Planet Atheism » CD-Host

Religious change terminology

CD-Host — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 02:21:00 +0000

Ryan Cragun has written an interesting dictionary for religious change (source). Since this is embedded in a pdf here are the highlights broken out:

exiter any person who leaves a religion

disaffiliate a person who leaves a religion by formally requesting their name be removed from the membership roles of the religion
disidentifier a person who leaves a religion by no longer self-identifying as a member of the religion
apostate a person who leaves a religion and then fights against that religion
deserter a person who leaves a religion with no intention of returning

switcher a person who leaves a religion and joins another religion

within family switcher someone who leaves a religion and joins a religion that belongs to the same broad religious family (e.g., Methodist to Baptist)
between family switcher a person who leaves a religion and joins a religion that belongs to a different broad religious family (e.g., Catholic to Buddhist)
taster a person who repetitively joins and leaves religions
defector a person who leaves a religion with the intent of joining a rival group

convert anyone who experiences a change in religious identity

deconvert a person who leaves a religion

none a person who does not associate with a religion

re-none a person who leaves a religion and becomes a religious none
native none a person raised without a religious identity who has not joined a religion
religious independent a person with no religious affiliation
dropout a person who leaves a religion and becomes a religious none
unchurched a person raised without a religious affiliation who has never joined one

identifier a person who self-identifies as being associated with an organized religion

affiliate a person who claims formal membership status in an organized religion
stayer a person who was raised with a religious affiliation and remains religiously affiliated later in life, regardless of any changes in affiliation.
loyalist a person raised with a specific religious affiliation who maintains that affiliation later in life.

It gets better and Mormonism

CD-Host — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 17:05:00 +0000

In dealing with the very high rates of homosexual suicide there is a movement called "It gets better" aimed at convincing kids not to take drastic action. Generally the videos are aimed at middle to high school aged students. This is a similar video aimed at BYU students.

In 2007 BYU stopped expelling gay students and in 2010 they allowed the creation of a gay alliance movement on campus. The results are, as is obvious from this video, obviously positive. This is keeping with the broader direction of the church. In 1998 many officials within the LDS church stopped using "so called gays and lesbians" effectively denying the existence of homosexuals. It appears that more officially the last few years the church has shifted position and no longer considers the homosexual inclination to be a result of sinful behavior, nor even sinful.

They still encourage people with same sex attraction to enter into heterosexual marriages, with no acknowledgement of how devastating that can be for both parties. They still, officially and culturally blame homosexuals for homophobia because of their political activities which to me is reminiscent of anti-Semites blaming anti-Semitism on Jewish obnoxiousness. They support Evergreen International, a "pray away the gay" scam.

So certainly the LDS continues a shameful history of anti-gay activism, but the last decade shows hope are addressing it and making some rather dramatic progress. Hopefully seeing their children not have to leave the church and instead make videos like the above, is a source of pride of their progress. For me it is wonderful to see a conservative church, especially one that has consistently focused on encouraging homophobia and anti-gay activities moving in the right direction.

Why Natural Family Planning (NFP) is a non answer

CD-Host — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 17:51:00 +0000

The problem with NFP is the results in practice. It is the case among people with years of experience who practice in a disciplined way that NFP has a pregnancy rate of .6-1.8% which is in line with chemical methods (study). But actually doing this is rather difficult, for example in the study cited above 13% of the women who had originally expressed interested in NFP refused to continue to use NFP in practice, even with extensive support services made available to them. Support far beyond what can be given in a widespread way.

When NFP is used by people who take it semi-seriously they have 7.5% chance of getting pregnant per cycle, to put that in perspective couples having frequent sex with no contraception of any type have 28% chance of pregnancy per cycle.

Because differences like this, though generally not this large, are common, when measuring birth control effectiveness: means are evaluated using a "typical use" scale not a "perfect use scale". So for example condoms when used every time and with a spermicidal gel have a 98% effectiveness rate (i.e. with perfect use a sexually active woman will get pregnant only 2% of the time). When used by actual people mistakes happen and the actual actual effectiveness rate is measured at 85%. Where NFP methods are heavily used unintentional pregnancy rates among sexually active women are about 24%. Considering we are talking several decades of sexually active fertility even a 10% failure rate would mean 2-3 extra children over the course of a woman's lifetime.

Western women seem to be heading towards a fertility rate of 1.3 children per woman, and even in America non immigrant woman are at 2.1 children per woman; NFP simple doesn't seem effective enough in the absence of heavy use of abortion.

Moreover, there is a bit of irony. If one adopts the currently fashionable definition that life begins at conception NFP greatly increases the incidence of implantation failure, which would be miscarriage under this definition, by encouraging sexual activity during the period when women still conceive but the fetus tends to fail to implant successfully. NFP, the Catholic church's recommended practice causes vast vast numbers of natural abortions over the course of a couple's life. So I would strongly disagree with the church, that it is not the intentional killing of children, if one defines life to begin at conception, and one defines "intent" in any consistent way.

The church is simply aiming for an irreconcilable situation:

They have over the last 200 years redefined abortion to apply much earlier than quickening, i.e. when the woman first feels fetal movement. This eliminates the sorts of birth control methods that were popular in previous centuries, which we would today call "abortion inducing drugs". It also introduces the moral issues with NFP I cited above.
They have redefined marriage to be primary about sex rather than primary about property and legitimate heirs. Thus there is no longer any distinction made between non-marital and marital pregnancy, as well as making much distinction between adultery and fornication. This to some extent is compounded in our society that has moved towards late marriage.
They dismiss artificial contraception of virtually any type as immoral. Thus eliminating the only means humans have discovered that in a widespread and reliable way is capable of keeping a woman's fertility down to 1-3 children per lifetime without heavy use of abortion (in the modern sense of the word).
They do aim for their standards to be adopted in a widespread way, and not seen as just theoretical goals that no one in practice actually follows.

When people talk about supporting birth control what they mean is keeping the fertility numbers down at the 1-3 children per woman over the course of their life. Standards of living correlate very strongly with per capita energy consumption. Energy production is not substantially boosted by population, it should be thought of as a limited resource growing slowly. High energy demand, effectively high energy prices, have been "a" if not "the" primary cause of global economic growth being constrained for the last 2 generations. That is, what is primarily preventing 3rd and 4th world people from having a good standard of living are these high energy prices. While technology is allowing us to boost energy production somewhat every percentage point of population growth is a percentage point of growth not available to raise the living standards of the poor. This tradeoff translates into millions of lives lost every year, not even discussing quality of life. Quite simply, overwhelming number of people, even people who care deeply about the sanctity of life, on this planet would prefer less children being born to everyone being subjecting to grinding poverty.

If the church wants Humane Vitae to be taken seriously they either need to indicate:

i) What is the unknown secret for massive energy production to allow for a growing population?

ii) How to maintain fertility at the rate of around 1-2.25 children per woman over the course of their life in practice using NFP?

Thoughts about Adam-God

CD-Host — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 20:40:00 +0000

Sara Clugage's
Adam Kadmon

There is an Evangelical myth which comes up frequently when there is a discussion of Mormonism that is probably worth dispelling. The myth goes something like this: in 1852 Brigham Young started teaching that God the Father and the Adam from Genesis were the same person. Adam was an exalted mortal man who came with one of his wives Eve to earth, ate of the tree of knowledge to become mortal and begat human children. This Adam later returned to earth to have sex with Mary and become the father of Jesus. In the Evangelical timeline version of the story, Orson Pratt objected to this teaching and Brigham continued to teach it throughout his life, with most Mormons of the 1850-1870s believing this. Later the church covered it up, and denied this doctrine had every been taught. This incident proves that Brigham was a false prophet, and the LDS a false church. To prove this rather substantial theory they present two pieces of evidence: a few second hand paragraphs with some scattered quotes from sermon records of the time spread over two decades, and the fact there are also several fundamentalist Mormon sects that still hold to a view that Adam was Elohim and physically impregnated Eve to start creation. And that is the extent of the evidence.

Conversely the LDS church's version of events initially appears less convincing. What they argue is that Brigham Young gave several sermons on the divinity of Adam, a popular doctrine called "Adam-God" developed from these sermons as a misunderstanding. The mainstream church starting with Joseph F. Smith became aware of this folk Mormon heresy and tried to surpress it. This folk Mormon theology did however pass onto splinter sects that broke off from the LDS like the FLDS and Apostolic United Brethren. I intend to argue the LDS church's version is correct, they are telling the truth. And not only do I intend to prove that but to further present evidence that what Brigham was actually teaching was neither terribly controversial nor original, rather mainstream Hermeticism.

The first thing that happens if one begins to examine evangelical theory is that the very words of Brigham Young in his quotes about Adam-God contradict the fundamentalist doctrine. For example:

If Adam is Elohim why does Brigham speak of “revelation given to Adam” revelation from whom?
Why does Elohim refer to “my son Adam” in Brigham’s sermons?
Why does he in these reports of the sermons say of Adam and Eve “they are the children of our Heavenly Father” and refer to us as their children which contradicts the entire supposed point?

Even thinking of Elohim as a plurality of God's doesn't resolve these issues and I have yet to hear an evangelical define an Adam-God doctrine that is consistent with their theory and consistent with Brigham's quotes on the topic. This in and of itself disproves the theory that the FLDS / AUB version of Adam-God represents the "authentic Brigham". Brigham either contradicted himself and there was no consistent doctrine, or the fundamentalist version doesn't match his teaching.

But if the Mormon fundamentalist view is not what Brigham was preaching that leaves unanswered the crucial question; if Brigham didn't mean that Adam was Elohim what did he mean? Brigham gives a crucial clue in those few paragraphs where he tells us he learned this doctrine from Joseph Smith. Now we do know a lot about Joseph Smith's theology near the end of his life (see Mormonism as Hermetic Christianity part 3), he was a lifetime member of the Free Masons, studying Kabbalah and delving into Hermetic Christianity all three of which have a doctrine called "Adam Kadmon" that does fit with the Brigham quotes.

The story of creation in the Hebrew is extremely poetic. Joseph Smith was aware of this, and in sermons of his he frequently complained about the poor quality of the English translation of his day (the King James Version) in capturing the nuances of the Hebrew for the introductory chapters of Genesis. The issue for any translator is that various word plays in the Hebrew are impossible to translate into English. For example when Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit they discover they are naked in English. In Hebrew they ambiguously discover they are naked and/or cunning. There is simply no way to be ambiguous in English between naked and cunning, the translator into English is forced into making an interpretation and suppressing the ambiguity.

In the same way there are problems with the tradition language regarding Adam. Adam is literally "the man", it also used by convention as a name of a specific person (Adam). This convention breaks down in several places, for example in Genesis 1

26 And God said, Let us make man (adam) in our image, after our likeness (order is reversed from what is normally gramatical. The word for image here is literally statue) and let them have dominion (verb tense indicates purpose) over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

27 So God created man (this time ha'adam literally "the aforementioned man" ) in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female he created (created is in the singular, refers to a singular entity) them (them in English makes "created" plural which isn't capturing the Hebrew. "It" would be standard English for singular so something like "it/them" would be needed here to capture the Hebrew).

Adam Kadmon
with 10 Sephirot

etc... In Hebrew there is a lot more going on that isn't in your English translation. Hellenistic Judaism, which after all saw its mission as to reconcile Judaism with Platonic philosophy, dealt with this language by introducing the idea of a spiritual Adam, Adam Kadmon. This spiritual Adam is an image of the ten sephirot (attributes of God). The image to the right has thse marked off and associated with body parts. A configuration of the sephirot (Partzufim) is in a platonic / Hellenistic Jewish sense a particular image of God, a conception like an avatar. So Adam Kadmon is a way of talking about a will of God, the same way God's wisdom is made manifest in works like: Sir 1:1-18; 4:11-19; 6:18-31; 14:20-15:10; 24:1-31; 51:13-30; Wis 7-9; Baruch 3:9-38. This spiritual Adam, doesn't have material properties like sex, so if you look at the image of Adam Kadmon at the top of the post, you'll notice that the model (Brittany Spears) is female. As such Adam Kadmon is the perfect image of the Logos. The material Adam, the one in the garden, as well as Eve would both be a reflection of Adam Kadmon, in keeping with the Hermetic "as above so below". So God -> Logos -> Adam Kadmon -> material Adam / mythic Adam.

This theology was fully developed by Philo and has remained part of Jewish mysticism since. It passed directly into primitive Christianity. Paul uses it casually in 1 Cor 15:45-50. The idea is explicated in the Clementine literature, Jesus is the incarnation of the heavenly image, Adam Kadmon i.e. a materialization of the Logos. Historically this idea becomes popular with the Elkasaites and other Gnostic Jewish groups and thus makes its way into Manichaeism where the 7 incarnation of Adam Kadmon are: Adam, Seth, Noah, Abraham, Zoroaster, Buddha, and Jesus. From here no particular order it gets incorporated into Druze and Islamic Gnosticism where it makes its way back into Christian Hermeticism, which acts as an indirect base for Free Masonry.

This doctrine did not however make it into mainstream Christianity. Saint Augustine, wrote the definitive interpretation of those early chapters of Genesis. That interpretation was based on the Greek bible (the Septuagint) which does not have the poetic ambiguity of the Hebrew, though it contains hints of it like the English. His interpretation is the classic view: original sin and the fall, both of which Joseph Smith rejected. While he is familiar with the Adam Kadmon view, being a former Manichean himself, he rejects it.

Joseph in teaching Adam Kadmon would have been teaching a lost doctrine of early Christianity (at least of some major sects) that is engaging in Christian restoration. His belief in this doctrine would be fully consistent with the "bible is true in so far as it is translated correctly" as this is a doctrine which comes directly from a good understanding of the originals. This doctrine justifies many of his other theological shifts. And the doctrine isn't even much of a stretch since, the idea of a heavenly Adam can easily be thought of as the "spirit child Adam".

I think it not just possible but likely that Brigham was preaching this, but being a bit loose on a few occasions about distinguishing between Adam Kadmon and material Adam. What's more Adam Kadmon in Judaism is the father of all human souls, which is Elohim's role in traditional Mormonism. As mentioned above Adam Kadmon is seen as either the father of the earthly Jesus, or earthly Jesus is an incarnation of Adam Kadmon. And equally material Adam is either the son or an incarnation of Adam Kadmon. So I can easily see how the roles in a few paragraph summary of Brigham's sermons got muddled. For example in the December 28 1845, Adam-God sermon Brigham talks about how Adam got his name from the "more ancient Adam", which would be confusing to anyone not familiar with this doctrine.

So for example:

Adam and Eve were the names of the first man and woman of every earth that was ever organized and that Adam and Eve were the natural father and mother of every spirit that comes to this planet
When you see your Mother that bear your spirit, you will see mother Eve

And so I propose:

a) That Joseph Smith ran across a very mainstream Hermetic Christian doctrine in his studies.
b) That Joseph Smith taught this theory to Brigham.
c) That Brigham gave a few lectures on it over a period of decades, but did not cite the Hebrew. Rather he used terms like "father Adam" for Adam Kadmon and Adam/"our father Adam" for material Adam.
d) Because he did a bad job explicating this theory, the roles got muddled in the reports of these lectures and a folk Mormonism developed with these muddled roles / theology.
e) The muddled roles got passed on to fundamentalist sects and codified.

Is all you have to believe to fully believe the LDS church's version of events. What I would suggest is go back and read Brigham's reported sermons with this doctrine in mind, and you'll see how they suddenly make sense.

The next question is, why the opposition from Orson Pratt at the time? Well the primary argument the two had was their respective theologies of exaltation. Brigham saw it as progressing in quality, while Orson saw it as progressing in terms of quantity. That is for Brigham God continues to progress in what he knows while for Orson the progression is in terms of his domain. Adam Kadmon himself is timeless, eternal, non material. He is a divine creator of human life but unquestionably subordinate to the Logos and from there to Elohim. In other words the doctrine of Adam Kadmon from a Mormon standpoint requires belief in Brigham's not Orson's theory of eternal progression.

Consistent with this, Orson was the primary advocate of Mormon Materialism (post on this topic), the doctrine that everything including the spiritual was matter that was simply re-organized by God. The Adam Kadmon theory posits a non material Adam, cutting out the heart of Mormon metaphysics for Orson. Moreover a non material image of Adam, certainly leads to returning to a "God without passions or parts". Mormonism is an incarnational theology, Adam Kadmon is inherently adoptionistic. Orson could have been concerned about the difficulties of reconciling adoptionistic view of Adam with a material view of the Godhead. This view of Adam would have presented no problem for early Christians that supported adoptionism. Moreover, religions like Judaism, Islam, Druze and Hermetic Christianity are adoptionistic in their view of all prophets strongly disbelieving in even the possibility of an incarnational theology in the orthodox Christian sense. So Orson's objection is understandable.

_______

See also:

Wikipedia article on Adam-God (link)
Article in Dialogue on the History of Adam-God (link)
Geoff Dennis article on Adam Kadmon: part1 part2
Chabad article, wikipedia article on Adam Kadmon
Adam-God on Mormonwiki (link) (hostile)
Adam-God on MRM (link), this page links to additional resources

Gospel of Thomas in the bible

CD-Host — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 20:27:00 +0000

That is what you are starting to see happen. In 1970 Gospel of Thomas was another Gnostic work of very little interest beyond scholars and esoteric Christians. Since then several dozen books have published on it with at least one best seller (Beyond Belief). 2 mid run bibles (Good as New, 5 Gospels) have included it. Even conservative scholars are backing away from claims of a late dating. Quotes from it have been put into at least 5 blockbuster (i.e. mainstream) movies I can think of as being “from Jesus”. Among the Hindi community GOT 19, “Jesus said: Blessed is he who was before he came into being. If you become disciples to me (and) listen to my words, these stones will minister to you. For you have five trees in Paradise which do not change, either in summer or in winter, and their leaves do not fall. He who knows them shall not taste of death. is heavily quoted.

Now don’t get me wrong this is still the early stages and probably 97% of Christians haven’t even considered whether Gospel of Thomas should be in the bible, but the fact that perhaps 3% have is likely a million fold increase in a generation. I can imagine in 100 years it becomes standard for liberal bibles to have it in an appendix, maybe 150 for conservatives and by say 2300 the equivalent of the NIV will have it in with the main text.

This isn’t a prophecy just a scenario of how it might play out. And then of course there is the daVinci code, which while terrible in terms of accuracy, has convinced millions upon millions of Christians that the canonical determinations should be questioned.

Other versions of New testament

Paula Kirby on Atheism

CD-Host — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 17:37:00 +0000

I couldn't resist reposting this essay from the Hibernia Times (Ireland's newspaper)

Here is a link to the originals: part1 part2

Everything below this line is Paula's

_____

By Paula Kirby

Until 2003 I was a devout Christian. And I mean devout. I believed absolutely, and my faith was central to my life at that time. Various clergy thought I had a calling to “the ministry”; one even suggested I might have a vocation to be a nun. Now I am an atheist: the kind of atheist who is predictably referred to by religious apologists as “outspoken” or “militant.” So what happened?
What happened was four little words: “How do I know?”

One of the things that had struck me during my Christian years was just how many different Christianities there are. Not just the vast number of different sects and denominations (over 38,000 by one reckoning), but the huge amount of difference between individual Christians of the same sect or denomination, too.

The beliefs and attitudes of an evangelical, biblical, literalist Christian compared with a liberal Christian are so wildly different that we might almost be dealing with two completely different religions – as I discovered from personal experience when moving from a liberal church in the south of England to the Presbyterian depths of the Scottish Highlands back in 2000.

Like every other Christian I have ever known, I had clear ideas about the kind of God I believed in and, on the basis of those ideas, I accepted certain bits of Christian dogma while utterly rejecting others. Again, let me stress: this is par for the course. In practice faith is always a pick-and-mix affair: believers emphasise those bits that sit comfortably with them whilst mostly ignoring those bits that do not, or concocting elaborate interpretations to allow them to pretend they do not mean what they actually say. So this was the question I faced up to in 2003: What was there to suggest that the version of Christianity I believed in was actually real? Was there any better evidence for the version I accepted than there was for the versions I did not?

The Bible could not help me. Both kinds of Christian – the ultra-conservative and the ultra-liberal – find abundant support for their views in the Bible provided they cherry-pick enough (and, of course, they do just that, filing the bits that don’t suit their case under the convenient headings of “Metaphor” or “Mystery”). Tradition was not reliable, either: a false belief does not become true simply through having been held through many generations.

So what else was there? A Roman Catholic I was debating with once argued: “To those who say there is no proof, there is the question of the numinous. I know there is a God, I have a relationship with him and spend time in meditative prayer on a daily basis.” Perhaps that’s where the answer lay?

Well, of course, I thought I had a personal relationship with God, too. I, too, spent time with him in meditative prayer every day. And as a result, I not only “knew” there was a god; I “knew” what that god was like. I didn’t believe – I really thought I knew.

Just about all the Christians I came into contact with “knew” there was a god, too. They, too, spent time in meditative prayer with him on a daily basis. And as a result, they, too, “knew” what God was like. So what did that knowledge tell us about him? How reliable were these personal relationships when it came to establishing the truth about God?

Some of us, on the basis of our relationship with God, knew him to be loving, compassionate, generous, always reaching out to us, pitying our mistakes rather than condemning them. Others, on the basis of their relationship with God, knew him to be angry, jealous, punitive.

Some of us knew that God had more important things to worry about than our sex lives; others knew that human sexual impurity was deeply offensive to him.
Some of us knew that God wanted us to respond to other people’s shortcomings with tolerance and forbearance and humility; others knew that he wanted sin to be made an example of, to be held up and publicly rebuked.
Some of us knew that God was offended by conspicuous consumption when so many people had nothing; others knew that God showered wealth along with other good things on those of whom he approved.
Some of us knew that God saw all religions as different expressions of people’s yearning for him; others knew that traditional, orthodox Christianity was the only route to him.
Some of us knew that the devil was just a myth to explain the existence of evil; others knew that the devil was very real and a genuine threat to our souls.
Some of us knew that there was no way God could ever allow such a thing as hell; others knew that hell was very much a part of God’s ordained order.
We all knew we were right, and we all based that knowledge on the personal relationship we had with him. How could any of us possibly be wrong?
What was striking about these observations was that those of us whose personalities led us to embrace the world and other people in a spirit of openness, generosity, warmth and tolerance “knew” that God did the same. And those who lacked the confidence for that, and consequently saw the world as threatening and evil and bad, “knew” that God saw it that way, too.

This is why subjective experience cannot tell us anything about God. Knowing what kind of god someone believes in tells us a great deal about that person – but nothing whatsoever about the truth or otherwise of the existence of any god at all.

And this brings us to something very important about atheism. Atheism is not in itself a belief. Few atheists would be so bold as to declare the existence of any god at all utterly impossible. Atheism is, quite simply, the position that it is absurd to believe in, much less worship, a deity for which no valid evidence has been presented. Atheism is not a faith: on the contrary, it is the refusal to accept claims on faith.

Atheists recognize that we need evidence in order to come to reliable conclusions about reality and that, so far, those who claim there is a god have signally failed to provide it. And atheists care about reality: not what it might be comforting to believe, or what has traditionally been believed, or what we have been instructed to believe. And this focus on reality, far from diminishing our experience of life, as so many religious people imagine, actually makes our lives all the richer: once you have faced up to the reality that there is no evidence to suggest there is another life after this one, it becomes all the more important to live this finite life to the full, learning and growing, and caring for others, because this is their only life, too, and there is no reason to believe there will be heavenly compensation for their earthly sufferings.

An atheist life, well lived, leads to the only kind of afterlife there is any evidence for whatsoever: the immortality of living on in the fond memories of those who loved us.

____

Many Christians don’t wish to question their beliefs, of course. Many genuinely feel to get something from their faith which they fear they would lose without it. For many believers, faith is a comfort: they find comfort in the thought of not really dying, of being reunited with loved ones in an afterlife, of a benign and powerful being watching over them and “working all things for the good.”

Someone who derives comfort from such thoughts may well prefer not to question the truth of them too closely. Besides, in a community where the majority are religious and censorious of non-belief, there is huge social pressure to conform.

Another reason lies in the lamentable fact that even now, in 2011, lack of scientific understanding is the norm in many societies. Not only do most people not understand even the basics of science themselves; they often have no idea of the huge range of questions that science really has begun to shed light on. People unschooled in scientific knowledge or methodology may quite genuinely be baffled about why there is “something rather than nothing,” or how life could possibly have arisen from non-life and then developed into the vast array of forms we see around us, and be unable to conceive of any answer other than God.

So there are reasons for not questioning belief that many Christians may themselves be fully conscious of and even happy with. However, I would suggest that there are other reasons, too: reasons arising from the way Christianity actively manipulates its followers and suppresses the natural spirit of enquiry.

The first is Christianity’s emphasis on faith. Faith is the acceptance of claims for which there is no good evidence; when someone invites you to take something on faith, they are actively telling you not to challenge it, not to question it, not to enquire whether it is really true: they are telling you to simply accept it on their say-so. And this “accepting it on their say-so” is at the very heart of Christianity.

It is the only absolute requirement for salvation: that you accept — on faith —
that Jesus died for your sins and took the punishment for them on your behalf. Faith is incompatible with genuine questioning. The moment you begin to question faith-claims, you are told you must stop, that to continue will be to lose your faith. And this is a dire threat indeed, for in Christianity everything you hope for is dependent on faith — on simply taking someone’s word for it, on simply accepting a particular set of claims as true.

Churches certainly pay lip-service to asking questions, of course; but never doubt that there are limits to the questions that are acceptable. “Does this verse mean this or does it mean that?”: this kind of question — the unthreatening kind that stays within approved boundaries — is smiled upon. But be careful not to voice questions that suggest doubt! That question the truth of Christian dogma!

It is no coincidence, I would suggest, that Doubting Thomas is second only to Judas in the Recalcitrant Disciple stakes.

Closely linked with faith is authority. It is there in the structures of all churches, but explicitly so in the case of the Roman Catholic Church, which claims infallibility for the pope when speaking on matters of dogma. (How does he know he’s infallible on these matters? How do you?) Authority reinforces the demand for blind faith, insists that you remain in your role of passive recipient of priestly wisdom. But these claims to authority are not always overt: they are also concealed within the very structure of church services. You are told when to sit, when to kneel, when to stand; when to pray, when to sing, when to say Amen, when to be silent. And you are told, in the creed, in the hymns, from the pulpit, what you are required to believe. There is no discussion, no Q&A, no opportunity to ask, “But how do you know?” Church services require congregations to be passive and unquestioning. (Have you ever wondered why the Church puts so much emphasis on obedience?)

All this is reinforced through ritual. When was the last time you actively stopped to think about how you drive? Unless you are newly qualified, the answer is almost certainly so long ago that you cannot remember it. After a while driving becomes automatic, reflexive, something you do without much conscious thought. This is what happens when we do something over and over again: we stop noticing the details. And churches — especially those, like the Roman Catholic Church, with set liturgies — exploit this to the full. In service after service there is the same rhythm, the same pattern, the same order of the individual components. The effect? We can switch our brains off; we don’t need to think; we are lulled into a state of passivity in which the words wash over us and we barely even register them. If you don’t believe me, see if you can recite — without looking! — the third verse of your favourite hymn. Or see how much you remember of the content of last Sunday’s sermon.

The combination of the insistence on faith, authority and endlessly repeated ritual all combine to lull our brains into unquestioning, passive acceptance. And as if this weren’t enough, believers’ confidence in their own judgement and ability to deal with life on their own is constantly undermined by the teaching that their every success is down to God’s goodness, their every failure firmly down to their own weakness.

Yet there still remains one more weapon in the Church’s armoury: a powerful weapon, a desperate weapon; you might even say a diabolical weapon. That weapon is hell. “Accept our authority; accept our claims on faith; believe and don’t doubt — or burn for all eternity.” How many generations of children have been psychologically scarred by this obscenity? How many adults still harbour lingering fears that this sadistic fabrication might just be true? How many cling to their faith for fear of eternal torment if they don’t? And how much must the Church fear the act of questioning, if it has to resort to such monstrous and perverted threats in order to deter you from doing it?

The forces arrayed against the believer who dares to question, dares to challenge, are formidable indeed. Small wonder that many believers never truly stop to reflect on their beliefs from the perspective of asking whether they are really true.

And yet an increasing number of us are doing just that. Increasingly we are shaking off the hobgoblins of belief, and in so doing we are discovering the joys of a life where no question is off-limits and where we no longer have to make do with pseudo-answers based in faith, authority or threats.

Abandoning religious faith is like waking after a deep sleep. Good morning! It’s a beautiful day…

The Rock-paper-scissors of Apologetics

CD-Host — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 21:04:00 +0000

So I tried another round of Catholic apologetics and yet again I'm discovering that the Catholic apologetic falls completely apart in the face of typical Baptist counter arguments. On the other hand I can't help but notice how quickly your more traditional Protestants, with a poorly thought out position on sola scriptura get tied in knots by the Catholic apologetic.

So I've come up with this theory based that apologetics have a big circle similar to rock-paper-scissors.

Catholic apologetics tie Calvinism in knots.
Calvinism biblically refutes Arminian credobaptists.
Arminian credobaptists doesn't let Catholic apologetics get off the ground.

Most modern Catholic apologetics came from the continent, they aren't American and don't deal with the sorts of claims that a Baptist would make. I've tried again and again to see if Catholics have refutations to basic Baptist theology and so far it appears they don't.

There really are about 5 principle arguments in Catholic apologetic.

Sola scriptura is not taught in the bible, in fact the bible teaches a historic church.
Protestants have to accept tradition on the question of canon and quite often on creed.
The Reformation failed to produce a robust orthodoxy. That is sola scriptura doesn't produce a unified belief and any basis for a true church i.e. the "there are hundreds of Protestant denominations..."
The key arguments some reformers had with the Catholic church: physical presence, Marian rites, infant baptism, special authority of bishops/pope go back very early. So the apostasy could not have been near the time of the reformation.
Church authority is non-severable, the church cannot fall into apostasy. The gates of hell shall not prevail....

To see how these arguments work consider them against, say a Presbyterian. The Presbyterian wants to tie himself tightly to historic Christianity. He doesn't want to put himself in the same boat as fundamentalists, Mormons and Adventists. So he ends up having to argue all sorts of subtle and disprovable theories. He wants there to be some absolute sense in which he is Christian and a Jehovah's Witnesses is not even though the Jehovah's Witnesses is at least as committed to an accurate read of scripture. Which means he has to grant historic creeds authority, but the creeds are far later than many other doctrines he would reject and he's off to the races of slitting his own throat.

The Baptist response to those arguments is easy. In order:

References to the church in the bible only apply to a local church. There is no further entity, thus no broad ecclesiology. The only church Jesus founded was the Jerusalem church, the one church he destroyed, to prevent the idolatry of tying a material church to God.
Baptists reject the idea that canon comes from tradition. Rather they believe God raises up a bible for his faithful in their languages. So for example, the Wulfila, the Gothic bible, doesn't have the book of Acts yet most Baptists believe the Wulfila to have been the legitimate scriptures for that community.
Baptists believe in a regenerate church. There will never be a broadly believed orthodoxy.
They grant that the errant theology was early, but because they aren't tied to any churches beyond the 1st century they are able to clearly look at the history and see the origins accurately. Baptists, believe that the apostasy started early, almost always by the 2nd century. The Reformation didn't reconstruct the church, the Protestant churches are just as bad, rather it created the room for further reform.
Many Baptists do believe that the Catholic church fell into a deep apostasy. They often believe in a faithful remnant existing inside or outside the church and quite often a restoration in the last 500 years.

The big difference is that the Baptist makes no claim to be in a qualitatively different situation than the Adventist or Jehovah's Witnesses; they believe themselves to be in a quantitatively different situation. Salvation comes from asking for Jesus's intercession. What exact level of understanding is needed, is unclear.

I suspect ultimately this is a short term phenomena, mostly having to do with English speakers and the internet. Most of the internet Catholics spend their time debating the internet Protestant apologists that are reformed, James White types. So this analysis may already be dead in the Spanish speaking community. In Latin America the real battle is between Pentecostalism and Western Rite Catholicism, the traditional apologetic won't work for the reasons above. Pentecostals also believe in "Landmarism-lite".

So... my question to the internet is... does anyone know what's happening in the Latin American apologetics community? What's happening in Spanish?

_________

See also:

A direct Baptist / Catholic debate: Campbell / Purcell debate.
In terms of addressing the argument of government, which is the core of the Neumann apologetic: Mell's book on church government and Savage's book on church government. More books of this type can be found on the Baptist History Homepage.
Remember Lot's Wife, an example of the Baptist apologetic in response to an article lementing the disunity of the reformation.
For a Baptist understanding of church history an easy to read and famous presentation to familiarize yourself with the Baptist mindset is Ellen White's Conflict of the Ages Volume 5 The Great Controversy. For material about the early church, Acts of the apostles (Vol 4) which discusses the early church. Especially her last few chapters of this volume address Catholic claims. As an aside these books are well written and a good read so, this would be where I'd start.
A short introduction which contrast baptist theology with liturgical churches: Why be Baptist.

Sects to the Reformation

CD-Host — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 13:05:00 +0000

This image is large and may not be laying out clearly on your browser. Try clicking on the image to see it better, and magnify if you need to. Or click on this link to download or view isolated. I had originally put this image together up to about the year 1000 for a debate on Christian origins. I got inspired to expand when I had to discuss origins of the Reformation and ideas from it. I think this is a useful reference post, and also might lead to some good discussion.

Because the reformation is so huge, I had to limit scope. At this point the chart covers the origins of the those sects that came to America from England, the English reformation and development. It doesn't include the minor dissenting sects that don't appear to have had influence on America.

Arrows are for strong influence or descent, these sects are interacting with one another and passing ideas between them just as religions today do. Coloring of the arrows is to help reduce visual complexity, and it doesn't mean anything beyond that. Where possible I've tried to include a sample work in parenthesis for each sect making it clear how I'm using the term and also demonstrating at a glance the evolution in thought. It is also for the early part, letting the chart do double duty explicating the origins of the bible.

In terms of the colors of the circles:

Salmon is for groups that are Jewish sects. They may have Christian aspects but they are not yet meaningfully Christian and are in some sense fundamentally Jewish or Samaritan.
Light Blue are proto-Christianities.
Yellow are full blown alternate Christianities, from ancient times. "Gnosticism" used in the religious sense.
Purple is for groups that I can meaningfully call Catholic, western or eastern rite.
Pink groups that broke away Catholicism. Sects that I would agree are "schismatic".
Dark Olive Green non-Christian religions.
Yellow-Green is for non-Christian groups with strong Christian influence.
Muddy Pink I'm using for Hermetic Christianity.
Dark-Brown for proto-Protestantism
Red-Brown for Protestantism
Magenta for the non-creedal sects of the Radical Reformation and their descendants
___

A few things worth noting.

Christianity originated from a variety Jewish and Samaritan cults, which were not part of the mainstream nor the branch that survived.
Catholicism represents a coming together of various groups. An early partial consensus, not some sort of original revelation.
Christianity has always been highly diverse.
The elements of the Protestant Reformation are very old. In a way, the Cathari and the Beguines are the father and mother of the reformation, with Christian Humanism playing an important role. Everything develops from the 13th century combination of:

primitivism
a desire for a lay church
a theological neo-gnosticism lite

In terms of remaining issues there are two that bother me. The first is that the Catholic section is terrible. Originally the chart just covered Catholic development up to the ancient world, so I only needed a 1/2 dozen Catholic sects. This one covers Catholicism in the middle ages, so to do it justice I'd probably need over a 100 sects and the diagram would be a sea of purple with a border in the other colors. I think top priority for the next round, is a full treatment of the origins of the Eastern Sects.

The other is I'm not sure about the Ebionites and the Elkasaites. If anyone has any suggestions there about the relationship please jump in. I think I'm going to need to jump into some Dead Sea Scrolls material to work this out.

______________________________________________

See also:

Christian origins an earlier post this post came from.
KJVonlyism series which discusses the origins of the bible.
Chart for Trail of Blood which is the Baptist perpetuity version of the above.

How the denominations see each other

CD-Host — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 22:52:00 +0000

Got this indirectly from Thomas the Doubter's blog, Think it is a great example of a picture is worth 1000 words.

Amanda Knox is free

CD-Host — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 21:57:00 +0000

Wonderful wonderful news, Amanda Knox is free. I feel fantastic being able to have a purely positive post. This was an example where a popular pressure was able to create effective political change.

We've been hearing for years how we should ignore the evidence, ignore police misconduct, ignore the fabrication of evidence. But thankfully large groups of people said "no" and justice won out. Its very nice to see the good guys win for a change and I hope Amanda all the best and happiness.

I don't know if she will ever again be the joyful girl we saw pictured but the tears of joy or relief show her coming back to life. We can hope and wish it for her. To everyone I met involved in this case, you saved a life, you did good! And for Italy we can wish and hope that they use this as an opportunity to overhaul their judiciary. To make sure that judges do not again fill in holes in cases with wild conjecture and the words, "it is probable".

The court ruled today that the "crime" of the staged break in never happened. Which is clear evidence of how truly silly the original verdict was, a theory based on a minor crime whose very existence is now disproven. In Italy there are 2 levels of not guilty: reasonable doubt and proven innocent, "per non aver commesso il fatto"; and as a result of the court looking at the evidence and not speculating she met the higher burden of proven innocent on the murder charge. I'm hoping that comes from using the autopsy, the medical examiner's timeline that the first court casually dismissed because it didn't agree with Mignini's theory. The people of Italy should not have to live under a law where judges freely fabricate evidence because they can't fill in the wholes with the evidence they have.

Christian Origins

CD-Host — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 10:13:00 +0000

This post is for historical reasons only. Please go to Sects to the Reformation, for an expanded and updated chart.

This image is large and may not be laying out clearly on your browser. Try clicking on the image to see it better, and magnify if you need to. Or click and download. I'm about to enter into a debate on Christian origins, the "one true church" debate. I put together this little diagram, which still has some definite flaws, breaking down how various groups merged to form ancient Christianities.

Arrows are for strong influence or descent, these sects are interacting with one another and passing ideas between them just as religions today do. Where possible I've tried to include a sample work in parenthesis for each sect making it clear how I'm using the term, and also letting the chart do double duty explicating the origins of the bible.

In terms of colors:
Yellow are full blown alternate Christianities.
Light Blue are proto-Christianities
Salmon is for groups that are Jewish sects. They may have Christian aspects but they are not yet meaningfully Christian and are in some sense fundamentally Jewish or Samaritan.
Purple I'm using for groups that I can meaningfully call Catholic.
Pink I'm using for groups that broke away Catholicism. Sects that I would agree are "schismatic".
Dark Olive Green I'm using for non Christian religions.
Yellow Green I'm using for non-Christian groups with strong Christian influence.

___

The core argument for the Catholic apologetic is:

There was a unique historical church that had a clear hierarchy with other local churches and sects in the Early Christian world (say 30-150 CE)

The church from (A) is contiguous with the current day Catholic church (I'm being ambiguous here with respect to Wester or Eastern for flexibility).

Continuity is the key determining factor for what church one should join now.

Classically Protestants have disputed (2). That debate generally comes down to the Catholic arguing the "gates of Hell shall not prevail..." doctrine vs. the Protestant citing lots of bad stuff the Catholic did or believes. Unlike Protestant, I will grant (2). I see no evidence for a sharp breaks anytime after the early church. As this diagram implies.

(1) is very tricky to prove. I would argue the evidence we have is that pieces of proto-Christianity formed around 200 BCE and from 200 BCE-200 CE these diverse sects merged. The 2nd century debates over Montanism show most clearly that it there was a great deal of ambiguity about which churches were or were not associated with other churches; totally inconsistent with the notion of a universally accepted hierarchy

Going back further to the first century we see debates among equals. Paul is arguing in his letters against Judaizers and proto-gnostics based on scripture (the LXX) because he doesn't have access to an authoritative hierarchy.

From a Protestant perspective this diagram is to some extent supportive of the theory in Landmarkism, of Baptist perpetuity. The idea that the Baptists have always existed. Certainly for example the Sabians are a baptist sect: believers baptism, salvation by faith... Though I'm actually putting it several centuries earlier and disagreeing that they have rolled back nearly enough. Renowned English Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon described Baptist perpetuity as:

We believe that the Baptists are the original Christians. We did not commence our existence at the reformation, we were reformers before Luther and Calvin were born; we never came from the Church of Rome, for we were never in it, but we have an unbroken line up to the apostles themselves. We have always existed from the days of Christ, and our principles, sometimes veiled and forgotten, like a river which may travel under ground for a little season, have always had honest and holy adherents.

As for point (3) I see the affirmative primarily rests on sacramental authority. That is apostolic succession is mostly demanded in a situation where sacraments (in particular the eucharist / mass) need a laying on of hands (sacramental) to be valid.

I'd argue for any Protestant which has a theory of ordinances rather than sacraments (3) falls apart and this is mainly a begging the question argument for most Protestants. For those like Anglicans or Lutherans that do have a sacramental theology the question becomes is there any reason to believe other than assertion in the claim that the chain is completely unbroken for the first 1500 years but shattered in the last 500?

As an aside the diagram above was a lot of work and is still has errors, I'm reserving the right to update and make improvements; though the basic structure will remain intact.

_____

See also:

reply to Ecclesial Deism an earlier thread on this topic.
KJVonlyism series which discusses the origins of the bible.
Chart for Trail of Blood which is the Baptist perpetuity version of the above.

The concept of choice

CD-Host — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 12:21:00 +0000

This is a discussion of choice and and causality.

Context is a debate and a conversation that you can read (here). Essentially I'm arguing for positivism and the existence of freewill, my opponent strict determinism with no free will.

Data on anti-Mormonism

CD-Host — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 21:49:00 +0000

So I ran into some interesting data on anti-Mormonism from How Americans View Mormonism. They asked the question of why people didn't trust or support Mormons in positions of leadership 45% of Americans were able to answer that question. And there answers basically amounted to: I don't know enough about the religion and what I know I don't like, but it was all about the religion:

25% Ignorance -- Don't know enough about Mormons to trust them
9% Different Beliefs -- Non biblical beliefs.
8% Polygamy -- Belief that this practice is still widespread though secret.
6% Non Christian -- Openly don't like non Christians and don't consider Mormons Christian.
5% Fear of unknown -- People don't know enough about Mormons and thus fear them.
5% Book of Mormon -- Disapprove of making your own bible
4% Joseph Smith -- Believe he is a false prophet
4% History -- racism, polygamy....

Conversely I did an article a few years back with corresponding numbers for Evangelicals relative to people under 30s (includes Christians) and you can see the stark differences:

antihomosexual 91%
judgmental 87%
hypocritical 85%
old-fashioned 78%
too political 75%
out of touch with reality 72%
insensitive to others 70%
boring 68%

There was no complaints what-so-ever that people didn't know what Evangelicals stood for. The Mormon list is primarily defined by knowing Mormons and elsewhere on the site they comment quickly on how knowing any Mormons drops the antagonism of these issues down. Their religions doctrines seem to create opposition, and some level of fear. But other than polygamy and history there is a complete lack of stuff Mormons have done that irritates people. I was actually shocked proposition 8, or the anti-ERA position didn't show up. I think in both cases the LDS took a strong political stand and then backed off when they started picking up enemies on the left faster than they were making friends from their activism.

This contrasts strongly with evangelicals where depending how you could only a single issue of doctrine is on the list, antihomosexual. Rather everything else comes down to some variant of obnoxiousness. And the percentages are much much higher. Which is something I'd also point out to Mormons who seem intent on joining evangelicals. This looks like a perfect case of out of the frying pan into the fire.

As an aside the authors give an example of where Mormonism becomes non-understandable , which I found interesting. The claim to be the only restored church is viewed very negatively. Quite simply the vast majority of people are unable to even understand the claim that Mormons are making. Slightly rephrasing to this triple:

Christ organized a church.
Men changed it.
It has been brought back.

Brings to light the vast majority of Christians are not rejecting #3 but rather have never considered #1 before. Once the position is understand 48% agree immediately with point #1. Of that 48%, 74% agree with point #2 immediately. And that probably corresponds to a all but a few percent of non-Catholics, And then from there 1/2 the people that agree to points #1 and #2 are willing to consider the Mormon claim for #3. Once this is understood as 3 separate claims:

17% -- Maybe Mormons are right
36% -- Mormons are probably wrong
29% -- Mormons are definitely wrong
18% -- No opinion

Without the need for anything more than a 3 paragraph explanation.

____

See also

Poll on American attitudes towards Mormons from 2011 (link)

Orson Pratt and alternative organizations of matter

CD-Host — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 00:48:00 +0000

One of the things about Mormonism that is quite interesting is that it tries to address the issue of how spirit and body interact in a meaningful way. That is what is the soul. This is a key theme in Hellenism, on what basis would God communicate with man? Cessationist Evangelical Christianity has essentially abandoned this question, God communicated through people in a book and now doesn't meaningfully talk. Further in terms of soul, it officially takes the orthodox position of a bodily resurrection, while the membership more and more takes the position that such a thing is impossible and believes in a non-corporeal soul. Which immediately raises the question in light of our modern understanding of the brain: what does the soul do that the body does not do? Contemporary evangelical Christianity simply doesn't have an adequate answer to this question.

Mormonism conversely has a very different answer. It essentially adopts hylozoism, "life generates form" that spirit is another form of matter that interacts with standard matter providing an organization. God is thus expressed in laws of interaction and man's spirit is a participant component of the Godhead. Spinoza was a well known advocate of this idea with Kant having been a well known opponent. Martin Buber is probably the most recent prominent advocate. This idea fit well within Deism, which is probably where Pratt encountered it. Because of the Pantheistic overtones, most religions reject this theory and even in Mormonism it seems somewhat under developed in terms of specifics.

In modern usage there are 3 main schools of understanding regarding matter and determinism:

hylostatism The belief that the universe is deterministic, thus “static” in a four-dimensional sense, classical mechanics, which was a view Orson Pratt was attacking at the time.
hylostochastism The belief that the universe contains a fundamentally random or stochastic component, which has been proven by quantum mechanics.
hylozoism The belief that the universe contains a fundamentally alive aspect, which is was discussed above. That the structures have in some sense intent, a drive or an intelligence behind them.

For Orson Pratt addresses the key argument was the mechanism for the organization of matter. He believed that matter was capable of different types of organizations and these types of matter would have different relationships to one another. The first type of matter we know of baryon matter. These are stable hadrons, quarks bound together, organized in the way we typically think of matter organized. This is the structure you heard all your life, protons and neutrons forming a nucleus with a negative charged electrons bound to them, forming molecular bonds via. chemical reactions. This idea was just becoming understood during the period Pratt wrote on materialism. Since he's died he have a bunch of examples of differently organized matter that we know of.

Of course in theory, we could imagine a situation with a negative charged nucleus and positive charged particles bound. This is called antimatter, or anti-baryons. This is exactly the same as traditional matter but with quarks who have reverse "spin". This can be created in low energy situations because, certain types of traditional matter radioactive isotopes produce anti-matter (anti-baryon) emission during radioactive decay, which is how a PETscan works.

Additionally we have found a virtual zoo of short lived hadrons. These are combinations of quarks that are fundamentally unstable. A far far greater number of organizations of matter then we had previous thought possible. In a dimension or an environment where certain physical constants were altered our traditional forms of matter (baryons) protons, neutrons, electrons...would be unstable and these other hadrons would be stable.

More recently we have discovered dark matter. This is a type of matter that we are able to detect by gravitational lensing and other effects but doesn't seem to exhibit any chemical or nuclear properties. Because of this it;s rather difficult to study but we can construct on paper a possible candidate the neutralino, but so far mostly haven't been able to prove or disprove this model. What is interesting from Orson's perspective is if true dark matter only lightly interacts with traditional matter proving that matter can exist, can interact and can be virtually undetectable.

Another organization that is still rather speculative is dark energy. This is still theoretical and we don't have widely accepted models but it appears that dark energy exhibits a collective effect in large quantities and makes up most of the mass/energy of the universe.

So in short Orson Pratt proposed a type of organization of matter, he called spirit which is capable of some sort of reaction with baryons but isn't itself baryon. The existence of such types of organizations of matter is now proven, and it appears there are plethora of examples.

Now to end on an apologetic note, there is frequently a claim that Mormons believe God lives with his spirit children on a planet called Kolob. Dark matter passes right through planets, as does dark energy. Further a planet effects you because you have mass, and spirit matter doesn't have mass or at least not much mass, thus no gravitational effects. If it did dead bodies would weigh less than living ones. That is most of these different organizations or matter have vastly different properties a "planet" in the conventional sense would mean nothing to them, they wouldn't even "know it was there". They would be stabilized / organized by entirely different sorts of structures. So I think Mormons are absolutely correct to object.

What is interesting though is that Joseph Smith seems to have hinted at a solution in Abraham 3 where he does describe Kolob. He describes it as exhibiting properties both of a star and a planet. He also mentions one other curious property that time passes on Kolob at a rate of 1 day for every 1000 years on earth. Taking this far more literally than Joseph Smith intended gives us some intriguing possibilities:

Doing the math, sqrt(1-1/365250) yields that Kolob moves at 99.99986% of the speed of light relative to earth. Galaxies move faster from us the further away they are. If that held up we could imagine Kolob as extremely far away. But we have no evidence anything that far away exists and our theories about the size of the universe would be contradicted if it did. Though, many Mormons do believe in an inflationary multiverse and this sort of speed is fully consistent with that view.
If it were an object in the known universe just moving that fast it would have all sorts of weird properties whenever it came in contact with anything from our universe moving in sync with known galaxies. At those sorts of high energies relativistic masses are enormous for even extremely lite objects. That still wouldn't allow for unusual organizations of matter, but it would allow for what would highly unusual during "slow down".
The second possibility is this slowdown is caused by relativistic gravity, and the only place there would that much gravity is inside the event horizon of a black hole. And of course black holes are one of the areas where the rules of quantum mechanics overwhelm classical constant and all sorts of bizarre organizations of matter are possible. If we assume that Abraham really was a vision I could imagine someone in the 1840s being at a loss for how to describe events within the confines of a blackhole, somewhere between a planet and a star. If we imagine spirits to be interacting with things near the event horizon that can escape, again we get unusual organization of matter there are immense amounts of heat energy available, billions of times what's available in the core of a normal star, which produce all sorts of quantum effects this is the theory of Hawking radiation. In many ways that would meet all the criteria that Orson Pratt described.
Of course there are things like other dimensions. via super strings which have a different organization of matter, because there would be different physics constant and have the possibility of affecting baryon matter. Assuming Orson Pratt were right, this is likely the most promising.

In short the theory has held up rather well, and the idea that Mormons believe in a "planet" in the traditional sense is just unsupportable. The term is being used in the sense of the book of Abraham not in the sense of a large rock circling a sun.

_________

See also

Mormon metaphysics has discussed these topics old blog, new blog

Mormonism as Hermetic Christianity (part 3)

CD-Host — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 23:55:00 +0000

This is 3rd part where I finally address Mormonism more directly for background on Hermetic Christianity: Part1 Part2. The idea that early Mormonism was Hermetic is not original to me. The best known sources on this are (and they wrote in this order):

D. Michael Quinn : Early Mormonism and the Magic World View (Revised and Expanded Edition) (link to Amazon). (4 hostile reviews from BYU studies)
The Refiner's Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644-1844 By John L. Brooke (link to preview).
Essays: Joseph Smith: America's Hermetic Prophet, Joseph Smith and Kabbalah: The Occult Connection by Lance S Owens.

In fact it is so blatantly obvious as to be almost indisputable: Divining Rods, Treasure Digging, and Seer Stones; Ritual Magic, Astrology, Talismans (Jupiter talisman); Magic Parchments and Occult Mentors, magic dagger (Mars dagger)....

The King Follet Discourse itself presents a thoroughly Hermetic Christianity.

The eternal nature of man
The Doctrine of heavenly councils
The Plurality of Gods
Deification of Saints (theopoiesis or theosis)
Temple ordinances
The Celestial Kingdom

Mormons often bristle at the mention of magic, "occult" and "magick" are loaded terms. Magick is used in a Christian context to be supernatural activities that the religion either doesn't believe in or doesn't support; which tautologically wouldn't apply here. Occult is generally used to mean non-Christian religious activity / form of worship, which again wouldn't apply. "Religious rite" would be a positive term. If one believes the Eucharistic celebration, baptism, efficiency of prayer, reconciliation by confession, marriage, laying of hands / conferring of holy orders, anointing the sick are all magick actives. They all rely on "as above, so below", they all assert that via. material manipulations supernatural events can be induced. Without this core belief religion is reduced to a gathering of an ethical society, so really what distinguished the Mormon church was that it was re-introducing older rites back into a mainstream faith, that is doing precisely what it had always claimed to be doing restoring the church.

It is worth pointing out that Evangelical Christianity, rejects completely the notion of sacraments instead often asserting that there rituals are merely "ordinances", demonstrations of faith that have no supernatural effects what-so-ever. They can often be quite inconsistent in this view, but not withstanding Protestantism has been moving away from even the sacramental theology of Catholicism for its entire history. Such an ideology is needless to say hostile to introductions of more religious rites, and especially claims that such rites are claimed to be efficacious. There is no getting around this core disagreement between the Mormon church and Evangelical churches, but it is worth pointing out the core disagreement would be equally strong with the Catholic church. Phillip Lee's Against the Protestant Gnostics, points out that generation by generation modern Protestants adopt point after point after point of the Gnostic positions on where they disagreed with the Orthodox. There is no question that Gnosticism and Hermeticism looked at the world in fundamentally different ways, and still do today.

The 2nd generation of Mormons extended these ideas. Orson Pratt argued that all life, including vegetable life was infused with celestial spirit. Brigham Young asserted the divinity of Adam. God himself was viewed as interacting with the universe Hermetically:

Universal Matter Is Indestructible. Matter is eternal, that is, everlasting. Whether the various forms of matter may be converted one into the other, is not definitely known. Any such conversion would, however, leave the total quantity of matter unchanged. God, the supreme Power, can not conceivably originate matter; he can only organize matter. Neither can he destroy matter. God is the Master, who, because of his great knowledge, knows how to use the elements, already existing, for the building of whatever he may have in mind. The doctrine that God made the earth or man from nothing becomes, therefore, an absurdity. The doctrine of the indestructibility of matter makes possible much theological reasoning that would be impossible without this doctrine. John Andreas Widtsoe, Rational theology as taught by the Church of Jesus Christ of latter-day saints

and from this comes the a Hermetic doctrine of salvation:

Self-effort, the conscious operation of will, has moved man onward to his present high degree. However, while all progress is due to self-effort, other beings of power may contribute largely to the ease of man's growth. God, standing alone, cannot conceivably possess the power that may come to him if the hosts of other advancing and increasing workers labor in harmony with him. Therefore, because of his love for his children and his desire to continue in the way of even greater growth, he proceeded to aid others in their onward progress. John Andreas Widtsoe, Rational theology as taught by the Church of Jesus Christ of latter-day saints

So the 2nd generation was continuing the themes of Joseph Smith's work, divinity of Adam is implied in Doctrine and Covenants 27:11; 116:1; 138:38, but made explicit in 1852. Now its interesting this is the same time that polygamy becomes institutionalized. That is, if we look at the Joseph Smith, Joseph and possibly a small number of leaders practice plural marriage, and often this involves little more than having sex with multiple woman as they continue to reside with their previous husbands. Sect leaders acting as "alpha males" and having sex with multiple female members is not out of the ordinary. Other leaders like Brigham Young are marrying widows who would be unlikely to find new husbands, essentially he seems to be primary funding and modeling a social security program.

What is out of the ordinary is the polygamy that starts in 1852, here you have 20-33% of the men in the church having 2 and quite often more wives. Humans produce male and female children in roughly equal numbers, polygamous households would create a massive shortage of marriageable women. I can see only 4 possibilities for how this would play out in practice:

There is a wide age discrepancy men and their wives, men marry late women early. The problem with this scenario is that it creates a large number of middle aged widows, who naturally do not wish to remain chaste for life and a large number of men who until their 30s are getting their sexual activity elsewhere. This is basically the situation in the high middle ages, which I described in a defense against patriarchy part 5. We see no signs of this, in fact the whole reason Joseph is marrying women is because the church is so firmly opposed to extra marital sex.
Same sort of age discrepancy as the first situation but with a small number of women with a large number of male lovers, essentially a prostitution culture. Again, given the opposition to extra marital sex this is unlikely. We have no record of anything like this.
Effective polyandry. That would be a situation where the head of household marries a woman and shares him with his sons until they are old enough to establish their own households. This is not an uncommon human sexual arrangement, for example it is the norm still in Tibet (though in this case brothers share). But, there is 0 evidence for it being the norm in 1850s Utah.
There was an over abundance of women. Given the Mormons were actively engaging in missions, if say 70+% of the recruits were female and they were losing even a small number of missionaries to apostasy, this would create a huge imbalance.

So if for a moment we assume (4) is what actually was the case, we see immediately the problem. The women recruits need to be fed and housed. One could have large numbers of women living in sort of convent setup, or amply opportunity for women to work and live alone. But given a gender imbalance new recruits might not have an opportunity to marry, and whether they did or didn't without widespread polygamy the culture would have had a large number of sexually available women, creating lots of extra marital sex. So an ethical way to handle that would by polygamy. And if you ask what sorts of women would have been attracted to a Hermetic faith, the budding Spiritualist movement comes immediately to mind. Young women from conservative backgrounds unhappy with their strict lifeless churches, would easily be drawn into the affirming Mormon faith of the 1850s. Moreover polygamy effectively creates a situation of a male head of household and a large number of women in a relationship of sisterhood, and a desire for female bonding and not the isolation of 1850s middle class America drew in a lot of the Spiritualists and drew them away from Congregationalist, Presbyterian, Anglican... churches.

So the 2nd generation of Mormon leaders had a membership that was primarily composed of either the the children of the religious radicals that had followed Joseph in Kirtland, in Zion in Nauvoo or Spiritualist female converts. Every step Brigham Young took towards Hermetic Christianity would have been met with strong approval. The goal was integration and maintaining them within the church authority, "ministrations for the salvation and exaltation of the world can only be obtained by one holding the keys of the oracles of God, as a medium through which the living can hear from the dead." (Journal of Discourses, , 1:36, 1855). Brigham Young said:

"You are right," say I. Yes, we belong to that higher order of Spiritualism; our revelations are from above, yours from beneath. This is the difference. We receive revelation from Heaven, you receive your revelations from every foul spirit that has departed this life, and gone out of bodies of robbers, murderers, highwaymen, drunkards, thieves, liars and every kind of debauched character, whose spirits are floating a round here, and searching and seeking whom they can destroy; for they are the servants of the devil, and they are permitted to come now to reveal to the people. . . . That is the difference between the two spiritual systems—yes, this is the higher order of spiritualism, to be led, governed and controlled by law, and that, too, the law of heaven that governs and controls the Gods and the angels. (Brigham Young, "The Word of Wisdom—Spiritualism," JD 13:274-83, 281)

But in the 3rd generation this completely shifts. We can see this immediate by looking at the temples. First generation temples like Nauvoo are loaded with Hermetic symbolism, the image on the left is a "sunstone" known to occultists as the symbol for Ba'al.

Second generation temples are simlarly Hermetic, Salt Lake City for examples has: Earthstones, Moonstones, Sunstones, Cloudstones, Starstones, a representation of the big dipper, clasping hands, all-seeing eye (the most fameous Hermetic symbol derived from the eye of Horus, from eye of Ra and before that the eye hieroglyph of the goddess Wadjet).

Third generation temples feature geometric shapes in a sort of toned down art deco style. The art is so de-personel except for a few details like the baptistry could be mosques.

Religiously a neo-orthodoxy starts which emphasizes the atonement of Jesus rather than traditional Mormon teachings. And moreover there is almost no progression towards Hermeticism. Mormons stop in this generation and from the 1950s outright reverse course. I suspect there are 3 reasons for this:

The church is no longer being led by religious radicals, but rather conservatives. The leaders the 1880 church are not the sort of men who would have joined with a wild young prophet in Kirtland, even missionary efforts start to fall off.
The membership is 4th generation and Mormons don't want the struggles of being outside the mainstream.
The changes in Spiritualism have made Spiritualist bad recruits and at the same time Mainline Christianity is amenable to restoration. So the church needs to emphasize its similarities with mainline Christianity.
The Spiritualism inside the church is becoming more threatening to the Mormon faith.

(1) and (2) are frequently discussed. And its important to understand the the 3rd generation of leadership was acting broadly in line with these goals:

The abolition of Christian Socialism. Mormons would no longer have a closed economy but engage the larder American economy.
A generation later Mormons would abandon the People's Party (the Mormon party in Utah) and instead become Republicans and Democrats.
Polygamy was abandoned.
Rather than wanting distance from the American government the Mormon church worked hard to address the issues preventing Utah from becoming a state.

But (3) and (4) have not been raised, and I think it gives insight into why the Mormon church is becoming more mainstream. In 1877 Helena Petrovna Blavatsky bursts onto the religious scene with the immensely popular and influential Isis Unveiled. Isis Unveiled, transformed Hermetic Christianity and the spiritual movement. Up until then the movement had seen itself as restoring a better form of Christianity, peeling off layer after layer of dead traditions that pulled one away from the simple pure message of Jesus. Blavatsky threw down the gauntlet, the picture you see to the right is not Jesus, its Dionysus from hundreds of years before Christianity emerged. As we talked about briefly in the first part, Jesus emerged from dying reborn gods: Hermes Trismegistus and Sophia. Behind them stand: Adonis, Tammuz, Amun-Mir, Attis and back another layer Horus, the son of Isis, Isis unveiled as the mother of all faiths.

The problem for restorationist Christianity is the layers are the onion. Everything is pagan if you go back far enough, religious debates are more than anything else about which pagan gods to follow in their modern forms. I suspect the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, like all Hermitic Christians, were shook by Blavatsky. I think the 3rd generation of church leaders, saw where their fellow travelers a few steps ahead had gone and lost their nerve, they began to doubt in a truly profound way Joseph Smith's vision in 1820 and where it led, and froze in their tracks. And from there started to regress slowly back to the Evangelical mainstream.

Moreover just as the dynamics of missionary activity and membership had encouraged the 2nd generation in building towards Joseph's vision the dynamics of the Isis Unveiled moved things in the opposite direction. The new Spiritualists stopped being Hermetic and became Gnostic with groups like Theosophy and Christian Science being the mainstream. Gnosticism, with its deep suspicion of any temporal leadership especially religious leadership and its profound individualism would have run counter to everything the church would desire in recruits. Spiritualists from the late 1870s on, would have been terrible missionary candidates, very difficult to integrate after their baptism. Finally, because the church had recruited heavily among Spiritualists it had deep problems in preventing this new anti-authoritarian Spiritualism from infecting the church. Quite simply the bridge no longer served its purpose.

At the same time, mainstream Christianity was itself going through a quest for Christian primitivism. What would become Liberal Christianity was fermenting in every mainstream denomination. The idea that the creeds were an artificial barrier to understanding the scriptures, was no longer a radical idea. Moreover, a critique that the bible was not the inerrant word of God, but rather an inaccurately transmitted creation of church was becoming more mainstream. Why go after a niche when the broader public was available?

The next hundred years would be a time of the LDS more and more and more integrating into the mainstream of America and trying to make the Mormon faith seem absolutely mainstream. But the membership appears to not share that goal and has held on to the revelations of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. When McConkie's Mormon Doctrine was pulled Sandra Tanner commented on the radio (link)

I believe the main reason McConkie’s “Mormon Doctrine” was taken out of print was due to its candid discussion of LDS doctrines that the church is now trying to hide. Such teachings as God once being a man, his wife–Heavenly Mother, and Jesus being the literal, physical son of God are just a few of the doctrines that are being minimized in current manuals. If the LDS Church felt “Mormon Doctrine” presented a faulty compilation of their doctrines, why haven’t they issued an authorized compendium of their beliefs? Mormons often say to me, “That’s not official doctrine” as though there was some place to look up the official teachings. Where is the official systematic theology of Mormonism?

And that leads us to where we are today. A church leadership intent on mainstreaming a radical form of Christianity. A constant tug of war between the goals of restoration of the primitive church, and a desire to acceptance. Arguably repeating the very mistakes that led to the great apostasy (see part 2 on the orignal death of Hermetic Christianity).
____

I hope this argument proves for both Evangelicals and Mormons that Hermetic Christian offers a compromise meeting the goals I set out in the first part of this essay. Now I'd like to comment on why its something Mormons should enthusiastically embrace:

Lady Gaga, the number one entertainer in the world, has built an empire on the emotional and intellectual draw of Hermetic imagery. Its not just her presentation its her content. The video for Bad Romance is a phenomenal exposition of what Mormons would call the estates of progression and atonement. Like Song of Songs it uses sex as a metaphor, for the relationship with God, which generally makes conservatives uncomfortable, though Mormons I suspect less so given a theology in which God is a father in a more literal sense. I'd challenge any Mormon to watch the video, which opens with the scratched star (link to this symbol from the DC temple), moves right on to birth in spirit vs. birth in flesh, talking in the mirror reflecting the relationship between spirit and flesh in prayer, birth in water (Eve) in innocence...her flashing the all-seeing eye and not see obvious material for a dozen sermons? What other church with millions of members and a missionary culture has a symbology tied to their theology that incorporates this symbolism? Who else can explain in a Christian context what those visuals mean? This is a slow-ball they should have been able to hit out of the park.

And this video isn't uniquely rich. Judas presents salvation where the Lady Gaga character rejects Jesus choosing Judas instead fails to be saved and becomes the Whore of Babylon in Revelations. Just about any Christian could present the theology in those verses but only the Mormon and Catholic churches have a semiotics rich enough to explore the accompanying visuals, and the Catholic church lacks a missionary culture. I'm not suggesting a theology book based on Lady Gaga for Mormons, I suspect the amount skin shown makes her a problematic source, but rather the fact that the number one musical act to come along in a long time is preaching their message and they won't take advantage is depressing.

Mormons are gong to have a culture conflict with any modern Hermetic Christianity. But putting the problems aside, we live in a a time when youth are losing all interest in churches and retention is terrible, there is one major church in the United States and possibly the world with the resources, missionary culture, understanding and theology to fill this gap, a desire to relate to God expressed Hermetically. The Mormon church has the ace of trump for the millennial generation. But as we discussed above over the last 100 years rather than embrace their Hermetic aspects the Mormon church has been losing their distinctives: these videos are the temple imagery acted out.

The Mormon church was founded by a man with no official station who used divination to arrive at new revelations and understandings of the scriptures. Was that a legitimate activity? The church still claims prophetic powers, though rarely uses them. Judaism, Islam and Orthodox Christianity all claim the time of revelation is over and now all we can do is study the existing revelations and draw meanings. Christian mysticism allows for personal insights but argues that drawing doctrinal conclusions is illegitimate. In the 21st century does the Mormon church want to be the sort of place it was in the 19th century or the sort of place the 19th century Mormons were fleeing?

Back in the 1950s there was a move within the Seventh Day Adventist church to eliminate the few remaining distinctives that prevented them from being seen as orthodox, to join the Evangelical mainstream. The book Questions on Doctrine, was a series of answers to questions that toned down Adventist beliefs, getting them to just barely qualify. In their case it was being driven by their academics who wanted to be able to speak and not just attend Evangelical conferences. The Adventist membership reacted strongly, in their mind if they had wanted to join an Evangelical church they would have. And today I still don't see 7th Day Adventists invited to Evangelical conferences as speakers, Evangelicals still detest Ellen White.

For the Mormons, they could throw out 90% of their distinctives and still not be where the Adventists were in the 1950s. Ellen White wrote commentaries about the bible, Joseph Smith wrote (translated) his own bible. Ellen White shifted the theological focus of salvation from Romans to Hebrews with its heavenly sanctuary, Brigham Young redefined heaven. The unique characteristics of the Mormon church are what make it so special. The Mormon church should play to its plentiful strengths, it should happily identify as Hermetic Christians.

_____

See also:

An article by the Maxwell institue critical of Owens research: (link)
A Catholic / Mormon dialogue on Lance Owen's paper (part1, part2)
One Eternal Round the Hermetic Vision, an article by Hugh Nibley (very well regarded Mormon theologian) on the Hermetic / Mormon comparison and connection.
A hostile but insightful article from James White where he talks about this tension (link to 1st of 10 parts)
Joseph Smith, The Gift of Seeing, a discussion about the use of seer stones
The best seller Pagan Christianity by Barna and Viola, and the house church movement show that the language or restoration, the goal is shared, the language is frequently used.
Parallel versions of the King Follet Discourse
Michael Homer Spiritualism and Mormonism: Some Thoughts on Similarities and Differences
Some original sermons on Spirit rapping from the Journal of Discourses
In the 1860s a Spiritualist faction broke off from the Mormon church, primarily over political issues called the Godbeite movement. Short introduction, detailed context.
The accusations tying Mormonism directly to demonic occult activities are common and unfounded. Here is an example of a refutation of a specific accusation, refuted by an anti-Mormon evangelical missionary, showing that the borrowing went in the reverse direction (Mormon to Wiccan not visa versa).
A discussion on booktalk, that's just started about Christ in Egypt which is sort of a modern version of Isis Unveiled.
Mormon neo-Orthodoxy Chapter 5, a discussion of the movement within Mormonism to make it compatible with Pauline theology.
A discussion of polygamy and lesbianism between sister wives at the start of A Revised History of Homosexuality & Mormonism, 1840-1980.

C. J. Mahaney stepping down

CD-Host — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 05:48:00 +0000

I've posted twice before regarding SGM Sovereign Grace Ministries which was a look at structural problems in their discipline process and Sovereign Grace Ministries' use of demotivational methods which was a particular abusive technique they made heavy use of which was a distinctive. The leader of SGM C. J. Mahaney is stepping down. Note on his blog, note from the board, leaked documents regarding the dispute. C.J. heads up Together for the Gospel, and is bringing in his friends from that organization to guide him during his stepping down.

I'd like to congratulate the people at the various SGM blogs: SGM Survivors, SGM Refuge, Spiritual Tyranny, Wartburg Watch, SGM Uncensored . Mahaney has been a major leader in the whole New Calvinism movement. So far the issues being discussed are internal problems regarding Mahaney creating problems with other pastors, rather than the more widespread longstanding pattern of abuse of membership. Its the authoritarian culture that's the problem, Mahaney, as dictators go is not unusually bad. Part of being a dictator is terrorizing or at least intimidating those around you, that's the job. If you don't like the behavior don't create authoritarian structures that necessitate it.

So the doctrinal and structural problems remain. But what has changed is the problems are being widely talked about on the web. When Joshua Harris rereleased Boy meets Girl the fact that 2 of the couples in his previous edition were getting divorced was public knowledge. Stories about church facilitated sexual abuses have leaked. Stories about embezzlement have leaked. Stories about wrongful terminations, ruined marriages, and how miserable so many women are in SGM have leaked. SGM is not able to act in secrecy anymore and the blogs above, and several others that were active over the last few years are responsible.

I don't have much to say other than this was an important step in people banding together to try and prevent the sorts of rampant abuses in authoritarian churches. And the offer I made to Josh Harris 3 years ago remains open. If SGM wants to start trying to build structures to stop abuses rather than to facilitate them I'd love to engage in constructive conversation.

____

Post Script (Feb 2, 2012)

It appears that way these allegations were handled was to create a biased board that investigated it and exonerate C.J. Mahaney. The results are still not published, but the underlying facts to present Mahaney as having threatened someone to keep them silent years ago. I'm not sure what is going to ever get published but I'll update here as more information becomes available:

Response to SGM panal report from Larry Tomczak

____
See also:

Al Mohler dismisses documents regarding Mahaney and abuse.

Mormonism as Hermetic Christianity (part 2)

CD-Host — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 21:40:00 +0000

We take up our story where part 1 ended in the middle of the 2nd century with a spectrum between Hermetic Christianity and Gnostic Christianity with Orthodox Christianity choosing between them. Gnosticism and (proto-)Catholicism fought throughout the 2nd and 3rd centuries for control of the Christian narrative. Hermetic Christianity conversely submitted to the discipline of the Church. The Church didn't persecute Hermetics within its body, the study of magick and science while mostly discouraged was not seen as a major threat. Even additional religious rites weren't seen as a major threat since the people performing them and the people receiving them identified them as part of Catholic church and submitted to the discipline of the Church on the issue of rites. That is 2nd and 3rd century Hermetic Christianity was mostly a movement within the Catholic Church, while 2nd and 3rd century Gnostic Christianity was mostly a movement alongside it.

And this friendly relationship meant that on the key points of debate in 3rd century Christianity the Catholics adopted many of the Hermetic viewpoint. Sacraments are, in keeping with Hermetic Christianity, not representations of supernatural events but rather earthly processes by which supernatural events occur, "as above so below". For a Catholic, the Eucharistic celebration involves a magick transformation of the host and eating the actual physical cracker in and of itself induces a supernatural change, "the mind is filled with grace, and a pledge of future glory is given to us." (see Mysterium Fidei, for the official doctrines). And one sees the same thing in the LDS, ordinances, their word more-or-less for sacraments, are actual requirements for exaltation (the good thing you are aiming for in the Mormon faith). And this contrasts completely with the Protestant notion that the Eucharist is an act of prayer and nothing more than a symbolic reenactment, the host/cracker does not in and of itself possess supernatural powers. Philip Lee's Against the Protestant Gnostics, has an excellent discussion of the drift in Protestant thought into essentially agreeing with Gnosticism on almost every point of dispute between Catholics and Gnostics (about 1/3rd of the book is available via. the link).

Moreover Hermeticism, Hermetic Paganism, was also on friendly terms with Catholic Christianity. Catholics began to view Hermes Trismegistus as a great Egyptian King who had lived in the time of Moses and his wisdom as important and key insights. The Hermetics preached that a proper religion should moderate between pure rationality and pure dogma, that the truth lay in-between those two extremes, was essentially an apologetic for Catholic Christianity as opposed to many of the then contemporary forms of paganism which fell on one side or the other. And so by the end of the 3rd century of any kind of distinct Hermetic Christianity was gone. Hermetic Christians had either become Hermetic leaning Catholics or Hermetic Pagans. Hermeticism itself began absorbing Christian thought because of the friendly dialogue and an offshoot form of 1/2 pagan, 1/2 Christian sect developed, Hermes Christianus which was quite often a way point between conversaion away from paganism to Christianity, a bridge religion. Hermeticism died in the 5th century, along with the rest of paganism. And if we identify Hermetic Christianity as the true Christianity, then this death and absorption of Hermetic Christianity, becomes a plausible historical defensible version of the great apostasy that matches the traditional Mormon timelines. And while it was a peaceful death one wonders if Hermetic Christianity had fought, had beaten Orthodoxy, and become the mainstream faith we would be looking at a Christianity of:

Sacramental theology especially expressed via. church / temple rituals with a magical flavor.
Legalism.
Diffuse ambiguous theology drawn from a multiplicity of conflicting sources and open acknowledgement of that rather than hiding behind dogmatic assertions.
Monotheism with an underlying polytheism.
Syncretism, an openness to multiple forms of revelation. In particular an open canon.
A desire to engage creation, to improve it, not to escape from it.
A desire to improve and develop one's self. In particular the doctrine of metempsychosis, that human soul is perfected during a series of earthly lives; essentially purgatory on earth.
The idea that salvation is not binary but a degree.

Does that not sound like Mormonism?

Between the 6th and 10th centuries there is almost no hint of Hermetic activity in any existant literature. In the early 11th century Hermeticism has a revival in the European monasteries. And in this revival we see many of the themes that will come to dominate the Enlightenment. These monks believed that because God is the author of the universe, God's makes his will known through his actions on the material universe. Because we have such clear access our primary source of revelation should be natural. In keeping with that belief that God is not silent they felt that today just as in the ancient world we can establish supernatural contact with the spirit realm and achieve revelation (prophecy in Mormonism). Dogma / revelation is a source of knowledge it is not the definition of all that is to be learned. Knowledge of science and magick grants to men new powers and thus new temptations, but these powers even if they appear intrinsically evil can be used for the good. The legend of Faust (link to plot summary), which originated around the same time, is an exploration of exactly these themes in myth. Faust takes knowledge and power from the devil, falls into temptation, but mostly tries and succeeds in doing good with the devil's assistance, and in the end is saved and the devil defeated.

These monks created a new Latin body of literature from the Greek, Coptic and Aramaic originals making a Corpus of works and collecting them. During the Renaissance collections of Hermetic works began to circulate. Before moving on to to the Renaissance and the Reformation its worth commenting that, Hermetic Christianity as the term is "officially used" does not include the folk religions, even those magical aspects, that existed alongside this rebirth in the Monasteries. Hermetic Christianity, is Egyptian and incorporates Egyptian / Hellenistic notions of magick not the kinds of Germanic magic one sees on the continent. However it would be fair to say that this folk magick was Hermetic in spirit, and perhaps Hermeticism of the highly educated monks was inspired by the folk magick coming from the last remnants of European paganism.

Hermetica is the term for any Hermetic books. A particular set of translated collections of works, called the Corpus Hermeticum, circulated widely by the end the 15th century. Alexandrian Christianity, with its mixture of ideas from Orthodox Christianity, Egyptian Paganism, Neo-Platonism, Judaism freely drawing from, contrasting and exploring these things fit with the mood of the Renaissance. All of Europe was trying to figure how to intermix their culture with ancient wisdom and here was a model.

Potentially we could have had a Hermetic reformation, but the Hermetic revival was killed off by two main things. First Isaac Casaubon showed that the Corpus Hermeticum could not possible date to the time of Moses (i.e. the still believed Christian dating for Hermes Trismegistus) but rather to 3rd century Egypt. Secondly the success of science in so many areas caused magick to go out of fashion. And by the early 17th century the Corpus as an inspiration in the mainstream was dead, the Corpus Hermeticum stopped circulating widely and became of interest primarily to scholars.

However, the Corpus was the only definitive guide to magick that existed in Europe at the time. So while no longer mainstream among European intellectuals the Corpus did remain active starting from the mid 18th century among European occultists. Those people in alchemy (supernatural transformation of materials) and theurgy (union with supernatural forces to gain, powers or insights). This existed side by side with 18th century sexual radicals who were interested in sex magick, as John Wilkes put it, "to celebrate woman in wine and adding ideas from the ancients just to make the experience more decadent". And when we talk about Christian Hermeticism today what we generally mean groups that are continuous with the 18th century occultists, and from this arises the cultural problem I alluded to the in first part of this essay. These European occultists, and from the 19th century on their American and Canadian cousins, continued to advance our knowledge of Hermetic literature and have conducted innumerable quality research projects, so today a modern student, even one not interested in magick but just history, is in their debt.

In the 19th century though the situation was quite different. Occultist studies became popular again with the middle class in Europe in 1845. And the scholarly translations began to recirculate along with a pletora of new materials that had been researched over the preceding century by the occultists. This movement exploded on the American scene as the American spiritualist movement in 1848. The Spiritualist movement was middle class in its orientation and while drawing inspiration from the literature wouldn't associate socially with libertine upper class variety. American Spiritualism in this first generation definitely identified as Christian. They saw themselves as practicing a form of the Christian faith that used supernatural means to gain revelations form the spiritual realm. The defining beliefs were:

Communication with spirits.
The ability for the soul to improve after death.
Legalism and a strong belief in personal responsibility.
Christian language though quite often over various non Orthodox theologies like Pantheism or Gnostic Christianity,
A rejection of a view of God as harsh, sending unbaptized infants to hell.
Political support for abolition and woman's rights. This often led to a rejection of traditional churches that were opposed or ambivalent on these issues.

Again, 1850s Christian Spiritualism were less radical than the 1880- variety most people are familiar with. Christian Spiritualism sought to enhance Christianity, not repudiate it. Their argument was with the Christian churches, not the Christian God. While Christian Science is a bit radical for what existed at the time it is right sort of model. But like Christian Science today, from a cultural standpoint it was a religion for Protestant woman, women mostly growing up in a Reformed tradition that were unwilling to accept a traditional role of submission and cultural isolation. This massively popular social movement lasted for 3 generations and by the time it was done had transformed every church in America. It is my contention that its influence was particularly felt by the Mormon church, that a huge number of these women in the 1850s joined the Mormon church, a church was already amenable to the ideas of Hermetic Christianity and in doing so moved the Mormon church outside the realm of Charismatic Christianity into a new distinctive form of Hermetic Christianity.

In the next section we are going to have to back two decades to the 1830s and talk about the development of the Mormon church prior to the arrival of American spiritualism. That the Mormon church was even during the Joseph Smith years leaning heavily in a Hermetic direction, that it already had most of the aspects of Hermetic Christianity already in place. And thus the Mormon church would have been amenable to the theology and attractive as a religious option for American Spiritualists. It's my contention that most of truly distinctive doctrines of the Mormon church that developed under Brigham Young, including the normalization of polygamy and the infinite regression of Gods, can be explained by this wave of converts reinforcing an already existing motif. Between 1850 and 1870 American churches were not in a growth phase in general (link) but the Mormon church grew from around 20,000 to 80,000 persons, even while experiencing persecution. So our 3rd part will concern itself with the history of the Mormon church.

Link to part3.

Mormonism as Hermetic Christianity (part 1)

CD-Host — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 23:25:00 +0000

I have to admit to being remarkably ignorant about the Mormon religion prior to a few weeks ago. I had always viewed Mormonism as a legalistic branch of Christianity combined with a ridiculous story about Jesus having come to America to preach to American Indians. For all the exotic religions from the ancient world, from the middle ages, from the more recent past, I'd explored I never looked at a faith with 6 million modern day Americans with anything more than a passing glance because I assumed there would be nothing interesting to see. And just recently with one of those passing glances I did a double take. I ran into an internet discussion with a bunch of religious Mormons the kind that don't know what coffee tastes like and were married by 23, using authors from History of Religions in a religious debate, the sort of authors and more importantly concepts that usually only atheists or radical theologians would cite; and the Mormons showed clear signs of having read, understood and at least in some part approving of those books.

And so I was caught off guard, so I read more and more of the discussions on that board, and saw ideas from esoteric Christianity, what looked to me like ideas from Rosicrucianism, being used casually. A bunch of people who all think George W. Bush was a good president, citing religious ideas that Paul Tillich might think but would figure too radical to speak? This warranted more investigation. And after a few weeks I've come to the conclusion that Morminism is genuinely cool. A truly new American religion, a blend of ingredients I've never seen before. That would be worthy of discussion in and of itself but a month ago if you would have asked me, "what would happen if a Conservative version of Helena Blavatsky had set up a mainstream church that grew to millions and thinks it's part of Evangelical Christianity"? I would have considered the question an oxymoron, not even possible enough to warrant discussion, until I looked at Brigham Young's church. I must admit I'm still getting over the idea of KJVonlyists who are to the left of Elizabeth Johnson on re-imaging God with Holy Mother(s). If you are someone who likes this blog, and haven't looked into Mormonism, I'll stop you right here and say this is religion worth looking at. It is frankly amazing that such a thing even exists much less is a church with million and millions of members, who have been in the church for 5-7 generations plus new recruits. It is shattering many of my assumptions about what is possible.

Mormons defines itself as a close cousin of Evangelical Christianity Evangelical Christianity defines itself first and foremost in terms of adherence to Protestant doctrines. Protestantism defines itself based on: its definition of scripture, faith defined by creeds, its understanding of grace within a narrow band between Luther and Calvin, a creedal understanding of Christ, and a rejection of sacramental theology. All 5 of which are contradicted by Mormon theology, and contradicted not by a little bit, either. From an evangelical standpoint 7th day Adventists, sit on the border between Christianity and heresy; Jehovah's witnesses while Christian are preaching clear cut heresies and Mormons well is just another religion.The paradox that gets beaten to death on the web is "Is Mormon Christian?" Now the average evangelical who understands something about Mormonism usually responds with some variation of, "What are you kidding?"

Ah but... Mormonism is a very theologically tolerant religion. It takes an open view of relationship between theology and religion, we are not saved by our knowledge of biblical doctrine. Catholicism fought against the ancient alternative forms of Christianity with a: one God, one creed, one Bishop slogan. And while Protestant Christianity has rejected the "one Bishop" in their mind that requires they cling all the more tightly to "one creed". So, is it really fair to use a evangelical standard, or can we possibly come up with some sort of neutral standard? There wouldn't even be a question if Mormonism didn't identify heavily with Evangelical Christianity, but it does, and further culturally and linguistically there are a lot of similarities. It would be hard to imagine someone who didn't take the ties with Evangelical Christianity serious writing an argument or an article like the Apostle's creed and the book of Mormon. Self identification is a key criteria, so we should treat it as respectfully as possible. As an aside, the argument about the Apostle's creed IMHO ducks the key issue, most evangelicals are willing to grant that at the time the book of Mormon was authored Joseph Smith was still essentially Christian in his religious views, its the developments after that, the beliefs that are held over and beyond those which are of at this point the largest source of conflict. And this is evidenced by the fact that a more mainstream group than the LDS, a group that rejects the later revelations, The Community of Christ, joined the NCC in 2010 (link), without the later revelations there simply is not nearly the same degree of theological hurdles.

So I actually have something different to say about this never ending debate; a possible compromise on the "is Mormon Christian" debate which:

Is historically accurate and is not an abuse of language.
Is supportive of Mormon theology regarding being a restored church. It provides some genuine historical meat to what is otherwise a vague claim, making "we are the re-established, original Christian church" plausible in a genuine historical context, capable of holding up to scrutiny and scholarship.
Is respectful of the theological objections that Catholics and Protestants express towards Mormonism by openly acknowledging their "non-normative" theology.
Offers a plausible theory for how the distinctive aspects of the Mormon faith developed as quickly as they did, and why Mormonism diverged from "normative" Christianity as far as it did under Brigham Young.

What I'm proposing is that we answer the question in the affirmative, Mormonism is a form of Hermetic Christianity, a form of Christianity that coexisted in the ancient world along with Catholic Christianity, and has continued to off and on exist throughout the next two millennia. Before getting into my argument for that answer let me first qualify by saying there are a few problems with this solution.

The Mormon church is probably over ten-times the size of all the other Hermetic churches worldwide, put together. Mainline or Evangelical Christianity are big enough that the Church of Later Day Saints could be "just another denomination" if grouped with Hermetic Christianity the Mormon church would redefine the entire group.
Culturally they are not a fit. Hermetic Christianity has a 1000 year history of having essentially always been associated with political and/or sexual radicalism. Hermetic Christian churches further have a more limited ecclesiology, they aim to be an activity their members engage in, they make no attempt to form an inter-generational relationship guiding their lives.
Because of (2) above, this doesn't address the core issue in terms of ecumenical dialogue, which is I suspect the main reason Mormons want to identify as Evangelical Christians. The religions themselves travel in different circles. Hermetic Christians groups in today's world along with Gnostic Christianity, form a bridge between the left end of Liberal Christianity and Neopaganism, New Age movement, Spiritualism... Its unlikely the people in those groups know who Al Mohler or John MacArthur even are, much less have a desire for their acceptance. If evangelicals came in contact with Hermetic Churches, while the counter arguments would be different, the level of hostility would likely be almost equally high.

So a fairly good case could be made that this article is irrelevant, I'm just ducking the issue. But I think its worth a conversation as a possible compromise. So lets start with a quick discussion about what is Hermeticism and Hermetic Christianity. In the ancient world, Hermeticism was a branch of Egyptian paganism created after Alexander the Great, merging the cults of Hermes, the Greek messenger (writing) god, the source of hidden wisdom, and for later Greeks the Logos; and Thoth an Egyptian god, the only begotten son of Ra the high god, who was the teacher of man, the god of writing.
The attraction for both sides was a well developed magick (we'll adopt the Hermetic convention of using magic for a form of stagecraft involving illusion and magick for ritual activities aimed at altering the material world through supernatural means) cult in each of the respective religions. Hermeticism became an international religion, centered in Egypt, focused on creating a synthesis between Platonic philosophy and its religious offshoots with more traditional, religious forms. To left you see pictured the Hermetic symbol, the symbol of Hermes Trismegistus, their merged God which has the the Ankh of Thoth merged with the twin snakes of Hermes. For later Hellenists, Hermes Trismegistus was the Logos who had become incarnate to teach man hidden wisdoms of the high God, including the magick healing i.e. medicine. You can see the obvious derivation with today's modern symbol for medicine, pictured to the right. I'll won't focus on the obvious symbolism of the cross but will (link) and mention in the Coptic church even today you can see Ankh crosses, hybrids between the Ankh and the cross and these go back to the 1st century.

In many ways this was exactly the goal of Hellenistic Judaism, to create a merger between Jewish ritual and theology with Greek culture and philosophy. This friendly alliance between Hermitics and Hellenistic Jews was strengthened with Julius Caesar's and Mark Anthony's conquest of Egypt. Hermetics rejected Roman rule and got involved political resistance, Jews were fighting the occupation of Judea and Roman customs and laws like circumcision prohibitions; another great friendship forged based on "the enemy of my enemy". This merger is evidence in both the literature and archeology of 1st century Judaism, its from this period that we find a wealth of Jewish magical amulets all over the ancient world using Hermetic incantations modified with Jewish / Babylonian angels rather than Egyptian / Greek names. Jewish Hermeticism sought to reinterpret Hermes Trismegistus with the Logos, the divine word or message reinterpret as Torah (the first 5 books of the old testament), the Word of God in essentially modern usage. Now if we consider the Gospel of Mark for a moment

A long Jewish midrash, a religious biography of a messianic character constructed from the Septuagint.
Miracles of healing including their wording a magical character (see for example Morton's Smith, Jesus the Magician for a long discussion of magick as a theme of Mark).
An adoptionist view of Jesus, in particular a description, bird and all (Mark 1:9-11), of the Hermetic magick rite for gaining divine powers.
The idea that the God, has secrets (the Messianic secret) openly only to the select few, a motif that hadn't appeared in Judaism to this point but was common in Hermeticism.
A focus on baptism, common for Jewish baptismal cults.
The Hermetic eating the god rite, eucharist, presented in a Jewish context (Mark 14:22-26).

Hermetic Jews / proto-Christians are by far the community most likely to have authored Mark. The same relationship that Mark has to Matthew and Luke (Mack the Knife, and biblical development) is founding underlying the Gospel of John, is a Signs Gospel which presents a list of earthly miracle worker in the Jewish community as a savior (see my post Bultmann's order for John for more on the construction of the Gospel of John). A focused tie on the connection between magick and revelation of truth which could have emerged from a Hermetic Jewish / proto-Christian community.

In terms of the Epistles, we also run into some pretty clear evidence in Colossians 2:8-23:

Col 2:8, Col 2:20 manipulation of matter through spirits, secret magick rituals;
Col 2:11 circumcision, the importance of earthly acts to control powers, Hermeticism is not gnostic "as above is below" is the core idea of magick.
Col 2:16-17 special ritual holidays
Col 2:18 angel worship, a truly distinctive part of Hermetic Judaism provides the strongest evidence for the identification
Col 2:21-23 legalism, a focus on ritual purity for the laity.

The opponents in Galatians, the Judaizers, with their demand for an earthly circumcision could very easily have been Hermetic proto-Christians. Interestingly enough, Paul's own methodology, of searching through scripture for mystical revelation has a Hermetic feel but then the lack of earthly action is Gnostic. And can view Paul, a 2nd generation Christian trying to steer the church between the two extreme of Hermeticism and proto-Gnosticism. Corinthians provides a wonderful example where he seems to be confronted with a congregation unable to decide whether material things are of no importance (Gnosticism) or what is bound on earth is bound in heaven (Hermeticism). We can imagine the world of Paul, confronting a Hermetic i.e. messianic congregation which has seen its earthly expectations of redemption crushed under Roman might. Jewish / Christian Gnosticism started as a reaction against what the Jews believes was their defeated god, fake god, a god who had promised that his faithful would be redeemed and then allowed them to be humiliated and defeated. Paul's message that it was not an earthly redemption, and far from a defeat that the cross represented a heavenly triumph against the powers and principalities would have represented an appealing message. When reading the epistles you can hear Paul viewing early Christianity caught between Scylla and Charybdis, Paul moving the congregation away from both magical thinking, believing they could change the course of human history through supernatural means; and at the same time fighting the utter dispair in history and this world that Gnosticism represented. In Paul's 7 authentic epistles we can view a second generation of Hermetic Jew, his Christianity which will uphold the power of the material sacraments, codes of morality while asserting that their effects are heavenly not earthly; in effect moving his congregation from proto-Christianity to Christianity. Jude can be seen in the same light loaded with mystical references and obscure literature while still asserting the key importance of earthly events.

Revelations is traditional apocalyptic literature, that could have been written at almost anytime. The theology is Hermetic with an interplay between levels of heaven. For example giving birth to a heavenly savior with a dragon cast down to represent the beasts of the earth and land. It could very easily have been an earlier work recast with the Christian community recasting Jesus as God's earthly redeemer.

Hebrews presents a mythical savior as a new form of priest establishing a new type of mythical priesthood, based on a new heavenly sacrifice in his heavenly sanctuary where he acts as High Priest making ineffectual earthly sacrifices. Nope not Hermetic Judaism. Hermetic Judaism would have been an argument that earthly sacrifices are effectual because they mimic the heavenly sacrifices of the heavenly Christ in his heavenly temple, or that the earthly ones aren't close enough to actually work. Hebrews is also unavoidably early, as it predates the destruction of the temple, so this theory of origins is going to require a belief in at least one other strand of early Christianity. But in the Essenes we have obvious candidates for its original authors. And we both sides of this for James, an early version from the Dead Sea Scrolls and the later "Christianized" version which is canonical James. And that solution of the Essenes would work for Hebrews as well, an argument for community holiness and God's deliverance over what they saw as Herod's perverse temple. So for the purpose of believing in a unique early church we could have the Hermetic Judaism influencing the Essenes and then literature passing between those communities.

The pastoral epistles with their obvious 2nd century references, as well as most of the catholic epistles belong to a later phase; a community done migrating from Judaism, that has concerns over governance. The two main strands of Q: Greek cynical philosophy and Jewish apocalyptic traditions are not part of Hermetic Judaism. Matthew's theology would not have come from this group, though again the Essenes would work. Similarly Luke/Acts (and even the earlier form of Luke, The Gospel of the Lord) is not Hermetic Jewish either but I'd date this well in 2nd century. The reworking Signs into John, is hard to date with confidence but we can be assured its later than most other works in the New Testament. Hence, those remaining books present no contradiction to the theory.

Hermetic Judaism was even without any other influence already a fairly complete proto-Christianity. It could very well have represented the original church, the church that authored most of the bible. A plausible source for the sort of group a primitive Christianity could initially have emerged from. This sort of naturalistic framework for viewing the bible is fully in accord with Mormon tradition:

“The Hebrew and Greek manuscripts of the Bible from which translations have been made, are evidently very much corrupted,…the learned are under the necessity of translating from such mutilated, imperfect, and, in very many instances, contradictory copies as still exist. This uncertainty, combined with the imperfections of uninspired translators, renders the Bibles of all languages, at the present day, emphatically the words of men, intead of the pure word of God.” (Pratt, Spiritual Gifts)

We will stop here and take up the rest of the argument in the 2nd half.

What happened to pagan Hermeticism and its collapse into Catholic Christianity, Hermes Christianus.
Hermetic Christianity, its disappearance from the ancient world and its rebirth as a religion of European aristocrats and religious radicals.
How a religion of European aristocrats might have made contact, transformed and been reborn in a middle / lower class rural American sect run by Brigham Young.

___________

See also:

part2 and part3 of this series
The ideas about Hermetic Christianity and its tie to Christian origins were first proposed by Richard Reitzenstein in Poimandres: Studien zur Griechisch-ägyptischen und frühchristlichen which unfortunately has never been translated. A good summary is found in chapter 8 of Pagan Regeneration, by Harold R. Willoughby. Also a more modern summary from lecture notes one by Vernon Robbins.
Wikipedia has a nice summary / introduction to magic from that period.
The idea that early Christians didn't in fact believe that the gospels were relating events in Palestine but viewed them mythically, like the stories of hercules, is extensively argued elsewhere. A fairly good treatment which examines references in depth is Earl Doherty's site.
Rediscovering Ancient Christianity by C Wilfred Griggs, a historically accurate approach from BYU agreeing overall with the Walter Bauer style analysis above. The article itself even goes further in addressing theorists like David Strauss who made strong negative claims about the historicity of the bible texts.
Fair LDS page on the diversity of early Christianity.
Evangelical analysis of the Colossian Heresy: part1, part2, part3

75 bible sayings

CD-Host — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 01:25:00 +0000

Terrific little list from http://www.av1611.org/kjv/fight.html of expressions that came from the KJV

1. Genesis 4:2-5: can't get blood from a turnip
2. Genesis 7: don't miss the boat
3. Genesis 11:7-9: babbling
4. Genesis 15:5: teller
5. Genesis 43:34: mess (of food)
6. Exodus 19:16-18: holy smoke
7. Exodus 28:42: britches
8. Exodus 32:8: holy cow
9. Leviticus 2:14: roast ears
10. Leviticus 13:10: the quick (raw flesh)
11. Leviticus 14:5-6: running water
12. Leviticus 16:8: scapegoat
13. Leviticus 25:10: Liberty Bell
14. Numbers 21:5: light bread
15. Numbers 35:2-5: suburb
16. Deuteronomy 2:14: wasted him
17. Deuteronomy 24:5: cheer up
18. Deuteronomy 32:10: apple of his eye
19. Judges 5:20: star wars
20. Judges 7:5-12: under dog
21. Judges 8:16: teach a lesson
22. Judges 17:10: calling a priest father
23. I Samuel 14:12: I'll show you a thing or two
24. I Samuel 20:40: artillery
25. I Samuel 25:37: petrified
26. II Samuel 19:18: ferry boat
27. I Kings 3:7: don't know if he's coming or going
28. I Kings 14:3: cracklins
29. I Kings 14:6: that's heavy
30. I Kings 21:19-23: she's gone to the dogs
31. II Chronicles 9:6: you haven't heard half of it
32. II Chronicles 30:6: postman
33. Nehemiah 13:11: set them in their place
34. Esther 7:9: he hung himself
35. Job 11:16: It's water under the bridge
36. Job 20:6: he has his head in the clouds
37. Psalm 4:8: lay me down to sleep
38. Psalm 19:3-4: he gave me a line
39. Psalm 37:13: his day is coming
40. Psalm 58:8: pass away (dying)
41. Psalm 64:3-4: shoot off your mouth
42. Psalm 78:25: angel's food cake
43. Psalm 141:10: give him enough rope and he'll hang himself
44. Proverbs 7:22: dumb as an ox
45. Proverbs 13:24: spare the rod, spoil the child
46. Proverbs 18:6: he is asking for it
47. Proverbs 24:16: can't keep a good man down
48. Proverbs 25:14: full of hot air
49. Proverbs 30:30: king of beasts
50. Ecclesiastes 10:19: money talks
51. Ecclesiastes 10:20: a little bird told me
52. Song Solomon 2:5: lovesick
53. Isaiah 52:8: see eye to eye
54. Jeremiah 23:25: I have a dream (MLK, Jr)
55. Ezekiel 26:9: engines
56. Ezekiel 38:9: desert storm or storm troopers
57. Daniel 3:21: hose (leg wear)
58. Daniel 8:25: foreign policy
59. Daniel 11:38: the force be with you (star wars)
60. Hosea 7:8: half-baked
61. Jonah 4:10-11: can't tell left from right
62. Zephaniah 3:8-9: United Nations Assembly
63. Matthew 25:1-10: burning the midnight oil
64. Matthew 25:33: right or left side of an issue
65. Matthew 27:46: for crying out loud
66. Mark 5:13: hog wild
67. Luke 11:46: won't lift a finger to help
68. Luke 15:17: he came to himself
69. Romans 2:23: breaking the law
70. Philippians 3:2: beware of dog
71. Colossians 2:14: they nailed him
72. I John 5:11-13: get a life
73. Revelation 6:8: hell on earth
74. Revelation 16:13: a frog in my throat
75. Revelation 20:15: go jump in the lake

Don’t reassure me, empower me

CD-Host — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 13:41:00 +0000

Terrific line I ran across today which of course applies more broadly:

I make my peace with the LDS Church’s institutional sexism every day, every week, because I believe that this is where God called me to be. I’ve also been very lucky to have local leaders who understand some of the challenges that women face in the Church and try to do what they can to encourage progress.

However, here’s the thing: no man gets the right to reassure me that I’m his equal when every single outward sign of how the Church is run tells a different story.

Salt Lake City leaders, here’s a request: Stop telling me I’m incredible, and start giving me responsibility and authority befitting an adult and not a child. Stop standing up each Mother’s Day to wax on about how women are fantastically spiritual and start taking a hard look at the institutional sexism that repeatedly devalues women. (read the full article)

Objective measure of translation accuracy

CD-Host — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 23:47:00 +0000

So I've had this idea for an accuracy test between bibles. The idea was to pick verses each of which has a different kind of complication and see how all the various bibles handle it. The complications and scoring is is thought for thought not word for word, but at the same time highly detailed so it should be fair between formal, dynamic translations and hopefully going further out in either direction. Score the various bibles form 1-5, with 2 being the "wrong answer" 4 being the "right answer" and 1 and 5 being additional penalties and bonus, and 3 being 1/2 credit. I'm going to score both translations and study bibles on how well they handle this, because there may be (and probably will be) differences between study bibles and some translation have excellent study bibles while other's don't and availability of good quality notes matters. I was going to do NT only so I can include a lot of bibles like The Voice, The Source, Gaus which don't usually get rated. I also intend to include bibles from non-Protestant groups: Catholic bibles, New World Translation (Jehovah's witnesses), Clear Word (Adventist)...

And hopefully with time:

a) Expand out to more translations
b) Expand out to more tricky aspects
c) Maybe move to a more random sample 3 of each type of issue

The idea being this gives something of an objective measure of "accuracy". Here are the types of issues and corresponding verses I was thinking about:

1 Corinthians 2:6-10 dual meaning of archons of the aion, as both heavenly demons manipulating the earth, ephemeral powers and their earthly representatives, "princes of this age". Most bibles just have this as earthly.

2 = earthly
4 = heavenly, both or ambiguos.
5 = captures the relationship between both.

2 Corinthians 12:2 "third heaven" Venus translation vs transculturation covers this one. Frequently bibles use "heaven" or "with God" and God simply doesn't live on the 3rd heaven.

1 = With God
2 = Heaven
4 = 3rd Heaven
5 = 3rd Heaven with an explanation of what the the term means.

Romans 6:8 (tense complexity and the Greek notion of time) (Bible translation: Ebonics and the aorist tense)
This is a tricky passage since the tenses are hard, particularly hard in standard English. This is a key verse of great theological importance that is tough to translate, and because it is tough to translate people often just change the underlying theology. Moreover the Greek notion of timelessness isn't really part of American / Christian culture so there is a temptation to consider what Paul is considering an act that takes place in eternity to have taken place at a simple point in the past.

2 = Simple past tense.
4 = Captures the aorist / continuing action of death in some way.
5 = Capturing the notion of an eternal act in a mythic realm rather than an act in the human realm, i.e. capturing the middle platonism of the original.

Romans 11:36 / Romans 12:2 (lack of concordance across chapter boundaries)
This is a tricky pair of verses because aion is frequently translated "world" or "age" depending on context. Normally bibles are concordant with aion within a single paragraph or idea because otherwise it converts Paul into speaking gibberish. But... this pair happens on a chapter boundary so translators often miss it. Of course chapter markers weren't added until centuries later so this split is part of our tradition not part of the original.

2 = Using world & age without treating this like a single thought.
4 = Using the same word.
5 = Doing something creative so it works in context.

1 Timothy 6:20 (de-historical ideology over accuracy). This verse is a great test because in it "Paul" makes reference to a 2nd century Christian book called the Antitheses, that the author of Timothy is hostile to. Generally conservative translations will try and obscure this issue so the verse makes no sense, because they don't want to undermine Pauline authorship. Liberal translators are quite often not any better. The word Antithesis means literally Oppositions, but in this case it is a proper noun. So a correct translation is something like: “O, Timothy, guard the precious deposit recoiling from profane and empty jabbering and the Antitheses (Oppositions or Contradictions in English) of the falsely labeled ‘gnosis’ for some who profess it have shot wide of the faith ”

2 = gibberish, meaningless comment like translating "opposition" lower case without any context.
4 = Right idea
5 = Antitheses capitalized or any explanation of what "Paul" (the author(s) of Timothy) is talking about here.

Romans 16:7 (Sexism over accuracy) This verse is often translated so as not to have a woman called an apostle even though unequivocally that's what Paul is doing. Here is a link to a meta article on BBB: http://englishbibles.blogspot.com/2006/11/junia-apostle-index.html )

2 = Cop-out, either making Junia male or dropping apostle
3 = Junia is an apostle but not highlighting Junia is a woman's name.
4 = Junia is a female apostle
5 = Discussion of this drawing attention and why there is resistance.

Galatians 5:6 (Protestant Orthodox corruption) this verse should be faith working through love. But quite often translators want to duck any hint of salvation through work and so change this to "faith expressing itself through love" so as not to offend. J.D. Kirk has a funny short article on this verse: Boo… Theologically Manipulated Translation. Boo…

2 = Non work
4 = Faith working through love

Mark 1:41 (proper footnoting) This is a simple verse where the textual information is split. The reading found in almost the entire NT ms tradition is σπλαγχνισθείς (splancnisqei", “moved with compassion”). Codex Bezae (D), {1358}, and a few Latin mss (a ff2 r1*) here read ὀργισθείς (ojrgisqei", “moved with anger”). It is more difficult to account for a change from “moved with compassion” to “moved with anger” than it is for a copyist to soften “moved with anger” to “moved with compassion,” making the decision quite difficult. Given a split original with experts cleanly divided on both sides:

2 = one side only
4 = both options

So what do you all think of the idea of objectively measure of accuracy? Do you like the list? Anything I should add or remove? Most importantly does this list meet the fairness criteria?

100 year predictions of the biblical landscape

CD-Host — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 19:56:00 +0000

So I figured a fun topic is what will bibles look like in 100 years. I invite anyone who wants to crack out their crystal ball to give it a shot. Here are my predictions.

I think the idea that a bible should be “general purpose” will die in the next generation. This in my mind is a legacy of the KJV pre Living Bible / Good News Bible tradition where the same bible was used for liturgy, study, devotion. Translations will stop aiming to be all things to all people and instead will focus on a niche like most products do in America. The KJV may very well survive for “high liturgy” like funerals, being treated like Shakespeare or the Old Latin liturgy of the Catholic church. Study bibles, will no longer be based on liturgical bibles and thus can do the obvious thing of forking off both a literal and a dynamic translation marked up with notes. Thus they will be explicating the text using a dual strategy having a literal translation at least as much so as the NASB and possibly more like a good interlinear and a profoundly dynamic translation capturing the meaning of the Greek. The concern with preserving traditional phrasing will be gone since these bibles will be made exclusively for study. Churches will use liturgical bibles designed to be understood best when read out-loud, translation like the Voice and highly poetical bibles for liturgical functions. The pew bible will be one of these read out-loud bibles.

I think the fact that evangelicals, including the most conservative with the ESV, have adopted the UBS/NA text is a fundamental shift in their relationship with the bible. Evangelicals today read bibles with “some texts contain X while others say Y", or "while the majority of the Greek texts say X the Syriac / Latin says Y”, etc…. In other words a view of translation has emerged which says:

The actual originals are unknown, what you are reading is an estimate.
The act of compilation is active not passive
The act of translation induces inevitable distortion in meaning.

That’s not a small thing. Evangelicals are undergoing what liberals did in the mid 19th century, but while liberals were having to follow a trail blazed first by radicals Evangelicals will be following the trail blazed by large institutional mainline Christianity, a much wider trail. Evangelical Christianity is fundamentally (no pun intended) about the bible, the gospel and being born again. Evangelicals have always focused heavily on bible study, the popularity of study bibles today which is far beyond what it was a generation ago. With computerization the amount of information in the tools used for lay study is exploding. I think these 2 trends merge and the study bibles of 100 years are loaded with lower criticism and textual variants, made much simpler since study bibles will be computerized interfaces and not books.

On the liberal side, I think this adaption of lower criticism by the right is going to push them further to the left over the next 50 years. Liberal bibles today are still very conservative. I've written elsewhere on this blog how delightful it was to read a translation of John in Bultmann’s order. Given how easy it is for a computerized book to have multiple arrangements I think this transition, a switch to go back and forth will become common. And once it happens for John we might see arrangements in other books, like Corinthians with Schmithal's decomposition. For the Synoptic Gospels, given how well know Q and the documentary hypothesis is, I think we'll see the Q material clearly delineated and since Q is now such a common term possibly broken out further according to the internal structure of Q. So while conservative bibles will incorporate lower criticism, liberal bibles will incorporate higher criticism.

This shift left by the mainstream churches will force texts teams to begin to assemble more comprehensive documentary break downs, i.e. mainstream biblical scholarship / divinity schools to go in its natural direction towards where Religious Studies professors are today. So in terms of the UBS/NA40 (or whatever it is called) the Greek (and maybe even the Hebrew ) will present a tree view of the origins of the text (see Mack the Knife and biblical development). The books will show trees of descent, you will be able to track lines as they evolved in the 5th century from a host of sources. For example the UBS/NA Luke will clearly show what came from Ur-Lukas (Gospel of the Lord), which came from later Q additions or refinements from Matthew, which came from Mark and which came from reading the epistles back into the gospels.

As an aside, of course if divinity scholar have moved to where Religious Studies professors are today, its hard to know where these scholars will be 100 years from now. But if the last generation is any hint I imagine they will be reconstructing the sects that gave birth to Christianity and by then people will have a fairly thorough timeline of Christianity's parents, its birth and its childhood.

Getting back to bibles, I think the debate on the canon will be fiery in 100 years. In the last 15 years we’ve started to see several bibles that are arguing for changes to the canon. Today almost no evangelical believes that Hebrews is “Paul’s epistle to the Hebrews” and it is becoming acceptable to question the authorship of the Pastoral Epistles even within conservative circles. The counter evidence is just too strong, in the same way that evolution was absolutely rejected in 1850 and considered the norm in Evangelical circles in by 1980; I believe the political nature of the canon will be mainstream. So once 100 now the idea that the canon is essentially political in nature not religious is mainstream the big theological question will be how to respond. It took the first 200 years of the reformation for evangelicals to admit that the corrupt theology of the 16th century church really went all the way back to the 5th century and that revolution not reformation was the goal.

Today the fringe view that evangelical Christianity is free to construct their own canon rejecting the Catholic canon will be a well represented minority view. So put me down for Gospel of Thomas in at least one mainstream translation by then. The Jesus Seminar's 5 Gospels included it in 1996 and John Henson's Good as New which was directed at liberals in Great Britain included it in 2004 so this prediction, it wouldn't shock me if it were fulfilled by 2030, other bibles will have followed suit by 2070 though I believe in 2111 Evangelical bibles will retain their current canon. But the debate on canon once opened will be raging, and this change will open the door to other revisions, though I'm unsure what specifically people will want since today they consider the canon closed.

So feel free to comment on my 100 year predictions or go for it and give your own.

100 year predictions of the biblical landscape

CD-Host — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 19:56:00 +0000

So I figured a fun topic is what will bibles look like in 100 years. I invite anyone who wants to crack out their crystal ball to give it a shot. Here are my predictions.

The actual originals are unknown, what you are reading is an estimate.
The act of compilation is active not passive
The act of translation induces inevitable distortion in meaning.

So feel free to comment on my 100 year predictions or go for it and give your own.

Sharper Iron on voting for excommunication

CD-Host — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 07:37:00 +0000

A few weeks back Sharper Iron, an IFB blog, posted an article entitled Should Congregations Vote to Discipline? The details on the case are left very vague but the procedural problems were not. A highly respected member of the church, seen as an elder / leader was accused of a offense and under went the first 2 phases of Matthew 18, an individual confrontation and then 2-3 others confirming it. The case was brought before the pastor who found the evidence sufficient and the matter was brought before the congregation. They did not believe the evidence to be sufficient to warrant excommunication and voted to retain the leader. The pastor seeing this as a lack of trust decided to leave his position and found a church plant. Ted Bigelow wrote the article above criticizing the congregation for the apparent reason of engaging in a broader debate.

Normally I'd answer Pastor Bigelow at the blog he wrote the post on but Sharper Iron is a closed blog. I always like to notify people when I mention them here to give them a chance to respond. I won't be able to notify Sharper Iron, so if anyone reading this is a member please post in my name a notification in the interests of fairness. I'll try and notify Pastor Bigelow right after authoring this.

For Pastor Bigelow the structure of discipline is:
Step 1: Individual confrontation
Step 2: 2-3 others confront and determine if the evidence is true and certain, i.e. an inquest
Step 3: The 2-3 others go to church leadership to have their inquest confirmed
Step 4: Leadership informs the congregation to carry out discipline.

What he is arguing against is:
Step 4': The congregation votes on the excommunication via. evaluation of the evidence.

And he is absolutely correct that if the inquest is sufficient then this is a valid process. But this structure where the inquest occurs in Step 2, rather than Step 2 is evidence gathering and evidence evaluation occurs in Step 3 puts tremendous stain on the 2 or 3 others. Naive laity, often chosen for their closeness to the principles, without leadership oversight are being asked to conduct a full gathering of evidence. That's a lot to ask. And that's why typically Step 2 plays the role of an indictment and Step 3 is a full on trial, where evidence is gathered in both phases.

And in this case, the structural problems that Pastor Bigelow was arguing for became evident. The pastor of the church in question found the Step 2 evidence convincing even thought he accused was still pleading not guilty and when he advanced it to Step 4 the holes in analysis of evidence became evident. That is evidentially the congregation found the process wanting. It appears from the article that the congregation determined that the Step 3 verification of the evidence collected in Step 2 did not meet their standards and they thus rightly refused to carry out sentence. The pastor in this case was being rebuked for dereliction in his duty, during his Step 3 confirmation. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that rebuke, it sounds deserved. He probably should have asked the congregation for permission to return to a more formal Step 3 process rather than resign in a huff.

Pastor Bigelow focus in the article is arguing that evidence evaluation should not be occurring during Step 4, because the information is so detailed. And he is absolutely correct, the congregation should not be confronted with detailed conflicting evidence that they have to evaluate. Rather what they should be doing is evaluating the findings and process that occurred in Step 3. In other words, evaluating the trial.

And what it appears the trial consisted of was Pastor heard from the witnesses, decided the accused was lying and moved on. There is obviously not enough detail to evaluate the information provided in this anecdote, but what I see from the anecdote is the 4 step process working exactly as intended; in this case Step 4 preventing an abuse that occurred in Step 3. Which from the description provided sounds very much like the congregation doing their duty.

Pastor Bigelow's response, the rest of the article, is an apology for a policy that the 2 or 3 others can simply never be questioned because that is questioning their judgement, "But a careful reading of Matthew 18:17 shows that the church is not called to a higher authority—that is, to judge the person’s guilt or innocence. Instead, the Lord calls the church to submit to the prior judgment of the two or three witnesses since they have “established the evidence...The Lord Himself placed the determinative authority of church discipline in the judgment of the two or three. He tasks them, and not the church, with the responsibility to prove unrepentant sin in Matthew 18:16.”

The entire congregation is duty bound to fall in line excommunicate the accused based on a process they found wanting. Given this is a fundamentalist board, this involves secondary separation so the effect of the excommunication is not just cast out the member, but to cast anyone who dares associate with the member since such a person isn't recognizing their non Christian status. And that's assuming the congregation doesn't practice tertiary separation, i.e. separating from someone who refuses to separate from someone associated with the accused).

Given the extent of that penalty the evidence and process requirements should be simply staggering. The idea that 2 or 3 semi-random people should be empowered to conduct the investigation with essentially no meaningful oversight is beyond irresponsible. Matthew 18 outlines a 4 step process because the church carries the sentence and thus the church is going to be collectively held responsible for this judgement. They are the ones in weeks, years and possibly decades to come that will need to defend these finding, defend this evidence, defend this process. The Catholic church, centuries later is still called upon to defends its actions with respect to Galileo and Luther. A strong case for a discipline process where the entire congregation is not involved in the details can be made. But it is the duty of the church collectively to evaluate actions that can permanently damage the church, and excommunication is one of those actions. I did two case studies for people who would like examples of less famous cases than Luther or Galileo (Anne Le Fert, Gresham Machen); but the last 60 years of Fundamentalism I think work as an excellent as well.

I think there is a genuine lack of understand of the importance of excommunication. Once an excommunication happens the church is going to be asking others to join them in "calling for repentance" from an accused person who is going to deny the facts of the case; which means far from having to defend the facts to the congregation the church is quite likely going to have to defend the facts to world. He's being cast out of the congregation and being publicly identified as non-Christian by the Church. The church has to vote because the church is passing judgement.

I wrote a post a few years back on rules for due process. I think they make it clear how much leadership needs to be involved in an excommunication and how much "dotting the i's and crossing the t's is required". The bible establishes a standard that no evidence can be considered without multiple witnesses. It does not establish a standard that 2 to 3 people can bind the church and force it take action. Thankfully though the comment section at Sharper Iron mainly agrees that Pastor Bigelow's process is dangerous and unbiblical.

Now the reason I say there is confusion is when Pastor Bigelow then compounds the entire thing, arguing that anyone who expresses any disagreement with the 2 or 3 is themselves guilty of serious sin, "Sadly, men’s ways can get involved in these matters and really make a mess of things. For example, congregational voting in the case of an unrepentant member could create a serious breach of faith with Christ. What if a church decides to discipline out an impenitent member by vote, but some in the church vote not to remove him? Those who vote not to remove the unrepentant member have sinned against the Lord by establishing their own verdict of innocence that opposes what the Lord already ratified."

This seems to confuse excommunication with anathematization. Excommunication is to declare someone no longer publicly part of the church. Anathematization is to definitely declare that the person is damned. Protestants generally do not believe churches are capable of anathematizing someone which is why lines like "what the Lord already ratified" seems to indicate Pastor Bigelow believes his church is in fact anathematizing and not simply excommunicating. If he does comment here I think this is potentially the most interesting topic though it wasn't raised on Sharper Iron at all. I suspect because the people on Sharper Iron are protestants and so simply reading excommunication even when Pastor Bigelow uses language consistent with anathematization. (Here is a more detailed post on the distinction).

As far as I know Pastor Bigelow is not a national figure, he just happened to be posting an article to a heavily read website. So as much as possible I'd like to keep this away from the specifics of Grace Church of Hartford, unless he or an elder from Grace bring this up in the comments section.

Sharper Iron on voting for excommunication

CD-Host — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 07:37:00 +0000

Sco v. IBM, what happens to a political case

CD-Host — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 23:06:00 +0000

The "save Amanda Knox" cause that has recently consumed this blog, is undergoing a shift. Initially the core group standing behind Amanda Knox were people who knew her. People who simply couldn't conceive of her being the sort of person Mignini described. People who paid their own airfare to testify in her trial. Then a small group of people examined the evidence and found it wanting. So while there was publicity, it was mostly directed in the early days by Mignini towards villifying Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito so as to generate false statements (see Amanda Knox and prosecutorial abuse for more on this). As the cause is broadening out to a few thousand people, its beginning to look more like a small political movement. Fewer and fewer people involved knew Amanda or any of the main parties involved personally.

So what we have here is a structure: a core group of people involved in the formal legal case, surrounded by a web support group who are gathering "evidence" in parallel with the actual trial, surrounded by a broader political movement. There are lots of criminal cases with the broader political movement. There are lots of political cases with a web based investigation but no broad political support. This triple is rare. And the best analogy is a civil suit that occurred recently SCO v. IBM that I was involved with in much the same way as this case. And the point of this post is to examine this earlier case for what is instructive about it.

SCO was a market leader in x86 (PC) based Unixes during the 1980s and 90s, and arguably along with Microsoft one of the few companies that believed there was money in the operating system's business as opposed to operating systems being a lost liter for selling hardware. As Linux came in they moved onto more of a legacy support role and eventually saw their value eroded, eventually being merging with a Unix company (see Caldera OpenLinux on wikipedia for more details).

The public controversy started when the SCO Group's CEO, Darl McBride, initiated a media campaign arguing that the Linux kernel contained "hundreds of lines" of code from SCO's version of UNIX, and that SCO would reveal the code to other companies under NDA in July. The Linux development process is public, and the kernel team has always been aggressive in attempting to ensure compliance with copyright law. The SCO code copyright violations, if they existed most likely were in the IPX module which had been funded by Caldera, the predecessor to the SCO group. And so this media campaign led to public outrage by a small group of people who were involved with Linux. But this outrage quickly moved onto the broader community of people involved in the Linux community. In much the same way that Mignini's media leaks to British and Italian tabloids originally offended just Amanda's family and friends but later generated the public interest in Seattle regarding Amanda Knox.

With a high level of public interest the initial filing in their lawsuit against IBM was heavily scrutinized. I was typical in noticing dozens of incorrect and false statement. I caught a lot of statements about the history of SCO, which I had been a fan of during the early 1990s, which were false. There were also provably false statements about the history of Linux. So in the discussions on the case I started raising these points. And this was nothing more than internet blather. What was different in this case, than so many others was I wasn't alone. Dozens of people were doing the same thing. And very quickly a site, Groklaw, was set up which organized this counter information. Playing much the same role as Injustice in Perugia and Friends of Amanda do for the Knox case. A central collection of information about the case as if the broader public had a vote.

Its hard to give examples on a general purpose blog since: most of the readers don't know what an operating system is, Linux / SCO has to do with operating systems kernels and the debates about things like IPX have to do with kernel libraries. So I'll pick an example, which while trite gives an example of how misleading and dishonest the entire filling was. Point 75, reads (points are mine)

The name "Linux" is commonly understood in the computing industry to be a combination of the word "UNIX" (referring to the UNIX operating system) and the name "Linus." The name "Linus" was taken from the person who introduced Linux to the computing world, Linux Torvalds.

Which of course is false in a whole bunch of ways. The name of the original programmer was Linus Torvalds, not Linux Torvalds. His name for the system was Freax which was a combination of Free, Freak and X. The name "Linix" (not a typo) was Ari Lemmke's abbreviation of "Linus' Minix". Ari ran the site where Linux was first uploaded and first distributed from. Minix was a reference to Andrew S. Tanenbaum Operating system he wrote as a companion to his standard text, Operating Systems: Design and Implementation (link is to the late 1980s version, current is here).

And these details are important in context. The point of 75 was to argue that even the name Linux is evidence for their theory of the derivation of Linux While in reality the origin of the name shows the opposite. The reference to Minix shows that the early version of the code came from the educational / academic community and not the commercial community, product lines with the AT&T code. As an aside, the name Linux was a failed attempt at unifying the pronunciation using Linus name. American's were pronouncing Linix (Linn-ks) rather than 'Lee-nuks' (Len-uxs) and since Linus pronounces his name 'Lee-nus' the assumption was Linux would be pronounced that way; however Americans pronounce Linus as 'lye-nus' and Lye-nuks was the natural connection which also wasn't right and just added to the confusion.

So again while that point may sound nitpicky, and it is, this is meant to be an example that doesn't require background of how wrong SCO was on its many many points. And there were hundreds of these. All like the Harry Potter book, the blood on the knife, the bloody footprints... evidence that simply didn't exist. And just as guilters today in the Knox case encourage everyone to ignore the specific facts that virtually ever piece of evidence that is not irrelevant has been refuted, SCO's defenders encouraged the people hearing about these nonsensical claims to focus on the big picture. But of course the big picture was just an amalgamation of innuendo. But unlike in the Knox case the judiciary didn't feel it appropriate to create their own theories from SCO's claims, filling in the blanks with "it is possible and in fact probable". Rather they focused on the evidence as presented by the plaintiff:

Viewed against the backdrop of SCO's plethora of public statements concerning IBM's and others' infringement of SCO's purported copyrights to the UNIX software, it is astonishing that SCO has not offered any competent evidence to create a disputed fact regarding whether IBM has infringed SCO's alleged copyrights through IBM's Linux activities.

The interest and controversy, fed by these sites continued to build. Journalists covering these sorts of things, typically rewrite a press release throw in a line or two of their own and move on after a few hours. For serious cases of course everything needs to be carefully fact checked, reputations can be made or lost based on how evidence was handled. And journalists soon found that this case was not going to be treated the same way as a minor lawsuit. The level of controversy and heat, was more like writing about the Israeli / Palestinian crisis or a major political case. There were expected to check and double check every line they wrote. Years later journalists faced criticism for what they had written in SCO v. IBM; and almost all who had done little more than regurgitate press releases had to write detailed apology / retractions admitting it, to maintain their credibility.

But journalists were not the only ones effected. The legal system itself was substantially influenced. They were people in IBM that originally been inclined to settle cheaply. The PR campaign and the community reaction to the SCO PR campaign put those ideas to rest. IBM knew the community reaction to anything short of total victory would be devastatingly negative publicity. Conversely the ongoing case was a net positive in terms of marketing, IBM's got to be the good guys among a large chunk of their potential customer base all for the cost of a minor lawsuit, SCO's PR campaign backfired. And again the analogy of Mignini's original vilification campaign leading to a dozen books and at least 3 movies works well in this analogy.

And as the case continued the people involved who were deposing themselves to assist IBM were not secondary players like myself but primaries. For example the project manager who had negotiated parts of the project Monterey contract for SCO with IBM came forward to contradict SCO's claims about what their intent had been at the time. The estate of John Lions, whom both sides knew had died of old age, came forward publicly to forward to contradict SCO's claims, and provide evidence to IBM about having gotten parts of Lions' Commentary on UNIX from AT&T that Lions hadn't. IBM's lawyers had the effect of an infinite investigative budget. Even SCO admitted how effective Groklaw was and tried to create a connection with IBM to put an end to their activities, which failed.

In terms of the Judges, most couldn't believe that this "BS lawsuit" was the case they were going to be famous for. None had experienced this level of public scrutiny where every motion was discussed publicly and in detail. It caused them to go more slowly and more carefully. It is my hope that the publicity for the Knox case similarly effects the Italian judges. The Italian judiciary is being attacked from the right within Italy, from the British with the EU it doesn't need to further alienate America where Italy has consistently taken the position that justice must meet international standards and shouldn't be a one country affair, (see Italy the EU and the international standards of justice).

Finally business partners and contributors to the lawsuit like like Yarro, Microsoft and Sun were affected. Negative PR for Linux had been a boon for Microsoft and Sun. Positive PR for SCO had been a boon for Yarro. But once this case became really hot everyone backed off. Microsoft while seen as unavoidably hostile to Linux needed to avoid being truly detested the way SCO was. SUN wanted credibility in the open source world. Conversely people on the other side like Novell and IBM who had often been mixed earned a lot street cred by being on the side of the angels. Perguia was shocked when Seattle rejected Perugia park. Rocco Girlanda has a US reputation now, and contacts with average Americans.

While the Knox case is not nearly as big as the SCO v. IBM case, I do think its an instructive example.

Sco v. IBM, what happens to a political case

CD-Host — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 23:06:00 +0000

The name "Linux" is commonly understood in the computing industry to be a combination of the word "UNIX" (referring to the UNIX operating system) and the name "Linus." The name "Linus" was taken from the person who introduced Linux to the computing world, Linux Torvalds.

Viewed against the backdrop of SCO's plethora of public statements concerning IBM's and others' infringement of SCO's purported copyrights to the UNIX software, it is astonishing that SCO has not offered any competent evidence to create a disputed fact regarding whether IBM has infringed SCO's alleged copyrights through IBM's Linux activities.

Amanda Knox: Murder On Trial In Italy

CD-Host — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 06:51:00 +0000

Its been interesting the last day or two reading the comments about this movie with apparently both the innocentisti and the colpevolisti thinking the movie is going to harm their cause. I've been rather confident almost from the start on this one that's its going to be friendly to Amanda. I don't have any kind of insider information here but what I've seen so far has been very promising.

First, lets start with the director Robert Dornhelm. He did a bunch of light fare in the late 1970's and all of the 1980s. In 1989, in the last days of the Ceausescu regime, a childhood friend of his, Dominic Paraschiv was shot. The doctor misidentified him, falsely accused of being involved in a massacre. The doctor being a member of the anti-communists tied him to a bed, posted a guard to let him die from his gunshot wound. As evidence mounted that he had the wrong man, the doctor stood by his original theory rather than admit the mistake. As the story broke, the international media was still in a hope and glory phase with the overthrow and no one wanted to carry story about a stone cold murder due to judicial incompetence. Dornhelm wrote a movie in tribute to his friend, and does a fantastic job in showing the banality of a the state killing Parashiv and how the media and the society all conspired in acts they would later regret. The analogy Parachiv / Knox, Timisoara massacre / Kercher murder, Clara Weber (the journalist who proved Parachiv was innocent) / Edda Mellas, Romanian anti-Communists / Italian Police, Doctor who originally misidentified Parachiv and lets him die / Mignini, the International Press / International Press is crystal clear. I can't read his mind, but perhaps, hopefully, Dornhelm hopes to do for Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito what he was too late to do for Parachiv. I hope that Dornhelm sees that instead of another eulogy / tribute movie this time he will not let Mignini kill pull off his murder to cover his own mistake, this time he will get there before Parachiv dies.

But without question ater the death of Parachiv, Dornhelm is not the same man. The light comedies are gone. He makes the tribute movie to his friend. His very next movie is the story of Marina Oswald, Lee Harvey Oswald's widow. That movie takes a conspiratorial view and is sympathetic to Oswald seeing Lee Harvey and Marina as pawns in a broader conspiracy. Over the next few years he does movies about Anne Frank, Spartacus; both victims of state violence, both tried and both guilty. He then does a movie about Michelle Brown. She was an early victim of identity theft. Her thief stole $50,000 in her name; she is accused and the authorities take a bad situation and make it worse. Eventually she becomes a leader in the credit protection acts but only after the US Senate acts, the police were none too helpful. I don't know Dornhelm's work too well, but I do not see a guy who is going to blithely assume that because the Italian police say something its true.

Next lets move onto Hayden Panettiere who has indicated she played Amanda as innocent. While she's not sure about the facts of the case herself and sees the facts as balanced, she is sure that Amanda Knox is no threat to society, never had malicious intent. She also doesn't believe Amanda got a fair trial (link to one interview). Marcia Gay Harden who plays Edda Mellas is appalled at the lies in the newspaper, what the prosecution leaked vs. what the actual case was (link to interview).

Further, Lifetime's brand is women getting screwed over by men. The natural villain for a Lifetime production, even knowing nothing else would be Mignini or Guede.

Its entirely possible I'm wrong. I've made some bad calls before from the crystal ball. And certainly I'd feel better if Candace Dempsey had written the screen play. But every indication I read is that the Guilters are fully justified in their freak out. I'm going to take the liberty to answer their string of questions they have raised.

Like Arline Kercher, Meredith’s mum, we wonder why only the name “Amanda Knox” appears in the title of the film when the victim is named Meredith Kercher. And finally, we wonder why, if Amanda Knox’s family and friends are unassociated with this project, as they claim to be, they are being given an hour of airtime directly following its scheduled showing? (Open letter on true justice protesting the movie)

As I mentioned in my earlier article on Amanda Knox and the Shadow they repeat the silly point that the movie should be named after Meredith Kercher, even though the movie is about Knox not Kercher. I addressed this bizarre notion that Knox is not a person in her own right but only a negative image of Kercher in my shadow article. But to use the analogy from Dornhelm in this article, his movie is called, Requiem for Dominic, its named after the man accused wrongly not after the 80 people who died in the Timisoara massacre.

"What possible justification could there ever be for inflicting this kind of pain on the real-life, grieving family of Meredith Kercher?" Saving the life of two kids for one thing. Preventing this sort of injustice from occurring again for another thing.

"Does it enhance our understanding of this heinous crime in any way? No, it does not." Of course it does. Most people who see this movie will know little if anything about the crime and will know far more about it after the movie.

Does it serve to dissuade others from engaging in such acts? Do you believe there are large numbers of people contemplating rape, torture, murders that need to be dissuaded from this course of action through a movie or two? What an odd question.

And then they close with this accusation about a bunch of people they know nothing about. On the contrary, it breeds the kind of callous disregard for human life and lack of empathy that led to this gratuitous act of violence in the first place and that apparently characterizes those who have produced, directed and otherwise participated in the project. The group of people who signed this letter, PMF, delights with open glee in acts of cruelty frequently complementing one another on their success in acting with callous disregard for others. But ignoring that. No one has any idea what led to this act of violence in the first place. It may have been a disregard for human life, it may been lust, it may have been greed, or any of dozens of possible motives. We just don't know that's part of the problem with the case never having been investigated properly.

But, what we do know is the people who produced this movie are good people. I may not think much of Hayden Panettiere as an actress, but as a human being far from callous she's been active in Save the Whales for years. Just to prove how absolutely not callous she is in this video you can see her break down in sobbing tears when she fails to save some dolphins:

You can also hear her being interviewed where she is excited about being arrested by the Japanese because it would give publicity to the cause. She's been active in other environmental causes. And Dornhelm, as I mentioned is someone who changed his life in response to a human tragedy. Marcia Gay Harden who we also mentioned is extremely active in the Red Cross, and is on the board of Hearts of Gold which helps New York's homeless especially homeless children. Valentina Carnelutti who plays Dr. Patrizia Stefanoni has done wonders in fighting against sexual abuse of children. So again we see that the accusers of Knox just make up facts about others.

What I see are more good people, standing up for the truth and holding a light into the darkness that the Migninis of this world wish to create.

Amanda Knox: Murder On Trial In Italy

CD-Host — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 06:51:00 +0000

Like Arline Kercher, Meredith’s mum, we wonder why only the name “Amanda Knox” appears in the title of the film when the victim is named Meredith Kercher. And finally, we wonder why, if Amanda Knox’s family and friends are unassociated with this project, as they claim to be, they are being given an hour of airtime directly following its scheduled showing? (Open letter on true justice protesting the movie)

Words from a murder, repentance vs. innocence

CD-Host — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 14:29:00 +0000

A couple times I've used the Gary Gilmore analogy. I'm going to do it again by contrasting a pair of speeches, Amanda's statement in her appeal vs. Gary Gilmore's first letter to Nicole Baker after his arrest (written Aug 3, 1976). Both are the thoughts of people looking down the barrel of annihilation. For those who don't know, Gilmore will go on to be the first man executed after the reimposition of the death penalty. He's been arrested for 2 murders during the course of a robbery. Gary in Green, Amanda in Red italic.

Amanda asserts her innocence, while Gary is "repentant" in the way guilters would have liked her to be:

I look around the ugly vile cell and know that I truly belong in a place this dank and dirty, for where else should I be?

vs Raffaele and I are innocent, and we want to live our lives in freedom. We are not responsible for Meredith's death, and, I repeat, no justice is accomplished by taking our lives away.

Gary agrees he is a threat to society; Amanda asserts she has never been a threat:

I’m so used to bullshit and hostility, deceit and pettiness, evil and hatred. Those things are my natural habitat. They have shaped me. I look at the world through eyes that suspect, doubt, fear, hate, cheat, mock, are selfish and vain. vs. Ask them if I have ever been violent, aggressive or uncaring in front of the suffering that is part of the broken lives in prison. Because I assure you that I'm not like that. I assure you that I have never resembled the images painted by the prosecution. How could it be possible that I could be capable of achieving the kind of violence that Meredith suffered? How could it be possible that I could throw myself like that at the opportunity to hurt one of my friends? such a violence, as though it were more important and more natural than all my teaching, all my values, all my dreams and my whole life?

Amanda is often attacking for not being repentent. Gary Gilmore is quite repentent, he killed two people to speed up his ability to make payments for a truck. Amanda is sorry only that the whole thing happened:

Eat my heart out for the wondrous love you gave me that I threw away Monday nite because I was so spoiled and couldn’t immediately have a white pickup truck I wanted? vs.

The only thing I am really sorry about now is that there are people to whom I should turn, who are not here, but I hope my words will reach them, because I am either locked in prison, or I'm here. And...I'm here. To the family and dear ones of Meredith, I want to say that I'm so sorry that Meredith is not here any more. I can't know how you feel, but I too have little sisters, and the idea of their suffering and infinite loss terrifies me. It's incomprehensible, it's unacceptable, what you're going through, and what Meredith underwent. [Long pause] I'm sorry all this happened to you and that you'll never have her near you, where she should be. It's not just and never will be.

Finally look at how they responded to the murder. Gary identifies with the person going to gallows, Amanda bravely declares she is entitled to a normal life, that is all just an enormous error:

Remember I told you about The Oldness? And you told me how ugly it was - the oldness, the oldness. I can hear the tumbrel wheels creek. So fucking ugly and coming so close to me. When I was a child… I had a dream about being beheaded. But it was more than just a dream. More like a memory. It brought me right out of the bed. And it was sort of a turning point in my life… Recently it has begun to make a little sense. I owe a debt, from a long time ago. Nicole, this must depress you. I’ve never told anybody of this thing, except my mother the nite I had that nitemare and she came in to comfort me but we never spoke of it after that. And I started to tell you one nite and I told you quite a bit of it before it became plain to me that you didn’t want to hear it. There have been years when I haven’t even thought much of it at all and then something (a picture of a guillotine, a headmans block, or a broad ax, or even a rope) will bring it all back and for days it will seem I’m on the verge of knowing something very personal, something about myself. Something that somehow wasn’t completed and makes me different. Something I owe, I guess. Wish I knew. vs.

Because I felt an affinity towards her, suddenly, in her death, I recognized my own vulnerability. I clung above all to Raffaele, who was a source of reassurance, consolation, availability and love for me. I also trusted the authorities carrying out the investigation, because I wanted to help render justice for Meredith. It was another shock to find myself accused and arrested. I needed a lot of time to accept that reality, of being accused, and redefined unjustly. I was in prison, my photo was everywhere. Insidious, unjust, nasty gossip about my private life circulated about me. Living through this experience has been unacceptable for me. I have trusted above all to the hope that everything will be arranged as it should have been, and that this enormous error about me will be recognized, and that every day that I spend in a cell and in court is one day nearer to my liberty. This is my consolation, in the darkness, that lets me live without despairing, doing my best to continue my life as I always have, in contact with my dear friends and my family, dreaming about the future.

You can stop here, or read the full versions below:

August 3, 1976 from Gary Gilmore

Nothing in my experience, prepared me for the kind of honest open love you gave me. I’m so used to bullshit and hostility, deceit and pettiness, evil and hatred. Those things are my natural habitat. They have shaped me. I look at the world through eyes that suspect, doubt, fear, hate, cheat, mock, are selfish and vain. All things unacceptable, I see them as natural and have even come to accept them as such. I look around the ugly vile cell and know that I truly belong in a place this dank and dirty, for where else should I be? There’s water all over the floor from the fucking toilet that don’t flush right. The shower is filthy and the thin mattress they gave me is almost black, it’s so old. I have no pillow. There are dead cockroaches in the corners. At nite there are mosquitoes and the lite is very dim. I’m alone here with my thoughts and I can feel the oldness. Remember I told you about The Oldness? And you told me how ugly it was - the oldness, the oldness. I can hear the tumbrel wheels creek. So fucking ugly and coming so close to me. When I was a child… I had a dream about being beheaded. But it was more than just a dream. More like a memory. It brought me right out of the bed. And it was sort of a turning point in my life… Recently it has begun to make a little sense. I owe a debt, from a long time ago. Nicole, this must depress you. I’ve never told anybody of this thing, except my mother the nite I had that nitemare and she came in to comfort me but we never spoke of it after that. And I started to tell you one nite and I told you quite a bit of it before it became plain to me that you didn’t want to hear it. There have been years when I haven’t even thought much of it at all and then something (a picture of a guillotine, a headmans block, or a broad ax, or even a rope) will bring it all back and for days it will seem I’m on the verge of knowing something very personal, something about myself. Something that somehow wasn’t completed and makes me different. Something I owe, I guess. Wish I knew.

Once you asked me if I was the devil, remember? I’m not. The devil would be far more clever than I, would operate on a much larger scale and of course would feel no remorse. So I’m not Beelzebub. And I know the devil can’t feel love. But I might be further from God than I am from the devil. Which is not a good thing. It seems that I know evil more intimately than I know goodness and that’s not a good thing either. I want to get even, to be made even, whole, my debts paid (whatever it may take!) to have no blemish, no reason to feel guilt or fear. I hope this ain’t corny, but I’d like to stand in the sight of God. To know that I’m just and right and clean. When you’re this way you know it. And when you’re not, you know that too. It’s all inside of us, each of us - but I guess I ran from it and when I did try to approach it, I went about it wrong, became discouraged, bored, lazy, and finally unacceptable. But what do I do now? I don’t know. Hang myself?

I’ve thought about that for years, I may do that. Hope the state executes me? That’s more acceptable and easier than suicide. But they haven’t executed anybody here since 1963 (just about the last year for legal executions anywhere). What do I do, rot in prison? Growing old and bitter and eventually work this around in my mind to where it reads that I’m the one who’s getting fucked around, that I’m just an innocent victim of society’s bullshit? What do I do? Spend a life in prison searching for the God I’ve wanted to know for such a long time? Resume my painting? Write poetry? Play handball? Eat my heart out for the wondrous love you gave me that I threw away Monday nite because I was so spoiled and couldn’t immediately have a white pickup truck I wanted? What do I do? We always have a choice, don’t we?

I’m not asking you to answer these questions for me, Angel, please don’t think that I am. I have to make my own choice. But anything you want to comment on or suggest, or say, is always welcome.

God, I love you, Nicole.

Amanda's speech in court: (translated from Italian by PMF)

...It would happen sometimes that someone would propose a subject to discuss among us, everyone giving their opinion. I liked to followed these discussions but I was uncomfortable about whether I should participate directly, because I'm not talented for discussions. Often I don't succeed in expressing my convictions, at least verbally right at the moment. In fact, of all my friends, I'm the weakest for this. That's why, jokingly, my friend would usually jump on this, that my character was so peace-loving, and would challenge me with a little sentence: “Stand up for yourself Poindexter”, which means “Defend yourself, grind” [secchiona=someone who studies too hard, too serious]. It was a joke. And inevitably, either I would answer, but the answer coming out of my mouth would get all twisted incomprehensible...incomprehensibly around itself, or, I just didn't succeed in answering at all, because my mind would get blocked and my tongue would get all stuck. I couldn't do the thing that my friend often asked me to do, which was to defend myself. We have to imagine [Figuriamoci se io...not easy to render in English: maybe “You can imagine”] that I'm the weakest person in this room for expressing myself. That's why I ask for patience, because all this that I've prepared are the things that I didn't succeed in saying to you yet. Or better, I find myself in front of you for the second time, but these are the things that I would like to have said already. I ask you for patience because there have been opportunities to speak, but I was of few words. I believe that often words didn't come to me, because I never expected to find myself here, condemned for a crime I didn't do. In these three years, I've learned your language, and I've seen how the procedure goes, but I've never gotten used to this broken life. I still don't know how to face all this [3:00] if not just by being myself, who I've always been, in spite of the suffocating awkwardness. I was wrong to think that there are right or wrong places and moments to say important things. Important things have to be said, and that's all.

The only thing I am really sorry about now is that there are people to whom I should turn, who are not here, but I hope my words will reach them, because I am either locked in prison, or I'm here. And...I'm here. To the family and dear ones of Meredith, I want to say that I'm so sorry that Meredith is not here any more. I can't know how you feel, but I too have little sisters, and the idea of their suffering and infinite loss terrifies me. It's incomprehensible, it's unacceptable, what you're going through, and what Meredith underwent. [Long pause] I'm sorry all this happened to you and that you'll never have her near you, where she should be. It's not just and never will be. If you're not alone when you're thinking of her, because I'm thinking of you, I also remember Meredith, [5:00] and my heart bleeds for all of you. Meredith was kind, intelligent, nice and always available. She was the one who invited me to see Perugia, with her, as a friend. I'm grateful and honored to have been able to be in her company and to have been able to know her.

Patrick? I don't see you. But, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, because I didn't want to wrong you. I was very naïve and really not courageous, because I should have been able to endure the pressure that pushed me to hurt you. I didn't want to contribute to all that you suffered. You know what it means to have unjust accusations imposed on your skin. You didn't deserve what you went through. I hope you'll succeed in finding your peace.

Meredith's death was a terrible shock for me. She was my new friend, a reference point for me here in Perugia. But she was killed. [7:00] Because I felt an affinity towards her, suddenly, in her death, I recognized my own vulnerability. I clung above all to Raffaele, who was a source of reassurance, consolation, availability and love for me. I also trusted the authorities carrying out the investigation, because I wanted to help render justice for Meredith. It was another shock to find myself accused and arrested. I needed a lot of time to accept that reality, of being accused, and redefined unjustly. I was in prison, my photo was everywhere. Insidious, unjust, nasty gossip about my private life circulated about me. Living through this experience has been unacceptable for me. I have trusted above all to the hope that everything will be arranged as it should have been, and that this enormous error about me will be recognized, and that every day that I spend in a cell and in court is one day nearer to my liberty. This is my consolation, in the darkness, that lets me live without despairing, doing my best to continue my life as I always have, in contact with my dear friends and my family, dreaming about the future. [9:06]

Now, I am unjustly condemned, and more aware than ever of this hard and undeserved reality. I still hope for justice, and dream about a future. Even if this experience of three years weighs me down with anguish and fear, here I am, in front of you, more intimidated than ever, not because I'm afraid or could ever be afraid of the truth, but because I have already seen justice go wrong. The truth about me and Raffaele is not yet recognized, and we are paying with our lives for a crime that we did not commit. He and I deserve freedom, like everyone in this courtroom today. We don't deserve the three years that we already paid, and we certainly don't deserve more. I am innocent. Raffaele is innocent. We did not kill Meredith. [10:54] I beg you to truly consider that an enormous mistake has been made in regard to us. No justice is rendered to Meredith or her dear ones by taking our lives away and making us pay for something we didn't do. I am not the person that the prosecution says I am, not at all. According to them, I'm a dangerous, diabolical, jealous, uncaring and violent girl. Their hypotheses depend on this. But I've never been that girl. Never. The people who know me are witnesses of my personality. My past, I mean my real past, not the one talked about in the tabloids, proves that I've always been like this, like I really am, and if all this is not enough, I ask you, I invite you, I ask you to ask the people who have been guarding me for three years. Ask them if I have ever been violent, aggressive or uncaring in front of the suffering that is part of the broken lives in prison. Because I assure you that I'm not like that. I assure you that I have never resembled the images painted by the prosecution. [13:00] How could it be possible that I could be capable of achieving the kind of violence that Meredith suffered? How could it be possible that I could throw myself like that at the opportunity to hurt one of my friends? [?] such a violence, as though it were more important and more natural than all my teaching, all my values, all my dreams and my whole life? All this is not possible. That girl is not me. I am the girl that I have always shown myself to be and have always been. I repeat that I also am asking for justice. Raffaele and I are innocent, and we want to live our lives in freedom. We are not responsible for Meredith's death, and, I repeat, no justice is accomplished by taking our lives away. [Whispers: “okay”] Um, thank you

Words from a murder, repentance vs. innocence

CD-Host — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 14:29:00 +0000

I look around the ugly vile cell and know that I truly belong in a place this dank and dirty, for where else should I be?

vs Raffaele and I are innocent, and we want to live our lives in freedom. We are not responsible for Meredith's death, and, I repeat, no justice is accomplished by taking our lives away.

Gary agrees he is a threat to society; Amanda asserts she has never been a threat:

Eat my heart out for the wondrous love you gave me that I threw away Monday nite because I was so spoiled and couldn’t immediately have a white pickup truck I wanted? vs.

Finally look at how they responded to the murder. Gary identifies with the person going to gallows, Amanda bravely declares she is entitled to a normal life, that is all just an enormous error:

NET Bible upgrade

CD-Host — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 13:56:00 +0000

The NET bible, which is my recommendation for all around best evangelical bible has just done a nice interface upgrade. If you haven't tried them yet or have and like them take a look at the new interface.

http://net.bible.org

NET Bible upgrade

CD-Host — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 13:56:00 +0000

JREF off topic

CD-Host — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 14:54:00 +0000

This is an open thread for comments coming from the James Randi Forum's Amanda Knox discussion. Its purpose to allow off topic materials to float over somewhere.

Please link to a post in the related discussion, when you start a new topic, if you know how. Otherwise I'll try and do it.

_________

JREF off topic

CD-Host — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 14:54:00 +0000

Senator Cantwell & Amanda Knox

CD-Host — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 02:42:00 +0000

One of the people that the Friends of Meredith love to trash is Senator Maria Cantwell. The reason is that she has taken an incredibly strong stand for Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito for a sitting US Senator. She's questioned not just the punishment, which is common but the verdict which is almost unheard of:

“I am saddened by the verdict and I have serious questions about the Italian justice system and whether anti-Americanism tainted this trial. The prosecution did not present enough evidence for an impartial jury to conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that Ms. Knox was guilty. Italian jurors were not sequestered and were allowed to view highly negative news coverage about Ms. Knox. Other flaws in the Italian justice system on display in this case included the harsh treatment of Ms. Knox following her arrest; negligent handling of evidence by investigators; and pending charges of misconduct against one of the prosecutors stemming from another murder trial.

I am in contact with the U.S. Ambassador to Italy and have been since the time of Ms. Knox’s arrest. I will be conveying my concerns to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. I have also been in touch with the Embassy of Italy in Washington, DC. (press release)

Now the argument made against her, is that she made that statement out of ignorance. That she didn't even know two Italians were convicted, hence her claims of anti-Americanism are ridiculous. But, if you clicked on the link to the press release you will see in her description, "Knox stood trial with co-defendant and former Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito." So claims that "she didn't even know that Raffaele Sollecito, an Italian national, was convicted by that same jury" are obviously false.
TJMK demand more details and Senator Cantwell being the gracious person she is offered them:

Dear Professor Snape,

Thank you for contacting me with your thoughts regarding the Amanda Knox case. I appreciate hearing from you on this important issue.

I have serious questions about whether Amanda Knox received a fair trial by an impartial jury. According to some news reports, Italian jurors were not sequestered and were allowed to view highly negative news coverage about Ms. Knox. Additionally, there may have been cross-contamination of evidence due to negligent handling by police investigators.

In this case, as in all cases where US citizens abroad face legal jeopardy, I believe that the U.S. Government should work to ensure that U.S. citizens are treated fairly, given adequate due process, and when appropriate, a fair trial by an impartial tribunal.

If Americans run into trouble while overseas, they should contact American Citizen Services at the nearest U.S. Embassy.

Thank you again for contacting me to share your thoughts on this matter. You may also be interested in signing up for periodic updates for Washington State residents. If you are interested in subscribing to this update, please visit my website at http://cantwell.senate.gov. Please do not hesitate to contact me in the future if I can be of further assistance. (link)

So of course like anyone else who dares speak up for Amanda she is subject to attacks. Peter Quennell in my debate with him regarding her, "The sitting senator (Cantwell) made a fool of herself, and it is a year since her staff shut her up. Hillary Clinton of course brushed her off. For one thing Italian-Americans in Congress are very ticked at the xenophobic attitudes toward Italy being shown. For another the State Department found NOTHING wrong with the process and the trial and anything in a bill would have the whole of Italy in an uproar. Besides there is NO sign the Italian judiciary can be leaned on. Go and ask a certain Mr Berlusconi."

Now lets talk about who Senator Cantwell really is. Is she a foolish woman being led around by her staff whom people casually brush off, or is that just a bunch of nonsense? Maria Cantwell got a degree in public administration and then went to work for the Alan Cranston's primary campaign in 1983. She got involved in local politics and was elected to the Washington House in 1986, had a successful legislative record. She was a sacrificial lamb candidate in a Republican district for the US House in 1992, except she won her seat. As a freshmen congressmen she took strong stands on electronic privacy, and changed national policy with regard to the clipper chip. She running in a Republican district, in a landslide year (1994) almost held her seat.

She left took over an executive position in RealNetworks and became instrumental in some of the very earliest streaming of sporting events ever done. She was an innovator in online music, balancing privacy with marketing, and we owe many of the compromises that have held for the last 15 years to her policies at Real. After leaving Real she used a substantial chunk of the money she had accumulated to fund a Senate campaign without having to accept any donations. She ran for the US Senate in 2000, won her seat and thus along with Senator Stabenow became the very first female candidate to beat an incumbent Senator. Since then she has served a decade in the Senate where she took the lead again on privacy issues, environmental issues (she chairs the Subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries, and Coast Guard ), alternative energy (she chairs the Subcommittee on Energy), and of course technology. In 2006 her opponent Mike McGavick was quite literally running from the Liberty Mutual Group, and one of the main reasons we have healthcare reform today was that she won that election and beat back, at least in this one instance the forces of political corruption.

This is a woman of substantial accomplishment. Amanda Knox is lucky to have such an outstanding Senator and I can't think of any reason her comments should not be treated with the seriousness of a statement by a United States Senator. There is simply no sign that Italian American politicians, like Nancy Pelosi, have anything but affection and camaraderie for Senator Cantwell. Her suggestion about impartial tribunals has been key to international trials for many years, and moving it down from trials of military/political figures to civilians strikes me as an excellent policy and one that is well considered. In short the attacks on Senator Cantwell are pure bunk.

____

See also:

Senator Cantwell & Amanda Knox

CD-Host — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 02:42:00 +0000

“I am saddened by the verdict and I have serious questions about the Italian justice system and whether anti-Americanism tainted this trial. The prosecution did not present enough evidence for an impartial jury to conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that Ms. Knox was guilty. Italian jurors were not sequestered and were allowed to view highly negative news coverage about Ms. Knox. Other flaws in the Italian justice system on display in this case included the harsh treatment of Ms. Knox following her arrest; negligent handling of evidence by investigators; and pending charges of misconduct against one of the prosecutors stemming from another murder trial.

I am in contact with the U.S. Ambassador to Italy and have been since the time of Ms. Knox’s arrest. I will be conveying my concerns to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. I have also been in touch with the Embassy of Italy in Washington, DC. (press release)

Dear Professor Snape,

Thank you for contacting me with your thoughts regarding the Amanda Knox case. I appreciate hearing from you on this important issue.

I have serious questions about whether Amanda Knox received a fair trial by an impartial jury. According to some news reports, Italian jurors were not sequestered and were allowed to view highly negative news coverage about Ms. Knox. Additionally, there may have been cross-contamination of evidence due to negligent handling by police investigators.

In this case, as in all cases where US citizens abroad face legal jeopardy, I believe that the U.S. Government should work to ensure that U.S. citizens are treated fairly, given adequate due process, and when appropriate, a fair trial by an impartial tribunal.

If Americans run into trouble while overseas, they should contact American Citizen Services at the nearest U.S. Embassy.

Thank you again for contacting me to share your thoughts on this matter. You may also be interested in signing up for periodic updates for Washington State residents. If you are interested in subscribing to this update, please visit my website at http://cantwell.senate.gov. Please do not hesitate to contact me in the future if I can be of further assistance. (link)

Mack the Knife, and biblical development

CD-Host — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 05:19:00 +0000

Mack and Jenny

So while I've been on the topic of murder I thought I'd get back to our regular scheduled programming with an analogy regarding the development of the books of the New Testament. The song Mack the knife has an interesting history:

One of the themes I've addressed regularly is how groups other than the proto-orthodox / proto-catholics produced earlier versions of many of the books of the NT. This often is a source of confusion and debate. So I thought I'd give an example from a song that underwent all sorts of diverse development and whose history his fully known. the song Mack the Knife. Here there is no dispute or missing links regarding the history. I have no doubt that Kevin Spacey sang the 2004 version. On the other hand the lyrics, music and style came from the 1959 Bobby Darin version.
Darin’s version picked up its score and lyrics from the 1956 Louis Armstrong version. Armstrong’s lyrics came from the 1954 Blitzstein translation from the German and the score from that came from 1928 Bertolt Brecht lyrics. To Brechts lyrics were originally Kurt Weill’s score, The Ballad of Mackie Messer, written for his wife Lotta Lenya (link to her singing it ). But Armstrong was familiar with the version as abridged by Ernie Kovacs, which had the dark cabaret feel (listen to original Brecht). Going back further the idea for the song came from Harald Paulsen (also in German), and he was modifying a folk tale that was based on a medieval German song whose origins are unknown.

So who wrote Mack the Knife? Clearly the “canonical” version is Darin’s but can I really talk about Bobby Darin as the author while he openly acknowledges his debt to Armstrong? Moreover, if I move fron just considering style and start asking questions about what the song means I need to look at the context, the 1928 Three Penny Opera. But that’s a modified version of the 1728 Beggar’s Opera. Most of the ideas for “Mack the Knife” come from Gay’s ballad opera, and there is a more primitive version of the song there. But that opera’s lyrics were based on Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope’s play in 1716.

Are those the original? Now imagine I asserted that God authored this song, based on historical events. Well the underlying historical events happened in the late 17th century and it was Pope and Swift who would have been inspired. Darin never claimed any sort of special inspiration but Mack the Knife stabilized in the 1950′s with his version. We have hundreds of records involving dozens or artists and million of copies of versions that agree on both lyrics, score from the 1950s and 60s. That doesn’t mean the two and a half centuries prior the song was stable. And this Darin stability ran in both directions with modern German versions show influence from Darin, for example this Dean Baxster, take.

There is no single author. The song evolved, from a variety influences. Earlier versions exist and give us insights. The modern Jazz, English language ballad has a culture but what gives the song its bite are the hints of the earlier cultures.

And this is precisely what is meant when evolution of various biblical books is discussed. For example Bultmann's theory how the legends formed into a saying gospel, the Signs Gospel, which became a proto-John, which evolved towards canonical John. Q and Mark form Ur-Lukas (proto-Luke in the diagram to the left), which migrate towards canonical Luke with Marcion's Luke (Gospel of the Lord) coming before or after. Similarly for Moses books, the first five books of the bible that have multiple strands with alternative theologies. When these notions come up think about how Mack the Knife evolved:
___

Variants on Mack the Knife:

A fun version from 1959 by Dinah Shore & Pearl Bailey showing how free the song became after Darin.
Marianne Faithful does a more traditional piano interpretation. This had no influence but is a delightful version.
Liberace, 1969 does Mack in 5 different styles on piano.
Czech version from 1961, stylized dancing girl version with an eastern european feel
Damia 1931 version which has a Parisian cabaret feel.

Darin / classical versions:

Kevin Spacy doing Darin's Mack the Knife
Ella Fitzgerald a nice smooth version which is well known.
Frank Sinatra 1989 where he acknowledges Darin / Armstrong influence.

Mack the Knife, and biblical development

CD-Host — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 05:19:00 +0000

Mack and Jenny

Variants on Mack the Knife:

A fun version from 1959 by Dinah Shore & Pearl Bailey showing how free the song became after Darin.
Marianne Faithful does a more traditional piano interpretation. This had no influence but is a delightful version.
Liberace, 1969 does Mack in 5 different styles on piano.
Czech version from 1961, stylized dancing girl version with an eastern european feel
Damia 1931 version which has a Parisian cabaret feel.

Darin / classical versions:

Kevin Spacy doing Darin's Mack the Knife
Ella Fitzgerald a nice smooth version which is well known.
Frank Sinatra 1989 where he acknowledges Darin / Armstrong influence.

windowserver.log, Raffaele Sollecito’s alibi witness

CD-Host — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 18:32:00 +0000

In the Massei report there is a ton of wild conjecture that passes for proven fact. In the section dealing with the computer forensics however we run into statements that are reproducibly falsifiable. That is Massei has findings of fact in his report which are not only contrary to literally thousands of pages of documentation published by Apple computer on how their operating systems work, but in fact can be falsified easily with every Macintosh computer sold in the last decade. This is the very height of exculpatory evidence, it is evidence that can be infinitely attested to. It is from an empiricist definition the very definition of a false statement. Now this attack on the computer forensics, may sound like me getting on a high horse and nitpicking. You might say something like "sure Massei is an arrogant buffoon for claiming as a matter of law that he understands OSX better than Apple computer, but he was deciding a murder case not a computer case" and you would be right. But the computer forensics came up for very good reasons. The false forensics were the means by which the police convinced Raffaele to give an alternate alibi to his original one. That is without the computer forensics there is no reason to suppose that Raffaele and Amanda were not in his apartment watching Amelie at 11:00 when the prosecution believes that Meredith Kercher was killed. They have an alibi again and we can go back to trying to decide this case on the facts on not on Mignini's hunch. Moreover, if Raffaele has his 11:00 PM alibi then the prosecution doesn't have to argue their own medical examiner botched the autopsy to get their theory of the timeline to match what they consider the key material evidence. Suddenly we are back to the murder happening at 9:00, Amanda and Raffaele being blocks away, and if they were involved at all only being involved in the clean up. So this is a very big deal. I'm going to do my best to try and make the debate between the prosecution and the defense on the computer forensics understandable, so you can follow as much of this as you can take and at least people have a reference they link off of. The actual documentation submitted is very difficult to read because, IMHO, whoever wrote the documentation is parroting things they heard rather than understanding what they are writing.

The core argument between the prosecution and the defense has been regarding the use of Encase which is a computer forensics tool. Encase was used to interact with Macs, running the OSX operating system on the POSIX level, the stuff common to every UNIX. So the prosecution did not look at anything which is OSX specific, for example the defense objected to the fact that the prosecution only examined the 3 types of timestamps used by POSIX vs. all 5 types of timestamps that OSX supports. The defense argues that there is evidence in some of the OSX files and flags showing signs of human activity, and that these signs are not present in the POSIX things that the prosecution examined. To give you an analogy If I were describing a book in Chinese I might have to talk about its color, its weight, the front cover illustration if there is one, the number of pages. That's a limited amount of information. While if I were talking about a book in English I could talk about its title, the description on the back or dust jacket, other books by the same author. And the defense's argument is that they have found evidence in that additional information proving human activity at the time of the murder.

Getting more specific the defense argues that there is exactly the kind of exculpatory evidence that could have been missed via. inappropriate methodologies in the windowserver.log file. Windowserver.log is part of OSX's NeXTSTEP heritage. On most POSIX systems the sorts of messages in the Windowserver.log file would have been caught at the X11 level, not by the windowserver and thus wouldn't have been logged. Since this is one of the key points in the appeal it is worth answering the questions:

What does the Mac's windowserver do?
What sorts of things does it log?

Take a quick peek at this diagram to the left. You can see basic I/O actions like typing on your keyboard or moving your mouse get dealt with at the lowest level by Kernel drivers these can also basic translations So user hold shift - a - release shift - n - g - e - l - space - f becomes user types "Angel f". Then the system needs context if the system is booting or in some sort of single user mode you don't want to send messages to a complicated GUI. The context determination is done by "Core Services". For hardware actions that are going to require interaction with end user applications, like spreadsheets, web browsers or games the message is passed through to the Windows Server. It then can handle the message itself, which is generally the case with mouse movements; or it can pass the message onto the correct application depending on where various things are on the screen, which is generally the case with keyboard input. Lets see an example of both. Microsoft Windows machines also have window servers and while things don't work quite the same, but close enough for this demonstation.

I want you to grab another window other than this web browser and move your mouse really quickly so that you keep covering and uncovering this line from various angles. Next I'd like you to reload this webpage and have the browser's rendering engine redraw everything. The first kind of redraw was fast. What happened was your window server saw the two windows were going to overlap, had already buffered what the applications wanted in their windows broke everything down into primitives and fed it to the your graphics card. When you changed your mouse direction the window server used the relative eternity of those hundredths of a second to repeat this process and the two windows passed smoothly. The second time we had the application actually redraw everything and let the window server know what was needed. Orders of magnitude slower.

So hopefully I've convinced you:

To be grateful to your window server for the years of eye strain it has saved you from suffering
Why the window server is a very credible witness to a human interaction with a computer. Exactly the sort of process that would know when Raffaele (or another user) was clicking his mouse or banging on his keyboard.

So you might think "perfect, we just ask the WindowServer what it was doing at the time of the murder and we either confirm or refute Raffaele's alibi". Oh if only it was that easy. WindowServer listened to your childhood coach about focusing on this play "keeping your head in the game". It is fast it lives unencumbered by the past, existing in a permanent now. Your obnoxiousness with the mouse and the two windows is forgotten. WindowServer itself is the perfect witness with an amazingly bad case of Alzheimer's. Oh but it does keep a log book a place where it writes down some important stuff, called windowserver.log.

I've highlighted where the Window Server sits on the OS side. This is just like our other picture but with more stuff on it, you still see hardware, kernel, core services, the window server, the application environments and the applications themselves. The point I wanted to make is where this plugs into on the OS side, the Quartz system, if you are a Mac user this is probably not your first time hearing about "Quartz" the part of the OS that handles graphics for applications and hopefully seeing Window Server in this context helps you make the mental shift to thinking of this from the application's perspective. If you start to think in terms of Quartz then you can think of this as the applications make calls to the Window server to draw, resize, hide, and move windows using Quartz graphics primitives. It also handles extraneous interactions like the screen passing over, from the previous example. What you would expect Quartz to do. If you haven't heard of Quartz don't worry about it, The main thing you need to understand is that it sits in the Quartz layer that most applications use to handle the screen. If you look directly above WindowServer, you'll see references to Carbon, Classic... the various applications environments.

Cocoa has the best support for Window Server so lets look at this from Cocoa's perspective rather than the Window Server's as we switch over to the logging.
I've highlighted the NSWindow binding which is where Window Server interactions will occur. You can see it is inside of NSResponder, which makes sense, this is how the system is going to pass events to you as an application that it believes you need to respond to. Conversely creating a Window needs to create a reference with Window Server so it can manage it....

It is this interaction between NSWindow as an abstract binding and WindowServer as an actual entity that will generate log. Anytime for example an application requests something impossible, like a window bigger than the screen it is on, if an applications reports that it has no idea what do with a message that was passed to it, etc... Window Server writes a short message in windowserver.log recording this failure and then "uses its judgement" about how to handle the problem. If you look at your own windowserver.log (if you are on a mac) you'll see that depending on your applications somewhere from every few seconds to every ten minutes something like this happens and a note is recorded. They may seem a bit cryptic but they are designed for the applications programmers to see where and when these times when windowserver had to guess occurred. Apple's documentation for the NSWindow class, discusses in detail what sorts of events specifically will generate log. For example in the section on setBackingType Apple indicates that if buffering is changed after initialization that will generate an error, a log entry in windowserver.log. I don't see any advantage in going another level deep but I hope the discussion above makes it clear what the connection is between NSWindow and Window Server, and why that documentation should be taken as authoritative on Cocoa applications generating windowserver.log entries.

For the other environments:

Carbon the default is to register windows and get messages more or less like the OS9 windowserver unless kOSAModeNeverInteract is set.
Java the interaction happens at the JRE level.
Quartz-wm: handles the interaction for X11 applications.
Quicktime has a lower level primitive that can peer with windowserver (this is complex)
Classic didn't run on Raffaele's computer so we can ignore.

And that's basically it. Most every application uses Quartz, Quartz uses Window Server to manager the windows, Window Server logs all errors or anytime an application doesn't know how to respond to but mostly when they make an invalid request. Common invalid requests are documented. That is the defense's theory and it is fully 100% supported by Apple. I leave it to you whether you consider Apple or Massei/Mignini more credible on what generates log. Needless to say everything in this post is reproducible and verifiable on any Apple computer running OSX.

_

Let me move away for teaching for a second, and do a pure editorial. I've never personally done forensics in a case involving violence; when I've done it has always been theft or fraud or mostly just trying to figure out and reverse the cause of corrupted data that is driving the investigation. That being said a programmer's laptop should be analyzed more like you would a server and less like you would a general end user's. Encase is fine for Amanda or Meredith's laptops had the prosecution not "accidentally" destroyed them. I don't think it is appropriate at all for Raffaele's. Since he was doing a computer science thesis he's a programmer it is going to require a skilled operator to do the investigation things are not going to in most obvious places or setup in the most obvious way and your typical forensic analysis will be wrong. For example the prosecution focuses heavily on cache data, and that is exactly the sort of thing you would typically check on an end user's laptop to look for activity. I agree with the prosecution's thinking. Most end users on a Mac would have their cache's in /Users/[Raf's username]/Library/Caches and /Library/Caches. But on Raf's machine I'd want to check places like /opt/local/var/cache (Apple's Darwinports default cache location), /sw/var/cache (Fink's default cache location) and he might even have a personal one like ~/caches. Encase won't check for those sorts of caches and thus the investigators won't find these in a cache's report. I agree with Raffaele's defense's intuitively, professionally, the examination the defense argues should have occurred, is exactly what I would have done were I investigating. I do consider this to have been a mistake.

Moreover, I'll say it is the sort of mistake that a forensic accountant / examiner is likely to make; so at least on this point I don't see evidence of an intent to mislead the court. I think the prosecution is innocently incorrect. I hate to take Mignini off the hook ever, but I don't see signs of the prosecution deliberately lying on this point.

There is one another bad news for the defense. Raffaele being a programmer cuts both ways. Because he programs we can assume he knows or can easily learn how to have programs generate events that look like interactions with hardware. He also knows how to change the windowserver.log file. Which means on his system we have to consider the contents of these files less definitive than they otherwise would be. I'd want to look at samples of his code from that time to get a grasp on whether the computer is telling me is likely to be true at worst or highly likely to be true at best. I would scratch definite however in either direction.

windowserver.log, Raffaele Sollecito’s alibi witness

CD-Host — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 18:32:00 +0000

What does the Mac's windowserver do?
What sorts of things does it log?

To be grateful to your window server for the years of eye strain it has saved you from suffering
Why the window server is a very credible witness to a human interaction with a computer. Exactly the sort of process that would know when Raffaele (or another user) was clicking his mouse or banging on his keyboard.

Carbon the default is to register windows and get messages more or less like the OS9 windowserver unless kOSAModeNeverInteract is set.
Java the interaction happens at the JRE level.
Quartz-wm: handles the interaction for X11 applications.
Quicktime has a lower level primitive that can peer with windowserver (this is complex)
Classic didn't run on Raffaele's computer so we can ignore.

Amanda’s confession

CD-Host — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 13:07:00 +0000

I can picture the scene clearly. Jean-Paul's bath is room temperature. I could hear Simonne, his wife, in the kitchen. She was using the stove to boil up more of Jean-Paul's concoctions for his bath and at the same time make the 4:00 supper, they liked to eat early when Jean-Paul was too ill to entertain. In the room I could smell the vinegar coming off the head bandage he was wearing, it was oppressive and mixed with the smell of rotten flesh it was hard to stay in the room with him. There was too much instruction I needed to get, so I tried and swallow the bile and focus on the work. Visually it was difficult as well. The afternoon he had a rash which looked awful on the right of his chest; it was blistering and scabbing. There were a few places in the rash where the skin had been peeled off. Jean-Paul knew better than to scratch his body, he was already covered with scars, but sometimes the pain the itching was too bad. His skin was like tissue sitting on-top of oil on top of ketchup. When he finally did scratch, it instantly tore and the smell of the puss made the visuals worse.

I was shocked when Charlotte walked in the room. Simonne would have announced her at the door. I wondered if she had just barged through the front door or Simmone didn't want to come up with Charlotte. Charlotte was a gorgeous woman, but the grief had aged her terribly since I'd seen her 30 months before. Her blond hair peaked out from her bonnett. She hadn't combed it that day, which was quite unusual.   She flew into the room. Charlotte walking right up to Jean-Paul, an undressed man, an undressed man not her husband. I couldn't believe what I was watching. Jean-Paul was less shocked then me, he reacted more quickly, sensed the danger, and started to bring the board he was writing on up like a shield. He was translating another famous English work, his English was so strong, he had this flair for capturing the metaphors that the English lace their writing with and could find just the perfect correspondence in French. That's what I was thinking about as I watched the board rise and those pages fall into the bath. I know that sounds odd but while I admired Jean-Paul I never really liked him.

It was then that I noticed the dagger Charlotte brought out from the money purse in the front of her dress. I doubt Jean-Paul recognized but I knew it was the daily wear dagger of Restif, her brother, her dead brother, he had died in the September massacre with much of Charlotte's family. Because Jean-Paul was still seated she had too much leverage, as she reached the tub she shifted her weight onto the board and it dropped back towards the bath trapping his hands in its fall. She used the blister on Jean-Paul's chest like a bulls-eye and targeted his heart. Her aim was solid, and the dagger pierced deep. She didn't get caught on the ribs, I've often wondered if she had she practiced on hogs?

She glanced at me, a smile. I was actually happy to see her smile, those blue eyes, with light in them again.   And then I thought of the irony. Five years ago, Charlotte even though she was little more than a petty aristocrat, would never have smiled at a commoner about a shared activity she would have considered that act grossly inappropriate. Now in her last truly free moment I saw that "égalité, fraternité" had become so much a part of her that she was untroubled sharing an emotion with one of a lower rank. She saw our shared humanity.

I suspect she missed the heart, but in Jean-Paul's condition that didn't matter. It took him almost ten minutes to die. I could hear the air from his punctured lung hissing with each breath. The noxious chemicals from the bath that he used for his skin kept the blood flowing faster. I don't know if he would he have bled out anyway, without the chemicals but I suspect he likely would have. Simmone entered and wept, and wailed. It was amazing how much she loved him, despite how visually and olfactory unpleasant it was to be in his presence,  that her care these years hadn't been just duty. I realized she always saw the marvelous doctor from the 70's and not the withered politician.

Simmone tried to help him but she had never been in the army, she didn't know what to do. I did, know what to do, but I've mentioned all that was going through my mind. Also I'm not sure it would have worked, so I followed Simmone's lead of laying him flat on the ground and let Jean-Paul bleed out.   It was a mercy when the hissing stopped. In his final moment, Jean-Paul looked at me accusingly, knowing I hadn't really tried. I shrugged, I loved him, but I never liked him. I admired what he did, and considered him a monster. I had often thought I was a terrible hypocrite for assisting him. But over the last year, I had seen his physical pain further twist his already damaged soul, this man had done much to damage our revolution. That his final glance would be an accusation for me and not a comfort for Simmone proved Charlotte had been right. Georges, Maximilian were there to take over for him.   If Charlotte thought this was worth the gallows for her, I'd honor her death with his. And that unforced smile of Charlotte's proved that Jean-Paul's life had accomplished its mission.

_____

Amanda Knox was asked to imagine the death of Meredith Kercher and provided some details about herself in the kitchen. That's not a confession to having been present to the murder, anymore than my little terrible attempt at fiction is a confession to having been present for the death of Marat. It is not hard to picture a murder when asked. That is not a confession and the use of the word "confession" to describe a vision she was asked to construct is frankly dishonest in the extreme.

It is fair to say those statements have a ring of authenticity too them. That is very different though than a confession.

Amanda’s confession

CD-Host — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 13:07:00 +0000

Italy the EU and the international standards of justice

CD-Host — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 17:18:00 +0000

Why have trails at all? What's the point? Prosecutors are usually right, police investigate. If the police knew they were not handing suspects off to a court but rather directly summary punishment / execution they would even be more careful. We already have a grand jury system to avoid the worst abuses. So why bother with the expense and time of a trial?

I want you to think if you really object to extrajudicial punishment. Is it OK to punish the probably guilty or do you need the virtual certainty of beyond a reasonable doubt? Julian Assange's lawyers were arguing in a British court last week that there was a serious threat of Assange disappearing into the USA's now fully functioning extrajudicial punishment system. Prior to 2001 the idea that the USA would be OK with running an extrajudicial punishment system in a systematic large scale manner was unthinkable. I'm still deeply ashamed that I agree with Julian Assange that there is no guarantee once he is in US custody of a fair trial. The world has started treating the USA like Egypt when it comes to criminal justice because we have started to act like Egypt.

The country that has most effectively led the charge against the USA on violating international norms of justice is Italy. Italy forms the backbone of the EU's opposition to the death penalty (link). The advertisements in the upper left hand corner of this post are by Benetton, a series of people on death row in America whose faces are being used to promote their clothing. The point of this image is to demonstrate how mainstream opposition to the death penalty is in Italy, that being associated with the anti-death penalty movement is like an American company wanting to be associated with Nascar.

But what is the moral basis of opposition to the death penalty in a foreign country? Italy makes the standard arguments: lack of deterrence, unfairness, inevitability of error, barbarity of methodology, cost but those are essentially domestic arguments. There they attack the death penalty for undermining human dignity and lacking deterrent value and the irreparable harm that it causes. But if you think about it there is underlying idea that trials should have a universal moral legitimacy beyond the scope of the governed. That governments should not engage in the naked use of power, they have physical possession of the citizen of another country and thus the right to with them what they will. In other words it is irrelevant to the United States whether Italy thinks our justice system is moral or immoral unless there is some underlying basis of morality that needs to be appealed to. They are one of the primary authors of UN 62/149, which calls for an immediate moratorium on the death penalty precisely because they do believe in an underlying moral basis for criminal justice that is subject to international oversight.

The EU and Italy in particular have argued forcefully that

The Death penalty
Torture
Detention without trial, Guantanamo Bay
Renditions (kidnapping)

undermine our -- with "our" being the west, the civilized world, the member states of the United Nations... -- shared sense of justice. But what basis do they have for these complaints if they hold that people captured by Italians should be subject to arbitrary Italian law without any international review or input?

Now lets return to the original question about why have trials. In the 12th century Henry II, King of England, was trying to centralize power. One of the ways to do this was to develop a direct relationship between the governing authority (the King's judges) and the people (the jury) that bypassed the local officials (the sheriff). So Sheriffs would have the authority to execute, judges ruled on matters of law (guaranteeing the King's control of the law) and juries ruled on matters of fact. The jury guaranteed the King's laws were applied in a way that the people approved of, preventing a popular resentment from building up against the national government which the local government could exploit. Thus by empowering the people as a check on their local governments, the King enhanced his own power and created a system which had legitimacy at every level. For a person to be convicted and punished: the local government, national government and people need to agree.

And this established a basic concept in law that the punishment of offenders needs to have popular consent. It should be noted that Henry II's reforms was the point our system forked from the Inquisitorial system, the system that exists in Italy today. Italy accepts the underlying morality of Henry's reforms if not the specific mechanism (the jury) . For example Italy certainly considers Israeli trials of Palestinians to lack legitimacy because they arise out of an "occupation government" that is to say a government that lacks the consent of the governed. Italy's attacks on Israeli justice point to another example of where Italy as a matter of policy holds that criminal law is in some sense universal and not just an arbitrary use of power by the state, and moreover needs to be.

So given that, what should Italy's response be when they've held a trial and Americans find the evidence wanting? This is a big deal, normally the punishment not the actual guilt is in question, so this is an unusual case. Yesterday, a poster on my board showed me the actual forensic methodology used to disqualify Raffaele Sollecito's alibi and there is no doubt that the methodology is highly questionable (see windowserver.log, Raffaele Sollecito's alibi witness for an extended discussion). That Raffaele should be doing two decades in prison based on is a travesty, it is quite simply morally repulsive. I do not see how Italy can claim to believe in universal standards of justice and behave like this. Every time I learn more about this case I become further disgusted with Italy's handling of it. I don't think I'm alone in the effects of education.

This trial reminds in many ways of Mumia Abu-Jamal, an activist with a domestic terrorist organization called MOVE conviced for the 1981 murder of Daniel Faulkner who developed a widespread following almost immediately that became a major political cause in 1984. Since the early 1980s there have been movies about his conviction pro and con continuing today (as those links show). Italy itself is on Mumia's side (see item Y). In Mumia's case I thought he was guilty and was rather opposed to MOVE though at this point I think he's reformed and I'd have no problem with his release. Amanda is well on her way to achieving this same kind of long term controversy. The parades the films the.... all attacking their justice system all undermining Italy's ability to be a leader on human rights. You would think they would want a lot in exchange for losing their moral authority. I don't understand is what Italy possible hopes to gain from his.

The "best case" for Italy is that Amanda does her time. Interest in her case wanes. She emerges a hardened criminal, no longer the girl with the naive faith in justice, no longer the girl who couldn't bring herself to even look at the crime scene photos. Now she seen people sliced dozens if not hundreds of times, she has seen done far worse than anything Meredith Kercher was involved in. Since Italy has a shortage of prison beds to keep this "murder" in prison means they have had to not hold many other prisoners. To simplify lets say over the course of 25 years say a dozen Albanian prostitutes that rob/stab customers. So they have an extra 200 stabbings to show for their detention. Destroying Amanda and driving their domestic crime rate up is the best case for Italy as far as I can tell. If someone wants to propose a better case feel free.

Another possible case, is she dies in prison or is seriously injured, particularly if it is at the hands of a guard. High security prisons are not low risk environments so this is a very likely outcome. If interest has waned then this really doesn't matter very much, most likely as her death would be a passing footnote. If interest has not wained she becomes a martyr. She's remembered forever as the image to the left. Seattle unquestionable severs their sister city relationship with Perugia (link). Italy has no moral authority on criminal justice issues for a generation, the EU move to suspend the death penalty is over. And that's assuming that there are no cases involving Italian nationals around the time of her death in Washington or Oregon courts so that things heat up even further. The same sort of thing would happen if the court of appeals reverses on premeditation and Amanda and Raffaele get life. These are the scenarios where there could be real meaningful blowback for Italy and its the sort of thing the state is not well equipped to avoid. The US still suffers substantial blowback from an assassination we were involved in 1953.

A more reasonable possibility is that the court of appeals is sane enough to realize what happens when the American girl is still in jail for over a decade more than the rapist on a rape murder and gives her a sentence reduction that gets her sentence down around Guede's or shorter. At worse they both get paroled after about 8 years in jail, 2015 or so. There is lingering resentment but the issue can die down. People like myself who think she's most likely guilty of something like manslaughter, aggravated sexual assault or obstruction can live with an 8 year or less sentence. While obviously I support immediate release due to severe prosecutorial and judicial misconduct, this would be a very sane outcome that's easy to achieve at this point. A way to backoff from a train wreck that I would urge the court to consider.

And those are the scenarios with no upside. Normally there isn't much upside to imprisonment, states detain dangerous people so they don't reoffend. The argument being that these prisoners pose an ongoing threat. The people to whom Amanda posses the most threat, assuming she were guilty, are the people the city she is likely to return to, Seattle. The people of Seattle are eager and enthusiastic for her return. They clearly understand and embrace the risk. The downside of release simply does not apply in this case. Even from a purely pragmatic standpoint the plusses and minus for Italy seem unbalanced in continuing their persecution.

On the FOM side, I'm running into essentially a different group of authoritarians than usual. Usually the authoritarians I deal with tend to see a group of church leaders as being essentially infallible, truly wonderful people motivated only by the best interests of all concerned, people who by default should be trusted. Now those people tend to have a fairly skeptical view of the government and the courts. They quite often have seen the IRS engage in abuses and have enough connection with the working and lower classes to have seen the innocent get convicted in traditional courts all the time. Many of the people who believe most fervently in church discipline do so because they believe the state has become utterly morally corrupt. If they are authoritarian towards the state it is usually mainly in theory not in practice, Gary North felt free to talk about the Obama inauguration with an essay, The Audacity of Hype.

This new group seems to view courts in essentially the same way. Their argument is that we as individuals have no right to question the details of the court cases. A good example was when I had a problem with a statement in Massei. The guilt side made sarcastic comments about Raffaele's defense, the innocent side provided me with more information about how the analysis was conducted. One side argues for blind faith the other for reasoned discourse. The forensic case is key for me, because it proves that even when we know that some of the findings in Massei, are easily demonstrably falsifiable the persons who support guilt are unmoved to change their opinion regarding that fact, not about the entire case but about the finding. In 1519 Luther stood against this very attitude at the Diet of Worms and held that all men were bound by conscience to judge the good by conscience, by reason and by divine law. While I would never compare myself to Luther I would urge all readers to consider his words with regard to the blind submission to Massei as the final arbitrar of truth:

Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. God help me. Amen. Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise.

_____

See also:

Brazil / Italy debate over Ceseare Battisti (link)
Politics and Inerrancy another foray into the connection between religious fundamentalism and support for right wing ideology.
The economist has been critical of Italy's justice system over the years considering it an underfunded, slow and inefficient mess. (sample editorial)

Italy the EU and the international standards of justice

CD-Host — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 17:18:00 +0000

The EU and Italy in particular have argued forcefully that

The Death penalty
Torture
Detention without trial, Guantanamo Bay
Renditions (kidnapping)

Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. God help me. Amen. Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise.

_____

See also:

Brazil / Italy debate over Ceseare Battisti (link)
Politics and Inerrancy another foray into the connection between religious fundamentalism and support for right wing ideology.
The economist has been critical of Italy's justice system over the years considering it an underfunded, slow and inefficient mess. (sample editorial)
An article published later (Oct 3, 2011) talking about how Perugia has been negatively effected by this case: Perugia fights sex-and-drugs image.

Evidence and the very unlikely

CD-Host — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 16:13:00 +0000

OK strange question, how much evidence would you need to prove that an human alien hybrid killed Meredith Kercher? Assume that were the prosecution's theory. Assume they had picked someone up and they believed that person was a human alien hybrid. Assume they were using his alien traits to explain evidence, like he had been able to get through the window because hybrids can jump 12 feet easy, he hadn't left any evidence because hybrids can make their fingers not secrete oils.... This was the prosecution's theory and you as a juror had to rule on the case. What sort of standard should you hold them to? You might stay that's a really stupid question, and your reaction is precisely where I want your head at, so bear with me please.

Is it impossible that human alien hybrids exist or just very very unlikely? You might say impossible. OK what if there were families of human alien hybrids known to exist, towns which people could visit full of them. Some had undergone analysis in various biological laboratories and the results were public. You even knew people, who had met some and see them change shape. Then you might say, "well then yes I'd believe in them". In other words, its not impossible its just a question that there is nowhere near enough evidence to believe in something so unlikely. Very much like Russell's Teapot. There are lots of good reasons to believe that an animal like the platypus didn't exist, when it was first described and for several years there were debates when it was discovered if it was a fraud or a fluke. But the evidence overwhelmed the skepticism. And I think that this is a similar case, you don't really mean "impossible" what you mean instead is highly improbably, that is to say something for which you are going to need lots of high quality evidence.

So given any murder there is a certain percent chance it was done by a human alien hybrid. There is a certain chance it was done by random quantum effects. There is a certain chance is it done by a monkey like The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Those are doubts in any case, they just aren't reasonable doubts, because they are so unlikely. But remember this situation is different, this is the prosecutor's theory. Which means the prosecution not only has to prove the crime but because they are using this theory to explain away the counter evidence like the 12 foot jump via. the alien hybrid theory they actually have to provide enough evidence to justify the existence of alien human hybrids. And of course you are beginning to see where I'm going; while Mignini and Massei's theories may not seem up there with alien human hybrids they are still incredibly unlikely. So lets work this hypothetical a bit before jumping back to the main case.

There is one more condition. Maybe even a tremendous amount of evidence doesn't cut it. The possibility that the pieces of evidence correlate and thus all or most of it is together wrong, that your analysis is wrong, that my analysis is wrong vastly overwhelm the likelihood of those scenarios. One of the things that will strike you immediately if you read old trials is the sorts of scenarios that are considered likely or unlikely. Something like an insect disease leading to a local significant shift in a particular insect population (like a bee) leading to a crop failure if it is considered at all, and not in that language, would be treated as unlikely while witchcraft or direct divine intervention are likely explanations for this natural phenomena. Its hard to account for these variables but they exist with most evidence. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, bu Kuhn talks about how science deals with the incredibly unlikely. Once it shows up it provides it disproves the paradigm of probably, which requires a paradigm shift, and that shift is undertaken only when the evidence becomes truly overwhelming.

Just to put this in perspective lets do a quick through experiment. Assume you have to decide between just two options A and B (with B being guilty). Assume that you have pieces of evidence each of which is 70% accurate and fully independent, to help in picking between A and B. If A and B are equally likely, and your standard of evidence was more likely than not you would just count up the evidence and side without whatever letter had more "evidence" behind it. For most everyday decisions even 2 pieces of evidence would be 90% and thus good enough. If OTOH you standard was "beyond a reasonable doubt" say 98% and A and B were still both equally likely, you would only need to go up 4 pieces of evidence. So this 70% evidence is great stuff for making day to day judgements.

But what if A and B weren't equally likely? Assume that B were something like a human alien hybrid conjecture and A were something like "drug killing, gang killing, robbery, x-boyfriend, honor killing combined" another words a grab bag of the alien human hybrid didin't do it. Lets say that the one in ten billion murders at most are caused by an alien human hybrid. So to meet the reasonable doubt standard we would need B to be 500 billion times more likely based on evidence alone than A. Which is to say if we have to pick between A and B we are often going to pick A even when most evidence points to B. If it were a pure 70/30 shot then it would take about 23 pieces of non correlating evidence each agreeing, to make the odds less than 1 in 500 billion.

Ah but happens if I have good quality evidence? Say 98% evidence like a videotape of my alien human hybrid or a repeatable blood sample that shows him his cells producing a silicon based sugar. 1 piece of evidence for reasonable guilt if A and B are equally likely and only 6 for human alien hybrid. So its a linear factor of 4. So if you think one of the pieces of evidence is overwhelming, certainly not as good as a video of the crime. Go ahead and count it twice.

But here is where it gets tricky notice I keep saying independent. What if they are not? Well if they are even slightly dependent on one another that doubles the amount of evidence, moderate and I'm up around 100 pieces of the alien human hybrid. And If you think about it that feels about right. You would probably need about 100 anecdotes to believe this murder was committed by an alien human hybrid. That is to say you believe this evidence correlated about 50% there is some overlap.

Ah.... but you might say. "Wait a minute, CD! Nothing in the Meredith Kercher murder theory is as unlikely as an alien human hybrid. People get into squabbles all the time and someone ends up dead. Domestic violence is frighteningly common not uncommon". And you would be right. You would also be rewriting the prosecution's theory of the case. And boy is it tempting. Their theory of the case is tremendously stupid. It requires us to believe multiple highly low probability things.

Its hard to know exactly what is needed to prove the case and what is rank speculation. But just starting on a particularly bad part of the report:

Meredith Kercher, returning home around nine in the evening, and without
anything in mind other than having a rest (the night before, Halloween, she had
stayed up very late) and doing some studying. Like her English friends, she thought
she had a class at 10 the following morning, and would not have had any intention
of acquiescing to the demands, held to be of an erotic-sexual nature by what has
already been observed, of whoever entered her room.
Besides, she felt attached to Giacomo Silenzi, with whom she had just started an
intimate relationship, and she was serious young woman with a strong
temperament.

How would you know what's on her mind as she is returning home? What do you think you are writing a novel?
Do we really know enough about Meredith's sex life to know whether her 10:00 am class would or would not have had any impact on whether she wanted to have sex. Heck there would have been many many years without sex if I had to wait till days I could sleep in till noon.
How do you know she felt attached with Giacomo Silenzi? We know she had just started boffing the pot grower downstairs. Maybe she just liked his pot? Maybe she liked his availability. Maybe she liked the fact that Amanda and Laura had both wanted him and she just wanted to be queen bee?
And even the statements themselves, "serious young woman with serious temperament" -- Who is dating a pot dealer and helping him grow the stuff
Most people when striking up a conversation with a girl hint around the erotic sexual part a bit. It might not have been entirely clear.

And on and on and on goes the rank speculation needed to make this murder work out. And mind you this is key. This is paragraph is the evidence that Meredith wouldn't have opened the door and thus someone else let Rudy in. The fact that someone else let Rudy is the evidence that Amanda had to fake the break in. Amanda having to fake the break in is one of the key pieces of evidence that Amanda is the murder.

Reading this "evidence" does it sound sufficient to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Meredith didn't say:

sure come on in lets smoke some weed and then I gotta go to class or
sure my boyfriends away I'd love to play tonight
or maybe going with different theory, a food theory
you know I'm already getting sick of pastas, stracciatella I'm totally in the mood for some boiled cabbage, maybe some chips. I'd love some company!

We are talking a guy who played basketball outside her school and hung with her boyfriend. This is called the Massei conclusions report, perhaps the Massei wild guesses report would be more fitting? So lets assume its 80% likely that Meredith didn't open the door herself for Rudy and assuming she didn't open the door that its 80% likely that Rudy had someone let him and given that 80% chance that the someone had to be one of the 4 girls that no one else had a key to a rental apartment that they had had made over the last decade and 80% that given all this Amanda would have realized she needs to fake a break-in.... well the whole scenario then is only 1 in 3. And the same way the evidence adds the rank speculation takes the odds down and down and down. And by way of example, if I used 60% for that the chances would have been just 7.75%.

So you go through the Massei report counting conjectures. How many of these 80% do you need to make the case. 20, 100,1000? At 20 its less than 1% likely that things came down the way Massei speculates. At 100 you are around the one in ten billion we used as a placeholder for the human alien hybrid. That's the power of compounding. It doesn't sound crazy because it is a huge collection of more likely than not theories strung together. But just multiple them out and you get something incredibly unlikely. To prove this kind of a sequence, in practice you would need to:

Collect evidence
Construct a fixed single sequence sequence
Collect evidence independent of your evidence in step (1) to confirm / disconfirm your sequence

otherwise you need an astronomical amount of evidence to show you aren't just fitting a conjecture to the facts rather than confirming a conjecture with facts.

The fact is Massei has no idea what happened, because an investigation was never done (see my article on prosecutorial abuse as to why it was never done). They think they probably have the right people and the rest of the report covers:

a) Stuff they did investigate
b) Wild conjectures to tie those scattered pieces of evidence into a case.

And he does hit his conjectures to the facts at hand. In the pages on the stab wounds and their order he has a high quality autopsy and thus lots of facts he has to fit to. On the what Meredith was thinking as she approached her door he has essentially none so he is free to assert anything he wants.

There certainly is enough to indict Amanda based on the Massei report, but to convict? Play a game. Read the Massei report. Each time you hit a piece of evidence cancel out 2 conjectures of his, which is being really generous with the evidence. And that's not counting the fact of how silly some of the conjectures are.

And then there are places where the evidence is just wrong. I'm not an expert on DNA, one can see extensive evaluation of the evidence all over the web and I don't have the background to know enough to evaluate it. But this line is different:

Encase forensic analysis software determined, for such time period, that the only files created (last created) or written (last written) were generated, automatically, either by the computer’s operating system or the Firefox web-browser within its own cache: being files generated at regular intervals.

I'm going to get a bit techie for this paragraph, explain how this is total nonsense, feel free to skip it as just an example. I'd like you if you are on a mac or a linux box to open up a terminal right now and type the phrase man touch. If you are stuck on a windows box here is what you would have seen link. Touch is a program designed to change timestamps because it is such a common activity. Changing those dates are standard Unix activities, I have tons of scripts that modify those dates to things other than their defaults that run on my machine; for example when I push data to the TIVO I script changes to mtime so that it sorts the way I want it on my TV. Mac's internally have 5 timestamps they associate with files: createDate, contentModDate, attributeModDate, accessDate and backupDate. accessDate implements atime, attributeModDate implements ctime and contentModDate implements mtime. The fsCatalogInfo attribute for a file in objective-C (the default language for system's programming on an Apple) has those five as variables (i.e. for example fsCatalogInfo.createDate), which is to say this is not some deeply hidden attribute, Apple invested money in making these timestamps alterable because programs need to do that so frequently. Other than those 5 attributes there is no place any time information is stored about file manipulation. You can in 3 seconds have a file on your mac that was last modified 10 years before you owned the computer, heck before it was created as far as the filesystem is concerned. And there is no secondary record of these changes. With an average user timestamps are obviously good evidence. By definition average users are people who think about how to work their computer not how their computer works. But Raffaele is a computer science graduate who is doing a degree in genetic programming, he's spending all day thinking abut how computers work. For him, the timestamp mean nothing more than the times he choose to assign to files. He's probably 10x the programmer I am, I'm way over the hill, he's in his prime. If this were Amanda's computer I'd think "determined that the only files created" was too strong I'd weaken it to something like "indicates that most likely the only files created". For Raffaele's I'd say "a weak easily modifiable record which at the time of analysis showed..." is a fair characterization. [note added 1/12/11: Rose below translated from Italian what they actually used. I'm leaving this unmodified for continuity, but the actual forensic method was much less reliable than the one I assumed they used]

I'm nitpicking the timestamp paragraph, because that is one where I'm not quoting other experts. I know for a fact that Massei is indicating that something that is only likely as an absolute certainty. This is at least for me a perfect example of the basic problem with the Massei report, it replaces possible with likely, likely with almost certainly true and almost certainly true with tautologically true. He takes weak evidence and argues that it shows things way beyond what it does in fact show. Please google everything in these two paragraphs, check that everything I'm saying about timestamps is absolutely true. Everyone does this with the inconsequential, "I'm sure I put gas in the car" as shorthand for "I'm usually pretty good about filling it once it gets below half full, and 3 days I remember it was less than 1/2..." But if my job depended on it, I'd go out and check the car and I'd still fill it up just in case the gas gauge wasn't working right. If someone's life depended on it, I'd try and fill it and I'd make sure to have a spare gas container in the trunk. And that's the level of certainty I would want before locking someone away for a quarter century, beyond a reasonable doubt. And that is what the law requires.

And then ask yourself did the forensic analysis really determine what happened on that computer or did it just provide a fallible piece of evidence about what happened on that computer? And if it didn't then Raffaele can be telling the truth about what he and Amanda did during the time of the murder. This little forensics was considered a major blow to their alibi. And while you are thinking about that, read the report for yourself and go find yourself a dozen example like this of these unbelievable leaps of pure conjecture. In the end there is one key question you absolutely must be able to answer before taking the awesome responsibility of destroying 3 children:

What lethal acts do we know for certain that Amanda Knox performed?
What lethal acts do we know for certain that Raffaele Sollecito performed?
What lethal acts do we know for certain that Rudy Guede performed?

And I have yet to hear an answer to that question.

_____

See also:

A similar argument was made by Raffaele's attorney's in his appeal (link), translated in the comments to this post here.

Evidence and the very unlikely

CD-Host — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 16:13:00 +0000

Meredith Kercher, returning home around nine in the evening, and without
anything in mind other than having a rest (the night before, Halloween, she had
stayed up very late) and doing some studying. Like her English friends, she thought
she had a class at 10 the following morning, and would not have had any intention
of acquiescing to the demands, held to be of an erotic-sexual nature by what has
already been observed, of whoever entered her room.
Besides, she felt attached to Giacomo Silenzi, with whom she had just started an
intimate relationship, and she was serious young woman with a strong
temperament.

How would you know what's on her mind as she is returning home? What do you think you are writing a novel?
Do we really know enough about Meredith's sex life to know whether her 10:00 am class would or would not have had any impact on whether she wanted to have sex. Heck there would have been many many years without sex if I had to wait till days I could sleep in till noon.
How do you know she felt attached with Giacomo Silenzi? We know she had just started boffing the pot grower downstairs. Maybe she just liked his pot? Maybe she liked his availability. Maybe she liked the fact that Amanda and Laura had both wanted him and she just wanted to be queen bee?
And even the statements themselves, "serious young woman with serious temperament" -- Who is dating a pot dealer and helping him grow the stuff
Most people when striking up a conversation with a girl hint around the erotic sexual part a bit. It might not have been entirely clear.

sure come on in lets smoke some weed and then I gotta go to class or
sure my boyfriends away I'd love to play tonight
or maybe going with different theory, a food theory
you know I'm already getting sick of pastas, stracciatella I'm totally in the mood for some boiled cabbage, maybe some chips. I'd love some company!

Collect evidence
Construct a fixed single sequence sequence
Collect evidence independent of your evidence in step (1) to confirm / disconfirm your sequence

Encase forensic analysis software determined, for such time period, that the only files created (last created) or written (last written) were generated, automatically, either by the computer’s operating system or the Firefox web-browser within its own cache: being files generated at regular intervals.

What lethal acts do we know for certain that Amanda Knox performed?
What lethal acts do we know for certain that Raffaele Sollecito performed?
What lethal acts do we know for certain that Rudy Guede performed?

And I have yet to hear an answer to that question.

_____

See also:

A similar argument was made by Raffaele's attorney's in his appeal (link), translated in the comments to this post here.

Amanda Knox and Prosecutorial Abuse

CD-Host — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

One of the few things both sides of this case agree is that it breaks your heart. If you take a look at the 3 pictures for the 3 articles you are immediately struck. The picture for the first article shows Amanda in her first year of prison: a joyful kid full of life and spunk, a mischievous little girl flirtish looking at the camera. She's so obviously full of hope, she can't imagine that everything won't work out in the end. You can see in those eyes the sort of girl to run off to Italy on a whim and immerse herself in the language, the people the culture for the sheer joy of discovery and adventure. Probably the same way she rock climbed right before the incident or climbed trees a few years before that. People were offended, but I think jealous is a better word. How dare she make it to 20 with that profound childlike joy fully intact?

The picture for the second article is the same girl experiencing fear. There is a hunted look in her eyes. She is still in denial that Mignini would be able to keep her in his box for decades but no denial about his intent. The carefree girl is gone replaced with a murder suspect trying to navigate the minefield of being a prisoner within a system that really does intend her harm, made all the worse by the careless errors of the carefree girl of the first picture. The first Amanda was immature the second picture is no longer a child but not yet a woman.

The picture for this article is shocking. The eyes are dead, passive all hope has been extinguished. Those are the eyes of an old woman ready to pass from this life to the hereafter they should not be the eyes of a girl the age of a college senior. Its hard to know whether there is anything left to save in that girl anymore, or just enough left to bury. 3 years of prison has destroyed her. All I can see: hopelessness, depression, fatalism.

When I started this series I just figured I'd grab a picture form 2008, 2009 and 2010 respectively. When I saw what they looked like I had trouble not bursting into tears, a maudlin emotionalism that is totally unlike me. Life should do this to people over decades, or better yet not at all. To be able to see the eyes and the face change in pictures which show no sign of aging, to see this happen to someone deliberately so quickly, is devastating. It really bring home the monstrous evil of what's going on in Italy, and since American prisons are worse here as well. Early in the life of this blog I wrote a piece (link) on the mechanism of real and false guilt and how church discipline was used to create this sort of effect, the analogy being to real imprisonment; in the case of that piece in a 1930s Soviet Prison. I think back on that piece now, in the one sense how apt the analogy is in the haunted looks I've seen in the people I've worked with tossed out of their communities for being gay or being disobedient wives or starting to question whether the leader was really right. But the real thing is so much worse than the analogy.

The justification offered for killing Amanda's soul and leaving behind a zombie is of course is the picture to the left of this text. Meredith Kerecher died slowly of exsanguination probably in pain, probably in fear. It was a brutal death of by all accounts a talented girl, delightful girl loved and cared for by many. Meredith probably fought for her life at the end that's why the blood smears are everywhere, she died in combat, she died fighting she died with a ferocious desire to live. Her 2007 picture will always be this. The horror of her death is compounded by the knowledge that she died young enough to fight like she did. She loved her life and she had so much to live for.

And in 2007 there were people looking at this Meredith picture that were probably worried about a reoccurrence. They were probably worried about public fear. When Sonia Marra was murdered in Perugia in 2006 the police hadn't charged anyone, and rumors were starting in the University for Foreigners about a serial killer targeting students. The police wanted to make damn sure this didn't happen again, they wanted to reassure the public that Italian police work would be swift. But they couldn't find a motive and Meredith on the surface wasn't doing anything that was likely to get her killed. There were some signs pointing to this murder being domestic violence and one of her roommates acted suspicious, offended the police and told some lies. So they fixated.

And then steps in a prosecutor who likes to play way over the line. Its important to stop here and point out that the fact this guy is a highly questionable character is not in dispute. Douglas Preston's Monster of Florence, about the Monster of Florence Murders (1968-85, well before Knox was born) talks about Mignini's villainy. His response was to engage in an illegal wiretapping operation against the police and journalists investigating for which he has been tried and convicted (link). Allegations of abuse swirl around him.

And even in the Knox case there have been substantial misconduct. For example Mignini has tried to charge Americans in Italian courts for activities performed in the United States, i.e. without any jurisdiction, and activities absolutely protected by the First Amendment:

He filed criminal defamation charges agains a newspaper, the West Seattle Herald for reporting that Mignini is seen by many locals as inadequate and mentally unstable (link)
He convicted (in absentia) Joe Cottonwood a California carpenter for calling Mignini a bully (link), its hard to do more then point out the irony of a DA filing criminal charges against someone for calling them a bully
Slander charges against Amanda Knox's parents for quoting her sworn testimony (this BTW was the charge that got me off the fence regarding Amanda Knox) (link)

He also has further tried to get around the protections against perjury in Italian law protecting defendants by filing a separate slander chargeagainst Amanda Knox for her sworn testimony in her defense.

So understanding this background, lets try and get inside Mignini's head in early Nov 2007. He's an experienced investigator, with a weak case against someone he is sure is guilty and is a serious flight risk. Her parents are on their way and while Amanda might not understand how much danger she is in, they will, and poof she will be back in Seattle. Once that happens he certainly isn't going to be able to get enough to extradite. Worse her alibi, Raffaelle, has money and might just follow Amanda back to the states for a few years, or head to Australia or even if he stays in Italy might be very hard to arrest with Amanda to tie him to the crime. So he's under immense time pressure and responds by conducting a series of illegal interrogations, the Italian equivalent of failing to Mirandize them, and then arrests them. He still doesn't have enough but he arrests them so he can hold them. Italy does not have the notion of right to a speedy trial so once arrested he can hold them for a year.

And immediately his problems worsen because the physical evidence isn't confirming his theories. Neither is the witness testimony. There is lots of blood but not much in the way of bloody footprints. The knives they find don't either have the right kinds of evidence or don't match the wounds. Psychopathic sexual killers have histories of working their way up to rape murders. We should see evidence of things like animal abuse, spousal abuse, sexual assaults on Amanda and Raffaele's criminal record, but they don't have a criminal record for anything remotely violent, or really much at all.

Since he's made an arrest he has to reassure the public that's he's done the right thing. Mignini starts planting false stories. For example he focuses the media on how Amanda's copy of Harry Potter was found at the cottage and not at Raffaele's place disconfirming her alibi, except it was found at Raffaele's place confirming her alibi. He leaks a false photo. Just to give you some idea of the effect of false evidence I played this the way he did. Notice how the "blood" on the photo on the left of the bathroom is pink, well its a chemical from the forensic team. The actual bathroom showed no signs of blood at all, except for a few drops in the sink, everything you see here would have been invisible to a human eye. Putting it next to the shot on the right which has actual blood misled you. I fell for the same trick when I first saw the photo. And he published these photos opposite stories of Amanda talking about not noticing the blood in the bathroom, when shown this picture makes her look like a total liar. Dozens of these propaganda stories were planted.

That's the sort of thing a prosecutor who is trying to inflame the public against a defendant who can't prove his case would do. Stories of non existent comics, stories of non existent bloody footprints making a path. Lying by 12 minutes about when the postal police arrived and then planting a story based on this time shift about Amanda trying to create an alibi after the police got there. Lets not brush over this because this is not a point in dispute, Mignini orchestrated a public campaign of defamation using a mixture of false and true information into an emotionally agitated Perugian population. No one denies this attack campaign of disinformation occurred, the only point in dispute is why.

What I would argue is he did so to try and create a political environment which led witnesses to make maximally incriminating statements against Amanda and Raffaele. We know that 31% of Republicans believe Obama is a Muslim. Essentially using the logic:

a) Being a Muslim is bad thing to call someone

b) Obama is bad

c) Hence Obama is a Muslim

Using a similar sort of technique many witnesses will tend to shave their answers in the direction of public opinion. In other words he needed to create incriminating evidence, so he creates an environment where it shows up. Moreover the media starts paying for witnesses to give stories and suddenly witnesses start popping up after months who heard Amanda running down the stairs, saw her across the street at crucial times, saw her shopping for bleach (but not buying it) the day after the murder. Who can possibly survive this sort of orchestrated disinformation? This is very similar to how George W Bush organized a campaign of disinformation to intimidate America's intelligence agencies to misrepresenting the state of Iraq's nuclear weapons program (see Plame affair).

Of course the problem has been this case generated more publicity than Mignini anticipated. The way he expected it to work was that he gets this swarm of evidence and Knox confesses. Or he gets the conviction against Knox and her version is discredited. He never expected a media counteroffensive.

One has to remember in reading this case in 2011 the question is not

Is Amanda Knox someone who acted suspiciously and thus the police were justified in investigating?

That would have been the correct question on Nov 5, 2007, but rather the correct question today is:

Has Amanda Knox been proven beyond a reasonable doubt to have engaged in a premeditated conspiracy to kill Meredith Kercher involving two other people with elements of the crime understood and known?

And the answer is not remotely. To demonstrate this just consider the following questions:

What lethal acts do we know for certain that Amanda Knox performed?
What lethal acts do we know for certain that Raffaele Sollecito performed?
What lethal acts do we know for certain that Rudy Guede performed?

And this is why this case has so much heat. From the start the prosecution has attempted to conflate those two statements. Some people want to pretend that we are ready to answer the beyond a reasonable doubt question "yes", because it is no longer possible to just conduct an investigation. Either Amanda Knox, Raffaele Sollecito and Rudy Guede were the killers, and the only killers, without substantial mitigation, or this case just is never going to be solved. So if Meredith is going to have "justice", by which they mean throwing 3 more kids away; they have to pretend that the evidence says far more than it does.

To put this another way, as a result of prosecutorial abuse we now have a situation where:

Amanda Knox had done some suspicious stuff before and after the murder.
Had there been a decent investigation we might had found out why.
But there wasn't a decent investigation.
So we are left with the fact that based on naive speculation she most likely either had something to do with the murder or is covering for someone who did.
Probably having something to do with a killing is a far short of being proven to have been a primary in a murder beyond a reasonable doubt.
The person who made the wrong choice to arrest quickly and use public pressure to force a defendant into talking, was not Amanda Knox. She should not be punished by being denied justice because Mignini picked an ineffectual strategy.

To support the trial verdict is to end 2 kids lives on firmly believing that more likely than not they had something to do with it. We can speculate on whether Amanda and Raffaele are actually guilty, we should not speculate on whether they should have been found legally guilty, the answer is an absolute unequivocal no. In the USA generally any evidence collected from abuses, like illegal searches are considered "fruits of the poisoned tree" and tossed out. In an American trial that would have happened to virtually all of the evidence against Amanda Knox. Essentially all the charges against her stem from early interviews of herself and Raffaele which were illegal. Their trial was an abomination and an insult to justice.

Having a prosecutor engaging in rampant prosecutorial abuse doesn't prove you are not guilty in a moral sense, the reason he engaged in these abuses was because he was positive she was guilty. So the question then becomes given a fallacious trial, and a screwed up investigation can we go on to argue that not only should Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito be found legally not guilty but in fact are actually innocent? The answer is yes, those very same illegal statement from her earliest detention show convincing information about her state of mind which tend to disprove murder and that discussion of state of mind will be the topic of our next post.

I'll close by commenting, I usually just whine about various news items. I don't usually even mention causes that raise money, but if you think enough is enough in this case: Amanda's Defense Fund helps both of them.

____

CBSnews' take on the prosecutor
Video demonstrating what Amanda saw in the bathroom
Filing from the Committee to Protect Journalists regarding the arrest of Spezi ordered by Mignini
Classic article: Amanda Knox Prosecutor Giuliano Mignini: His Bridge to Hell

Amanda Knox and Prosecutorial Abuse

CD-Host — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

He filed criminal defamation charges agains a newspaper, the West Seattle Herald for reporting that Mignini is seen by many locals as inadequate and mentally unstable (link)
He convicted (in absentia) Joe Cottonwood a California carpenter for calling Mignini a bully (link), its hard to do more then point out the irony of a DA filing criminal charges against someone for calling them a bully
Slander charges against Amanda Knox's parents for quoting her sworn testimony (this BTW was the charge that got me off the fence regarding Amanda Knox) (link)

a) Being a Muslim is bad thing to call someone

b) Obama is bad

c) Hence Obama is a Muslim

One has to remember in reading this case in 2011 the question is not

Is Amanda Knox someone who acted suspiciously and thus the police were justified in investigating?

That would have been the correct question on Nov 5, 2007, but rather the correct question today is:

Has Amanda Knox been proven beyond a reasonable doubt to have engaged in a premeditated conspiracy to kill Meredith Kercher involving two other people with elements of the crime understood and known?

And the answer is not remotely. To demonstrate this just consider the following questions:

What lethal acts do we know for certain that Amanda Knox performed?
What lethal acts do we know for certain that Raffaele Sollecito performed?
What lethal acts do we know for certain that Rudy Guede performed?

To put this another way, as a result of prosecutorial abuse we now have a situation where:

Amanda Knox had done some suspicious stuff before and after the murder.
Had there been a decent investigation we might had found out why.
But there wasn't a decent investigation.
So we are left with the fact that based on naive speculation she most likely either had something to do with the murder or is covering for someone who did.
Probably having something to do with a killing is a far short of being proven to have been a primary in a murder beyond a reasonable doubt.
The person who made the wrong choice to arrest quickly and use public pressure to force a defendant into talking, was not Amanda Knox. She should not be punished by being denied justice because Mignini picked an ineffectual strategy.

____

CBSnews' take on the prosecutor
Video demonstrating what Amanda saw in the bathroom
Filing from the Committee to Protect Journalists regarding the arrest of Spezi ordered by Mignini
Classic article: Amanda Knox Prosecutor Giuliano Mignini: His Bridge to Hell

Amanda Knox as the shadow

CD-Host — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 03:48:00 +0000

Michael Wolff wrote a good summary of the case:
The promiscuous girl next door goes on her junior abroad to Italy, where she has lots of sex, smokes tons of weed, meets other students and rootless young people from exotic places, has the time of her life, and then one day finds her British roommate raped and with her throat cut. The hapless and desperate Italian authorities shortly implicate the American girl, her Italian boyfriend, and an African bar owner in the murder. Then, possibly because this is Italy, they convict a more or less random passerby for the murder. At the same time, the authorities continue to insist that an orgy-gone-wrong is the motive for the murder and that Amanda Knox is the mastermind.

I think that pretty accurately captures why this case has become an international case, though of course grossly oversimplifies what happened. The other aspect which is different and leads to publicity of course is that the Knox family and Amanda Knox herself have encouraged publicity. Generally suspects are reluctant to talk to the media the "anything you say can be used against you". People talk after they are exonerated, after they are pardoned, after they do their time or finally after they are on death row. They don't generally talk during the early phases. And of course given that the press generally, but not always, treats people who talk to them more favorably than people who don't Amanda is getting a more sympathetic press than most other criminal defendants. And then there is some culture clash, where actions of the Italian authorities are things that an American would object to. My post regarding the "slander" charges against Amanda Knox and her parents being typical of those cultural issues.

So of course given a sexy murder, a sexy suspect and controversy there are several movies coming out about this case. The feeling of the anti-Knox people is that the movies should be about Meredith Kercher. But any objective person knows of course the movie should be about Amanda. There will never be a movie about Max Jensen or Bennie Bushnel, rather Executioner's Song is about Gary Gilmore, his inner demons and the people who loved him. And perhaps it is precisely this that the anti-Knox people find most upsetting. Executioners song humanized Gilmore after he was shot by Utah. Throughout the movie, the audience identifies with Chrisine Lahti's Brenda Nicol trying to rescue Gilmore. They agree that prison has made him worse, they hope he can be saved they hope that the intense love he feels for Rosanna Arquette's Nicole Baker and her children. There is no article on Wikipedia for Max Jensen. He is lost like sands in a hourglass. Kercher's father rails about Amanda's celebrity, thinking this is something unusual; but honestly when you were reading this paragraph did you have to look up who Jensen was? I remember Gilmore clear as day, and had to look up the names of Jensen and Bushnel (Gilmore's two murder victims) to write this.

So once it becomes obvious that of course the movie is not going to be about Meredith Kercher the question becomes why do intelligent people think it should be? The father is obvious, but why the rest? Why would an issue like this even be raised? I can think about US trials where the verdict was genuinely in doubt and controversial I don't think anyone pretended that "the victims family" not liking the controversy was all that relevant. It's not uncommon for the victim's family and friends to fixate on a suspect, that isn't given much weight for good reason. But why of the 3 would they choose to fixate on Amanda?

At first blush one could argue the most likely cause is the prosecutor. When one reads between the lines of the prosecutor, he seems fairly sure that the other two suspects are bad people but Amanda Knox was a budding young serial killer cut off by a careless act before she had time to fully flower. That the best thing they can do for society is keep her off the streets for as long as possible, and / or once the trial is over give her some treatment for whatever her real motivations are. His focus may be experience but it is yet more piece of the puzzle. What's interesting of course is that the prosecutor with this view is considering Amanda much more special (though in a negative way) than Meredith. For example Judy Bachrach asserts, "Soon the Italian officials came up with a theory that Amanda wielded such enormous power over Rudy and Raffaele that she could order them both to violate and murder her housemate."

And when one sees the discussion online, Their focus as well is on Amanda, even while arguing the focus should be on Meredith. Sometimes the two groups even identify themselves as FOA (Friends of Amanda) vs. FOM (Friends of Meredith), since the FOA name came first I think I can freely call them the anti-Knox faction. When they say the focus should be on Meredith they mean it only in a negative sense as a contrast. a sort of ego / shadow dichotomy with Amanda vs. Meredith.

Meredith studied hard in a respectable program while Amanda flittered just taking some classes on the side.
Meredith had a single boyfriend and never would have cheated on him with Rudy Guede while Amanda is a sexual libertine (this one despite the evidence to the contrary).
Meredith's family has quiet dignity while Amanda's are loud and inappropriate
Meredith was going to work hard at the bar while Amanda flirted with customers.
Meredith is beautiful while Amanda is only cute.
Meredith is financially responsible while Amanda is financially reckless.
Meredith is liked by all while Amanda is avoided.
Meredith is British (civilized, deserving), Amanda is American (uncivilized, rude, feeling entitled while being undeserving)

etc....

And I'd like to give one more. Meredith suffering is seen as unconnected with her life. In reading the anti-camp's writings you are struck immediately by the delight in Amanda's suffering while being completely disinterested in Rudy Guede's imprisonment. Which is odd for people supposedly interested in supporting Meredith , Guede was after all the drug dealing rapist whose skin was inside her and most likely stabbed her, since he didn't object to the murder charge. He doesn't matter to them, rather they show him sympathy. And it is not a situation of hating all defendants equally, they are very concerned that Amanda might get off by blaming the crime on the actual rapist. If they were primarily concerned about the rape/murder why not want revenge on the one person who unquestionably a primary? I think it is fair to say something else is going on here then just a desire for justice. The prosecutors view that Amanda is in some sense more responsible for the deaths than the men who carried it out, is more evil than the actual rapists and murders predominates.

The theory speaks to this sort of confusion. Rather than the humorous, playful, mischievous and overly trusting Amanda they see a stone cold psychopath who is also overcome by emotion and guilt for a murder she committed because of narcissistic jealous outburst enhanced by drugs, except on the night of the murder which she callously planned.

And I think I know why. I used the Jungian shadow term deliberately. From listening and hearing what we are dealing with is projection. Meredith and Amanda are changed from people into archtypes and symbols. The murder becomes a moment where the shadow is triumphant over the ego, which is soon replaced with the shadow being imprisoned in the unconscious mind unable to effect reality (i.e. prison) its desired state. People have been reading into Amanda their own anxieties about their own psychological struggles and reading into Meredith an ideal they strive for. I challenge you to read the anti-Knox blogsphere (see links in previous article) and not immediately notice the tremendous hatred of Amanda Knox uniquely among the defendants and how this seems out of sorts with what we are dealing with at worst. A 20 year old who got into a situation over her head and acted out under the influence of drugs and doesn't know how to dig herself out of the hole. The absolute worst case demands our sympathy. Who has not been in a similar situation, though generally one with lower stakes?

Moreover this shadow dichotomy allows for people to hold simultaneously incompatible negative opinions of Amanda. For example, frequently she is accused of being tremendously jealous of Kercher and insulted by her negative comments. That would make her catathymic killer, someone with a lifetime of pent up anger that explodes in a homicide. Catathymics rarely reoffended, the actual violent murder releases the anger, scares the perpetrator and they achieve many of the effects of therapy. For her to be a budding young serial killer she would have had to be disinterested in Meredith and looked down on her contemptuously. But jealousy is a negative emotion, and being a threat to society is negative hence both must be true. One can believe that Amanda felt like a loser intimidated and humiliated by Meredith but then her moral conflicts about the murder are real and she experiences genuine remorse. One can believe that Amanda is remorseless or even savors the memory of the killing, but then she was not jealous of Meredith. (See link for a discussion of types of killers in this case). The fact that people insist on believing both shows that Amanda and Meredith are being related to as archetypes and not people by the FOM crowd.

About 10 years ago there was an Italian, Derek Rocco Barnabei. He was alleged to have raped and killed his girlfriend . Good looking kid with a nice mother. The Italians including the Pope thought he was innocent and protested. Virginia executed him. He got a first class trial but there was some misconduct by the prosecutor as this case became an international incident. Italy flew his body back and erected a memorial (link).

If Amanda does a quarter century worth of time based on no direct evidence but rather evidence that she participated in concealing evidence she is going to remain a figure of sympathy. The anti-Knox people seem to be so blinded by their psychological angst that they are not thinking through what is becoming the likely future. Right now the person the evidence points most strongly to, and who is most the career criminal, Rudy Guede, is going to be released first two decades before Amanda Knox, with the Italians constantly trying to pile on more more minor crimes to increase her time in prison. The punishment she receives in Italy is not going to seen as a just punishment for a serious crime but rather just another example of American killed (effectively) by foreigners, little different than say Jack Hensley who was tried and convicted in a foreign court using different legal procedures resulting in a verdict which is absolutely rejected by Americans. If the goal is to hurt Amanda moral legitimacy may not be important. If the goal is to have the punishment be seen as just, for her not to be viewed as a victim then the substantial and serious questions about this trial need to be rectified. Amanda Knox's father is absolutely correct that the technique used to justify the questionable legal strategy of aiming for murder when the evidence, at best proves much less has been character assassination. Rather than try her on the evidence for the lesser charge, the Italian prosecutors has insisted on whipping up hate against her. Many people see what happened in this case, want trails to determine the truth and rightfully object to what happened.

_____

See also

Definition of the different types of sexual murders.

Amanda Knox as the shadow

CD-Host — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 03:48:00 +0000

Meredith studied hard in a respectable program while Amanda flittered just taking some classes on the side.
Meredith had a single boyfriend and never would have cheated on him with Rudy Guede while Amanda is a sexual libertine (this one despite the evidence to the contrary).
Meredith's family has quiet dignity while Amanda's are loud and inappropriate
Meredith was going to work hard at the bar while Amanda flirted with customers.
Meredith is beautiful while Amanda is only cute.
Meredith is financially responsible while Amanda is financially reckless.
Meredith is liked by all while Amanda is avoided.
Meredith is British (civilized, deserving), Amanda is American (uncivilized, rude, feeling entitled while being undeserving)

etc....

_____

See also

Definition of the different types of sexual murders.

Amanda Knox

CD-Host — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 18:30:00 +0000

So I've been reading with some horror about the Amanda Knox case. This isn't a church discipline case, its a real court case. Up until the judges report was available in English there wasn't much that could be said. The report (link) falls far far short of establishing anything remotely like a murder conviction. It essentially provides some evidence (and IMHO not enough to convict) for either a conspiracy after the fact or obstruction of justice. In particular it never presents clear specific acts that Amanda Knox engaged in to kill Meredith Kercher. The standard of evidence seems to be whether the police can find evidence to definitely contradict their theories, rather than to find a theory which is provable beyond a reasonable doubt. The report makes detailed allegations regarding conspiracy after the fact and almost none about the murder itself. Further if you believe the prosecutions case you see people aggressively acting to clean up a murder scene but not having prepared for the murder in any way, meaning that malice aforethought seems to be missing. I have trouble seeing how you convict for murder.

The key evidence is are inconsistencies in testimony that the defendant has off and on alleged resulted from beating a suspect up. I'm from the North East, its not unknown for a cop to "tune up" a suspect, though it is rare. Its almost never used with a first time offender who is so obviously terrified, or high, she's acting erratically already. And what Knox describes, strikes to the back of the head, are very dangerous and used primarily to avoid bruising. I don't have good statistics but using these sorts of methods would seem to imply a nonchalance about whether the suspect suffers brain damage. These sorts of hits cause the brain stem to separate from the brain with the degree of force and exact type of hit determining the degree of separation. They are called "rabbit punches" because this type of blow was traditionally how hunters killed rabbits. If true, her life was quite literally in danger and confusion from head trauma isn't totally unreasonable.

In reading her statements even if we assume she was not being hit or sleep deprived, she clearly was being denied council and repeatedly expressed confusion. Drugs, which the prosecution obviously suspects could also make her unfit to give testimony. Her early testimony is worthless and should have been thrown out, and some has been. And that's not even counting the fact that she was obviously a suspect yet still being interrogated like a witness a clear violation of Italian law. And even if it weren't the lies provide more evidence for the obstruction charge they prove nothing about the murder. What we are left with after that is some circumstantial evidence that points to her probably being involved in some way, particularly after the fact. Which is far short of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that she was a primary.

What is absolutely beyond the pale though is the slander charge. Essentially the court ruled that because the police all agree they didn't hit there therefore they want her to do an extra 6 years. Italy doesn't have a notion of perjury for a defendant and this seems like an attempt to get around that. What's even worse is going after her parents with the slander charge, which is both blatant censorship and witness intimidation. This is where IMHO this case went from a young woman overcharged and over-convicted to pure injustice.

This injustice is especially bad because one of the primary points of dispute was the prosecution making up all sorts of elaborate stories and distributed these stories to the media to taint the jury with claims that it wouldn't matter in Italy. For all my complaints about the USA its nonsense like that gives me pride to be an American. This case is getting lots of attention though the Italians seem intent on stealing this woman's (and really at the time of the murder, girl's) life away from her.

I'd like to send her a message that she is not forgotten, so I gave a donation to her defense fund.

______

See also:

Pro Knox/Sollecito:

Friends of Amanda
Perugia Shock, this blog has been active for 3 years you can see the author go from being convinced Knox and Sollecito are guilty to innocent piece of evidence by piece.
Candice Dempsey, author of the best book on the topic.
Injustice in Perugia, Bruce Fisher's site, good quality information and analysis. Has a forum with good discussion only open to innocentisti, and a blog open to all.
Science Spheres, a critical look at the evidence, Author of The Framing of Amanda Knox,
The Ridiculous Case Against Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito
View from Wilmington
Graham Lawyer Blog, Steve Graham
Amanda Knox & Raffaele Sollecito are innocent
Alternate theories, explores the single sex offended theory in depth
Amanda Knox Appeal form

Anti Knox/Sollecito

True Justice for Meredith Kercher, good quality legal analysis; however openly biased and very mean spirited.
Perugia Murder File, excellent source of raw information, practices active censorship of pro-Amanda information, mean spirited
Miss Represented, psychological speculation done at the time of the trial
Statement analysis, analysis of Amanda Knox's statements for deception.

Neutral:

Imam rapito affair, a case of 22 Americans being tried and convicted in absentia at the same time. It provides a political context for those alleging anti-Americanism in the judiciary. There are no allegations by either side that Knox had any involvement with Abu Omar.
Statement by Senator Cantwell on the verdict. This is extraordinarily rare and serious. The Italians and Kercher supporters are blowing this off as irrelevant, but an attack on the verdict in a purely criminal case by a sitting US Senator is almost unheard of and implies very series misgivings in Cantwell's mind.
Blog wars article about the domestic factions pro and con.http://amandaknoxappealforum.blogspot.com/

Amanda Knox

CD-Host — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 18:30:00 +0000

I'd like to send her a message that she is not forgotten, so I gave a donation to her defense fund.

______

See also:

Pro Knox/Sollecito:

Friends of Amanda
Perugia Shock, this blog has been active for 3 years you can see the author go from being convinced Knox and Sollecito are guilty to innocent piece of evidence by piece.
Candice Dempsey, author of the best book on the topic.
Injustice in Perugia, Bruce Fisher's site, good quality information and analysis. Has a forum with good discussion only open to innocentisti, and a blog open to all.
Science Spheres, a critical look at the evidence, Author of The Framing of Amanda Knox,
The Ridiculous Case Against Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito
View from Wilmington
Graham Lawyer Blog, Steve Graham
Amanda Knox & Raffaele Sollecito are innocent
Alternate theories, explores the single sex offended theory in depth
Amanda Knox Appeal form

Anti Knox/Sollecito

True Justice for Meredith Kercher, good quality legal analysis; however openly biased and very mean spirited.
Perugia Murder File, excellent source of raw information, practices active censorship of pro-Amanda information, mean spirited
Miss Represented, psychological speculation done at the time of the trial
Statement analysis, analysis of Amanda Knox's statements for deception.

Neutral:

Imam rapito affair, a case of 22 Americans being tried and convicted in absentia at the same time. It provides a political context for those alleging anti-Americanism in the judiciary. There are no allegations by either side that Knox had any involvement with Abu Omar.
Statement by Senator Cantwell on the verdict. This is extraordinarily rare and serious. The Italians and Kercher supporters are blowing this off as irrelevant, but an attack on the verdict in a purely criminal case by a sitting US Senator is almost unheard of and implies very series misgivings in Cantwell's mind.
Blog wars article about the domestic factions pro and con.http://amandaknoxappealforum.blogspot.com/

Trevor Project

CD-Host — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 17:27:00 +0000

So after Seth Walsh we just crossed over to 5 confirmed suicides in the USA this year as a result of homophobic bulling. 5 more people dead because "we don't hate the sinner just the sin" is nothing but a lie. We have no idea what the numbers are but even Christian conservatives put it at 7.5% of kids were bullied for sexual orientation. Yet they still oppose explicit mentions (see truetolerence.org) because they see homophobia as intrinsic to the faith. There is quite a few poor argument and justification for the gays are icky position, just the like girls are icky position that this blog often addresses. But I don't know any justification for the pro-harassment position. it is frankly amazing to me how successful the right has been in promoting bullying. You would think it would be hard to get millions to be in favor of teen suicide.

Anyway, if you are a gay kid going through this and stumble on this website. There is a group called the Trevor Project that is designed to help. 866-4-U-TREVOR (866-488-7386). If you are an adult

Politics and inerrancy

CD-Host — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 02:46:00 +0000

Peter Francia made an interesting comment that opinions about the bible were highly determinant of voting. He classed voters into the groups:

Fundamentalists -- who believed in biblical inerrancy
Moderates -- who believed the bible was the word of God but could not be understood literally
Minimalists -- who believe the bible was of human origin

	Blue State	Red State
Fundamentalist	28%	50%
Moderates	53%	38%
Minimalists	18%	12%

What is fascinating is the correlation with politics an inerrancy didn't just hold up on issue like abortion. But for example issues like tax cuts vs. balancing the budget (Fundamentalists favored an unbalanced budget), environment vs. military (minimalists favored large military cuts and increases on environment spending), etc...

Books like Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics that go broader. For example the correlations between spanking and support for Republican candidates:

Odes and the Tea Party

CD-Host — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 16:14:00 +0000

So I'm a bit torn and I feel like ranting, one of the great joys of running a blog is getting to do classic blogging just sharing your thoughts rather than my usual advocacy.

On one hand I'm a liberal who thinks Barack Obama and Harry Reed are doing a very good job and I adore Nancy Pelosi. On the other hand this feeling of warmth is coming from the diminished expectations of a lifetime of disappointment. For example, half the time I can think of Health Care Reform as a historic accomplishment, something that Democrats have been aiming to accomplish since Truman. For the first time ever it is going to be possible for the government to start having national health policy and we may finally be able to make American health care rational.

The other half I think of it this way:
That really this bill was nothing like Truman's. Essentially it was enacting the counter proposal first suggested by Nixon and drafted by Dole.
Obama cut secret deals to sell out America with the Drug companies.
When the insurance industry objected to the bill the major provision in the public interest, the public option was removed and instead strong provisions making it a finable criminal act to not buy the health insurance industries products which amounts to little more than the same kind of corporate fascism that we've had for a generation.
Worse yet to get it passed Obama had to pay huge bribes. It would have been a lot cheaper to just give Nelson and Landrieu a suitcase full of cash then the obscene way they were bribed.
So in the end we got mild insurance reform masquerading as health reform, a defeat made to look like a victory, and a defeat that institutionalized corruption even further.

My turning point when I decided our government was nothing more than a facade for corporate corruption was the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (wikipedia page). Up until then I had believed that we basically had a good but flawed government. Since then I've lived in a world of diminished expectations looking for candidates that are the least destructive. Appalled at our leadership and appalled at Americans for voting for this leadership. It seems like TARP had that effect on millions of other people and I'm thrilled that lots of people now view our government as a kleptocracy since maybe that understanding will create the pressure needed for real reform. With huge leads in the House, 59 Democratic Senators and the Presidency and a population more progressive than any since the 1930s was this year's Financial Reform Bill really the best we could do? TARP, which I was neutral too, demanded real reform in exchange for these huge loans, but I've watched with complete disgust as our Senators and Congress were bribed and bought off by banking interests to act against the common good. Even TARP was designed in such a way to make sure that the public achieved almost no benefit from taking on hugely risky assets and that the profits would flow back to Wall Street. Pure institutional corruption involving tens of billions of dollars. Timothy Geithner's theft from the treasury may very well be the largest financial crime of my lifetime.

One of the differences I noticed between living in California and New Jersey/Pennsylvania was the corruption of local politicians. In New Jersey we have political machines and corrupt non idealogical politicians. Things can get done as long as the right hands are greased. There is a casual indifference to corruption. For example the Chief of Police in Elizabethtown owns the towing company with the exclusive contract to tow off the Highway. And everyone thinks this is funny, a gallows humor born of the desperation of people having given up on having the sort of government we were raised to think we had. When some disadvantaged kid rips off a store he does years in jail. When the Chief of Police uses his office to transfer hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars from the public to his own accounts its treated as a joke. That Elizabethtown corruption pales in comparison to the corruption at the national level but its a perfect example of the problems in the North East and why we can't have decent government here.

Conversely in California we had no corruption that I knew of in local government. California public officials were mainly idealogical: environmentalists, right wingers, liberal activists.... These officials were drawn to government over a few limited issues they were passionate about; and once there had to active in many issues so they ended up joining coalitions and reinforcing one another. These California officials were generally independently wealthy and thus hard (or at least expensive) to bribe, unlike the blue collar or professional class politicians of New Jersey who are on average middle class. Senator Heinz used to make a joke that he was "Too rich to be bribed and too powerful to be threatened", and there is a lot of truth to that. One of the reasons I like idealogical politicians is that at least they they act on the public interest as they see it. So given the intense desire to corrupt our system I think we need more ideology not less.

Its one of the reasons I have mixed feelings about citizens united. It might just create a group of politicians that are adequately funded and don't need to be constantly hawking for money. On say 3% of the issues they are bought and paid for but on the 97% they can vote their conscience. That's a lot like how the system worked in the 70s and 80s. So there is some hope, but I'm appalled that the best I can hope for, for my country is that the attempt of the Supreme Court to facilitate easier bribery backfires into accidentally producing a more honest government. But alternately, wealth doesn't seem to work on the Presidentially level, Kerry was still a weasel even though Teresa Heinz (who had Senator Heinz's fortune) is worth between $750m and $1.2b.

All this brings me to the Tea Party. Where we suddenly have a group of ideologues taking a major political party. People who are definitely planning to shake things up in Washington. Of course we've all heard this before, and I may be setting myself up for disappointment. But still its hard to live in constant disgust with your government. Pat Buchanan sees the Tea Party as playing the role of commissars ensuring that the Republicans officeholders don't sell out. I can easily see that. Lately I heard the Tea Party's anthem and I was moved. While I doubt I agree with Krista Branch, the singer, on the solutions I completely agree with her on the problems, we both agree that a government completely unresponsive to real American concerns and focused on K-street is the real threat to America:

And this little patriotic ditty is moving. She may be hokey but I'm desperate for any kind of patriotic message that I can actually believe in at all, what she in the previous video and Glen Beck mean by "restoring honor". Under Clinton corruption was terrible, but George Bush pushed it to a level not seen in America since Andrew Jackson drove John Quincy Adams from power. She is absolutely right that America has forgotten who we are, we are not a people damned to forever live under a government so incompetent and dishonest that the rest of the world can look across the ocean in pity for how poorly governed we are.

So could I be one of those 8% of the Tea Party which are Democrats? First off I just don't agree with them on the issues. Economically I am a Keynesian. I agree, with Paul Krugman's critique that the problem with Obama's policies has been that the stimulus was too small. Where I disagree with Krugman is believing this is accidental, high unemployment has been very useful in driving down wages and maintaining profits allowing corporations to de-leverage without harming the income of the investing class. I think Summers and Geithner were quite willing to throw ten million people out of work to make sure the right 100,000 didn't see their income drop off. Krugman's perspective is the exact opposite of what the Tea Party has argued. Also I don't think they way the Tea Party have been debating is helpful. I guess I'm also an intellectual and incoherent rage is scary. This is the first mass armed citizens political group active in the USA since the Klan.

But as I thought about it more, one can make a pretty good analogy between the reconstruction scalawags and our current elected officials, the reconstruction carpetbaggers and k-street. Carpetbaggers were Northern business interests that had come down to the South after the civil war bribed public officials and seized control of the means of production. The Redeemers considered these people the way occupied people consider the investing class of a foreign invader and understood with absolutely clarity that their continued involvement eliminated the ability to self govern. Our current crop of corporate oligarchs is if anything worse than the crop of business interests that exploited the south's defeat. A Scalawag, literally a worthless deformed animal, was a term for the southerners that were helping the north, generally government officials, the recipients of the bribes. Its a great word to apply to the modern government officials that have let money so corrupt their purposes that they no longer do anything like what they were sent to Washington for. The Redeemers which arose out of the first Klan had a simple program for rebuilding self rule drive the Northern army out of the south; and then soon thereafter put in place economic reforms ending carpetbagging. This gave the South, or at least the white south, back a democracy a government which represent the people rather than national business interests. The analogy is very very apt; the Tea Party's primary enemy is the sort of crony capitalism that both our parties support. Being a Northerner myself the Klan has nothing but negative emotional connotations for me, but when I abstract away my own upbringing and try and relate to this like a southerner; yeah I get it, and I agree.

But then on a third pass, my frustration with the Republican party today, which is southern dominated, is very similar to the New England Republicans abandoning the carpetbaggers (Northern Republicans that had moved south) right after the civil war for their political corruption. In the other words the North East became so offended by Southern Republican corruption that they (passively) supported the Redeemers including their militant arm. Hmmm..... this analogy gets better and better. For corporate lobbyists there are billions if not trillions of dollars at stake, violence might be the best way or even the only way to break K-street's hold on our elected government. In the 2008 crisis I must admit to rooting for the bear and not the government.

So is this is a role I'm comfortable in, the North Eastern Republicans who passively sided with the Redeemers? We know that this policy was a moral disaster, once the Redeemers drove out the North they, like any revolutionary party facing a similar problems, immediately turned on the indigenous population likely to side with the North. That brought on Jim Crow and generations of racial tension that still hasn't healed. But..... we don't get to run history backwards. Had the North Eastern Republicans not passively supported the Southern Democrats and allowed corruption to become intrinsic to US government would we have fallen into a cycle of destructive corruption, with a 1870-1950 century history similar to Argentina or China rather than the explosive growth we did experience? And moreover I'm not sure in our modern analogy there is an indigenous population the Tea Party redeemers will need to turn on, does the metaphor break down here and offer the good without the bad? And then I flash to Hispanics and the anti-immigration movement that is part of the Tea Party and, well, I can see there might be a population that could play the role of the blacks.

In 2008 when Sarah Palin was nominated I was excited. I knew immediately that Sarah Palin has the potential to be America's Eva Peron. The platform of the vice presidency could have been a powerful voice for good. When she was unable, as my cousin put it, "to channel her inner Pat Buchanan" and instead essentially parroted George Bush positions on everything, I decided to vote for Obama. Obama didn't inspire me but at least had sensible policy prescriptions. And he has not disappointed in either regard, his policy prescriptions have been excellent though far too weak and he remains uninspiring, tinkering around the edges to create a better run and kindler gentler corporate oligarchy. To this day Palin has been an odd paradox, personally taking classical Neo-Conservative positions very much George Bush; while strengthening and leading Paleo-Conservatives (including the virtual rebirth of the John Birch society) and hardcore Libertarians. I think with Palin's involvement in the Tea Party and the new platform coming out Palin will get another bite at the apple to decide whether she wants to offer a different vision or just be a stupid hot looking version of Mitt Romney. In Eva's case her goal was to get Argentine business back into the hands of Argentina and away from the British, another analogy to our finance class; and one hopefully tis analogy is a little less inflammatory than the Redeemers driving the North out.

But in less Fascistic direction the Tea Party came out of the Ron Paul Libertarian movement's Tea Parties and both Glenn Beck and Dick Armey are clearly inside this new vision. A simplified tax code, non interference in markets a tiny government, the end of the military industrial complex provides a decent vision. That could starve state capitalism and possibly allow us to be free again. The Tea Party still runs quite explicitly on the sorts of massive spending cuts needed to shrink the government. The Tea Party could just be the Libertarian Party finally getting big enough to have a real electoral impact. Redeemer philosophy and Libertarian philosophy mesh quite well, the old Libertarian party was northern this southern flavor could be quite exciting. The question would be whether the Libertarians could handle the temptations towards corruption, the history of American Railroading which happened when Libertarian philosophy had broad support in both parties seems to indicate they probably couldn't. Worse when you poll the people who attended Tea Party protests last year, even though they were mouthing Libertarian slogans their actual concerns seemed to be rooted in fears that their own generous benefits will be cut. So, some of the GOP's most reliable voters are simultaneously demanding budget restraint and protesting anything that might reduce their own benefits. This is a tricky circle to square, and so I have much less hope that Libertarianism would be followed in practice but less hope is not no hope. Our modern carpetbaggers don't have an enemy army that first needs to be driven out, so perhaps this can all be done peacefully.

I'll close with a rapper named Jasirix who makes the same point regarding the Tea Party's imagery and how to think about them. His perspective, is in this case directly related to race:

Sophia Bibliography

CD-Host — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 06:12:00 +0000

Ran into a great bibliography of Sophia at the Lutheran Seminary (link to original). I have to frequently discuss the issue of Christianity emerging from Hellenistic Judaism i.e. a progression of:

Hellenized Judaism
Hellenistic Judaism
Gnosticising Jews
Christian Gnosticism
Orthodox Christianity

Sophia as the origin of Jesus comes up quite frequently and a handy list of references....

Aldredge-Clanton, Jann. In Search of the Christ-Sophia : An Inclusive Christology for Liberating Christians. Mystic, CT: Twenty-Third Publications, 1995.

Aubin, Melissa M. "'She Is the Beginning of All the Ways of Perversity:' Femininity and Metaphor in 4q184." Women in Judaism 2 (2001).

Barker, Margaret. "Wisdom: The Queen of Heaven." Scottish Journal of Theology 55 (2002): 141-59.

Brock, Ann Graham. "The Identity of the Blessed Mary, Representative of Wisdom in Pistis Sophia." In Walk in the Ways of Wisdom, 122-35. Harrisburg ; London ; New York: Trinity Pr Intl, 2003.

———. "Setting the Record Straight--the Politics of Identification: Mary Magdalene and Mary the Mother in Pistis Sophia." In Which Mary?, 43-52. Atlanta: Soc of Biblical Literature, 2002.

Camp, Claudia V. Wisdom and the Feminine in the Book of Proverbs. Bible and Literature Series, 11. Decatur: The Almond Press, 1985. BS1465.2 .C26

———. “Woman Wisdom As Root Metaphor: A Theological Consideration.” The Listening Heart: Essays in Wisdom and the Psalms in Honor of Roland E. Murphy, ed J. Hoglund K.Huwiler E.J. Glass. Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1987.

Chryssavgis, John. "Sophia, the Wisdom of God: Sophiology, Theology, and Ecology." Diakonia 34 (2001): 5-19.

Cole, Susan, Marian Ronan, and Hal Taussig. Wisdom's Feast : Sophia in Study and Celebration. 1st ed. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989.

Conway, David. The Rediscovery of Wisdom : From Here to Antiquity in Quest of Sophia. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000.

DaCosta, Jacqueline. "Can Apophatic Theology Be Applied to Goddessing as Well as to God?" Feminist Theology 11 (2002): 82-98.

Edwards, Mark J. "Pauline Platonism: The Myth of Valentinus." In Studia Patristica Xxxv, Ascetica, Gnostica, Liturgica, Orientalia, 205-21. Louvain: Peeters, 2001.

FitzGerald, Constance. "Transformation in Wisdom: The Subversive Character and Educative Power of Sophia in Contemplation." In Carmel and Contemplation, 281-358. Washington: ICS, 2000.

Good, Deirdre Joy. Reconstructing the Tradition of Sophia in Gnostic Literature. Monograph Series (Society of Biblical Literature) ; No. 32. Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1987.

———. "Sophia as Mother and Consort: Eugnostos the Blessed (Nhc Iii, 3 and V, 1) and the Sophia of Jesus Christ (Nhc Iii, 4 and Bg 8502, 3)." University Microfilms International, 1983.

Gilbert, Maurice. “Le Discours De La Sagesse De L'Ancien Testament.” La Sagesse De L”Ancien Testament, ed Maurice Gilbert. BETL, 51. Leuven: Leuven Universtiy, 1990. John Ireland BS1455.S12 1990

Jacobson, Diane. “Strengths and Weaknesses of Wisdom/Sophia Talk.” in A Reforming Church...Gift and Task Charles P. Lutz, 107-25. Minneapolis: Kirk House, 1995.

Johnson, Elizabeth A. She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse. N.Y.: Crossroad, 1993.

———. "Holy Wisdom: Image of God's Saving Presence." Review of Wisdom ATLA0001280248. Living Pulpit 9 (2000): 6-7.

Keleher, Serge. "Response to Sophia Senyk, 'the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church Today: Universal Values Versus Nationalist Doctrines'." Review of Senyk, Sophia Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church today ATLA0001334828. Religion, State & Society 31 (2003): 289-306.

Kuhn, Heinz Wolfgang. "The Wisdom Passage in 1 Corinthians 2:6-16 between Qumran and Proto-Gnosticism." In Sapiential, Liturgical and Poetical Texts from Qumran, 240-53. Leiden ; Boston: Brill, 2000.

Lang, Bernhard. “Lady Wisdom: A Polytheistic and Psychological Interpretation of a Biblical Goddess.” A Feminist Companion to Reading the Bible: Approaches, Methods, and Strategies, ed. Athalya Brenner, and Carole Fontaine, 400-425. Sheffield: Sheffield Press, 1997.

———. Wisdom and the Book of Proverbs: An Israelite Goddess Redefined. New York: Pilgrim, 1986.

Lefebure, Leo D. “The Wisdom of God, Part 1.” Christian Century, no. 10/19 (1994).

———. “The Wisdom of God, Part 2.” Christian Century, no. 10/26 (1994).

Matlack, Hugh. “The Play of Wisdom.” Currents in Theology and Mission 15 (1988): 425-30.

Matthews, Caitlin. Sophia--Goddess of Wisdom : The Divine Feminine from Black Goddess to World-Soul. London: Mandala an imprint of HarperCollins, 1991.

McKinlay, Judith. Gendering Wisdom the Host: Biblical Invitations to Eat and Drink. Sheffield: Sheffield, 1996.

Meehan, Brenda. "Orthodox Understandings of Wisdom/Sophia." Review of Wisdom ATLA0001280248. Living Pulpit 9 (2000): 20-21.

Murphy, Peregrine L. "The Evolution of Sophia." Review of Wisdom ATLA0001280248. Living Pulpit 9 (2000): 29.

Murphy, Roland E. “The Personification of Wisdom.” Wisdom in Ancient Israel, ed John Day, Robert P. Gordon, and H. G. M. Williamson, 222-33. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1995. LTS BS 1455.W56

Nolan, Lucinda A. "Seeing What Is Not There Yet: Sophia Lyon Fahs, Entelechy and the Religious Education Association." Review of Embracing the past, envisioning the future ATLA0001488686. Religious Education 99 (2004): 247-71.

———. "Together with Questioning Minds: Sophia Lyon Fahs (1876-1978)." Religious Education 98 (2003): 454-70.

O'Connor, Kathleen “The Invitation of Wisdom Woman: A Feminine Image of God.” BibToday 8 (1990):87-93.

Petry, Janine. "The Matchmakers: When the Wesley Brothers Agreed to Help Each Other Find Wives, They Never Guessed Their Deal Would Lead to Disaster." Review of Wesleys ATLA0001478583. Christian History (2001): 23-25.

Polak, Frank H. "Joab and David in Double Vision." Biblica 82 (2001): 264-69.

Racine, Jean-François, and Madeleine Beaumont. "Three Approaches to the Position of Women in the Q Document: Hal Taussig, Luise Schottroff, and Amy-Jill Levine." InWomen Also Journeyed with Him, 99-116. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2000.

Sandelin, Karl-Gustav. Wisdom As Nourisher: A Study on an OT Theme, Its Development Within Early Judaism, and Its Impact on Early Christianity. Abo: Abo Akademi, 1986.

Schmidt, Josef. "Nous Und Sophia in Offb 17." Novum testamentum 46 (2004): 164-89.

Schneemelcher, Wilhelm. "Zur Gestalt Der Eva in Der Gnosis." In Hairesis, 48-63. Münster: Aschendorff, 2002.

Schroer, Silvia. “Wise and Counselling Women in Ancient Israel: Literary and Historical Ideals of the Personified Hokmâ.” Feminist Companion to Wisdom Literature, Athalya Brenner, 67-84. Sheffield: Sheffield, 1995.

———. Wisdom Has Built Her House : Studies on the Figure of Sophia in the Bible. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2000.

Stiers, Brenda J. "Preaching on Wisdom...The Sophia Tradition." Review of Wisdom ATLA0001280248. Living Pulpit 9 (2000): 40-41.

Terrien, Samuel. “The Play of Wisdom: Turning Point in Bibilical Theology.” HorBibTheology 3 (1981): 125-54.

Walthe, Bruce. “Lady Wisdom As Mediatrix: An Exposition of Proverbs 1:20-33.” Presbyterion: a Journal for the Eldership - Covenant Seminary Review 13 (1987): 65-78. 87080.00.

Waltke, Bruce. “Lady Wisdom As Mediatrix: An Exposition of Proverbs 1:20-33.” Presbyterion: A Journal for the Eldership - Covenant Seminary Review 14 (1988): 1-15. 87080.00

Winter, Marie Therese. Woman Wisdom. New York: Crossroad, 1990.

Zur, Yiphtah. "Parallels between Acts of Thomas 6-7 and 4q184." Revue de Qumran 16 (1993): 103-07.

Venus translation vs transculturation

CD-Host — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 14:07:00 +0000

When discussing the ideology of accuracy of translation there really is a conservative bias against genuine accuracy of translation. In general conservatives want accuracy but not at the expense of breaking with the traditional renderings. The most obvious example is in the treatment of old testament texts which are elsewhere quoted by the new testament:

Even fifty years ago, no scholar who wished to be taken seriously in conservative churches would have contradicted Ramm's statement that "If an Old Testament scholar says that a given passage meant so-and-so to the Jews (on the grounds that the passage must have meaning to its contemporaries) and limits its meaning to that meaning, he is misapplying the cultural principle and denying the sensus plenior of Old Testament prophecy." (14) Ramm associated this negative "use of the grammatico-historical method of exegesis in the hands of the religious liberals" with "radical criticism" and characterized it as "a return of Marcionism." (15) In 1953 the faculty of Dallas Theological Seminary issued a scathing Critique of the Revised Standard Version for this manner of treating the Old Testament. But evidently this seminary has changed quite a bit since then. (Michael Marlowe review of NET bible)

In term of my personal opinion regarding tradition, I take the opposite position. I think there is huge gap between four very different statements and this needs to be absolutely disambiguated:

The Greek text X means Y
Paul meant X when he said Y
The church has always taken Paul to mean X in passage Y
The church interprets Paul to mean X in passage Y

I have no objection to a bible being written in terms of #4. I have huge objections to conflating #1 with #3 or #4. In other words a church is free to say what they believe they aren't free to rewrite history. With respect to #4 I have no problem talking about the living church developing its theories over time, the Catholic position. With respect to #1, I am an absolute fundamentalist. I expect bibles to be very careful about their language and not conflate those two.

Most of the places where this comes up are politically hot verses. I'd like to pick low passion verse where translations tend to obscure the Greek, "I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago, (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;) such an one caught up to the third heaven. (2Cor 12:2)". Some bibles and most commentaries drop the term "third heaven". What's interesting is this is an example of overly literal translation being used to avoid the actual meaning. What's worse is what commentaries frequently do here. Taking the views from above:

The Greek text means "Venus". (i.e. in order the heavens are: The moon, Mercury, Venus, the sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn).
I think Paul meant Venus, but he was bringing with him a Hellenistic notion of layers of heaven in a metaphorical sense (as per the Secrets of Enoch). The third heaven would have been above the land of the Archons but not quite there with God, the abode of Raphael where great mysteries like the Tree of Life resides....
The church has always taken this to mean "with God" or "elevated / greatly honored" (and elevated or greatly honored is correct).
The modern church takes him to mean a vision of being with God.

I have no trouble with a bible saying in a note, "This is understood by the church as being a spiritual vision of being with God". I have a huge problem with a bible saying "The Greek means a place where God lives" (from the Harper Collins or the Reformation Study bible for example). The Greek means Venus, and Hellenists including Jews did not believe the 3rd heaven was where God lived.

The NISB and the NET bible actually addresses this directly. The NISB agrees with the treatment above. They explain this is being used in the sense of Jewish mysticism, they make no false claims about where God lives. And that is a perfect example of why I recommend the NISB. The NET comes with an unusual theory based on no texts AFAIK but at least shows an awareness of the Greek meaning:

In the NT, paradise is mentioned three times. In Luke 23:43 it refers to the abode of the righteous dead. In Rev 2:7 it refers to the restoration of Edenic paradise predicted in Isa 51:3 and Ezek 36:35. The reference here in 2 Cor 12:4 is probably to be translated as parallel to the mention of the “third heaven” in v. 2. Assuming that the “first heaven” would be atmospheric heaven (the sky) and “second heaven” the more distant stars and planets, “third heaven” would refer to the place where God dwells. This is much more likely than some variation on the seven heavens mentioned in the pseudepigraphic book 2 Enoch and in other nonbiblical and rabbinic works. (NET bible note on 2Cor 12:4)

Now in the case of Harper Collins and the Reformation Study Bible I think they were just being lazy. 20th and 21st century educated people don't know their astrology and they didn't bother to check. I freely bash all the major bible translations for screwing up Paul's frequent use of astrology. But this reads like an honest mistake.

Because this isn't an idealogical mistake I think it is a good one to discuss. How do you think this verse should be translated? What should the textual comments say? What do you think it means? And given how the mentally imagery of Venus has changed. A modern American when he hears "Venus" pictures the image to the left not the one to the right.

___

Addendum:

Douglas Ward has an article where he takes the takes the position of the sky as an onion.

5 views of translation

CD-Host — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 14:20:00 +0000

All translation is a commentary on the original. The purpose of a translation is to help someone understand the original in line with how one would read a commentary (call this the Jewish / Muslim position).
Translation is an attempt to capture the ideas of the original. Because ideas don't exist in a vacuum one needs to quite often make the translation less accurate so as to avoid "misunderstandings" which are a result of the new host language and / or come from lack of context (call this the Lutheran position).
Translation is an attempt to capture the ideas and/or the wording of the original as understood by the church historically. Word level accuracy is to be considered preferable to phrasal accuracy but not at the expense of creating ambiguity regarding ancient heresies (call this the Conservative Protestant position).
Translation should aim for the most accurate rendering possible at some predetermined unchanging level, be it word, phrase or paragraph. While church history can influence between otherwise equal choices the original should be held as superior to the understanding of the church (call this the Liberal Protestant position).
Translation should aim to capture as best as possible the original intent of the writer as it would have been understood by contemporaneous readers. Word level accuracy should only give way to phrase level when absolutely needed to avoid problems in the new host language. Church history is likely to distort the original understanding and we need to deconstruct the translational tradition to find where "Orthodox corruption" in meaning has occurred. (call this the New school position).

Spam

CD-Host — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 16:21:00 +0000

I'm starting to get spam all the time on this blog. Sorry but I have to turn on comment moderation on for threads over 30 days. I hate doing this. It is infuriating that people are unable to follow basic rules of civility and instead feel it necessary to pollute the world with this garbage.

Fixing MacPorts for Snow Leopard

CD-Host — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 15:30:00 +0000

This is off topic so if you are one of my regular readers you probably don't care. This isn't anywhere else on the web though so I figured I'd add it to my blog so people can find the information.

OK so from here on out I'm assuming you were a Tiger or Leopard MacPorts user who has upgraded to Snow Leopard and is getting an error message that looks like:

dlopen(/opt/local/share/macports/Tcl/pextlib1.0/Pextlib.dylib, 10): no suitable image found.  Did find:
/opt/local/share/macports/Tcl/pextlib1.0/Pextlib.dylib: mach-o, but wrong architecture
while executing
"load /opt/local/share/macports/Tcl/pextlib1.0/Pextlib.dylib"
("package ifneeded Pextlib 1.0" script)
invoked from within
"package require Pextlib 1.0"
(file "/opt/local/bin/port" line 40)

What's happening is you have a PowerPC version of this TCL library. You need an Intelx86 version to run port. Rather than reinstall you can just fix this. I've put a zip file of the correct version on the associated website.

Pextlib.dylib.zip

download and unzip this to /opt/local/share/macports/Tcl/pextlib1.0/Pextlib.dylib

replacing the broken one then you can do your

sudo port -d selfupdate

and everything will be fine.

Coolest intelligent design protest of the year

CD-Host — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 20:10:00 +0000

OK we have winner for 2009 (yes it is early and if someone else wins even better). The winner is.... The Raëlian movement(wikipedia article). The protest was for intelligent design. It was on Venice Beach in California, the women went topless the men wore bras. The religion teaches about the revelations received by a French journalist who covers the race car circuit over a period of 6 days by aliens who are the biblical Elohim.

Baptize young, before leaving the house

CD-Host — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 12:45:00 +0000

Mike Dever made an interesting point about Baptism:

Oh, a lot of things. I mean, spiritually, people’s affluence, people wanting to be served, consumers moving to urban areas where churches are close enough to where they compete for members, pastors not being taught this. I’m sure any real abuses that happen, and, of course, there were, anytime sinners like you and me are involved, any time abuses happen in church discipline, I’m sure those were repeated endlessly. And so I’m sure those stories would have been used against practicing it at all, because to practice it at all would have been in some way to have been involved in some kind of abuse of it. Now, I’m sure it’s just a combination of things like that. Also I think the theology changed and churches became more and more man-centered. I think people more and more misunderstood what it really meant to be converted. I think our evangelistic practices watered down the gospel. I think we started taking responses very quickly. We started baptizing people at a much younger age.

You know, I’ve been reading a lot of Baptist biographies in the last couple of years and noting baptismal ages. And if you look at all the Baptist leaders in the nineteenth century, they were all baptized at 17, 18, 19, 20, and 21. It’s when they get out of the home, or they have their first job, that’s when they’re baptized. Baptists these days baptize children at 12, or at even 8, or younger. It’s very hard. I mean, I’ve got kids. It’s hard to look at the kids who are pretty obedient, love their parents, and want to have the approval of their parents, it’s hard to know whether or not they’re really born again. I mean, of course they’re being sincere when they tell you something, but people can be sincere and be wrong, and I think we’ve just lost a lot of that subtlety of judgment. It’s not been encouraged among the pastors in our churches.

So what is your feeling. Is it a good idea to baptize before kids leave the house or not?

UBS process, ecumenicalism at its best

CD-Host — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 15:00:00 +0000

The United Bible Society publishes the most heavily used Greek text the Novum Testamentum Graece. Now like everyone else who gets involved in translation discussion I disagree with their choices, their are times I would have made gone the other way. But what I think is fantastic is how they have created a successful ecumenicalism, providing a model that is truly able to cross the divide and get a major complex religious issue resolved in a way that everyone can stand behind the final product. Roman Catholics participate in the UBS process the same as Protestants. Jehovah’s witnesses and Adventist translations are pulling from the same UBS text. And not only across denominations: from the ESV (conservative) to the NRSV (NCC) to the very liberal scholars version to even atheist translations like Price the UBS/NA is the standard. Asian and African churches are pulling from the same source. The Jewish Publication Society is a member of the UBS and the NJPS (1985) is pulling from the UBS Hebrew which means that even the Jews are part of this ecumenical unity. This is one of the great ecumenical triumphs of this century that doesn't get appreciated nearly enough.

This didn't have to happen. Had the IBS/Zondervan stuck with the MT or the TR for the NIV we could have had a very situation today where Christians wouldn't even have agreement on what the original texts say.

But more than this I’ve argued that this process is a model for ecumenicalism that actually worked and continues to work. I’m not sure why people who are interested in ecumenicalism don’t pay more attention to an area where the goals were achieved, full Christian unity. Think about that for a second, at least in one example humanity was are able to publish unified collection of books on an important topic which is authoritative to all Christiandom! We don’t have this breadth of consensus on the creeds.

What makes it work is the focus on consensus. Essentially the system looks like

A scholar makes a proposal about a verse based on manuscript evidence.
If that proposal gains wide acceptance as a variant in the academic community it will become a textnote in the UBS. For a new one that probably be around the NA29, but this is one going back a long time.
Some translators will start to incorporate it, generally as a possible variant which will draw larger debate and discussion.
If that proposal continues to draw a consensus it will become the default reading in the Greek.
At that point essentially all translations will attach a note similar to the one for 1John 5:7-8 that you see in Protestant bibles. This creates awareness of the issue and builds consensus among the whole community.
Some translations will start to move the older variant to an appendix which will again widen the debate. If there are strong objections the process may stop here.
Most translations will move the older variant to an appendix
Some translations will start to drop the appendix.
The older variant will be dropped entirely across the board.

Which is to say everyone is treating everyone respectfully and consensus emerges. At every step their is a check back. The system is very conservative but is open to discussion and reason inside the system.