Wednesday Talk Radio on 12/26/18

Thank you Paul and the callers this morning. Your program needed more than the one hour allotted to provide just some of the necessary disc-US-sion of Leon Rosselson's song "Stand Up for Judas" (Iscariot from Latin word for particular type of Traitor to Rome; the knife assassins aka Sicari of the Roman occupation of Judea, Philistia and Israel along with neighboring fiefdoms). I didn't need to call in as each of your callers with your own moderation and tempo pacing helped clarify my own attempts to reorient myself in these ever more disorienting times.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1irXjtkD1Y

What this discussion does, and I will share the audio archive podcast link here on your KBOO page with the Media Discussion List referenced below, is deepen this season turned into holy days by so many of the world's historical faith traditions and pursuers after mytho-poetic revelations and visions of transcendence. Perhaps the American Transcendental tradition isn't fully illustrated in the works of Deloria, Melville, Emerson, Balakian, Dickinson and Thoreau as much as it is in the buoyancy and resilience of the material culture of consumerism, but that's another even thornier topic for discussion.

The values in necessarily human-limited scriptures, texts and before that the oral transmission of epics and creation story-homilies is not the received and reductive dogmas (interesting to note that in Hebrew the near homonym with the English word Dogma is the word "doogma" that means example or illustrative point) that emerge and are institutionalized with such horrifying manifestations as you and your callers note in the western world's institution of the genocidal and rapacious Church Doctrine of Discovery.

The true value is in being able to discuss such suppressed history and its implications not just with those whose views and faith traditions mirror our own. Getting out and using our airwaves to perhaps teach Comparative Religion along with Civics would go a long way towards mutually beneficial comity. That however might lead to participatory democracy and is where we can expect continued push-back from the corporate titans that own our airwaves and cyber platforms as opposed to the "Peoples' Airwaves" envisioned with the advent of broadcasting and now netcasting.

Clearly we need as wide and ecumenical as possible human forum for discussing these foundational (and subject to laying new foundations when necessary) mytho-poetic texts and non-canonical scriptures as well as the canon without feeling as though the sanctity of what some hold to be Direct DIVINE TRANSMISSIONS sans fallible human agency or our own identity formation is somehow threatened by such discourse and exchange. Or communally or personally defensive in our pursuit of deeper understandings.

The toughest thing in the Human Condition may be our inability to leave any of our received canons open to whichever Maker or Maker(s) one worships as is required by any Omniscient Infinite force; the freedom to change his\her\their mind(s) as time unfolds and history unfurls. As a kid no one in the orthodox religious communities I went to school with ever thought of a conflict between Creationism and Darwin's theories of Evolution or with the principles of science. Whatever we as finite humans can learn and retain of the wonders of the world were just naturally attributed to whatever CREATOR we worshiped and sang praises to.

Keep up the good faith struggle. Fascinating to go back to the more frantic attempts to reach clarification in the last installment of your Wednesday Morning Chat with author and journalist Jacqueline Keeler via audio archive of the Bears Ears subject and then reflect and perhaps revisit to unpack Ms. Keeler's own evolving relationship to the foundational texts of North American First Nations literature via the seminal academic histories assembled and essayed by her cousin Vine Deloria, Jr as set up against the mytho-poetics of the Native American Church as refined at least in part from his divinity school studies within the broader American Lutheran tradition. There'd be much value across communities of faith and hard science as well as social science in those discussions. Thinking out loud should be encouraged and room left before the critical piling on begins (in earnest and in jest...)

I've long been engaged and recently taken more interest in addressing the disorientation and bafflement added to by corporate-captured and mass mediated industries by applying some of the precepts carried forward in the Orthodox Hebrew Prayer book of my youth (the Paltiel Birnbaum siddur\daily prayerbook) which begins morning prayers with a recitation of and meditation upon Rabbi Ishmael ben Elisha'as Baraitha d'Rabbi Ishmael, introduced in a prayer book footnote this way: "Rabbi Ishmael ben Elisha'a, a contemporary of Rabbi Akiba, died as a martyr in the year 135 during the Roman persecutions. The Baraitha d'Rabbi Ishmael, which constitutes the introduction to the Sifra (tannaitic commentary on Leviticus), has been inserted here to complete the daly minimum of Bible and Talmud study required of every Jew. This section is prefaced (on page 13) by two blessings concerning Torah study."

The slippery slope and inter-braiding of subjective with attempts at objective study of texts is for me best illustrated by simply trying to understand the 13 rules of exegesis and scriptural study set forth in the same attempt at clarity of reasoning and logic as was wrestled down into 13 rules by Rabbi Ishmael. It is tough to bring the rudiments of this sage's cautionary and useful guidelines into clear focus even after so many years of my trying to think them through, apply them and meditate on their wider values.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baraita_of_Rabbi_Ishmael

This tradition so well refined by the Greek philosophical texts and traditions over so many interrupted generations and as was widely practiced the world over in various traditions and most closely by rival imperial force the Seleucid Greeks through their Hellenic culture which had a volatile effect on events in Judea, Philistia, Israel, Assyrian occupied Egypt and the Levant well before the Roman Occupation and in terms of seasonal solstice holidays remains elusive.

The never completely canonized (C)hanukah festivities that have via the human condition's often perverse dynamics been conflated in theological importance by its proximity to indigenous faiths termed pagan at the equatorial latitudes and by the canonization and institutionalization of the gospels and beatitudes then later bastardized into the Imperial Doctrine of Discovery and downright idolatrous conferring of the human rights of an individual upon self-perpetuating corporate hierarchies deserves ever more study and discussion.

Keep on doing,
warmly and lifting a cup of piping sahlab to those spreading friendship and community in these stressed out times and helping bring the house-less indoors and stabilized while we as a society and polity desperately seek some common sense policy-making.

Mitch Ritter\Paradigm Sifters
Lay-Low Studios, Ore-Wa
Media Discussion List