End clergy coalitions

This is to comment on Tom Watson’s “Guest column: State’s budget deficit should not be balanced on the backs of our children,” The Advocate online, June 2, 2016, then also comment on monuments to the Civil War that could commemorate terminating the priest-politician partnership in civic morality, or ending Chapter XI Machiavellianism.

theadvocate.com/news/opinion/15980921-64/guest-column-states-budget-deficit-should-not-be-balanced-on-the-backs-of-our-children

I view the clergy coalition in a historical light and see harm: Politicians subjugate themselves to the clergy and civically indolent people allow it. Only a dreamer would resist the priest-politician partnership. I dream.

I have studied Machiavelli's The Prince, 1513, off and on for about 15 years, especially Chapter XI. I understand James Madison was influenced by Machiavelli but did not take to heart Chapter XI’s irony. One of Madison’s documents that disappoints is "Memorial & Remonstrance," 1785. Madison states: "Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governour of the Universe." I take “Civil Society” to mean legal society or civil propriety, but do not know Madison’s mind. Regardless the USA is not a legal society: it is a sovereign people limited only by the preamble to the constitution for the USA.

This week, I attended Congressman Garret Graves' Town Meeting. It featured a Baptist minister and his report of the conservative lobby's approval, as part of the Christian program, I suppose under aggressive application of the Greece v Galloway error, which states that legislative prayer is “ceremonial,” for the legislators. The mood felt worse than David Vitter’s Christian congregation--a gestapo crowd I felt a reluctant part of before I met Vitter.

Reflecting, it occurred to me for the first time that USA history informs humankind to reverse the order in Chapter XI Machiavellianism: the priest-politician partnership picks the people's pockets while the people pray to their personal god for relief; it would take a fool to try to resist the priest-politician partnership. What’s sad is that the adult generation passes the folly on to their progeny. (That happened to me, but my spouse showed me civic morality, and now I’m hooked on it.)

I'm trying to learn if Christian tyranny under Supreme Court opinon is Congressman Graves' intent or mere blind, conservative tradition—the same blindness that gave us the Civil War, DOMA, Bush's war, Bobby Jindal's "service," and plenty of other miseries. Regardless, a civic people can reform the losses and misery that continue under Chapter XI Machiavellianism. A civic people can, together, create a possible better future by establishing civic morality based on the facts of reality, discoverable with physics. Help from innovators like Congressman Graves would not be a bad thing for the people and might broaden his joy as well.

Regardless, history shows the factional Christian majority uses the clergy coalition or Chapter XI Machiavellianism to prevent real-no-harm (RNH) private liberty with civic morality (PLwCM). This achievable possibility has never been expressed before, so maybe it is coming.

 

Monuments could commemorate resolution of ruinous Bible interpretation

 

Now, I want to segue from Tom Watson's clergy coalition to an illustration of how the facts of reality are discoverable with physics, and how religion in general and Christianity in particular denies physics and contributes to human loss and misery. This is a response to a question www.quora.com/What-is-something-you-find-amazing-about-physics/answer/Phil-Beaver-1 anonymously “directed” to me.

It seems to a civic people (ACP) that humankind has been amazingly slow to recognize that by appreciating discovered physics, misery and pain could be drastically lessened. The timeline of the universe fascinatingly indicates that everything emerges from physics, which is energy, mass and space-time. That statement begs a few questions and perhaps weak answers.

ACP doesn’t know if physics emerged from something but thinks it did. Some people hypothesize that a god caused physics, and so far, that hypothesis is alive on the shelf of imagination. It seems every discovery of the facts of reality begins with imagination leading to a hypothesis, so it might not be wise to discount the god hypothesis. My speculation, based on E=m times C squared is that physics emerged from potential energy (PE), which is circular to the causal question: from what did PE emerge?

What is everything? With the systematic study of physics—perceived observation, examination, hypothesis, designs to test the hypothesis, tests, evaluation, repetition—the timeline of discovery seems to indicate that even opinion derives from physics. Here’s a condensed timeline to illustrate my point:

All things emerge when?

1.      Physics (energy, mass &space-time) emerged 13.8 billion years ago (ya).

a.       Since then, everything else emerges from physics

b.      Cosmos, inorganic chemistry and Earth emerged

2.      Biology on Earth emerged 3.8 billion ya

a.       Placental mammals 65 million ya

b.      Homo species 3 million ya

3.      Opinion, cultures, and politics emerged

a.       Monotheism four thousand ya (tya)

b.      Slavery (physics of chains and brutality) four tya

c.       Catholic Christianity with slavery ordained by the god two tya

d.      Magna Carta; English, opinion-based law under Catholicism 800 ya

e.       Factional (sectarian) Protestant Christianity with slavery 500 ya

f.       Black church in America 258 ya

g.      The preamble to the constitution for the USA 229 ya

h.      The USA under Protestant Christian religious liberty 227 ya

i.        American civil war—white Christian church vs white Christian church 155 ya

j.        Liberation theology 55 ya

k.      Black liberation theology 47 ya

4.      Physics-based civic morality emerges 1 ya

 

The timeline gives evidence of key issues that otherwise might not come to light. For example, does life differ from biology? And when the Church canonized the Bible, the physics of slavery was well known, so why include books that seem to advocate that slavery is an institution by the Christian god?

 

If white church went to war with white church over slavery, why has black liberation theology emerged? Why hasn't civic morality emerged? Has history not shown that the canonization of the Bible was an error by men and that the Church needs to publicly reform by its own morals? Do four millennia of African slaves as a commodity to the world enter the moral debate?

 

The Bible may be useful for saving souls for the afterdeath—that vast time after body, mind, and person have stopped functioning. However, it is ruinous as the basis for civic morality. This is an indication not that Christianity should be terminated, but that it should be practiced in the privacy of closets, homes, and churches, so that it can at last be a real-no-harm (RNH) institution. Michael Polanyi represented the value of Christianity for believers very well in his book, Personal Knowledge, 1958, and left it to other believers to represent their religions. We are not schooled in other religions, but speculate the same holds true for them: they should be private practices. In privacy, all RNH religions may flourish among ACP.

 

These ideas are not mine alone, rather are the consequences of library and other collaboration by A Civic People of the United States, Baton Rouge, LA, USA. Yet I claim sole responsibility for the writing.

 

Copyright©2016 by Phillip R. Beaver. All rights reserved. Permission is hereby granted for the publication of all or portions of this paper as long as this complete copyright notice is included.