[ospamma] and the titanic struggle between big brother and "them"

There's an interesting little issue but I'm not sure what to think of it. The idea is so firmly embedded in the mind that the Government should have no reach into anyone's private life that even a Swiss bank account should be sacrosanct.

Does anyone remember Jeffrey Archer's Twist in the Tale, with the story of Clean-Sweep Ignatius?

"Set against a backdrop of a Finance Minister who vows to clean up the corruption that is rampant in his country (haven’t we heard this one before ?), this tale innovatively explores the ’’as safe as a Swiss bank vault’’ statement."

The story turned on the whole notion of private details being absolutely sacrosanct - that the economy of Switzerland might even falter once that security was breached.

Now we have this:

Several Swiss financial experts criticized last week's settlement between UBS AG and the U.S government, saying that Switzerland's banking secrecy is likely to come under pressure from other countries.

"There are two winners [from the deal]," Swiss banking expert Hans Geiger told Swiss weekly Sonntag. "UBS...and the U.S. Internal Revenue Service [IRS]. Switzerland and our market place have lost. Now it's clear that Germany and Italy will increase pressure."

UBS and the U.S. government on Wednesday signed a deal to settle a U.S. tax-evasion probe that had sought the names of 52,000 of the Swiss bank's U.S. clients. Details of the settlement can be expected as early as next week, according to the IRS.

Some might see this as poetic justice that money does talk and banks in another country can be bribed or coerced into releasing private details. Others might see this as the overture in a new titanic struggle between Big Brother government and Them, not the same entity in the least. Big Brother might start the wars but They start the depressions leading to wars, create the destabilization and finance the wars.

Therefore you might see this as a struggle which doesn't concern us but it does. For if the Government is able to extend its reach even this far, there is no escaping it, just as in the Soviet Union and this reach is not necessarily benign. One's assets can be seized on the flimsiest of pretexts.

At the same time comes another seemingly minor issue and that is the White House email scandal, whereby people with no knowledge of being on a White House mailing list in the first place received emails pushing the public health-care initiative. The issue deepened when it was thought that:

One possible reason for the confusion is that advocacy groups, when dealing with online petitions, are sending in their membership lists whenever they make contact with the White House - the e-mail addresses affiliated with those members could then become embedded in the White House distribution list. The White House indicated its Web site managers are going to seek out and block online petitions so that people can only sign up for information individually.

So - block online petitions. Just beautiful. People miraculously appear on a White House list. The White House blames third parties for that, including "advocacy groups" or lobbyists who must give their membership lists any time they make contact with the White House. So, to solve the problem, advocacy is blocked and the White House no longer gets requests from community groups.

Who's worse - the Government or Them? Answer - the Government because we can't see Them and what the eyes don't see ...... etc.

[crazy women] dance the charleston

Or women crazily dance the Charleston or women dance the crazy Charleston:

[english national day] poll so far

Over at English Parliament, this is how the poll's going [click to view]:


Naturally, Brown wants a Workers Day [haven't they already got Walpurgis?] as close as possible to St. George's, to stymie an English National Day. I'm surprised that that sworn enemy of England still feels he's safe in London.

[silent sunday] the hand, having writ, moves on ...

[dating of the gospels] part 1 revisionism and other political agendas

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6

We, in that vague area of the blogosphere we could call the libertarian centre right, like to pat ourselves on the back as the rationalists of the sphere, as distinct from the left-liberals and socialists who argue from broad brush strokes and emotion rather than from micro-stats. and other data.

On site I always point to for a man who lets stats do his talking, is Wat Tyler, of Burning our Money.

Why is it then, that when these so-called rationalists among us are confronted by Christian history, they go into some sort of automatic apoplectic denial, claiming “it’s been disproved” and “everyone knows it’s myth”?

No they don’t and when I’ve pushed my fellow rationalist centre-right libertarian all round good guys, they’ve muttered, gruffly “Well we just don’t know, do we?”

Sir Norman Anderson, describing himself as "an academic from another discipline who has browsed widely in the writings of contemporary theologians and biblical scholars, wrote in Lawyer Among Theologians, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1973, p15, about the quality of the criticism of the anti-Christian so-called intellectuals:

"At times [I am] astonished by the way in which they handle their evidence, by the presuppositions and a priori convictions with which some of them clearly (and even, on occasion, on their own admission) approach the documents concerned, and by the positively staggering assurance with which they make categorical pronouncements on points which are, on any showing, open to question, and on which equally competent colleagues take a diametrically opposite view."

That's precisely my contention.

Evidence

What is evidence? In terms of history, I’ve always defined it as a document from the particular period we’re talking about. So, in the case of Christianity, that means that the writings of Josephus and Tacitus are documents and the synoptic gospels are also documents, as are the gnostic writings of the time. They were written, it’s not seriously contested that these things were written, therefore they are documents.

A document of the time, used to support or deny a propostion is evidence. Admittedly there is good and bad evidence but they’re still evidence.

So I’m amazed at a fellow rationalist who said, in a dismissive way, “I don’t accept that as evidence.”

‘But you have to because they are attested documents.”

“I don’t have to do anything I don’t want and they’re not evidence.”

How can one deal with that statement, especially as the fellow rationalist considers he’s the most reasoned of men and bases arguments only on available data, which he ordinarily does, with great perspicacity ……. except on this issue.

Revisionism

History will always be revised, as and when new facts come to light and that’s fine. Where it’s not fine is when the existing historical record, which has neither been added to nor subtracted from for millennia, is “revised” in order to support a contention more in line with new thinking.

In other words, selectively twisting the facts round to support a contention which a political position requires.

This is precisely what has happened with the dating of the synoptic gospels. I can point to the first ten pages of Google, flooded with late-dating “arguments”, presenting themselves as “scientific” analysis but which are there for solely political purposes or assuming a certain position before they even start.

It comes out particularly in the language used, the vocabulary utilized and one of the greatest giveaways is someone who employs the PC terminology CE or BCE – common era or before the common era.

This is an automatic giveaway for to use these terms means you were educated post-1969 when the PC socialism really kicked in and produced the educational situation we see all about us today. Anyone educated in this era is going to claim that his education was just as good as any earlier era but it simply is not – it refers to a restricted book list for a start and in wider reading, haivng been academically raised this way and into this mode of thinking, the neo-historian is only going to reinforce his perspective with similar titles which more than likely were gleaned from bibliographies at the end of “learned” articles which themselves follow the new thinking.

It takes an incredibly open minded person to go into pre-1969 material with an unjaundiced eye and I don’t accept that a person who employs BCE is bias-neutral. The whole point of BCE is that it denies BC – before Christ. In other words, it cuts out Jesus Christ.

Our neo-historian would not even have addressed the issue because it has never been presented to him to be addressed in the first place. The apporved reading list uses BCE and so he just tacitly accepts that as a done deal. When he encounters BC, he puts it down to the now-exploded thinking of a bygone, discredited era.

Being part of the mainstream educational arena, one encounters this type of thing all the time, quite unquestioned by the majority of the young academics of today. If it was questioned, they’d see themselves either “re-educated’ or marginalized, something which occurred to Ruth Malholtra in America who didn’t toe the feminist-PC line and was treated shamefully and labelled hate-monger, bigot and all the other labels in the PC grab-bag, all for claiming that university courses are brainwashing students.

As I wrote above, the chances of any new rationalist of this era dispassionately examining evidence is almost nil.

So why bother? Well, why bother doing anything? If I don’t believe in gnosis, should that stop me examining and studying it, willing to allow something vaild to seep into the knowledge base in the brain? If I claim any sort of rationality – it should not stop me coming to the table with at least a willingness to consider an argument.

The Gospels

There are things it’s as well to know before we even embark on this debate, to bring us up to speed, so to speak. Just as in deciding which is the better guitar – a Gibson or a Fender, it’s an idea to see what is the current state of thinking.

The anti-Christians, that big tent which encompasses strange bedfellows, would at least allow me to say that the current thinking is that the gospels are late dated. As mentioned above, Google presents an overwhelming number of pro-late dating sites which are quite caustic and can’t conceal their hostility towards early-dating or “correct dating” in my terms.

Early-dating was the historical stance before the enlightenment revisionists got to the debate and hijacked it. You’ll find very few sources these days on the net for early-dating and the man who consistently comes up is John A. T. Robinson, a most maligned, marginalized and vilifies man – you know the way it goes for those with unpopular opinions.

Thus we get “the overwhelming views of historians today” which contains such assumptions that boggle the mind of the scholar. Since when do sheer numbers establish a proposition rather than a well argued point of view? Since when does the political hijacking of a debate constitute the establishment of a universal truth?

You’ll see below that John Robinson had critical claim for his research but it was passed over for publication and is almost never discussed on campus these days. Not only that, but he was character assassinated and it’s claimed he only has one argument in support of his contention. More than that, it’s claimed that he had no support for his contentions, again that populist claim, whereas, in fact he had quite a deal of eminent support, itself ignored today.

This is sheer intellectual dishonesty.

I don’t mind if I can put my argument up and it is disproved, as long as I could put my argument up in the first place, unedited, unexpurgated and not covered with strawmen from the opposition, before it even begins. But when the opposition asks publishing houses not to print my argument, when the oppostion claims it’s had a wideranging forum where it was dispassionately examined and found wanting when it clearly bloody wasn’t, then this is plain dishonest and that gets my blood boiling.

I detest this sort of dishonesty and we see it all the time today in these devalued times.

Why is there such ferocity over the seemingly dry, intellectual irrelevancy of the dating of the gospels? Because they are far form irrelevant. Around this crucial issue lies the whole foundation of Christianity and the efficacy of the Logos. This is a point Muslims will kill for and other faiths, along with the global socialists, will fight to the death to discredit.

So please don’t be fooled by any seemingly intellectual discourse form someone who employs the terms CE and BCE – what, in fact, you’re getting, is a very political campaign indeed and the target is the millions of still practising Christians, mainly in Catholic nations. it’s a fight for the hearts and minds of men and women.

Part 2 concerns John A. T. Robinson himself.

[dating of the gospels] part 2 john a. t. robinson

Part 1 concerned anti-intellectualism and political agendas.

John A. T. Robinson

A critique on his book goes:

Why should people read this book? It is a fascinating read, with John Robinson coming across as a humble yet creative person.

I don't agree with all his theology, but yet admire him - he was the writer of the controversial Honest to God in the 1960s, he was called to defend 'Lady Chatterley's lover', and had a breadth of writing, from biblical material to ethics and modern theology.

The biography of John Robinson, a central figure in 20th century Christianity, and one the great influences of our age. Scholar, pastor & prophet, he was one of the most original thinkers within the Church of England.

That’s the reason he should not be dismissed in such an offhand manner by the PC Left. A man’s a man for a’ that and a scolar is a scholar. We don’t have here a kook or an amateur – we have a professor, an academic and a historian whose CV is pretty impressive indeed and before he came out with his book on the dating, was revered as such.

Here is a mini-bio of the man

Robinson, A.T. Remembered
By the Rt. Rev. John Shelby Spong
Bishop of Newark

One of the great mentors of my life was an English bishop and New Testament scholar named John Albert Thomas Robinson. He burst into public awareness in the United Kingdom in the late fifties when he testified before a commission seeking to ban the novel Lady Chatterley's Lover. For a bishop to favor Lady Chatterley titillated the English media who love juxtaposing religion with sexual expose. People were not aware at this time that this Bishop of Woolwich was also a serious student and a prolific, if not yet well known, writer.

In 1962 a back ailment required that John Robinson be confined to bed for a number of months. His fertile and imaginative mind was freed from other distractions and he wrote a little book called Honest to God that appeared on the bookstands in 1963. It made the controversy about Lady Chatterley's Lover look pale by comparison. This book forced people to recognize that the language of traditional religion was not a language that people believed today whether they continued to use it or not.

An advance story in London's SUNDAY OBSERVER trumpeted the headline, "Bishop says the God up there or out there will have to go." Thus, the Church was launched into what came to be known as the "Honest to God Debate," and John A. T. Robinson became a household word in the English-speaking world.

That little book sold more copies than any religious book since Pilgrim's Progress. It was translated into dozens of languages. It was discussed, not just in religious circles, but in pubs, on golf courses and over bridge tables. It brought religion out of the churches and planted it firmly on Main Street.

One would think that the leaders of the churches would have welcomed such an initiative, but that would be to misunderstand the nature of institutional religion. The religious establishment, instead, recoiled defensively. Every would-be theologian rushed into print to denounce this book.

Calls were issued for Bishop Robinson's resignation or for him to be deposed for heresy. A book of reactions to Honest to God was published to keep the waves rolling. It revealed just how deeply John Robinson had touched the hot buttons of religious fear that the traditional defenders of the faith struggle to conceal.

The echoes of this debate reached my ears in my small-town parish in Tarboro, North Carolina. I did not rush to read the book. Reviews indicated that it quoted extensively from Rudolf Bultmann, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Paul Tillich. I was quite familiar with these thinkers and so I dismissed the book as a popularizing effort of no great significance. Nonetheless I placed the book on my reading schedule, and finally got to it in 1965.

I remember the day I first opened this book. Vacationing on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, I sat on the beach one afternoon with Honest to God. I did not put it down until I had read it through three times. I knew from that moment that my life would never be the same.

John Robinson made me aware that my childhood understanding of God would not live in my world. He forced me to face the fact that the words of both the Bible and the Creeds sound strange to post-modern people and that my faith had to grow or it had to be abandoned.

I began on that day the long, tortuous and, to this moment, not yet completed process of rethinking all of the symbols of my religious past so that I could continue to claim them with integrity. I also pledged myself never again to use pious clichés that I clearly no longer believed.

This book drove me first back to the Bible. I knew that the Noah story, or the splitting of the Red Sea story, could not be literally true, to say nothing of the stories of Jesus turning water into wine, walking on water and ascending to the heaven of a Ptolemaic universe that had ceased to exist with Copernicus.

My church had prepared me poorly, I discovered, to live as a believer in a post-Copernican world, to say nothing of a world shaped by such giants as Newton, Darwin, Freud or Einstein. The Church still lived in a world of miracle and magic, where reward and punishment were meted out by God according to human deserving.

Seven years later, in 1972, this internal struggle emerged externally in the form of my first book which was deeply shaped by the "Worldly Holiness" chapter in Honest to God. My publisher entitled my book Honest Prayer, hoping, I am sure, to be pulled into the Honest to God energy that was still abroad.

In 1973 I first met John Robinson.

This larger-than- life man came to speak in Richmond on the 10th anniversary of the publication of Honest to God. He was very British, displaying little emotion. After the session I was introduced to him. I thanked him for what his writing had meant to me. I presented him with a copy of Honest Prayer.

We talked for a while and then we each returned to our respective lives. Five years later in 1978 John and I met again at the Lambeth Conference of the Anglican Bishops of the world. I was now one of those bishops and John, who had returned to Cambridge to teach New Testament, was present as a consultant.

Both of us, bored by the speeches, decided to leave early and walk through the woods of Kent to discuss the New Testament. We came across a country pub and stopped to share "a pint." We even engaged in the pub game of "bowls," but all the while still discussing the New Testament. It was such a pleasant experience that we decided to repeat it each day. So while the bishops were debating, John and I probed the gospel tradition and I learned from his incisive mind.

In those years John and I both continued to write books which addressed the theme of bringing the church into dialogue with today's reality. I read everything he wrote. John Robinson's echoes were heard in me every time I spoke and certainly every time I wrote. When one reviewer referred to me as the American Bishop Robinson, I was deeply touched. After Lambeth, John and I began to correspond. I yearned to bring him to lecture to our diocesan family, and finally he agreed.

Six months before his scheduled appearance, however, John wrote that he had received a cancer diagnosis and had only a few months to live. He sent me a copy of the sermon he preached at Clare College, Cambridge, the Sunday after he received the diagnosis. I was deeply touched by it, though it made me aware of how lonely I would be without this kindred spirit. John died in the early months of 1983. In my grief I was pleased to be asked to write the American tribute to him published in THE CHRISTIAN CENTURY. Someone else had recognized how important he was to me.

I did not have either John's intellectual training or his Cambridge PhD. Yet after his death, in a real sense I was the only other bishop who was addressing publicly the issues he had raised. That fall of 1983 I published a book entitled Into the Whirlwind: The Future of the Church. It marked a watershed moment for me from which there was no turning back. It was not that it was a great book, but reading it today I discover that the seeds of every book I have written since were present in its pages.

Part 3 concerns his arguments.