De gustibus...

I remember a special kind of disdain that the mother of a childhood friend used to utter. Anything that did not meet with her standards simply wasn't 'Christian'. Later I met people whose demean for another was that he was not 'Socialist', not a 'Scientist' and these days of course there are those that are not exactly 'Jews' or 'Zionists'.

With all that we assume the quality to strive for, the predicate we need in order to excel as a human being we have a hard time to define what it is. In the acclaim, however, someone does not deserve that label or meet that standard, or possess that quality, we indulge, heartily. Thus making the finer distinctions between mere human beings and the achieved specimen.

The most elusive of the aspirations and no less weapon in our war against the lesser of our peers is Taste. Surely, it can be no good person, if he has no taste and conversely we assume, or like or hope to think of ourselves that we do and thus earn membership of the salt of the earth. When did taste become such a treasured commodity? Have we ever been able to define it, or is it, maybe even more so, of those qualities that we can only identify where it is absent? Listen to and begin to find the answer with the latest edition of BBC's In Our Time.

Bioethics without Christ, please

The Bioethics podcast delivers two episodes (048 and 049) which together are a lecture by Amy Laura Hall, Ph.D. titled Conservative and Liberal Bioethics. This is a lecture of which I expected a lot and eventually eluded me altogether. I can appreciate that Hall is a conservative and is not poised to represent Liberal Bioethics in an advantageous light, but I was hoping to get a little bit more information, so that I could better understand what it is and how it is different from the Conservative view.

Unfortunately, Liberal views are hardly outlined and as far as I was hoping to be introduced into the Conservative view, I am left a bit frustrated also, I wouldn't be able to repeat. It makes me think Hall was speaking for her own parish and such may explain better so, what beginning and end held the lecture together.

The beginning is that Hall complains she has to explain to liberals that there can be no ethics without a believe in God, 'till she is blue in the face'. How so, I wonder, though I can anticipate some of the thinking. I can even appreciate it, when we treat 'God' as an abstract supreme order, and not as Christ, G-d or Allah, for that matter. According to the end of the lecture, Hall's version is clearly Christ. And she utters the last sentences in the way of liturgy, in the language of worship and not of rational discourse. What I make of it is that The Crucifixion of Christ is in her opinion the most important happening in past and present and has everything to do with Bioethics. At that point, it is entirely beyond me what is talking about. How could I, I am not a member of the liturgy anyway.

I want to engage in Bio Ethics, but here I am shut out of the deal, not on the grounds of my opinions, nor my intelligence, nor my writings, but on the ground of not being a member of the club. I wonder whether this is ethical at all.

Speaking of Faith - Einstein and Ethics

After this program I feel a bit dissatisfied. Einstein's ethics was a little bit about his pacifism and slightly more about his stance against segregation. (see transcript) Neither elements were presented in some systematic form and they were hardly coupled to each other or to more Einsteinian ethics. Is this all there is? I have a feeling there is more.

I must point out this is a good program and an interesting edition, but it is so obviously radio. You are treated with snippets from Einstein and from the interviews Tippett did. In the end, it is the inevitable assemblage nature of the program that leaves me dissatisfied and I understand that for a program such as Speaking of Faith it cannot be different.

It is for the likes of me, that the site offers additional stuff. More from the interviews, authentic audio with the voice of Albert Einstein, links, more from Krista Tippett's book (with the same title: Speaking of Faith) and her journal. Thus, you can make your own assemblage. An assemblage it remains, I am afraid.

The Daily Whiplash (7)

The whole day yesterday, pains kept haunting me and I had the impression (as I wrote) the pain killers had begun to wear off. So today I am trying to survive without taking them at all. I am not sure whether I will be able to handle until the end, but so far so good. The pain is still bearable.

Historical Jesus - Tom Sheehan, Stanford

Stanford University offered in the fall of 2006 a course with the compelling title The Historical Jesus; it can be downloaded from iTunes U. Theology Professor Thomas Sheehan takes us in ten 90 minute lectures through the intricacies of text analysis and the historical reception and development of the stories about Jesus in order to dissect what has been added and what presumably is authentic fact. Even though the pretense is a course in history, the implied theology imposes itself. Nevertheless a very exciting history podcast.

Even though I am an ardent secular wound up in the land of the Jews, I received a very thorough Protestant Christian education. As a result of that, many of the basic facts that Sheehan uses to reconstruct the Historical Jesus were already known to me. I knew the chronological order in which the stories were written. I knew the gospels arose from different communities and so on. This course was the first to put all of these known points together and draw conclusions about what must have been added and what, consequently can be assumed to be the man and his message on which the elaborations were built.

Though not identical, much of what is discussed in the course and what conclusions are drawn parallel Sheehan's book The First Coming. The synopsis reads:

Thomas Sheehan analyses the historical background of Jesus and his teachings, and finds, amidst variously-conceived messianic expectations among Jews of the time, the probable content of what Jesus taught: a message of God's definitive presence among humankind, with radical implications for social justice and personal ethics. Sheehan argues that Jesus thought of himself not as God or Christ but as God's eschatological prophet proclaiming the arrival of God's kingdom, that the resurrection had nothing to do with Jesus coming back to life, and that the affirmation that Jesus was divine first arose among his followers long after his death.

This bold and well-argued theory rescues the message and person of Jesus from the literalist absurdities of contemporary fundamentalism and recovers the social and ethical significance of what Jesus called the "kingdom of God." In making its case, the book leads the reader through the basics of modern Scripture scholarship, as well as the the development of christology within first-century Christianity. An excellent bibliography and an abundance of end-notes provide resources for further research on these and related topics.

The Daily Whiplash (6)

The pain killers are beginning to show their limitations. Or are they simply wearing off? There is some persistent flow between stiff nuisance and sharp pain that can be dulled by the pain killers, but never taken away. And now, after some ten days, in me there is a level of getting used and I feel the need to pick up normalcy again. While avoiding heavy lifting and long sittings, I am trying to engage life as I would normally have done.