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"The Primordial Sin" of Ethical Knowledge as the Necessary Condition for betterment of the human race

M.G.'s comment to McCarthy's trust in the Word of Hebrew Bible

After publishing, at the end of July 2008, my "Ahriman's Tales of Redemption and Natural Selection" (http://www.israelshamir.net/Contributors/rd4.htm), I received several negative reactions to my work on the "two gods" present in the New Testament. One of numerous enthusiasts of the story incessantly repeated by the Church (about the crucifixion of the truth-telling Jesus) wrote to Shamir's website a letter clearly indicating that she would be pleased to see a fate similar to Jesus' administered to all heretics questioning official Church teachings:

"The article on Israel Shamir's website has got to be the biggest waste of time for your thesis concerning Christianity and the Catholic religion. It is no secret that today's so-called philosophers consider themselves much wiser than those of ancient times....ahh pride! It is a fact of history that many have attempted to dismiss the crucifixion of Christ, and the spiritual understanding of it because they have no light. What cannot be seen they do not understand and what they do not understand they reject. – So goes the world. Anne M. Canada.

Another, more elaborate comment was written by Anthony S. McCarthy, with whose critics of a recent book of Christopher Hitchens ("God is not Great") I polemized in my text "Ahriman's Inspired Fairy Tales". McCarthy's answer to my comments was recently published at www.israelshamir.net (see below), so here I am formulating a possibly concise reaction to his objections. In particular McCarthy observes: At the beginning of Part II, MG refers to Jesus as a "truth-teller", yet fails to mention that this truth-teller speaks with the utmost respect for Abraham, referring to the God of Abraham, whom He identifies as the God of the Living – His Father. Christ also says (John 8.40) "But as it is, you are seeking to kill me, a man who has told you the truth, which I heard from God; this Abraham did not do." So it is evident that Christ does not view Abraham as a murderer or even one who seeks to kill (in the sense of, seeks to murder). More importantly, MG neglects to mention that Abraham was entitled to hope against hope, knowing that He whom he trusted would not have deceived him ... Thus St Paul tells us: "By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac".

It means that St. Paul believed that "his" Abraham sincerely ("trustfully") wanted to 'offer' Isaac – it means to kill, to bleed, and to roast his adolescent son. This confirms that the "God of St. Paul" – it is the one which speaks from pages of the Hebrew Bible – is substantially different from the one, about which Jesus of Nazareth spoke . There is a substantial differentia specifica, between the Abram/Abraham described in the Hebrew Bible (HB in abbr.), truly subhuman (IQ = 0) (who, among other his glorious doings was a wandering Middle-East pimp), and his noble homonym, known not only to Jesus of Nazareth, but later on also to Muhammad. In order to avoid confusion, I propose to call symbolically Abraham imagined by Jesus, "IQ Abraham". (IQ might be read not only as "having the Intelligence Quotient > 0", but also as "Islam Qur'an".) In fact Islam's Qur'an (IQ) reports that its Alien (to Hebrews) Abraham had no intention to 'offer' Isaac, despite his adolescent son's pleas to commit such an odious act.

If we associate the above observation that "it is evident that Christ does not view Abraham as a murderer or even one who seeks to kill", with another McCarthy statement (expressed in his critique "Neither is Hitchens Great") that "Of course, the story of Abraham and Isaac prefigures the ultimate sacrifice of Christ at Calvary", we are invited to conclude that in a similar manner, as Moslems feast the purely symbolical "sacrifice of Isaac", Christians who every Sunday commemorate "the ultimate sacrifice of Christ at Calvary", refer to an event created in imagination of Apostles. The Alien (to Hebrews) Heavenly Father, to whom Jesus refers in Chapter 8 of Gospel of John, had no intention to harm his beloved Son and Messenger – exactly as claimed by Marcion and later on also Muhammad. It means that McCarthy remains in error, McCarthy who, forgetting Jesus' opinion about IQ Abraham, wrote in his anti-Hitchens pamphlet "Christ the God-man chose to suffer and to die in order to atone for our sins. ... (which sins are) inexorably bound up with Original Sin (of) Adam's faithlessness". In case Jesus' sufferance and the death at the cross were only 'a conjecture' – as the Qur'an pretends – the atonement of sins of Christians by Christ's crucifixion is only virtual, meaning not true. In this case the whole "redemptory" theology of the Catholic Church reveals itself to be a a lure, with no good implications for the real world. As observed by Ken Freeland in his commentary to my text, no betterment of humanity was noticed since the cross has been installed in pagan shrines in Europe and elsewhere.

Who then is making profit on "selling" the history of Jesus martyrdom as a (self-)sacrifice of God? The chapter of Gospel of John indicated by McCarthy informs us that there were in particular these Jews "WHO HAD BELIEVED IN HIM", who had the intention of killing Jesus for telling them the truth. This specific breed of ancient Jews, considering themselves to be descendants of biblical Abraham (IQ = 0), Jesus denounced as descendants of a sinister deity, known to Iranians as Ahriman "You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, etc.". From the point of view of Jesus, reported in Gospel of John, the odious "Genesis" story of Abram/Abraham, who sincerely intended to kill his son, is simply not true. It signifies that all religious people who, like McCarthy, believe that Jesus of Nazareth "treats the Old Testament as authoritative – that is, as God's Revelation of Himself to the human race". are of course in error. It is rather the Devil, not the God of Wisdom, of Goodness and of Beauty, which manifested himself in the OT to the human race, this in order to lower this "race's" average IQ, of course. "There is no truth in the (Hebrew) Bible" remarked (ahh pride! – as Anne M.would comment) the apostate Jewish philosopher Spinoza in the 17th century. And naturally, for this statement Spinoza's former co-religionists sincerely intended to kill him: the ancient Hebrews had a Law recommending the stoning of everyone who dared to question the veracity of Moses' Torah (this was the pretext for stoning of St. Stephen), and this law has not been completely forgotten in modern times. The case of Spinoza illustrates the ambitions of the so-called legitimate children of HB Abraham, trying "to do what their devilish father did" (see Gospel of John).

There is another teaching of the OT, regarded with admiration by all "IQ = 0" theologians, and in particular by these politicians which dream of New Hebrew Global Theocracy. Criticizing my "Marcionist" heretical idea that it is indecent for a God to suffer, (for such suffering will make unhappy all those naive enough to imitate such handicapped deity), McCarthy made the following "orthodox" comment: "That people should prefer a story without suffering, especially a patient suffering which we are called to imitate, is hardly surprising. Yet to truly understand the meaning of human suffering we need to be sure we understand the Crucifixion. I would advise reading John Paul II's Apostolic Letter Salvifici Doloris. etc." The physiological feeling of pain informs us that something is wrong with our organism, in particular that an alien body has entered it. In order to achieve once again its internal equilibrium, our organism is spontaneously performing appropriate to remove the alien body (vomiting, the rising of temperature permitting to enhance activities of immune system, the spontaneous removal, by local abundant lymph secretions, of thorns and splinters, etc.)

If we force ourselves to do nothing against the pain, we may expect two physiological reactions: 1. we will become ever more self-centred and thus egoistic, for the pain forces us to think principally about ourselves; and 2. with time we will become habituated to the pain, which we will perceive less and less, like a man, who fasts, at the beginning feels the pain in his stomach, but after several days of not eating he feels no more hunger, and becomes capable of starving himself, without pain, to death. Both these physiological phenomena are dangerous not only for us, but also for our environment, for someone who continually suffers has a tendency to infect others with his bad mood. In short, by centring ourselves on our own – or someone else's – mishaps, we willy-nilly are becoming crippled, both in body and spirit, and thus prone to colonisation by various parasites. Who are those who profit from simple people's efforts to suffer (but not to reason) together with Christ? As an answer I propose a short linking pope JPII "poems" about Salvifici Doloris with the observed reality, modification of a known litany, which I recently heard at Radio Maryja in my very Catholic country:

By His painful Passion Pharisees attained the salvation,
by His painful Passion hypocrites have big bellies and Mercedes cars,

by His salutary Passion thieves are walking around in purple cloths.

In order to demonstrate, how the infection of a populace with the cult of Salvifici Doloris, assures a wellbeing of "investors" in this very "catholic" lure, I propose as a lecture part of an article in Polish on this subject, which I had already completed 10 years ago.

Salvifici Doloris of Scapegoat-God, healing wounds of "evildoers who believe in Him" (John 8, 31)

(Translated from M.G.'s article "The Scapegoat and the Fate of Yugoslavia", published in "Tradycje duchowe Europy Środkowej i Wschodniej" (Spiritual Traditions of Central and Eastern Europe) WSP, Slupsk, 1999.)

(...) The management of profits, which result from punishment of a "scapegoat", is a practice known for thousands of years. For this reason, in order to understand better, why the modern mass-media are organizing Orwellian "seances of hate", directed against Serbs, or against Saddam Hussain (or against the Iranian president in 2008), it is worthwhile to recall ideas formulated by known contemporary Catholic theologians, concerning the barbaric practice of punishment of an innocent animal, which serves as substitute for the punishment of a real criminal. A compilation of these views was done by the priest Stanislaw Budzik in a book "The Drama of Redemption" published in 1997 by a Catholic edition Byblos in Tarnów, Poland.

We learn from Budzik's book that according to the French librarian-and anthropologist René Girard, living for the past few decades in USA, that very primitive societies, in a situation of an accumulation of social tensions, had (and still have) the tendency to discharge these tensions by a collective murder of one of their randomly chosen members. In ancient Israel this barbaric and intelligence-less (for not intending to search for roots of the conflict), practice of attenuation of social tensions, had become civilized and ritualized. As the Book of Priests (Leviticus) informs us, as an atonement for socially noxious behaviors (but only these which become known to the populace), priests of Israel were killing, in a difference with primitive African tribes, not the innocent tribal member chosen at random, but domestic animals offered to the Temple by unmasked sinners. Corpses of these bled out, innocent animals were subsequently incinerated as offerings to the Lord. As Girard stresses, during rites of "scapegoat punishment", extremely important is the FAITH of participants in the efficiency of these sinister mysteries, their faith that the sacrifice has the redeeming power ofsaving the sinner, Without this FAITH, which immobilizes normal inquisitive processes of thinking, there is no hope for a reconstruction of a social solidarity, which was shaken in whatever manner.

The effect of the belief, in the salutary power of an offering, which sacrifice temporally social tensions, might be compared to the medicinal effect of a placebo: in case one believes that a neutral substance is a true medicament, this "psychical medicament" frequently is able to heal a patient believing in the placebo. The faith in the efficacy of the placebo makes miracles up to certain limits, the placebo used repeatedly must be, with time, more potent in order to be still efficient, and in a similar manner primitive cultures evolved, in which the social cohesion was assured by sacrifices of innocent "scapegoats". The Mexican Aztec Empire five hundred years ago was entangled in the logic of cruel sacrifices just prior to its invasion by Spaniards; local priests were making bloody 'offerings' of up to twenty thousand young people yearly; in a more "civilized" ancient Israel, just prior to its destruction by the Romans, were bled out and burned more than thousand oxen, goats and muttons yearly in Jerusalem's Temple, making this temple the biggest slaughterhouse and crematory of Antiquity. (Thus reports well known historian of Antiquity Tadeusz Zielinski in a book "Hellenism and Judaism" published only once, in 1927 in Warsaw.)

In his book "Le Bouc Emissaire" (The Scapegoat), published for the first time in 1982, and than republished in numerous languages, René Girard reasons in a manner characteristic of Darwinians, and claims that the necessity of substituting animal offerings results from the simple growth of population. Due to this biological fact an increasing number of identical individuals has to compete, inside their tribal organization, for power and for the ever more limited material resources. He calls this phenomenon "the mimetic crisis", for it results from the behavior of non-differentiated masses, which try to imitate (at least externally) individuals visible at the summit of the social hierarchy. It is of interest that René Girard remains completely blind to the realm envisioned by the incomprehensible-to-him Plato. Namely that the normal, natural mimetic process consists of our efforts to imitate individuals which impress us with their courage, with their strength, with their noble behavior, and/or with their knowledge. Simply, we like to imitate the aristos, meaning the best, most perfect individuals in our environment. And these aristos, by the very definition of this notion, cannot be jealous of anything. It means that young people, by imitating noble behaviors, naturally attenuate in themselves feelings of jealousy which could disrupt any society. In a truly aristocratic society there is no need to search for scapegoats in order to assure social cohesion.

Thus all religious associations and sects, which were striving for the cognitive and ethical betterment of their members – be it Pythagoreans in Greece, be it Essenes and early Christians in Israel, be it Suffis among Moslems – were/are considering the cult of offerings "for sins" to be something hideous, and to be avoided. (...) Moreover, any keen observer may notice that the behavior of these priestly castes, which practice the fraudulent trick with "scapegoat punishment" (...) resemble the behavior of ordinary pickpockets. Such small-time criminals, by yelling "thief, thief," deflect the attention of the public from their own fraudulent actions by directing suspicions of the crowd at victims of their theft. (...) An association of ritual "redemptory" offerings, practiced by various low-class sects, with criminal activities of persons, or groups of persons, specializing in plunder of their neighbors, is cognitively very fertile. A skilful thief is not making a scapegoat from an individual chosen at random from a group which is socially suspected of mischief (as Girard suggests it). If a thief has the IQ > 0 (it means IQ higher than the Hebrew Bible Abraham) he directs his accusations at men and social groups most keen in observation, and courageous enough to denounce him. Moreover, by throwing accusations of being the source of evil,onto the most noble and courageous members of a society, an accuser takes on the pose of a "saint", and thus someone "naturally elected" to take over the leadership of the group dominated by his demagogy.

The confirmation that this is indeed the 'hard core' of any redemptory practice, we find in the works of contemporary Austrian theologian R. Schwager, quoted in Budzik's "Drama of Redemption". This Austrian researcher analyzed the well-known prophecy of Isaiah, who pointed at profits which priests of Israel may realize thanks to the skilful affliction of their victim called "God's servant": According to Schwager this famous text of Isaiah, read properly, states the following "The LORD has accepted that we have charged him with sins of all of us, he was wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities, he was afflicted but he agreed with his affliction, upon him was the chastisement, which became the salvation for all of us, and with his stripes we are healed". (And subsequently "And they made his grave with the wicked ... although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth" – Is. 53, 4-5 and 9.) Interpreting this significant text – which forms the prefiguration of future Christ's Passion – Schwager pertinently notices that "Evildoers unite against the righteous, and by a violence done to him pass on to him their own guilt. The activity of God in this process consists of making the servant able to accept voluntarily the affliction." It means that God in Isaiah prophecy is an active collaborator of a group (Mafia) of evildoers, it is the God of Evil, very well perceived by studying the Bible as did the ancient gnostics and Marcionists. Historical sources (like the writings of Aristotle's collaborator Teofrast, quoted by Zielinski), inform us that the theocracy ruling in antique Israel was in its essence a SECT OF BRAINKILLERS, of hypocrites and necrophiles, feeding themselves with scenes of affliction of all more noble individuals and nations. (Post Scriptum 2008. This hideous sect (of "7000 Aaronites"? – Rom. 11,4) is still alive and active, it is sufficient to recall the very recent case of bleeding and dismembering of Yugoslavia, which was so much praised in the "Western" Mafia-of-"Brainkillers"-controlled media.)

The Hebrew Bible cult, and the devastation of our Planet resulting from it

Ten years ago, I finished the translated above article "The scapegoat and the fate of Yugoslavia" with following conclusions: "The interception of the glory, of the power and of ownership by the method of 'scapegoating', was considered to be baseness practically until the end of the social influence of authentic aristocracy, meaning until the beginning of 20th century. Since this time, to a large extent thanks to the widespread electronic mass media, permitting the efficient concealment of the true personalities of demagogues, the practice of profitable lying up of reality has become common, especially in countries dominated by the plebeian culture of United States. (...) In agreement with Lamarcko-Lysenkist law of genetic fixation, of reflexes trained for long periods of time, people living in an atmosphere permanently poisoned with ever repeated lies, over time are becoming indifferent and resistant to the man made cognitive rubbish surrounding them – as did the Jews, who in their majority simply ceased to believe in biblical "God". Nevertheless the struggle for the relative concordance of the social imaginations of the world with the reality of this world – it means something, which Aristotle called the truth – is a task still ahead of us. And it is a task becoming ever more difficult in a situation where the majority of machines used for the indoctrination of the masses has been intercepted by the same clique of "Doctors and Scribes" commonly known as Pharisees to ancient Israel"

This last remark I dedicate to my opponent McCarthy, who argues that Jesus Christ "treats the Old Testament as God's Revelation of Himself to the human race". I have to recall once again that the system of Law existing in ancient Israel consisted of condemning to death anyone who questioned the veracity of Torah. Due to this simple fact, neither Jesus, nor Gospel writers reporting his miracles, could overtly question the myth of the Primordial Sin, (which myth, absent in Islam's Qur'an*, substantially hinders human moral development), nor the commandment repeated several times to "subjugate the earth", which has led to a mindless devastation of our planet, which was already being orchestrated in the 17th century by Anglo-Saxon Protestant, Bible-inspired industrialists.

dr Marek Glogoczowski, Zakopane 16.09.08
www.zaprasza.net/mglogo

* Post Scriptum. After writing the last, lengthy sentence, having at hand the text of the Koran (Qur'an), I verified how Moslems interpret the Genesis myth of the "forbidden tree". Soon I discovered that their "IQ forbidden tree" symbolizes not the "forbidden knowledge of what is good and what is evil" (as describes it HB), but just the contrary, it symbolizes evil behaviors, which make people fall among these which are unjust, and thus live in a permanent fear, sorrow and mutual hostility (Sure II, 35-38). It means, as verses of Qur'an incessantly repeat it, the fall among those which are not straight, the fall among liars, deceivers, usurers and hypocrites so much hated by the Jesus we know from the Gospels...

A Response to Professor Marek Glogoczowski
by Anthony S. McCarthy

Some time ago, Professor Marek Glogoczowski wrote a lengthy response to my Culture Wars book review of Christopher Hitchens' God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. I am always flattered when someone devotes some time to something I have written and therefore thank the good professor for doing so.

This response will be somewhat terser than MG's essay in part because I found it difficult to understand some of his comments/accusations. For example, I will not reply to the series of assertions in the final paragraph, which MG does not attempt to elucidate. However, I would like to pick up on a number of other points MG makes, and I thank him for making these as they are worth pursuing.

In judging Abraham as "an odious person who deserves to stay in Hell", MG omits to mention some salient points. At the beginning of Part II MG refers to Jesus as a "truth-teller", yet fails to mention that this truth-teller speaks with the utmost respect for Abraham, referring to the God of Abraham, whom He identifies as the God of the Living – His Father. Christ also says (John 8.40) "But as it is, you are seeking to kill me, a man who has told you the truth, which I heard from God; this Abraham did not do." So it is evident that Christ does not view Abraham as a murderer or even one who seeks to kill (in the sense of, seeks to murder).

I would ask readers to look again at the story in the proper context. To begin with, Isaac may have been willing to die: he, in the vigour of his youth, could presumably have easily prevented his 125-year-old father from binding him. Such willingness would, of course, be consonant with the One of whom he is an type, and this has been recognised by Church commentators.

More importantly, MG neglects to mention that Abraham was entitled to hope against hope, knowing that He whom he trusted would not have deceived him concerning descendants, even if Abraham could not explain how exactly Isaac would have children after he was sacrificed. Thus St Paul tells us:

"By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises offered up his only begotten son, of whom it was said, 'In Isaac your seed shall be called,' concluding that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead, from which he also received him in a figurative sense" (Hebrews 11.17-19).

All this talk of sacrifice and redemption will naturally be confusing if one does not have a proper sense of the nature of Original Sin. For MG, "according to the Bible Original Sin consisted of human curiosity to learn what is Good and what is Evil…"
But MG mistakes the perfectly acceptable theoretical knowledge we seek of good and evil for practical knowledge. To commit a practical evil (sin) is ultimately not to increase our knowledge but to diminish it (by corrupting ourselves and deflecting us from our ultimate goal). Such actions are inherently irrational (if I seek the practical knowledge of murder do I act rationally?). And the action here is infused with pride, in that the actor wishes to set himself up in opposition to that Necessary Being who is his Creator, and who holds him in existence each moment of his life.

God had conferred on us supernatural life, making us not mere creatures but sons of God. Adam, representing the entire human race, damaged that races relationship with God, returning it to a merely natural level, bereft of supernatural gifts and prey to other forces. And such a damaged race cannot, of itself, expiate the wrong in its entirety: that was left to Christ, the New Adam, who chose to expiate our sin through embracing the Cross.

Before examining this, it is worth quoting theologian F.J Sheed on Original Sin:

"But wherein lies our guilt? That this privation of grace should be in us as an effect of sin we can see. But how is it sin? It is, as we have seen, not personal sin. But if it is not personal, how is it ours? Because of that other element that is in us, our nature. It was a state of sinfulness in Adam's nature, and Adam's nature was the source of our nature…The accusation of unfairness is peculiarly fragile. We have no right to supernatural life at all, because as men our nature is fully constituted without it; if God chooses to give it us, it is an entirely free gift on His part, a gift, therefore, which He can give or withhold or give conditionally entirely as He pleases, with no question of right upon our part arising…even the complaint at our being this bound up with Adam's disaster shows a failure to grasp the organic solidarity of the human race. We are not isolated units, but even in the natural order members of one thing: it would be no advantage to us to be separated out, cut off, from the consequences of other men's ill deeds, but cut off, too, from a sharing of the fruits of other men's virtues." (Theology and Sanity, Sheed & Ward 1960 pp. 140-141). St Paul covers this ground at Romans 5.18.

Christ, in showing obedience to His Father (and he repeatedly refers to His Father as clearly the same God as the God of the Old Testament) corrects Adam's sin. And he does so through offering Himself as an innocent victim. One need only look at Christ's utterances throughout the Gospels and especially through the Passion to see that he steadily aims to sacrifice Himself (e.g. Mark 8.31-33) and on the cross draws the onlookers' attention to that famous Psalm 22. Christ frequently cites Scripture to His hostile Jewish interlocutors to show them how they have misinterpreted and betrayed what it says. He treats the Old Testament as authoritative – that is, as God's Revelation of Himself to the human race. All this from the "truth-teller" Christ should, at least, give Marcionists pause for thought. It should also give pause for thought to the "apostate" MG mentions, who seems to have problems reconciling himself to the meaning of Christ's death.

Bearing all of this in mind, let us now turn to MG's approving recitation of a Polish dictum: "The one who gives, and than takes back, shall find his fate in hell."
It is surely extraordinary to apply this dictum to gifts given on trust.
Are those who give a loan and then request or even take it back to find their fate in hell? And has not God freely given us lives in order that we use those lives such that they flourish and fulfill their purpose – the purpose for which He made them? Is it not for God to decide when life ends, and if God is the Lord of Life, could not His authority over life sometimes be delegated?
A problem that some have with the Old Testament is that they fail to see that the central and dominant character of the entire tome is God Himself. G. K. Chesterton once wrote of those who condemn the Old Testament:

"Those…who complain of the atrocities and treacheries of the judges and prophets of Israel have really got a notion in their head that has nothing to do with the subject. They are too Christian. They are reading back into pre-Christian scriptures a purely Christian idea – the idea of saints, the idea that the chief instruments of God are very particularly good men…the Old Testament idea was much more what may be called the common sense idea, that strength is strength, that cunning is cunning and that worldly success is worldly success, and that Jehovah uses these things for His own ultimate purpose, just as he uses natural forces or physical elements…I cannot comprehend how it is that so many simple-minded skeptics have read such stories as the fraud of Jacob and supposed that the man who wrote it (whoever it was) did not know that Jacob was a sneak just as well as we do….But these simple-minded skeptics are, like the majority of modern skeptics, Christian….they fancy that Jacob was being set up as some kind of saint…The heroes of the Old Testament are not the sons of God at all. The heroes of the Old Testament are not the sons of God, but the slaves of God, gigantic and terrible slaves…(Prophet of Orthodoxy: The Wisdom of G.K. Chesterton ed. Russell Sparkes (Fount 1997) pp. 184-185).

The comments MG makes on Jacob also ignore the fact that Esau sinned greatly by giving up his birthright, given to him by God. He rejected God through his own free will (with predictable results, see Proverbs 1.28) and showed no repentance for what he had done, yet still expected to receive his father's blessing. He did not humble himself and he only regretted his loss. In this, he contrasted with Jacob. Again, without understanding both the nature of the Old Testament and the context of the story of Jacob and Esau, one is liable to be led into error.

Admittedly, these are difficult matters, as is the question of suffering which seems – perhaps rightly – quite unmerited. Job the non-Jew, the everyman, questions the way of God and eventually God replies. In his perplexity, Job finds solace, if not a definitive solution. Even before God replies, Job strikingly appears to prophesy the coming or Second Coming of Jesus (19: 25-27), whose entire life is an answer to our questions regarding suffering.

Thus the Old Testament is constantly pointing towards the new, and it tells us of God's preparation of the world for the Incarnation. One simply cannot make sense of either Testament by taking it out of context.

In the endnotes MG tells us:

"I asked my students which version they preferred, the Christian one, in which Jesus prior to his rapture has to suffer a cruel Calvary, or the Marcionist/Mohammedan one, in which God's Messenger is raptured, not suffering at all, by his heavenly Master. No wonder that my, students, not yet corrupted by "our" religion, preferred the story of "the salvation of the Savior" told by the Mohammedan myth."

That people should prefer a story without suffering, especially a patient suffering which we are called to imitate, is hardly surprising. Yet to truly understand the meaning of human suffering we need to be sure we understand the Crucifixion. I would advise reading John Paul II's Apostolic Letter Salvifici Doloris http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/apost_letters/documents/hf_jp-ii_apl_11021984_salvifici-doloris_en.html
MG seems to think that it is not compassionate to Christ's suffering to accept the dogma of Redemption. Has MG never been to a Catholic Good Friday service or listened to Bach's St. Matthew's Passion? In fact, those who understand that Christ's suffering is undergone because of our sins are all the more compassionate to Christ's suffering precisely because their compassion is (or should be) mixed with a sense of personal responsibility.

And of course, the Catholic Church can be proud of the compassion towards the suffering of fellow-humans shown in her enormous contribution to healthcare, as well as to spiritual comfort: a compassion inspired by faith in Christ.

Finally, perhaps the most tragic statement of MG's piece is his statement that
"FROM AN (UNPUNISHED) EVIL ONLY AN EVEN GREATER EVIL CAN ORIGINATE". This statement is, we are told, "logically scrupulous".   But firstly, there can be good side-effects from any action, evil or not. This is a point so evident that I will not detain the reader with examples, for there are as many examples as there are actions. Secondly, that includes evil actions that are hitherto unpunished. Thirdly, who says that the crucifixion of Christ is an 'unpunished' action?

There is more from MG on St Paul, the Church, etc; however, as he does not offer evidence to support his statements, I shall not address them here. I only hope that some of my own points are of some use to MG and other readers – at least so that they may gain a sympathetic understanding of that which they may wish to critique, surely a necessary condition for fruitful discussion.

Anthony S. McCarthy can be contacted at asdmccarthy@hotmail.com

2008/9/17 Marek Glogoczowski <mglogo@poczta.fm>

"The Primordial Sin" of Ethical Knowledge as the necessary condition for betterment of the human race

M.G.'s comment to McCarthy's trust in the Word of Hebrew Bible

After publishing, at the end of July 2008, my "Ahriman's Tales of Redemption and Natural Selection" (http://www.israelshamir.net/Contributors/rd4.htm), I received also negative reactions to my work on "two gods", which are present inside New Testament. One of numerous enthusiasts, of the incessantly repeated by the Church story of the crucifixion of the truth telling Jesus, wrote to Shamir's website a letter clearly indicating that she would be pleased with a similar to Jesus fate, administered to all heretics questioning official Church teachings:

An another, more elaborate comment wrote Anthony S. McCarthy, with whose critics of a recent book of Christopher Hitchens "God is not Great", I polemized in my text "Ahriman's Inspired Fairy Tales". McCarthy's recently published at www.israelshamir.net (see below), his answer to my arguments, so here I am formulating a possibly concise reaction to his objections. In particular McCarthy observes: „At the beginning of Part II MG refers to Jesus as a "truth-teller", yet fails to mention that this truth-teller speaks with the utmost respect for Abraham, referring to the God of Abraham, whom He identifies as the God of the Living – His Father. Christ also says (John 8.40) "But as it is, you are seeking to kill me, a man who has told you the truth, which I heard from God; this Abraham did not do. So it is evident that Christ does not view Abraham as a murderer or even one who seeks to kill (in the sense of, seeks to murder). More importantly, MG neglects to mention that Abraham was entitled to hope against hope, knowing that He whom he trusted would not have deceived him ... Thus St Paul tells us: "By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac".

If we associate the above observation that "it is evident that Christ does not view Abraham as a murderer or even one who seeks to kill", with another McCarthy statement (expressed in his critics "Neither is Hitchens Great") that "Of course, the story of Abraham and Isaac prefigures the ultimate sacrifice of Christ at Calvary", we are invited to conclude that in a similar manner, as Moslems feast the purely symbolical "sacrifice of Isaac", Christians who every Sunday commemorate "the ultimate sacrifice of Christ at Calvary", refer to an event created in imagination of Apostles. The Alien (to Hebrews) Heavenly Father, to whom Jesus refers in Chapter 8 of Gospel of John, had no intention to harm his beloved Son and Messenger – exactly as claimed it Marcion and later on also Muhammad. It means that in error remains McCarthy who, forgetting Jesus' opinion about IQ Abraham, wrote in his anti-Hitchens pamphlet "Christ the God-man chose to suffer and to die in order to atone for our sins. ... (which sins are) inexorably bound up with Original Sin (of) Adam's faithlessness". In case Jesus' sufferance and the death at the cross were only 'a conjecture' – as pretends it Qur'an – the atonement of sins of Christians by Christ crucifixion is only virtual, it means not true. In this case the whole "redemptory" theology of the Catholic Church reveals itself to be a a lure, with no good implications for the real world. As observed it Ken Freeland in his commentary to my text, no betterment of humanity was noticed since the cross has been installed in pagan shrines in Europe and elsewhere.

Who than is making profit on "selling" the history of Jesus martyrdom as a (self)sacrifice of God? The indicated by McCarthy chapter of Gospel of John informs us that there were in particular these Jews "WHO HAD BELIEVED IN HIM", which had an intention to kill Jesus for telling them the truth. This specific breed of antique Jews, considering themselves to be descendants of biblical Abraham (IQ = 0), Jesus denounced as descendants of a sinister deity, known to Iranians as Ahriman "You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, etc.". From the point of view of Jesus, reported in Gospel of John, the "Genesis" odious story of Abram/Abraham, who sincerely intended to kill his son, is simply not true. It signifies that all religious people who, as does it McCarthy, believe that Jesus of Nazareth "treats the Old Testament as authoritative – that is, as God's Revelation of Himself to the human race". are of course in error. It is rather the Devil, not God of Wisdom, of Goodness and of Beauty, which manifested himself in OT to the human race, this in order to lower this "race" average IQ, of course. "There is no truth in the (Hebrew) Bible" remarked (ahh pride! – as would comment it Anne M.), the apostate Jewish philosopher Spinoza in 17th century. And naturally, for this statement Spinoza's former co-religionists sincerely intended to kill him: antique Hebrews had a Law recommending the stoning of everyone who dared to question the veracity of Moses' Torah (this was the pretext for stoning of St. Stephen), and this law remained not completely forgotten in modern times. The case of Spinoza illustrate what are ambitions of so-called legitimate children of HB Abraham, trying "to do what their devilish father did" (see Gospel of John).

There is an another teaching of OT, regarded with admiration by all "IQ = 0" theologians, and in particular by these politicians, which dream of New Hebrew Global Theocracy. Criticizing my "Marcionist" heretical idea that it is indecent for a God to suffer, (for such suffering will make unhappy all these naive, which try to imitate such handicapped deity), McCarthy made a following "orthodox" comment: "That people should prefer a story without suffering, especially a patient suffering which we are called to imitate, is hardly surprising. Yet to truly understand the meaning of human suffering we need to be sure we understand the Crucifixion. I would advise reading John Paul II's Apostolic Letter Salvifici Doloris. etc." The physiological feeling of pain informs us that something is wrong with our organism, in particular that an alien body has entered it. In order to achieve once again its internal equilibrium, our organism is spontaneously performing appropriate, removing the alien body actions (vomiting, the rising of temperature permitting to enhance activities of immune system, the spontaneous removal, by local abundant lymph secretions, of thorns and splinters, etc.)

If we force ourselves to do nothing against the pain, we may expect two physiological reactions: 1. we will become ever more self-centred and thus egoist, for the pain forces us to think principally about ourselves; and 2. with time we will become habituated to the pain, which we will perceive less and less, like a man, who fasts, at the beginning feels the pain in his stomach, but after several days of not eating he feels no more hunger, and becomes capable to starve himself, without pain, to the death. Both these physiological phenomena are dangerous not only for us, but also for our environment, for someone who continually suffers, has a tendency to infect others with his bad mood. In short, by centring ourselves on our own – or someone else's – mishaps, we willy-nilly are becoming crippled, both in body and spirit, and thus prone to colonisation by various parasites. Who are these who profit from simple people efforts to suffer (but not to reason) together with Christ? As an answer I propose a short, linking pope JPII "poems" about Salvifici Doloris with the observed reality, modification of a known litany, which I recently heard at Radio Maryja in my very catholic country:

By His painful Passion Pharisees attained the salvation,

by His painful Passion hypocrites have big bellies and Mercedes cars,

by His salutary Passion thieves are walking in purple cloths.

In order to demonstrate, how the infection of a populace with the cult of Salvifici Doloris, assures a wellbeing of "investors" into this very "catholic" lure, I propose a lecture of a part of an article in Polish on this subject, which I completed already 10 years ago.

Salvifici Doloris of Scapegoat-God, healing wounds of "evildoers who believe in Him" (John 8, 31)

(Translated from M.G.'s article "The Scapegoat and the Fate of Yugoslavia", published in "Tradycje duchowe Europy Środkowej i Wschodniej" (Spiritual Traditions of Central and Eastern Europe) WSP, Slupsk, 1999.)

(...) The management of profits, which result from punishment of a "scapegoat", is a practice known since thousands of years. For this reason, in order to understand better, why the modern mass-media are organizing orwellian "seances of hate", directed or against Serbs, or against Saddam Hussain (or against Iranian president in 2008), it is worth to recall ideas formulated by known contemporary Catholic theologians, concerning the barbarian practice of punishment of an innocent animal, which serves as substitute for the punishment of a real criminal. A compilation of these views was done by the priest Stanislaw Budzik in a book "The Drama of Redemption" published in 1997 by a Catholic edition Byblos in Tarnów, Poland.

We learn from Budzik's book that according to the French librarian-and anthropologist René Girard, living since decades in USA, very primitive societies, in a situation of an accumulation of social tensions, had (and still have) the tendency to discharge these tensions by a collective murder of one of their, chosen at random, members. In antique Israel this barbarous and intelligence-less (for not intending to search for roots of the conflict), practice of attenuation of social tensions, had become civilized and ritualized. As informs us the Book of Priests (Leviticus), as an atonement for noxious for the society behaviors (but only these which become known to the populace), priests of Israel were killing, in a difference with primitive African tribes, not the chosen at random, innocent tribe member, but domestic animals offered to the Temple by unmasked sinners. Corpses of these bleed out, innocent animals were subsequently incinerated as offerings to the Lord. As stresses it Girard, during rites of "scapegoat punishment", extremely important is the FAITH of participants in the efficiency of these sinister mysteries, their faith that the sacrifice has the saving the sinner, redeeming power. Without this FAITH, which immobilizes normal inquisitive processes of thinking, there is no hope for a reconstruction of a social solidarity, which was shaken in whatever manner.

The effect of the belief, in the salutary power of an offering, which sacrifice is temporally attenuating social tensions, might be compared to the known in medicine effect of placebo: in case one believes that a neutral substance is a true medicament, this "psychical medicament" frequently is able to heal man believing in placebo. The faith in the efficiency of placebo makes miracles up to certain limits, the placebo used repeatedly must be, with time, more potent in order to be still efficient, and in a similar manner evolved primitive cultures, in which the social cohesion was assured by sacrifices of innocent "scapegoats". In Mexican Aztecs Empire five hundred years ago, which empire was entangled in the logic of cruel sacrifices, just prior to the invasion by Spaniards, local priests were making bloody 'offerings' from up to twenty thousand young people yearly; in a more "civilized" antique Israel, just prior to its destruction by Romans, in Jerusalem's Temple were bleed out, and burned more than thousand oxen, goats and muttons yearly, making out of this temple the biggest slaughterhouse and crematory of the Antiquity. (This reports the known historian of Antiquity Tadeusz Zielinski in a book "Hellenism and Judaism" published only once, in 1927 in Warsaw.)

In his book "Le Bouc Emissaire" (The Scapegoat), published for the first time in 1982, and than republished in numerous languages, René Girard reasons in a manner characteristic for Darwinians, and claims that the necessity of substitute animal offerings results from the simple growth of population. Due to this biological fact the increasing number of identical individuals has to compete, inside their tribal organization, for power and for the ever limited material resources. He calls this phenomenon "the mimetic crisis", for it results from the behavior of non differentiated masses, which try to imitate (at least externally) individuals visible at the summit of the social hierarchy. It is of interest that René Girard remains completely blind to the realm, which saw the incomprehensible to him Plato. Namely that the normal, natural mimetic process consists of our efforts to imitate individuals which impress us with their courage, with their strength, with their noble behavior, and/or with their knowledge. Simply we like to imitate aristos, it means the best, most perfect individuals in our environment. And these aristos, out of the very definition of this notion, cannot be jealous of anything. It means that young people, by imitating noble behaviors, naturally attenuate in themselves feelings of jealousy, which disrupts every society. In a truly aristocratic society there is no need to search for scapegoats in order to assure the social cohesion.

Thus all religious associations and sects, which were striving for a cognitive and ethical betterment of their members – be it Pythagoreans in Greece, be it Essenians and early Christians in Israel, be it Suffis among Moslems – were/are considering the cult of offerings "for sins" to be something hideous, and to be avoided. (...) Moreover, any keen observer may notice that the behavior of these priestly castes, which practice the fraudulent trick with "scapegoat punishment" (...) resemble the behavior of ordinary pocket thieves. Such small criminals, by yelling "thief, thief" deflect the attention of publics from their own fraudulent actions by directing suspicions of the crowd at victims of their theft. (...) An association of ritual "redemptory" offerings, practiced by various low-class sects, with criminal activities of persons, or groups of persons, specializing in plunder of their neighbors, is cognitively very fertile. A skilful thief is not making a scapegoat from an individual chosen at random from a group which is socially suspected of mischief (as Girard suggests it). If a thief has the IQ > 0 (it means IQ higher than the Hebrew Bible Abraham) he directs his accusations at men and social groups most keen in observation, and courageous enough to denounce him. Moreover, by throwing accusations, of being the source of evil, onto the most noble and courageous members of a society, an accuser takes a pose of a "saint", and thus someone "naturally elected" to take the leadership of the dominated by his demagogy group.

The confirmation that this is indeed the 'hard core' of any redemptory practice, we find in works of a contemporary Austrian theologian R. Schwager, quoted in Budzik's "Drama of Redemption". This Austrian researcher analyzed the well known prophecy of Isaiah, who pointed at profits which priests of Israel may realize thanks to a skilful affliction of their victim called "God's servant": According to Schwager this famous text of Isaiah, read properly, states the following "The LORD has accepted that we have charged him with sins of all of us, he was wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities, he was afflicted but he agreed with his affliction, upon him was the chastisement, which became the salvation for all of us, and with his stripes we are healed". (And subsequently "And they made his grave with the wicked ... although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth" – Is. 53, 4-5 and 9.) Interpreting this significant text – which forms the prefiguration of future Christ's Passion – Schwager pertinently notices that "Evildoers unite against the righteous, and by a violence done to him pass on him their own guilt. The activity of God in this process consists of making the servant able to accept voluntarily the affliction." It means that God in Isaiah prophecy is an active collaborator of a group (Mafia) of evildoers, it is the God of Evil, very well perceived by studying the Bible antique gnostics and Marcionists. Historical sources (like writings of Aristotle's collaborator Teofrast, quoted by Zielinski), inform us that the theocracy ruling in antique Israel was in its essence the SECT OF BRAINKILLERS, of hypocrites and necrophiles, feeding themselves with scenes of affliction of all more noble individuals and nations. (Post Scriptum 2008. This hideous sect (of "7000 Aaronites"? – Rom. 11,4) is still alive and active, it is sufficient to recall the very recent case of bleeding and dismembering of Yugoslavia, which was so much praised in "Western", Mafia of "Brainkillers" controlled media.)

The Hebrew Bible cult, and the resulting from it devastation of our Planet

I finished the translated above, written ten years ago, article "The scapegoat and the fate of Yugoslavia" with following conclusions: "The interception of the glory, of the power and of ownership by the method of 'scapegoat', was considered to be baseness practically until the end of social influence of authentic aristocracy, it means until the beginning of 20th century. Since this time, in large extend thanks to the widespread of electronic mass media, permitting to conceal efficiently the true personality of demagogues, the practice of profitable lying up of reality has become common, especially in countries dominated by the plebeian culture of United States. (...) In agreement with Lamarcko-Lysenkist law of genetic fixation, of trained for long periods of time reflexes, people living in the atmosphere permanently poisoned with ever repeated lies, with time are becoming indifferent and resistant to the surrounding them, man made cognitive rubbish – as did it Jews, who in their majority simply ceased to believe in biblical "God". Nevertheless the struggle for the relative concordance of social imaginations of the world, with the reality of this world – it means for something, which Aristotle called the truth – is a task still ahead of us. And it is a task ever more difficult in a situation, when the majority of machines used for the indoctrination of masses has been intercepted by the same, as in antique Israel, clique of "Doctors and Scribes" commonly known as Pharisees."

This last remark I dedicate to my opponent McCarthy, who argues that Jesus Christ "treats the Old Testament as God's Revelation of Himself to the human race". I have to recall once again that the system of Law existing in antique Israel was condemning to death anyone, who questioned the veracity of Torah. Due to this simple fact, neither Jesus, neither reporting his miracles Gospel writers, could overtly question nor the myth of the Primordial Sin, (which myth, absent in Islam's Qur'an*, substantially hinders human moral development), nor the repeated several times commandment "subjugate the earth", which has lead to a mindless devastation of our earth, which was orchestrated already in 17th century by Anglo-Saxon Protestant, Bible inspired industrialists.

dr Marek Glogoczowski, Zakopane 16.09.08

www.zaprasza.net/mglogo

* Post Scriptum. After writing the last, lengthy sentence, having at hand the text of Coran (Qur'an), I verified how Moslems interpret the Genesis' myth of the "forbidden tree". Soon I discovered that their "IQ forbidden tree" symbolizes not the "forbidden knowledge what is good and what is evil" (as describes it HB), but just the contrary, it symbolizes evil behaviors, which make people fall among these which are unjust, and thus live in a permanent fear, sorrow and mutual hostility (sure II, 35-38). It means, as verses of Qur'an incessantly repeat it, the fall among those which are not straight, the fall among liars, deceivers, usurers and hypocrites so much hated by Jesus we know from Gospels...

A Response to Professor Marek Glogoczowski

by Anthony S. McCarthy

Some time ago, Professor Marek Glogoczowski wrote a lengthy response to my Culture Wars book review of Christopher Hitchens' God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. I am always flattered when someone devotes some time to something I have written and therefore thank the good professor for doing so.

This response will be somewhat terser than MG's essay in part because I found it difficult to understand some of his comments/accusations. For example, I will not reply to the series of assertions in the final paragraph, which MG does not attempt to elucidate. However, I would like to pick up on a number of other points MG makes, and I thank him for making these as they are worth pursuing.

In judging Abraham as "an odious person who deserves to stay in Hell", MG omits to mention some salient points. At the beginning of Part II MG refers to Jesus as a "truth-teller", yet fails to mention that this truth-teller speaks with the utmost respect for Abraham, referring to the God of Abraham, whom He identifies as the God of the Living – His Father. Christ also says (John 8.40) "But as it is, you are seeking to kill me, a man who has told you the truth, which I heard from God; this Abraham did not do." So it is evident that Christ does not view Abraham as a murderer or even one who seeks to kill (in the sense of, seeks to murder).

I would ask readers to look again at the story in the proper context. To begin with, Isaac may have been willing to die: he, in the vigour of his youth, could presumably have easily prevented his 125-year-old father from binding him. Such willingness would, of course, be consonant with the One of whom he is an type, and this has been recognised by Church commentators.

More importantly, MG neglects to mention that Abraham was entitled to hope against hope, knowing that He whom he trusted would not have deceived him concerning descendants, even if Abraham could not explain how exactly Isaac would have children after he was sacrificed. Thus St Paul tells us:

"By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises offered up his only begotten son, of whom it was said, 'In Isaac your seed shall be called,' concluding that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead, from which he also received him in a figurative sense" (Hebrews 11.17-19).

All this talk of sacrifice and redemption will naturally be confusing if one does not have a proper sense of the nature of Original Sin. For MG, "according to the Bible Original Sin consisted of human curiosity to learn what is Good and what is Evil…"

But MG mistakes the perfectly acceptable theoretical knowledge we seek of good and evil for practical knowledge. To commit a practical evil (sin) is ultimately not to increase our knowledge but to diminish it (by corrupting ourselves and deflecting us from our ultimate goal). Such actions are inherently irrational (if I seek the practical knowledge of murder do I act rationally?). And the action here is infused with pride, in that the actor wishes to set himself up in opposition to that Necessary Being who is his Creator, and who holds him in existence each moment of his life.

God had conferred on us supernatural life, making us not mere creatures but sons of God. Adam, representing the entire human race, damaged that races relationship with God, returning it to a merely natural level, bereft of supernatural gifts and prey to other forces. And such a damaged race cannot, of itself, expiate the wrong in its entirety: that was left to Christ, the New Adam, who chose to expiate our sin through embracing the Cross.

Before examining this, it is worth quoting theologian F.J Sheed on Original Sin:

"But wherein lies our guilt? That this privation of grace should be in us as an effect of sin we can see. But how is it sin? It is, as we have seen, not personal sin. But if it is not personal, how is it ours? Because of that other element that is in us, our nature. It was a state of sinfulness in Adam's nature, and Adam's nature was the source of our nature…The accusation of unfairness is peculiarly fragile. We have no right to supernatural life at all, because as men our nature is fully constituted without it; if God chooses to give it us, it is an entirely free gift on His part, a gift, therefore, which He can give or withhold or give conditionally entirely as He pleases, with no question of right upon our part arising…even the complaint at our being this bound up with Adam's disaster shows a failure to grasp the organic solidarity of the human race. We are not isolated units, but even in the natural order members of one thing: it would be no advantage to us to be separated out, cut off, from the consequences of other men's ill deeds, but cut off, too, from a sharing of the fruits of other men's virtues." (Theology and Sanity, Sheed & Ward 1960 pp. 140-141). St Paul covers this ground at Romans 5.18.

Christ, in showing obedience to His Father (and he repeatedly refers to His Father as clearly the same God as the God of the Old Testament) corrects Adam's sin. And he does so through offering Himself as an innocent victim. One need only look at Christ's utterances throughout the Gospels and especially through the Passion to see that he steadily aims to sacrifice Himself (e.g. Mark 8.31-33) and on the cross draws the onlookers' attention to that famous Psalm 22. Christ frequently cites Scripture to His hostile Jewish interlocutors to show them how they have misinterpreted and betrayed what it says. He treats the Old Testament as authoritative – that is, as God's Revelation of Himself to the human race. All this from the "truth-teller" Christ should, at least, give Marcionists pause for thought. It should also give pause for thought to the "apostate" MG mentions, who seems to have problems reconciling himself to the meaning of Christ's death.

Bearing all of this in mind, let us now turn to MG's approving recitation of a Polish dictum: "The one who gives, and than takes back, shall find his fate in hell."

It is surely extraordinary to apply this dictum to gifts given on trust.

Are those who give a loan and then request or even take it back to find their fate in hell? And has not God freely given us lives in order that we use those lives such that they flourish and fulfill their purpose – the purpose for which He made them? Is it not for God to decide when life ends, and if God is the Lord of Life, could not His authority over life sometimes be delegated?

A problem that some have with the Old Testament is that they fail to see that the central and dominant character of the entire tome is God Himself. G. K. Chesterton once wrote of those who condemn the Old Testament:

"Those…who complain of the atrocities and treacheries of the judges and prophets of Israel have really got a notion in their head that has nothing to do with the subject. They are too Christian. They are reading back into pre-Christian scriptures a purely Christian idea – the idea of saints, the idea that the chief instruments of God are very particularly good men…the Old Testament idea was much more what may be called the common sense idea, that strength is strength, that cunning is cunning and that worldly success is worldly success, and that Jehovah uses these things for His own ultimate purpose, just as he uses natural forces or physical elements…I cannot comprehend how it is that so many simple-minded skeptics have read such stories as the fraud of Jacob and supposed that the man who wrote it (whoever it was) did not know that Jacob was a sneak just as well as we do….But these simple-minded skeptics are, like the majority of modern skeptics, Christian….they fancy that Jacob was being set up as some kind of saint…The heroes of the Old Testament are not the sons of God at all. The heroes of the Old Testament are not the sons of God, but the slaves of God, gigantic and terrible slaves…(Prophet of Orthodoxy: The Wisdom of G.K. Chesterton ed. Russell Sparkes (Fount 1997) pp. 184-185).

The comments MG makes on Jacob also ignore the fact that Esau sinned greatly by giving up his birthright, given to him by God. He rejected God through his own free will (with predictable results, see Proverbs 1.28) and showed no repentance for what he had done, yet still expected to receive his father's blessing. He did not humble himself and he only regretted his loss. In this, he contrasted with Jacob. Again, without understanding both the nature of the Old Testament and the context of the story of Jacob and Esau, one is liable to be led into error.

Admittedly, these are difficult matters, as is the question of suffering which seems – perhaps rightly – quite unmerited. Job the non-Jew, the everyman, questions the way of God and eventually God replies. In his perplexity, Job finds solace, if not a definitive solution. Even before God replies, Job strikingly appears to prophesy the coming or Second Coming of Jesus (19: 25-27), whose entire life is an answer to our questions regarding suffering.

Thus the Old Testament is constantly pointing towards the new, and it tells us of God's preparation of the world for the Incarnation. One simply cannot make sense of either Testament by taking it out of context.

In the endnotes MG tells us:

"I asked my students which version they preferred, the Christian one, in which Jesus prior to his rapture has to suffer a cruel Calvary, or the Marcionist/Mohammedan one, in which God's Messenger is raptured, not suffering at all, by his heavenly Master. No wonder that my, students, not yet corrupted by "our" religion, preferred the story of "the salvation of the Savior" told by the Mohammedan myth."

That people should prefer a story without suffering, especially a patient suffering which we are called to imitate, is hardly surprising. Yet to truly understand the meaning of human suffering we need to be sure we understand the Crucifixion. I would advise reading John Paul II's Apostolic Letter Salvifici Doloris http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/apost_letters/documents/hf_jp-ii_apl_11021984_salvifici-doloris_en.html

MG seems to think that it is not compassionate to Christ's suffering to accept the dogma of Redemption. Has MG never been to a Catholic Good Friday service or listened to Bach's St. Matthew's Passion? In fact, those who understand that Christ's suffering is undergone because of our sins are all the more compassionate to Christ's suffering precisely because their compassion is (or should be) mixed with a sense of personal responsibility.

And of course, the Catholic Church can be proud of the compassion towards the suffering of fellow-humans shown in her enormous contribution to healthcare, as well as to spiritual comfort: a compassion inspired by faith in Christ.

Finally, perhaps the most tragic statement of MG's piece is his statement that

"FROM AN (UNPUNISHED) EVIL ONLY AN EVEN GREATER EVIL CAN ORIGINATE". This statement is, we are told, "logically scrupulous". But firstly, there can be good side-effects from any action, evil or not. This is a point so evident that I will not detain the reader with examples, for there are as many examples as there are actions. Secondly, that includes evil actions that are hitherto unpunished. Thirdly, who says that the crucifixion of Christ is an 'unpunished' action?

There is more from MG on St Paul, the Church, etc; however, as he does not offer evidence to support his statements, I shall not address them here. I only hope that some of my own points are of some use to MG and other readers – at least so that they may gain a sympathetic understanding of that which they may wish to critique, surely a necessary condition for fruitful discussion.

Anthony S. McCarthy can be contacted at asdmccarthy@hotmail.com

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