Re: Heathian Anarchism is Neo-Feudalism

Adding to some things that Brainpolice said about capitalism and mini-states.

Have the Ebionites vanished from Youtube?

I have a link that would lead to the youtube channel of a real life authentic Ebionite - if that account weren't deleted. I was very disappointed to find out that this channel is no more. This user was in the middle of a thriving youtube community of Ebionites, and there were scores of friends and subscribers on his page who identified as non-Christian, Jewish revivalist followers of Yeshua. These weren't your typical seekers attracted by gnosticism, nature-olatry, and vegetarianism (though most of these guys probable were vegetarian). These were all out bearded guys who recite Torah in Hebrew and read reconstructions of the Gospel of the Ebionites. This one user wrote that he celebrates the High Holy Days based on a lunar calendar, rather than the modern solar calendar, because the lunar calendar is more Biblical. He would post videos of himself sitting on his balcony waiting for the sun to set and for Shabbat to begin. He would post videos in which he would claim that Paul was a Hellenizing pagan who led people away from the teachings of Yashua and introduced such idolotrous ideas as the divinity of Christ and salvation through his death.

One of his friends posted a video on his own channel describing what it was like for him to go shopping while wearing a kippah, and encouraging the viewer to try wearing one too. Another guy posted videos about how that the followers of Yeshua are called to be different, that it is worldly to publicly present oneself in clothes that highlite the contours of the body, and thus that shirts should be baggy and untucked, and that the necktie is an article of vanity and a symbol of bourgeois bondage (he called it a noose).

Now that that channel I looked for is gone, I'm having a very hard time finding youtube videos about the Evyonut that are posted by actual Ebionites. Maybe the Ebionite circle is well tucked away, and it just takes a lot more clicking around to find them again. But as of now I can't find them and I am disappointed.

If they have truly vanished from Youtube, then all Ebionite self-definition that I could see occurs through a couple websites that haven't had a new post in a couple years. I may have seen the life and death of a religion in my lifetime.

The Evyonut may classify as an internet religion. Thanks to instant and long-distance ways of communicating - like the internet - people can share whole packages of belief and practice with each other without ever meeting face-to-face.

I used to think that libertarianism and the factions that support Ron Paul were internet religions. That idea was supported by the sobering difference between Ron Paul's sweeping successes in online polls and what happend in the polling booths. The RonPaulians kept winning online because that's the planet they live on. But there is evidence (though yes, it is online evidence) that small-government anti-war folk congregate in real life too.

If a movement were more than an internet religion, then within its online presence there would probably be documentation of groups meeting face-to-face - videos of people celebrating a holiday together, or reading scripture or praying together, or something like that. There are videos online of libertarian and RonPaulian lectures, meetings, and demonstrations. I have not seen a single video of more than one Ebionite in the same room together.

I use "more than an internet religion" reluctantly, because it sounds a bit paternalist in that it implies that internet religion is an inferior way of "doing church". But let's be frank here. If 99% of your interpersonal religious interaction with others who share your beliefs occurs online, then your fellowship is in a very real way relegated to cyberspace. This is a substantial problem for most religions, because religiosity (especially that based on the Hebrew Bible) is very much about day-to-day interactions with others. There is an approved mode of living, which regards many more aspects of you life than your online social media, and which can hardly occur without the cooperation and support of like-minded others. If everyone you know who shares your beliefs lives so far away that you only see them in online videos, then you will have a hard time following the approved mode of living. If your religious identity is to survive as an online religion, then your approved mode of living must be reduced to an atomoton religiosity.

The approved mode of living is so much more than reading this book or that book. It's about how to interact with your neighbors, your employees, and your supervisors; it's about who and when to fuck; it's about what to eat and how to grow or raise it; it's about what to wear and how you'll get it.

Now, since many aspects of the day-to-day Evyonut were borrowed from Orthodox Judaism, it is possible that an Ebionite can live in near-complete conformity with his approved mode of living if he (yes, he) lives around Orthodox Jews. So maybe the Ebionites weren't total atomotons. But then, maybe they were all absorbed into Judaism.

I can only speculate about what happened to the Ebionites. Maybe they still do exist, and I just haven't re-found them yet. Maybe they're meeting together in houses and reading Torah and the prophets, and Matthew and James, and I just haven't seen videos of it yet. Maybe I'm the one who's constraining things to online videos - maybe I should be more willing to go find them with my body. I'd be a lousy sociologist of religion if all the sources I relied on were youtube videos and Wikipedia articles.

I should be confident. I doubt a whole religion can go cold within a matter of months - especially one whose adherents are so spread out. I'll probably find a video of theirs in time. But let this be the lesson for now - if you want to start your own religion, having a number of fellow-believers live in proximity with each other might be nice.

(For the record, I am not an Ebionite. My interest in the Ebionites is purely "academic". I'm intrigued by obscure and reconstructionary religions and other weird things, and Ebionism is obscure, reconstructionary, and weird, and so I like reading about it, just as I like reading about Atenism, Satanism, Jainism, and Anarcho-Nationalism.)

The Weakness of "God"

These days I don't see any descriptive power in the word "God" - that is, I don't think it means anything, and when it does, it means something that doesn't make much sense to me. When people use the word "God" they usually mean something that is both (1) the ultimate cause of every physical thing and (2) the absolute form of moral correctness. Why the cause of everything and the sum of moral principles have to be referenced in one single breath, and how they even can be referenced in one single breath, is beyond me.

Modern theology is often in the business of explaining away God to the point that He/She/It/Them/We cannot be thought of as the conventional sum of (1) + (2). Luther and Calvin mangled (2) to the point that morality was thought of as simply God's preferences. Deism, and its cousin Unitarianism, emphasized (2) to the demotion of (1).

Contemporary, chic theology today does the same thing to a greater degree. On one side of contemporary theology, God is described as "the Ground of all Being" - a phrase which triggers within me the question "so what?". A God reduced all the way to (1) and nothing else doesn't give me any indication of how I should behave, what kinds of relationships I should have, or how I should cultivate my own character. Or at least, I don't see how it does.

On the other side of contemporary theology is Caputo's weak God. This can be thought of as a kind of (2) without any (1). I should mention, that It is a very special kind of (2). In The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event, he writes:

God, the event harbored by the name of God, is present at the crucifixion, as the power of the powerlessness of Jesus, in and as the protest against the injustice that rises up from the cross, in and as the words of forgiveness, not a deferred power that will be visited upon one’s enemies at a later time. God is in attendance as the weak force of the call that cries out from Calvary and calls across the epochs, that cries out from every corpse created by every cruel and unjust power.

(Yes, I copied this from Wikipedia. All Hail Wikipedia!)

To my utter confusion, I hear the same people in the same service use these two kinds of God concepts which to me look like total opposites. They'll preach a sermon in which they use the name "God" purely as a moral claim. Then they'll pray in the name of "The Creator, The Sustainer, and The Redeemer" - as if a pure moral claim would then go ahead and enforce itself.

The weak God is a nice idea to flirt with, but the 3-letter G-word has such a history of referring to both (1) and (2) that even the hippest of religious leaders are going to use it in both the contexts of Might and Right. The 3-letter G-word is really an open invitation for everyone to conflate power and morality. And so, I think the kind of religion that will come about in the New Reformation (if we're worthy enough to have it) will be one where the word "God" is conspicuously absent.

A Quote from Increase Mather

from Sermon Occasioned by the Execution of a Man Found Guilty of Murder, Preached at Boston in New-England, March IIth 168 5/6. (Together with the confession, Last Expressions, and Solemn Warning of that Murderer, to all Persons; especially to Young Men, to beware of those Sins which brought him to his Miserable End.) [Yah, that parenthetical comes right from the heading of the printed version!]

"No man that acted like a man, ever hated his own flesh. To be cruel, though to a Servant or Slave, is a very sinful thing. Nay Cruelty though to a Beast argueth a murderous, bloody disposition. The Scripture saith that a good man is merciful to his Beast. They then that make themselves sport with putting dumb creatures to misery, do very sinfully. Yet that has been practised here of later years in the open Streets, especially on one day of the Year. (I intend the Cock-scalings of Shrove Tuesday.) To do it at such a time is vanity and Heathenish Superstition; besides to make sport with exercising cruelty on dumb Creatures, which had never been miserable had not the sins of men made them so; it is a wicked thing, and ought not to be amongst those that call themselves Christians." [Mather, Increase. "Sermon Occasioned by an Execution." American Sermons: The Pilgrims to Martin Luther King Jr. Ed. Michael Warner. Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., New York, 1999. p183.]

Increase Mather really was this preacher's name. In his day he preached against a whole lot of things, including stage plays, card games, drinking toasts, and giving gifts at New Year's. His opposition to cock-fighting is special, though, because he condemned it not only for its connections to paganism but also (and maybe especially) because he considered it inherrently cruel. He says more against what he saw as pagan practices in his tract A Testimony Against several Prophane and Superstitious CUSTOMS, Now Practised by Some in New-England, The Evil whereof is evinced from the Holy Scriptures, and from the Writings of both Ancient and Modern Divines. Though Plymouth had been established as a Puritan community, the market took its toll on collective religious identity and by the late 1600's New England was running rife with Anglicans who were steeped in such Popish practices as celebrating Christmas and observing saints' days.

Rothbard on Utilitarianism

He says more about utilitarianism in other pieces, but this one jumped out at me today.

"There were two critically important changes in the philosophy and ideology of classical liberalism which both exemplified and contributed to its decay as a vital, progressive, and radical force in the Western world. The first, and most important, occurring in the early to mid-nineteenth century, was the abandonment of the philosophy of natural rights, and its replacement by technocratic utilitarianism. Instead of liberty grounded on the imperative morality of each individual's right to person and property, that is, instead of liberty being sought primarily on the basis of right and justice, utilitarianism preferred liberty as generally the best way to achieve a vaguely defined general welfare or common good. There were two grave consequences of this shift from natural rights to utilitarianism. First, the purity of the goal, the consistency of the principle, was inevitably shattered. For whereas the natural-rights libertarian seeking morality and justice cleaves militantly to pure principle, the utilitarian only values liberty as an ad hoc expedient. And since expediency can and does shift with the wind, it will become easy for the utilitarian in his cool calculus of cost and benefit to plump for statism in ad hoc case after case, and thus to give principle away. Indeed, this is precisely what happened to the Benthamite utilitarians in England: beginning with ad hoc libertarianism and laissez-faire, they found it [p. 16] ever easier to slide further and further into statism. An example was the drive for an "efficient" and therefore strong civil service and executive power, an efficiency that took precedence, indeed replaced, any concept of justice or right.

"Second, and equally important, it is rare indeed ever to find a utilitarian who is also radical, who burns for immediate abolition of evil and coercion. Utilitarians, with their devotion to expediency, almost inevitably oppose any sort of upsetting or radical change. There have been no utilitarian revolutionaries. Hence, utilitarians are never immediate abolitionists. The abolitionist is such because he wishes to eliminate wrong and injustice as rapidly as possible. In choosing this goal, there is no room for cool, ad hoc weighing of cost and benefit. Hence, the classical liberal utilitarians abandoned radicalism and became mere gradualist reformers. But in becoming reformers, they also put themselves inevitably into the position of advisers and efficiency experts to the State. In other words, they inevitably came to abandon libertarian principle as well as a principled libertarian strategy. The utilitarians wound up as apologists for the existing order, for the status quo, and hence were all too open to the charge by socialists and progressive corporatists that they were mere narrow-minded and conservative opponents of any and all change. Thus, starting as radicals and revolutionaries, as the polar opposites of conservatives, the classical liberals wound up as the image of the thing they had fought.

"This utilitarian crippling of libertarianism is still with us. Thus, in the early days of economic thought, utilitarianism captured free-market economics with the influence of Bentham and Ricardo, and this influence is today fully as strong as ever. Current free-market economics is all too rife with appeals to gradualism; with scorn for ethics, justice, and consistent principle; and with a willingness to abandon free-market principles at the drop of a cost-benefit hat. Hence, current free-market economics is generally envisioned by intellectuals as merely apologetics for a slightly modified status quo, and all too often such charges are correct." -For a New Liberty, 1973

The Fancy New Golf Game

In two weeks, the world's most accessible and artistic source of intelligent social commentary will release on their website an episode that my brother said represents exactly everything he thought about the issue. In short, the episode's message is that we need to start blaming the person more and the conditions less.

My friend Andy had a somewhat different opinion of things. He didn't know why private indiscretion should become such a public matter that an adulterer would have to publicly apologize for it. Woods' sponsors supposedly pay him to play golf, not to be a saint. That some of his sponsors withdrew their support because of his marital infidelity reveals what Andy takes to be another dangerous conflation between the public and private spheres.

I actually find the public reaction to this affair both disappointing and encouraging. Disappointing, in that I agree with Andy. But encouraging, in that this shows how social norms can be strictly enforced through mere noncompliance. This was an instance where people "punished" a guy, and impelled him to make it right, simply by not doing things for him anymore.

We already have the basic infrastructure for it, so I'm quite confident that - if it were allowed to - some good old fashioned shunning can work to incentivize other duties besides the duty to not cheat on your wife.

Happy Easter, and No on J

...quite frankly...

The Blog: http://stadiumfacts.blogspot.com/ This has several links to articles about the inefficacy of subsidized stadiums.

The Website: http://www.santaclaraplaysfair.org/

The Speech: http://santaclaraca.gov/ftp/csc/pdf/49ers-20070522-Public-Presentations.pdf