Visitation - Why Earthlings Need Aliens, Lourdes, And Miracles

Ivan Karamazov in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov tells his brother that Jesus Christ sold out the world when he met the Devil in the Judean desert.  'Man does not live by bread alone', he told the Devil who offered him riches beyond imagining, but in so doing he made promises which he could not keep.  Man needed bread, didn't have it, led a life misery, pain, and misfortune, and with his divine power he could have set the world straight. 

 

Miracles, mystery, and authority was what he gave, and because of it the Church - a manipulative, exploitive, authoritarian - arrogated to itself authority for all moral and ethical principle.  To maintain its power, it gave the credulous, deceived, and ignorant masses what Christ promised, but did nothing to alleviate their suffering - to ease the earthly pain which was humanity's hallmark.

And so it was that Our Lady of Lourdes and Our Lady of Fatima was said to be seen in grottos in France and Portugal, and why saints were granted the right to heaven thanks to the miracles that they performed; and all through this magic, this vaudevillian show of immense appeal, the Church grew to a size and importance which challenged kings. 

Alyosha, Ivan's devoutly religious brother is shocked at Ivan's apostasy.  Alyosha has given his whole life to Christ, had believed completely in Christ's divine mission to offer salvation, redemption, and forgiveness of sins. 

'Ha', said Ivan, unconvinced and cynical of his brother's piety and went on to tell of the most horrendous, brutal, and inhuman treatment of children in the world - beatings, rapes, forced labor, starvation, and early death.  Christ said, 'Let the children suffer unto me', but behind this seemingly innocent and generous gesture, this expression of love and kindness, lay the most duplicitous deceit.  Christ could have eliminated suffering and yet he made it a pillar of the Church. 

To each and every one of Ivan's accusations of Christ's bribery - giving candy to childlike believers but deceiving them in his real intent by offering spiritual renewal and a place beside the Lord, Alyosha could only respond with the simplistic, superficial, patently false platitudes of the Church. 

The story of Christianity is a remarkable one - the evangelism of St. Paul who travelled from Palestine to Rome, preaching the gospel of hope and establishing churches in Galatia, Ephesus, and Corinth, small household gatherings of those whose lives held nothing but penury, sickness, and death. 

These churches could not be left on their own in an age of apostasy, so priests were created, and when the churches grew in number they were given bishops, then archbishops, then cardinals and popes. A quite secular, geopolitical, authoritative institution was created. 

And still the credulous masses blessed themselves, told ordained priests their sins, believed whole-heartedly in the pagan ceremony of transubstantiation, turning bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ as asking believers to 'eat of it'. 

This ritual sacrifice was to evoke the suffering of Christ on the cross where he died a painful, suffocating death.  Suffering had become the mainstay of the Church - a necessary feature of life to make one worthy of admission to heaven. 

Muslims deny that this painful, torturous death on the cross never occurred.  How could the Almighty permit such barbaric treatment of one of his prophets?  How could suffering be made the central feature of human life? 

Yet this was the genius of the Catholic Church - by making suffering the cornerstone of salvation, it was not obliged to relieve it in any way, and so the credulous became even more so.  Every new infliction of pain had divine purpose. 

The Church also knew that it could not sustain its majesty without proof, and so invented the ideas of mystery and miracles.  Go to Lourdes, the Vatican said, and there witness the magnificence of the Virgin Mary come down to earth as a messenger of Our Lord and Savior, and come to Holy Mass to witness the invocation of Christ through symbols, metaphor, verse, and magic. 

Protestant fundamentalism took a page out of the Vatican's book but added a note of urgency.  If you read the Bible, believed in its inerrancy, prayed, and took Jesus as your personal savior, he might well come to you - a visitation, an invitation to glory. 

In churches all over the South, congregants became ecstatic with unbounded joy when they saw Jesus appear before them.  Heaven was real, they now knew, and their path there was assured. 

Over the centuries the spiritual authority of the Church and in fact belief in God himself waned, and the most recent statistics confirm that much of Northern Europe is agnostic, demurring when asked the question, 'Do you without reservation believe in God'; but in Mississippi and Alabama there are no such doubts and questions about divinity are considered traitorous apostasy. 

Yet modernization - what closed the door on spiritual cant in Scandinavia - will happen in Mississippi and Alabama and the thousands of churches that seem to be everywhere will disappear. 

But the Church knew something about human nature and the desire of human beings to believe in something bigger than themselves.  There is no way that human beings could have no need for divine authority, a higher intelligence, a superior force. 

Conservative critics have noted the erosion of a central Christian ethos in America - one, universally accepted credo that unified the varied and diversified population of the nation.  It was there at the heart of the Republic when created after Independence, God-given rights, the declarers of freedom said, drawing inspiration from European Enlightenment. 

Now America is a playing field of secular identities, promoted as the new ethos.  Diversity, equity, and inclusivity became the mantra of the new Left.  God is immaterial, unnecessary, supernumerary in the struggle for a utopian, secular reality. 

The Left of course - like its Communist forbears - wants the State to assume the mantel of absolute authority, and progressives have preached the gospel of statism.  There is nothing that government cannot do, and in an ironic reprise of Dostoevsky, certainly more than God can provide. 

Americans of every living generation grew up on comic books, and alien invasion was a common theme.  Creatures from outer space, fleeing their own dying planet were looking for new worlds to conquer, and earth with its verdant landscapes, abundant water, and generous climes was the perfect place.  These creatures were superior in all ways, but human beings always found ways around their dazzling intelligence and superpowers. 

Arthur C Clarke wrote 2001 - A Space Odyssey and Stanley Kubrick turned it into an iconic movie about human contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence.  This story was a sophisticated antithesis to the dime store fantasies of the day.  It suggested that the universe did indeed contain intelligences far more advanced and superior to our own - intelligences which had evolved far beyond physical form and space and were simply pure intelligence, existing everywhere. 

Clarke admitted that he found inspiration in Hinduism where God is simply the One, a universal, inexplicable force that suffuses the universe with its being.  Hindus despite the profusion of their many gods is a profoundly monotheistic religion.  Siva, Krishna, Vishnu, Ganesh, and all the other gods are but manifestations of the One, the understandable transformation of the unknowable into knowable form. 

These more sophisticated notions often do not find currency in Christian America.  Judeo-Christian tradition insists on palpability, knowability, approachability, fear, respect, and duty.  God and Moses talk to each other in Exodus.  God wants Moses to lead his chosen people out of Egypt, but Moses says he is not worthy.  He stutters, is just a poor man, and not a leader. 

God and Job speak.  Job wonders why he has been chosen by God to suffer so.  What have I done? he asks God, but God refuses to answer and send another pestilence to test Job. 

All of this leads to the obvious question - if all human societies, every last one has believed in religion, deities, higher powers, supreme, authoritative intelligences, can our modern one survive without it?  Can there ever be a completely atheistic, secular society that lives and breathes on its own?

The Russian Communists tried.  Marx and Engels conceived of a utopian secular society without God. God and belief in him were obstacles to progress; and American progressives are no different.  Yet religious belief persists, at least in pockets especially in the South.  What has always been a human need cannot easily be eradicated.   

 

There has been talk recently of UFOs, and the current administration has promised to open formerly secret files about them, giving at least some currency to the notion of extraterrestrial, highly intelligent life.  

And what if there were some truth to the rumors?  Given Clarke and Kubrick - and Hinduism - it seems highly unlikely that aliens of a supreme intelligence would be riding around in flying saucers. 

Nevertheless Christian fundamentalists are preparing for first contact and deciding how they would evangelize these alien visitors.  The assumption that a human god - Jesus Christ - a very accessible divinity with human and celestial origins but very much from our planet could have relevance for a evanescent, transcendent intelligence is arrogant and presumptuous at best; but that is the nature of true belief.  An absolute conviction of rightness. 

The advance of Artificial Intelligence adds a new twist to Ivan Karamazov and his cynical dismissal of Christianity.  Before long AI will become more than human.  In its self-replicability, its boundless intelligence and complete authority it will become God, perhaps not worshipped but accepted as a higher power. 

Only time will tell.  Believers insist there is a God, an all knowing, all powerful being; but have a tough time distinguishing it from a future, although not so remote artificial intelligence.  God has always been a human abstract if not a creation, so let's see what new form 'he' will take.  

Increasing Polar Ice, Healthy Coral Reefs, No Rise In Sea Levels - A Climate Activist Loses It And Goes 'Round The Bend

 'Mighty cold for May, isn't it?', Edgar the gardener remarked to Cheryl Biggs, a bit of a poke in the eye to a woman who was always screeching about climate change, global warming, the rising seas, the melting ice caps, and the coming environmental Armageddon.  

Of course it was none of his business, but as he trimmed the hedges and raked the lawn, he could hear her go on about how soon Miami would be under water, the Maldives would disappear, southern crops would be incinerated, and life in cities would become unbearable. 

People will run their air conditioners full steam, energy output will be at maximum capacity and the air will be filled with billions more tons of hydrocarbons fueling even more heat and existential destruction.  Before long, there will be no stopping the inevitable.  Even Canadian crops will burn up, the Colorado River will run dry, Sacramento Valley will be a charred wasteland, and Los Angeles gangs will roam the city looking for water. 

Edgar shook his head when he heard the worst of it - the shrieks and lamentation, the anguish, the palpable pain - but he had to laugh at this flailing caricature of a mad woman, Sturm und Drang, sound and fury, lights out craziness, the end of days, repentance, and anticipation of a fiery, all-too-soon Judgment Day. 

He pulled up his collar against the unseasonable chill - global warming, said climate activists.  The melting polar ice was cooling the Arctic Ocean and currents were bringing cold water to the East Coast of the United States, chilling the air, disrupting normal Spring patterns, and keeping sweaters and mufflers from mothballs. 

Edgar was old enough to have heard it all, from Al Gore's dire predictions of environmental doom, to periodic updates citing bird migrations, hurricane activity, and coral reef erosion.  The drumbeat grew louder and more insistent. It was no longer just a bass line increasing in tempo, but a thundering crash of timpani, snare drums, and cymbals.  Climate warriors were in the streets in phalanxes, shouting, beseeching, pleading for environmental sanity. They howled like Old Testament prophets and latter day Doomsday sayers.  There is little time left. 

 

Of course none of this was true, all confabulations and very inspired demagoguery.  Harping on about something so beyond human reach but insisting that if we all pulled together and bought electric cars, turned down the heat and raised the thermostat in the summer, used prudence and good sense and gave our all for the planet, maybe...just maybe...disaster could be avoided. 

Meanwhile the polar caps gained ice, flawed, biased reports predicting dramatic rises in global temperatures were uncovered for the shameless screeds they were, new underwater high-resolution spectrometry showed that the Australian coral reefs were thriving, sea levels were not rising but holding steady.  

While most Americans who had been unbothered by all the climate fol-de-rol, kept their thermostats where they had always been, and kept Ford-350s at the top of the list said, 'I told you so'. They had just made it through the unconscionable government shutdown of everything during COVID, the senseless six-foot rule, outdoor masking, vigilantism and totally freaked-out housewives - all fabricated and cockamamie - that the climate change hoopla was to be expected. 

Edgar was old enough to remember the Hong Kong flu, a savage, highly infections virus, when he and his young girlfriend took turns at the stove, so weak were they; but when able out they went, no masks, no distancing, no panic. Every so often a flu strain got out of hand but it would die out, would take its toll but would not be an extinction-level event. Life went on, schools remained open, businesses bought and sold, it was a challenging time but soon over. 

'Soon we won't be needing you, Edgar', Cheryl said as she paid the man.  'All this...', and here she pointed to the luxuriant skip laurels, the chrysanthemums, the thick grass, the magnolia, and cherry trees all in bloom, 'will be history'. 

Edgar nodded, smiled, and said, 'Not for a while, Mrs. Biggs, see you next week', and with that he loaded up his gear and headed back to Maryland.  He put an Iron Maiden tape in the deck - why he still loved heavy metal was beyond him and his children but he did, dutifully almost...a statement? - swung on to the Beltway and headed for Poolesville. 

'What's a mother to do?', Cheryl said, remembering the old ad for Velveeta cheese or some other spread, but this was no time for idle fancy. The climate emergency had not disappeared, just lost traction given the various wars going on, the financial scandals in Minnesota and California, and the wild doings of Donald Trump.  Climate change would soon be back in the news once the seas started rising, the ice caps went back to melting, and the coral reefs began again to degrade. 

Yet the ethos, the zeitgeist of America had changed once the harbinger of bad times, former President Joe Biden, was out of office.  Trump had tapped a chord - Americans weren't the worriers progressives had made them out to be.  Live and let live, and make hay while the sun shines had always been tried and true adages. Unbelievably, they not only didn't care about climate change, they thought the whole thing was a hoax. 

Worst of all, the nation was building energy- and water-sucking data centers at an unstoppable pace. The demand for AI was growing by leaps and bounds, and the country was desperate to find ways to fuel it.  Solar and wind power simply wouldn't do, nuclear would take years to build back up, so it was dig, baby dig for coal and gas.  

The climate would heat up despite the new, soon to be discredited evidence that it is not, and this greedy, inconscient demand for energy to make Google searches a bit more thorough would only accelerate the trend.  Not only was the climate crisis still upon us, we were even closer to disaster. 

What if...what if...what if the naysayers were right and the earth was not warming, then what?  The last twenty years of activism would have been for nothing, a waste of time, a buy-in to a total fabrication, a victim of the worst scam on record.  Perish the thought, she said, and went about her business; but the juice had been squeezed out of the orange.  

The climate and environmental conferences were airless, spiritless, poorly attended affairs. Could she simply say, 'Let bygones be bygones' and turn her attention to something else which needed fixing? Hardly.  She was an old lady now, and the time for change had long gone.  It was chaise lounge time at best. 

'You gave it your best, dear', her husband said to her as he sprayed the rose bushes for aphids.  'It was the effort that counted'. 

How could he say that, Cheryl wondered?  Effort without result is wasted effort, nothing less, so there he is self-satisfied, spraying away without a care in the world when the wind had been completely taken out of her sails.  

Her husband picked her an American Beauty, and the gloom lifted.  Little things, she thought.  I must learn; but she couldn't let go of that visceral need for social change so part of her life for decades.  Is it too late for the black man? she wondered, or the mestizo? 

 

True belief had taken its toll, and once engrained in the credulous soul, there's no getting rid of it. 

The Senator And His Courtesan - An Unapologetic Libertine In A Censorious Age

Haley Windham grew up on a farm in a small farm community of Presbyterians who had moved there in the early years of the 19th century, prospered thanks to hard work, faith, and singular ambition.  Hiram Windham, the family patriarch, had settled on land newly platted thanks to the Lewis and Clark expedition that explored and laid initial claim to the lands west of the Mississippi.  Plat 454 once bought and titled became the Windham family homestead, five hundred acres of fertile eastern prairie on which Hiram husbanded livestock, grew corn, and tended to goats and chickens.

By the time Haley was a young woman, the rural life of the Midwest no longer held any interest.  She had had her fill of eggs, milking, drawing water, and tending to her five brothers and sisters, and after a spell at Franklin Pierce junior college, headed east to Washington to seek her fortune. 

Haley was a modest girl and 'fortune' was not a mythical wealth of Croesus, a spectacular marriage, or good fortune.  It was only getting what any young, bright, attractive young woman deserved.  She had no particular long term goal in mind, but had the good sense to approach her Senator and apply for an internship.  She would be loyal, diligent, and patient; and he would find her a most able and apt assistant. 

Now this Senator was unusual for his times - a censorious, accusatory, puritanical era of MeToo supposition of male deceit and misogyny - for he cared nothing for such rectitude.  Women were women who all looked alike with their clothes off, who all had a peculiarly female ambition, but who were still in the thrall of male protectorship - easily seduced by men who took them seriously, explored their inner rooms, and treated them with respect and dignity. 

The Senator had been gifted with a silver tongue, useful both for the seduction of young women and for political election.  The constituents of his state loved him, and his career from state legislator to attorney general, to Congressman to Senator was one of easy elision and happy outcomes.  They liked him for what he did for their state, but loved him for his charm, easygoing sexual confidence, and sincerity.  As such they not only forgave him for his sexual dalliances, they loved him for it. 

Now every Senator since Alexander Hamilton's day has had lovers, mistresses, and concubines.  One remembers the origins of the august Upper Chamber and Alexander Hamilton's debate with his colleague Thomas Jefferson over the dangers of populism. 'One must be wary of the mob, my dear Thomas', he wrote in a letter to Jefferson, 'lest they enslave us and send us back to Africa along with the Mandingos here to pick cotton'.  S

Such respect for breeding, education, and intelligence provided a buffer to the ragged peasantry that Jefferson so loved, and gave a certain privilege and social immunity to those who legislated there.  Sexual pleasure was by and large the currency of the realm. 

Times change, and such patrician privilege went by the wayside as the Senate became much like its little brother the House of Representatives, 'a bunch of rubes' said Hamilton, 'hayseeds, chicken farmers, and wool gatherers'.  Along the way these Senators got infected with the same puritanical fervor as their friends in the Longworth building and led - at least in public - lives of moral rectitude and self-censorship. 

Things went from bad to worse, and by the time that Joe Biden was president, the country - let alone the Senate - was dominated by a cabal of shrewish vixens who lambasted men and their misogynist intentions at every turn.  Men, whether Walmart greeters, plumbers, or Senators were to hew to the same moral line.  Keep it in your pants or there will be hell to pay. 

But these Congressional vixenish bullies were still women, and they gave the Senator a royal pass.  He not only gave them the time of day but convinced them that he was firmly in their camp. Gender must be aligned to protect women, chastise men, and allow for freedom of sexual choice. 

Of course this was all a contrived scam. The Senator neither believed this feminist cant or paid it any mind.  Women were women, a distinctive, historically consistent class, to be used when convenient, praised when advantageous, and seduced whenever possible. 

It was tribute to the Senator's canniness and ingenuity that he led the live of a Lothario, a Casanova, a Count de Valmont in the midst of such hysterical sexual fol-de-rol.  So when he took the lovely Haley Windham as his lover, every single one of the watchdog harridans on Capitol Hill looked the other way.  If they had any second thoughts it was because the handsome, desirable Senator had not chosen them. 

The Senator was married of course to a charming woman in her own right who, both seduced by her charming, irresistible husband and politically ambitious also looked the other way.  A marriage of convenience; and only by taking lovers of her won did she escape the opprobrium of deceived wife. 

Remarkable for 21st century American politics, the Senator acted no differently than Francois Mitterrand, former President of France at whose gravesite mourned his legitimate daughter and wife and his lover and illegitimate adult child.  He was as open as Mitterrand, Sarkozy, and presidential pretender Dominique Strauss-Kahn, famous sexual libertine and sexual adventurer. 

He was the very epitome of 'diversity', that overmarketed, hapless, divisive, and rudely ignorant deformation of heterogeneity. As much as many progressives hated to admit it, he occupied one of the  sexual points on the gender spectrum - not only a straight, white male, but one aggressively so, a virtual sexual wolf on the prowl. 

Haley Windham was well taken care of by the Senator, often seen at his side, but never demanding attention.  She was his consort, concubine, lover, and confidant and she wanted no more.  There is chivalry in adultery and the Senator treated Haley like a princess, and for that his constituents loved him even more.  He was never dismissive or disregarding of his wife - on the contrary she was always with him at official functions, respected as his partner and sexually liberated individual.  

It was a bit like the English Victorians Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicholson who enjoyed the pleasures and privileges of an open marriage and were accorded no censure for it. 

The affair between the Senator and Haley Windham lasted longer than anyone - particularly he - expected, but when it did there were no tears shed.  They parted friends and both went on to successful individual lives. 

It all goes to show you - there is no such thing as absolutes.  Life is a series of comings and goings and the most able, morally accommodating, and considerate people will not only survive but profit. 

As for the MeToo harridans of Washington, the old maids, shrewish, embittered women of the Left, they were left to whoop and holler, castigate and excoriate to no avail.  They had been so snookered by the Senator that if not for his charm and warm, engaging manner, would be the hated enemy.

And so it would always be.  Savvy men have never taken feminist screeds seriously, and used the perennial feminine desire to be taken seriously to good advantage.  No harm, no foul.  The Senator went on as if the brouhaha on the Left never existed, and the cabal of wicked sisters never knew how unimportant they were.