s administration I would have been very happy with a military coup because I trusted the US military with the Constitution in the long run considerably more than I trusted the President. As time has gone on my conviction is if anything strengthened in that instance.
01/18/2022 @ 6:23 pm
Yes, when a king or an emperor acts in the interest of justice, he is not using power. He is essentially donating to justice.
There is a part of a jet engine called a thrust reverser. It is essentially a metal clamshell that clamps down over the end of the jet exhaust to cut off the thrust. The engine still has power, but it is not propelling itself with the thrust reverser on. That is kind of how I see a king or emperor acting outside of his self interest. He is not acting as an unchecked power. He is acting as a brake on his own power. I see that as a movement toward justice, but not justice. The beneficiaries of his largesse don’t have the power to manage their freedom. They can only depend on the King’s willingness to be a benefactor.
01/18/2022 @ 7:06 pm
Yes and no. Increasing justice can result in an increase in the power of the tool he rules.
China is less just these days. It is not helping China’s power. It is damaging China’s power. They exist on exports and they are scaring their trading partners. They are causing all sorts of unrest in Hong Kong. If they were more worried about being just they might have reunified with Taiwan which would certainly increase China’s power. Right now they have to figure out how to break out of the South China Sea in the event of a conflict. If they’d won over Taiwan that would be less of an issue. Instead of an obstacle, Taiwan would be a base, and Taiwan’s considerable economy and military skills would be theirs. So there is power and there is power.
01/18/2022 @ 7:34 pm
Democracy, freedom, and justice are as much process as they are result, perhaps more so. Without a healthy, just, free process, the results can be reduced or removed.
Take the US Constitution. Until recently, it has been a bit of academic curiosity and debate about the 13th amendment which freed the enslaved, the 14th…equal protection, and the 15th…the right to vote, could all be repealed by an authoritarian government with the will to do so, and by so doing return Blacks to slavery, or apartheid style oppression. This weakness in our free society can be exploited to make everyone less free. Now, that is essentially what is happening. The forces of authoritarianism are pounding on the same fault line in our society that was willed with some much plaster, wax, and ink.
The period since 1865 has been the appearance of justice without being just because it left an exploitable fissure. The condition of women in our country is in jeopardy in a variety of ways right now also. Leaving intact this ramshackle mechanism has created a danger to everyone. It is only more immediate for some. Justice is a vessel, and when the integrity of the vessel is endangered somewhere, the vessel is endangered everywhere. Process matters.
01/18/2022 @ 11:20 pm
I’m the last person you have to tell that process matters. The biggest problem the US has politically is the deterioration of respect for the process. It started with Newt Gingrich and the Contract On America. He’s the guy who made Congress as adversarial as a courtroom. It continued with the Supreme Court’s Bush v. Gore decision straight along partisan lines. The next phase was Mitch McConnell refusing to vet the Supreme Court nomination of a sitting President. Then came a whole lot of Trump’s attacks on everything, though that was less on Trump than on McConnell refusing to limit it. Most recently came the Trump reaction to the 2020 election, emphatically including Jan. 6, where McConnell has lost control of Trump and falls into line.
The latest evidence of the Republican death of respect for process was Tucker Carlson upbraiding Ted Cruz on television for putting process over partisanship and Cruz essentially apologizing for doing that.