Black Muslims?

The recent references to Louis Farrakhan, Nation of Islam leader, reminded me of the days when we were interacting with Black Muslims, as they were called, during our student days while living in Harlem. Contrary to the image of hate of whites, we found our Muslim neighbors cordial once the ice had been broken. Within Harlem it was a well known fact that the Muslims were the most effective group in rescuing people from drug addiction and a criminal life pattern.

The news reports of our media back in those days -- early 1960s -- almost inevitably distorted any news events in Harlem which was viewed as some sort of black whole of crime and brutality. The upshot was that the almost exclusively white police from the outer boros of suburbs were murderously free to do their criminal things, up to and including murdering African Americans on a whim -- a young man had spoken back when ordered to move back and would get a bullet in the head and a spare gun of a cop thrown down beside his body to 'justify' the murder. Witnesses to the contrary were disregarded and the sort of anger one has seen manifested by Jeremiah Wright was understandable then and a background to the Sean Bell outrage -- although two of the 3 police involved in this case are African Americans.

One of the subtleties lost both then and now was/is that there are two quite different Black Muslim traditions that have been competing with each other for half a century -- that dominated by Farrakhan and that launched by Malcolm X (probably assassinated in 1965 by Farrakhan supporters). Malcolm actually went to the Middle East to explore Islam there and became a Sunni. He also had moved far from the hate sources of his tradition towards reconciliation with the rest of us in American society who had, indeed, been racists and oppressors for so many centuries of our minority groups.

There are now two different houses of Muslim worship in Harlem -- that of the Farrakhan wing and that started by Malcolm. I do not have access to the inner workings of them now, but I suspect that some of the original divergencies are still at work. One thing of which I am sure is that while Farrakhan may have moderated his hatreds as he has aged, he is still a man who seems not to have repudiated his bigotries directed against Jews and others. It used to be fashionable in Harlem and presumably in some other inner cities of the North to target Jewish landlords and business people who exploited African Americans. Such prejudices can be flamed and I am sorry to hear the Wright could praise Farrakhan for his good works. Perhaps some there are, but what Wright has manifested this past week is that he more likely shares his hatreds with Farrakhan than his respect for good works. Racism blinds all of us to our own particular prejudices.

And so it goes.

Websites for Farrakhan and Malcolm:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Farrakhan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_X
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
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Supreme Court Hostile to Democracy!

Supreme Court Hostile to Democracy!

When I first was drawn to legal philosophy in the mid 1960s, we were experiencing a Supreme Court of which one could be proud. It had been given its shape by a band of distinguished scholars of law — Holmes, Cardozo, Frankfurter, Douglas, and others drawn to serve justice with their dispassionate decisions. One did not always agree with them, but critical ones running against the demagogic main stream attitudes of their day shifted the course of the nation from gross violations of persons to liberation from ancient and corrosive prejudices — desegregation at long last of our schools and the attendant civil rights advances of the 1960s, legalization of abortion, support of workers’ rights against greedy corporate leadership, protection of the public in a vast array of areas ranging from environment to drug and safe food regulation.

Our present court has been eroding all of these positive gains by appealing to the grossest of human prejudices once again and step by step sabotaging the democratic process itself! One might have been able to predict its disastrous award of the the presidency to the loser of the election in 2000, but the restoration of the poll tax with its most recent decision to support using the pretext of requiring current state credentials with pictures as a bar to voting goes beyond any expectation that one might have had of court corruption. Lest we forget the U.S. was founded as a republic incorporating slavery, subordinating women and those who did not own significant property to the rule of about 10% of our population — rich white males. My ancestors — particularly the Vermonters by family legend — were rebels against these early perversions of democracy. Read De Tocqueville’s caveat about “tyranny of the majority” in the U.S. of his day (echoed by John Stuart Mill of his Britain). They were not talking about a majority constituted by all citizens, but rather of the relatively small proportion of them allowed to participate in government. Britain in Mill’s day treated women even worse than in the U.S. and so was launched in Britain what was called the Women’s Revolution. They blew up two castles in Scotland one dark night.

Sadly we may need yet another revolution in this country to recapture democracy from the oligarchs who seem to have bought us on the cheap. Never has an election been more important for the survival of our nation as a viable entity. We are both on the verge of national bankruptcy and increasingly cut off from the rest of the world which sees us as a big bully with two many deteriorating weapons on its hands.

Let us hope for the best, but the Court’s most recent intervention may only represent the tip of an iceberg of yet another stolen election.

Beware! This court is manifestly dominated by malcontents hostile to democracy!

………………………..

In a 6-to-3 Vote, Justices Uphold a Voter ID Law
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
The Supreme Court said the challengers to an Indiana law
had failed to prove that the law’s ID requirement was an
unconstitutional burden for voters.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/29/washington/29scotus.html?th&emc=th
–
“A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope.” (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
–
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Punishing Children?

When children are very young, one learns how to distract and deter them from doing dangerous and/or destructive things. Ordinarily this involves calming them down and talking to them persuasively as to why such things should not be done. I recall an experienced early childhood teacher showing us how to get through to an enraged 2-year-old. One kneeled down to their level and hugged them. Hugging has a calming effect at that age -- works later on, too.
As children grow older, one learns to scale restrictions for wrong doing by, say, depriving of privileges and more talking. Eventually one will most likely have a rebellious teen on one's hands on the verge of leaving the nest one way or another -- college, work, military service, whatever when they are on their own. By that time the lessons have either been learned or not.

Back to early childhood, one of the saddest scenes one sees is some over stressed parent whacking a small kid in a store, say. The kid screams in pain and manifests understandable resentment. What does such a child learn from inappropriate and excessive punishment? It is pretty obvious that one must dodge getting caught doing the wrong things or lie to get out of a trouble spot. One of my grandfathers many years ago ran away from home at age 12 (and stayed away) when he was wrongly punished by a cruel step mother who had accused him of getting into the sugar barrel which was actually the offense of his younger step brother. He grew up, incidentally, to be a man of great integrity, respected by all who knew him. On the day of his funeral his town, Hanover, NH, closed down and flew flags at half mast. He had, among other things, actively opposed the Klan when it was at its height all over the U.S. in the 1920s.

The bottom line here is our American criminal justice system has been running wild with punitive approaches to all areas of real or alleged wrong doing. We have more people in jail than any other nation -- 1/4 of the world's prisoners (some 2.3 million) with only 1/20 of the total world population. We are seen as punishment nuts who seek to solve our social problems simplistically by punishing someone -- often an innocent someone who may be executed to give comfort to families and friends of victims, regardless of guilt. What an horrendous commercial reduction. That one can 'pay' for a life with one's own!

The Sean Bell case is an all too obvious manifestation of America's hate religion relating to punishment. The judge in this case made the only just finding that he could. Careless the officers may have been or badly trained, but amidst the flashing bullets in the dark of dawn, they did what people scared for their lives do, they shot at the assumed source of bullets they thought were coming their way. The compensation for the Bell family will be with a civil suit award that will care for them.

A number of my students were police officers and we often discussed the pressures they faced in such circumstances. They were the first to acknowledge that there were bad and/or dangerous cops. But the saddest case was my student going through college with hopes of pursuing a law degree who was cruelly and painfully disabled when a perk forced his police car off the road into a tree. He was beset by crippling back pain and mustered out with a minimal disability support arrangement, his life destroyed.

I note that Senator Clinton in response to the Bell decision is calling for a federal civil rights prosecution of the officers. Obama accepts the judge's verdict and calls for outreach, proper training, and healing between groups to avert future conflicts of this sort. Obama's looks to me to be the way to go in our future. He has been there and seen precisely this sort of challenge in his work in Chicago.

We must stop being THE draconian nation that boasts its democratic values while engaging in brutal practices in war and peace. It is time for us to grow up stop acting like a nation of enraged small children!
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
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Understanding the Sean Bell Decision

[I happen to be a legal philosopher who has taught many a class plumbing the significance of the concepts applied by the judge in his Sean Bell decision, finding the three officers not guilty of a crime. I also feel the pain of the deaths which resonate with the little gang of Harlem kids with which I worked many years ago -- all but three of about a dozen of whom who died violent deaths later.

As I understand the judge's decision, he determined (reasonably it seems to me) that there was no evidence either of criminal intent or deliberation by the 3 offices, two of whom are African American unlikely to be motivated by racism. The only way to have found guilt would have been either to discover a plan to kill or recklessness on the part of one or more of those doing the shooting.

To illustrate the possibilities here, imagine four involving a man driving down a street with a 30 mile speed limit who kills a small child who runs out into the road. Were this individual to have planned this killing, he would be a murderer. Had he been driving at a high (reckless) speed he could be criminally held responsible for manslaughter, Had he been distracted by chatting with his girlfriend on a cell phone, he might be declared "careless" as this judge has done here and sued for this negligence in a civil suit. Had the child rushed out leaving him no chance to halt his car before the death, he would be entirely innocent in this tragic incident.

There was actually a case along these lines in which an elderly taxi driver panicked and took the child a way and then stuffed her under a car. Had she not died instantly, he would have been guilty of murder. As she had been killed instantly, he was convicted of illegally transporting a corpse!

Our judge has chosen here the third option which still opens the door to civil suits against both the police and the city (their employer) for possibly large compensation to care for the mother and children left orphaned.

The uproar over the case is probably overdone so far as an injustice having been done. The standards of proof for a crime are understandably more strict than for civil damages, i.e. "guilt beyond a reasonable doubt" rather than "probable cause" responsibility as outlined above for careless training and/or actions.

Sad as this case is, the judge has by all appearances made a just finding within the long developed framework of Anglo American law. A jury might have allowed its emotions to do injustice here. The police were well advised to choose a judge to make the decision. They may now face other non criminal charges that will cost them possibly their jobs and more. Ed Kent]

......................

Three NY Detectives Acquitted in Bell Shooting
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/042508A.shtml
Michael Wilson reports for The New York Times: "Three detectives were found not guilty Friday morning on all charges in the shooting death of Sean Bell, who died in a hail of 50 police bullets outside a club in Jamaica, Queens."
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
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Gender/Authority Gaps?

Pope Benedict XVI is doing his best to regain the trust and confidence of American Catholics after the child abuse fiasco, but as some commentators have noted, he may be missing the main points of criticism of the institution that he is trying to shape. Two of these are the gender gap in and the authoritarian structure of his church, both of which he embodies. A commentator noted at one point in the past two days that Benedict is surrounded by men, but few women seem to be allowed within his range. And ex-nuns are occasionally cited as critics. This has been my observation. This church still denigrates women as did its primary saint, Paul.

The other flaw in Benedict's church which may explain the departures from it is its authoritarian structure. For most of its history this church assumed that it was guiding illiterate children with its educated, well organized (male) authorities. Off to confession with you! But as the departures intimate, people want to do things now on their own -- possibly the explanation for the success of Pentecostals in pulling ex-Catholics:

A Populist Shift Confronts the U.S. Catholic Church
By FERNANDA SANTOS
An estimated 1.3 million Latino Catholics have joined
Pentecostal congregations since immigrating to the U.S.,
presenting a growing challenge to Roman Catholicism.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/nyregion/20pentecostals.html?th&emc=th

I don't want to rain on Benedict's parade here, but I am saddened to see his lost opportunities. As I have commented previously, he has driven his church's best theologians quite literally out of Catholic universities. Their silenced voices might have made the difference.
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
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Obama Pulls Ahead; Deaths Mount in Iraq

As the first website below indicates, the past few days have brought Obama more or less even with Clinton in PA -- and double digit ahead nationally with Democrats. One anticipates that this race will soon be over and the big one will begin. I assume that without some major gaff, Obama should be able to beat McCain simply by treating him with respect as a person while demonstrating the nonsense of his positions, if you can really identify much in the way of a stable set of them with this changeable guy.

http://www.usaelectionpolls.com/

The sad news lies with the next website which shows an uptick in deaths and wounding in Iraq this month. The word that the al-Sadr is being goaded into ending his truce is not good news. One cannot conceive of a breakdown in his truce which will not entail a brutal series of slaughters of all involved and even more Iraqi disenchantment with our occupation of their country.

http://www.antiwar.com/casualties/

Iraqi Army Takes Last Basra Areas From Sadr Force
By JAMES GLANZ and ALISSA J. RUBIN
Despite the apparent concession of Basra, the cleric
Moktada al-Sadr threatened to declare "war until
liberation" if fighting against his Mahdi Army militia
continued.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/world/middleeast/20iraq.html?th&emc=th

As a personal footnote I would add that our Democratic family is more or less in accord on the policies, domestic and foreign, that need to be implemented by a new president, as are the Democratic candidates. We are, however, sharply divided along gender lines as to whether that president should be Clinton or Obama. We shall have some personal healing to do when the choice is resolved, as will Democrats at large who have been passionately backing one or another of the candidates.
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
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The Importance of Knowing Animals

One of my colleagues from India notes his and Gandhi's respect for all life.

The sad thing for those of us living in developed nations is that we have largely lost contact with most domestic animals and, thus, tolerate extraordinarily cruel conditions under which animals for food are mass produced.

I am old enough so that, as was the case with my peers, many of us had grandparents who were farmers. Two of mine came from farms -- one ran away from the accusations of a cruel stepmother at 12 (and any more formal education) and eventually with the help of a brother started a retail business in Hanover, NH. The other born in the starting town of the Mormons, Palmyra, NY, became a distinguished scholar with overseas study and a career finally at Yale. Both would have been familiar with and presumably kindly disposed towards farm animals -- they were both kind men.

I had the good fortune to spend my early years living in the country and had direct contact with farm animals one way or another. During WW2 we actually were raising two baby sheep for food. We made the mistake of naming them, Betsy and Butch. They were cute and marvelous at keeping our lawn cut and fertilized with small organic pellets. We did not have the heart to eat them and so back to the sheep farm they went to spend the the balance of their lives producing wool!

Another home creature was Tiny, our pig. He was a small piglet bouncing by the side of the road in a sack when my father picked him up and brought him home. Tiny, too, was supposed to become bacon and pork on our table. But as any familiar with them know, pigs are perhaps the smartest of the animals with which we have contact. So Tiny became bigger as our built in garbage disposal unit and we became fast friends. Tiny went back to a pig farm and not to our table.

My contact with cows came through my friend, David, whose parents ran the home and farm of a gentleman farmer nearby. I learned to bring in the hay. I was not good at milking. Cows are benign but not very bright either -- bulls are dangerous! We had bought our land from a chicken farming family and I passed their chicken yard each day on my way to the school bus. Chickens are pretty stupid! We also had our dogs and cats (who got along fine as long as they were raised as little ones together). I had a rabbit for a time.

The bottom line with farm animals was that they were well treated until they were killed. That usually was done with such things as a blow to the head which probably stunned before pain set in. One summer a playmate in Vermont taught me how to chop off a chicken's head on the family chopping block for wood. He could hit just the right spot on the neck so that the headless chicken would hop around for a time spouting blood. But ordinarily the chicken was dead before it knew what had hit it.

I, myself, shot at wild animals until a kindly lady persuaded me that I might be killing mommies and leaving the kids uncared for. So I gave up the hunter instincts that are embedded presumable in us. I did hunt frogs and my mom was shocked when following the Boy Scout handbook directions she salted the skinned legs which promptly started quivering. They taste like sweet chicken. The Scout book gave me the directions for turning a blacksnake's skin into a belt -- nonsense -- too frail. But I note that it was easier to kill creatures less like ourselves.

We now live in NYC and we have had occasional animals in our apartment -- a cat that had to go to Maine when a daughter became allergic (had a friend living in Maine who could use a mouser), a dog which we loved dearly, a hamster (done in by the cat), etc. But it is not the same as growing up with them. And how sad that the same farm animals are so abused by agribusiness in ways that I will not spell out here. I fear that we have been desensitized to life in ways that may prove dangerous in the end. We seem to be living in a second hand la la land divided from reality by our omnipresent TV horrors.

Ed Kent

Hark! ! The Angel of Death!

One of the horrors that I discovered as a student of divinity many decades back was that some of our religions or subdivisions of same are really oriented towards death and dying rather than life and living. This was certainly true of the Pauline diversion of the message of Jesus towards an early end to the human race and the need to prepare for the worst when the Christ would allegedly return and only the good guys and gals (i.e. Christian converts) would make it to the city of g-d.

I am not an expert on Islam, although I did teach a comparative religion course long ago (from a pre assigned textbook biased towards Christianity), but I assume there are passages in the Koran sufficient to encourage desperate young men and women to suicide bomb with the exception of multiple (sexual?) rewards in an after life. I am a skeptic about such things as, I suspect, are many who are formally religious believers. There is absolutely no evidence that one lives past one's assigned 3 score and 10 or whatever. The trilemma of reconciling an all good and all powerful deity with real evil has never been done persuasively apart from "Who is this that darkens council?" (G-d's ways are inaccessible to humankind).

As I studied the brutalities inflicted on people by Christianity -- the history of anti-Semitism launched by Paul (accusing the Jews of stealing from the pagan temples in his Letter to the Romans!), his denigration of women (don't let young widows into the church and marry rather than sexually burn), his murderous attack on gays, et al -- I became a doubter.

What emerges from all this death worship is the disposition to wage wars on THEM. The gods of old were viewed as the front-line leaders of one's troops into battle and this travesty endures into the present -- onward Christian soldiers. The history of such wars between and within major religions in nightmarish, if one really takes it in. Would the U.S. have dropped two nuclear weapons on a fellow Christian nation?/ Probably not. But notice the hints that either Israel or the U.S. might do so with Iran.

Such death worship is the way to the end of the human race. We are, indeed, haunted by that Angel of Death who has apparently replaced a benevolent deity in too many religious quarters.
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
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McCain Is Too Old?

Had I not taught a psychology course focused on geriatric changes in one's mental functions, I would be worried now about the fact that I have to pause on occasions to recall a name or fact that would have been instantly in mind only a few years ago. I happen to be the same age -- 75 -- as Representative John Murtha who yesterday suggested that John McCain is too old to take on the pressures of the presidency:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24162740/

Murtha is dead right. My own experience as a professional philosopher now just retired tells me so.

Several decades back I was delighted to hear that the retirement age of 65 -- an accident of the Depression years when we were trying to open up scarce jobs for younger people -- would no more be imposed. I had seen too many fine academics (and others) tossed prematurely on the scrap heap of history precisely at the time when they were hitting their peak in performance. I greatly enjoyed teaching and was good at it. I had a manageable schedule of two days a week with an occasional extra day for a meeting or other event. I had no heavy physical demands placed on my body that could have ended my working life. So I sailed on happily doing my things until last year. Then during the semesters following my 73rd birthday I found myself tiring earlier in the afternoons and evenings when my classes were scheduled, waking early each morning at dawn, and frankly not doing such a good job as a teacher later in the day as I had throughout my teaching career. I realized that it was time for me to retire and so took the final sabbatical semester during the spring last year and entered retirement this past September 1.

I am keeping busy with other things such as this blog -- it is marvelous to be able to communicate with email friends daily at all corners of the earth ranging from the West Bank to Scotland. But I am aware that I taper off during the course of the day and find myself weary towards the end of it and slower by far in recollecting facts and making decisions. I am good for a four hour day rather than an eight hour one and use the non working hours for other things that seem to crop up regularly -- doctors' appointments, errands, time with children and grand children or whatever comes my way.

In addition to mental slow downs the body presents its problems, too. Arthritis and other conditions cause a bit of pain and resulting irritation with the world and friends and family on occasions. I know my judgment is not at its best at such times.

In short -- John McCain IS too old to take on the incredible rigors of the most demanding and critical job in the world today. He is a nice guy. Not a genius by all reports. He lacks some basic information and will be facing a slowdown in his capacity to learn and to stay fully alert during critical briefings on this and that. There is no assurance that he would be alert for a 3 a.m. phone call demanding an instant decision, say, as to whether to launch a nuclear attack on Iran!

Hopefully Senator McCain will pass through the election process okay and be returned to the Senate where he can continue to make a contribution at his own pace. If a nice guy, he is a bit wobbly in his stands on this and that, not too clear on domestic or foreign policy as well -- who are the Sunnis and who are Shias? His blic on life is through the eyes of his military training -- far too narrow for the current world situation.

Murtha is right, as he and I know from our own experiences with aging past 70 -- McCain is too old!
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
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Benedict XVI -- a Well Meaning Anti-Christ?

The major crisis facing the human race, its very survival, is not global warming, environmental degradation or a host of other threats to human welfare. It is our failure to restrain our population growth to manageable limits which will not exhaust the basic resources and surrounding environmental protections that will permit our future survival.

Many of us were distressed when the People's Republic of China imposed a one child limit on families under the threat of economic sanctions. Some suspected that forced abortions were also used to restrict births and the ratio of boy to girl babies led to the further suspicion that families were choosing the more economically favored gender of the one child that they would have.

Similarly the program in India of paying men to have vasectomies which particularly targeted desperately poor families was held to be a somewhat improper national policy. Again with the availability of abortions one noted the preponderance of boy babies being born -- with similar economic benefits in a culture that expected sons to support elderly parents.

The bottom line here is that any and all agencies that have opposed population control both by the use of contraceptives and abortion -- particularly in poor countries overburdened already with the effort to feed their populations -- have been sabotaging future generations of humans -- even threatening our very survival -- both of individuals and whole societies thrown into brutal conflict to control the remaining diminished resources. We escaped the dire threat of a nuclear holocaust all too recently. But now we must face the possibility of the future uses of WMDs by pols determined to control their economic turf by any means necessary. We are already seeing such figures emerging here and there in Africa and the Middle East.

The point to which I have been leading here with the arrival today of a pope to be greeted by the U.S. President with great ceremonial display is that Benedict XVI is in fact an enemy of the human race. His church has fought the use of contraceptives and other means to limit human population. The Roman Catholic Church has in fact literally disrupted world conferences focused on population control, has lobbied against contraception, and has sought to criminalize abortion wherever it can:

http://www.geocities.com/paulntobin/contraception.html

In countries such as Nicaragua women are literally dying because even medically necessary abortions are outlawed there. In the U.S. we stand only one crucial Supreme Court justice away from outlawing abortion once again, leading to yet more horrible deaths particularly of desperate poor women who seek out kitchen table abortionists to restrict births of children they cannot adequately feed and care for under current American economic conditions. No, not all children can be readily adopted despite the suggestion that adoption is an escape hatch -- particularly in the all too many nations where children are now dying of malnutrition.

Let us face the fact that we have been expelled from an Eden that could once provide for all our human needs and are mow racing towards a hell which may effect our extinction as a species.

Our media today are filled with horror stories about food riots and the threats of conflicts over oil. No, I will not be among those celebrating Benedict's visit to the U.S. I see him representing the worst threat facing humanity today -- a well meaning anti-Christ?
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
Ed Kent 212-665-8535 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
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Two Versions of Christianity - Jesus' Versus Paul's

With Pope Benedict about to hit NYC it is appropriate to note what biblical scholars have recognized for more than a century -- that St. Paul put a spin on the Gospels of Jesus which diverted a call for social justice to ceremonial worship of death. This distinction is sometimes called that between prophetic Christianity which derives its precedents in the prophets and the apocalyptic vision in which Paul focused on imminent death and destruction of the individual -- but also the world with the murderous return of Jesus in the figure of the Christ.

A Canadian scholar who converted to Judaism which he views as the true religion of Jesus, Barre Wilson, makes this critical point in his current book, How Jesus Became a Christian:

http://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Became-Christian-Barrie-Wilson/dp/0312362781

I personally discovered this distinction when I studied theology for 3 years between my undergrad years and continuing on in philosophy. I had taken this detour sincerely as my grandfather, whom I had never known, had been our leading American biblical scholar in his day:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Foster_Kent

As well as a scholar he had also been a liberal social activist who had challenged the antiSemitism and racism of the early 20th. century and had worked to open the doors of our universities to both Jews and African Americans who were then being excluded.

I was personally shocked to discover that I was really studying two different religions in divinity schools here and in Britain. The one stressed love and care for one's fellow humans. The other specified hatreds of others -- Jews who had been persecuted for two millennia by Christians, culminating in the Holocaust, and such others as gays or ones who violated the dogmatic claims that had been added to the initial hostilities -- towards sex and any restrictions on it that halted the mass production of babies at any cost to their mothers or to communities overwhelmed with limits on their capacities to provide for them.

There are archetypal Christian churches that illustrate the contrast between these two religions with a broad spectrum ranging between the two. These are respectively the Roman Catholic church with its authoritarian structure and death oriented moral scheme versus the Quakers and other peace churches which strive to fulfill the Gospel claim that we respect and care for those who need us to do so.

I would not say that Benedict means to defy the exhortations of Jesus per se. But he more than other recent popes has steered his church towards the abyss. There is a certain irony here in that he was led into the scholarly world by one of the Catholic theologians who had it right and who has been repudiated by Benedict -- Hans Kung:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_K%C3%BCng

Many other CAtholic theologians have been silenced along the way such as John Courtney Murray, SJ, whose essay on natural law I included in one of my collections in legal philosophy. There is a long line of such, unhappily, who have been side tracked by such as Benedict who was the hit man for John Paul who steered the hierarchical appointments to the far right. I have good friends who were former priests and nuns who have left the Benedict's church. And it is dying out in Europe if flourishing in some (but not all) parts of the third world. Benedict was severely criticized in South America where evangelical protestantism is thriving.

One assumes that Benedict will be warmly welcomed -- particularly in this political year. However, he faces the near bankruptcy of his church here in the U.S. following upon the pedophile disaster. And his church cannot staff itself any more with heterosexuals who see celibacy as a sick tradition. He will have to decide whether gay priests who behave themselves are the way to go? How odd, but certainly understandable, as gays were the primary enemies of St. Paul -- see his horrendous Letter to the Romans where he attacks both unconverted Jews and gays. And sad that Benedict is reintroducing such hatreds -- even into his restoration of liturgy from which they had been removed!

Sorry to blast here, but people should be aware of the wrong headedness of this man. Perhaps protests from disappointed Catholics will have some impact?
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
Ed Kent 212-665-8535 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
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U.S. Penal Reform at Last!

[Let us hope that the reversal from jailing to rehabilitating will become an established feature of American policy in dealing with non-violent criminals. The U.S. in response to 'law and order' having become a hot button way to get elected to political office has become the leading imprisonment nation -- more than 2 million currently. Such stats not only spell lives destroyed (of their families as well as those imprisoned), but also huge costs that might better be spent on education and rehab (which is far less expensive -- keeping someone in jail costs as much as an Ivy League college tuition year!

The switch over to draconian punishment practices began about the time I started my college teaching career in the mid 1960s. Innumerable students in my philosophy of law courses did research papers on various aspects of our penal system and were constantly amazed (and embarrassed as Americans) that our nation could sink so low. We began to treat young kids as adult criminals. We were one of some five or six nations (not a very nice crew) that was executing juveniles (which we only stopped doing two years ago). Prisons are schools for crime and one imprisoned is three times as likely to commit crimes again -- with greater sophistication.

There have been many reformers working to restore American justice to decency. One with whom I communicate periodically is Anthony Papa who served 12 of 15 years for a drug conviction before he was pardoned and proceeded on with a reform campaign for drug offenders:

http://www.15yearstolife.com/

The Justice Project is spread across the nation with many subdivision:

http://ga3.org/tjp/home.html

The Death Penalty Information Center provides basic information on this grim subject -- all three of our national presidential candidates still support the death penalty -- 93 nations at last count had abolished it as an incitement rather than deterrent to murders and an abyss of erroneous executions of innocent people: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/

It is, thus, with a sense of relief as one recently retired to see that this lonely battle is now becoming a public cause that needs some more house cleaning (our candidates), but which looks to be moving along at last. Ed Kent]

........................

U.S. Shifting Prison Focus to Re-entry Into Society
By ERIK ECKHOLM
In a sharp change in prison policy, the Bush administration
is lending support to programs that are turning from "get
tough" laws to "re-entry" strategies.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/08/washington/08reentry.html?th&emc=th
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
Ed Kent 212-665-8535 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
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Unwinnable Wars

As we remember the brutal assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. today, we must not forget the critical fact that during the last year of his life he was being widely condemned as a traitor for his opposition to the Viet Nam war which he had strongly voiced in a sermon in Manhattan's Riverside Church just down the street from where I am writing this.

King, as many others then, could see that we had stumbled into an unwinnable war, murderously destructive to millions of lives and finally more than 58,000 Americans before it was finally ended off in chaos.

How had this come about? Briefly after WW2 what came to be known as the North Vietnamese had driven out the occupying Japanese from most of the old French colony, Indochina. Charles de Gaulle, however, the domineering French general/president blackmailed the U.S. into sending French troops (in American uniforms) back into Indochina with the threat that he would otherwise boycott NATO. Shortly the French got themselves into serious trouble and after a particularly deadly loss of troops in a 1954 battle at Dienbienphu decided to pull out. Eisenhower at the time warned us against becoming involved in the conflict, but when Kennedy came to office he sent a corps of military advisors to guide the struggling South Vietnamese. Unhappily upon his death the inexperienced with such matters Johnson escalated our troop commitments to more than a million. He and the Congress had been misled by a false report of an attack on an American destroyer by North Vietnamese boats at Tonkin Gulf.

The war dragged on into an impossible stalemate. Some background -- during the Korean War General MacArthur had marched American troops (in defiance of orders) up to the border of China. As they had threatened, the Chinese sent in a massive number of troops which nearly drove our military out of Korea -- but a lesson had been taught. Don't press the Chinese when they threaten a counter attack if you come too close to their borders!

The same circumstances evolved in Viet Nam. The Chinese and Vietnamese had never been allies (China has too often occupied Viet Nam in the past -- as Tibet today). But the Chinese warned that they would send in troops if we invaded the North with ours. So we were left with the frustrating option of bombing the North -- with horrible weapons such as napalm and delayed action bombs dumped in rice fields. Napalm consists of jellied gasoline which splatters long distances and sets on fire anything in its way -- particularly humans. And the timed bombs were likely to kill children -- as are the illegal cluster bombs of today.

Finally after the massive number of deaths mentioned above -- we used to read aloud the names of the most recent Americans killed in hour long shifts at Riverside Church -- we saw the pointlessness of it all and got out ignominiously. Those who say we could have "won" the war are nuts. There was no way to do so short of launching WW3 against China -- and to what end?

I mention all of this as background because of the parallels with the situation that we have created in Iraq. We have fractured Iraq into many parts. The Shia are natural allies of the Iranians with whom we do not want them to associate. So far as democracy is concerned they maintain a 60% majority in any election and do not look to be ready to share the goodies with either of the minorities -- Sunnis or Kurds.

Once again we have stumbled into a no win mess. There is no way to 'win' a war there and each day we stay the situation deteriorates more and a small percentage of Americans bear the burden. Furthermore we are wasting both our military and our finances. Have we learned nothing from the former Soviet Union having bankrupted itself in that region? The rest of the world looks on with a mixture of horror and amusement.

Let us not forget the warning of Martin Luther King, Jr. (and those who follow in his shoes -- possibly Jeremiah Wright per the President of the United Church of Christ on CNN last night). This is not a justified 'war' and it is long gone time that we ended it off.
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
Ed Kent 212-665-8535 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
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Obama May Win Pennsylvania

First Signs That Barack Obama Might Win... Or Be Competitive In Pennsylvania: http://www.usaelectionpolls.com/

The Presidential Poll site above keeps track of the various poll results on a daily update basis. As the quote above indicates, yesterday's polls had Obama pulling even or ahead of Clinton in PA. Bill Clinton has said that the race will be over if Hillary loses in Pennsylvania, probably believing such would not happen. However, Obama seems to have overcome some mean hurdles in recent weeks and looks to be moving right along.

A college thing with with MSNBC in West Chester PA last night showed Obama with his strongest new supporters -- students totally enthusiastic about his campaign and comments in ways that I as a college teacher have not seen in several decades. If he can also reach working people and older women, he will finish off this primary campaign and the general election with massive and wildly enthusiastic support. As an old timer who first became politically aware and active in college myself, it looks good, better, and best from this vantage point.

From my contacts out there in the internet I gather that Obama is having the same effect on college students even in some of those nations less than friendly toward us. Perhaps he will become the secret weapon that will restore the respect and trust in the U.S. that Bush has squandered? Let us hope.
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
Ed Kent 212-665-8535 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
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All Three Candidates for Capital Punishment!

Unhappily all three of our presidential candidates still support capital punishment. One assumes lingering anxiety about offending the law and order nuts who see killing as a solution for crimes -- or at least for soothing the bruised feelings of friends and relatives of murder victims.

Ironically the lex talionis ("eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth") source for capital punishment in the Hebrew bible was actually borrowed from a Babylonian commercial code (ancient religious texts are all too often composites put together from borrowings from nefarious sources).

I was curious to learn the positions of our candidates following Hillary giving a rather strangled answer to a direct public question on this subject. She, Obama, and McCain should be ashamed of holding these positions. They are well enough informed to know that:

1) capital punishment does not deter murder. It all too often incites it (getting rid of witnesses, death by cop, etc.)

2) capital punishment is all too often imposed on innocent people.

3) capital punishment is imposed vastly unequally -- on the poor, on minorities, etc.

The Talmudic tradition and strict rabbinical positions today reject capital punishment -- with the rarest exceptions. Israel has executed only one murderer in its recent history -- Adolph Eichmann, Nazi war criminal. It is, thus, sad to witness its all too frequent assassinations of enemies without judicial procedures. What becomes obvious from such behavior is that capital punishment serves no positive social function -- it is an expression of the revenge motive, of pure human hatred of real or imagined enemies. Capital punishment displays us humans at our very worst. And despite the various appeals against it by religious authorities -- Popes, rabbis, other clergy -- the revenge motive prevails.

Our 3 candidates mutter things about reforming capital punishment -- can't be done. But it can be abolished here in the U.S. as it is in all civilized countries in the world -- a good number of them now -- 92: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment

As a teacher I would encourage students who favored capital punishment to do research papers on it. Almost without exception they were persuaded that capital punishment was wrong afterall. See the Death Penalty Information Center for details: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/

If you happen to have an opportunity to ask a candidate about capital punishment, frame it with the fact that 92 countries have abolished it -- why not us? Only two years ago we stopped executing juveniles -- we were among a handful of the most vicious nations in that practice.

Maybe one of the candidates will show a little courage on this subject. Who knows what lurks in the hearts of men (and a women)?
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
Ed Kent 212-665-8535 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
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