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The Fall of Historic Liberalism: How it became Autocratic Liberalism through a Discussion of Freedom, morality, and God

14 Sunday Aug 2022

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I’ve been thinking a good bit about Liberal Ideology. My purpose in this article will be modest: I want (1) to establish a few dominant features of historic liberal ideology, (2) discuss how it transformed from its historic form into its present authoritarian form and (3) discuss the nature of freedom as it relates to authoritarianism, morality, and God. Firstly, then, liberal ideology as it exists today is bent towards authoritarianism. This is strikingly different then historic “liberalism” that understood its main task to be holding big corporations and government accountable. In this sense, that libertarianism is the natural extension of historic liberalism makes sense.

Liberalism has long been framing ‘freedom’ vs. ‘morality.’ What I’ve said often is that only what society sees as morally allowable will be legislatively possible. We know, with few exceptions, that society has grown more and more immoral evinced in the legislation that now protects what was once deemed too immoral. The picture, of course, is more complex than this since America has a well-known shadow government, the Administrative State that is largely unaccountable to the People because they are appointed, not elected. Liberalism has historically aimed to question authority and to act as a check on that authority. Morality is such an authority, especially since the Church accrued the status morality supplied. The framing of this was “you do you” but don’t tell “me how to do me.” This resulted in the imperative of ‘freedom’ overtaking and often defeating the boundaries that morality set. We thus had a very free society in America crafted in this morality vs. freedom process while the historic boundaries set by morality loosely stabilized most of the country.

As time passed, it became increasing evident that how ‘freedom’ was defined was terribly flawed. The Founders defined ‘pursuit of happiness’ as ‘the attainment of virtue.’ Through the 20th century, the Church’s influence waned in America and, at some point, the great rights of the United States, “right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” became redefined. The ‘pursuit of happiness’ was redefined from ‘attainment of virtue’ to ‘satisfaction of one’s preferences and tastes.’ ‘Liberty’ was redefined from ‘behaviors that enhance our freedom’ to ‘freedom to do as one wishes.’ The development of thought on what the phrase “pursuit of happiness” means traces back to ancient Greek philosophy, the Bible, and then is given renewed articulation leading up to its use in the Declaration of Independence by John Locke. Locke states in his work An Essay on Human Understanding:

“The Necessity of pursuing happiness is the foundation of liberty. As therefore the highest perfection of intellectual nature lies in a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness; so the care of ourselves, that we mistake not imaginary for real happiness, is the necessary foundation of our liberty. The stronger ties we have to an unalterable pursuit of happiness in general, which is our greatest good, and which, as such, our desires always follow, the more are we free from any necessary determination of our will to any particular action ….”

John Locke

It may not be immediately evident that the pursuit of happiness always already presumes a morality. What morality to use for the pursuit is the optimal question. To set out to attain happiness means that we have determined what is the highest good because we mean to attain it. Locke takes a very narrow view on what “pursuit of happiness” means while admitting that there is an “imaginary happiness” we can confuse with genuine happiness. Simply put, the enhancement of one’s freedom is the achievement of happiness, which “is our greatest good.”

It takes no genius and very little life experience to know that some behaviors eliminate our freedom: the use of freedom robs us of acting freely in the future. With time, what was a free choice is now a compelled slavery. There is precisely no one who thinks becoming more and more a slave is one’s greatest good. Even in the biblical texts of the New Testament in which believers are called “slaves of God” or “slaves belonging to God,” this ‘slave’ status is grouped together with being eminently free.

“But now having been freed from sin [you] have become slaves of God.”

Romans 6:22

The New Testament’s definition of freedom is to be free from sin.

Jesus states, “… you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free … everyone who commits sin is a slave of sin. The slave does not remain in the house forever; the son does remain forever. So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.”

Jesus the Christ, John 10:32 – 35

 Such a behavior state means these “slaves of God” are free to do righteousness (Romans 6:18), which is the highest form of satisfaction, communal good among humanity, and reconstitutes the Imago Dei (image of God) to iteratively enhance ever greater degrees of freedom. The argument here is simple: virtuous behavior equals greater freedom which equals happiness. God is radically the freest Entity imaginable; His freedom is fundamentally different from our freedom. Nevertheless, the more fully the Imago Dei in us is realized, the growth in our ability to act freely continues.

We are ready now to come full circle. As historic liberalism took “freedom” to mean simply “doing as one pleased” and understood “pursuit of happiness” as a hedonist quest of satisfying one’s desire, the morality subtly shifted. Formerly, both ‘freedom’ and ‘pursuit of happiness’ meant engaging in behaviors that enhanced one’s ability to act more freely in the future, which implied doing “good” or “virtuous” acts. This is so because using one’s freewill to enact evil results in lesser and lesser degrees of freedom — we know this because we have all engaged in behaviors that become increasingly compelled over time (which is an evil itself, since deprivation of freedom is evil).

What is the natural extrapolation of historic liberalism? Since being free to do what one pleases will invariably result in doing some actions that extinguish one’s freewill, there will come a time where much of the society is enslaved to their desires. The conflict in Western society is now born out of a host of citizens enslaved to their desire, unable to break those patterns of life, while yet another large segment of society remains set on preserving their freedom by doing good. Here we are again, the “Freedom vs. morality” conflict. What is missed is that it is more like “compelled-self-slavery vs. morality.” The implication is that those who remain moral are also those who remain free. Morality enhances one’s ability to freely choose. The conflict really lies on a big segment of society, both on the Right and the Left, who are self-enslaved vs. the moral-&-free.

Because self-enslavement is experiencing authoritarianism, the desire to compel others to act like the one who is enslaved is nothing more than eliminating the same freedom in others that one has already extinguished in oneself. Here is where evil looks tangible. We Christians call is Satan, but you can all it what you will. The point is that the evil that enslaves someone looks and feels more and more like an external force. The self-enslaved person might really be horribly enslaved to this external force, making this self-tortured slave an agent of a power that consumes and destroys freedom.

We have now returned to the present where liberalism has transformed into autocratic liberalism. What I have sought to do in the forgoing paragraphs is demonstrate that using freedom to engage in depraved behaviors leads inexorably to self-slavery that wants to extend that slavery outward to others. There is an appetite not only in the depraved behavior but in the consumption of the freedom itself. When the freedom in oneself is lost, one must go outside oneself to consume others’ freedom. One’s way of life becomes a droning enactment of slavish habits; this, over time, begins to be a new normal. Acting in a way that excludes freedom seems ever more natural, and so likewise should all others be compelled. Authoritarianism is given birth. It came from an unlikely place. A movement, historic liberalism, that sought to put checks on authority and advance freedom has now become autocratic in the extreme. This historic liberalism went astray when it failed to remember than “freedom” is a fundamentally moral feature of human existence. Said differently, hedonism without moral guidance leads to self-slavery. When this self-slavery is experienced, it bespeaks loss of self-determination, which implies that something, someone is compelling the enslaved person. Through the practice of consuming and destroying their own freedom, they extend this practice onto others. I introduce to you authoritarian liberalism which is only satisfied when the freedom to do differently from them is destroyed. Enter critical race theory, enter wokeism, enter grooming kids, and say hello to depravity, a moral system with enslavement as its end goal, which is why we would call this an immoral system rather than a moral one.

We might, in close, ask further questions. Is the desire to control others born out of not being able to control oneself? Is being an agent of darkness, eliminating freedom, a kind of worship of the darkness one advances? Can there be freedom in darkness or only in the Light? Blind leading the blind seems to hit the nail on the head, no? Is all this “destroying and consuming” the freedom of others really just irrational? Is perhaps the act of self-enslavement so contrary to human reason that it generates tyranny, despotism, totalitarianism, and authoritarianism, as a kind of nihilism, a ritual of destruction that must be performed over and over again to satiate dark masters?

Dr. Scalise

Some Thoughts on Critical Race Theory as a System of Liberal Ideology

13 Saturday Aug 2022

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Critical Race Theory (CRT) as a system of Liberal Ideology frames all of society’s institutions, cultural expressions, symbols, and features, in terms of its genealogy — or how it came down through the times. This is a mouthful. The point is that it is an ideological system that builds out and understands all cultural expressions based on where that expression came from. The claim that structural or systemic racism exists in America is forcibly conjoined to liberal theology, stigmatizing any and all other ways of trying to address this. Evidence of this is easy to see: if the problem of systemic racism were not forced into complying with liberal ideology, the claim, “All lives matters,” in place of “black lives matter” would not be troublesome or met with vitriolic behavior. What this really shows us is a big time epistemic problem; this is fancy talk for saying that the bottleneck of the media and social media is becoming increasingly dictatorial. As an ex-professor, freedom of thought is an absolute virtue that is nearly dead in the academy these days — bear in mind, that protecting freedom of thought is not the same as condoning or accepting those thoughts.

Two points require careful navigation when looking at this issue: (1) that something of systemic racism might exist is not to be rejected out of hand, and (2) that accepting the framework of systemic or structural racism as conjoined to liberal ideology must be rejected out of hand. The past two years have made it clear that reframing the racism discussion in any way except as it serves liberal ideology will be censured immediately. This happens either through violence/vitriol or epistemic limitation (what I mean by this is that media and/or big tech will stifle alternative ways to address racism). It must be understood that brokering in knowledge, intel, or data, is perhaps the most powerful human device, in the form of media/social media, ever constructed since the Tower of Babel. Being able to set the limits to what humans think on a matter is profoundly consequential and markedly powerful.

We know this means that we must be able to know our audience and likewise demands that we build our own likeminded communities. The claim that echo chambers are bad is misleading, a tool of liberal ideology to keep likeminded people apart. To speak to (2) above, we must realize that one step into that liberal ideological framing of structural racism is to be utterly overwhelmed and defeated with no way out. We cannot play nice with a system as well thought out as that one; to admit that structural racism of this liberal ideological sort exists at all is to admit that everything in Western civilization is racist. One step into it means absolute ruin and endless class/race warfare. Let me show you where such leads. Although historically inaccurate, the State of Washington schools recently affirmed that “math was racist.” It is historically inaccurate because the numerals we use today are Arabic numerals, coming from brown people. Of course, we ask, “How can math be racist?” In the logic of liberal ideology on structural racism, math ails from Europe, a bunch of white people. If non-whites have trouble with math, this is an institution and field of knowledge (math) that inhibits non-whites from advancing. That math is troublesome and hard to get combined with the claim that it comes from Europe makes the math itself racist.

To speak to (1) above, the notion of systemic racism is as old as the world itself, or at least nearly. My point is that all human development occurs through certain races. Certain developments win out over time for a myriad of reasons. That the initial development was done by a particular race and might be troublesome later for another race to handle is the shear nature of civilizations’ ebbs and flows. Hence, this is a perfect issue for endless warfare. There is no end to it because you’d have to eliminate human civilization in its entirety to get rid of it. Systemic racism, packaged this way outside of the framework of liberal ideology and agenda, is salient and non-dismissive of the issue. It allows us to address its reality without obliterating every institution as guilty of some especially grotesque evil; this likewise frees kids and young people from finding a monster behind every single bush. Furthermore, it allows for change within those institutions — Equal Opportunity Employment being one example — to have very different ethos than what it might have had long ago. In my experience, such change is accurate and reflects on the growth of the idea of equality among all people

Although I think the battle cry of “I am a man!” was perfectly suited for the civil rights movement, the continued sanctification of such an idea leads to the idea of humanity’s destiny as it is tied to the perfect humanity of Christ. Scripture tells us to consider no one anymore according to the flesh, but to consider them in terms of the economy of salvation. Therefore, I think the Church’s framework here is profoundly healing on the matter, and it advances and perfects the idea of “I am a man!” The genetic fallacy, of faulting an idea because of where it came from, is less important than repackaging said idea within the Church’s economy of salvation. In other words, an idea or institution’s viability is tied to its destiny not its origin. Civilization itself, as conveyed in the metanarrative of Scripture, is flawed in its origin (the fall) but revived and reconstituted in its destination in Christ. I could say a lot more on this, but I believe these thoughts are enough to reflect on for the moment, and dinner is callin’.

Dr. Scalise

Power, Demonism, and the Likeness to Governmental Power

30 Saturday Jul 2022

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This title might appear at first to be hyperbole, but I believe the connections between the three are frightfully close. We could use the biblical text to facilitate this conversation, but I will try to offer mere philosophical-linguistic observations at the outset. What is the nature of governmental power when it is not put in check? What is the nature of demonic activity? We will concede before we enter the foray of this discussion that there might be far more horrid, scary, and overt demonic activity than what we discuss herein.

Sec. 1: Power

There are at least two connotations that stand together with the underlying denotation of ‘power.’ First, the denotation (strict definition) is “capacity” or “exertion” or “influence.” To this, connotations include (1) forcing others into conformity and (2) consuming influence with a clear tendency towards being no more (nihilism) if this power cannot feed. This is worldly power; Nietzsche’s Will to Power is abundantly accurate. We can summarize this common human experience of power this way: coercive influence enforcing conformity to some norm that can only sustain itself through finding new souls to coerce. Politicians and political scientists have a shorthand word for this reality: totalitarianism. The party or the politicians use this power with no other end in mind except extending the reality of that power through time. This lackluster end is rightly called nihilism because its ultimate fate is to be a consuming devourer until no sustenance can be found or no sustenance can be served up.

There are only two possible ways to exist in this world as a person, an agent. You will either be a life consuming spirit or a life-giving spirit. To suppose both options are on the table radically presupposes an exceptionally high view of God, one in which God has both life in Himself and is benevolent. In this theistic direction, God must be available, welcoming, and happily involved in communion with humanity. Why is this the case? Because humans and anyone or anything else that is not God are contingent. This is a fancy way of saying that we are not necessary and that not one thing has in itself any ability to sustain itself. This puts everything categorically into the “consuming spirit” box, at least de jure (in principle) without someway to connect the consuming spirits to a life-giving spirit. This complication is one reason why the claim that God is Trinity is potently more persuasive than other claims about a monotheistic God. To put it briefly, if God is Trinity, He already has the blueprint for society or family in the shear manner in which He eternally persists. It can be argued that communion with the life giving Spirit is the only way to turn away from being a devouring spirit. It is funny, isn’t it, that Scripture can capture these ideas so succinctly:

Their end is destruction, their god is their belly, and they glory in their shame (Phil. 3:19) . . ..” Similarly, it states elsewhere, “The last Adam (resurrected Christ) became a life-giving spirit (1 Cor. 15:45).”

St. Paul

Therefore, there is clearly a rift: either you are a life-giving spirit or a life-consuming spirit. That’s it. I can hear an objection already: “does not your workup here require someone to be a Christian to ever be a “life-giving” person? I know many people who are not Christians who behave in up-building sorts of ways all the time.” The objection has merit, but even though I  have painted this issue as clear and neat, the de facto (on the ground) reality is a true mess. This world is the testing arena; call it what you will (prevenient grace perhaps), but all humanity have the ability to behave attuned to The Spirit or join the discord of the consuming spirits. Thus, all humans enjoy the perk of the image of God, the Imago Dei, which is a kind of imprint and remembrance of the Spirit’s original impartation of life. All humans can tap this; however, their ability to continue to tap into it wanes the nearer they come to death since the lesson of death is that time is short, and the original benefit of The Spirit’s life-giving effects moves towards despoilment or impotence. This lesson thunders the need to renew indefinitely the connection with the Life-Giver, the Spirit of God.

Sec. 2: The Nature of Demonism, a Basic Synopsis

Demonism, then, is of the spirit consumptive kind. It is the willful rejection of the Author of Life in preference to being wedded to a perishing cosmos. It has oft been wondered why the cosmos is so vicious, or why the animal kingdom is so horrific. If the “Satan usurped humanity’s kingdom interpretation” of Genesis 1 – 3 is accurate, the answer is easy. Humanity was to spread out and fill the earth — recall here that Adam and Eve or Moses later when he writes down Genesis do not have any grasp on the cosmological build-out of the universe. My point is that “earth” to an ancient mind in no way refers to the ball floating in space; to them, the earth was one continuous question mark, a vast domain to be explored whose boundaries were utterly unknown. Perhaps the cosmos would have been very different if humanity had not had the keys to its kingdom taken by Satan. The image of God’s magnification and pervasiveness was replaced with the image of Satan, an image that wanted to be like God through one’s own efforts and in one’s own manner. This upended the creational order, leading to God’s curse, subjugating everything to futility and to be “marked out” to perish. A timer or countdown clock was put on the reign of Satan, sin, and death, codified into reality itself, the vastness of death, emptiness, and the voids being a kind of object lesson humanity could observe more and more as humanity’s sophistication advanced.

With this laid out, consuming spirits feast on a creation destined for annihilation. In some sense, it is suicidal; in another sense, it perfectly illustrates the self-defeating nature of power apart from the Life-Giving Spirit. Demonism, therefore, is an exertion of power to replicate itself in more or less unwilling people to conform to its image, which image is on a quest to evade the annihilation which awaits it. Demonism in short is totalitarianism of a suicidal “same.” To restate in a less confusing way, demonism coerces persons to enact demonic or life-consuming behaviors in an effort to pull you into this quest to defeat annihilation. What are some ramifications of this on us as people? Demonism is recognized as the need to control and so the need to remove freedom. God’s granting of freedom was and is an invitation to choose, to evaluate the merits and demerits of your situation in this world as you consider your ultimate destiny. Life consuming behaviors rob oneself of the freedom its seeks to devour; those wishing to eliminate freedom of others will find themselves ever more unable to act freely to resist the impulse to devour. Another outgrowth of the demonic quest is insanity. The only resource that can defeat final death or annihilation is a store of value that is endless in its supply; as far as we know, this would be by definition God, as the only One who “has life in Himself.” The quest requires a repeated rejection of the known resource (God) which solves the final death problem. As the saying goes, repeating the same action and expecting a different result is insanity; the demonic quest not only repeats this over and over again but replicates this ongoing rejection in all others it ensnares.

There are certainly more ramifications, but I am getting long so let’s recap and point out some future lines of thought. First, demonism is far nearer than we usually think. Have you ever stalked an ex? Have you let jealousy turn you ravenous? What do these have in common with demonism? The impulse to assert your will over and often against the life of another. Power as it is usually expressed in this world, with the connotations I discussed earlier, is inherently demonic. That so many governments of the 20th century and even in the 21st century have made their chief aim the expansion of their power while replicating its own image is by no way strange if demonism truly exists. Scripture discusses demonic activity to be uniquely obsessed with the high positions of power; if my philosophical analysis here is largely accurate, the corrupting effect of power itself unified to an underlying impulse by governments to advance totalitarianism is an unsurprising outcome. In fact, the picture I have painted asserts that demonic activity and governmental activity are the same and fixated on consuming behavior to prolong its power-exertion greed.  I think we will call it quits with a reminder of the “great inversion” evinced by the Lord Jesus Christ. The willingness to die in order to persuade humanity to opt for the life-giving Spirit, for humanity to choose to be on the side of life-giving rather than life-consuming, is an inversion of the use of power. Truly, and I will do another video and writing on this at some point, we need to utterly redefine and attach totally different connotations to the word “power” when we speak of the power of the cross or the resurrection. The last Adam became a life-giving Spirit, St. Paul tells us. This power was used to illustrate God to offer an invitation. It is not totalitarianism, an enforcement of an image. It is a presentation of God, with all its life-giving intimations. The presentation is an invitation, and we will decide what to do with that invitation. The choice is to be a life-consumer or join the harmony of the Life-Giver as you become just that.

Dr. Scalise

The Life Wars (part II): Cessation of Abortion via OT and Science

29 Wednesday Jun 2022

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It is commonplace to see science at odds with religion. There is certainly a place for this, but, from what we know from medical science about conception, it seems that an Old Testament text from Exodus 21:22 – 23 harmonizes neatly. What I am investigating here is twofold: (1) what does this OT text say as applied to abortion and does this accord with science, and (2) if we do not accept this scientific or Old Testament framework for life as it relates to abortion, who will decide when life begin? I do not think these are novel ideas, but they are worthy of revisiting given the severity of the topics of ‘life,’ ‘abortion,’ and ‘god-like decider of when life begins.’

Revisiting the abortion discussion, the Old Testament Law, antiquated and obscure as it sometimes feels, offers insight even on such a modern issue. The text states:

“If men are fighting and they strike a pregnant woman resulting in her child(ren) coming out and no harm occurred, he {the man who struck the woman} will be punished with a fine as what the husband of the woman sets, and he will give it in accord with the judges. If, however, harm occurred to the child(ren) then you shall give life in place of life . . .. (translation mine from the Masoretic Text, Hebrew OT)”

Exodus 21:22 – 23

The text goes on the added refrain, “eye for eye, hand in place of hand,” etc.  The harm done to the child is born out of human conflict and violence. The abortion of these child(ren) is the outgrowth of misplaced violence, the arbitrary overflow of men fighting onto the pregnant woman. That the text calls the pre-born “children” decidedly marks them as part of the family; they are not merely human and they certainly are not something less than human. When do babies start to take humanoid physical form? The text begins forcefully with calling for ‘life for life’ or literally ‘soul for soul’ if the baby is “aborted” through this violence resulting in the baby’s death. A baby takes humanoid form as early as 4 weeks, which is often prior to a woman knowing she is pregnant.

Perhaps more importantly is the use of the word, “soul,” which is nefesh in Hebrew. Soul is not some immaterial of the human (that was Plato’s view); in the OT, it is the distinguishing marker of life. ‘Soul’ is used to show that something lives, that what was once life-less is now animate, that real vitality is part of it now. God in Genesis 2, breathes the breath of life into the pre-formed man and man became a living ‘soul.’ Before moving forward, we should juxtapose this notion of ‘soul’ with the legal court’s notion of ‘viability’ that is so central to the issue of abortion in the United States.

‘Viability’ in this abortion conflict means “the time at which the fetus can live on its own outside the womb” and is notoriously vague, leading to the big question of why so vague a term would be used to determine something so sacred as human life. Does it mean viable with tech helping the baby or does it mean able to feed himself or herself? Up until June 24th, 2022, the Supreme Court let stand the notion that viability was set at 24 weeks although I do not know the full history on the develop of this term and concept. Now that Roe v. Wade is overturned, we are seeing viability situated in different States around a number of new spots, like the appearance of the heartbeat. I want to return to the OT text’s usage of nefesh, or ‘soul.’

The OT law sees this pre-born life as a nefesh, a soul. If the baby is harmed to the point of death, it takes another nefesh as payment for the loss of this baby’s nefesh, “soul in place of soul.” When does the accountability for the life of the baby inside the pregnant woman begin in this Old Testament text? The immediate answer is when it is discerned that the woman is pregnant and that the baby is forced out of the woman apart from the natural progress of pregnancy and birth. We must do some recontextualization to move from ancient time’s medical and physiological knowledge to modern day: that a woman was pregnant in the ancient world can be indicated in several ways: nausea, odor of urine, and obviously missing a menstrual cycle. Many of these can be discerned in the first few days. The OT text’s emphasis on parts of the baby’s body being harmed is also suggestive of the earliest weeks of pregnancy since humanoid form takes place during the end of the first month of pregnancy. With this said, knowledge of being pregnant even in the ancient world could happen very early on for the discerning or careful observer. It is little different today; someone might be very attuned to her body and notice differences. There are pregnancy tests that have an assorted range of accuracy if someone wants to attend to her body with extra attention. With all this said, in this OT text, accountability for the baby’s life comes virtually at the time of conception, with a range of deviation for the careful versus careless observer. If a woman knew she was pregnant, even if not showing, and she is struck resulting in a miscarriage, the soul of that baby would require the soul of the man who struck her as recompense: “life for life, soul for soul.”

In summary, ‘viability’ has little value except to provide human governments the god-like ability to declare when human life begins. This OT text accords better with science than any of these laws built around ‘viability.’ Why would we have any interest, religious people or not, in the government having a de facto position to determine when human life begins. Frankly, it is a hellish proposition, and we have seen hell rise as a result: baby parts’ market, massive pharmaceutical research and development using these parts, dismembered babies stored in the baby parts warehouse at the University of Pittsburgh, or even a generation of women viewing babies as an infringement of their freedom instead of the miracle a baby is. Conception is the moment of actualized and perpetuated union, between a man and woman, resulting in a new life, a new soul. The OT text intimates that people are accountable for that baby’s life as soon as their discernment realizes that the baby lives. The resulting death of a pre-born baby from external, unnatural force applied to the mother required the death of another person, ‘soul for soul.’ Abortion should therefore be banned in all States since a mother seeking an abortion has knowledge of her baby’s existence and thus is accountable for that baby’s life. Whatever humanizing we do to limit the consequences for killing one’s own baby (I am ambivalent about this), that they are accountable must be implied in the consequences by being severe enough to communicate that someone is acting as a murderer.

Dr. Scalise

Addressing Transgenderism and Gender Confusion from Biblical Foundations: Ancient Fertility Cults, Transsexualism, and 1 Cor. 11:2-14

27 Monday Jun 2022

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Thoughts on 1 Cor. 11:2 – 14 in Light of Ancient Pagan Cult Practice

These verses are obscure and lack needed historical contextualization to draw a full set of strict conclusions. Specifically, St. Paul seems to be drawing on some conversation familiar to the Corinthians, but we do not know what that was. With this in mind, we then can pull from that text what can be known from the text alone without speculating on what St. Paul taught them before. Paul is repeating a clear teaching from Deuteronomy 22:5, “A woman shall not wear a man’s apparel, nor shall a man put on a woman’s garment; for whoever does such things is abhorrent to Yahweh your God.”

Ancient paganism of Mesopotamia — specifically referring to the fertility cults best known around the god Baal and goddess Asteroth — and the ancient world generally came in much the same form, which often involved transvestites, genital mutilation, and the instinct to confuse the sexes, male and female. These pagan temples, often associated with demonology of the ancient world, would also include male and female prostitution, with all the confusion of that transsexualism. What is remarkable about the limited statues and architecture we know of that time is the Baal and Molech depictions. They often show a man’s body, a beast’s head, and female breasts. The body is clearly masculine while confusing that with animals and women.

Why am I bringing Ancient Near Eastern culture and context to bear? It is because much of the fertility cults and their rituals form the backdrop, or historical cultural context, of prohibitions in the Old Testament. Even the text above, Deut. 22:5 — given the battle ancient Israel had with the worshippers of Baal (and Asteroth) and how frequently these deities are mentioned in the Torah — supposes knowledge of the transvestite (and often genital mutilating) practices of these cults. As we zoom out to look at the rest of the ancient world’s pagan practices, we find a striking similarity among most: prostitution, often of males who were castrated, transsexualism, transvestitism, and orgies or other sexual escapades. These trends do not cease and continue down to the times of the New Testament and indeed even to the modern day.

What can we draw from this rather strange text on how men and women dress and adorn hair? This Corinth passage points to these truths, at least the ones I am comfortable to say are clear: (1) men and woman are to be distinct as distinctly created and different, (2) men are woman are to emphasize those distinctions, (3) and to reduce those distinctions is abhorrent to God, “dishonoring oneself.” The context of the many pagan temples in Corinth should not be missed, including the male (and female) prostitution. Hair styles of that time, which deviated from ‘standard male’ or ‘standard female’ styles, aside from signaling a male going effeminate or a female going masculine, were sometimes used to convey sexual availability especially concerning the cult prostitutes. It is not so much different from today, really. St. Paul’s instructions on how to dress and adorn one’s hair is as much about distinguishing maleness and femaleness in the church as it is about disassociating from the styles or adornments suggestive of cults, transsexualism, and associated illicit sexual behavior. Given that converts were coming into the church from these cults, it is altogether appropriate that St. Paul would readdress the importance of not only male and female distinctions but of cult vs. church distinctions. Social trends and embedded meaning in the culture born from those trends battle and invade subcultures like a church’s culture and ethos. It is no different today from then. Although it may seem trivial to focus in on hair style and adornment, it is really the fool that doesn’t understand the nature of cultural embedded influences who is captured by them. Because of the way hair, dress, and adornment are part and parcel to the cults’ devotees involvement, addressing the same within the church is as prudent as essential: likely the church being just down the street with converts coming in from these cults,

I am unprepared to opine on whether the covering for women is their hair or not; 1 Cor. 11:6 suggests that there is a covering of some sort that is not her hair. However, in 1 Cor. 11:14 – 15 we find that the woman’s long hair is her covering. To revisit what I said at the beginning, there is a historical conversation that we simply do not have access to that might clear all this up. Plenty of commentators run you through the list of possible meaning on this issue, so I will leave that to their capable minds and save myself both the time and space. There are a few words in verse 14 that have always stood out to me: οὐδὲ ἡ φύσις αὐτὴ διδάσκει (oude he fusis aute didaskei), “Does not nature itself teach . . .” that a man with long hair dishonors himself and a woman with long hair has glory. I want to leave on this point because I’ve always been captivated by theological aesthetics, or just aesthetics, the “study of beauty.” There is something objectively “true” about a woman with long hair being a marvel of beauty, and I appreciate that “nature itself” teaches this as a way to break out of the notion that all this is merely cultural, built out of and around the meanings embedded at that time in place.

Dr. Scalise

The Life Wars, part 1: Roe v. Wade Fallout

26 Sunday Jun 2022

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The rights of the pre-born are in our thoughts today, now more than ever. I want to advance our “war for life” in ever more resounding and determined ways. The days of letting the politicians do as they like, promising and failing to perform, and us sitting on the sidelines are over. This is a democratic Republic; We the People have the power, governing authority, and the right to out-source that to representatives that really stand for our interests. The Christians, the church, the religious right: the text of the Declaration of Independence,

“. . . governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed ….”

Declaration of Independence

means that the government authority resides with the “consent of the governed” and is given to representatives for the sake of efficiency and effectiveness. This means religious people are not under a Nero, a Roman Emperor, or any other autocratic or aristocratic government: when Jesus the Christ says, “give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s,” this requires massive recontextualization of the government context from that of which Jesus was under to that of a “consent of the governed constitutional republic.”  No excuses for the religious people not to be full in on the abortion “war for life.” There is no excuse that you have to just submit to government and do as you are told; this would imply that the constitution is not born out of ‘We The People’ and that the Declaration of Independence did not put the authority to govern in the hands of the people. The impact of the Supreme Court’s ruling this week was as much about decodifying a so-called ‘right to murder’ as it was about telling the government that it cannot play God. If you read Justice’s Alito’s Majority Opining, it comes to a decided conclusion:

“. . . the Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion. . . . We now . . . return that authority to the people and their elected representatives.”

US 597 DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION 2022, Justice Alito, Majority Opinion, pg. 79.

Kavanaugh says something similar shortly thereafter: “The Constitution neither outlaws abortion nor legalizes abortion.”

That the government cannot play God is implied in at least three ways from this conclusive closing comments by these justices.

  1. Intrinsic authority that is then outsourced to local representatives to decide local and State (like Florida, or Tennessee or Pennsylvania) laws is retuned to the voter. The Supreme Court’s de facto legalization of abortion, without going through legislatures, has been corrected; the three branches of government have regained equilibrium on this matter of abortion. Each man and woman must decide how his or her relationship with God will go. It is thus fitting that individuals in States will have determining say in the legality or illegality of abortion.
  2. The term ‘viability’ — which means that a fetus can be considered not a human up to 24 weeks — has been vacated of its national importance. This term more than anything else in this Roe v. Wade drama was used to play God. What the Supreme Court decided does not remove ‘viability’ as a functional and legally important term for this war on abortion. What is implied in the term though is that the government, and not God, gets to determine when human life starts. Some blue States will undoubtedly still use the concept of viability; other States, however, will make the concept irrelevant as many States — already 13 States at the time of this writing — will just make abortion entirely illegal.
  3. This decision likewise reemphasizes the right to privacy a woman has entails responsibility to keep her body private. Arguably, aside from horrid situations of rape, a pregnancy is evidence that the woman has decided to make her body available to someone, and hence void her right to privacy on her own, willingly. It is now no longer a centralizing authority (the US government through the Supreme Court) stating that a woman’s right to privacy (together with the notion of viability), guaranteed by the Constitution, ensures her the right to abort a baby. Likewise, that a woman’s pregnancy should be understood as a private matter is returned to the States and the people of those States to decide. I’ve argued elsewhere that the fetus, no matter how early, is partly the man’s body and not merely the woman’s body. As such, the fetus itself is the actualization of a non-private enterprise and the fetus is not “owned” by the woman. It is as much the man’s body as the woman’s body with the exception that the woman carries the baby in her body. The matter of how privacy should be understood, then, is up for discussion. In some sense, this ruling of the Supreme Court makes the entire discussion about privacy a bit less important since it was, arguably, the right to privacy that the Constitution provided which somehow made abortion a constitutional right. The return of responsibility and marginalizing this “privacy” aspect of the abortion debate recenters the discussion on woman’s right to choose as it relates to (a) herself, her conscience, (b) the man, who has vested biological interest in the fetus, and (c) the woman responsibility before and/or with God. Most movements toward individual sovereignty in terms of self-determination are equally theocentric, or God centered. I can’t argue this here; I would get too far afield, but the significant freewill God provided humanity entails God’s intent that humanity have self-determination.

This is a Constitutional win, for sure. It is likewise a Declaration of Independence win too. As such, it is a God-centric win as well. Determinative authority residing in individuals, as responsible persons and as part of the “consent of the governed” crowd will always bring with it, so long as the form of the Declaration of Independence persists, the Creator who endowed that authority and dignity. The totalitarian shift is often marked by the government making determinations, often on the most profound of issues, for the people and alleviating them of responsibilities. The Supreme Court has this week said that profound moral questions (per Justice Alito, pg. 79 – 80) are best decided by the people through the States. The task at hand this is to advance this war on abortion, to go State by State, arguing for the only truly viable point of a human’s beginning: at conception. If you think otherwise, understand that history is not on your side. Before the mid-1900s, abortion was virtually outlawed in all places in the United States. Do not be an “ageist” which is the bigotry of thinking your immediate time and place is somehow more excellent than all other ages. I will do a biblical piece on abortion today too.

Dr. Scalise

Is God biased?

26 Sunday Jun 2022

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This is a question I’ve been putting out there time to time as I advance the fact that becoming unbiased is impossible. It is no more possible to evade bias than it is to evade being a limited human. If you’ve never thought about it, humans are defined by their limitations: whether it be running, power, thinking, height, knowledge, etc. It other words, to be human is to be restricted. This idea goes further though: to be anything in the cosmos is to have some restrictions on it. Even the cosmos itself has some energy restrictions on it: energy cannot be created or destroyed and the energy that exists is moving into greater disorder every day (entropy is increasing). At one point in my audio, I stated that even God has a point of view, which may suggest that I think God is biased.

Scripture gives a profound and heavily agenda-oriented report of events that are discussed in it pages. Any human reporting in this fashion we would say has their bias controlling them or are totally into their confirmation bias. I will not deny any of this. There is an a priori question about the nature of Scripture, one that cannot be discerned by the scientific method. Why not?

As Richard Dawkins has opined in various contexts, and I am paraphrasing, “If God is, it is a scientific question even if science has no methods to resolve the question.”

I’ll grant there are ways to a posteriori determine the divine origination of Scripture at least in an abductive logic manner. Abduction is the logical process of “inferring from the data to the best explanation.” Doing historiography and archeology from the pages of Scripture is one way to discern if events in Scripture describe historical events accurately. Still, the intangibility and, presumably, the ‘stuff’ of the Divine, of God, is not something creaturely discerned or naturally produced, and as such, obscures and perpetually frustrates merely naturalistic ways of investigation. If these events are truthful, then by extrapolation, the associated theocentric (focused on God narrative) point of view on the event may be assigned some measure of truth-value.

Moving on: I will assume the Judeo-Christian worldview is true as are its formative Scriptures (the Bible), and I mean ‘true’ in the sense that they accurately describe the cosmos and point to its Author as the Constitutor of truth. This means that God is a maximally great Entity, and, for our purposes here, has the properties of omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, and immensity (or magnitude).  He is all knowing, all powerful, everywhere, and fully able to attend to all information, knowledge, data without any diminishment in His capacity to comprehend, synthesize, and “know” the best point of view on this data. We might also note the fact that His Mind abilities should not be strictly governed by time-sequence. Why is this importance: if you have access to all intel, data, info, at all times and places, if God had to work through this in any sequence that implied time, we might wonder if the info would ever be worked through. Simply put, this would imply a restriction on God; the maximally great God would be infinite, and such time restrictions would be unbecoming – and might inadvertently make time more supreme than God Himself.

We are now ready to address the question of whether God is biased.

Next to that, we will also ask does God have a point of view. The answer is that God is not biased but God has a robust and extremely agenda-oriented point of view.

How can this be? Humanity has their biases built out of their limitations – where were you born, what language did you speak, what were the cultural norms, the mores of that group, traditions, demographics, etc.? These biases are inescapably part of who you are. Don’t mishear me. I am not saying that you cannot limit or rid yourself of a bias. You can. You cannot rid yourself of all biases though without gaining divine capacities – because humans are, as is the cosmos itself, defined by its/their limitations. Humans thus are ‘boundary defined’ in what they think. Again, this does not mean you can’t break out of the boundaries in some ways – hence the importance of imagination and self-transcendence = narratives and story telling – but it does mean that some limitations or boundaries will define and control what you think. God, on the other hand, as a maximally great Entity, does not have His point of view formed in this way, like humans or like creations. He has access to all intel at all time, in all places, without diminution to his attentiveness to that intel, with the needed power to comprehend it. His point of view, then, is born from objective reality as His mind constitutes it. It is not that He sees the objective truth of the cosmos, and whatever particular event in the cosmos as it should be understood; it is that His mind is constitutive of how the cosmos really is. The notions of absolute “best interpretations” of an event already assumes that a mind is involved. In this case, it is the Mind, and this maximally great mind sees all intel in a way that grounds the entire notion of objective truth or knowledge.

The crux of the matter resides in the fact that God’s understanding of events is formed from a maximally great set of data, beyond which cannot be conceived, while humans’ understanding of events is always born from limitations. Ergo, God can have a point of view while not being biased because bias assumes limitation, of which God has none. When we read the Bible and it seems to us an entirely too agenda driven narrative, we need only remind ourselves that the humans that masquerade as neutral interpreters are the real deceivers. All humans working within the naturalist framework have biases implicitly or explicitly. Even the scientific method, concerning which I love, must make a decision, a pre-experiment decision, about the contours of the experiment – the limitations both in the experiment and the humans doing it are already implied. This is no assault on the scientific method; it is a naturalist method, and as such should be limited as its method requires. It is the context of the manifold interpreters, of limited humans, that complicates the situation. Don’t think God missed this issue either. It may well be the case that God has massive interest in preserving the freewill of humanity, and as such provides reasonable grounds for rejecting Him. I don’t know for sure. In conclusion, God has a point of view, but how He informs it makes it categorically different than a bias. Is the journey done? No, not at all. Part of the intrigue of theism, or believing in God, is that it provides a run-way that does not end in death, in the heat deprivation of the universe. Discovery becomes its ethos, morality its means, and its Author the framework that makes it all possible.

Dr. Scalise