[Dialogue] 8/04/2022, Progressing Spirit: Carl Krieg, Ph.D.: Diversion, Dictatorship and the Concentration of Wealth; Spong revisited

Thu Aug 4 07:36:13 PDT 2022

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|  Diversion, Dictatorship and
the Concentration of Wealth  |

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|  Essay by Carl Krieg, Ph.D.
August 4, 2022In an op-ed for the NY Times, David Brooks berates the Jan 6 committee for focusing on the conspiracy to overthrow the government, analyzing who did what when. What we require, he shouts, is a committee that can discover why the social movement we call maga believes and acts as they do: promoting a stolen election, endorsing violence if necessary to overthrow the government, and flouting the norms and values that have been the glue in our society for over 200 years. A committee to discover the problem!!

We all know what the problem is. If you consistently deprive people of education, health, homes, and hope for a better future, forcing them to question their own value and the value of a system that so belittles them, then you already know where it leads. A messiah arises who promises whatever a beaten down person dreams about, demanding absolute power and loyalty, deluding the masses into believing that he cares about them when in reality the charade is nothing but self-aggrandizement. Liz Cheney knows that the base of the Republican party, followed by party lawmakers, is a cult cheering on messiah Trump. We don’t need a committee. We know what the problem is.

The solution to the problem is obvious. The wealth of the country must be shared. Even some billionaires have said that. Over the course of the pandemic millions lost jobs and savings, while the billionaires doubled their wealth, increasing their assets by trillions of dollars. Elizabeth Warren proposed a tax that would impose a small percentage on wealth over 50 million, a proposal shot down as too radical. Trump’s great legislative achievement was a tax cut for the super rich, depriving society of funds for education, health, housing, and hope. Not too radical there. We know what the problem is. 

It has been shown that wealth actually changes the structure of a person’s brain, destroying a sense of empathy for others while at the same time creating a sense of entitlement. I can do what I want, just because I am rich. Not only that, but I deserve more. The rich and powerful feel as though they deserve even more wealth and power, and need not share any of it. This is where we are. On the one hand, the millions with no education, no home, no health, and no hope, on the other hand those whose purpose in life, admitted or not, is to gather and steal more, wherever it may be found. And the folks in the middle are confused about the problem.

The poverty/wealth disparity, determinative as it is, creates a downward spiral wherein division and chaos serve the needs of the rich and powerful. Public education is a core necessity for a democracy, but it also costs a lot of money, money that the haves would just as soon keep for themselves. The attempt to kill public education for all involves shifting money to private charter schools, where some students are allowed in and others not. The current chaos fomented by “cancel culture”, and the cry that parents have a right to say what their children learn, is a blatant tactic of white nationalism that appeals to the masses by shifting the blame for their difficulties away from the rich to people of color. We know what the problem is.

One might expect that keeping machine guns out of the hands of the public would make us all feel safer, but no. This is an issue capable of creating the deep division and chaos that creates opportunity for those with power to step in and “create order”, and so it will not be resolved, even if schools become the battleground. The more killing, the more chaos, the greater need for the messiah, and the greater diversion from the real problem. 

The issue of abortion, also, is a creator of division and chaos. Fifty years of settled law has been overturned. Why? Is it because it is a real issue, or an issue fabricated to make people turn against one another? Abortion is used to stir up the maga people, giving them a focus other than their own despair.

The list goes on and on. Mask mandates. Vaccination. Banning books. Any issue that can create confrontation is thrown into the public arena. The idea is not to change a policy or to settle a question, but simply to create division and chaos. Why division and chaos? Because they take the focus away from the real cause of poverty and the loss of the middle class, and open the door for authoritarian intervention. Diversion and dictatorship. We know what the problem is.

As long as news commentators and politicians limit the discussion to details of the issue- any issue- there will be no change. Should an 18 year old be allowed to purchase a machine gun? Let’s talk about it. And how many rounds in a magazine? Do we need more police in schools? teachers with guns? Should family members be prosecuted for encouraging abortion? Which books should local school boards ban? On and on. Raising and discussing these types of issues is a smokescreen that only serves to divide so that wealth can conquer. The real issue is economic justice, and that is an issue that the haves don’t want to talk about, and the compliant politicians prostrate themselves and betray their constituents for 30 pieces of silver.

Mammon and betrayal are not new, as the 30 pieces remind us. The seeming omnipotence of the rich and powerful has been the scourge of the earth since the beginning of history. If the US has inherited anything from the Judeo-Christian tradition, it should be that God is against the exploitation of the weak and helpless, the “widows and orphans” to use the biblical phrase. Read the prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures who again and again warn the wealthy that they must change their ways. Jesus walked in the footsteps of Amos and Ezekiel and the myriad other prophets who spoke the Word of the Lord. Who can forget or neglect the powerful imagery of the Gospel of Matthew? To those who have kept the wealth for themselves, Jesus throws these words: “ ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’” Although this was written by a disciple, Jesus most likely not believing in eternal damnation, the point is clear. We know what the problem is, and we know where God stands on the issue. 

Studies have shown that peak happiness, if we can use that term, happens when one has enough but not too much. In 2022 America, that annual income number is a bit over $75,000. More is less. Greed is not conducive to happiness. Love is. Love is who we are and can and must be. Sharing with and caring for one another is the path to peace and happiness. We know what the problem is. And we know how to fix it.~ Carl Krieg, Ph.D.
Read online here

About the Author
Dr. Carl Krieg received his BA from Dartmouth College, MDiv from Union Theological Seminary in NYC, and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago Divinity School. He is the author of What to Believe? the Questions of Christian Faith,   The Void and the Vision and  The New Matrix: How the World We Live In Impacts Our Thinking About Self and God. As professor and pastor, Dr. Krieg has taught innumerable classes and led many discussion groups. He lives with his wife Margaret in Norwich, VT.  |

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Question & Answer

Q: By A Reader

Writings by Progressive Christians have left me very sad and with a profound sense of loss. I always thought there would be heaven awaiting--where I would continue to exist---and see those that I have loved. Now, I know that is not true. I will "meld", for want of a better word, into the Cosmos. There is no reward for sacrifice or painful times, no reward for giving or suffering. There is not even the "God" I used to believe in, and talk to. There is no one there. Why bother to "love wastefully" ?? Why sacrifice?? Why do anything or be anything beyond being a relatively decent, law-abiding person?

A: By Kevin G. Thew Forrester, Ph.D.Dear Reader,I would begin by inviting you to remain with your profound sense of loss and your feeling of sadness. I’m aware that it might not feel like this now, but they are gifts. They are gifts because they are expressions of your soul here and now. I invite you to breathe into the loss and the feeling of sadness in your body. Come to know them – Are they contractions in your solar plexus? A hard pit in your belly? A lack of sensation in your pelvis? Hot? Cold? Too often we “intellectualize” our bodily experiences and miss the wisdom being communicated. So, I invite you to begin with honoring where you are. In the darkness of your loss and sadness is your path – the unfolding thread of your personal journey.

What I say next is not meant to make you feel better or even differently. I offer these words as possible aids to your own curiosity in your unfolding journey.

Each of us is an embodiment of Holy Mystery – Boundless Love. Love, as you are discovering is not an object, or a person, but the very fabric of Reality itself. When we are young the primary way we understand this love is as a God that is a person, like us, only greater. But to realize that God is Love is to slowly awaken to the truth that the fluid fabric of Reality itself is Love. And that there could never be anything more intimate than that. This is a kind of intimacy we can only discover for ourself within the loss of something familiar to hold onto.

We love, we care, we forgive, we sacrifice, because it’s the true nature of our soul – our being. We love, care, forgive, sacrifice not in hope of a reward, or out of fear, or because of a command; we love because love is our deepest longing, and we experience profound joy in being true to what we are. Even when that truth involves loss and sadness, such as you are experiencing now. When we don’t love, we feel hollow, cold, and lost.

Because Love is the fabric of Reality, no creature, no person, no friend, is ever lost, forsaken, or forgotten. Love never ends. None of us knows, or can know, how the spiritual journey continues to unfold after our body dies. But my sense is that the journey does indeed continue because Love has no end.

I don’t see any reason for you to stop talking with Holy Mystery. Let your heart and body express itself – its loss, its sadness, its confusion, its longing. Express yourself in words, tears, song, silence, and ritual. The response of Holy Mystery will not be in words but in your continuing journey of awakening as the embodiment of Love. The possibility is that your sense of intimacy with your soul, with the ones you love, and with Holy Mystery, will deepen in ways you never imagined possible.~ Kevin G. Thew Forrester, Ph.D.

Read and share online here

About the Author
Kevin G. Thew Forrester, Ph.D. is an Episcopal priest, a student of the Diamond Approach for over a decade, as well as a certified teacher of the Enneagram in the Narrative Tradition. He is the founder of the Healing Arts Center of  in Marquette, Michigan, and the author of five books, including I Have Called You Friends, Holding Beauty in My Soul’s Arms, and My Heart is a Raging Volcano of Love for You and Beyond my Wants, Beyond my Fears: The Soul’s Journey into the Heartland. Visit Kevin’s Blog: Essential Living: For The Soul’s Journey  |

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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited

The Birth of Jesus, Part I: Introduction

Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
November 8, 2012Most of the portraits of the mother of Jesus that hang in the great museums of the world are dependent first on the biblical stories of Jesus’ birth and second on the presumed appearances of his mother at the foot of the cross.  Take those two traditions away from the New Testament and the mother of Jesus almost totally disappears.  Indeed, what remains is mostly negative.  She is portrayed in Mark (chapters 3 and 6) as thinking that Jesus was “beside himself,” that is “out of his mind” and she, along with his brothers, moves to “put him away.”  He had, this story implies, become an embarrassment to the family.  In the Fourth Gospel, in the narrative of the water being changed into wine, the mother of Jesus is portrayed as inappropriately pushing Jesus to act and she receives from him the rebuke, “Woman, what have you to do with me, my hour has not yet come?”  She is also not present at the cross in the writings of Paul or in any of the earlier gospels of Mark, Matthew or Luke. Only with the appearance of the Fourth Gospel at the end of the first century did anyone think to portray her at the foot of the cross.

These biblical facts force us to recognize that most of the ideas we have about the mother of Jesus are late developing myths that make assumptions the Bible does not make.  The birth stories are found first in Matthew, the dating of which is generally between 82 and 85, and second in Luke, which is generally thought to have been written about a decade after Matthew.  This means that the New Testament’s accounts of Jesus’ birth are both products of a time 52-65 years after the life of Jesus came to its earthly end and some 82-95 years after the time of his birth.  This is not eye witness reporting. Clearly the tradition that was built around the mother of Jesus is both late developing and continues to grow with the passing of years.

Once the time of the writing of the New Testament has passed, however, the mythology that developed around the mother of Jesus apparently knew no bounds.  The virgin mother of the birth narratives became in successive generations, first, the permanent virgin, thus redefining Jesus’ siblings, referred to by name in both Galatians and in Mark, and referred to in John simply as “his brothers,” as half brothers or cousins. Next she was declared to have been a “post-partum” virgin, which suggested that even the birth of Jesus did not disturb her virginal hymen.  In the service of that idea the “Fathers” of the church even searched the scriptures for biblical texts that would support this growing conviction.  They settled on two.  First, they looked at the writings of a sixth century BCE prophet named Ezekiel, who in the first verse of the 44th chapter wrote these words: “This gate shall remain shut; it shall not be opened and no one shall enter by it, for the Lord, the God of Israel, has entered by it; therefore it shall remain shut.”  Without either apology or embarrassment, they leaped on these words to claim that the “post partum virginity” of the “Blessed Virgin Mary” had actually been predicted by the prophets! The second text was found in the resurrection story according to the Fourth Gospel.  In that narrative the disciples were in hiding in an upper room with the doors and the windows closed and locked and Jesus came and stood in their midst.  If the risen Christ could pass through walls guarded by locked doors, they argued, it was no great stretch to imagine the infant Christ passing through the birth canal of his mother without breaking the hymen.  Mythology always does strange things to facts and to reality.

By the 19th century, devotion to the mother of Jesus became so strong that the Roman Catholic Church, in which this devotion was most encouraged, declared that she, unlike all other human beings, had been “immaculately conceived.”  That is, her mother had been miraculously cleansed of the sin of Adam, which was believed to have infected all human beings and to have been passed on from generation to generation.  For Jesus to have been born without sin, his mother would have to have been especially prepared for this birth.   This necessity also reflected the fact that in the early years of the 18th century, the discovery had been made that women have an egg cell and therefore that the woman literally contributes half of the genetic makeup of every person who has ever been born.  Prior to this the assumption was that the woman simply provided the womb that nurtured the male seed to maturity.  Like “Mother Earth” into which the farmer planted the seed, the woman’s role had been seen as simply to bring to birth the life that came from the male.  When the egg cell was discovered, the realization dawned on the leadership of the church that the mother of Jesus was, like all women and indeed like all people, a child of Adam and so the sinlessness of Jesus was compromised through his mother’s line. That had not been a problem in the old view of reproduction. The Immaculate Conception addressed that theological problem demonstrating once and for all that even “infallible” doctrines are forced to adjust to new discoveries.
The final chapter in the mythological development of the mother of Jesus came in the 20th century when Mary was declared to have been bodily assumed into heaven.  Since she was born without sin, she was not required to go through the passage of death, since death, according to the story of the Garden of Eden, was punishment for sin.

Carl Jung rejoiced in the Vatican’s declaration of the bodily assumption of the mother of Jesus into heaven because in his world of symbols this meant that the feminine had finally been lifted into God and the patriarchal tyranny of a God conceived of in only masculine terms and always addressed as “Father” had finally been tempered.

In this new series of columns over the next few months, I want, first, to get underneath the mythology of the ages and second, the development found in the New Testament itself, so that we can look at Jesus, the mother of Jesus and the entire Christian story with a set of eyes honed by scholarship and tempered by the facts of history as we can demonstrate them.  I trust it will be an illuminating and worthwhile story for my readers.

If the familiar biblical images of the mother of Jesus are late developing, what do we have that is original and perhaps trustworthy?  That is the question we will address as this series unfolds.  I begin with some statements of fact that I will pursue in detail going into each of them deeply before any conclusions are reached, probably some time in February.  For now, I simply file them as bullet points for your consideration. As the Book of Common Prayer in my church states these bullet points are designed to be “read, marked, learned and inwardly digested.” This series will provide the time to do just that.

We can now date the life of Jesus with some degree of accuracy. Recent discoveries have made it possible to fix the life of Jesus between the years of 4 BCE and 30 CE.  We get to these dates first by the discovery in ancient Roman records that King Herod died in 4 BCE and since the clear New Testament tradition is that Jesus was born when Herod was the king so we fix the date of Jesus birth at 4 BCE.  Second, we learn, once more from secular records, that Pilate was the procurator of Judea for the Roman Empire between the years 26-36 CE.  If, as each of the gospels asserts, the crucifixion occurred under the authority of Pilate, then the crucifixion has to happen some time between those dates.  Roman records also provide us with some other facts in the life of Pilate that have to do with the reasons for his removal from office.  Since they appear to have happened well after the crucifixion we can squeeze those dates a bit closer to perhaps 28-32 as the time of the crucifixion.  We then split the difference and settle on 30, with the knowledge that we might be off two years in either direction.  So for our working purposes, we set the life of Jesus between 4 BC and 30 CE.

We have nothing preserved in writing anywhere of anything concerning the life of Jesus before the year 51 CE. That is a silent and dark historical tunnel, which can be illumined only by speculation.  It is filled in only by what we call “the oral tradition” that we have almost no way of recreating, entering or capturing.

Paul the first writer, whose work was destined to be included in the New Testament, did all of his writing between the years 51 and 64.  Not all of the epistles attributed to Paul are authentically from his hand.  The ones about whom a consensus of the certainty of Pauline authorship exists are I Thessalonians, Galatians, I and II Corinthians, Romans, Philemon and Philippians.  This means that II Thessalonians, Colossians, Ephesians, I and II Timothy, Titus and Hebrews are not considered to be from the hand of Paul.
Nowhere in any part of the authentic Pauline corpus is there a reference of any kind to the birth of Jesus, nor is there any mention of the mother or father of Jesus. There are in Paul, however, several references, mostly in Galatians, to James, the brother of the Lord.

Our study of the birth of Jesus will therefore start with Paul, the earliest writer in the New Testament. That means that we will start our investigation in the sixth and seventh decades of the Christian era.

I hope that whets your appetite.  We will continue the drama in subsequent columns.~  John Shelby Spong

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