One of the differences between a modernist a someone trapped in a medieval mindset is the approach taken toward the entity that medieval thinkers claim to be divine. A modernist will infer from the poor track record of medieval thinking that the entity considered to be divine is not really divine. The assumption that it is only divine in the medieval imagination is a natural consequence of the track record of theft, murder, and destruction that such imaginations have demonstrated in the past.

This would also conform well with modern theories of astral objects which have themselves evolved as more and more information about them becomes available. There was a time when people considered the Sun to be an eternal entity. Current speculation considers it to have a beginning and an ending. If such is the case with the Sun then such can also be the case with the entity that the medieval mind thinks of as the inventor of the Sun. There was a time when the medieval deity did not exist. It has not been around forever.

The bridge between medieval thought and modernity is the notion of eternal law. The difference between the two is the process used to determine what qualifies as an eternal law and what does not. The modern mind studies nature to search for patterns that are valid in any time and place. Those patterns are used to formulate relational expressions that are assumed to always hold true until further research finds cases where they do not apply.

I encountered a medieval thinker who rejected an idea because he considered it to be "man's" law rather than the law of his deity. All of the relational findings of natural science could easily be rejected as fabrications of the human imagination in favor of the laws of an entity that bears the earmarks of human creativity. Rather than search for a natural relation that is always true, the medieval minds asserts that his indoctrinated relation was the product of an eternal entity.

The medieval mind cowers in terror at the thought of eternal torment as punishment for questioning the validity of the authority that would supposedly treat her in such a vicious and brutal manner. How anyone could find such a fiend to be lovable is beyond my comprehension. It would be like loving the hostage taker who threatened to cut off body parts one at a time.

What is even worse is the zealotry that results from this kind of thinking. It compels people to commit unspeakable atrocities in order to uphold medieval regulations. Teens torment their peers to the point of suicide out of a medieval sense of justice. People who suffer from such torment are labelled as chemically imbalanced and fed brain damaging chemicals. The tormentors are considered to be practitioners of traditional religion. Actions against them would be a form of religious persecution. Religious persecutors are protected by medieval minds using modern concepts of civil rights.

Do you agree that religious persecutors deserve the freedom to persecute and that their victims should be treated as somehow genetically defective? On a related note, what do you make of the recent events in the Central African Republic?

Links: The previous entry in this series. EuroNews report on religious violence in the Republic of Central Africa.

A pivotal character in Church history was an Italian monk of the Dominican Order by the name of Girolamo Savonarola. He was a contemporary of another Italian who made a name for himself by enslaving Native Americans and stealing their land. Savonarola advocated in favor of Church reform before it became a fashionable endeavor. His fans have given him credit for inspiring subsequent activists in the field such as Martin Luther and Jean Calvin. Savonarola's detractors considered him to be a political conspirator with ambitions for worldly power.

Savonarola recounted his personal visual experiences in public sermons. He related those visions to actual events. Many of his contemporaries considered him to be a lunatic. He spoke in a way that would result in psychiatric incarceration if done today. For example he claimed to be in direct communication with the material Creator of the flat and immobile Earth. His critique of the sex lives and economic injustices of political and clerical leaders earned him a martyrdom of hanging and burning in a public square in Florence along with two co-conspirators.

Some of his reforms had a rational appeal. He advocated a more just tax structure to replace the one that benefited the affluent at the expense of merchants and laborers. He opposed the despotism of the Medici family which had driven Florentine politics into the closet. He favored the inclusion of middle class people in government offices at the disfavor of the landed gentry. Marx would have seen him as a bourgeois revolutionary for such advocacy. Freemasons may recognize one of their own in his use of symbols and secret gatherings.

Like most medieval thinkers Savonarola did a grave injustice to philosophy by exploiting its rich fruits then slapping it in the face. He imitated Plato with a dialog style and used Peripatetic shadowcraft to prove that darkness is light and light, darkness. He denied any eternal merit in the ancient thinkers as he employed their style in the eternal practice of personal aggrandizement. In an effort to deflect attention from his own vanity by claiming divine inspiration he attacked the vanity of the idle rich. He attempted to replace festive pagan bonfires with "Christian" bonfires of the vanities that served as archetypes for future book burnings.

Would you consider Savonarola to be a prophet or does he better qualify as a demagogue? What lessons can we take from his story in order to understand the medieval aspects of modern politics?

Links: Lauro Martines on the history of Savonarola An excellent collection of Savonarola's written work. (Part 3 of the series)

Back in the day word leaked out of the Soviet Union that political dissidents were being incarcerated as mental patients. To be opposed to the outcome of the proletarian Revolution was seen as a symptom of psychosis. A rationale could easily be made that only a sick mind would seek to depose the all-powerful Communist Party. The logic of psychiatry is such that the profession is perfect as an instrument of political control. It is the ideal Orwellian power tool.

Thomas Szasz criticized the feigned shock and horror of American psychiatrists over this news. He pointed to a similar mechanism in the American version of the profession that characterizes defiant children as sick in the head. It is a nifty device that provides parents with the authority to dope up children when they become frighteningly disobedient. It also gives teachers the capacity to marginalize students who have yet to buy into the program of educational indoctrination.

In their work on the problem of social problems Malcolm Spector and John Kitsuse describe the political machinations of American and other Western psychiatrists to control the debate over the political aspects of psychiatry. When calls for an investigation into Soviet practices went out few sociologists had the cycles to spare on the project. Psychiatrists insisted on recruiting researchers who were not hostile to their profession. The fear that a sociological inquiry into Soviet abuses would be used to look into abuses on the other side of the Iron Curtain was not unfounded. After all the field of sociology was known to be critical of psychiatry including the famous Rosenhan experiment. (That study sent fake patients into mental "health" facilities in order to further open up the can of worms of psychiatric abuse.)

Psychiatry serves well as a loophole in the institution of civil rights. Anyone can be stigmatized as a mental case and denied rights supposedly guaranteed by the government. Children can be defrauded of their rights to parental contact when one or both parents rub government bureaucrats the wrong way. Once an individual has been sucked into the mental "health" regime they are never the same as before. Even if a victim of psychiatry escapes the brain damage of "treatment," they cannot escape the iron maw of official stigma. Certainly this is not completely the fault of psychiatry itself, but the profession resists attempts to strip it of such power. We can see this in Spector and Kitsuse's description of resistance to investigations into psychiatric abuse.

Do you truly believe that Western psychiatry is immune to the practices witnessed in the Soviet Union? Have you ever met anyone who is the victim of psychiatric abuse? Could it be said that any mental "health" patient has escaped psychiatric abuse?

Links: Thomas Szasz on the Soviet psychiatry. Spector and Kitsuse on psychiatric resistance to sociological investigation.

Q: Why don't conservatives go to Hell after they die?
A: They wind up in Limbaugh.

In a recent broadcast response to the current pope, Rush Limbaugh waved his banner of capitalist cheer-leading. He gave the example of disaster relief as a positive aspect of his personal religion of greed, hate and delusion. What Limbaugh failed to grasp is that sincere disaster relief does not conform to the strict tenets of pure capitalism.

Capitalists practice charity as a means to an end. The classic example of capitalist charity works somewhat like a loss leader. "Here is some good stuff for free." When the consumer becomes accustomed to the stuff, it is no longer free. Disaster relief from a capitalist perspective is a way to open up a new market for business expansion. It has nothing to do with helping out someone in distress except a distressed business in need of expansion.

Limbaugh claims that the US would not have the resources for disaster relief overseas were it not for the "virtuous" system of capital accumulation. What he omits is the way that the process of accumulation of assets into the hands of a few already wealthy investors tends to drain resources away from other parts of the globe rendering them susceptible to natural calamities. Nations impoverished by Anglo-American global domination have a reduced capacity to help their own people in a time of crisis. There is also the "ideological" barrier of opposition to a social safety net as imposed by capitalist domination. People will not work for marginal wages in a society with a social safety net. The absence of a safety net aggravates the effects of a natural disaster.

A more telling example of a capitalist response to a natural disaster is the way oil companies jacked up the price of gas after hurricane Katrina hit the American gulf coast. Sure, this conformed to the law of supply and demand. After all the supply of oil was reduced by the loss of Louisiana supplies and the demand was increased by the fact that residents fled by vehicle and remained on the road. Employees of capital know how to exploit a situation and would be fired if they failed to do so.

Another blind spot in the Limbaugh religion is the denial of the effects of capital accumulation on the global climate. Melting ice caps and increased storm severity have no human contribution. They would have occurred without the mad rush to profit from fossil fuel consumption. The greenhouse effect is the bogey man of weak-kneed liberals who cannot appreciate the fine bouquet on a glass of anti-freeze enhanced ground water.

What is your take on disaster relief with respect to the global political economy? And, do you accept Rush Limbaugh into your heart as your lord and savior?

Links: Rush Limbaugh on pope Frank.

Our previous discussion on the pervasiveness of the medieval mindset in the modern world brought up an interesting attitude that could be characterized as either a willful ignorance of medieval thinking or a naive assumption that medieval thinking simply no longer exists. Perhaps some further consideration of the topic would help. For example, pseudo-modernist John Meier's perspective on fundamentalism makes the assumption that fundamentalists approach sacred literature from a modern perspective and misinterpret it due to a lack of contextual information. What he fails to see is that modern scholars do a better job of putting sacred literature into context than he does because his ultimate mission is to discredit modernism in favor of medieval thinking.

Fundamentalists cannot be considered modern because they have yet to make the transition to modernity. Their rejection of advances in understanding such as evolutionary theory and set theory point to a profound antipathy with modernity that could be characterized as medieval zealotry. Their inability to put sacred literature into a historic context does not reflect modern naivety. Instead it reflects a zealous rejection of any ancient literature other than sacred texts. This rejection is the same as the orthodox rejection of Pagan culture at the dawn of medieval Christianity.

The same kind of rejection can be seen in Meier's rejection of scholarship based on a deep understanding of Pagan culture. Meier even goes so far as to deny the possibility (or probability) that Jesus spent time in Sepphoris, a city quite close to Nazareth thought to have a significant degree of cosmopolitan influence. It seems that his rejection of the idea of Jesus spending time in Sepphoris is based on an urge to isolate Jesus from Pagan influence. This disagreement with modern speculation puts Meier in a medievalist camp much closer to the fundamentalists he criticizes.

For another example, the papacy is itself a medieval institution. One of the key distinctions between modernists and medievalists is the rejection of papal authority by the former, although fundamentalists could be considered medievalists who also reject papal authority much the way that Eastern Orthodoxy rejected it. As long as people revere papal authority and idolize sacred literature, medieval thinking will persist. The former could be considered a Western medievalism while the latter could be considered an Eastern medievalism.

The political implications of persistent medievalism cannot be understated. German National Socialism is the most prominent back-lash against modernism that we know of. The bullying of homosexual youth in American society can also be debited to medievalism. The tendency to use brutal interrogation and punitive methods also marks the persistence of the medieval mindset.

Are you willing to rethink your position on medieval thinking?

Links: Reza Aslan on modern speculation about the life of Jesus. John Meier criticizing modern speculation and fundamentalist limitations.

Death dates are rather grim affairs. The Jesus cult transformed a traditional Jewish festival into a celebration of the execution of its principal martyr. There are people in the US and abroad who reflect on the martyrdom of history's most famous jelly doughnut Berliner. One of my favorite music groups of the 80's sang a tribute to Herr Kennedy. This week marks an even five decades, a half century, since the making of the Zapruder film in Dallas, Texas.

I remember one of the conspiracy theories of the 60's speculating that the assassination was motivated by Kennedy's plans to withdraw American troops from Vietnam. Like all such theories, there was no evidence other than the fact that Kennedy had recently announced plans to draw down military advisers from a country that was hotly contested by Communist and anti-Communist factions. In fact, the draw-down proceeded as planned after Kennedy's death with a thousand soldiers being sent home from Vietnam the following month.

One of the things that puzzled me as I got older were the competing conspiracy theories that the long arms of Moscow or Havana were responsible for the assassination because of Kennedy's hostility concerning the island hosting the Guantanamo military installation. Those theories had the support of the assassin's supposed Soviet loyalty behind it, but the theorists ignored the larger body of anti-Communist hostility against Kennedy. They also ignored the possibility that Oswald's pro-Communist stance may have been a ruse. Later documentation of government penetration of the Communist Party points to the possibility that Oswald was a mole.

Does this mean that I buy into the CIA plot conspiracy theory? There are plenty of people outside of official government channels who could have been involved. It is quite possible that a private party with Federal connections was the ultimate force behind the attack. The fact that some CIA bureaucrats have acted in a rogue capacity may be used to favor CIA involvement, but it does not prove anything.

Do you buy into the official story of a lone gunman? Do you trust that the findings of the Warren Commission constitute an accurate analysis of the event? If not, which group of conspirators do you think is most likely responsible?

Links: Spliff singing Herr Kennedy. The Zapruder film. Rebecca Onion on JFK in anti-Communist, John Bircher crosshairs. British TV series from 25 years ago on the plethora of conspiracy theories. David Freedlander reviews Roger Stone's book pinning the blame on Lyndon Johnson.

If you ever wondered what it would be like to attend a Klan rally, I suspect that a meeting of the Family Research Council comes pretty close. A recent convention of that bastion of religious bigotry has been published on the Internet for the whole online world to see. The video is an excellent artifact for the study of reaction to progress. It gives us a glimpse into an Orwellian world where despotism is promoted in the name of religious freedom.

The issue at hand is the sorry plight of a beleaguered military sergeant who had been reprimanded for misconduct that he professes to be an exercise of his constitutional rights. He paints a picture of military personnel cowed into silence by regulations that are intended to maintain decorum in a pluralistic military organization. Fundamentalists are groaning over the oppressive burden of restrictions against proselytism and against the denigration of soldiers considered to be sinners.

One of the speakers at the meeting is an advocate for fundamentalist chaplains in the military. It is ironic that he quotes a famous Freemason who instituted the chaplaincy in order to serve Christian soldiers. Fundamentalists think of Masonry as a form of devil worship. One of our students remarked that the quote referred to "good Christian" rather than vicious, brutal, bigoted Christian soldiers.

The chaplain advocate showed his reactionary hand when he described how awful it would be for fundamentalist children to be exposed to public displays of affection by same-sex couples. People in the audience could easily agree with that assessment. People who live outside the narrow confines of Redneckistan might not sympathize with the plight of these homophobic people.

One of the speakers, a former military intelligence general, overtly decried the policy of tolerance in the military. He considers religious pluralism to be communistic. He even advocates a conspiracy theory about preparations for martial law. It is clear that fear and intolerance are some of the key traditional family values promoted by the Family Research Council.

There is concern on the part of legitimate military religious freedom advocates that repressive measures may be part of the reaction against progress. In reducing the hostility against homosexuals and freethinkers, bigots in the military are turning the heat up on their own kind. This creates a sacrificial lamb effect that makes the beleaguered bigot seem like a martyr.

One of the greatest ironies of the whole affair is that the chaplain advocate tried to hide his naked aggression behind the fig leaf of biblical misinterpretation. He claims that the Bible says that marriage is only between one man and one woman, which it does not. He also claims that he believes that the Bible says what it says. He clearly advocates a Bible that says that which it does not say. I suspect that his basic problem is that he has not yet figured out the distinction between good and evil.

What advice do you have for the benighted souls at the Family Research Council?

Links: Faux News on the sergeant's case. Zack Ford rebuts Faux News story.

When we study martial organizations we need a way to distinguish a legitimate organization from a band of brigands. What is the essential difference between the two categories of organization? If we are not careful in how we establish the criterion we could easily wind up conferring legitimacy on a piratical organization. As we saw with the FBI, an organization with one ostensible purpose can end up supporting the opposite purpose. The American constitution guarantees equal protection to African Americans, but the federal enforcement agency acted in the interest of terrorists who subverted that guarantee.

The hazing operation conducted against Aaron Alexis gives us some insight into the piratical aspects of the American military. Hazing is used by a variety of organizations for purposes of both induction and expulsion. College fraternity hazing is probably the most publicized form of the practice. Criminal organizations practice a variety of hazing inductions and expulsions. A number of popular films have portrayed military hazing from both sympathetic and critical perspectives. One of the most distasteful military hazing induction practices is the Navy's Shellback ritual.

The hazing of Aaron Alexis fits the pattern of an expulsion hazing with earmarks that are similar to the attempted expulsion of Mikey Weinstein. Neural wave machinery was not employed in Weinstein's case, but the people responsible attempted to make him believe that the hazing was a figment of his imagination. The responsible people tried to hide behind the skirts of mental disorder like children who have been caught stealing from the neighbor's cabbage patch.

Two elements are common to the hazing cases: race and religion. If Alexis had not been of an ethnic persuasion from outside of Europe, he might have been treated differently. Had his religious affiliation been more in line with Roman tradition, he might have been treated better. There are people in the US military who espouse both racial and religious bigotry. They are vicious, brutal, and cowardly. The inability of the military to handle this problem puts their legitimacy into doubt. Cowardly racist religious bigots cannot and will not uphold the American constitution.

What criteria would you suggest for determining the legitimacy of a martial organization? Does your local organization pass the test?

Links: Carie Little Hersh on the Navy Shellback hazing ritual. Mikey Weinstein on his personal passage through military expulsion hazing. Weinstein speaks on religious bigotry in the military today.