“God” is a word; it is a name for something - not the thing itself. As such, it is a sign, a signifier, and “an outward indication of the existence or presence of something not immediately evident.” Ordinarily, words refer to phenomena, that is, immediately perceived realities, as distinguished from noumena, or realities which are perceived by mediation but cannot be directly known or apprehended. “God,” “Allah,” “Yahweh,” “Jehovah,” and all holy names like these, are signs that point toward, or refer to, the limitless noumenon that underlies all phenomena, that is, “being itself.”
Love is the orientation of the soul that arises in the conscious relation of personal being with being itself. This (“the conscious relation of personal being with being itself”) is also how I have described “the presence of God.” Ergo, God is love, as the Johannine scriptures tell us. Now I affirm this as true myself, not because John said so, but because I have discovered it to be true according to my own experience and reflection. This sheds light as well on Paul’s scripture saying, “Faith, hope, love; these three abide.” In other words, faith and hope, too, are orientations of the soul inherent in this conscious relation. But, as the Apostle avers, “love is the greatest of these.” Without love, hope is faint and futile; without love, faith is brittle and desiccated.
It is notable that in these terms, “God” is a relation, not a thing. I used to speak of God as “being itself,” that is, the ultimate reality “behind” or “beneath” all things, until I realized that I have also come to understand that the human personal consciousness of God is necessary for the “presence” of God. As I once wrote, “If there were no minds to know God, there would be no God to be known.” Just as the human being - or “personal being” - is an aspect of the ultimate reality I describe as “being itself,” personal God-consciousness can be regarded as the “consciousness of being itself,” something I’ve also said repeatedly. Here, then, is the truth of the religious affirmation that humanity is created by the love of God, and in “God’s image.”
I refer here, as I have again and again through the years, to my first articulation of this, which I wrote twelve or thirteen years ago, when my daughters Anna and Maggie were very young:
“How big is God, Daddy? Is he bigger than a house?”, asked Anna, my firstborn and the more pensive of my two little girls, one afternoon while we sat together on the front porch railing after their preschool day.
“God is not a person, or a thing you can see, or touch, or hear,” I answered her, quite as thoughtfully. “God is . . . a feeling inside you. God is how you feel when you know you are alive. God is what you feel when you love someone. When you say, ‘I love you,’ you feel God in you.”
Anna sat quietly for half a minute, enjoying her ice cream cone. “I love you, Daddy”, she said.
“I know, sweetie. I love you, too. Listen. Do you remember the day we were at the beach, when you were kneeling in the wet sand, with your back to the waves, and you’d laugh as each wave surprised you, splashing over your shoulders? Maggie was playing by herself, near us on the big rocks, and you and I were there in the surf, and I’d laugh when you laughed, and you looked up at me then and yelled, ‘I’m haaaap-py!’ Do you remember how good you felt then? That was God, laughing inside you.”
Being itself recognizes itself in the aspect of personal being. As this relationship becomes conscious, love arises, the subjectivity of which is called “divine love.” It is all together the love of God for the world and humanity, the human person’s responsive love of God, and love of neighbor. Thus we recognize the “subjective self” in each other, each and every one a being created in the image of God. And thus, God is love, and is located in the conscious relation of God with God’s human image.
And for animal lovers, to the extent that other sentient beings are in conscious relationship with God, love is there too. What about atheists? Well, in my view, they’re no exception. They just don’t like to use the term, “God.”
And what about agnostics? Their difficulty is in the mistake of worrying about the existence of God. God does not exist – God is existence itself, the ground of being, or being itself. To use some fancy verbal footwork, theirs is the perplexity of existents questioning the reality of existence itself, in which they consist.
This is, pretty much, the setup for St. Anselm’s “ontological argument” for the existence of God. The agnostic knows explicitly that he or she exists, and implicitly that all things in existence also exist, but doesn’t know that God is not to be understood to exist in the same way, as an existent, but rather as existence itself in relation with its human aspects which consist in it, and by grace and providence become conscious of their relation with it. As soon as a relational description of God is accepted by them, all their worries will fall away, like scales from their eyes.
What is God? God is not a what. God is not an existing being. God is not an object; God is the ultimate subject. God is being itself. God is. Who is God? God only knows. If God is anyone, God is I and Thou; God is the ultimate subject in the subject-subject relation.
To impute attributes of beings to God, as God, is to speak of God as if God were in being, among other beings. You and I and the lamp post are beings. Attributes, or Names of God, are metaphoric when speaking of God as God: God is good; God is just; God is merciful. Or else they are hyperbolic: God is great; God is all-knowing; God is all-powerful. Any words that can be said of God as God can be said of no thing in being: God is infinite; God is eternal; God is unconditional; God is absolute.
God the Creator and God’s Creation are completely interpenetrated. All Creation is in being; God is being itself. Wherever you are, there you jolly well are, aren’t you? And there God is, too; God always was, is now, and ever shall be, forever and ever, Amen. God’s presence is in us and among us here and now; ours is the consciousness of being itself. In our awareness of being, being itself experiences being itself. With each new generation, God’s faith in humanity is renewed; in each regeneration, humanity’s response of faith is renewed.
Through our consciousness, God apprehends Creation, and we, the fully self-conscious parts of Creation, apprehend God the Creator. This state of God-consciousness is what is called “sanctification” or “redemption.” It is a state of reconciliation with God; it is what is meant by being “in Christ.” When we then act out our lives in congruence with the ethics of Christ, we are “saved.” Salvation means we are saved from the effects of our potentialities for doing evil.
What is Satan? Satan is said to be the anti-Christ; as such, it is the antithesis of the human potentiality for redemption. If the Christ is the human capacity for reconciliation with God, the Satan is its converse. Neither the Christ nor the Satan is a supernatural person, or divine being, or real entities of any sort. Their names are symbols of the universal human potentials for salvation and damnation, ultimate good and ultimate evil. In Hebrew, the words ha Satan ("the Satan") appear in the Book of Job. These are usually translated as “the Adversary,” understood allegorically to signify the “shadow” side of the human personality.
Between the Adversary and the moral righteousness of the "blameless and upright" human being, a constant dialectic was thought to be acted out in people’s daily lives. The effect of the embodied and unconstrained Satan is to tempt or traduce the human soul to sin, which denies the Christ potential and alienates the person from God’s grace. Deeply infected with sin, people do evil, causing various kinds of harm and damage to others, usually intentionally.
Remember well that the Christ and the Satan are symbols standing for human mental, ideational, and intentional configurations, or “states of mind,” that can become more or less permanently internalized, and consequently affect a person’s conscience, character formation, moral and ethical faculties, and the entire array of human personality factors, for good or ill.
To be “in Christ” is the converse of being “in sin.” In Christ (remember, this is a sanctified state of the psyche, a holy condition of the soul, not a mystical divine being), the “saved” or “redeemed” person is incapable of sin, that is, of doing willful harm to self or others, or to God’s Creation. The sanctified one is relieved of sinfulness by virtue of a capacity for self “disciple-ing” in which one walks in the way of the internalized Christ. The sanctified one “fears God,” that is, conscientiously avoids doing harm to God’s Creation.
To be in sin, in thrall to the Satan, means that the potential of being reconciled with God, of being “in Christ,” is denied or preempted. The human will to do evil, to not refrain from doing harm, is unleashed. In this state, the human person is free to act out diffidence or malice, and to carry out damage, destruction, aggression, and oppression by whatever means will suit his sinful ends or sinful attributes – Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Greed, Gluttony, and Lust, among them.
Who is Jesus? “Is” is the wrong tense. Jesus was an itinerant, indigent Jewish teacher and religious reformer, a Rabbi and a rabble-rouser, a prophet of profound religious and social transformation. He was brutally murdered by crucifixion at the orders of the Roman Provincial Authority, as an enemy of the state. He was not, by any means, the only person to have suffered this fate, for the same reasons.
Jesus was not a Christian. He was, however, “in Christ,” awakened, enlightened, exalted, and sanctified. He was truly a saint. He was also not, by any means, the only saint to have been sanctified “in Christ.” There have been multitudes, before and since Jesus, even now there are. Some of them are Christians; many are not. Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, for instance, was “in Christ.” Maybe Augustine of Hippo was, maybe Muhammad of Medina, John Wesley, George Fox, Mahatma Gandhi, and John Freeman, to name but a few.
How does Jesus redeem us from our sins? He doesn’t. He died two thousand years ago. “In Christ,” one day at a time, we are redeemed and sanctified by reconciliation with God through our own human conscientious faculties. We are to promote salvation, by proclaiming this gospel and acting out in beneficence toward others, “in Christ,” until we die and are eventually taken up, body, mind, and soul, into the earthly biosphere from whence we came.
Except in Biblical mythology, no one has ever seen or heard God, and no one ever will. This is because the "Supreme Being" is not a being, as human beings are, as every object of human intentionality or relationality is. We are persons; God is not a person. Yet God the Creator and God’s Creation are completely interpenetrated. All Creation is in being; God is being itself. God cannot be known objectively, because God is not an object. The human person can only know God subjectively, as we know our own experience and ourselves.
All I can say about God, qua God, is that God is. God’s essence is to be; in God alone, essence and existence are one. Of this, I can have the same perfect certainty as that I am. Objectively considered, my personal being is contingent, finite, temporal. I was once not in being, and the time will come when I am no longer, subjectively incomprehensible though that is. God’s being is absolute, infinite, eternal, and necessary to my being. That I am is indubitable, if not necessary.
The miracle that I am a conditional being, who can apprehend the ultimate, unconditional reality of being itself, is the gift and grace of God. In this transcendent apprehension, it may be said truly that I manifest the consciousness of being itself. What people call the presence of God is the self-conscious relation of personal being with being itself; and vice-versa, if you prefer - the relation of being itself with conscious, personal being. One key to this understanding is relatedness, but not just in the usual interpersonal sense. God is self-relatedness; God is relatedness itself. In God-consciousness, the dichotomy of subject and object is both necessary and it is self-transcendent.
The American Buddhist teacher Adyashanti says, “Because of an innocent misunderstanding, you think that you are a human being in the relative world seeking the experience of Oneness, but actually you are the One expressing itself as the experience of being a human being.”
As Alan Watts put it, “Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.” (I have put it this way: “We are being itself experiencing itself being experienced.” Experienced by whom? By itself, of course.) Watts explained further, “God also likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside God, he has no one but himself to play with. But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. Now when God plays hide and pretends that he is you and I, he does it so well that it takes him a long time to remember where and how he hid himself. But that’s the whole fun of it – just what he wanted to do.”
In the ancient Hebrew myth, God’s presence is revealed to Moses, appearing symbolically, in a burning bush that is nevertheless not consumed. It is significant that this realization is made by a human being. It could not be otherwise. It is said we are made in God’s image, because it is in human reflection that God the Creator recognizes himself, or herself, and remembers that the Creation was no accident, after all.
Sometimes this realization occurs to us when we recognize ourselves in other beings, other people. It is in shared awe and in praise of this incomprehensible reality that we worship together. If you would see the face of God, look in the faces of women, men, and children. If you would see the hands with which God works in the world, the feet with which God walks in the world, look at your own hands and feet. If you would hear the voice of God, listen to your own silent voice in prayerful reflection.
As Jesus taught, all the Torah and the Prophets are summed up in this single greatest commandment, “you shall love the LORD your God with all your soul, and all your heart, and all your mind,” because God is ever present within us and among us. Jesus taught another commandment like it, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself,” because every person – the inner conscience in every person – reflects the image of God, whether we recognize it or not.
This is the good news. The presence of God is reflected, brightly or dimly, in six billion human souls’ mirrors, everywhere in the world. These are God’s images. These are our neighbors. Jesus’ ministry called us to love them, and ourselves, for our brightness and our dimness as well.
Jim Weller is a graduate of Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California. He is currently a member of Peace United Church of Christ, formerly called First Congregational Church of Santa Cruz.
Monday, July 25, 2005
Saturday, July 23, 2005
Reflections on War and Poverty
I had been thinking that perhaps the two highest-order material evils of our time, and all times, are war and poverty - conventional enough thinking - when I realized how deceptively framed these ideas have become in ordinary public discourse.
Take, for instance, the huge and perennial evil of poverty. It occurs to me that poverty itself is not the primary problem. Poverty has a primary cause, and that is – wealth. Wealth, the obsessive accumulation of it, and the misdistribution of it, are the root causes of endemic poverty in our world.
Throughout the history of human civilization, wherever great excesses of wealth have been amassed, great poverty has existed not far away. This is no mere coincidence. Excessive wealth and extreme poverty are directly correlated by causality, not by accident. Neither social condition can exist without the other. In fact, the existence of one is the definition of the other. Wealth cannot be seen to be excessive except by contrast with a co-existing extreme of poverty. Poverty, by conventional definition, is the deprivation of sufficient wealth for human well-being. Excessive wealth, by my definition , is not only the condition of more than sufficient wealth, but that condition which also entails the objective insufficiency we call poverty.
I have sometimes put it as follows, and as no economist without an ideological axe to grind will ever dispute: At any point in the process of an economy, there is a finite quantity of created wealth in existence. There is a certain distribution of this wealth among its owners. Some have more than others. However “enough” is defined, when some have much more than enough, others will necessarily not have that excess. If there are many who, in fact, do not have enough, then those who have more, have what is needed by others who have less. The “have-mores” have their excesses at the expense of those who have less than they need.
Republicans, libertarians, and apostles of the “prosperity gospel” will take umbrage at this. But their protestations notwithstanding, I am here to tell you that theirs is bad philosophy and bad religion. The Hebrew prophets of the ages, straight on down to Jesus of Nazareth, had it right, distorted though their prophecies have become in popular parlance. You cannot serve God and Mammon. You may worship one or the other, but not both, unless you are a fool or a hypocrite. To parallel Albert Einstein’s famous saying, “You cannot simultaneously work for peace and prepare for war,” I say, “You cannot dispel poverty while accumulating excessive wealth.”
Furthermore, excessive wealth and concomitant poverty are the root causes of war. Let me explain myself: Poverty consists of deprivation. Excessive wealth entails deprivation. What constitutes war? Violence carried out by people against other people. People act violently against others when they have been objectively or subjectively deprived of something which is of worth to them.
A simple instance: An insecure person responds violently to an insult, because in a state of personal insecurity, the insult deprives that person of his or her sense of self-worth. Another instance: A person needing or wanting something takes it from another person to whom it belongs and to whom the thing taken has value. The person deprived of something of worth responds violently against the other. Yet another instance: A person acting violently causes bodily harm or injury to another person, or threatens to do so. Thus the other is deprived of well-being, or the sense of security, and responds violently.
These instances of interpersonal violence can serve as analogues for international violence. Such violent personal acts, acts of deprivation, greatly compounded, are the constituents of war. Every act of war directly or indirectly deprives people of some or all of their lives, liberties, happiness, health, and homes. Thus, the function of war is to impoverish those against whom it is directed. And acts of war are also the ultimate resort of national or subnational groups of people who have been likewise impoverished, or deprived of what they value, by those whom they will regard as their enemies.
Most significantly however, in the modern world, it must be recognized that war engaged in by powerful nation states has another important function. War always enriches those who declare it and direct it, and those who profit by the provision of the economic factors involved in the production of war. Thus, once again, the interests of amassing excessive wealth, in this case for purposes of waging war, are the efficient causes of abject poverty.
While the foregoing are universal economic verities in the modern world, there is one unique special case which ought to be considered. In all of history until September 11, 2001, only the United States among powerful nation states was able indefinitely to wage war and to cause widespread foreign impoverishment (along with its corresponding domestic enrichment) beyond its borders with impunity, except for military casualties. Other than in the case of the U.S.A., acts of war and political and economic exploitation against other peoples have always before long resulted in retaliatory warfare against the enemy population. So war and poverty continued to be reciprocally engendered, and the interests of wealth – Mammon – have been their progenitor. The terrorist attacks of 2001 on the World Trade Center signaled that the specially privileged people of the United States are no longer invulnerable.
Whoever the instigators of the terrorist crimes of 9-11 were (and, despite conventional public wisdom, this has not been established with certainty) their evil was not done because “they hate our values,” as the Bush regime insists. To the extent that the perpetrators were Islamic militants, it is more probably because they hate the desolation and deprivation we have wrought against their values, i.e. the impoverishment of Muslim peoples in the “third world” by the people of the “first world,” preeminently in the United States and the United Kingdom.
In a sign of our times, a 1985 pastoral statement circulated in churches of Johannesburg, South Africa, is as timely as tomorrow for us here and now:
"We now pray that God will replace the present unjust structures of oppression with ones that are just, and remove from power those who persist in defying his laws, installing in their place leaders who will govern with justice and mercy . . . The present regime, with its structures of domination, stands in contradiction to the Christian gospel to which the churches of the land seek to remain faithful . . . We pray that God in his grace may remove from his people the tyrannical structures of oppression and the present rulers in our country who persistently refuse to hear the cry for justice . . . We pledge ourselves to work for that day."
Gustavo Gutiérrez writes that, for the fulfillment of the prophetic imperative, “the support of the community [of saints, the religious community] is essential . . . community life [as in the basic ecclesial communities of Latin America] cultivates receptivity for God’s reign and also proclaims . . . the special call to overcome . . . oppression, injustice . . . and to struggle for the values of the kingdom that Jesus proclaimed.”
The life work of Gustavo Gutiérrez (and liberation theologians following him) consisted in a synthesis of ethics and theology, politics and religion. Politics and religion meet, if they meet at all, in the personal. If the personal is political, then for the religious person, religion is political. I believe that all persons are both – we are inherently religious and political. A society of persons in which the religious and the political do not meet is in deep trouble, for it is either in error or it is in denial. Recognizing that a society is nothing but a complex of inter-relationships among persons, I think it must be true that in a just society the realms of religious ethics and political ethics would be coterminous.
Even in a religiously pluralistic society, the golden rule necessarily applies as the supreme ethic: I will not do unto others as I would not have done unto me. Don’t pee in my pool, and I won’t pee in yours. What, you may ask, does this rule of social reciprocity have to do with religion? For one thing, it is the first ethic of all religions in all cultures known to have ever existed – that is, the ones which were sustainable for more than a few generations. As Paul Tillich said, “Religion is the substance of culture, and culture is the form of religion.” Religion informs culture. The key to understanding Tillich’s bon mot is that, in his terms, religion is not simply identical with theology and ecclesiology; it includes within its meaning secular religions, the profane as well as the sacred. For, as we know, one person’s sacrament is another’s profanity.
This is not to say, as some young people do, “It’s all good.” Certainly not all that is done is good. Some is absolutely evil, unpalatable though that term may be to moral relativists. What is evil? It is the antithesis of good, and good has consistent objective meaning when considered inter-relationally, as all ethical considerations ought to be. What is considered good for one, or some, ought to be not other than what is good for all. As I suggested with reference to the golden rule, this should be no big news. Among other things, it was the core ethic of Plato’s philosophy concerning the just society. (By the way, there is good reason to suppose a direct connection in the history of social thought between the golden rule of the Hebrew Bible and the ethics of Plato and Aristotle.)
As usual, the devil is in the details. I think this is because of the recurrent ethos of what Rabbi Michael Lerner calls selfish individualism, which is what you might call sin. (Or you might not – I do.) Is sin original, inescapable, and inherent in humankind? I don’t think so. Endemic, perhaps, but not incurable. Did Jesus want to redeem us from sin? It certainly appears so, but not by getting crucified. I imagine that was John the Baptist’s objective, too. Unfortunately, he got murdered for his efforts as well.
How could a holy teacher’s words redeem us from sin? You have one big clue already. That’s right – the golden rule. An informed and conscientious application of it in praxis throughout our society would save us. Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics would be helpful, too. And Plato before him had a similar take on the subject. Speaking in Socrates’ voice (and identically with the ethic of Jesus) he wrote, “It is better to suffer injustice than to do injustice unto others.”
Take, for instance, the huge and perennial evil of poverty. It occurs to me that poverty itself is not the primary problem. Poverty has a primary cause, and that is – wealth. Wealth, the obsessive accumulation of it, and the misdistribution of it, are the root causes of endemic poverty in our world.
Throughout the history of human civilization, wherever great excesses of wealth have been amassed, great poverty has existed not far away. This is no mere coincidence. Excessive wealth and extreme poverty are directly correlated by causality, not by accident. Neither social condition can exist without the other. In fact, the existence of one is the definition of the other. Wealth cannot be seen to be excessive except by contrast with a co-existing extreme of poverty. Poverty, by conventional definition, is the deprivation of sufficient wealth for human well-being. Excessive wealth, by my definition , is not only the condition of more than sufficient wealth, but that condition which also entails the objective insufficiency we call poverty.
I have sometimes put it as follows, and as no economist without an ideological axe to grind will ever dispute: At any point in the process of an economy, there is a finite quantity of created wealth in existence. There is a certain distribution of this wealth among its owners. Some have more than others. However “enough” is defined, when some have much more than enough, others will necessarily not have that excess. If there are many who, in fact, do not have enough, then those who have more, have what is needed by others who have less. The “have-mores” have their excesses at the expense of those who have less than they need.
Republicans, libertarians, and apostles of the “prosperity gospel” will take umbrage at this. But their protestations notwithstanding, I am here to tell you that theirs is bad philosophy and bad religion. The Hebrew prophets of the ages, straight on down to Jesus of Nazareth, had it right, distorted though their prophecies have become in popular parlance. You cannot serve God and Mammon. You may worship one or the other, but not both, unless you are a fool or a hypocrite. To parallel Albert Einstein’s famous saying, “You cannot simultaneously work for peace and prepare for war,” I say, “You cannot dispel poverty while accumulating excessive wealth.”
Furthermore, excessive wealth and concomitant poverty are the root causes of war. Let me explain myself: Poverty consists of deprivation. Excessive wealth entails deprivation. What constitutes war? Violence carried out by people against other people. People act violently against others when they have been objectively or subjectively deprived of something which is of worth to them.
A simple instance: An insecure person responds violently to an insult, because in a state of personal insecurity, the insult deprives that person of his or her sense of self-worth. Another instance: A person needing or wanting something takes it from another person to whom it belongs and to whom the thing taken has value. The person deprived of something of worth responds violently against the other. Yet another instance: A person acting violently causes bodily harm or injury to another person, or threatens to do so. Thus the other is deprived of well-being, or the sense of security, and responds violently.
These instances of interpersonal violence can serve as analogues for international violence. Such violent personal acts, acts of deprivation, greatly compounded, are the constituents of war. Every act of war directly or indirectly deprives people of some or all of their lives, liberties, happiness, health, and homes. Thus, the function of war is to impoverish those against whom it is directed. And acts of war are also the ultimate resort of national or subnational groups of people who have been likewise impoverished, or deprived of what they value, by those whom they will regard as their enemies.
Most significantly however, in the modern world, it must be recognized that war engaged in by powerful nation states has another important function. War always enriches those who declare it and direct it, and those who profit by the provision of the economic factors involved in the production of war. Thus, once again, the interests of amassing excessive wealth, in this case for purposes of waging war, are the efficient causes of abject poverty.
While the foregoing are universal economic verities in the modern world, there is one unique special case which ought to be considered. In all of history until September 11, 2001, only the United States among powerful nation states was able indefinitely to wage war and to cause widespread foreign impoverishment (along with its corresponding domestic enrichment) beyond its borders with impunity, except for military casualties. Other than in the case of the U.S.A., acts of war and political and economic exploitation against other peoples have always before long resulted in retaliatory warfare against the enemy population. So war and poverty continued to be reciprocally engendered, and the interests of wealth – Mammon – have been their progenitor. The terrorist attacks of 2001 on the World Trade Center signaled that the specially privileged people of the United States are no longer invulnerable.
Whoever the instigators of the terrorist crimes of 9-11 were (and, despite conventional public wisdom, this has not been established with certainty) their evil was not done because “they hate our values,” as the Bush regime insists. To the extent that the perpetrators were Islamic militants, it is more probably because they hate the desolation and deprivation we have wrought against their values, i.e. the impoverishment of Muslim peoples in the “third world” by the people of the “first world,” preeminently in the United States and the United Kingdom.
In a sign of our times, a 1985 pastoral statement circulated in churches of Johannesburg, South Africa, is as timely as tomorrow for us here and now:
"We now pray that God will replace the present unjust structures of oppression with ones that are just, and remove from power those who persist in defying his laws, installing in their place leaders who will govern with justice and mercy . . . The present regime, with its structures of domination, stands in contradiction to the Christian gospel to which the churches of the land seek to remain faithful . . . We pray that God in his grace may remove from his people the tyrannical structures of oppression and the present rulers in our country who persistently refuse to hear the cry for justice . . . We pledge ourselves to work for that day."
Gustavo Gutiérrez writes that, for the fulfillment of the prophetic imperative, “the support of the community [of saints, the religious community] is essential . . . community life [as in the basic ecclesial communities of Latin America] cultivates receptivity for God’s reign and also proclaims . . . the special call to overcome . . . oppression, injustice . . . and to struggle for the values of the kingdom that Jesus proclaimed.”
The life work of Gustavo Gutiérrez (and liberation theologians following him) consisted in a synthesis of ethics and theology, politics and religion. Politics and religion meet, if they meet at all, in the personal. If the personal is political, then for the religious person, religion is political. I believe that all persons are both – we are inherently religious and political. A society of persons in which the religious and the political do not meet is in deep trouble, for it is either in error or it is in denial. Recognizing that a society is nothing but a complex of inter-relationships among persons, I think it must be true that in a just society the realms of religious ethics and political ethics would be coterminous.
Even in a religiously pluralistic society, the golden rule necessarily applies as the supreme ethic: I will not do unto others as I would not have done unto me. Don’t pee in my pool, and I won’t pee in yours. What, you may ask, does this rule of social reciprocity have to do with religion? For one thing, it is the first ethic of all religions in all cultures known to have ever existed – that is, the ones which were sustainable for more than a few generations. As Paul Tillich said, “Religion is the substance of culture, and culture is the form of religion.” Religion informs culture. The key to understanding Tillich’s bon mot is that, in his terms, religion is not simply identical with theology and ecclesiology; it includes within its meaning secular religions, the profane as well as the sacred. For, as we know, one person’s sacrament is another’s profanity.
This is not to say, as some young people do, “It’s all good.” Certainly not all that is done is good. Some is absolutely evil, unpalatable though that term may be to moral relativists. What is evil? It is the antithesis of good, and good has consistent objective meaning when considered inter-relationally, as all ethical considerations ought to be. What is considered good for one, or some, ought to be not other than what is good for all. As I suggested with reference to the golden rule, this should be no big news. Among other things, it was the core ethic of Plato’s philosophy concerning the just society. (By the way, there is good reason to suppose a direct connection in the history of social thought between the golden rule of the Hebrew Bible and the ethics of Plato and Aristotle.)
As usual, the devil is in the details. I think this is because of the recurrent ethos of what Rabbi Michael Lerner calls selfish individualism, which is what you might call sin. (Or you might not – I do.) Is sin original, inescapable, and inherent in humankind? I don’t think so. Endemic, perhaps, but not incurable. Did Jesus want to redeem us from sin? It certainly appears so, but not by getting crucified. I imagine that was John the Baptist’s objective, too. Unfortunately, he got murdered for his efforts as well.
How could a holy teacher’s words redeem us from sin? You have one big clue already. That’s right – the golden rule. An informed and conscientious application of it in praxis throughout our society would save us. Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics would be helpful, too. And Plato before him had a similar take on the subject. Speaking in Socrates’ voice (and identically with the ethic of Jesus) he wrote, “It is better to suffer injustice than to do injustice unto others.”
Thursday, November 04, 2004
It’s Not Just The Economy, Stupid.
By Jim Weller
3 November 2004
Hello friends. Wake up and smell the gun smoke.
It is 9:37 a.m. in Berkeley, California, and John Kerry, the unfortunate leader of the too little, too late Democratic opposition, has conceded electoral defeat.
The blood-stained hands of George Bush and Richard Cheney are raised in exultation, and the crypto-fascist cadres of Republican demagogues standing balefully behind them are sharpening their battle-axes.
Gird your loins and say your prayers, for today, the People's Resistance begins. The Democratic Party, as we knew it, has had its last hurrah. If any hope is left for the formerly democratic Republic of the United States, it will be in a resolute and stone-cold serious National Resistance Party.
There can be no more equivocating political gamesmanship. The Republican strategists are playing for keeps, and believe me, their strategy from here on in is all-out war; scorched earth.
The re-elected Bush Dynasty will, in short order and irredeemably, make the United States Public Enemy Number One everywhere in the world. You think you’ve seen shock and awe in Baghdad? You ain’t seen nothing yet.
U.S. military forces will soon be engaged in catastrophic warfare far beyond Iraq. As wars of resistance against the U.S. imperium spread throughout the Middle East, expect policies of aggression from Washington that will make the present state of war in Iraq look like the shoot-out at the O.K. Corral.
Expect killing fields in Palestine such as have not been known since the medieval crusades; since the fabled ancient Israelites’ conquests in Canaan.
Bush has not committed himself to deploying new battle-field nuclear weapons for no particular reason. In Teheran, in Damascus, and in Pyongyang, there is every reason to worry.
Expect the economy to continue going to hell in a hand basket. That is part of the Grand Old Party’s plan. The Republican junta has learned well the political lessons of the Third Reich. While the military industrialists prosper, and the super-rich continue to appropriate for themselves the wealth of the nation, widespread economic disintegration will play into the hands of the warmongers and national security freaks.
Meanwhile, the class struggle in this country will continue unabated, as it has since the founding days, but with greater violence and intensity than ever before. The fault lines in this country’s socio-political topography have never been more apparent. The mythology of the middle class will now become obvious shadowplay to all but the stupidest and most selfish.
Listen up, people: The time has come to finally decide which side you are on.
Soon, Bush will appoint the next Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and a replacement on the high court for William Rehnquist. No prizes for guessing correctly that these will be far-right extremists who will start up their chain saws immediately and have another go at the edifices of civil liberty and social justice that still remain standing.
As David S. Broder and Richard Morin write in the Washington Post today (Wednesday, November 3, 2004; Page A01),
The hard-fought 2004 fight for the presidency reflected both deep-seated social divisions in the country and the polarizing effects of Iraq, the economy and the war on terrorism.
The decision to invade Iraq split the electorate almost evenly, according to the polling, although more think it is going badly than going well. Those who opposed the war and those who think it is failing went 4 to 1 for Kerry. Supporters of the Iraq policy and optimists backed Bush by equally lopsided ratios.
The issue agenda varied by state. In Ohio, the economy and jobs topped the list, named by almost twice as many voters as those who singled out Iraq. But in New Hampshire, the reverse was true. And in Florida, terrorism topped both Iraq and the economy.
One voter in five said moral values were the most important issue driving the vote, and almost eight out of 10 of them backed Bush. Terrorism was almost as high in importance, and 85 percent of voters citing it also supported the president. Kerry found his strongest support -- more than 80 percent -- among those who named the economy, jobs and the war in Iraq as their most important concerns.
It is clear that not only must we patiently convince people with whom we’d rather not associate at all that war is not the answer; we must radically change their understanding of moral values.
We must unremittingly teach the truth that terrorism is the consequence of the violence and injustice we inflict upon the world, not just an evil inflicted on us by our enemies. They are our enemies for good reasons. Osama bin Laden is correct in telling us our security is in our own hands.
We must commit our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor to dismantling the structures of economic injustice that have brought us to the dire place where we are. No longer will privileged liberals and bourgeois conservatives be able to occupy the relatively high places while the teeming masses toil and glean disconsolately below.
We must convince Republicans and Democrats alike that it is not just the economy and jobs with which we all need to be ultimately concerned. There is a deep, implacable, xenophobic, religious fundamentalist, racist Weltanschauung abroad in this nation, which simply must be converted if we are not to descend into a new civil war.
As Broder and Morin report,
Overall, white voters were favoring Bush by about 54 percent to 44 percent -- similar to his 2000 share. The exit poll indicated that about 22 percent of yesterday's voters were white evangelical or born-again Christians. White House strategists had made a major effort to recruit more voters from that group, but no comparable figure for 2000 was available.
A reactionary inversion of universal human morality, which has overcome the imagination and the common sense of the people of the United States of America, now threatens this country and the world with devastation and desolation.
My friends, the time to rise up in a permanent national resistance movement has come at last. This will take us the rest of our lives, and we will surely be called on to sacrifice much.
God help us.
Yet there is hope. Today’s Washington Post story continues,
Another notable feature of the election was the Kerry edge among voters younger than 30. Their ranks grew as much as those of older voters, who usually are much more reliable in showing up at the polls. And those between 18 and 29 -- one-sixth of the electorate -- were going for Kerry by 13 points last night.
We, who were under 30 in “the movement” of the late 1960’s, must now pass on our socio-political legacy to the young of this era. We ought by now to have learned the lessons of the intervening decades, how the corrupt consumer capitalist system invidiously co-opts the moral aspirations of youth, and suffocates their incipient liberation movements.
We must not let this happen again to our children. We must join with them, and educate them in the ethics of resistance, and arm them with real humanitarian morality, for it is they who will carry the revolution forward after us.
These youth, whom we must support in their radicalization with us, under our tutelage, and in collaboration with us, will not be well served by the inept Democratic partisan forms that have failed us this day.
We must build with them a committed National Resistance Party that will not turn from the demand of the people for liberation, and will resolutely speak the truth to power, demanding reform, and committing to patiently convert the hearts and minds of our benighted neighbors.
Let us remember the immortal words of Frederick Douglass, away back in 1857:
This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
3 November 2004
Hello friends. Wake up and smell the gun smoke.
It is 9:37 a.m. in Berkeley, California, and John Kerry, the unfortunate leader of the too little, too late Democratic opposition, has conceded electoral defeat.
The blood-stained hands of George Bush and Richard Cheney are raised in exultation, and the crypto-fascist cadres of Republican demagogues standing balefully behind them are sharpening their battle-axes.
Gird your loins and say your prayers, for today, the People's Resistance begins. The Democratic Party, as we knew it, has had its last hurrah. If any hope is left for the formerly democratic Republic of the United States, it will be in a resolute and stone-cold serious National Resistance Party.
There can be no more equivocating political gamesmanship. The Republican strategists are playing for keeps, and believe me, their strategy from here on in is all-out war; scorched earth.
The re-elected Bush Dynasty will, in short order and irredeemably, make the United States Public Enemy Number One everywhere in the world. You think you’ve seen shock and awe in Baghdad? You ain’t seen nothing yet.
U.S. military forces will soon be engaged in catastrophic warfare far beyond Iraq. As wars of resistance against the U.S. imperium spread throughout the Middle East, expect policies of aggression from Washington that will make the present state of war in Iraq look like the shoot-out at the O.K. Corral.
Expect killing fields in Palestine such as have not been known since the medieval crusades; since the fabled ancient Israelites’ conquests in Canaan.
Bush has not committed himself to deploying new battle-field nuclear weapons for no particular reason. In Teheran, in Damascus, and in Pyongyang, there is every reason to worry.
Expect the economy to continue going to hell in a hand basket. That is part of the Grand Old Party’s plan. The Republican junta has learned well the political lessons of the Third Reich. While the military industrialists prosper, and the super-rich continue to appropriate for themselves the wealth of the nation, widespread economic disintegration will play into the hands of the warmongers and national security freaks.
Meanwhile, the class struggle in this country will continue unabated, as it has since the founding days, but with greater violence and intensity than ever before. The fault lines in this country’s socio-political topography have never been more apparent. The mythology of the middle class will now become obvious shadowplay to all but the stupidest and most selfish.
Listen up, people: The time has come to finally decide which side you are on.
Soon, Bush will appoint the next Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and a replacement on the high court for William Rehnquist. No prizes for guessing correctly that these will be far-right extremists who will start up their chain saws immediately and have another go at the edifices of civil liberty and social justice that still remain standing.
As David S. Broder and Richard Morin write in the Washington Post today (Wednesday, November 3, 2004; Page A01),
The hard-fought 2004 fight for the presidency reflected both deep-seated social divisions in the country and the polarizing effects of Iraq, the economy and the war on terrorism.
The decision to invade Iraq split the electorate almost evenly, according to the polling, although more think it is going badly than going well. Those who opposed the war and those who think it is failing went 4 to 1 for Kerry. Supporters of the Iraq policy and optimists backed Bush by equally lopsided ratios.
The issue agenda varied by state. In Ohio, the economy and jobs topped the list, named by almost twice as many voters as those who singled out Iraq. But in New Hampshire, the reverse was true. And in Florida, terrorism topped both Iraq and the economy.
One voter in five said moral values were the most important issue driving the vote, and almost eight out of 10 of them backed Bush. Terrorism was almost as high in importance, and 85 percent of voters citing it also supported the president. Kerry found his strongest support -- more than 80 percent -- among those who named the economy, jobs and the war in Iraq as their most important concerns.
It is clear that not only must we patiently convince people with whom we’d rather not associate at all that war is not the answer; we must radically change their understanding of moral values.
We must unremittingly teach the truth that terrorism is the consequence of the violence and injustice we inflict upon the world, not just an evil inflicted on us by our enemies. They are our enemies for good reasons. Osama bin Laden is correct in telling us our security is in our own hands.
We must commit our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor to dismantling the structures of economic injustice that have brought us to the dire place where we are. No longer will privileged liberals and bourgeois conservatives be able to occupy the relatively high places while the teeming masses toil and glean disconsolately below.
We must convince Republicans and Democrats alike that it is not just the economy and jobs with which we all need to be ultimately concerned. There is a deep, implacable, xenophobic, religious fundamentalist, racist Weltanschauung abroad in this nation, which simply must be converted if we are not to descend into a new civil war.
As Broder and Morin report,
Overall, white voters were favoring Bush by about 54 percent to 44 percent -- similar to his 2000 share. The exit poll indicated that about 22 percent of yesterday's voters were white evangelical or born-again Christians. White House strategists had made a major effort to recruit more voters from that group, but no comparable figure for 2000 was available.
A reactionary inversion of universal human morality, which has overcome the imagination and the common sense of the people of the United States of America, now threatens this country and the world with devastation and desolation.
My friends, the time to rise up in a permanent national resistance movement has come at last. This will take us the rest of our lives, and we will surely be called on to sacrifice much.
God help us.
Yet there is hope. Today’s Washington Post story continues,
Another notable feature of the election was the Kerry edge among voters younger than 30. Their ranks grew as much as those of older voters, who usually are much more reliable in showing up at the polls. And those between 18 and 29 -- one-sixth of the electorate -- were going for Kerry by 13 points last night.
We, who were under 30 in “the movement” of the late 1960’s, must now pass on our socio-political legacy to the young of this era. We ought by now to have learned the lessons of the intervening decades, how the corrupt consumer capitalist system invidiously co-opts the moral aspirations of youth, and suffocates their incipient liberation movements.
We must not let this happen again to our children. We must join with them, and educate them in the ethics of resistance, and arm them with real humanitarian morality, for it is they who will carry the revolution forward after us.
These youth, whom we must support in their radicalization with us, under our tutelage, and in collaboration with us, will not be well served by the inept Democratic partisan forms that have failed us this day.
We must build with them a committed National Resistance Party that will not turn from the demand of the people for liberation, and will resolutely speak the truth to power, demanding reform, and committing to patiently convert the hearts and minds of our benighted neighbors.
Let us remember the immortal words of Frederick Douglass, away back in 1857:
This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
Wednesday, September 15, 2004
Facing the Republican Anschluss
15 September 2004
By Jim Weller
Let’s shut off the spin cycle in public discourse and talk some turkey about socio-political reality in contemporary America.
Some pundits and apologists will dissemble every which way, but the plain truth is that supporters of the Republican agenda today are people I must identify as white supremacists. They fear and loathe everyone different from themselves, whether ethnically, religiously, culturally, attitudinally, by socioeconomic class, nationality, sexual orientation, sexual identity or sub-cultural identity – in other words, they are dangerous xenophobes.
What does it mean to be a white supremacist?
First, it means being white by psycho-social identification – which is not equivalent to being a person of Anglo-Saxon ancestry. There are those of non-Anglo ancestry or appearance, who are yet definitively white. Some prominent examples are the Bush administration office holders Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Rod Paige, Alphonso Jackson, Alberto Gonzales, and Elaine Chao. In my lexicon, being white is mainly a matter of social class and psychological disposition, not race identity.
Second, it means being supremacist – in other words, an aggressive control freak, one whose ultimate concern is to wield and maintain coercive power, and who is indiscriminately willing to harm or destroy others in doing so. There have been other sorts of so-called supremacists in the world – Black supremacists, Jewish supremacists, Islamic supremacists, and so on. More properly speaking, most of these are separatists, that is, variously oppressed peoples seeking to defend themselves in confrontation with or against domination by other groups. Acting in their own cause, they sometimes become oppressors. However, the greatest oppressors of all are those Americans who now indeed dominate the earth, the white supremacists – and the Republican Party is their political confederacy.
There are all kinds of white supremacists.
Some are Protestant, some Catholic, some Jewish, and some Non-Denominational. Some are Conservatives, some Liberals, and some Centrists. Some are Democrats, who might as well be Republicans. Some are Independents, some Libertarians, some Free-Marketers, and some Protectionists. Some are Isolationists, some Internationalists, and some are Regionalists. Some are Militarists, and some are Missionaries. Some are GLBT, in which case, they are deeply conflicted. Some are Cosmopolites, some Urbanites, some Suburbanites, and some are Ruralites. Some are Highbrows, some Lowbrows, and some Middlebrows. Some are Establishmentarians, some Disestablishmentarians, and some Know-Nothings.
In all their social and political diversity, they are a small minority of the peoples of the earth, and even of America. What should the rest of us, the great majority, do about the white supremacist Republicans who are presently in power? We should shut them down politically, decisively and soon.
As I’ve always said (well, I would have if I’d thought of it) – the only good Republican is a disempowered one. When they’ve been disarmed and removed from power, they can fume and fulminate until hell freezes over, if they must. Those who are demonstrably criminal, including the Presidential Pretender George W. Bush, his War Cabinet, and their co-conspirators, should be stripped of their property and privilege, and incarcerated permanently. Their supporters and accessories, who have merely aided and abetted in the Republican crimes of this century, can remain free and be rehabilitated as they will. We are a tolerant people, but we cede our power to the avaricious and the intemperate among us only at our extreme peril.
I am very serious about this. At this moment in history, I believe we are in immediate danger of a fascist takeover in this country that could make the Nazi Anschluss look quaint by comparison. The political offensive being led by the Bushites is a white supremacist movement to its core, and the Republican Party is its global assault vehicle.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: On the first Tuesday in November 2004, vote as if your life depended on it. It does, and you just might not have another chance.
By Jim Weller
Let’s shut off the spin cycle in public discourse and talk some turkey about socio-political reality in contemporary America.
Some pundits and apologists will dissemble every which way, but the plain truth is that supporters of the Republican agenda today are people I must identify as white supremacists. They fear and loathe everyone different from themselves, whether ethnically, religiously, culturally, attitudinally, by socioeconomic class, nationality, sexual orientation, sexual identity or sub-cultural identity – in other words, they are dangerous xenophobes.
What does it mean to be a white supremacist?
First, it means being white by psycho-social identification – which is not equivalent to being a person of Anglo-Saxon ancestry. There are those of non-Anglo ancestry or appearance, who are yet definitively white. Some prominent examples are the Bush administration office holders Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Rod Paige, Alphonso Jackson, Alberto Gonzales, and Elaine Chao. In my lexicon, being white is mainly a matter of social class and psychological disposition, not race identity.
Second, it means being supremacist – in other words, an aggressive control freak, one whose ultimate concern is to wield and maintain coercive power, and who is indiscriminately willing to harm or destroy others in doing so. There have been other sorts of so-called supremacists in the world – Black supremacists, Jewish supremacists, Islamic supremacists, and so on. More properly speaking, most of these are separatists, that is, variously oppressed peoples seeking to defend themselves in confrontation with or against domination by other groups. Acting in their own cause, they sometimes become oppressors. However, the greatest oppressors of all are those Americans who now indeed dominate the earth, the white supremacists – and the Republican Party is their political confederacy.
There are all kinds of white supremacists.
Some are Protestant, some Catholic, some Jewish, and some Non-Denominational. Some are Conservatives, some Liberals, and some Centrists. Some are Democrats, who might as well be Republicans. Some are Independents, some Libertarians, some Free-Marketers, and some Protectionists. Some are Isolationists, some Internationalists, and some are Regionalists. Some are Militarists, and some are Missionaries. Some are GLBT, in which case, they are deeply conflicted. Some are Cosmopolites, some Urbanites, some Suburbanites, and some are Ruralites. Some are Highbrows, some Lowbrows, and some Middlebrows. Some are Establishmentarians, some Disestablishmentarians, and some Know-Nothings.
In all their social and political diversity, they are a small minority of the peoples of the earth, and even of America. What should the rest of us, the great majority, do about the white supremacist Republicans who are presently in power? We should shut them down politically, decisively and soon.
As I’ve always said (well, I would have if I’d thought of it) – the only good Republican is a disempowered one. When they’ve been disarmed and removed from power, they can fume and fulminate until hell freezes over, if they must. Those who are demonstrably criminal, including the Presidential Pretender George W. Bush, his War Cabinet, and their co-conspirators, should be stripped of their property and privilege, and incarcerated permanently. Their supporters and accessories, who have merely aided and abetted in the Republican crimes of this century, can remain free and be rehabilitated as they will. We are a tolerant people, but we cede our power to the avaricious and the intemperate among us only at our extreme peril.
I am very serious about this. At this moment in history, I believe we are in immediate danger of a fascist takeover in this country that could make the Nazi Anschluss look quaint by comparison. The political offensive being led by the Bushites is a white supremacist movement to its core, and the Republican Party is its global assault vehicle.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: On the first Tuesday in November 2004, vote as if your life depended on it. It does, and you just might not have another chance.
Wednesday, September 08, 2004
Bush By Numbers: Four Years of Double Standards
03 September 2004
By Graydon Carter.
1 Number of Bush administration public statements on National security issued between 20 January 2001 and 10 September 2001 that mentioned al-Qa'ida.
104 Number of Bush administration public statements on National security and defence in the same period that mentioned Iraq or Saddam Hussein.
101 Number of Bush administration public statements on National security and defence in the same period that mentioned missile defence.
65 Number of Bush administration public statements on National security and defence in the same period that mentioned weapons of mass destruction.
0 Number of times Bush mentioned Osama bin Laden in his three State of the Union addresses.
73 Number of times that Bush mentioned terrorism or terrorists in his three State of the Union addresses.
83 Number of times Bush mentioned Saddam, Iraq, or regime (as in change) in his three State of the Union addresses.
$1m Estimated value of a painting the Bush Presidential Library in College Station, Texas, received from Prince Bandar, Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States and Bush family friend.
0 Number of times Bush mentioned Saudi Arabia in his three State of the Union addresses.
1,700 Percentage increase between 2001 and 2002 of Saudi Arabian spending on public relations in the United States.
79 Percentage of the 11 September hijackers who came from Saudi Arabia.
3 Number of 11 September hijackers whose entry visas came through special US-Saudi "Visa Express" programme.
140 Number of Saudis, including members of the Bin Laden family, evacuated from United States almost immediately after 11 September.
14 Number of Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS) agents assigned to track down 1,200 known illegal immigrants in the United States from countries where al-Qa'ida is active.
$3m Amount the White House was willing to grant the 9/11 Commission to investigate the 11 September attacks.
$0 Amount approved by George Bush to hire more INS special agents.
$10m Amount Bush cut from the INS's existing terrorism budget.
$50m Amount granted to the commission that looked into the Columbia space shuttle crash.
$5m Amount a 1996 federal commission was given to study legalised gambling.
7 Number of Arabic linguists fired by the US army between mid-August and mid-October 2002 for being gay.
George Bush: Military man
1972 Year that Bush walked away from his pilot duties in the Texas National Guard, Nearly two years before his six-year obligation was up.
$3,500 Reward a group of veterans offered in 2000 for anyone who could confirm Bush's Alabama guard service.
600-700 Number of guardsmen who were in Bush's unit during that period.
0 Number of guardsmen from that period who came forward with information about Bush's guard service.
0 Number of minutes that President Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney, the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, the assistant Defence Secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, the former chairman of the Defence Policy Board, Richard Perle, and the White House Chief of Staff, Karl Rove the main proponents of the war in Iraq served in combat (combined).
0 Number of principal civilian or Pentagon staff members who planned the war who have immediate family members serving in uniform in Iraq.
8 Number of members of the US Senate and House of Representatives who have a child serving in the military.
10 Number of days that the Pentagon spent investigating a soldier who had called the President "a joke" in a letter to the editor of a Newspaper.
46 Percentage increase in sales between 2001 and 2002 of GI Joe figures (children's toys).
Ambitious warrior
2 Number of Nations that George Bush has attacked and taken over since coming into office.
130 Approximate Number of countries (out of a total of 191 recognised by the United Nations) with a US military presence.
43 Percentage of the entire world's military spending that the US spends on defence. (That was in 2002, the year before the invasion of Iraq.)
$401.3bn Proposed military budget for 2004.
Saviour of Iraq
1983 The year in which Donald Rumsfeld, Ronald Reagan's special envoy to the Middle East, gave Saddam Hussein a pair of golden spurs as a gift.
2.5 Number of hours after Rumsfeld learnt that Osama bin Laden was a suspect in the 11 September attacks that he brought up reasons to "hit" Iraq.
237 Minimum number of misleading statements on Iraq made by top Bush administration officials between 2002 and January 2004, according to the California Representative Henry Waxman.
10m Estimated number of people worldwide who took to the streets on 21 February 2003, in opposition to the invasion of Iraq, the largest simultaneous protest in world history.
$2bn Estimated monthly cost of US military presence in Iraq projected by the White House in April 2003.
$4bn Actual monthly cost of the US military presence in Iraq according to Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld in 2004.
$15m Amount of a contract awarded to an American firm to build a cement factory in Iraq.
$80,000 Amount an Iraqi firm spent (using Saddam's confiscated funds) to build the same factory, after delays prevented the American firm from starting it.
2000 Year that Cheney said his policy as CEO of Halliburton oil services company was "we wouldn't do anything in Iraq".
$4.7bn Total value of contracts awarded to Halliburton in Iraq and Afghanistan.
$680m Estimated value of Iraq reconstruction contracts awarded to Bechtel.
$2.8bnValue of Bechtel Corp contracts in Iraq.
$120bn Amount the war and its aftermath are projected to cost for the 2004 fiscal year.
35 Number of countries to which the United States suspended military assistance after they failed to sign agreements giving Americans immunity from prosecution before the International Criminal Court.
92 Percentage of Iraq's urban areas with access to potable water in late 2002.
60 Percentage of Iraq's urban areas with access to potable water in late 2003.
55 Percentage of the Iraqi workforce who were unemployed before the war.
80 Percentage of the Iraqi workforce who are unemployed a Year after the war.
0 Number of American combat deaths in Germany after the Nazi surrender in May 1945.
37 Death toll of US soldiers in Iraq in May 2003, the month combat operations "officially" ended.
0 Number of coffins of dead soldiers returning home that the Bush administration has permitted to be photographed.
0 Number of memorial services for the returned dead that Bush has attended since the beginning of the war.
A soldier's best friend
40,000 Number of soldiers in Iraq seven months after start of the war still without Interceptor vests, designed to stop a round from an AK-47.
$60m Estimated cost of outfitting those 40,000 soldiers with Interceptor vests.
62 Percentage of gas masks that army investigators discovered did Not work properly in autumn 2002.
90 Percentage of detectors which give early warning of a biological weapons attack found to be defective.
87 Percentage of Humvees in Iraq not equipped with armour capable of stopping AK-47 rounds and protecting against roadside bombs and landmines at the end of 2003.
Making the country safer
$3.29 Average amount allocated per person Nationwide in the first round of homeland security grants.
$94.40 Amount allocated per person for homeland security in American Samoa.
$36 Amount allocated per person for homeland security in Wyoming, Vice-President Cheney's home state.
$17 Amount allocated per person in New York state.
$5.87 Amount allocated per person in New York City.
$77.92 Amount allocated per person in New Haven, Connecticut, home of Yale University, Bush's alma mater.
76 Percentage of 215 cities surveyed by the US Conference of Mayors in early 2004 that had yet to receive a dime in federal homeland security assistance for their first-response units.
5 Number of major US airports at the beginning of 2004 that the Transportation Security Administration admitted were Not fully screening baggage electronically.
22,600 Number of planes carrying unscreened cargo that fly into New York each month.
5 Estimated Percentage of US air cargo that is screened, including cargo transported on passenger planes.
95 Percentage of foreign goods that arrive in the United States by sea.
2 Percentage of those goods subjected to thorough inspection.
$5.5bnEstimated cost to secure fully US ports over the Next decade.
$0 Amount Bush allocated for port security in 2003.
$46m Amount the Bush administration has budgeted for port security in 2005.
15,000 Number of major chemical facilities in the United States.
100 Number of US chemical plants where a terrorist act could endanger the lives of more than one million people.
0 Number of new drugs or vaccines against "priority pathogens" listed by the Centres for Disease Control that have been developed and introduced since 11 September 2001.
Giving a hand up to the advantaged
$10.9m Average wealth of the members of Bush's original 16-person cabinet.
75 Percentage of Americans unaffected by Bush's sweeping 2003 cuts in capital gains and dividends taxes.
$42,000 Average savings members of Bush's cabinet received in 2003 as a result of cuts in capital gains and dividends taxes.
10 Number of fellow members from the Yale secret society Skull and Bones that Bush has named to important positions (including the Associate Attorney General Robert McCallum Jr. and SEC chief Bill Donaldson).
79 Number of Bush's initial 189 appointees who also served in his father's administration.
A man with a lot of friends
$113m Amount of total hard money the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign received, a record.
$11.5m Amount of hard money raised through the Pioneer programme, the controversial fund-raising process created for the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign. (Participants pledged to raise at least $100,000 by bundling together cheques of up to $1,000 from friends and family. Pioneers were assigned numbers, which were included on all cheques, enabling the campaign to keep track of who raised how much.)
George Bush: Money manager
4.7m Number of bankruptcies that were declared during Bush's first three years in office.
2002 The worst year for major markets since the recession of the 1970s.
$489bn The US trade deficit in 2003, the worst in history for a single year.
$5.6tr Projected national surplus forecast by the end of the decade when Bush took office in 2001.
$7.22tr US national debt by mid-2004.
George Bush: Tax cutter
87 Percentage of American families in April 2004 who say they have felt no benefit from Bush's tax cuts.
39 Percentage of tax cuts that will go to the top 1 per cent of American families when fully phased in.
49 Percentage of Americans in April 2004 who found that their taxes had actually gone up since Bush took office.
88 Percentage of American families who will save less than $100 on their 2006 federal taxes as a result of 2003 cut in capital gains and dividends taxes.
$30,858 Amount Bush himself saved in taxes in 2003.
Employment tsar
9.3m Number of US unemployed in April 2004.
2.3m Number of Americans who lost their jobs during first three Years of the Bush administration.
22m Number of jobs gained during Clinton's eight years in office.
Friend of the poor
34.6m Number of Americans living below the poverty line (1 in 8 of the population).
6.8m Number of people in the workforce but still classified as poor.
35m Number of Americans that the government defines as "food insecure," in other words, hungry.
$300m Amount cut from the federal programme that provides subsidies to poor families so they can heat their homes.
40 Percentage of wealth in the United States held by the richest 1 per cent of the population.
18 Percentage of wealth in Britain held by the richest 1e per cent of the population.
George Bush And his special friend
$60bn Loss to Enron stockholders, following the largest bankruptcy in US history.
$205m Amount Enron CEO Kenneth Lay earned from stock option profits over a four-year period.
$101m Amount Lay made from selling his Enron shares just before the company went bankrupt.
$59,339 Amount the Bush campaign reimbursed Enron for 14 trips on its corporate jet during the 2000 campaign.
30 Length of time in months between Enron's collapse and Lay (whom the President called "Kenny Boy") still not being charged with a crime.
George Bush: Lawman
15 Average number of minutes Bush spent reviewing capital punishment cases while governor of Texas.
46 Percentage of Republican federal judges when Bush came to office.
57 Percentage of Republican federal judges after three years of the Bush administration.
33 Percentage of the $15bn Bush pledged to fight Aids in Africa that must go to abstinence-only programmes.
The Civil libertarian
680 Number of suspected al-Qa'ida members that the United States admits are detained at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
42 Number of nationalities of those detainees at Guantanamo.
22 Number of hours prisoners were handcuffed, shackled, and made to wear surgical masks, earmuffs, and blindfolds during their flight to Guantanamo.
32 Number of confirmed suicide attempts by Guantanamo Bay prisoners.
24 Number of prisoners in mid-2003 being monitored by psychiatrists in Guantanamo's new mental ward.
A health-conscious president
43.6m Number of Americans without health insurance by the end of 2002 (more than 15 per cent of the population).
2.4m Number of Americans who lost their health insurance during Bush's first year in office.
Environmentalist
$44m Amount the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign and the Republican National Committee received in contributions from the fossil fuel, chemical, timber, and mining industries.
200 Number of regulation rollbacks downgrading or weakening environmental laws in Bush's first three years in office.
31 Number of Bush administration appointees who are alumni of the energy industry (includes four cabinet secretaries, the six most powerful White House officials, and more than 20 other high-level appointees).
50 Approximate number of policy changes and regulation rollbacks injurious to the environment that have been announced by the Bush administration on Fridays after 5pm, a time that makes it all but impossible for news organisations to relay the information to the widest possible audience.
50 Percentage decline in Environmental Protection Agency enforcement actions against polluters under Bush's watch.
34 Percentage decline in criminal penalties for environmental crimes since Bush took office.
50 Percentage decline in civil penalties for environmental crimes since Bush took office.
$6.1m Amount the EPA historically valued each human life when conducting economic analyses of proposed regulations.
$3.7m Amount the EPA valued each human life when conducting analyses of proposed regulations during the Bush administration.
0 Number of times Bush mentioned global warming, clean air, clean water, pollution or environment in his 2004 State of the Union speech. His father was the last president to go through an entire State of the Union address without mentioning the environment.
1 Number of paragraphs devoted to global warming in the EPA's 600-page "Draft Report on the Environment" presented in 2003.
68 Number of days after taking office that Bush decided Not to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, the international treaty to reduce greenhouse gases by roughly 5.2 per cent below 1990 levels by 2012. The United States was to cut its level by 7 per cent.
1 The rank of the United States worldwide in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.
25 Percentage of overall worldwide carbon dioxide emissions the United States is responsible for.
53 Number of days after taking office that Bush reneged on his campaign promise to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.
14 Percentage carbon dioxide emissions will increase over the next 10 years under Bush's own global-warming plan (an increase of 30 per cent above their 1990 levels).
408 Number of species that could be extinct by 2050 if the global-warming trend continues.
5 Number of years the Bush administration said in 2003 that global warming must be further studied before substantive action could be taken.
62 Number of members of Cheney's 63-person Energy Task Force with ties to corporate energy interests.
0 Number of environmentalists asked to attend Cheney's Energy Task Force meetings.
6 Number of months before 11 September that Cheney's Energy Task Force investigated Iraq's oil reserves.
2 Percentage of the world's population that is British.
2 Percentage of the world's oil used by Britain.
5 Percentage of the world's population that is American.
25 Percentage of the world's oil used by America.
63 Percentage of oil the United States imported in 2003, a record high.
24,000 Estimated number of premature deaths that will occur under Bush's Clear Skies initiative.
300 Number of Clean Water Act violations by the mountaintop-mining industry in 2003.
750,000 Tons of toxic waste the US military, the world's biggest polluter, generates around the world each Year.
$3.8bn Amount in the Superfund trust fund for toxic site clean-ups in 1995, the Year "polluter pays" fees expired.
$0m Amount of uncommitted dollars in the Superfund trust fund for toxic site clean-ups in 2003.
270 Estimated number of court decisions citing federal Negligence in endangered-species protection that remained unheeded during the first year of the Bush administration.
100 Percentage of those decisions that Bush then decided to allow the government to ignore indefinitely.
68.4 Average Number of species added to the Endangered and Threatened Species list each year between 1991 and 2000.
0 Number of endangered species voluntarily added by the Bush administration since taking office.
50 Percentage of screened workers at Ground Zero who now suffer from long-term health problems, almost half of whom don't have health insurance.
78 Percentage of workers at Ground Zero who now suffer from lung ailments.
88 Percentage of workers at Ground Zero who Now suffer from ear, nose, or throat problems.
22 Asbestos levels at Ground Zero were 22 times higher than the levels in Libby, Montana, where the W R Grace mine produced one of the worst Superfund disasters in US history.
Image booster for the US
2,500 Number of public-diplomacy officers employed by the State Department to further the image of the US abroad in 1991.
1,200 Number of public-diplomacy officers employed by the State Department to further US image abroad in 2004.
4 Rank of the United States among countries considered to be the greatest threats to world peace according to a 2003 Pew Global Attitudes study (Israel, Iran, and North Korea were considered more dangerous; Iraq was considered less dangerous).
$66bn Amount the United States spent on international aid and diplomacy in 1949.
$23.8bn Amount the United States spent on international aid and diplomacy in 2002.
85 Percentage of Indonesians who had an unfavourable image of the United States in 2003.
Second-party endorsements
90 Percentage of Americans who approved of the way Bush was handling his job as president on 26 September 2001.
67 Percentage of Americans who approved of the way Bush was handling his job as president on 26 September 2002.
54 Percentage of Americans who approved of the way Bush was handling his job as president on
30 September, 2003.
50 Percentage of Americans who approved of the way Bush was handling his job as president on 15 October 2003.
49 Percentage of Americans who approved of the way Bush was handling his job as president in May 2004.
More like the French than he would care to admit
28 Number of vacation days Bush took in August 2003, the second-longest vacation of any president in US history. (Record holder Richard Nixon.)
13 Number of vacation days the average American receives each Year.
28 Number of vacation days Bush took in August 2001, the month he received a 6 August Presidential Daily Briefing headed "Osama bin Laden Determined to Strike US Targets."
500 Number of days Bush has spent all or part of his time away from the White House at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, his parents' retreat in Kennebunkport, Maine, or Camp David as of 1 April 2004.
No fool when it comes to the press
11 Number of press conferences during his first three Years in office in which Bush referred to questions as being "trick" ones.
Factors in his favour
3 Number of companies that control the US voting technology market.
52 Percentage of votes cast during the 2002 midterm elections that were recorded by Election Systems & Software, the largest voting-technology firm, a big Republican donor.
29 Percentage of votes that will be cast via computer voting machines that don't produce a paper record.
17On 17 November 2001, The Economist printed a correction for having said George Bush was properly elected in 2000.
$113m Amount raised by the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign, the most in American electoral history.
$185m Amount raised by the Bush-Cheney 2004 re-election campaign, to the end of March 2004.
$200m Amount that the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign expects to raise by November 2004.
268 Number of Bush-Cheney fund-raisers who had earned Pioneer status (by raising $100,000 each) as of March 2004.
187 Number of Bush-Cheney fund-raisers who had earned Ranger status (by raising $200,000 each) as of March 2004.
$64.2mThe Amount Pioneers and Rangers had raised for Bush-Cheney as of March 2004.
85 Percentage of Americans who can't Name the Chief Justice of the United States.
69 Percentage of Americans who believed the White House's claims in September 2003 that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 11 September attacks.
34 Percentage of Americans who believed in June 2003 that Saddam's "weapons of mass destruction" had been found.
22 Percentage of Americans who believed in May 2003 that Saddam had used his WMDs on US forces.
85 Percentage of American young adults who cannot find Afghanistan, Iraq, or Israel on a map.
30 Percentage of American young adults who cannot find the Pacific Ocean on a map.
75 Percentage of American young adults who don't know the population of the United States.
53 Percentage of Canadian young adults who don't know the population of the United States.
11 Percentage of American young adults who cannot find the United States on a map.
30 Percentage of Americans who believe that "politics and government are too complicated to understand."
Another factor in his favour
70m Estimated number of Americans who describe themselves as Evangelicals who accept Jesus Christ as their personal saviour and who interpret the Bible as the direct word of God.
23m Number of Evangelicals who voted for Bush in 2000.
50m Number of voters in total who voted for Bush in 2000.
46 Percentage of voters who describe themselves as born-again Christians.
5 Number of states that do not use the word "evolution" in public school science courses.
This is an edited extract from "What We've Lost", by Graydon Carter, published by Little Brown on 9 September
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
For a former college drop-out from Ontario and, briefly, a lineman stringing up telegraph wires on the railways of Canada, Graydon Carter, 55, has risen to impressive heights. The editor of Vanity Fair since 1992 after succeeding Tina Brown he is one of America's celebrity editors with clout, glamour and a nice line in suits.
It is hard to imagine Carter doing physical work of any kind, beyond exercising his thumb on his silver Zippo lighter. His labour is restricted to rejigging headlines in his magazine he is a self-confessed failure at delegation of duties and swanning to Manhattan parties. Martini in hand, he cuts an almost princely and dandyish figure, with billowing shirts and similarly billowing silver hair.
The spotlight on his activities has never burned brighter. In recent months he has transformed the regular editor's letter at the front of the magazine into less of a chat about its coming contents the spreads of Annie Leibowitz and rants of Christopher Hitchens and more a full-bore diatribe against the world of George Bush.
By Graydon Carter.
1 Number of Bush administration public statements on National security issued between 20 January 2001 and 10 September 2001 that mentioned al-Qa'ida.
104 Number of Bush administration public statements on National security and defence in the same period that mentioned Iraq or Saddam Hussein.
101 Number of Bush administration public statements on National security and defence in the same period that mentioned missile defence.
65 Number of Bush administration public statements on National security and defence in the same period that mentioned weapons of mass destruction.
0 Number of times Bush mentioned Osama bin Laden in his three State of the Union addresses.
73 Number of times that Bush mentioned terrorism or terrorists in his three State of the Union addresses.
83 Number of times Bush mentioned Saddam, Iraq, or regime (as in change) in his three State of the Union addresses.
$1m Estimated value of a painting the Bush Presidential Library in College Station, Texas, received from Prince Bandar, Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States and Bush family friend.
0 Number of times Bush mentioned Saudi Arabia in his three State of the Union addresses.
1,700 Percentage increase between 2001 and 2002 of Saudi Arabian spending on public relations in the United States.
79 Percentage of the 11 September hijackers who came from Saudi Arabia.
3 Number of 11 September hijackers whose entry visas came through special US-Saudi "Visa Express" programme.
140 Number of Saudis, including members of the Bin Laden family, evacuated from United States almost immediately after 11 September.
14 Number of Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS) agents assigned to track down 1,200 known illegal immigrants in the United States from countries where al-Qa'ida is active.
$3m Amount the White House was willing to grant the 9/11 Commission to investigate the 11 September attacks.
$0 Amount approved by George Bush to hire more INS special agents.
$10m Amount Bush cut from the INS's existing terrorism budget.
$50m Amount granted to the commission that looked into the Columbia space shuttle crash.
$5m Amount a 1996 federal commission was given to study legalised gambling.
7 Number of Arabic linguists fired by the US army between mid-August and mid-October 2002 for being gay.
George Bush: Military man
1972 Year that Bush walked away from his pilot duties in the Texas National Guard, Nearly two years before his six-year obligation was up.
$3,500 Reward a group of veterans offered in 2000 for anyone who could confirm Bush's Alabama guard service.
600-700 Number of guardsmen who were in Bush's unit during that period.
0 Number of guardsmen from that period who came forward with information about Bush's guard service.
0 Number of minutes that President Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney, the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, the assistant Defence Secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, the former chairman of the Defence Policy Board, Richard Perle, and the White House Chief of Staff, Karl Rove the main proponents of the war in Iraq served in combat (combined).
0 Number of principal civilian or Pentagon staff members who planned the war who have immediate family members serving in uniform in Iraq.
8 Number of members of the US Senate and House of Representatives who have a child serving in the military.
10 Number of days that the Pentagon spent investigating a soldier who had called the President "a joke" in a letter to the editor of a Newspaper.
46 Percentage increase in sales between 2001 and 2002 of GI Joe figures (children's toys).
Ambitious warrior
2 Number of Nations that George Bush has attacked and taken over since coming into office.
130 Approximate Number of countries (out of a total of 191 recognised by the United Nations) with a US military presence.
43 Percentage of the entire world's military spending that the US spends on defence. (That was in 2002, the year before the invasion of Iraq.)
$401.3bn Proposed military budget for 2004.
Saviour of Iraq
1983 The year in which Donald Rumsfeld, Ronald Reagan's special envoy to the Middle East, gave Saddam Hussein a pair of golden spurs as a gift.
2.5 Number of hours after Rumsfeld learnt that Osama bin Laden was a suspect in the 11 September attacks that he brought up reasons to "hit" Iraq.
237 Minimum number of misleading statements on Iraq made by top Bush administration officials between 2002 and January 2004, according to the California Representative Henry Waxman.
10m Estimated number of people worldwide who took to the streets on 21 February 2003, in opposition to the invasion of Iraq, the largest simultaneous protest in world history.
$2bn Estimated monthly cost of US military presence in Iraq projected by the White House in April 2003.
$4bn Actual monthly cost of the US military presence in Iraq according to Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld in 2004.
$15m Amount of a contract awarded to an American firm to build a cement factory in Iraq.
$80,000 Amount an Iraqi firm spent (using Saddam's confiscated funds) to build the same factory, after delays prevented the American firm from starting it.
2000 Year that Cheney said his policy as CEO of Halliburton oil services company was "we wouldn't do anything in Iraq".
$4.7bn Total value of contracts awarded to Halliburton in Iraq and Afghanistan.
$680m Estimated value of Iraq reconstruction contracts awarded to Bechtel.
$2.8bnValue of Bechtel Corp contracts in Iraq.
$120bn Amount the war and its aftermath are projected to cost for the 2004 fiscal year.
35 Number of countries to which the United States suspended military assistance after they failed to sign agreements giving Americans immunity from prosecution before the International Criminal Court.
92 Percentage of Iraq's urban areas with access to potable water in late 2002.
60 Percentage of Iraq's urban areas with access to potable water in late 2003.
55 Percentage of the Iraqi workforce who were unemployed before the war.
80 Percentage of the Iraqi workforce who are unemployed a Year after the war.
0 Number of American combat deaths in Germany after the Nazi surrender in May 1945.
37 Death toll of US soldiers in Iraq in May 2003, the month combat operations "officially" ended.
0 Number of coffins of dead soldiers returning home that the Bush administration has permitted to be photographed.
0 Number of memorial services for the returned dead that Bush has attended since the beginning of the war.
A soldier's best friend
40,000 Number of soldiers in Iraq seven months after start of the war still without Interceptor vests, designed to stop a round from an AK-47.
$60m Estimated cost of outfitting those 40,000 soldiers with Interceptor vests.
62 Percentage of gas masks that army investigators discovered did Not work properly in autumn 2002.
90 Percentage of detectors which give early warning of a biological weapons attack found to be defective.
87 Percentage of Humvees in Iraq not equipped with armour capable of stopping AK-47 rounds and protecting against roadside bombs and landmines at the end of 2003.
Making the country safer
$3.29 Average amount allocated per person Nationwide in the first round of homeland security grants.
$94.40 Amount allocated per person for homeland security in American Samoa.
$36 Amount allocated per person for homeland security in Wyoming, Vice-President Cheney's home state.
$17 Amount allocated per person in New York state.
$5.87 Amount allocated per person in New York City.
$77.92 Amount allocated per person in New Haven, Connecticut, home of Yale University, Bush's alma mater.
76 Percentage of 215 cities surveyed by the US Conference of Mayors in early 2004 that had yet to receive a dime in federal homeland security assistance for their first-response units.
5 Number of major US airports at the beginning of 2004 that the Transportation Security Administration admitted were Not fully screening baggage electronically.
22,600 Number of planes carrying unscreened cargo that fly into New York each month.
5 Estimated Percentage of US air cargo that is screened, including cargo transported on passenger planes.
95 Percentage of foreign goods that arrive in the United States by sea.
2 Percentage of those goods subjected to thorough inspection.
$5.5bnEstimated cost to secure fully US ports over the Next decade.
$0 Amount Bush allocated for port security in 2003.
$46m Amount the Bush administration has budgeted for port security in 2005.
15,000 Number of major chemical facilities in the United States.
100 Number of US chemical plants where a terrorist act could endanger the lives of more than one million people.
0 Number of new drugs or vaccines against "priority pathogens" listed by the Centres for Disease Control that have been developed and introduced since 11 September 2001.
Giving a hand up to the advantaged
$10.9m Average wealth of the members of Bush's original 16-person cabinet.
75 Percentage of Americans unaffected by Bush's sweeping 2003 cuts in capital gains and dividends taxes.
$42,000 Average savings members of Bush's cabinet received in 2003 as a result of cuts in capital gains and dividends taxes.
10 Number of fellow members from the Yale secret society Skull and Bones that Bush has named to important positions (including the Associate Attorney General Robert McCallum Jr. and SEC chief Bill Donaldson).
79 Number of Bush's initial 189 appointees who also served in his father's administration.
A man with a lot of friends
$113m Amount of total hard money the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign received, a record.
$11.5m Amount of hard money raised through the Pioneer programme, the controversial fund-raising process created for the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign. (Participants pledged to raise at least $100,000 by bundling together cheques of up to $1,000 from friends and family. Pioneers were assigned numbers, which were included on all cheques, enabling the campaign to keep track of who raised how much.)
George Bush: Money manager
4.7m Number of bankruptcies that were declared during Bush's first three years in office.
2002 The worst year for major markets since the recession of the 1970s.
$489bn The US trade deficit in 2003, the worst in history for a single year.
$5.6tr Projected national surplus forecast by the end of the decade when Bush took office in 2001.
$7.22tr US national debt by mid-2004.
George Bush: Tax cutter
87 Percentage of American families in April 2004 who say they have felt no benefit from Bush's tax cuts.
39 Percentage of tax cuts that will go to the top 1 per cent of American families when fully phased in.
49 Percentage of Americans in April 2004 who found that their taxes had actually gone up since Bush took office.
88 Percentage of American families who will save less than $100 on their 2006 federal taxes as a result of 2003 cut in capital gains and dividends taxes.
$30,858 Amount Bush himself saved in taxes in 2003.
Employment tsar
9.3m Number of US unemployed in April 2004.
2.3m Number of Americans who lost their jobs during first three Years of the Bush administration.
22m Number of jobs gained during Clinton's eight years in office.
Friend of the poor
34.6m Number of Americans living below the poverty line (1 in 8 of the population).
6.8m Number of people in the workforce but still classified as poor.
35m Number of Americans that the government defines as "food insecure," in other words, hungry.
$300m Amount cut from the federal programme that provides subsidies to poor families so they can heat their homes.
40 Percentage of wealth in the United States held by the richest 1 per cent of the population.
18 Percentage of wealth in Britain held by the richest 1e per cent of the population.
George Bush And his special friend
$60bn Loss to Enron stockholders, following the largest bankruptcy in US history.
$205m Amount Enron CEO Kenneth Lay earned from stock option profits over a four-year period.
$101m Amount Lay made from selling his Enron shares just before the company went bankrupt.
$59,339 Amount the Bush campaign reimbursed Enron for 14 trips on its corporate jet during the 2000 campaign.
30 Length of time in months between Enron's collapse and Lay (whom the President called "Kenny Boy") still not being charged with a crime.
George Bush: Lawman
15 Average number of minutes Bush spent reviewing capital punishment cases while governor of Texas.
46 Percentage of Republican federal judges when Bush came to office.
57 Percentage of Republican federal judges after three years of the Bush administration.
33 Percentage of the $15bn Bush pledged to fight Aids in Africa that must go to abstinence-only programmes.
The Civil libertarian
680 Number of suspected al-Qa'ida members that the United States admits are detained at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
42 Number of nationalities of those detainees at Guantanamo.
22 Number of hours prisoners were handcuffed, shackled, and made to wear surgical masks, earmuffs, and blindfolds during their flight to Guantanamo.
32 Number of confirmed suicide attempts by Guantanamo Bay prisoners.
24 Number of prisoners in mid-2003 being monitored by psychiatrists in Guantanamo's new mental ward.
A health-conscious president
43.6m Number of Americans without health insurance by the end of 2002 (more than 15 per cent of the population).
2.4m Number of Americans who lost their health insurance during Bush's first year in office.
Environmentalist
$44m Amount the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign and the Republican National Committee received in contributions from the fossil fuel, chemical, timber, and mining industries.
200 Number of regulation rollbacks downgrading or weakening environmental laws in Bush's first three years in office.
31 Number of Bush administration appointees who are alumni of the energy industry (includes four cabinet secretaries, the six most powerful White House officials, and more than 20 other high-level appointees).
50 Approximate number of policy changes and regulation rollbacks injurious to the environment that have been announced by the Bush administration on Fridays after 5pm, a time that makes it all but impossible for news organisations to relay the information to the widest possible audience.
50 Percentage decline in Environmental Protection Agency enforcement actions against polluters under Bush's watch.
34 Percentage decline in criminal penalties for environmental crimes since Bush took office.
50 Percentage decline in civil penalties for environmental crimes since Bush took office.
$6.1m Amount the EPA historically valued each human life when conducting economic analyses of proposed regulations.
$3.7m Amount the EPA valued each human life when conducting analyses of proposed regulations during the Bush administration.
0 Number of times Bush mentioned global warming, clean air, clean water, pollution or environment in his 2004 State of the Union speech. His father was the last president to go through an entire State of the Union address without mentioning the environment.
1 Number of paragraphs devoted to global warming in the EPA's 600-page "Draft Report on the Environment" presented in 2003.
68 Number of days after taking office that Bush decided Not to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, the international treaty to reduce greenhouse gases by roughly 5.2 per cent below 1990 levels by 2012. The United States was to cut its level by 7 per cent.
1 The rank of the United States worldwide in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.
25 Percentage of overall worldwide carbon dioxide emissions the United States is responsible for.
53 Number of days after taking office that Bush reneged on his campaign promise to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.
14 Percentage carbon dioxide emissions will increase over the next 10 years under Bush's own global-warming plan (an increase of 30 per cent above their 1990 levels).
408 Number of species that could be extinct by 2050 if the global-warming trend continues.
5 Number of years the Bush administration said in 2003 that global warming must be further studied before substantive action could be taken.
62 Number of members of Cheney's 63-person Energy Task Force with ties to corporate energy interests.
0 Number of environmentalists asked to attend Cheney's Energy Task Force meetings.
6 Number of months before 11 September that Cheney's Energy Task Force investigated Iraq's oil reserves.
2 Percentage of the world's population that is British.
2 Percentage of the world's oil used by Britain.
5 Percentage of the world's population that is American.
25 Percentage of the world's oil used by America.
63 Percentage of oil the United States imported in 2003, a record high.
24,000 Estimated number of premature deaths that will occur under Bush's Clear Skies initiative.
300 Number of Clean Water Act violations by the mountaintop-mining industry in 2003.
750,000 Tons of toxic waste the US military, the world's biggest polluter, generates around the world each Year.
$3.8bn Amount in the Superfund trust fund for toxic site clean-ups in 1995, the Year "polluter pays" fees expired.
$0m Amount of uncommitted dollars in the Superfund trust fund for toxic site clean-ups in 2003.
270 Estimated number of court decisions citing federal Negligence in endangered-species protection that remained unheeded during the first year of the Bush administration.
100 Percentage of those decisions that Bush then decided to allow the government to ignore indefinitely.
68.4 Average Number of species added to the Endangered and Threatened Species list each year between 1991 and 2000.
0 Number of endangered species voluntarily added by the Bush administration since taking office.
50 Percentage of screened workers at Ground Zero who now suffer from long-term health problems, almost half of whom don't have health insurance.
78 Percentage of workers at Ground Zero who now suffer from lung ailments.
88 Percentage of workers at Ground Zero who Now suffer from ear, nose, or throat problems.
22 Asbestos levels at Ground Zero were 22 times higher than the levels in Libby, Montana, where the W R Grace mine produced one of the worst Superfund disasters in US history.
Image booster for the US
2,500 Number of public-diplomacy officers employed by the State Department to further the image of the US abroad in 1991.
1,200 Number of public-diplomacy officers employed by the State Department to further US image abroad in 2004.
4 Rank of the United States among countries considered to be the greatest threats to world peace according to a 2003 Pew Global Attitudes study (Israel, Iran, and North Korea were considered more dangerous; Iraq was considered less dangerous).
$66bn Amount the United States spent on international aid and diplomacy in 1949.
$23.8bn Amount the United States spent on international aid and diplomacy in 2002.
85 Percentage of Indonesians who had an unfavourable image of the United States in 2003.
Second-party endorsements
90 Percentage of Americans who approved of the way Bush was handling his job as president on 26 September 2001.
67 Percentage of Americans who approved of the way Bush was handling his job as president on 26 September 2002.
54 Percentage of Americans who approved of the way Bush was handling his job as president on
30 September, 2003.
50 Percentage of Americans who approved of the way Bush was handling his job as president on 15 October 2003.
49 Percentage of Americans who approved of the way Bush was handling his job as president in May 2004.
More like the French than he would care to admit
28 Number of vacation days Bush took in August 2003, the second-longest vacation of any president in US history. (Record holder Richard Nixon.)
13 Number of vacation days the average American receives each Year.
28 Number of vacation days Bush took in August 2001, the month he received a 6 August Presidential Daily Briefing headed "Osama bin Laden Determined to Strike US Targets."
500 Number of days Bush has spent all or part of his time away from the White House at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, his parents' retreat in Kennebunkport, Maine, or Camp David as of 1 April 2004.
No fool when it comes to the press
11 Number of press conferences during his first three Years in office in which Bush referred to questions as being "trick" ones.
Factors in his favour
3 Number of companies that control the US voting technology market.
52 Percentage of votes cast during the 2002 midterm elections that were recorded by Election Systems & Software, the largest voting-technology firm, a big Republican donor.
29 Percentage of votes that will be cast via computer voting machines that don't produce a paper record.
17On 17 November 2001, The Economist printed a correction for having said George Bush was properly elected in 2000.
$113m Amount raised by the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign, the most in American electoral history.
$185m Amount raised by the Bush-Cheney 2004 re-election campaign, to the end of March 2004.
$200m Amount that the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign expects to raise by November 2004.
268 Number of Bush-Cheney fund-raisers who had earned Pioneer status (by raising $100,000 each) as of March 2004.
187 Number of Bush-Cheney fund-raisers who had earned Ranger status (by raising $200,000 each) as of March 2004.
$64.2mThe Amount Pioneers and Rangers had raised for Bush-Cheney as of March 2004.
85 Percentage of Americans who can't Name the Chief Justice of the United States.
69 Percentage of Americans who believed the White House's claims in September 2003 that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 11 September attacks.
34 Percentage of Americans who believed in June 2003 that Saddam's "weapons of mass destruction" had been found.
22 Percentage of Americans who believed in May 2003 that Saddam had used his WMDs on US forces.
85 Percentage of American young adults who cannot find Afghanistan, Iraq, or Israel on a map.
30 Percentage of American young adults who cannot find the Pacific Ocean on a map.
75 Percentage of American young adults who don't know the population of the United States.
53 Percentage of Canadian young adults who don't know the population of the United States.
11 Percentage of American young adults who cannot find the United States on a map.
30 Percentage of Americans who believe that "politics and government are too complicated to understand."
Another factor in his favour
70m Estimated number of Americans who describe themselves as Evangelicals who accept Jesus Christ as their personal saviour and who interpret the Bible as the direct word of God.
23m Number of Evangelicals who voted for Bush in 2000.
50m Number of voters in total who voted for Bush in 2000.
46 Percentage of voters who describe themselves as born-again Christians.
5 Number of states that do not use the word "evolution" in public school science courses.
This is an edited extract from "What We've Lost", by Graydon Carter, published by Little Brown on 9 September
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
For a former college drop-out from Ontario and, briefly, a lineman stringing up telegraph wires on the railways of Canada, Graydon Carter, 55, has risen to impressive heights. The editor of Vanity Fair since 1992 after succeeding Tina Brown he is one of America's celebrity editors with clout, glamour and a nice line in suits.
It is hard to imagine Carter doing physical work of any kind, beyond exercising his thumb on his silver Zippo lighter. His labour is restricted to rejigging headlines in his magazine he is a self-confessed failure at delegation of duties and swanning to Manhattan parties. Martini in hand, he cuts an almost princely and dandyish figure, with billowing shirts and similarly billowing silver hair.
The spotlight on his activities has never burned brighter. In recent months he has transformed the regular editor's letter at the front of the magazine into less of a chat about its coming contents the spreads of Annie Leibowitz and rants of Christopher Hitchens and more a full-bore diatribe against the world of George Bush.
Tuesday, September 07, 2004
Republicans for Voldemort, Repent!
6 September 2004
By Jim Weller
Not all Republicans are irredeemably evil people. Some of them are ignorant fools. Those are the redeemable ones. As Jesus is supposed to have prayed upon the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Maybe God will have mercy on their souls.
On the other hand, villains like Dick Cheney and his front-man George W. Bush decidedly belong among the former, hell-bent for election group. In a glimpsed video of Cheney addressing the Republican Convention in New York last week, I was astonished by the technical wizardry which somehow erased images of the fiendish reptilian tongue flicking out between his lips.
Though Bush is deeply malevolent and implacably hateful, his practice of the dark arts of deception seems sort of semiconscious, with a dim, zombie-like awareness. Cheney, on the other hand, brings to his role as grim mastermind the fully self-aware malice aforethought of the inveterate assassin.
In an unholy alliance with legendary Republican Svengali and political saboteur Karl Rove, this White House junta, in control of the awesome coercive and destructive powers of the United States, deserves to be thought the greatest single threat to world peace - as indeed it is by most of the earth’s peoples. “Public Enemy No. 1” signs should begin to be posted by the millions, in every U.S. city, prominently exposing Bush and Cheney as the 21st Century war criminals they truly are.
Let’s ask whom the parents and siblings and spouses of the thousands of people killed in Bush/Cheney’s misbegotten wars would hold ultimately accountable for their loved ones’ deaths.
Would they name Sadaam Hussein, who never posed a real threat to the U.S.A., and who had complied with U.N. Resolutions to get rid of his so-called weapons of mass destruction? Would they name Osama Bin Laden, who had no organizational connection with Iraq and little with the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan, even though a few of his protégés did manage to do a great deal of harm with their hijacked airliners?
No doubt some, perhaps more than a few, American families have begun to suspect the secret, criminal collusion with which the Bushites were involved in the 9/11 events. No doubt they are beginning to see that the men ultimately responsible for their grief and losses are the imposters Bush and Cheney, illegitimately ruling in the White House, and scheming to do anything it takes to win the next election, even if thousands of U.S. citizens and untold numbers of others must die, in order to make the electorate terrified enough to elect the warlords.
I say to those Americans, it is the soulless thugs, thieves, and assassins in the Bush War Cabinet who are directly responsible for your losses and suffering, and for those of hundreds of thousands of families abroad.
What are you going to do about it? Are you going to do everything in your power to help bring them a resounding electoral defeat in November? Are you going to demand they be imprisoned and publicly tried in a world court for their crimes against humanity?
I say to you, “Carpe diem!” November 2 may be the last chance we have to halt this nation’s descent into the hell of Republican fascism.
As we longhairs shouted ages ago in the 1960’s, now as greybeards we must vow out loud again, “Power to the people! Right on!”
I bet you'll vote this time - eh, hippie?
Vote as if life itself depended on it. It does!
By Jim Weller
Not all Republicans are irredeemably evil people. Some of them are ignorant fools. Those are the redeemable ones. As Jesus is supposed to have prayed upon the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Maybe God will have mercy on their souls.
On the other hand, villains like Dick Cheney and his front-man George W. Bush decidedly belong among the former, hell-bent for election group. In a glimpsed video of Cheney addressing the Republican Convention in New York last week, I was astonished by the technical wizardry which somehow erased images of the fiendish reptilian tongue flicking out between his lips.
Though Bush is deeply malevolent and implacably hateful, his practice of the dark arts of deception seems sort of semiconscious, with a dim, zombie-like awareness. Cheney, on the other hand, brings to his role as grim mastermind the fully self-aware malice aforethought of the inveterate assassin.
In an unholy alliance with legendary Republican Svengali and political saboteur Karl Rove, this White House junta, in control of the awesome coercive and destructive powers of the United States, deserves to be thought the greatest single threat to world peace - as indeed it is by most of the earth’s peoples. “Public Enemy No. 1” signs should begin to be posted by the millions, in every U.S. city, prominently exposing Bush and Cheney as the 21st Century war criminals they truly are.
Let’s ask whom the parents and siblings and spouses of the thousands of people killed in Bush/Cheney’s misbegotten wars would hold ultimately accountable for their loved ones’ deaths.
Would they name Sadaam Hussein, who never posed a real threat to the U.S.A., and who had complied with U.N. Resolutions to get rid of his so-called weapons of mass destruction? Would they name Osama Bin Laden, who had no organizational connection with Iraq and little with the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan, even though a few of his protégés did manage to do a great deal of harm with their hijacked airliners?
No doubt some, perhaps more than a few, American families have begun to suspect the secret, criminal collusion with which the Bushites were involved in the 9/11 events. No doubt they are beginning to see that the men ultimately responsible for their grief and losses are the imposters Bush and Cheney, illegitimately ruling in the White House, and scheming to do anything it takes to win the next election, even if thousands of U.S. citizens and untold numbers of others must die, in order to make the electorate terrified enough to elect the warlords.
I say to those Americans, it is the soulless thugs, thieves, and assassins in the Bush War Cabinet who are directly responsible for your losses and suffering, and for those of hundreds of thousands of families abroad.
What are you going to do about it? Are you going to do everything in your power to help bring them a resounding electoral defeat in November? Are you going to demand they be imprisoned and publicly tried in a world court for their crimes against humanity?
I say to you, “Carpe diem!” November 2 may be the last chance we have to halt this nation’s descent into the hell of Republican fascism.
As we longhairs shouted ages ago in the 1960’s, now as greybeards we must vow out loud again, “Power to the people! Right on!”
I bet you'll vote this time - eh, hippie?
Vote as if life itself depended on it. It does!
Saturday, August 07, 2004
Names of God: Attributes of Divine Nature In Maimonides' Jewish Philosophy
December 7, 2003
By Jim Weller
Just what is God, after all? What can we say about God to represent an apprehension of divine nature? What can we know of God qua God, as distinguished from our knowledge of God’s effects – what the ancient philosophers called the “sensible” and the “intelligible” aspects of reality? What in the world can we attribute to God’s essence – what God is, in the way that we give “names,” or attributive terms, to signify what an existing thing essentially is? These are some of the puzzling questions the medieval philosophers of theology asked themselves. Our contemporaries are still asking them. The questions asked in terms of any other object of knowledge, or philosophical apprehension, remain, when asked of God (in an oft-used phrase), “an enigma inside a puzzle wrapped in a mystery.”
I know no better way of answering than this: All we can truly say, or know, or understand concerning what God is, is that God is. That is just how God answers the Biblical Moses’ question asking God’s name: Eyeh-Asher-Eyeh – “I am that I am.” These are the words of the oldest text in the Hebrew Scriptures, dating from around 950 BCE. In other words, God’s essence and existence are one. As St. Thomas Aquinas put it, according to University of Notre Dame professor of theology and philosophy David B. Burrell, Deus est esse – God is “to-be,” in the infinitive, i.e., “existence,” or “being.” Alternatively, as in Paul Tillich’s twentieth-century formulation of the Biblical answer, God is “Being-itself.” Tillich finds that the basis – what he calls the "prius" – of all philosophy of religion, as affirmed by St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, is the Deus est esse. God is being, a unity of essence and existence.
Just so, for Moses Maimonides, writing in his twelfth-century didactic on the meaning of Torah and Talmud, The Guide of the Perplexed, nothing that can be said of the human experience of reality can be properly said of God as God, “there being nothing in what exists besides God . . . and the totality of the things He has made. There is, moreover, no way to apprehend Him except it be through the things He has made; for they are indicative of his existence and of what ought to be believed about Him, I mean to say, of what should be affirmed and denied with regard to Him.”
Maimonides’ doctrine is that we can only speak of God’s attributes, or “names,” by analogy, as though, like anything in existence, something might be predicated of it – what its formal features, or substantial properties or qualities are, or even what it is, essentially, its “quiddity.” Because, unlike something in existence that can be made the object of thought, God is existence essentially.
Maimonides enunciated the public doctrine that he maintained ought to be believed by the multitudes “on traditional authority,” as follows: “that God is not a body; that there is absolutely no likeness in any respect whatsoever between Him and the things created by Him; [and] that His existence has no likeness to theirs.” He explained further, concerning the Names of God,
"Everything that can be ascribed to God . . . differs in every respect from our attributes, so that no definition can comprehend the one thing and the other. Similarly, the term ‘existence’ can only be applied equivocally [differently] to His existence and to that of things other than Him. As for the discussion concerning attributes and the way they should be negated with regard to Him; and as to the meaning of the attributes that may be ascribed to Him . . . and the notion of His names, though they are many, being indicative of one and the same thing – it should be considered that all of these are obscure matters. In fact, they are truly the mysteries of the Torah and the secrets [of the Talmud.]"
Therefore, in a declaration of the absolute limits to human understanding given as a preface to his discussion of the knowable aspects of God, Maimonides warned against intellectual hubris, writing,
"Know that the human intellect has objects of apprehension that it is within its power and according to its nature to apprehend. On the other hand, in the totality of that which exists, there also are existents and matters that . . . [the human intellect] is not capable of apprehending in any way; the gates of . . . apprehension are shut before it. There are also in that which exist things of which the intellect may apprehend one state while not being cognizant of other states. The fact that it apprehends does not entail the conclusion that it can apprehend all things."
Maimonides emphasized that the incomprehensibility of divine or metaphysical realities (he equates the two adjectives), “for the apprehension of which [humankind] . . . has a great longing,” has been recognized by philosophers of all times and cultures, and this is not “a statement made [just] in order to conform to Law [Torah].” He recounts the Greek philosopher Alexander of Aphrodisias’ dictum that there are three causes of differences of human opinion concerning speculative truth, one of which is plain ignorance. The others are human contentiousness, and “the obscurity of the object of apprehension in itself and the difficulty of apprehending it” – the ultimate incomprehensibility just mentioned. To these, Maimonides adds another cause of perplexity. “It is habit and upbringing. For [humankind] has in his nature a love of, and an inclination for, that to which he is habituated.” By this, he means the mistake of flat, literal interpretation of the sacred texts, “whose external meaning is indicative of the corporeality of God and other imaginings with no truth in them, for these have been set forth as parables and riddles.”
Because of the fundamentally incomprehensible Eyeh-Asher-Eyeh, there is profound virtue and sense in the Holy Scriptures’ use of parabolic and metaphoric language, “in such a manner as the mind is led toward the existence of the objects of these opinions and representations but not toward grasping their essence as it truly is.” The central enigma must be approached only with the utmost circumspection, awe, and humility. It is “beyond the domain of things that [humankind] is able to grasp,” and yet it is the truth of ultimate reality. In this regard, Maimonides teaches by allusion to Proverbs 25:16, rendering: “Hast thou found honey? Eat [only] so much as is sufficient for thee, lest thou be filled therewith and vomit it.”
As for the Names of God and the other “mysteries of the Torah,” Maimonides explained, “When people have received this doctrine [of the incorporeality and unity of God], are habituated to and educated and grown up in it, and subsequently become perplexed . . . they should be elevated to the knowledge of the interpretation of [the books of the prophets], and their attention should be drawn to the equivocality and figurative sense of the various terms.”
Thus, Maimonides explains at length, every affect, act, feature, and quality ascribed to God is meant in figuratively humanistic terms. Citing the Babylonian Talmud, he reminds the reader, “The Torah speaketh in the language of the sons of man.” He asserts thus that scripture attributing to God such human affects as wrath, anger, and jealousy express the attitudes of the faithful toward idolaters and infidels, the willfully ignorant and blasphemous people of the society amongst whom they lived and worshipped. Anthropomorphisms in scripture, i.e., terms used of God such as “face,” “back,” “heart,” “air [breath],” “soul,” “living,” “wing,” “eye [or sight, seeing],” and “hear [hearing],” are in each instance “an equivocal term, its equivocality being mostly with respect to its figurative use.” Furthermore, he avers, “When we . . . begin to expound the negation of the attributes, we shall make clear how all this is reducible to one notion, which is exclusively that of the essence of God . . . who produces everything other than He, and in addition apprehends His own act.” Maimonides presages for his reader, “When . . . the true reality is investigated it will be found . . . that He has no essential attribute existing in true reality, such as would be superadded to his essence [esse].” Then, he gives his well-known expostulation of antitheses concerning the divine essence:
"On the attributes . . . it is known that existence . . . is superadded to the quiddity [essence] of what exists. This is clear and necessary with regard to everything the existence of which has a cause. As for that which has no cause for its existence, there is only God. For this is the meaning of our saying . . . that His existence is necessary. Accordingly, His existence is identical with His essence and his true reality, and His essence is His existence. He exists, but not through an existence other than His essence; . . . He lives, but not through life; . . . He is powerful, but not through power; . . . He knows, but not through knowledge. He is one not through oneness."
Regarding these, Maimonides’ famous “negative attributions,” the fundamentals are the dogmatic attributions he prescribes, of the in-corporeality and un-likeness of God to any other existent. These negations derive from the primal credos of Jew, Muslim, and Christian: “Hear, O Israel, God our God is one;” “There is no God but Allah;” and “I believe in one God.” Thus, his summary teaching is the admonition to “Know that the description of God by means of negations is the correct description – negations are in a certain respect attributes and . . . we have no way of describing Him unless it be through negations and not otherwise.”
The sole affirmative attribution proper to God, according to Maimonides’ treatise, is the one I began with here. Maimonides makes of this a demonstration founded in the scriptural revelation “made known to Moses and through which they [the Israelites] would acquire a true notion of the existence of God, this knowledge being: I am that I am.”
"This is a name deriving from the verb to be, which signifies existence. The whole secret consists in the repetition in a predicative position of the very word indicative of existence. For the word that requires the mention of an attribute immediately connected with it. Accordingly, the first word is I am, considered as a term to which a predicate is attached; the second word that is predicated of the first is also I am, that is, identical with the first. Scripture makes, as it were, a clear statement . . . that He is existent not through existence . . . [i.e.] the existent that is the existent, or the necessarily existent. This is what demonstration necessarily leads to, namely, to the view that there is a necessarily existent thing that has never been, or ever will be, nonexistent.”
Maimonides has a very great deal more to say to the perplexed reader concerning his “divine science.” For myself though, dear reader, I say at this juncture, “Further, plaintiff alleges not,” as it were in a legal complaint; or – not to put too fine a point on it – in the words of the Biblical sage Qoholeth, “God is in heaven and you are on earth; that is why your words should be few.”
By Jim Weller
Just what is God, after all? What can we say about God to represent an apprehension of divine nature? What can we know of God qua God, as distinguished from our knowledge of God’s effects – what the ancient philosophers called the “sensible” and the “intelligible” aspects of reality? What in the world can we attribute to God’s essence – what God is, in the way that we give “names,” or attributive terms, to signify what an existing thing essentially is? These are some of the puzzling questions the medieval philosophers of theology asked themselves. Our contemporaries are still asking them. The questions asked in terms of any other object of knowledge, or philosophical apprehension, remain, when asked of God (in an oft-used phrase), “an enigma inside a puzzle wrapped in a mystery.”
I know no better way of answering than this: All we can truly say, or know, or understand concerning what God is, is that God is. That is just how God answers the Biblical Moses’ question asking God’s name: Eyeh-Asher-Eyeh – “I am that I am.” These are the words of the oldest text in the Hebrew Scriptures, dating from around 950 BCE. In other words, God’s essence and existence are one. As St. Thomas Aquinas put it, according to University of Notre Dame professor of theology and philosophy David B. Burrell, Deus est esse – God is “to-be,” in the infinitive, i.e., “existence,” or “being.” Alternatively, as in Paul Tillich’s twentieth-century formulation of the Biblical answer, God is “Being-itself.” Tillich finds that the basis – what he calls the "prius" – of all philosophy of religion, as affirmed by St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, is the Deus est esse. God is being, a unity of essence and existence.
Just so, for Moses Maimonides, writing in his twelfth-century didactic on the meaning of Torah and Talmud, The Guide of the Perplexed, nothing that can be said of the human experience of reality can be properly said of God as God, “there being nothing in what exists besides God . . . and the totality of the things He has made. There is, moreover, no way to apprehend Him except it be through the things He has made; for they are indicative of his existence and of what ought to be believed about Him, I mean to say, of what should be affirmed and denied with regard to Him.”
Maimonides’ doctrine is that we can only speak of God’s attributes, or “names,” by analogy, as though, like anything in existence, something might be predicated of it – what its formal features, or substantial properties or qualities are, or even what it is, essentially, its “quiddity.” Because, unlike something in existence that can be made the object of thought, God is existence essentially.
Maimonides enunciated the public doctrine that he maintained ought to be believed by the multitudes “on traditional authority,” as follows: “that God is not a body; that there is absolutely no likeness in any respect whatsoever between Him and the things created by Him; [and] that His existence has no likeness to theirs.” He explained further, concerning the Names of God,
"Everything that can be ascribed to God . . . differs in every respect from our attributes, so that no definition can comprehend the one thing and the other. Similarly, the term ‘existence’ can only be applied equivocally [differently] to His existence and to that of things other than Him. As for the discussion concerning attributes and the way they should be negated with regard to Him; and as to the meaning of the attributes that may be ascribed to Him . . . and the notion of His names, though they are many, being indicative of one and the same thing – it should be considered that all of these are obscure matters. In fact, they are truly the mysteries of the Torah and the secrets [of the Talmud.]"
Therefore, in a declaration of the absolute limits to human understanding given as a preface to his discussion of the knowable aspects of God, Maimonides warned against intellectual hubris, writing,
"Know that the human intellect has objects of apprehension that it is within its power and according to its nature to apprehend. On the other hand, in the totality of that which exists, there also are existents and matters that . . . [the human intellect] is not capable of apprehending in any way; the gates of . . . apprehension are shut before it. There are also in that which exist things of which the intellect may apprehend one state while not being cognizant of other states. The fact that it apprehends does not entail the conclusion that it can apprehend all things."
Maimonides emphasized that the incomprehensibility of divine or metaphysical realities (he equates the two adjectives), “for the apprehension of which [humankind] . . . has a great longing,” has been recognized by philosophers of all times and cultures, and this is not “a statement made [just] in order to conform to Law [Torah].” He recounts the Greek philosopher Alexander of Aphrodisias’ dictum that there are three causes of differences of human opinion concerning speculative truth, one of which is plain ignorance. The others are human contentiousness, and “the obscurity of the object of apprehension in itself and the difficulty of apprehending it” – the ultimate incomprehensibility just mentioned. To these, Maimonides adds another cause of perplexity. “It is habit and upbringing. For [humankind] has in his nature a love of, and an inclination for, that to which he is habituated.” By this, he means the mistake of flat, literal interpretation of the sacred texts, “whose external meaning is indicative of the corporeality of God and other imaginings with no truth in them, for these have been set forth as parables and riddles.”
Because of the fundamentally incomprehensible Eyeh-Asher-Eyeh, there is profound virtue and sense in the Holy Scriptures’ use of parabolic and metaphoric language, “in such a manner as the mind is led toward the existence of the objects of these opinions and representations but not toward grasping their essence as it truly is.” The central enigma must be approached only with the utmost circumspection, awe, and humility. It is “beyond the domain of things that [humankind] is able to grasp,” and yet it is the truth of ultimate reality. In this regard, Maimonides teaches by allusion to Proverbs 25:16, rendering: “Hast thou found honey? Eat [only] so much as is sufficient for thee, lest thou be filled therewith and vomit it.”
As for the Names of God and the other “mysteries of the Torah,” Maimonides explained, “When people have received this doctrine [of the incorporeality and unity of God], are habituated to and educated and grown up in it, and subsequently become perplexed . . . they should be elevated to the knowledge of the interpretation of [the books of the prophets], and their attention should be drawn to the equivocality and figurative sense of the various terms.”
Thus, Maimonides explains at length, every affect, act, feature, and quality ascribed to God is meant in figuratively humanistic terms. Citing the Babylonian Talmud, he reminds the reader, “The Torah speaketh in the language of the sons of man.” He asserts thus that scripture attributing to God such human affects as wrath, anger, and jealousy express the attitudes of the faithful toward idolaters and infidels, the willfully ignorant and blasphemous people of the society amongst whom they lived and worshipped. Anthropomorphisms in scripture, i.e., terms used of God such as “face,” “back,” “heart,” “air [breath],” “soul,” “living,” “wing,” “eye [or sight, seeing],” and “hear [hearing],” are in each instance “an equivocal term, its equivocality being mostly with respect to its figurative use.” Furthermore, he avers, “When we . . . begin to expound the negation of the attributes, we shall make clear how all this is reducible to one notion, which is exclusively that of the essence of God . . . who produces everything other than He, and in addition apprehends His own act.” Maimonides presages for his reader, “When . . . the true reality is investigated it will be found . . . that He has no essential attribute existing in true reality, such as would be superadded to his essence [esse].” Then, he gives his well-known expostulation of antitheses concerning the divine essence:
"On the attributes . . . it is known that existence . . . is superadded to the quiddity [essence] of what exists. This is clear and necessary with regard to everything the existence of which has a cause. As for that which has no cause for its existence, there is only God. For this is the meaning of our saying . . . that His existence is necessary. Accordingly, His existence is identical with His essence and his true reality, and His essence is His existence. He exists, but not through an existence other than His essence; . . . He lives, but not through life; . . . He is powerful, but not through power; . . . He knows, but not through knowledge. He is one not through oneness."
Regarding these, Maimonides’ famous “negative attributions,” the fundamentals are the dogmatic attributions he prescribes, of the in-corporeality and un-likeness of God to any other existent. These negations derive from the primal credos of Jew, Muslim, and Christian: “Hear, O Israel, God our God is one;” “There is no God but Allah;” and “I believe in one God.” Thus, his summary teaching is the admonition to “Know that the description of God by means of negations is the correct description – negations are in a certain respect attributes and . . . we have no way of describing Him unless it be through negations and not otherwise.”
The sole affirmative attribution proper to God, according to Maimonides’ treatise, is the one I began with here. Maimonides makes of this a demonstration founded in the scriptural revelation “made known to Moses and through which they [the Israelites] would acquire a true notion of the existence of God, this knowledge being: I am that I am.”
"This is a name deriving from the verb to be, which signifies existence. The whole secret consists in the repetition in a predicative position of the very word indicative of existence. For the word that requires the mention of an attribute immediately connected with it. Accordingly, the first word is I am, considered as a term to which a predicate is attached; the second word that is predicated of the first is also I am, that is, identical with the first. Scripture makes, as it were, a clear statement . . . that He is existent not through existence . . . [i.e.] the existent that is the existent, or the necessarily existent. This is what demonstration necessarily leads to, namely, to the view that there is a necessarily existent thing that has never been, or ever will be, nonexistent.”
Maimonides has a very great deal more to say to the perplexed reader concerning his “divine science.” For myself though, dear reader, I say at this juncture, “Further, plaintiff alleges not,” as it were in a legal complaint; or – not to put too fine a point on it – in the words of the Biblical sage Qoholeth, “God is in heaven and you are on earth; that is why your words should be few.”
Thursday, August 05, 2004
What Is The Soul?
4 August 2004
By Jim Weller
Let’s say that the soul is the I at the center of personal being. I might have said, at the center of the experience of personal being, but that would entail consciousness – experience is not usually thought of as non-conscious. But sometimes personal being is non-conscious, or not self-aware, as when dreamlessly sleeping, for instance. Experience goes with self-awareness; but persons in being are not always self-aware, as in various states of non-consciousness. Deep meditative states and comatose states are other instances of this, aren’t they? In all those instances, though, the I is still there, or at least it is potentially, isn’t it? If it isn’t, where did it go? Whence does it return when we return to self-aware, conscious experience? No, I think what I mean by the I, the soul, is there as long as the whole person is alive – “brain-dead” persons notwithstanding.
Many people, usually children and simple-minded folk, want to believe that the I exists independently from the living body. With my definition, this would mean that personal being is distinct and separable from the living organism. Thus, the soul existed, in some sense, before the organism came into being, will continue after its death, and is potentially apart from it while it lives. This is the idea of the immortal, incorporeal soul popularized by Plato and his followers, which became standard in many quarters of Western civilization afterward until the late modern era, and is still firmly ensconced, as I’ve said, in many people’s minds.
I don’t think so. I think that personal being, and the I at its center, the soul if you will, is a consequence, an incident, a feature, or a function of the living organism, with its brain and mind, and that it is nonsensical to imagine it existing otherwise, especially before the person’s life or after death. The soul is coterminous with personal being, and the life of the person. It probably begins at some point in prenatal development, is certainly present neonatally, and ends with death. (I don’t limit the application of this discussion to human beings, incidentally, because it is obvious that some other species exhibit many characteristics of personality, whether or not we refer to them as “persons,” which I occasionally do.)
There is something else to consider, though, and that is the fact that no one is “an island.” All persons exist in society, in communities, in ecosystems involving a multitude of other living beings. No person – no self, no I – can come into being and continue to live, except interdependently, as a reflection of, and in relation with other selves, other persons, other beings. We are biologically and socially constructed and conditioned.
Thus, in a very real sense you might say, with Emerson, that there is an “oversoul” analogous with the individual soul, correlative with all of life itself – the entire biosphere in which all souls are situate – which extends physically and temporally beyond the limits of individual persons’ lives, and includes all of them, along with all their ancestors and descendants. This is what has sometimes been called the “collective unconscious.” I think that’s what Jung meant, and I think it would not be mistaken to regard it also as a collective consciousness. This is still in the realm of ecology, social psychology, and anthropology.
That is not God, though. It is a feature of life on earth. You might say it is an aspect of God’s consciousness, if you want to get metaphysical. But you can’t really talk about God in these terms. God and the soul are different subjects, in my opinion. Metaphysics is philosophy. God-talk is theology. Soul-talk is in the realm of biology, social science and the humanities.
By Jim Weller
Let’s say that the soul is the I at the center of personal being. I might have said, at the center of the experience of personal being, but that would entail consciousness – experience is not usually thought of as non-conscious. But sometimes personal being is non-conscious, or not self-aware, as when dreamlessly sleeping, for instance. Experience goes with self-awareness; but persons in being are not always self-aware, as in various states of non-consciousness. Deep meditative states and comatose states are other instances of this, aren’t they? In all those instances, though, the I is still there, or at least it is potentially, isn’t it? If it isn’t, where did it go? Whence does it return when we return to self-aware, conscious experience? No, I think what I mean by the I, the soul, is there as long as the whole person is alive – “brain-dead” persons notwithstanding.
Many people, usually children and simple-minded folk, want to believe that the I exists independently from the living body. With my definition, this would mean that personal being is distinct and separable from the living organism. Thus, the soul existed, in some sense, before the organism came into being, will continue after its death, and is potentially apart from it while it lives. This is the idea of the immortal, incorporeal soul popularized by Plato and his followers, which became standard in many quarters of Western civilization afterward until the late modern era, and is still firmly ensconced, as I’ve said, in many people’s minds.
I don’t think so. I think that personal being, and the I at its center, the soul if you will, is a consequence, an incident, a feature, or a function of the living organism, with its brain and mind, and that it is nonsensical to imagine it existing otherwise, especially before the person’s life or after death. The soul is coterminous with personal being, and the life of the person. It probably begins at some point in prenatal development, is certainly present neonatally, and ends with death. (I don’t limit the application of this discussion to human beings, incidentally, because it is obvious that some other species exhibit many characteristics of personality, whether or not we refer to them as “persons,” which I occasionally do.)
There is something else to consider, though, and that is the fact that no one is “an island.” All persons exist in society, in communities, in ecosystems involving a multitude of other living beings. No person – no self, no I – can come into being and continue to live, except interdependently, as a reflection of, and in relation with other selves, other persons, other beings. We are biologically and socially constructed and conditioned.
Thus, in a very real sense you might say, with Emerson, that there is an “oversoul” analogous with the individual soul, correlative with all of life itself – the entire biosphere in which all souls are situate – which extends physically and temporally beyond the limits of individual persons’ lives, and includes all of them, along with all their ancestors and descendants. This is what has sometimes been called the “collective unconscious.” I think that’s what Jung meant, and I think it would not be mistaken to regard it also as a collective consciousness. This is still in the realm of ecology, social psychology, and anthropology.
That is not God, though. It is a feature of life on earth. You might say it is an aspect of God’s consciousness, if you want to get metaphysical. But you can’t really talk about God in these terms. God and the soul are different subjects, in my opinion. Metaphysics is philosophy. God-talk is theology. Soul-talk is in the realm of biology, social science and the humanities.
Tuesday, August 03, 2004
Will They Do It Again?
3 August 2004
By Jim Weller
Tuesday, September 11, 2001 was a day off work for me. I woke up and, as usual, turned on the local public radio news. When I had listened long enough that morning to get a full picture of what was happening, the really big question for me was this: How could this incredible, horrible attack have happened, entirely unbeknownst to the most powerful national security establishment in world history? It took me awhile to accept the cognitively dissonant but obvious answer: It didn’t. I think Bush knew. It was all part of the big White House plan, which would unfold in due course.
“Nah,” you think. “You must be crazy. The President of the United States would never sacrifice thousands of American lives in some gigantic political power game.” Is that what you think? Well, I don’t. The man-on-the-street Bush apologist says, “Well, we had to do something after 9/11, didn’t we?” Yes, of course. That’s the point. The Bushites wanted to be in that position. And the best their cadre of policy wonks could come up with to do about it was to knock over a couple of weak, impoverished Muslim countries?
Look what Bush has done since then. Well in excess of a thousand U.S. soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. Many more thousands have been maimed and injured. Increase those numbers at least thirty-fold if you want to estimate how many foreign people are dead and dismembered, and tortured – don’t forget that, as the result of the U.S. military adventures there. Dozens more of us and them fall every day. And it’s getting worse, not better. All for what? The people and the national institutions of Iraq and Afghanistan, such as they were – even the worst of them, were never a threat to the United States. Never. Not in 1991, not in 2001, not in 2003.
So what’s it all about? What’s the big aim of all this fighting and fear and loathing? November 2, 2004, that’s what. It’s about political power in America, Republican power. Bush wants to be the War President. National Super-Hero, Defender of Truth, Justice, and the American Way. Who do you trust more to defend the security of the nation? George W. Bush or John Kerry? That’s it. “We are a nation in danger,” Bush said Sunday, as he raised the terror color code from yellow to orange. “This is a solemn reminder of the threat we continue to face.” Terror is the key factor in the Republican campaign strategy. Bush plans to consolidate political power by terrorizing the U.S. electorate.
I think the Bushites are going to do it again. Stage another terrorist attack in the United States. In the next ten weeks or so, before the election. Maybe it won't have to be such a big production this time. Maybe it'll be a foiled attempt. Maybe they'll catch a few Muslim extremists in the act and kill or capture them. Or maybe they'll only kill a few of us, say a few dozen victims instead of 3,000 as in the 9/11 attacks. Still, it'll scare the living shinola out of the swing voters; make them rally ‘round the flag in a big way. The more ground the Kerry/Edwards campaign gains, the more likely it is that Bush/Cheney will play their ace in the hole. They seem to be preparing the stage now, putting on the Homeland Security high alert. Jack-booted, black-jacketed thugs with assault rifles ready, guarding every financial district street corner.
Go ahead; tell me I’m a conspiracy nut. Yes, I do think the political progenitors of Bush and Cheney snuffed the Kennedys and Malcolm X and Rev. King in the 60’s. It’s the same power elite pulling the wires, now as then. These people will stop at nothing to stay in power –the 9/11 Commission and the Warren Commission reports notwithstanding. As the electoral tide turns against them, they're getting ready to roll out the Terror Factor, and the Big Lie - the sequel.
On the day this fall when we all wake up and say, “My God, how could this happen – again?” Bush will say, "We warned you." And I’ll say, “I told you so.”
By Jim Weller
Tuesday, September 11, 2001 was a day off work for me. I woke up and, as usual, turned on the local public radio news. When I had listened long enough that morning to get a full picture of what was happening, the really big question for me was this: How could this incredible, horrible attack have happened, entirely unbeknownst to the most powerful national security establishment in world history? It took me awhile to accept the cognitively dissonant but obvious answer: It didn’t. I think Bush knew. It was all part of the big White House plan, which would unfold in due course.
“Nah,” you think. “You must be crazy. The President of the United States would never sacrifice thousands of American lives in some gigantic political power game.” Is that what you think? Well, I don’t. The man-on-the-street Bush apologist says, “Well, we had to do something after 9/11, didn’t we?” Yes, of course. That’s the point. The Bushites wanted to be in that position. And the best their cadre of policy wonks could come up with to do about it was to knock over a couple of weak, impoverished Muslim countries?
Look what Bush has done since then. Well in excess of a thousand U.S. soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. Many more thousands have been maimed and injured. Increase those numbers at least thirty-fold if you want to estimate how many foreign people are dead and dismembered, and tortured – don’t forget that, as the result of the U.S. military adventures there. Dozens more of us and them fall every day. And it’s getting worse, not better. All for what? The people and the national institutions of Iraq and Afghanistan, such as they were – even the worst of them, were never a threat to the United States. Never. Not in 1991, not in 2001, not in 2003.
So what’s it all about? What’s the big aim of all this fighting and fear and loathing? November 2, 2004, that’s what. It’s about political power in America, Republican power. Bush wants to be the War President. National Super-Hero, Defender of Truth, Justice, and the American Way. Who do you trust more to defend the security of the nation? George W. Bush or John Kerry? That’s it. “We are a nation in danger,” Bush said Sunday, as he raised the terror color code from yellow to orange. “This is a solemn reminder of the threat we continue to face.” Terror is the key factor in the Republican campaign strategy. Bush plans to consolidate political power by terrorizing the U.S. electorate.
I think the Bushites are going to do it again. Stage another terrorist attack in the United States. In the next ten weeks or so, before the election. Maybe it won't have to be such a big production this time. Maybe it'll be a foiled attempt. Maybe they'll catch a few Muslim extremists in the act and kill or capture them. Or maybe they'll only kill a few of us, say a few dozen victims instead of 3,000 as in the 9/11 attacks. Still, it'll scare the living shinola out of the swing voters; make them rally ‘round the flag in a big way. The more ground the Kerry/Edwards campaign gains, the more likely it is that Bush/Cheney will play their ace in the hole. They seem to be preparing the stage now, putting on the Homeland Security high alert. Jack-booted, black-jacketed thugs with assault rifles ready, guarding every financial district street corner.
Go ahead; tell me I’m a conspiracy nut. Yes, I do think the political progenitors of Bush and Cheney snuffed the Kennedys and Malcolm X and Rev. King in the 60’s. It’s the same power elite pulling the wires, now as then. These people will stop at nothing to stay in power –the 9/11 Commission and the Warren Commission reports notwithstanding. As the electoral tide turns against them, they're getting ready to roll out the Terror Factor, and the Big Lie - the sequel.
On the day this fall when we all wake up and say, “My God, how could this happen – again?” Bush will say, "We warned you." And I’ll say, “I told you so.”
Saturday, July 31, 2004
On The Ethical Significance of Liberation Theology for Unitarian Universalists
May 15, 2004
By Jim Weller
We liberal religionists really enjoy having our cake and eating it, too. (I trust I may be permitted this metaphoric generalization, if only for rhetorical purposes – I think it points to an elephantine general truth about us.) Unitarian Universalist congregations rightly regard themselves as the radical and revisionist avant garde of Protestant Congregationalism in North America. In lieu of any religious creed, we mutually covenant to affirm and promote a set of theological/ethical principles which are fully consistent with the liberation ethics articulated in the most progressive theologies of our time.
Most of us in the Unitarian Universalist religious movement (we avoid the term, “denomination” since any hierarchical authority is anathema to our traditions of congregational polity) would agree that the dominant social, economic, cultural, and political power structures of the United States and much of the world are fundamentally unjust and evil, and that these systems must be transformed radically in order to promote the ideals of peace, liberty and justice for all, which we so publicly affirm. We see as well that our times demand an inclusive humanistic revision of the socio-religious ethos of the dominant Judeo-Christian traditions, for the same reasons.
Yet it is uncomfortably clear to some of us that we are the oppressors the prophetic voices we recognize in our Covenant warned us against – or, at least, we are among the relatively privileged minority by and through whom their oppressive powers are derived. As welcoming of psycho-social and cultural diversity, as willing to incorporate into our fellowships all souls of every sort of identity or ethnicity as we profess to be, we are nonetheless still predominantly WASP religious groups. The center of gravity of our association of congregations remains where it was established some three centuries ago – on Beacon Hill in Boston.
We advocate publicly for social justice on behalf of the poor and oppressed, and our socially oriented institutions have made significant contributions toward those ends. Our religious identity and group self-esteem are based upon this ethic, and though we don’t use the Catholic term, “preferential option for the poor” in our congregational discourse, it is the same. This is the justice cake we celebrate. Yet exceedingly few of our members live in conditions of material poverty or socioeconomic oppression. We take full part in the social class once called the Bourgeoisie, now perhaps better described as a “meritocracy,” in appropriating for ourselves much more than our share of the common wealth. Thus we gladly eat the justice cake the poor lack.
We UUs, and typically, WASP church members in general, tend not to relate easily to the concerns of practical theology, per se. Such a one might very likely ask, “What has theology got to do with social and political reality?” Asked by UUs, the question reflects the fact that most have rejected and become alienated from the “straight and narrow” religious orthodoxies of the social milieux in which we came of age, and therefore, many are chary of “God-talk” of any sort. Asked by other more or less liberal Protestants, it reflects the belief that the realm of religious observance is to be strictly maintained within the community of the church and one’s separate, personal “spirituality.” In either case, it is not at all clear how the articles of one’s faith and the methods of theology can or should be integrated with one’s way of living in the secular sphere of economic, social, and political life, and especially in relation with people of different religious affiliations.
So-called liberation theologies began to be explicated, first among Latin American Catholics, and then others, at about the time of the merger of the Universalist and Unitarian congregational associations in the early 1960’s. As I have said, the social ethics of Christian liberation theologies and ours are completely coherent, and the fundamental religious witness to human equality in God’s image (though the Imago Dei metaphor is off-putting to some) is the same as well. Since so many of us have difficulty relating to the language of theology (probably simply because of having become unaccustomed to it), we might as well speak, instead, of “liberation ethics.” I think we can manage to recognize these as generically religious ethics, despite our aversion to conventional piety, since even we rationalists will assent that our common ethics are grounded in fundamental non-empirical beliefs about human morality.
Thus wrote the ancient Hebrew prophet Jeremiah of God’s “new covenant” in the socio-religious reform of his time: “I have put my truth in your innermost mind, and I have written it in your heart. No longer need you teach your fellows about God. For all of you know Me, from the most ignorant to the most learned, from the poorest to the most powerful.” Or, as the eighteenth-century Japanese poet Ryōkan, put it, “In all ten directions of the universe, there is only one truth. When we see clearly, the great teachings are the same.”
What then, explicitly, are these UU liberation ethics, and what is their significance for us? They are, precisely, the same as the terms of our Covenant. The ethics of our “creedless faith” were articulated by a series of consultative assemblies of our congregations’ ordained ministers and lay leaders – themselves deeply religious theologians – to translate into summary postmodern terms the substantive practical theological legacy of our religious forebears:
"The living tradition we share draws from . . . Words and deeds of prophetic women and men which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love; Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God’s love by loving our neighbors as ourselves."
The significance of this Covenantal ethos of ours for the ways and means by which we ought to live our private and public lives, as congregants, as congregations, and as an association of congregations – our religious praxis - will become clear with a review of the subject of contemporary Christian liberation theology.
The editors of Orbis Books’ “Theology and Liberation Series” introduce the topic saying, “Its proponents have insisted that liberation theology is not a subtopic of theology but really a new way of doing theology.” The approach of this theology involves the oft-mentioned “preferential option” for the poor and oppressed. The theological “starting point” of the liberation ethic is in the lived experience of the dispossessed, disadvantaged, and disenfranchised peoples of the earth. Contrasted with orthodox, liberal, and neo-orthodox Christian ethics, this is a radical way of “doing theology,” in that its central concern is identical with the root themes of both the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian Gospels: the universal moral imperative of justice for the liberation of the oppressed.
The alternatives to beginning this way, in situ, with the religiosity of the contemporary human person-in-society, are more conventional approaches which mainly serve the interests of the dominant social order, oppressively attempting to impose the fixed interpretations of established ecclesial doctrine upon people’s living religious experience in their actual social situations. The responses of today’s liberation theologies involve not only a radical focus on social, political, psychological, and cultural liberation, but also a far-reaching theological revisionism, sometimes antagonistically disparaged as religious “syncretism.”
The radical aspect of this approach is well described by Gustavo Gutierrez, one of the first to articulate the concerns of a liberation theology, who writes, “The product of a profound historical movement, this aspiration to liberation is beginning to be accepted by the Christian community as a sign of the times, as a call to commitment and interpretation. The Biblical message, which presents the work of Christ as . . . liberation, provides the framework for this interpretation.” He explains that “the word ‘liberation’ allows for another approach leading to the Biblical sources which inspire the presence and action of man in history.”
James Cone expresses the revisionist imperative of a liberation theology, declaring, “Although I am a Christian theologian, I contend that a just social order must be accountable to not one but many religious communities. If we are going to create a society that is responsive to the humanity of all, then we must not view one religious faith as absolute. Ultimate reality, to which all things are subject, is too mysterious to be limited to one people’s view of God.” Peter Paris states the case even more pointedly, writing “The prophetic aim of liberation theologies is for ecclesiastical change both in thought and action.”
Cone describes the common standpoint of liberation theologies succinctly, stating that “our primary theological question and problem arise from the encounter of God in the experience and misery of the poor. The chief issue of our theologies is the problem of the non-person, the poor person.” He also expresses the “preferential option” of liberation theologians for empowerment for social and political action, viz: “To be a Christian is to love one’s neighbor and that means making a political commitment to make the world a habitable place . . . [and] not only to pray for justice but also to become actively involved in establishing it.” This is an option for activism made clear in the frequent use in liberation theologies of the term praxis. As Paris writes, “liberation theologies view themselves as practical throughout – praxis designating its origin, agency, form, and end . . . [and, further] liberation theologies argue that every theology is political in a similar way; none is transcendent of its sociopolitical context.”
Contemporary liberation theologies have arisen among Christian communities along with people’s liberation movements in the twentieth century, as responses to social, political, economic, and cultural oppression throughout the world. Wherever Western European colonialism and neo-colonial capitalism has extended its dominion, investing superior privilege and supreme power in a predominantly white male ruling class, it has gone hand in hand with co-opted ecclesiastical authority and “establishment” theology. In these places, liberation theologies have developed among people in churches claiming their ethnic and sexual identities, demanding justice in their struggles against oppression, and insisting upon recognition of their inherent worth and dignity on religious grounds.
Diverse though the subjects of liberation ethics are, chief among their commonalities, as Paris identifies it, “is their vigorous denial that theology can ever be culturally transcendent and epistemologically universal. Rather, liberationists argue that sociopolitical values inhere in the basic suppositions underlying all theologies. More specifically . . . the presuppositions underlying the Western theological tradition reveal [its] solidarity with the . . . societal values of their ruling elites . . . which by definition [have] always stood in opposition to the struggles of oppressed peoples for liberation.” Thus, we witness the motivation for radical, revisionist theologies of liberation embodying the values of oppressed humanity.
The various forms of liberation theology which have been developed reflect the identities of the distinct classes of humanity of whom they are representative. Thus, there are liberation theologies enunciated on behalf of Latin American people, Black American people, Black African people, and Asian people. In addition, women’s liberation movements have given rise to feminist critiques in North America and elsewhere, identified among Latina women as "Mujerista" theology, among Black women as “Womanist” theology, and among Asian women as Asian Women’s theology. Similarly, people of GLBT identities and orientations have contributed from their own experience of injustice, as people also marginalized and discriminated against by established social and ecclesial tradition.
Thus, there are the “Womanist” perspective of Professor Katie Cannon and the "Mujerista" perspective of Professor Ada Maria Isazi-Diaz. Both advocate a revision of principles for the practice of Christian moral theology, or religious ethics, so as to integrate the marginalized feminist consciousness with the androcentric approaches of the first enunciations of liberation theology.
Cannon adopts the definitions of the term “Womanist” introduced in 1983 by the acclaimed novelist Alice Walker. Isazi-Diaz and her Hispanic feminist colleagues adopted the cognate term "Mujerista" for their theological perspectives in 1988. Both demand recognition of the fully equal worth and dignity of women’s moral agency, among their different, but equally oppressed, ethnic groups, amidst the dominant WASP society of the United States. The thrust of their work is to express and honor the significant differences that their differences make, for the goal of empowerment and redemption of their afflicted, abused, aggrieved communities, for the triply oppressed women of those communities, and for their just reconciliation with the larger society.
Isazi-Diaz’ approach elucidates the dialectic of traditional Catholic moral reasoning with the “lived-experience” of individual Hispanic women of distinct social and ethnic backgrounds in the United States, through conversational interviews with them concerning their struggles to effectuate their moral agency despite variously oppressive social, cultural, political, and economic circumstances. She explores how each of these women’s ways of living cohere in the hopeful and faithful future orientation she describes as their "Projecto Historico" – the movement toward redemption for the people of the "Mestizaje diaspora."
Cannon engages the “real-lived” historical experience of African-American women from the seventeenth through the mid-twentieth centuries in segregated and slave communities, as represented in the literature of Black women authors. The context for her ethical exploration of women’s moral agency is backward-looking in order to reconcile our understanding of who we are with how we have been, as contrasted with Isazi-Diaz’ contemporary sociological context, examining how we will be in society, given the way we are. Both ultimately orient themselves toward the project of becoming the more just and blessed society we can be.
Both scholars uphold and celebrate a communitarian ethic, which is a consequence of the special integrative role of women as mothers having to cope with the vital needs of children and families in distressed situations. The two contrast the ways in which the popular religiosities of marginalized Black women and Hispanic women, in their respective communities, have assimilatated and accommodated the dominant ecclesiologies of the Protestant Evangelical and Roman Catholic social milieux in which they are situated.
In contrasting particularities, but similarly in spirit, Cannon and Isazi-Diaz demonstrate that the religious liberation ethic, for these women, is a moral struggle for survival as fully-human persons against inimical social structures. Both confront oppressive and enervating forces with the courage of faith, in the theological establishments where they are situated professionally, as well as in the common social predicaments of the sisterhoods with whom they identify ethnically.
Our UU social ethics affirm that justice is to be found in equitable sharing of life’s blessings. We say, “From each according to one’s means, to each according to one’s need,” in countervailing against the dominant ethos which says, “More for me is always better; enough is never enough.” Contrary to the ideal of individualistic self-interest though it is, it is nonetheless true that at any given stage, political economy is a zero-sum game. At the end of the day, “them what has gets and them what ain’t don’t” – and we say that just ain’t right. For those of us nearer the top of the unjust socio-economic pyramid than most, righteousness calls us not only to lend those below a hand up, but to roll down the stones on which we stand, bringing down those on top and leveling out the structure for all.
We see that it is unjust for the few to enjoy superabundance, having much more than is needed by the many who have much too little. But what are we to do, give away our hard-won surplus? Let others take the gains that are ours? As a matter of fact, yes. As M.K. Gandhi urged us, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” There are many in need, who are prevented from having by those who do have, and don’t need it. Give away what you have and don’t need; and don’t take any more than you need. This is what it means to “love your neighbor as yourself.”
Since we, the privileged, recognize the injustice of the social, political, and economic systems by which the few benefit excessively at the expense of the many, and we ourselves are benefited more than most, it is up to us to use our relative empowerment not only to modify these systems, to help liberate the oppressed, and to oppose the excesses of the willfully unjust among us, but to liberate ourselves from the spiritual oppression of unjust enrichment by renouncing it.
It is written that, when Jesus was teaching, a righteous and pious man, who yet despaired of redeeming grace, came to him and asked, “What must I do to inherit eternal life? I have observed the law and honored the conventions of church and society all my life, but I fear that I am still not saved.” Jesus loved him in his anxiety, and said, “You know not what you lack. Go, sell all that you own; give the proceeds of it to the poor, and follow me.” The man was aggrieved by this, and went away despairing more than ever, for his estate was large. “How difficult it is,” Jesus said, “for the wealthy ones to enter the kingdom of God; it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.”
The rich man in this story was a good man, but he was oppressed by his privilege, and remained spiritually unliberated. He missed the point of Jesus’ hyperbole, which was not that he needed to be abjectly impoverished to enter the kingdom of God, but only to become “poor in spirit,” for eternal life is here and now, on earth as it is in heaven, within us, not in worldly riches. We are called to enter into a state of solidarity with the poor, in communion with the oppressed, to be blessed in the spirit of the meek, not in the power and glory of the mighty.
By Jim Weller
We liberal religionists really enjoy having our cake and eating it, too. (I trust I may be permitted this metaphoric generalization, if only for rhetorical purposes – I think it points to an elephantine general truth about us.) Unitarian Universalist congregations rightly regard themselves as the radical and revisionist avant garde of Protestant Congregationalism in North America. In lieu of any religious creed, we mutually covenant to affirm and promote a set of theological/ethical principles which are fully consistent with the liberation ethics articulated in the most progressive theologies of our time.
Most of us in the Unitarian Universalist religious movement (we avoid the term, “denomination” since any hierarchical authority is anathema to our traditions of congregational polity) would agree that the dominant social, economic, cultural, and political power structures of the United States and much of the world are fundamentally unjust and evil, and that these systems must be transformed radically in order to promote the ideals of peace, liberty and justice for all, which we so publicly affirm. We see as well that our times demand an inclusive humanistic revision of the socio-religious ethos of the dominant Judeo-Christian traditions, for the same reasons.
Yet it is uncomfortably clear to some of us that we are the oppressors the prophetic voices we recognize in our Covenant warned us against – or, at least, we are among the relatively privileged minority by and through whom their oppressive powers are derived. As welcoming of psycho-social and cultural diversity, as willing to incorporate into our fellowships all souls of every sort of identity or ethnicity as we profess to be, we are nonetheless still predominantly WASP religious groups. The center of gravity of our association of congregations remains where it was established some three centuries ago – on Beacon Hill in Boston.
We advocate publicly for social justice on behalf of the poor and oppressed, and our socially oriented institutions have made significant contributions toward those ends. Our religious identity and group self-esteem are based upon this ethic, and though we don’t use the Catholic term, “preferential option for the poor” in our congregational discourse, it is the same. This is the justice cake we celebrate. Yet exceedingly few of our members live in conditions of material poverty or socioeconomic oppression. We take full part in the social class once called the Bourgeoisie, now perhaps better described as a “meritocracy,” in appropriating for ourselves much more than our share of the common wealth. Thus we gladly eat the justice cake the poor lack.
We UUs, and typically, WASP church members in general, tend not to relate easily to the concerns of practical theology, per se. Such a one might very likely ask, “What has theology got to do with social and political reality?” Asked by UUs, the question reflects the fact that most have rejected and become alienated from the “straight and narrow” religious orthodoxies of the social milieux in which we came of age, and therefore, many are chary of “God-talk” of any sort. Asked by other more or less liberal Protestants, it reflects the belief that the realm of religious observance is to be strictly maintained within the community of the church and one’s separate, personal “spirituality.” In either case, it is not at all clear how the articles of one’s faith and the methods of theology can or should be integrated with one’s way of living in the secular sphere of economic, social, and political life, and especially in relation with people of different religious affiliations.
So-called liberation theologies began to be explicated, first among Latin American Catholics, and then others, at about the time of the merger of the Universalist and Unitarian congregational associations in the early 1960’s. As I have said, the social ethics of Christian liberation theologies and ours are completely coherent, and the fundamental religious witness to human equality in God’s image (though the Imago Dei metaphor is off-putting to some) is the same as well. Since so many of us have difficulty relating to the language of theology (probably simply because of having become unaccustomed to it), we might as well speak, instead, of “liberation ethics.” I think we can manage to recognize these as generically religious ethics, despite our aversion to conventional piety, since even we rationalists will assent that our common ethics are grounded in fundamental non-empirical beliefs about human morality.
Thus wrote the ancient Hebrew prophet Jeremiah of God’s “new covenant” in the socio-religious reform of his time: “I have put my truth in your innermost mind, and I have written it in your heart. No longer need you teach your fellows about God. For all of you know Me, from the most ignorant to the most learned, from the poorest to the most powerful.” Or, as the eighteenth-century Japanese poet Ryōkan, put it, “In all ten directions of the universe, there is only one truth. When we see clearly, the great teachings are the same.”
What then, explicitly, are these UU liberation ethics, and what is their significance for us? They are, precisely, the same as the terms of our Covenant. The ethics of our “creedless faith” were articulated by a series of consultative assemblies of our congregations’ ordained ministers and lay leaders – themselves deeply religious theologians – to translate into summary postmodern terms the substantive practical theological legacy of our religious forebears:
"The living tradition we share draws from . . . Words and deeds of prophetic women and men which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love; Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God’s love by loving our neighbors as ourselves."
The significance of this Covenantal ethos of ours for the ways and means by which we ought to live our private and public lives, as congregants, as congregations, and as an association of congregations – our religious praxis - will become clear with a review of the subject of contemporary Christian liberation theology.
The editors of Orbis Books’ “Theology and Liberation Series” introduce the topic saying, “Its proponents have insisted that liberation theology is not a subtopic of theology but really a new way of doing theology.” The approach of this theology involves the oft-mentioned “preferential option” for the poor and oppressed. The theological “starting point” of the liberation ethic is in the lived experience of the dispossessed, disadvantaged, and disenfranchised peoples of the earth. Contrasted with orthodox, liberal, and neo-orthodox Christian ethics, this is a radical way of “doing theology,” in that its central concern is identical with the root themes of both the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian Gospels: the universal moral imperative of justice for the liberation of the oppressed.
The alternatives to beginning this way, in situ, with the religiosity of the contemporary human person-in-society, are more conventional approaches which mainly serve the interests of the dominant social order, oppressively attempting to impose the fixed interpretations of established ecclesial doctrine upon people’s living religious experience in their actual social situations. The responses of today’s liberation theologies involve not only a radical focus on social, political, psychological, and cultural liberation, but also a far-reaching theological revisionism, sometimes antagonistically disparaged as religious “syncretism.”
The radical aspect of this approach is well described by Gustavo Gutierrez, one of the first to articulate the concerns of a liberation theology, who writes, “The product of a profound historical movement, this aspiration to liberation is beginning to be accepted by the Christian community as a sign of the times, as a call to commitment and interpretation. The Biblical message, which presents the work of Christ as . . . liberation, provides the framework for this interpretation.” He explains that “the word ‘liberation’ allows for another approach leading to the Biblical sources which inspire the presence and action of man in history.”
James Cone expresses the revisionist imperative of a liberation theology, declaring, “Although I am a Christian theologian, I contend that a just social order must be accountable to not one but many religious communities. If we are going to create a society that is responsive to the humanity of all, then we must not view one religious faith as absolute. Ultimate reality, to which all things are subject, is too mysterious to be limited to one people’s view of God.” Peter Paris states the case even more pointedly, writing “The prophetic aim of liberation theologies is for ecclesiastical change both in thought and action.”
Cone describes the common standpoint of liberation theologies succinctly, stating that “our primary theological question and problem arise from the encounter of God in the experience and misery of the poor. The chief issue of our theologies is the problem of the non-person, the poor person.” He also expresses the “preferential option” of liberation theologians for empowerment for social and political action, viz: “To be a Christian is to love one’s neighbor and that means making a political commitment to make the world a habitable place . . . [and] not only to pray for justice but also to become actively involved in establishing it.” This is an option for activism made clear in the frequent use in liberation theologies of the term praxis. As Paris writes, “liberation theologies view themselves as practical throughout – praxis designating its origin, agency, form, and end . . . [and, further] liberation theologies argue that every theology is political in a similar way; none is transcendent of its sociopolitical context.”
Contemporary liberation theologies have arisen among Christian communities along with people’s liberation movements in the twentieth century, as responses to social, political, economic, and cultural oppression throughout the world. Wherever Western European colonialism and neo-colonial capitalism has extended its dominion, investing superior privilege and supreme power in a predominantly white male ruling class, it has gone hand in hand with co-opted ecclesiastical authority and “establishment” theology. In these places, liberation theologies have developed among people in churches claiming their ethnic and sexual identities, demanding justice in their struggles against oppression, and insisting upon recognition of their inherent worth and dignity on religious grounds.
Diverse though the subjects of liberation ethics are, chief among their commonalities, as Paris identifies it, “is their vigorous denial that theology can ever be culturally transcendent and epistemologically universal. Rather, liberationists argue that sociopolitical values inhere in the basic suppositions underlying all theologies. More specifically . . . the presuppositions underlying the Western theological tradition reveal [its] solidarity with the . . . societal values of their ruling elites . . . which by definition [have] always stood in opposition to the struggles of oppressed peoples for liberation.” Thus, we witness the motivation for radical, revisionist theologies of liberation embodying the values of oppressed humanity.
The various forms of liberation theology which have been developed reflect the identities of the distinct classes of humanity of whom they are representative. Thus, there are liberation theologies enunciated on behalf of Latin American people, Black American people, Black African people, and Asian people. In addition, women’s liberation movements have given rise to feminist critiques in North America and elsewhere, identified among Latina women as "Mujerista" theology, among Black women as “Womanist” theology, and among Asian women as Asian Women’s theology. Similarly, people of GLBT identities and orientations have contributed from their own experience of injustice, as people also marginalized and discriminated against by established social and ecclesial tradition.
Thus, there are the “Womanist” perspective of Professor Katie Cannon and the "Mujerista" perspective of Professor Ada Maria Isazi-Diaz. Both advocate a revision of principles for the practice of Christian moral theology, or religious ethics, so as to integrate the marginalized feminist consciousness with the androcentric approaches of the first enunciations of liberation theology.
Cannon adopts the definitions of the term “Womanist” introduced in 1983 by the acclaimed novelist Alice Walker. Isazi-Diaz and her Hispanic feminist colleagues adopted the cognate term "Mujerista" for their theological perspectives in 1988. Both demand recognition of the fully equal worth and dignity of women’s moral agency, among their different, but equally oppressed, ethnic groups, amidst the dominant WASP society of the United States. The thrust of their work is to express and honor the significant differences that their differences make, for the goal of empowerment and redemption of their afflicted, abused, aggrieved communities, for the triply oppressed women of those communities, and for their just reconciliation with the larger society.
Isazi-Diaz’ approach elucidates the dialectic of traditional Catholic moral reasoning with the “lived-experience” of individual Hispanic women of distinct social and ethnic backgrounds in the United States, through conversational interviews with them concerning their struggles to effectuate their moral agency despite variously oppressive social, cultural, political, and economic circumstances. She explores how each of these women’s ways of living cohere in the hopeful and faithful future orientation she describes as their "Projecto Historico" – the movement toward redemption for the people of the "Mestizaje diaspora."
Cannon engages the “real-lived” historical experience of African-American women from the seventeenth through the mid-twentieth centuries in segregated and slave communities, as represented in the literature of Black women authors. The context for her ethical exploration of women’s moral agency is backward-looking in order to reconcile our understanding of who we are with how we have been, as contrasted with Isazi-Diaz’ contemporary sociological context, examining how we will be in society, given the way we are. Both ultimately orient themselves toward the project of becoming the more just and blessed society we can be.
Both scholars uphold and celebrate a communitarian ethic, which is a consequence of the special integrative role of women as mothers having to cope with the vital needs of children and families in distressed situations. The two contrast the ways in which the popular religiosities of marginalized Black women and Hispanic women, in their respective communities, have assimilatated and accommodated the dominant ecclesiologies of the Protestant Evangelical and Roman Catholic social milieux in which they are situated.
In contrasting particularities, but similarly in spirit, Cannon and Isazi-Diaz demonstrate that the religious liberation ethic, for these women, is a moral struggle for survival as fully-human persons against inimical social structures. Both confront oppressive and enervating forces with the courage of faith, in the theological establishments where they are situated professionally, as well as in the common social predicaments of the sisterhoods with whom they identify ethnically.
Our UU social ethics affirm that justice is to be found in equitable sharing of life’s blessings. We say, “From each according to one’s means, to each according to one’s need,” in countervailing against the dominant ethos which says, “More for me is always better; enough is never enough.” Contrary to the ideal of individualistic self-interest though it is, it is nonetheless true that at any given stage, political economy is a zero-sum game. At the end of the day, “them what has gets and them what ain’t don’t” – and we say that just ain’t right. For those of us nearer the top of the unjust socio-economic pyramid than most, righteousness calls us not only to lend those below a hand up, but to roll down the stones on which we stand, bringing down those on top and leveling out the structure for all.
We see that it is unjust for the few to enjoy superabundance, having much more than is needed by the many who have much too little. But what are we to do, give away our hard-won surplus? Let others take the gains that are ours? As a matter of fact, yes. As M.K. Gandhi urged us, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” There are many in need, who are prevented from having by those who do have, and don’t need it. Give away what you have and don’t need; and don’t take any more than you need. This is what it means to “love your neighbor as yourself.”
Since we, the privileged, recognize the injustice of the social, political, and economic systems by which the few benefit excessively at the expense of the many, and we ourselves are benefited more than most, it is up to us to use our relative empowerment not only to modify these systems, to help liberate the oppressed, and to oppose the excesses of the willfully unjust among us, but to liberate ourselves from the spiritual oppression of unjust enrichment by renouncing it.
It is written that, when Jesus was teaching, a righteous and pious man, who yet despaired of redeeming grace, came to him and asked, “What must I do to inherit eternal life? I have observed the law and honored the conventions of church and society all my life, but I fear that I am still not saved.” Jesus loved him in his anxiety, and said, “You know not what you lack. Go, sell all that you own; give the proceeds of it to the poor, and follow me.” The man was aggrieved by this, and went away despairing more than ever, for his estate was large. “How difficult it is,” Jesus said, “for the wealthy ones to enter the kingdom of God; it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.”
The rich man in this story was a good man, but he was oppressed by his privilege, and remained spiritually unliberated. He missed the point of Jesus’ hyperbole, which was not that he needed to be abjectly impoverished to enter the kingdom of God, but only to become “poor in spirit,” for eternal life is here and now, on earth as it is in heaven, within us, not in worldly riches. We are called to enter into a state of solidarity with the poor, in communion with the oppressed, to be blessed in the spirit of the meek, not in the power and glory of the mighty.
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