WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS

 Or God/dess help us this poster is probably not only registered to vote but does. I don't know if this person just slept through science class or was homeschooled with workbooks that featured Adam and Eve and the dinosaurs. And yes these do exist. Or at least they did about twenty years ago because I saw them in a Portland "Christian" bookstore while my sister was picking up more Christmas decorations. 

Well I was planning to post about Quaker ideas on liberty and then The Politburo of Teabilly Mockery posted this little gem. This is why we can't have nice things. The Bible is not a science text book. Most of it was written almost two thousand years or more ago when a good many of our fellow humans believed the earth revolved around the sun. Those that bothered to think about it all. Matthew was, so it is said, a reformed tax collector. Peter was a fisherman. Paul was a tentmaker. 

We didn't "lose" the tech to go back to the moon, we just have to reinvent the wheel so to speak. And decide to spend the cash to do it. There is a great line in Apollo 13 when Jim Lovell is taking a tour group through. "A computer that fits in a room" imagine that. I probably have more computing ability in my phone than the Houston Space Center had to follow the Apollo missions. Catch the movie if you have the chance. Slide rules, computer monitors, smoking in the room, coffee. Lots and lots of coffee. 

Those shots of the earth from the moon were not composites they were taken by at least one astronaut with his very own camera. Oh and this should really blow his tiny little mind. Voyager I "woke up" and fired it's thrusters ot make a tine course change. Forty years old and more than a billion miles away from home. That blows my mind. 

I've known about this mindset for years but I simply cannot imagine living in a universe where you believe that just about everything is a trick of the devil or that the tiny little god you follow has filled your world with deceptions to test your so called faith. Is it fear that keeps your mnd and imagination in a straight jacket? 

Do I sound cranky this morning. Damn straight. 

BEING CALLED A LIBERAL IS NOT AN INSULT

 AOL comments used to be quite the experience. If you enjuoyed swimming in the castle middens in July in a heat wave. Anyway a blastfrom the past. 

 I’ve been dipping my toes in some of the comments sections over on AOHell (yes, Lisa there does lie madness). Considering how some of the posters feel about the Huffington Post, I wonder how they’ll feel about the merger with AOL. After all there’s no site I know of that’s crazier than AOL, so where can they go? :-)It can be useful place to pick up journal ideas sometimes though. There are folks on those boards who treat the word Liberal as if was an insult. I guess in their eyes it is.

I’ve got to tell you though, as possible insults go, liberal is about as mild as it gets. And since a few of them claim to be Christians, I’d love to ask them if they’ve read that pesky little verse about hating your neighbor. I seem to remember that Jesus said something along the lines of “saying that you hate your neighbor in your heart is the same as murdering him.”

I’ve been researching my family tree over the last year. And the ancestors seem to run heavily to New England dissenters and seekers, Mid Atlantic Quakers and the odd Maryland or Virginia Roman Catholic. I’m sure there’s the odd Anglican in the mix, too.

A distant cousin four centuries or so removed, Thomas Gerard, went to the stake with Robert Barnes in July of 1540 for being too Protestant. They hanged three Catholics the same day because they wouldn’t sign the Act of Supremacy that made Henry VIII the head of the church in England. Henry, it seems, was something of an equal opportunity oppressor when it came to religion. (did I really say that?)

Ironically, Thomas Cromwell who pointed out to Henry that if he was head of the English church he could basically grant himself a divorce and get on with the business of getting a male heir without interference from Rome had gone to the block two days earlier. He’d let the genie out of the bottle, miscalculated how far Henry was willing to go on the road to reformation.

A great uncle a dozen or so times removed, John Gerard, spent a stretch in the tower in Elizabeth’s time for being too Catholic. He was a Jesuit who had been functioning as an underground priest. He managed to survive, finally went into exile for good and wrote his memoir

Members of the family have probably been called ranters, levelers, diggers, schismatics, heretics, papists, atheists and/or blasphemers. Remember, being called a Puritan or a Quaker was not meant as a term of affection. Heck, being called a liberal is relatively tame.

And that was while they were in England. Once they arrived in the New World each group became targets for the others. Roger Williams came into conflict with the Puritan leadership in what became Massachusetts and ended up founding Rhode Island.

Thomas Hooker was no believer in universal suffrage, but did believe that if you belonged to the church (and were a man) you should have the right to vote even if you weren’t a land owner. He and his followers helped found Connecticut.

Quakers who showed up preaching in Massachusetts were lucky if they were just kicked out of the colony. Come back and you risked being flogged at the back end of a cart while being paraded through the town. A few insisted on coming back a third or fourth time and finally faced a date with the village hangman. Not that many, but it's scary how fast the persecuted turn around and become persecuters.

I guess that set the pattern for what has happened over the years. As long as there was someplace else to go, we could get out of Dodge if we couldn't get along with each other. But, now there’s no frontier to run to; we have to stay where we are. Hopefully, somewhere along the line we’ll finally grow up (sort of) and learn to get along (maybe).

THE LIBERTY TO ORDER OTHERS-COLONIAL VIRGINIA

 Most of this material comes from David Fischer’s Albion’s Seed.

Well, I’m beginning to understand why a lot history got left out when I took US history. Twice. High school and university. :-P.

“How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?” Dr. Samuel Johnson. Died 1784.

“I am an aristocrat, I love liberty; I hate equality.” John Randolph of Roanoke Virginia

These quotes help to capture the paradox of the love of liberty expressed by the gentry of Virginia. The gentry, who controlled between to seventy five percent of the land and other productive assets including a growing population of African American slaves, had an exceptionally strong sense of their English liberties. While many Englishman turned out reams of prose and poetry celebrating their heritage of English liberty going back to Magna Charta those visions often contradicted each other. New England’s ordered liberty that emphasized a liberty that often subordinated individual liberty to the community and the church was much different from the hierarchical vision of liberty that grew up in colonial Virginia and the broad lands of the Chesapeake.

Hegemony and hierarchy, the uprights that held the rungs of Virginia’s social ladder. Hegemony was a condition of dominion over others and a dominion over themselves. When a traveler named Andrew Barnaby spoke of the colonial Virginian’s he observed “the public and political character of the Virginians corresponds with their private one: they are haughty and jealous of their liberties, impatient of restraint, and scarcely bear the thought of being controlled by any superior power.”

In Fischer’s opinion that was the key of Virginia colony’s definition of liberty; the power to rule. To rule over others, not to be ruled by them. The opposite of the power to rule was slavery. You didn’t have to actually be a slave, just have lost your power to rule over others.

When Britain first, at Heaven’s command,
Arose from out of the Azure main,
This was the charter of the land,
And guardian angels sang this strain:
Rule, Britannia, rule the waves;
Britons never will be slaves. James Thomson

There’s almost innocent arrogance in this verse. Britain, protected by its namesake stormy Channel, has the right to rule; Heaven has spoken. Simply by being the sons of southern England’s landed gentry, Virginia’s gentry assumed the right to rule over others.

In Virginia’s hierarchical paradise, your status was determined by the liberties you possessed. The big land owners on the top rung of the ladder had the most liberty. They controlled most of the land and had enough power to negotiate favorable tax rates and limitations on the power of the colonial government from sympathetic governors. Granted the colonial government, at least in the first generations, didn’t have a lot of responsibilities. The patriarchal head of the new world manor regarded his dependents, those with less liberty as his responsibility. This protection could extend to immediate family, wards, house servants, visitors, farm workers and slaves.

Next came the thirty percent or so of the population that were small farmers and tradesmen. They were expected to bend the knee to the gentry and the established church, but they could give orders to the landless laborers they employed.

The laborers seem to have had at least one liberty. They could quit and look for a job somewhere else. But in a colony with large separated land holdings and few towns that may not have counted for a lot.

At the bottom of the ladder were the slaves. They had no liberties that the law was obliged to recognize. Anything they were granted was dependent on their masters. The masters had the liberty. They had none. Fischer uses a term, laisser asservir. It literally means the “right to enslave.” He doesn’t explore where the basis of the belief of the planters that they had the right to enslave others. It may go back to the whole concept of “Britannia Rules the Waves.” We have the right to do this simply because we’re British and it’s mandated by Heaven. I feel another headache coming on.

The ideal of hegemony was not only public, but personal. The ideal colonial member of Virginia’s elite was a master not only of others but of himself. To be truly free, you must rule your thoughts and actions; not be ruled by them. And while they believed in minimal intervention by the colonial government they also believed that part of their personal liberty was the duty to fulfill the duties and responsibilities of their station. Well, that’s one saving grace I suppose.

I’d love to go back to the 1780’s and invite the likes of Jefferson, Adams and Washington to a little get together.

ORDERED LIBERTY IN NEW ENGLAND

 When British emigrants came to the New World they brought more than thier religious beliefs and folkways. Each group; Puritans and dissenters, Quakers and Pietists, exiled Cavaliers, British borderers and Irish economic refugees brought their own conception of liberty.

The colonists of New Englanders had some conceptions of liberty that were unique to their settlements. David Fischer argues in Albion’s Seed that the word liberty was used in four different ways that would probably strike modern Americans as unusual.

One use of liberty described liberty or liberties that belonged to the community or communities rather than the individual. Writers, from the founding of the colony for the next two centuries spoke of the liberty of New England, the liberty of Boston, or the liberty of the town. There is evidence that Sam Adams wrote more often about the ”liberty of America” than the liberty of individual Americans.


This concept of collective liberty was consistent, to New Englanders at least, with restrictions on individual liberty that modern Americans would find very restrictive to say the least. In early years of the Massachusetts colony, potential colonists couldn’t settle there without permission from the general court. Persons who were judged to have dangerous opinions, in the eyes of the authorities, could be and occasionally were shipped back to England. Not every Tom, Dick, or Harry was allowed to move into the colony without permission.

Those colonial New Englanders accepted restraints, but did insist that the restrictions be consistent with the written laws of the Commonwealth. And they insisted that they had the right to order their communities in their own way. Not the way it was done in Pennsylvania, or Virginia, or in some cases even England.

Liberty or liberties had a second meaning in New England. One that had roots in the counties of East Anglia where many of colonists and most of their pastors left when they emigrated. Individuals could be granted the liberty to do something that they normally couldn’t do. For example, certain individuals could be granted the liberty to fish or hunt in certain areas while that liberty was denied to others. In some cases the liberty granted depended on someone’s social rank. For example a gentleman could not be punished with a whipping unless the crime was extremely serious and “his course of life was vicious and profligate.” (the author didn’t provide any examples) Those of lesser rank, had a lesser liberty: they were limited to forty stripes or less if they were sentenced to a flogging.

And codified in the fundamental liberties of the colony was the right of any man, inhabitant or foreigner to come before the courts or town meetings and have his voice heard. And if he couldn’t plead his own cause he had the right to ask someone else to speak for him.

And there was a third kind of liberty in New England. It was referred to as Soul Liberty, Christian Liberty or Freedom of Conscience. This did not mean freedom of conscience in the way we understand it. This was freedom to practice the true faith as defined by the fundamental law of the colony. This liberty did not apply to Quakers, Catholics, Anglicans, Baptists, or even Presbyterians who did not agree to a very restrictive definition of reformed theology. And the definitions could, and often did, depend on the whim of the local minister. Basically, it meant they were free to persecute everyone else in their own way. I know, I’m getting a headache just trying to wrap my brain around the idea that the freedom to serve God in your own way in your own community could be defined as the right to hang Quakers for preaching in the town.

And, at times, liberty was used in a fourth way. It described an obligation of the “body politicke” to protect individual members from what the author calls the “tyranny of circumstance.” The Massachusetts poor laws may have been limited but the General Court recognized a right for individuals to be free from want in a basic sense. It wasn’t a question of collective welfare or even social equality.

In Fischer’s opinion these four ways of looking at liberty; collective liberty, individual liberties, soul freedom and freedom from tyranny of circumstance were all part of what the New Englanders sometimes called ordered liberty. The New Englanders had their ways of defining liberty; other colonies and their settlers didn’t always agree.

A WARNING

 The last few days my get up and go got up and went leaving without telling me where it was going. So until the search party gets back hereis a little something. 

Eriu, one of the queens of the Tuatha Da Danaan, to the Sons of Milin the novel Bard by Morgan Llywellan. You can't keep taking without giving back and giving thanks. Perfect description of our if we can't make a profit off of something it's worthless economy.

HERESY?

  "You will realize that doctrines are the inventions of the the human mind, as it tries to penetrate the mystery of God. You will realize that scripture itself is the work of human minds, recording the example and teaching of Jesus. Thus it is not what you believe that matters; it is how you respond with your heart and actions. It is not believing in Christ that matters, it is becoming like him." from the letters of Pelagius a British theologian. He disagreed, intensely, with Augustine's theology of Original Sin. He's come down through the history of Western Church as a heretic. I first ran across the pesky Britain, oh it must have been twenty years ago. My mention of him during a home visit with our pastor brought an immediate "he was a heretic." OK, we won't go there right now. And folks a little further from my tapdancing line would probably agree with him. If they'd ever heard of Pelagiius in the first place. 

The Eastern Church wasn't quite so sure about the heresy charges and withheld judgement. He saw the world with different eyes, and what he saw he loved.

The Celtic church is widely believed to have taken its inspiration from the Gospel of John. The emphasis was on listening for God in the world around us. Listen carefully and you can hear the heartbeat of God in all that is around us. It sounds easy, yeah really easy. Until you damn near knock yourself out when you run into the brick wall. If the Spirit is in every man, woman, child, fish and flower then it not only dwells where it's least expected but where it's least wanted. Who do you think of when you find yourself thinking "you really don't mean that the Spirit can be found in ______________?"

And I suspect we all can think a few folks with the spirit buried so deeply you couldn't find it with a map, a compass, a backhoe and a case of dynamite

I SUPPORT YOUR INDIVIDUAL RIGHT TO ________ EXCEPT FOR (TAKE YOUR PICK)

 A detour on the journey through Genesis. Maybe not a such a big detour after all back when I was stuck in Springfield with no fundies to torment. 

There’s a dirty little secret at the foundation of the fixation many of our economic and political leaders have on hyper individualism. It’s only really tolerated in the economic sphere of our lives. It’s ok to make as much money as you can, any way you can. No matter who or what gets hurt along the way.

Good jobs get outsourced to India or China? Ok, as long as my dividends and stock options survive. Another oil pipeline breaks and oil leaks out destroying habitat or farm land. Just the costs of doing business. And if we work it right we’ll stick the taxpayers with the clean up costs. Which means it won’t get done any time soon. Another gas pipeline breaks and explodes. Another train carrying cars full of oil and blows up. Well at least we didn’t kill anybody this time. Again somebody else probably get stuck with the clean up costs.

But, just try to carry that individualism over into our private or social lives and you might just come a cropper. Abortion on demand is the logical outcome of that individualistic philosophy. Just try to tell that to the true believers. They’ll give you chapter and verse about the “Right to Life.” At least until baby is born and then you are on your own. Have a couple of kids when times were good, fall on hard times and need a hand up? Tough, you should have consulted your trusty crystal ball, saw this coming and not had the kids in the first place.

And we’ll just belly up to the tax money fountain and ask for financing for pregnancy crisis centers staffed with counselors  that will outright lie to their clients. For their own good of course. No outdated, largely unverified information is too off the map to used to convince scared young women to keep their babies. Again for their own good. Too bad about the cuts in food stamps and other help; it’s never to soon to teach little Joey or Joanie that they’ll have to pull themselves up by their own bootie ties.

The right to decide how many children you have and when to have them? Same thing.  Just don’t step into one of our counseling centers believing you’ll get the same information as the Planned Parenthood clinic that closed down a couple of months ago. Not going to happen.

The right to marry person you love whether it’s Adam and Eve, Adam and Steve or Eve and Louise. Under that hyper individualistic philosophy it’s nobody’s business but yours. Not your neighbor, not the pastor down the street or groups like the American Family Association and their clones.

Yep. How you make your money is your business. How you live the rest of your life is the business of every Nosy Parker with a megaphone, a website, a Face Book page and a 501 whatever the designation is group with a good donor list.

You can’t have it both ways. Either it’s unfettered individualism in all parts of our lives or it isn’t. If you have the right to question how your neighbors live their private lives, they have the right to question the full costs of how you run your business and make your money.