White Jesus

Do White people really believe that Jesus was White? As a person of European extraction I certainly pictured him as having White European features back when I was a Christian, but I don't think I ever would have made his whiteness a hill that I'd die on. Surely there are people would though. I was also aware that other cultures pictured him in ways that reflected the way they looked. I saw more than one depiction of a Black Jesus. I've seen Asian Jesuses. I think that anyone who gave it any thought would suspect that he resembled the people who inhabit that part of the world, i.e. Arabs, Iranians - dark complexion, dark hair, dark eyes. 

There is no physical description of Jesus given in the Gospels, which would indicate that his appearance wasn't unusual for his time. There is a description in Revelation of a apocalyptic Jesus that gives him hair white as lamb's wool and feet like brass. I've heard some people say the "wool" describes a Black person's hair, and the brass indicates a dark color. I don't know. Maybe. It's the Book of Revelation; everything's weird in that book. 

A couple of things that come to mind when I hear the two extremes: (1) Jesus was white and (2) There are no white people in the Bible:

One is that the concept of "whiteness" is a fairly recent invention. During the European age of colonization and conquest Europeans used it to distinguish between themselves and the people that they needed to dehumanize in order to subjugate them. While skin color was definitely a factor in the whiteness scheme, it was not the only consideration. For example, the Irish, as far as skin color goes, one of the palest ethnicities around, were for a long time not considered White. In the United States, which had been dominated by Northern European nationalities, immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, Italians, Greeks, and other Mediterranean people were not considered White. A lawsuit in the early 1900's established that Arabs were White (in order to claim the societal benefits of Whiteness). 

So "Were there White people in the Bible?" is a meaningless question. If one is seriously curious, one might want to know if there were people in the Bible who, based on current understanding of who is considered White, would be considered White if you saw them on a 21st Century street. Again, hard to say. Rome, for example, was not a homogenous empire comprised of one ethnic group. At its greatest extent it included North Africa and the Middle East, surely some of the people identified as Romans in the Bible were what today we would call White, but just as surely there would be some with typical African features, or dark hair and "olive" skin. Without detailed physical descriptions, we just don't know. Recently I've been following a "History of Rome" podcast and have been looking up images of some of the emperors. While some of them appear stereotypically White, one or two look like they could be part African. 

Finally, why do we assume that everyone in the Biblical era looked like people from that region today? And why do we assume that everyone from that region today looks the same? There are indigenous fair skinned, blond, blue-eyed people in that region today, and images from that era are notoriously ambiguous about things like eye, skin, and hair color. (There are also dark haired, dark eyed, swarthy people native to Northern Europe) Modern Jews, who are descended from people in that region, have a wide variety of physical types among them. 

So was Jesus White? No. Maybe. What's White mean? Who cares?

The Persian Empire and Biblical Literalism

This might be completely boring to the usual readers of this blog, but I've always been interested in history. Specifically American and European history and the cultures that preceded them. Sure, I know that Africa and Asia had flourishing civilizations too, but as someone primarily descended (as far as I know) from Europeans, that's where my interest lies. Occasionally intersecting with Biblical history, as Christianity, and the world from which it sprung, inarguably created the template for European civilization from the Roman Empire onwards. I've been listening to a series of podcasts about the empires in what we now refer to as the Near East that existed in what is now Iran, Iraq, Syria and environs. I just finished one focused on the Persian Empire during the time of Cyrus the Great and his immediate successors, Cambyses II and Darius I (also called The Great). This was an area where I got most of my knowledge (or what passed for it) from an English Biblical scholar from the late 1800s, E.W. Bullinger. 

Now some might find it odd that I would depend on this source, but 20 years ago I was involved with a religious group that used Bullinger as a source for much of its doctrine. In addition to numerous books covering subjects such as figures of speech and the word of God encoded in the constellations, Bullinger produced The Companion Bible. The Companion Bible took the King James Version of the Bible and annotated virtually every verse, and added over a hundred appendices further cataloging word usage, Greek word definitions and customs of the Biblical era. One appendix dealt with the genealogy of the Persian kings, included in an effort to tie the kings mentioned in various books of the Old Testament with historical records. In the Bible, several kings are mentioned: Ahasuerus, Artaxerxes, Darius the Mede and Darius the Persian. While there are several Artaxerxeses and Dariuses, there is no Ahasuerus in the historical record. Bullinger, in the snip from his appendix pictured here, took information from the Greek historian Herodotus, and records left by Cyrus and Darius themselves and tied it all in a neat bow. Here's a link to some of his assumptions:

http://www.posterite-d-abraham.org/BULLINGER/append57.html One of the things that we know about Cyrus the Great was that, rather than slaughtering conquered people and killing their rulers, he allowed a measure of self-rule, including underwriting the cost of rebuilding their temples. The temple in Jerusalem was one of these, for which he is called, in the Bible, messiah.  In Bullinger's calculation, Cyrus' solicitude toward the Jews was because of his parentage. He claims that the Ahasuerus of the Book of Esther was Astyages, the historical ruler of Media and that after the events laid out in Esther he married Esther and by her fathered Cyrus. Furthermore, he believed that Darius' father Hystaspes was also a son of Astyages by a different mother, Vashti, the deposed queen of the Book of Esther. For 20 years this was as good an explanation as any in my mind. 

Until recently when I started listening to and reading real historians. 

According the available records, Astyages was the ruler of Media and the overlord of the smaller territory of Anshan, where Cyrus' father Cambyses I was king. Cyrus may or may not have been the grandson of Astyages by way of Astyages' daughter. At any rate, once Cyrus inherited the throne of Anshan he revolted against his over-king, Astyages, and replaced him, eventually conquering most of the region, including the former regional super-power, Babylon. Not only was he not the son of Astyages, but the Book of Esther describes a time several generations after Cyrus. Cyrus left behind a document now called "The Cyrus Cylinder" where he describes his many victories, as well as his genealogy. Just as in the image above, he lists his genealogy as son of Cambyses, who was the son of Cyrus (I) who in turn was the son of Teispes. So far so good. Now we come to Darius. 

Darius was a high-ranking military officer in the army of Cambyses II, the son and heir of Cyrus the Great. He may have assassinated Cambyses, but he certainly assassinated Bardiya, the second son of Cyrus and the legitimate successor to his brother Cambyses. Darius justified this assassination by claiming that Bardiya had actually been secretly killed by Cambyses, and that the man he killed was an imposter posing as Bardiya. When the dust had settled, Darius was the new King of Kings. He handled the question of his legitimacy by calming to descended from the same Teispes that Cyrus was descended from; if this was true Darius' father Hystaspes would have been the second cousin of Cyrus. There is some disagreement among historians about whether Darius' genealogy (which he had inscribed on the side of a mountain) was completely invented, if it was true up through his great-grandfather and only the descent from Teispes was invented, or it was completely true. I lean toward some combination of invention, since there is no indication previous to his assassination of Bardiya that he was of the royal house. 

All of this is documented in ancient documents, but the temptation for Biblical literalists to make parts of the Bible fit together, not only with each other, but with historical records, leads to some silly conclusions. Bullinger, in addition to making Cyrus the son and legitimate heir to Astyages when he actually revolted and defeated him, and Hystaspes, Darius' father another son of Astyages, decided that since Cyrus and Darius, in their respective royal genealogies, list Teispes as a common ancestor, then the fathers and grandfathers in their genealogies must be referring to the same people. This is really jamming it all together with a shoehorn to make it all fit when there is every indication that it will never fit and the Biblical records are just stories to teach a lesson and not historical documents. 

All in all, interesting stuff...to me anyway

Christmas: Then and Now

We always celebrated Christmas when I was a boy. To be honest, a lot of the details are kind of hazy, but if memory serves we would either have one of the grandmothers over, or we'd go over there - I'm sure there was some kind of schedule involved that I didn't have to be concerned about. My parents were religious, and back in those days so was I, so attending Mass on Christmas morning was always part of the holiday ritual. One Christmas memory that is very clear involves a visit from Santa Claus. I don't remember how old I was, but I was in that transitionary time when I hadn't given up believing in Santa Claus yet, but was developing some skepticism. My brothers and I were already in bed on Christmas Eve when my parents opened the bedroom door, turned on the lights and came in...accompanied by Santa Claus. I'm sure that this extended the duration of my belief, but to this day my mother has not revealed which neighbor or friend had donned the Santa suit to visit us kids. 

As a young adult I was involved in a group that had some non-mainstream and often contradictory beliefs about Christmas and how to observe it, if at all. There's a verse in the Bible which tells Christians to not be observers of times or seasons, so this group told us that we shouldn't be celebrating Christmas (or any other holiday), but they did anyway, changing the name, but putting up Christmas trees and exchanging gifts, while pretending that they weren't celebrating Christmas. The leader of the group had also published a book wherein he claimed to have calculated the birth of Jesus down to an around 90 minute window on September 11, 3BC. So, not only were we supposedly not supposed to observe Christmas, but Jesus wasn't even born in December according to them. It made for a lot of confusion, but mainly they just gave lip service to the "not observing" and observed anyway. It was around this time that I moved to Nebraska, away from my family and ceased to be involved in family Christmas gatherings. 

After getting married and starting a family I wasn't so involved with my former group, and celebrated Christmas in a more or less traditional manner, although on a small scale. My income was pretty small, so we couldn't afford anything lavish, but we always had a tree and gifts, assisted by my parents who always sent a box with small presents and a check to purchase other stuff. But since we weren't involved in any church and my only family were my in-laws who were very unsociable, I really missed the big family gatherings of my childhood. After being married around 10 years we got back involved in my former religious group. We sometimes did group things - one year we got a few hotel rooms on Christmas Eve and hosted a pool party for our local home Bible fellowship. My kids were also, after hearing Adam Sandler's Chanukah song, became curious about that holiday. Having grown up in New York around many Jewish families, I knew what Chanukah was and for a few years we celebrated, in addition to Christmas, the Festival of Lights. We also had a Christmas ornament tradition for many years. One year, after one of my children complained that our tree had no star, I cut out a photo of Bob Dylan and put it atop the tree. Every year we had a different "star". 

Things changed quite a bit in 2001 when my wife and I separated and then divorced. She had convinced most of my children that I was a bad guy and pressured them to not spend time with me. I spent Christmas 2001 friendless and alone, living in a dingy apartment that I called "The Hovel". On Christmas Eve, after closing the store where I worked, I went back to my apartment, ate dinner and got drunk on eggnog spiked with Jack Daniels. At midnight I went to the nearby Catholic Church where the highlight of the evening was me enthusiastically hugging people who I didn't know at "the sign of peace". On Christmas Day, as I took an afternoon walk, I discovered that movie theaters were open on Christmas Day and I stopped in for a viewing of The Fellowship of the Ring which had just come out. For the next several years that was my Christmas ritual: close the store on Christmas Eve, go to a movie and eat dinner at a buffet on Christmas Day. After a few years I met my second wife, Susie, and we continued the tradition, spending time with Susie's daughter Sami on Christmas Eve. 

This tradition lasted for a few years until, one by one, my children saw through their mother's propaganda and started spending time with me again. We started inviting all the kids over on Christmas Eve and continued our movie and buffet tradition on Christmas Day. Most years we put up a tree and outdoor lights and sent out cards. I was so excited to have my kids as part of my life again, and having put my former religious group behind me, I was also excited to be able to reanimate the family-oriented Christmases that I membered from my childhood. This also lasted a few years, but began to peter out as marriages and jobs and different interests began to interfere. I became a bit jaded about the planning and work I'd put into a family gathering only to have several no-shows. Probably the last Christmas Eve gathering was 2018. We had left town for Thanksgiving, and had a small open house on Christmas Eve. The year before, 2017 we drove to New York to spend Christmas with my mother (whose birthday is Christmas) and siblings. For Christmas 2019 we got together for a movie on Christmas Day with some snacks afterward. The pandemic pretty much killed off any Christmas gatherings - I think the momentum is gone. 

Now, as the second Covid Christmas is almost upon us, I reflect on my expectations for the holiday. The local family just doesn't seem interested in doing anything for Christmas. So we're not. I still put up Christmas decorations (no tree), watch Christmas movies and listen to jazz, blues and rock versions of Christmas songs, but we're not even attempting to organize a family Christmas. And that's okay. I've gotten comfortable with not beating myself up over not conforming to societal expectations for the holiday, and accepting that the warm and fuzzy memories of Christmases past don't necessarily paste onto the present. 

This doesn't mean that I'm sad about it. Quite the opposite. I'm happy and thankful that I am in regular contact with family, both local and far-flung, and that we all can do what makes us happy on the holidays and any other day.

Happy Hogswatch!
 

Hypothesis Contrary to Fact

What is a logical fallacy?

In philosophy, a formal fallacy, deductive fallacy or non sequitur is a patter of reasoning rendered invalid by a flaw in its logical structure.

Some logical fallacies are pretty easy to explain. 

• 'Ad Hominem' is when, instead of addressing, attacking or arguing against a person's position, the person himself is attacked. For example, claiming that a person's position on Medicaid for All is wrong because she once got a DUI
• A 'Straw Man' is when a weaker (or sometimes an imaginary) version of an argument is attacked rather than the argument itself
• A 'False Dilemma' supposes that there are only two alternatives, for instance "We either pass this bill or we are no longer a Democracy", when there are in reality multiple intervening positions. 
• An 'Appeal to Authority' is when a person's intelligence, credentials or background are substituted for actual evidence, like when the opinion of Neil DeGrasse Tyson or Steven Hawking, eminent physicists, is treated as valid in the realm of economics or public health. 

In any logical fallacy, the person resorting to its use isn't necessarily wrong, just that they have not presented facts or evidence sufficient to back up their position. A person who says that Donald Trump was a bad president because he was a New York real estate developer may have been 100% correct about him being a bad president, but the fact that he was a New York real estate developer had nothing to do with it. That would be the ad hominem fallacy. 

The fallacy 'Hypothesis Contrary to Fact' gets used a lot, but the casual  participant in social media arguments may be unfamiliar with it. Simply put, the premise is something that didn't actually happen, which is used to support the conclusion. The fictional literature subgenre called "alternate history", or sometimes "contrafactual history" uses this fallacy. We've all likely heard of, if not read, the "If The South Won the Civil War" books. "The Man in the High Castle" by Phillip Dick builds upon the premise that the Allies lost World War II. (In a neat twist, the book references a fictional account of how the Allies won World War II). All of these stories are extended version of 'Hypothesis Contrary to Fact'.

How does this relate to current events? Many of us reacted to the news that the killer of two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin last year by making statements that started with "If the killer was Black..." and drawing various conclusions about the outcome if this was true. I recently saw these types of statements described as "flawed and worthless" since the "if" portion of the statement, the premise, was false. I will concede two points: (1) The premise is not factual, the killer isn't Black and (2) We can't prove that the conclusion based on the contrafactual premise would have come to pass if the premise were true. 

So what?

No one who makes statements or shares opinions about what they think would have happened if the murderer of two people in Kenosha were Black thinks that they are proving anything. We'll never know for certain how the verdict would have been different, or even if he would have gotten past the police alive, if he had been Black...not with 100% certainty, but we can make a pretty good guess based on the difference between how armed White people and armed (or even unarmed) Black people are treated by law enforcement and by the courts. The lack of certainty is only a technicality within the laws of logic, which don't always align with the real world. There's certainly examples where, despite the presence of this particular fallacy, we can speculate pretty accurately how things would have turned out. I can state with a high degree of confidence that if I had begun contributing to a retirement account when I was 25, instead of when I actually did, at age 45, that my financial situation would be much better. Technically and logically, I don't know that, but...c'mon. 

There have been enough examples, enough of a trend, about how White and Black people have been treated and how they're viewed differently to come to reasonable conclusions. I think we can reasonably extend our suppositions to the difference in how progressive/left wing protesters are treated versus right wing protesters. There hadn't been a lot of shootings at last year's protests, but we have one example of Michael Reinoehl, a self-described Antifa activist, who allegedly shot and killed a right wing counter-protester in Seattle. Reinoehl never had the opportunity to plead self-defense at his trial because he didn't have a trial. He was shot and killed by police. We can also look at, specifically in Kenosha, how Black Lives Matter activists were viewed as a threat, while armed counter-protesters were allowed to roam freely, despite there being a curfew that the police were attempting to enforce on the BLM protesters. Of course, unless you have been hiding under the proverbial rock for the last few years we see how quick police are to shoot first, ask questions later when it comes to Black men. Right next to you under that same rock will be people who deny that there is racial bias in our legal system despite mountains of evidence to the contrary. 

So, even though, according to the rules of logic, a hypothesis contrary to fact is a logical fallacy, that doesn't mean that the conclusion is wrong, just that it can't be proven logically. Based on the long history of unequal justice in this country it's certainly reasonable to conclude that if the killer who roamed the streets of Kenosha with a deadly weapon, who had killed two people and wounded a third in plain sight, had been Black, he would not have been allowed to walk away, and likely would have been shot as a threat. And if he had survived that night, it's also reasonable to presume that he would have had a less friendly judge and spent time in jail. 

Not everything can be neatly tied up in a logician's bow.

Havelock Burger King & Supply & Demand

For any business to run properly, make a profit, provide good customer service and also provide a good work experience for the employees there must be mutual respect among management, owners, employees and customers. For a long times employers have had the upper hand. The ever-popular "If you don't like it, find another job" has finally become a reality, with the power pendulum swinging in employees' favor due to variety of conditions.

The capitalist ethos teaches us that the business owner gets to call all the shots, because they provided the capital and took the risks necessary to start the business. But this mindset ignores the concurrent reality that for all but the smallest business, the business owner could not continue as a business operator without employees. In the businesses that I have been in, those with specialized skills or education have, to a certain extent, been able to set the conditions of their employment, while those employees considered "unskilled" were viewed as expendable and easily replaceable. The reasons for this are related to the principle of supply and demand. A job seeker whose knowledge or ability is in short supply may find that the demand for her skill set exceeds the supply, so the salary is bid upwards and there is competition for her services. Owners and managers are forced to pay a decent wage and to allow flexibility and a sought-after work-life balance, as well as comfortable working conditions. In job classifications where the supply of job seekers exceeds the demand for them, the opposite takes place: the wage trends downward, working and conditions and work-life balance are as bad as management can legally get away with. There is no market-based incentive to do any better.

What we are seeing in many service sectors of the economy is that the low-wage workers have woken up to the reality well ahead of their managers and the owners of the businesses where they work. Suddenly, as the economy has opened up after the worst of the Covid pandemic, workers realize that they have choices, if they don't like it, they can "go find another job"...and they do it. Business owners are slower to make the connection. One thing that some businesses are figuring out is that in order to keep staffing levels up they need to increase wages to attract applicants. What they haven't figured out yet is that it's not just about the money. Employees don't want to live to work, they don't want to endure abuse from bosses or customers. They want to be able to stay home if they are sick or there is a family emergency. In short, they want to be treated with respect, not as a dispensable cog in the wheel.

Of course a business has to turn a profit in order to remain operational. There are many expenses involved in running a business. Unfortunately one of the first areas that gets cut when revenue goes down is payroll. In a retail store, labor cost budgets are usually tied to sales. If sales go down, then the money that can be spent on staffing goes down. What the corporate bean counters often fail to realize is that usually a certain minimum of work has to be done, no matter what the revenue looks like. So what happens is that hours get cut, positions get eliminated, and the remaining workers have to work harder to achieve the same tasks. Things don't get done, or don't get done right. Customers get angry, which causes resentment among the workers. Top management continues to cut labor while running sales and special events, which the reduced staff is ill-equipped to execute.

What used to happen was that employees would just complain, maybe fight back by stealing, or slowing down, or coming to work high, because they didn't want to risk having no job. Now, they know there are plenty of other jobs available, so they just quit.

At some point business owners will have to figure this out.

 

Why I Don't Pray

A few explanations and clarifications before I start:

1. I am defining "prayer" as asking "God" (or gods) to do something, provide something, or answer something, either for oneself or others
2. I am aware that there is a category of prayer that involves thanks or praise, that's not the type of prayer that I am discussing
3.  I am also aware that some people insist that #1 is not true prayer, but #2 is. My response to this is that millions of people engage in #2 - that's what I'm talking about. 
4. I have no problem with other people praying. Go for it, knock yourself out, but if you're going to attempt to convince me that it "works", provide evidence

I don't know when I started praying. I know that our family were traditional church-goers and that I was taught to pray. Formulaic, ritual prayers, like "grace" before meals, scripted prayers that were part of  Sunday mass and personal praying - between me and God. I don't remember if this was actually taught, or it was just something that was simply believed, but I remember believing that "sometimes the answer is 'no'" when asking God for something. I don't recall ever being told how we were supposed to know what we were allowed to ask for and what God's standards for answering prayer affirmatively were.

When I was 19 I joined a group that can easily be described as a cult (see my journey in the blog series "So, You Want to Join a Cult"). They taught that when you didn't get the answer you asked for when praying, it wasn't some ephemeral "Sometimes God says no", but that it was one of two main categories. This group pointed to two verses that talked about prayer, one said that God would answer our prayers that were "according to his will". How would we know what God's will was? It was in the Bible! The other verse said that God would provide "whatsoever we asked in prayer, believing...". So, before praying, we needed to know if what we were asking for was something that God said in the Bible we could pray for, and that we had to believe; believe that the promise in the Bible was true, and believe that God would answer our prayer. What it boiled down to was that when we didn't get an answer to prayer, it wasn't some "mysterious ways", it was our own lack of faith. I subscribed to this view for many years.

Over the years I started paying attention to the results that I was receiving (or not receiving) when I prayed. It seemed like the way things were turning out had nothing to do with whether I prayed about it or not. Prayer just didn't seem to be a factor. Now this lack of results could be chalked up to me being an "unbeliever" (I prefer "disbeliever"), or that I wasn't a "real" Christian, or any other number of excuses. But I started then to look at the people around me as they talked about the things that they were praying for and the results that they were receiving and saw a pattern. 

A common logical fallacy is what's called confirmation bias. This is when events that back up, or confirm our pre-existing beliefs or opinions are remembered, or even magnified or exaggerated, while those that contradict those pre-existing positions are forgotten, ignored or explained away. This was something that I observed among people whom I knew believed in the power of prayer. When things went well, when that surgery was successful, when that job came through, well, that was a "praise God" moment, but when the surgery didn't go well, or the person died, or someone else got the job, that's when the excuses and rationalizations came out. The ever-popular "Sometimes God says no" or "God knows what's best for us" or "God doesn't necessarily give us what we want, but what we need". Or sometimes, just silence. 

Some of this just doesn't make sense. If God is just going to override or ignore your prayer in order to give you something better, why pray at all? If praying doesn't get you the desired result all the time, then it doesn't really work, does it? If there's a good chance that your prayer will go unanswered, it's kind of like playing the lottery. 

I look at the evidence, and I see none that there is any efficacy in prayer. It doesn't work. 

To expand upon a previous point, if you want to pray, I'm not trying to talk you out of it. I'm not trying to convince you that it's a bad idea, or even that it's stupid. But if you want to try to rebut or refute what I'm saying, be prepared to offer evidence. What evidence would I accept that might change my mind that praying is effective - that it's perhaps my own stubbornness that is preventing me from seeing the light? How about a prayer log, containing every single thing that is prayed for over a year's time? Log the results, in detail. No excuses. If done honestly it would be quite illuminating....one way or another.

So that's why I don't pray. 

 

I Rise on Invisible Wings

I rise

On invisible wings

The air of the night

lifting me above

the gravity of sin

I float

on an invisible sea

waves of dawn

horizon-ward

I see

the darkness

summoned

inside