Contra Buddhism II

The eye that sees an I
Wants to obliterate it.
If thine I offend thee, pluck it out.
Camus once said
Suicide is the ultimate question of philosophy.
And so it is for Buddhist metaphysics.
How can the Theravada I,
Self-extinguished yet self-preserved
For the enlightenment
Of the non-transcendent masses,
Explain the inexplicable transcendental mu-nothingness
Without obliterating itself again?

Contra Buddhism I

This religion says,
“I am not a religion,”
And yet it is.
Some Magritte word-picture-play,
A paradox of some modern Zeno,
Or a Zen koan,
That would pitch one toward deeper meanings?
Its devotees would say “yes,”
If not rejecting the religious tag completely.
Does atheism make a religion not a religion?
I say “no.”
You stand charged in the dock, Buddhists.
Holding metaphysical matters of ultimate concern —
Afterlives, reincarnations, non-physical life forces.
You pray,
And engage in other rites,
Possess sacred texts,
And follow mandates,
In attempts to control these ultimate concerns.
No Zen koan;
This religion is.

October poignancy

A waning autumn sun
Lights trash in tired, stubble-strewn byways;
The emptiness and absurdity of life
Strewn as a randomized collage of suburban detritus.
Another fall is coming on;
I feel the pangs of poignancy in the weakening, shortening sun,
As the orb slips toward another southern nadir.
Another year suddenly seems too short,
As I age more,
And sense that the potential of another love
Is fading with that westering, lowering sun.

Twilight of the Idols

Schopenhauer falls first, then Wagner,
Until Nietzsche stands bare-faced before himself,
No absolutes and no absolutists still in place.
The core of pessimism,
Free of metaphysics and free of systems,
In his grasp.
His later, Fury-ridden madness,
An ironic vote for absurdity,
Mad not from seeing the truth but from helplessness,
His personal Birth of Tragedy,
Struck from the stage in the middle of Act III.

Lee Siegel could try to be open-minded about reading secularist tomes

Siegel, in a Los Angeles Times op-ed, takes to task the recent books of “militant atheists” like Christopher Hitchens (five-starred by me on Amazon), Victor Stenger (given an advance provisional five-star rating), Richard Dawkins (four-starred) Dan Dennett (generously three-starred) and Sam Harris (two-starred). Hitchens is by far the best of those I’ve read, as he is the only one to, metaphorically speaking, show that the Dalai Lama as well as the Pope has no clothes. Dennett barely touches on Eastern religion, as does Dawkins, and Harris tries to pretend that Buddhism isn’t a religion, and that it doesn’t have any empirical or philosophical problems, both of which are incorrect. (Hat tip to Kevin Drum for his discussion of this op-ed column.)

Siegel first cites things from Internet pornography to the Kansas Board of Education being overruled on trying to teach creationism intelligent design (creationism-lite) as examples of why we don’t have to worry about religious control in America. He ignores that, no matter how many setbacks in the field, the Religious Right won’t give up. After all, it trotted out intelligent design to replace creationism. Here in Texas, “under God” was added to the Texas flag pledge of allegiance this year by the state legislature. (How many states are nutbar enough to have a state flag pledge, anyway? The U.S. and the Philippines are the only two countries to have a national flag pledge.)

He then claims “the attacks in the book don’t make much sense.” Well, if you’re going to adopt the patristic Christian claim, “I believe because it’s absurd,” as Siegel does later in the column, well, of course, they won’t make sense. Logic doesn’t make sense in an illogical, self-contained, hermetically sealed thought system.

Finally, Siegel trots out this old chestnut:

For the imagination is what embodies concepts, ideas and values that cannot be scientifically verified and that have no practical usefulness.

He is, in essence, making the old claim that the atheist can’t appreciate the “spirituality” of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, let alone Handel’s Messiah, tying that with the canard about “soulless reductionistic science.”

I can surely appreciate the spirituality, or whatever, even of Mozart’s Requiem or Bach’s B minor Mass as much as any religious person, and said so in a newspaper column.

As for the “soulless reductionistic science” idea, I put up the quote of evolutionary biologist and science writer Robert Sapolsky:

Science is not meant to cure us of mystery, but to reinvent and reinvigorate it.

In short, Robert Siegel doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. The title of his forthcoming book, “Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob,” also labels him as some sort of Luddite.

Night Life (a poem)

The orangish sodium vapor glow
Brings out the yellow in the red oak’s green leaves.
The colors of our world have such sensitivity and delicateness
To be far away from full capture by any camera.

The sun-like warmth of the security light
Provides a tone of calm serenity to the night.
In the background, the drone of overused air conditioners
Provides an aural backdrop to the early fall chirps of crickets.

Meanwhile, my body relaxes and unwinds.
I sense the fiber-fullness of my stomach
And feel a touch of post-rain clammy heaviness in the night air.
While making myself aware of the cleanness of its scent.

Tonight,
It is good to be alive, good to be sensual, in the night air.

Why Nero couldn’t have been persecuting Christians for the fire of Rome

Even assuming that Rome had a number of Christians besides those mentioned in Paul’s letter to the group there, by AD 64, the entire city is unlikely to have had more than 200. (The whole world likely had no more than 1,500 or so; the Book of Acts and Paul’s letters paint a success story that just ain’t so.)

On a fairly conservative, but not extremely conservative estimate, Rome had a population of 500,000. Two hundred people, given the lack of electronic communications, newspapers, etc. would stand out even less in a city of 500,000 than they do today.

Now, the Roman historian Tacitus does mention a disturbance about a certain Χρήστος, but several observations need to be made. First, this is NOT the same as the Greek Χριςτός. The first Greek word means “excellent” or similar. It is nowhere used in the Greek New Testament, nor the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. Instead, it was an epithet used about Greek Olympian divinities in general and Apollo in general. (Sidebar: nearly 200 years, Constantine would have a sun-struck vision that, had he not had a Christian mother, he probably instead would have interpreted as a vision of Apollo[or perhaps Mithras] instead; his first post-conversion coinage shows a beardless, Apollonian Jesus.)

Let’s say that Tacitus was unfamiliar enough with Judaism and with this nuance of Greek vocabulary that he used the wrong word. That, then, would mean he wasn’t familiar with Judaism in general, nor disputes among Jewish “sects.” He may have known enough to be familiar with the basic concept of the Messiah, the Christ, and that was, and thought Χρήστος was the right word.

In other words, he could be talking about a general dispute between Jews about the Messiah, and not about Yeshua bar-Yusuf at all. Second, he places this disturbance in the imperium of Claudius, not Nero. So, it could in no way be connected to any disturbance that caught Nero’s eye.

Between the likely generic Jewish dispute of Tacitus’ account and the small number of Christians at the time of Nero, and assuming Christians took to heart Paul’s “submit to the governing authorities” command of Romans 13, there seems to be no reason Christians were blamed for the fires.

Ergo, perhaps they weren’t blamed. Detailed accounts of this alleged persecution are found only in Christian writings, and not in any early ones. Clement of Rome nowhere mentions them in his epistle to Christians in Corinth, though it would have been an excellent example of steadfastness to pass on.

Update, May 26, 2024: A person at r/AcademicBiblical, in chat with me about a main comment of hers there, where she claims that 1 Clement, stripped of legendary accretions, is about Peter and Paul being killed by fellow Christians, nonetheless, in response to me, claims that the Tacitus is not an interpolation. 

I offered as a sidebar the Option B, that, if genuine by Tacitus, it's still a double-bankshot smear, projecting back from his own interactions with Christians, of what was a non-event, so that he could smear Nero even more than Christians.

As for said person's claims rejecting the interpolation idea? They note that the Correspondence of Paul and Seneca mentions the Great Fire earlier. Two counterpoints: First, on a late dating, only about 20 years earlier. So, it's in the same milieu, even if earlier. Second, the 11th letter of said correspondence is generally believed to be by a second forger than most other letters. Severus himself?

Said person does reject an actual persecution, so they're solid there.

So, perhaps there was no Neronian persecution of Christians, even one just limited to Rome.