Stephen T. Asma fellates religion

In a post of several years ago, I saluted Asma for saying universal disinterested love was impossible. He was focused on secular philosophers like Peter Singer, but I said his reasoning extended to Buddhism (and didn't think that it extended to Christianity's call to sanctified humans, too.)

Well, maybe there's a reason he didn't extend that to religions.

That's because he's an idiot about religion as a class. And, there's a whole book of his idiocy, with a puff review here by a theist and a piece by him.

His idiocy?

Asma, who claims to be an agnostic himself, says that religion has therapeutic value in emotional regulation. Reality?

It only does that as an occasional or sometime spandrel of what it really does.

The history of religion bloody red in tooth and claw, to riff on Matthew Arnold, is that religion often stimulates, even excites, emotions. The long legacy of crusades, jihads, other conversions at swordpoint by even the allegedly non-evangelist Jews, heresy trials, witch hunts, the persecution of Muslims in Burma by allegedly peaceful Buddhists and more all show that emotional stimulation, excitement or worse is what religion usually does. Emotion-laden visionary trances, speaking in tongues and more are other examples.

Also contra the puff reviewer, Asma's arguments for believing in religion are wholly utilitarian. And, since the evidentiary warrants for the argument are false, the argument is as fallacious of a utilitarian argument for religious belief as Pascal's Wager.

I'm not a Gnu Atheist, so contra Dawkins and others, I don't believe religion poisons everything it touches. But, since it is an "-ism," like other "-isms," it can damage a fair amount of what it contacts.

Finally, I reject No True Scotsman arguments for what constitutes "true religion," whether from Judeo-Christian scriptures or elsewhere.

Anyway, Asma sure doesn't seem like an agnostic. Massimo said that his peers have commented on this. Massimo also says he's touted pseudoscience before.

This shows that being a philosopher doesnt' guarantee intellectual acuity, despite the word's etymology.

Antichrist vs the man of lawlessness vs the beast and the mark of 666 or whatever

Christian fundamentalists (that includes you standoffish, smug conservative Lutherans), non-fundamentalist conservative evangelicals (and I suppose, more literalist types among the Catholics and Orthodox) generally get all three of these critters confused.

(Per the first paragraph, the term "funadgelicals," which I've seen on some Patheos blogs, might be better than using "fundamentalist" for all conservative Protestants. On the other hand, politically and theologically moderate to liberal Protestants in mainline denominations refer to themselves as "liberal evangelicals," among other things, and are represented in thought by magazines like Sojourners, so, it's actually not such an ideal alternative. But I digress.)

Well, not confused as much as claiming they're the same.

They're not.

First, there is NO "theology of the New Testament." There's theologies of different authors. And, one might even distinguish early from late Paul, and I'm not even counting the "Pauline" pseudepigraphal works.

Second, they're simply not the same.

First, Paul's man of lawlessness in 2 Thessalonians:

2 Thessalonians 2:3-10 New International Version (NIV) 

3 Don’t let anyone deceive you in any way, for that day will not come until the rebellion occurs and the man of lawlessness[a] is revealed, the man doomed to destruction. 4 He will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God.
5 Don’t you remember that when I was with you I used to tell you these things? 6 And now you know what is holding him back, so that he may be revealed at the proper time. 7 For the secret power of lawlessness is already at work; but the one who now holds it back will continue to do so till he is taken out of the way. 8 And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will overthrow with the breath of his mouth and destroy by the splendor of his coming. 9 The coming of the lawless one will be in accordance with how Satan works. He will use all sorts of displays of power through signs and wonders that serve the lie, 10 and all the ways that wickedness deceives those who are perishing. They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved.

Actually, "Paul" should probably be in scare quotes; the majority of modern scholarship considers this pseudepigraphal, albeit with lack of consensus on when it actually was written, per the intro to this quote. In addition, the "don't you remember" of verse 5 reads exactly how I would expect a pseudo-Paul to read.

Anyway, this appears to be almost like an evil version of the intertestamental Metatron. And arising from within the faithful.

 

BUT! He's not currently present in this realm. He's being held back. And, this seems to be part of "Paul" explaining that the eschaton will come — when the man of lawlessness is revealed. In other words, part of 2 Thessalonians explaining away the immanent eschaton that pervades 1 Thessalonians.

It is this critter that is fused with the 666 of Revelation, but given the name of Antichrist. It is this critter that, given his internal rise, Luther identified with the papacy. Note: The office, not any individual pope.

And THAT said, I just had a brain flash.

What if this is a vaticinium ex eventu, with the "coming" in verse 9 being Rome entering the Most Holy Place? As in, the Jewish War. Or, if this is allegedly from "inside the faith," or kind of like that, it would be the Zealot rebels, or the worst of them. That would probably mean that the early end of critical dating of 85-115 is correct. The Bar Kokhba War is too late a date, as Marcion had it in his canon, and much later than 85? The Temple Revolt might not be a good sign. Maybe we could date as late as 95 or so, the time of the Christian sections of Revelation.

 

Per what I said above, if connected to the Jewish War and the temple, it can't be Titus, as he doesn't arise from among the faithful.

And with that, on to "the number of the beast."

First, given that no word is intended, "616" is not the text-critical tougher read. The Greek for “666,” χξϛ, has a “triple sibilant” sound which the Greek for “616,” χιϛ, does not.

Second? "Nero Caesar" in the Hebrew alphabet is נרון קסר‎ NRON QSR, which when used as numbers represent 50 200 6 50 100 60 200, which add to 666. And one does not have to be a preterist to accept this. (If you drop the final "ן" [which has you at the nominative singular of the name Nero in Latin], you get "616." That might mean that a scribe familiar with Latin did an edit.)

J. Massingbyrde Ford, in her Anchor Bible volume on Revelation, had the interesting theory that the central sections were written by John the Baptist. My review is here.

Just one problem. Not only the Christian gospels but Josephus claim that Antipas killed John. And, I've never seen that Josephus passage credibly claimed to be a Christian interpolation.

BUT! As noted in my review, we know that disciples of John were running around during Nero's imperium. Says who? The author of Acts, in chapter 19.

So, say one of them wrote Revelation 4-11. (Some other scholars, like James Tabor, favor ideas along this line.) But the beast is in chapter 13. 

Can we extend Ford's thesis to see strands later on? It's tough. Unless one wants to claim that John's followers had a Messianic view of him by this time, and the Christian final writer of Revelation did a copy and rewrite even past chapter 11, it's tough. But, from what we've seen in the Dead Sea Scrolls, as well as, of course, what Paul promulgated about Jesus, not impossible. (Per some recent critical scholarship on the ante-Nicean era and its larger milieu, trying to find actual historical ties from Mandeanism to the Baptizer is a mug's game.)

In case you're wondering, some of the specifics from the first three chapters of the book date it to the time of Domitian, pretty strongly. (At Vridar, Neil Godfrey references Adela Yarbro Collins, among others, on this dating and the information that's a hinge.) So, traditional unitary authorship theories, or even Ford's idea if we can't extend the central area through chapter 13, throw Nero as the beast out the door.

At the same time, chapter 14 refers back to the mark. And chapter 16 refers back to this beast. Chapter 17 refers to another beast, based on Daniel imagery.

But the Babylon throughout could be Jerusalem, not Rome, with a Johannine follower saluting its overthrow. Certainly, if one rejects prophecy other than vaticinium ex eventu, Babylon can't be Rome. AND, the name of "Jesus" does not appear until Revelation 20, which can, on other grounds as well, be seen as starting something new.

Or, whether Johannine or Yeshuite, the core of Revelation could be dated later than the 60s. This, Revelation 13:14:

Because of the signs it was given power to perform on behalf of the first beast, it deceived the inhabitants of the earth. It ordered them to set up an image in honor of the beast who was wounded by the sword and yet lived.

Could be seen as reflecting Nero Redivivus legends that flourished years, even decades, after his death. Indeed, a pretender arose during Domitian's time. (Collins and others mention this, too.)

In any case, this beast is NOT the man of lawlessness. It arises from outside the congregation of the faithful, and operates by forceful, violent opposition, not deceit.

 

(Godfrey elsewhere discusses the whole book coming from Nero's time. This, and other updates, come from a subReddit post about a British academic claiming that the eruption of Vesuvius was the target, with VERY specific alleged terminus a quem/ad quo dates for the writing range. Color me skeptical. That's even more so since Alan Garrow also claims the first part of the Didache precedes even 1 Thessalonians. He gets there by saying this is the same as the "Jerusalem Council," which he claims actually happened and also claims that Acts 15 is paralleled by Galatians 2:1-10. Really? Pass. I get the feeling that some young bucks at r/AcademicBiblical are looking for young bucks in biblical scholarship who have one foot, at least, halfway in the Sokol hoax camp. And, Garrow's Sokol hoax is a Didache fetish. Side note: Now that I've been comment banned for calling a quasi-Nazi moderator just that and other things, I'll say there's a fair amount of nuttery in that subReddit.)

And neither the beast nor the man of lawlessness is the antichrist(s) of 1-2 John, specifically 1 John 4:2-3 and 2 John 1:7. Per the parentheses, more than one person is referred to.

My personal guess is that, the "denying that Jesus has come in the flesh" has the author (authors?) battling some sort of Docetism. This is neither a deceiver leading one to Satan (2 Thessalonians) nor a mighty emissary of Satan (Revelation). That said, that only encompasses two of the four references. A third would seem to be against Ebionism or similar, calling those who reject Jesus' full divinity antichrist. The final verse, but, the first in order, seems to anticipate one final antichrist, but without any further definition.

In any case, all the 1-2 John references are theological ones about what would later be called Christology. And, the battles already in these books are a pretty good support for a second-century date of writing. And, the different reference in 2 John might indicate that, within a "Johannine school," it and 3 John have a different author than 1 John.

No, the KGB didn't kill Camus

That's despite a new book, based on old journal gleanings from Czech poet and translator Jan Zábrana, claiming exactly that.

Giovanni Catelli claims the KGB rigged the car of Camus' publisher to crash in 1960 because of his comments after the Hungarian uprising.

This ignores MULTIPLE countervailing items.

Start at the tail end. The accident wasn't really regarded as suspicious at the time, contra a 1978 biographer.

Go to the front end. Camus was openly anti-Communist in the writing of "The Rebel" way back in 1951. So, why would the KGB not be pissed off until 1957?

Now, insert meat in between.

Why would it take three years to kill Camus if the KGB were that upset? (Or nine years, in my counterblast?) Why would it target his publisher's car rather than going for something more direct, as the KGB then already had the expertise at doing? Or, pre-KGB, note the ice ax in Trotsky's skull.

And, indeed, wouldn't the KGB want something that, while not pinnable on it, might have a hint more of connection to it than the fatal car crash did? (Maybe the KGB paid the other driver in the James Dean crash?)

The real Luther — in bits and pieces

I came to this book on a circuitous route. I had first read Eric Metaxas’ wholly wrong, politically driven bio of Luther, which tried to make him into a modern conservative evangelical. I rejected it as a former Lutheran AND a current secularist who knew it was wrong theologically and a leftist who knew it was wrong politically. Many conservative and liberal Lutherans did likewise.

Shortly after, I read a dual bio of Luther and Erasmus, reviewed here, which had some interesting tidbits but nothing huge.

Then, someone on Goodreads, asking in comment to my Metaxas review what I would recommend, and after I mentioned that book as an alternative, asked if I had read Lyndal Roper. I said I had not and I got it via interlibrary loan.

It was interesting and very good, but … not quite over thetop. Although not Erik Erickson’s “Young Man Luther,” and not Freudian (I think) in the basis for the psychoanalyzing, Roper does a lot of that. As a professor, she has some chops — but it’s a professor of history.

(Also, looking now at her bibliography, from what I know, I’d disagree that witch burning was concentrated in German-speaking Imperial lands.)

So, I continued to look. And via a string of Net searches, came across the reviews to Oberman.

What follows is the review itself.

Luther: Man Between God and the Devil by Heiko A. Oberman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


How I missed this when it came out, I don’t know. It’s a shame to it that my conservative Lutheran college didn’t discuss this in any religion classes I took there. Given that it was still just six years old when I entered my conservative Lutheran seminary, it’s even more a discredit to Concordia Seminary to not have this book discussed in any classes there.

I know that Oberman was likely Dutch Reformed, not Lutheran, but, he clearly takes Luther at face value, including his man being like a mule ridden by either god or devil, and takes seriously what Luther intended by that.

And, he’s got the theological chops to know Luther’s history.

Even without him making connections, I now see that his reading Hutton’s edition of Valla exposing the Donation of Constantine as a forgery may well have upped not “just” Luther’s general antipathy to the papacy, but his seeing it as Antichrist. In turn, that meant to him that the end times were here.

I need to digress there for a moment. The “anticrhist,” or actually “antichrists” of I John are not the same as I Thessalonians’ “man of lawlessness,” but the term has become ascribed to that being. Rather, writing at least 40 years after Paul, and maybe 60, the author of I John seems to be referring to a king-sized “alligator” in a church or something like that, not a quasi-metaphysical entity. Digression done.

At the same time, Oberman’s book falls short in some ways.

Here’s one. If Luther wasn’t nearly as literalistic about “sola Scriptura” as the Scofield reference bible, then on what grounds was he right and the Schwärmerei wrong? On what basis were the Reformed (and Karlstadt) wrong and him right on the Eucharist, since Karlstadt had proven him wrong on the “this is” per Greek grammar?

None other than Luther being a cantankerous stubborn mule.

For that matter, since Master Melanchthon was the professor of Greek at Wittenberg, why didn’t HE challenge Luther like Karlstadt did? (Roper could have done some psychoanalysis with THAT in her book.)

Also, Oberman reports Luther myth as fact even as religious historians and theological scholars were challenging it by the time he wrote this book. I talk specifically of the nailing of the 95 Theses and the “here I stand” at Worms as fact, when almost certainly neither are.

Does it matter? In the second case, it’s more something of pietistic hagiography. But, Oberman cuts through that on other things.

On the Theses? Yes it matters. Goes to motive, or similar. If they were never nailed to a door, how did they become public so quickly, and what hand did Luther have in that, especially since his concerns about indulgences had been building a few years?

Otherwise, the book is spot on about aspects of Luther’s life Oberman covers. He is indeed an existentialist, but not Kierkegaard, let alone Sartre. He does have one foot in the medieval world and literalistic beliefs not even Kierkegaard did.

BUT … per the above, Oberman covers very little about Luther’s interactions with others. Much less than Roper on Karlstadt or the Reformed. Nothing on the Peasants Revolts or Muntzer et al.

So, five stars for what he covers. Three stars for what he doesn’t and for repeating Luther legend. We’re at a disappointing four stars, and yes, disappointing.

To get that fifth star?
1. A more complete explanation of Luther vis-a-vis the peasants, and within a larger framework of Luther's understanding of the post-1521 non-Catholic state.
2. Half a dozen pages, minimum, on the Marburg Colloquy, set within another half dozen pages on Luther vs the Reformed.
3. More on Luther's table talk.
4. Ideally, a bit on Luther's apparent glory-hogging at times, per Roper.

And with that, I have scratched my Luther bios itch more than enough.


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Walter Kaufman vs John Rawls: Without guilt and justice in Texas courtrooms

The title's second half, first part, should be in quotes, as I am referring to Walter Kaufman's "Without Guilt and Justice."

Without Guilt and Justice: From Decidophobia to Autonomy by Walter Kaufmann
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Kaufmann, Nietzsche's foremost expositor, and best English translator, brings his own considerable philosophical skills to play in this volume.

It is true that some of his specific references, such as the "alienation" of mid-20th century psychology, or his riffs on Solzhenitysn, may be dated.

But his core arguments certainly are not.

Kaufmann spends a fair amount of time turning a withering moral eye to retributive justice, and another withering logical and existential eye to the idea of proportional justice, and various related ideas.

Hence his title "Without Guilt and Justice." Kaufmann argues convincingly that neither idea can be logically generated within an overarching system of morals. One can almost see John Rawls being ground to grist between the millstones of Kaufmann's cogitating.

But, this is small confort to humanists who would argue that an enlightened system of morality exists without religion. Instead, Kaufmann is saying that ALL systems of morals, no matter their metaphysical base or antimetaphysical base, are existential in nature. As for particular moral terms like "guilt" and "justice," without specifically referencing Wittgenstein, or any philosopher of language, Kaufmann's argument appears to be that they are part of the language games we play.

Speaking of language, while Kaufman's "humbition" comes off as clunky, it seems to be his translation of the Greek ἀρετή, although he never expressly says so, as I recall.

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So, where does the Texas courtroom come in?

Last month, at my current newspaper location, a teacher pled guilty to two counts of "improper relationship with a student."

She got five years probation, a fine, and of course, loss of her teacher certification. No jail time.

Had it been a male teacher and female students? The book probably would have been thrown. Absolutely, if we had had a male-male or female-female situation. This is Texas. And rural Texas is still where the wingers fly high.

But, it's not just that.

Two newspapers back, five years ago, had a similar situation. Female teacher, male student. Complicated by the teacher's oldest son being at the same high school.

Case went to trial and the teacher got several years.

In the first case above, the later, current case? One of the hookups involved, in part, Snapchat. Now, "snaps" are supposed to disappear by default, but I think you can make them non-disappearing. You can also, of course, do screengrabs. Reportedly, parents just wanted the case to go away, too. But, maybe the DA was being a red ass. Until he was told, "Look, if this goes to trial ..."

The earlier case? The kid had a Twitter account. It was mentioned — not just that he had one, but WHAT the account was — during the trial. During lunch break, the first thing I did back at my office is look it up.

His feed looked like a wannabe "playa." And, no, not the Spanish word for a salt flat.

Did the hookup turn him into that?

Well, I had the approximate date for the start of the sexual part of the hookup, so I scrolled back that far in his Twitter feed.

It may have made him more of a playa wannabe than before, but, he was somewhat that way before that. 

Why the defense attorney didn't introduce this? Especially as said kid had just signed a college sports scholarship, and to a private college to boot?

If the judge ruled it inadmissible, just to make doubly sure my appeal was well grounded, I think I would have tried to introduce it anyway.

Besides that, that can't have been the case. After all, the assistant DA was the person who mentioned the Twitter account.

That said, this was a teacher, not some indigent. And, the lawyer wasn't from Shelby County. the family hired someone, I don't even think from Nacogdoches; I think they went to Tyler.

Just shows you that you can blow money on a lawyer and still get a bad one.

And, it goes to illustrate Kaufman's premise, too.

Is it "fair" for the one teacher to get only probation, the other not? Is it "fair" for the earlier teacher to have spent more money on a lawyer from a more "regional" community (Tyler, Texas, is about 100,000, and the "capital" of East Texas, and the communities themselves in both cases are under 2,000; the attorney in the latter teacher's case was from Denton, bigger, but with more local focus). Is it "fair" for the one student's parents to just want the case to go away, with "justice" being less exposure of their kids, and in the other case, wanting the teacher to "get justice served"?

Arguably not, in any of the cases. The recent case, in Muenster, involved TWO students, which arguably made it MORE heinous. The previous case, in Shelbyville, arguably had the teacher actually kind of interested in the student.

Let us also remember that "guilt and justice" theoretically exist outside of courts of law and the laws that said courts are supposed to uphold. The Shelbyville teacher? Besides married, to boot, her oldest kid at the same small high school where she taught and where her sex target also attended. The Muenster teacher also married and with kids, but none at the same school.

So, was it "justice" for the Shelbyville teacher to get the hammer, then? Why? Her family, her husband, and their oldest son had been gossiped about before the case went to trial, possibly before the event came to legal attention and she was arrested.

In other words, just in cases like this, we have the question of what's "just" changing if we ask what's just, or unjust, for the perpetrator, the victim, the victim's parents, and general society. And, setting aside age of consent laws, we haven't asked about guilt and whether it could be apportioned at all to the victim, or to the perpetrator's family or origin, or many other things.

Goodbye to Godless in Dixie

A couple of years ago, after getting into it with Tim O'Neill, I deblogrolled his History for Atheists. Beyond his insistence that I HAD TO listen to his podcast, a repeated insistence, I realized that, in the vein of Samuel Huntington's cultural Christianism, he practices some type of cultural Catholicism, especially in defending the papacy against antisemitism and other issues.

I also realized I was FAR from alone in recognizing this. And, the issue popped up on social media as well.

So, now, to Neil Carter, proprietor of Godless in Dixie.

He's another of the "deconverted gurus," like Ryan Bell.

He's run Godless in Dixie for several years and gotten a large following.

First? Before you go there? While not wanting to be a deconversion guru myself, do I admit to a bit of sour grapes over the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or whatever? Hellz yes, both on the fame itself and any money he makes that I don't. I'm kind of a post-capitalist, but not totally so.

Anyway, to the story.

He's not on my blogroll, but he's officially not worth my time at all.

About two years ago, he blocked me from commenting. Patheos uses Disqus, and I normally log into it via Twitter. So, a "why" would have been nice. (That said, I got blocked by MLB Trade Rumors years ago on that same account. Can't figure why.)

OK, I started following on Twitter a regular commenter on Shem the Penman's blog. That itself was a mistake, as I found out on another Patheos blog. So, I unfollowed him, but I still get Disqus notices regarding his comments anyway.

So, he was commenting on one of Neil's sites, and it involved something about New Testament interpretation and other things. Less than 24 hours later? Blocked again.

This time I know why. I called a lying Jesus mythicist a liar and was banned a couple of hours later. That violates either Rule 1 or Rule 2.

So, on Twitter, I told Carter to go fuck himself, gave him a small amount of time in daylight hours to comment back, and with no response, blocked him there.

As far as the gurudom? Well, I haven't started Facebook pages for any of my blogs because Facebook. My anonymity level is fairly thin, but it is there. And, I've done fake videos on my main blog, but no real ones or podcasts.

That said, in his commenting rules, Carter let the cat out of the bag. Other people do (most of? all of?) comment moderation. He surely has help with podcast recording, Facebook management, etc.

Anyway, back to the main point.

If I can't call a liar a liar, you've got a pretty weak site there. It's just like I said when leaving Quora — if you're going to let liars tell lies (Quora's bad on the alt-right, especially neo-Confederates) but you won't let me call them liars, you lost me.

And, if you're trying to protect mythicists, even though you claim you're not one, you've got less than critical thinking skills on this subject. (I "abused" other people as well as that particular mythicist.)

That said, as far as abuse? This, to me:

That said, said person is also a gun nut.

That said, while saying he's not a mythicist, Carter shows he's not a New Testament scholar, either. No, Paul in 1 Corinthians is not passing on traditions he received about the Eucharist from Jerusalem disciples. Rather, he's claiming a direct revelation from God for something he's inventing out of semi-whole cloth/stealing from mystery religions and dolloping with some Judaism on top. (As we don't know FROM PAUL when Jesus was killed, he can't be proven to be using a Passover seder as that dollop, either.)

Also, as multiple commenters have noted, the existence of Gospel fragments as early as 150CE may prove that something that became Christianity existed, contra a subset of mythicists who claim Constantine invented Christianity (yes, those nutters still exist), but that isn't proof for Jesus' existence.

I'm not a mythicist myself, but ... this is poor reasoning.

So, while Neil Carter won't be on my blogroll, he won't even be watched.

The first block, on my previous main Twitter account? I didn't notice that right away because it was the last time I visited that particular post.

A second reason he won't be watched is because he's on Patheos. And its corporate concern-trolling on comment moderation is simply ridiculous. I will occasionally visit Friendly Atheist, and a blog or two I follow there. Hemant Mehta generally knows his stuff, including on First Amendment law. Otherwise? Forget it.

And, Neil, if you and the guru team don't like it? My house, my rules, to quote your rules.

==

Ditto for a much more recently deconverted guru, Ryan Bell. I was asked to like his Facebook page and passed. I didn't get any AP stories written about me; you've got more than enough publicity already.

Do I wish I had enough publicity to comfortably come out of the shadows into a new line of work and other things? Yes. But I don't.

Ditto for many others who have chosen to make the leap of unfaith without wanting to be gurus, or even being able to enter gurudom if we did.

Carter, Bell and others could learn more about luck, starting with reading or re-reading "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven."

No, your free will isn't zombified by digital advertisers

That's the ultimate philosophical takeaway from this long piece about the lack of effectiveness of online advertising.

It's snark-heavy, with a headline of "The new dot-com bubble is here: It's called online advertising."

But beyond snark, there are real points.

A key early point of Jesse Frederick and Maurits Martijn is that here, in the most dismal of the social sciences (advertising as part of economics), as in other sciences, correlation is not causation.

From there, we dive into some actual research, which the hand-wavers didn't.

Finding one? Paid company brand name keyword links? Bupkis.

We then move beyond that to:

The benchmarks that advertising companies use – intended to measure the number of clicks, sales and downloads that occur after an ad is viewed – are fundamentally misleading. None of these benchmarks distinguish between the selection effect (clicks, purchases and downloads that are happening anyway) and the advertising effect (clicks, purchases and downloads that would not have happened without ads).

Interesting.

And the authors go on to tsk-tsk best-selling pop philosopher Yuval Noah Hariri:

An essay by best-selling author Yuval Noah Harari on "the end of free will" exemplifies the genre:  according to the Israeli thinker, it’s only a matter of time before big data systems “understand humans much better than we understand ourselves."

Now, Harari may have been operating in part from a starting point of traditional social psychology, which talks about the "blind self" or similar, being a part of ourselves that others know better than we do.

And that's true.

But, that's people. 

Not algorithms based on selection bias. More on that? 

The authors talk further about "selection effects" (i.e., selection bias) vs "advertising effects." And they apply this to the Hucksterman Empire.

In seven of the 15 Facebook experiments, advertising effects without selection effects were so small as to be statistically indistinguishable from zero.

Well, that's pretty serious.

Because the target audience for a lot of ad sales is small, you have to run large sample sizes on testing before you can figure out if you've got something real. The audience for some new Max Factor lipstick is nothing like presidential polling. Rather, going the other way, the authors compare the rarity of many product needs to that of cystic fibrosis.

From here, the authors note that this also shows advertising can't manipulate people as much as digital advertisers claim.

In other words, you, I and Yuval Noah Harari can all relax. We still have something similar to free will. It may have some psychological constraints, but nothing more than those "nudges" above.

Brian Dunning was not just a fraudster, he was ineffective; now, who will tell Sharon Hill and others?

That's one of several findings from this long piece about online advertising

It's snark-heavy, with a headline of "The new dot-com bubble is here: It's called online advertising."

A key early point of Jesse Frederick and Maurits Martijn is that here, in the most dismal of the social sciences (advertising as part of economics), as in other sciences, correlation is not causation.

From there, we dive into some actual research, which the hand-wavers didn't.

Finding one? Paid company brand name keyword links? Bupkis.

We then move beyond that to:

The benchmarks that advertising companies use – intended to measure the number of clicks, sales and downloads that occur after an ad is viewed – are fundamentally misleading. None of these benchmarks distinguish between the selection effect (clicks, purchases and downloads that are happening anyway) and the advertising effect (clicks, purchases and downloads that would not have happened without ads).

Interesting.

Now, that's all true of old-fashioned ads as well.

From there, the authors talk further about "selection effects" (i.e., selection bias) vs "advertising effects." And they apply this to the Hucksterman Empire.

In seven of the 15 Facebook experiments, advertising effects without selection effects were so small as to be statistically indistinguishable from zero.

Well, that's pretty serious.

From here, the authors note that this also shows advertising can't manipulate people as much as digital advertisers claim.

The information above is as true on affiliate marketing as on search, the authors show.

And, given that much of the research on both search and affiliate that the authors cite is about eBay, the specific company that unrepentant pseudoskeptic fraudster Brian Dunning pled guilty to defrauding? Schadenfreude is sometimes a semi-Nietzschean recurring bitch.

Now, who will tell Sharon Hill?

Is post-Great Recession America going to be like post-World War II Europe on religious participation?

Per the latest Pew Research Center data on religion and American life, it sure looks that way.

The biggest takeaway from all this latest data? Millennials (yeah, those slackers, despite adults calling the younger generation slackers as far back as Aristotle) are a LOT less religious than their parents. A LOT less.

"Nones," the common word for those with no religious affiliation or identity, plus non-Christians, have as great an identity among Millennials as all Christian groups combined. No, really.

Now, this is a lot broader group than atheists or agnostics, despite Gnu Atheists talk of an "atheist surge," which has been going on for a decade or more now. (The talk, not any surge.) That said, self-identified atheists and agnostics have more than doubled over the 12-year range of the data, from 4 percent in 2007 to 9 percent in 2019.

It should be noted that "nones" may well have metaphysical beliefs. That's another reason for Gnus to stop poaching and crowing. Looking back 15 years or so, a woman on Match.com who originally wanted to meet me said "no" when she found out that "atheist" meant just that and NOT "spiritual but not religious" or Wiccan light or whatever. (It should also be noted, which Gnus don't, that millions of Buddhists around the world, mainly in the Theravada tradition, are both atheist and religious — and believe in metaphysical ideas, just not a personal god.)

That said, Nones are voting with their feet, not just their brains. In 2014, people who attend religious services just a few times a year first exceeded those who worship monthly or more. Among Millennials, it's just one-third who go to services once a month or more.

Among Americans overall, that growth is driven by a surge in those who NEVER attend, by self reporting. That's up to 17 percent.

Yes, one-sixth of Americans, even if they have some metaphysical beliefs (astrology, luck, Kabbalah or whatever) lurking somewhere, say they NEVER attend religious services. Related? Among those who say they attend once a month or more, the most ardent, the weekly attenders (or more) lost six percentage points, down to 31 percent. (If even that is correct; time and motion studies have shown that decades-old self-reported religious attendance surveys were consistently too high.)

Pew notes that the National Opinion Research Center, with different questions and framing, shows a similar number of Nones. It's at 22 percent for all ages vs 26 percent from Pew, even with somewhat different framing and questioning.

At the same time, Christian denominations seemed to have plugged the gap among the self-identified faithful. Worship rates among them have held pretty much steady over the past decade. But, with more and more of this being among the older generation, not just the Baby Boomers but the Silent Generation behind it, absolute numbers of Christians are declining due to death if nothing else.

That said, there are other takeaways. Despite the "give me that old time Christianity" (which type? Catholic? Lutheran? Reformed? Arminian? Anabaptist? Eastern Orthodox? Jacobite/Nestorian?) claim that it's those liberal Protestants (and cafeteria Catholics) who are all running away.

Not really.

Conservative mainline Protestants and conservative newer-line denominational Protestants (Southern Baptists, Disciples of Christ, etc.) are declining at almost the same rate as mainline Protestants (UMC, PCA, ELCA, Episcopaleans, UCC). I have theories on why.

They relate to the header.

It's true that the decline started before the Great Recession. It started with the slow recovery after the tech bubble burst in the early years of the George W. Bush presidency. But that recovery was anemic by historic standards, and the recovery from it and the post-9/11 slump (along with late-Clinton era and Bush era deliberately blind regulatory eyes) directly lead to the Great Recession.

Paul, in 1 Corinthians 15:19, said:

If we have put our hope in Christ for this life only, we should be pitied more than anyone.

But I think the flip side holds true.

If you tell Millennials, just like Southern massas told slaves who weren't in a position to challenge them, that their hope should only be in and for the next life, they'll laugh at you.

And, it's not just today. It's like the claim in Isaiah 7:14, the famously mistranslated almah passage:

Therefore Yahweh Himself shall give you a sign: behold, the young woman shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.

No "virgin" was involved, of course, nor was any metaphysically divine Messiah being predicted. King Ahaz of Judah, worried about being invaded by Rezim of Syria and Pekah of Judah, would take cold comfort in being told to wait 700 years for a Metatron or whomever.

Instead, Isaiah was proclaiming in all likelihood that the new wife of Ahaz's son Hezekiah was going to give birth within a year, and per the rest of Isalah 7, before the child got much past the terrible twos, Rezin and Pekah would be smashed. Ironically, that baby would be King Manasseh, deemed the worst of Judah's rulers by biblical chroniclers.

I digressed a bit, but for a point. Contra Christians proof-texting the Old Testament, proclamations ("prophecies") were made for the people to whom they were directed.

So, today, with Millennials almost certain to have it worse off than not just smug Baby Boomers, but also Gen X, any church that can't address the here and now will get tuned out.

And, that's more than a soup kitchen or food bank. It's a job bank. It's sobriety support that may not be explicitly AA. It's church-based yoga and other exercise programs and more. Also, as America gets more ethnically diverse and it hits more than 50 percent non-white babies being born now, if that old church not only doesn't offer this support network, it's a bunch of old white people, the Millennials will tune out. Related to that? Unless they're conservative white Millennials, if they don't see social justice being addressed at that church (or synagogue, Orthodox and Conservative Jews), they'll tune out. 

And obviously already are.

And, given that they're young and debt-burdened in an era where income inequality continues to grow, they won't even be at success Gospel churches.


After all, per what I said about warning Christians about proof-texting the Tanakh, the preachers ("prophets") of the prophetic books were about preaching social justice, not "making predictions." And much of that social justice preaching was about wealth that was unearned, unshared, or both.

The situation is not directly parallel to World War II in Europe (and maybe in Japan?) where destruction was massive, and where deprivation lasted more deeply, not to mention pre-war and wartime political fissures that make America's look mild. But I think there are parallels.

For fundamentalist-type Christians who consider Europeans who aren't godless Communists to be mostly godless mostly Socialist, you're wrong to a degree today on belief (and way wrong on politics) and of short time sensibility.

European religious involvement closely tracked America's until the Great Depression started. It diverged some degree during then and the rearmament period, stayed about the same degree of difference during the war, then diverged more yet after World War II. But that shows it was a process. Jews lost god in the camps. Many Protestant and Catholic young German males, and their anxious families, lost god in Russian prison camps. Yet others on the Western side of the Iron Curtain lost god in postwar capitalism. (OK, the parallel fails there.)

But, it is happening, and unlikely to change. That's my analytical notes, including to my conservative Lutheran family.

Beyond that? I welcome it.

It's probably kind of like cigarette smoking. If the Nones who truly don't go to church at all continue that through age 30, they'll likely never be there. And, with that, contra the fakery of Supreme Court backtracking in rulings like Town of Greece, at some point, the First Amendment's freedom of religion meaning true freedom from government propping up religion in any way will maybe start to be realized. Beyond totally banning pre-meetings prayers, etc., I'm talking about things like churches not getting any tax breaks beyond those extended to nonprofit entities in general and things like that.

==

Update, with some related stats? In 2019, 23 percent of Americans went to church every week. Sounds fairly devoted, right, every week? But 29 percent never went once. Texas, Bible Belt stereotypes aside, is no exception. This site says that it was less than 20 percent, and they're a religious website.

A few thoughts on Catholic projectionism, partly Reformation connected

I'm using the word "projectionism" in its normal everyday psychological sense, made more popular perhaps by Freud but existing as an intellectual concept long before him.

As I noted before, Catholics don't seem to miss a dollar with church bulletin ads.

Nor, per my most recent post before this, do they miss a dollar with tchotchkes related to the Sacred Heart of Jesus cult.

And, even though Chimayó is not a wealthy place, the squabble between the Archdiocese of Santa Fe and other folks, plus the fact that it doesn't work even though it has swag for sale and takes donations, show that no dollar is missed there either.

And, the early modern Catholics who developed the Cult of the Sacred Heart (while condemning Aztecs for something, arguably in a symbolic sense no more grotesque) were lusting for gold in the New World.

And, on the reality side of legend vs reality on Martin Luther, the medieval indulgences system was a money-grubbing gold mine, and lots of Germans' beliefs about a ravenous Curia were true.

So, the projection?

First starting around, oh, 1095 CE and the First Crusade, then articulated by kings and emperors (often with Church-blessed titles) who didn't want to pay off bank loans, seems to me that about 1,000 years ago, and moving on from there, talked about "money-grubbing Jews."

Projectionism.

And, the bloodiness of the Sacred Heart, at least symbolically? The ancestors of the priests at Chimayo, the Franciscan missionaries who flagellated themselves (Puebloan society and moiety leaders also did)? The re-sacrifice of the Mass, which comes off not as metaphorical or symbolic, but, yes, as the church proclaims, a re-creation, a re-enactment, and which I also don't get as atheist or ex-Lutheran?

Versus those bloody pagan Aztecs, or other bloody pagans?

Projectionism.

I'm sure Tim O'Neill, cultural Catholic (maybe actual Catholic and not total atheist) proprietor of the deblogrolled History for Atheists will object.

Not that Protestants might not have some projectionism of their own on "pagans." Nor, given British then American capitalism and the so-called Protestant work ethic, that there's not Protestant projectionism on money-grubbing Jews.

But, I'd argue that, once we get past the early Baroque and into the Age of Enlightenment, Protestant monetary projectionism onto Jews was lower than Catholicism's. And, that lacking a cultus of sacrifice, that even if Luther himself held on to elements of the Sacred Heart myth, there still wasn't the same projectionism onto "savages" in this way.

Gun nuts in the name of Luther! Happy Reformation Day

No, really.

In one of those "just when you think you've seen it all moments," when nosing around for other reviews of Lyndell Roper's 2017 Luther bio, I came across Heiko Oberman's book, and one other Luther bio by an ELCA, liberal wing of Lutheranism native, and professor. (I didn't ILL it as it seemed ... OK but not fantastic.)

Anyway, I came across the name of a wingnut Lutheran who I semi-recognized on a review comment, and from there, Googled his name. Paul McCain is head of Concordia Publishing House, the publishing arm of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, the leading lights of fundamentalist Lutheranism.

Sorry, sis, but they/you are. You may have DIFFERENT fundamentals than fundamentalist Reformed, per "The Fundamentals," but you do have fundamentals, and a fundamentalist mindset. But, I digress.

In a takeoff on Armed Forces Radio or something, there's Armed Lutheran Radio.

In Texas, natch.

With accompanying Facebook group.

Of which my oldest brother is a member, natch.

And a Patreon site, too, of course.

Quick glance?

The Patreon disclaimer, which surely applies to the main page, states:

(W)e discuss the right to keep and bear arms from a Christian point of view and have a lot of fun along the way. 

This is of course a lie. There is no “Christian point of view” on gun control or bearing arms and a fundamentalist should know that. There is no biblical statement about the state controlling weapons period. The closest thing to a Christian point of view on this is the oft-overused (except when I use it to punk the Religious Right) “submit to the governing authorities” of Romans 13. So, if Beto O'Rourke is right, and I am wrong, on the constitutionality of mandatory gun buybacks, and should he be elected president and be in a situation to legally do that? You'd have to give em up, Lutheran gun nuts.

(That said, as I’ve blogged before, there’s a lot of “selectivity” parallels between fundamentalist Christians and originalist constitutional jurisprudence.)

Also a lie is the website’s about page.

Since the podcast has the occasional black person on there, and since it lists Dallas PD Sgt. Bill Sivlia as a ballistics expert on podcast episodes, in the wake of Amber Guyger, rather than talk only about Botham Jean’s brother offering forgiveness, why doesn’t ask Old Bill about racism in the Dallas PD?

Because, “we’re all Greeks, we’re all Jews,” right? Let’s quote the bible out of context again.

Beyond the lies above, overall, the level of wingnuttery appears to be no greater than medium — within the gunz world, that is. That, of course, is a big caveat.

And, I've seen my brother involved with other Tea Party, or at least Tea Party lite, stuff back in Obama's first term time. 

And, the Self-Defense Radio Network that Armed Lutheran Radio has joined? Well, whenever I see "freedom" boldly displayed like that here in America, I'm sure I'm at a winger website.

Anyway, let's take Armed Lutheran Radio up on their challenge, starting from the "left hand kingdom," or Augustine's "earthly city," since he, not Luther, invented the idea.

And, let's take all ten "secular commandments," the U.S. Constitution's Bill of Rights, one by one. (I've already tackled the Second.)

First Amendment? Assuming conservative Lutherans are like conservative evangelical fundamentalists, no, most of them don't like it when school graduations can't have prayers. Most probably thought Town of Greece vs Galloway did not roll the ball back far enough on public meetings and prayers.

Third Amendment? Probably not a biggie.

Fourth Amendment? Depending on how trusting of the government they are, per Romans 8, or how much they think only "other people" are snooped on, they're probably OK with a lot of the unconstitutionality of today's snooping-spying national security state. Maybe some of them think Snowden's a traitor.

Fifth Amendment? Might be considered as criminal coddling? After all, it's not just a prohibition against having to testify against oneself on the witness stand. Our Miranda warning safeguards come from it. I'm sure the good conservatives approve the "good faith" carve-outs to the exclusionary rule on evidence. (That connects to the Fourth Amendment as well.)

Sixth Amendment? I assume they're OK with this, other than likely blaming defense lawyers for abusing it.

Seventh Amendment? Probably OK.

Eighth Amendment? Probably hate things like the Harris County settlement to waive cash bail on many offenses.

Ninth Amendment? Like wingnuts in general, they probably repeat the myth that the Tenth Amendment — the states' rights amendment, if one will — is the constitution's most overlooked amendment, when in actuality it's this amendment, the people's rights amendment, which is the most overlooked, despite the first three words of the Preamble to the constitution.

Tenth Amendment? See above.

Mental priming: A personal anecdote

Last weekend, I was up on the Red River. I was mucking around right by the riverfront, looking for a better camera angle on some pictures. I eventually stepped into some fairly thick clay mud.

Then I thought, what if this is the edge of quicksand? I didn't panic, but I told myself "get out now!" That was even as two lenses spilled out of my camera bag, with the top strap click-locked, but not cinched as tightly as it could be.

Well, that slippery red Choctaw clay, per the folks who gave Oklahoma its name (I was below the high water mark on the south bank so I wasn't in Texas!) wasn't quicksand, but it IS slippery, and I was sliding on any stuff that had dried out on top but was wet beneath. Fortunately, there was a "sawyer" snag downed right in front of me. I grasped it, then cleaned some of the stuff off my shoes after I got on terra firma.

So, why had I thought it was quicksand at first, at least possibly?

Well, I'd read a Backpacker article about a boyfriend-girlfriend hiking in backcountry in Zion National Park and pushing the weather. They got to a big muddy area with some bits of water in/on it, and figured they could hike through. But the GF soon hit what was quicksand. The BF got her free but got more seriously stuck himself.

He couldn't get out. He told her she had to go for ranger help. Worse? She'd never hiked with anybody but him. (Sidebar: He may have pushed her hiking development level too quickly, methinks.) She eventually did so.

Well, they were also pushing the weather there in Zion. Said BF got a fall snowstorm dropping flakes on him even as he wasn't fully dressed for the weather. (BF was not only pushing GF's hiking development too quickly, but was being young and not fully preparing, methinks.) Well, rangers eventually got there, but they all had to spend a night on the floor there as the guy's one leg was too numb from a mix of being stuck AND how forceful a wrenching (with a rope around his body connected to a ratchet) was needed to haul him out.

After I hit terra firma, I realized that had likely been in my mind.

At that point, conscious of it, it's no longer "priming."

But it surely was before that.

Martin Luther: Narrow-minded renegade

Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet by Lyndal Roper
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I missed this book when it came out, I think in part due to moving to a new job. Someone who liked my review of Eric Metaxas' dreck about Luther asked if I were familiar with this book, and I said no.

Interlibrary loan did its magic and voila.

This is a much-extended version of my Goodreads review, which ultimately led me to ILL another Luther bio, one from a few decades ago.

I was worried in the preface that, despite many conservative Lutherans complaining in other reviews that it was too harsh on Luther's antisemitism, that Roper might pull punches. Tis not the case.

I was also worried, from the introduction that Roper might be too kind to the late 1520s and beyond Luther vis-a-vis the Reformed, when it talked about dialogues he had with them over the Eucharist. They were actually more monologues than dialogues, and Roper spells that out in detail.

Roper starts with a good grounding on just how well off Luther's father might have been. In the late 1400s, she says Mansfeld was producing one-quarter of Europe's new copper as well as significant amounts of silver. Hans Luder was not a mine owner, but managed smelting, and later other operations, for several mine shafts. (Miners were as rough a bunch then as today, and Luther was worried about them during the Peasants Revolt.) That said, the mines were already playing out before Luther's death, a factor in the last dispute he tried settling between the counts of Mansfeld.

Chapter 2, without going specifically Freudian a la Erick Erickson, does start looking psychologically at Luther and father figures. Obviously, the papacy, il papa, was rejected. Hans had been rejected when Luther honored his vow to St. Anne and became a monk. Roper looks at Staupitz as being a father figure, also later rejected. Duke Frederick died before Luther could get to a point of possible rejection. Even though Karlstadt was younger, he was at the university first, and Roper speculates on him as also a one-time father figure. Near the end of the book, she notes that most of Luther's close associates were young enough to be his children — Melanchthon's age or so, or even younger. She does note, rightly, that this led most of them to be yes-men, but for some reason, doesn't pick up directly on this being Luther in the father figure catbird seat.

Nor does she look at Luther's explanation to the commandments in his Small Catechism: "We should fear and love god ..." Isn't that exactly what a 1500s German paterfamilias expected? Love, but love following fear?

I also got to wondering about his monastic years, if his emotional self-abuse was a form of emotional masochism, ultimately a source of mental pleasure. Roper misses this point.

The one full chapter, and parts of others, on Karlstadt are simply excellent. Though not an Anabaptist, his Gelassenheit combined with his reforming instincts led him more that way (though NOT a "Schwarmer") than Luther's or the Reformed's ideas in some ways. He was trying to combine medieval mysticism and reform.

Roper also shows the first hints of the late-life Luther in his treatment of Karlstadt. The groveling that he made Karlstadt do at times reinforces Luther seeking the father figure upper hand, though Roper doesn't comment specifically on that.

Roper also misses something that doesn't directly connect to Luther, but yet. When Staupitz left the Augustinians and became a Benedictine, his last letters to Luther? Sure are open, at least, to the possibility that Staupitz had erotic interest in Luther.

After this, as noted above, Roper shows how Luther's battles with the Zwickau prophets et al, then with the Reformed, left him more and more surrounded by yes men. But it was left to others, like Duke John and Melanchthon, to establish a new church that eventually became known as Lutheran.

Meanwhile, Roper, like others, shows Karlstadt had the draw on Luther on Greek exegesis, specifically the words of Institution of the Eucharist. Maybe this is part of why Luther hated Zwingli at the Marburg Colloquy. It becomes clear that Luther never had an intent of moving, per the famous tablecloth story with "hoc est meum corpum" (in Latin, not Greek of course) written underneath it. That said, given that I've read elsewhere long ago that Melanchthon wanted Luther to be firm in the hope of some Catholic compromise, maybe this too is myth?

I had never before heard that Luther went as far as accusing the Reformed of being Nestorians. Interestingly, my conservative Lutheran seminary didn't mention it. Perhaps even they recognized it was a bridge too far.

Especially after Marburg and other such colloquies and so forth, it's clear that Luther was monologing, not dialoging. And, he didn't care — and also apparently didn't recognize — how much so much of south Germany was against him.

On the Eucharist, as a secularist ex-Lutheran, I accept that he was wrong exegetically on the Eucharist. Given his slowness to abandon the veneration of the host, the Reformed weren't all wet (maybe partially so) in wondering if Luther wasn't still peddling a version of the sacrifice of the Mass. That's doubly true when one looks at their different stances on what the unbelievers receive (and although papered over) what the "unworthy" receive. On this, it's not a matter of Calvinists limiting the power of Christ; nor is it tied to the limited atonement, since Zwingli, Bucer and others before John Calvin felt this way.

Indeed, as an interlinear clearly shows, it is most likely that the Τοῦτό of "this is," being neuter, refers back to δεῖπνον, or "dinner." A Westar book that I otherwise one-starred recently now has me thinking that, in light of this, Paul's Eucharist was not a Greek mystery religion dinner Judaized up, but rather, that, his Corinthian house church(es) had a monthly fellowship meal similar to those that the various guilds held in Greek towns and cities of any size. And, instead of Artemis being their patron, as with Ephesian metal smiths, Yahweh was.

That said, this is another area where Roper left things on the table, if more were available.

WHY was the sacramentarian issue life and death to Luther? Did he see the Reformed as being humanists? Did the fact that Karlstadt was the one calling him out on misunderstanding the Greek of the Words of Institution (while Wittenberg Greek scholar and son to Luther Melanchthon kept silent) get him to egg himself on? Why was he so polemical against the Reformed in general? Was it a competitive streak that recognized he was losing arguments, so he figured he would yell louder? I mean, to me, that's part of the issue right there.

That said, exegetically, and going beyond Roper, it's laughable that the Reformed appealed to John 6, and that Luther did as well to spots in the end of that chapter. Today, it seems clear that John 6 had at least three editorial rewrites before the final version of the gospel, and that Jesus almost surely said none of those words.

Roper does a decent job on "Bondage of the Will," or "The Enslaved Will" as she translates the title (probably a better translation) and the broader issues with Erasmus. But here too, items were left on the table, and the biggie again relates to the Reformed. If, per Luther, either god or devil is always in the saddle, even if "just" for individual actions, isn't that ultimately double predestination by other words?

On father figures, near the end of the book, she goes back to Luther's thunderstorm. She has Luther wondering if his dad weren't right and this was Satan, not God, though god ultimately using it.

She misses the chance to speculate on why the man who called so many things in church liturgy and ritual "adiaphora" couldn't say that many acts of life were "adiaphora," just "happenings" uncontrolled by either a god or a devil.

I mean, most mainline Protestants and more liberal Catholics today reject the idea that every action in this world is caused by either god or devil. (Beyond that, to hoist the literalists by their own petard, since god created you know who, and said in Isaiah "I bring darkness," the ultimate blame lies at his feet, as Calvin recognized logically.)

But why couldn't the Luther who rejected both Catholic and Anabaptist on sexuality, among other things, see more of life as "adiaphora" in this way? There may not be a lot to glean from Luther's writings, but let's have more of what there is to glean. As it is, he, who derided Saxon peasants for not knowing much Christianity, seems to have one foot planted in a medieval semi-superstitious mindset himself. Heiko Oberman nails this. Maybe Roper felt she didn't need to say anything, but I think she should have. Indeed, per the end of this Wisconsin Synod pastor's review of Oberman's book, I think said reviewer gets it wrong and Oberman nails it on how fear-driven Luther was. Again, the explanation of the Commandments, "that we should fear and love God ..." comes to mind. Surely good Lutheran Rev. Jeffrey Samelson knows that too — and represses it.

Third, the Jews. Roper notes, as I've read elsewhere, both that Luther's antisemitism arose from before the 95 Theses and that he wasn't along, with Eck among others being worse than Luther's earlier antisemitism. And, she does delve into the basics of his late-life virulent antisemitism, exemplified in "On the Jews and their Lies." But she doesn't ask the "why" as much as she could here, either.

Was this related to Luther's increasingly apocalyptic mindset? But the likes of Savonarola were never this vehement; no religious leader of medieval and early Renaissance Christianity ever went this far off the bend.

Anyway, again, a good to very good book, but ... there could have been more.

And, that other book on order? Oberman.


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