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Culture War or not, I don't know.
I've finished watching the Good Friday service from the Vatican and I want to quote this part of the service, sections of Psalm 21 (which includes the famous "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" quotation which is part of the Seven Last Words from the Cross).
Something which Nietzsche would despise, at least going by the discussions about this we've had on here before. The triumph of the weak. Slave morality. "I am a worm and no man" is not what the Strong, the Aristoi, say of themselves, such types are the ones trampled underfoot and rightfully so, pity being wasted on them.
And yet. And yet. This is the God of all Creation, the Maker of the Universe, the ground of all being, the Power beyond power, the True, the Beautiful and the Good who emptied Himself out, who became a slave and lower than a slave, to die a criminal's death.
Maybe true power is not trampling all others underfoot. The wretch who died the slave's death is venerated and remembered in the most gorgeous, opulent setting. Maybe the Strong look tawdry by comparison in their tinsel crowns.
Something, something. Tickling at my brain, to think about it.
That might depend on the definition of 'worm'.
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If you read the Iliad or any other of the great texts of "master morality", they all have their "Masters" indulge in great fits of weeping emotion. "I am a worm and no man, scorned by everyone, despised by the people" is the exact sort of thing they could cry - before picking up and going on to get their victory. In the Christian case, the ultimate victory. Christ is not purely a figure of slave morality in Nietzsche (that would be the Disciples, Paul, the Martyrs, etc.); he is, like Socrates, a complex figure who has traits of the best of both. Even in The Antichrist, his most vicious polemic against Christianity, Christ is barely mentioned except to say how incomprehensible his followers clearly found him.
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And where did all those riches come from? From the works of Nietzchean virtue - conquest and craft and cunning.
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The psalm promotes the Good of the community, even as it emphasizes the absolute weakness of the single individual, in the following ways:
Submitting humbly to God for salvation is a way to (implicitly) practice the emotional and cognitive state of submitting to other authorities generally, especially if your belief system tells you that all civic authority is ordained by God. If you want the greatest and strongest army, 99% of the men must submit to authority, and the remaining 1% must submit to Reason. Without our even knowing, the rehearsal of the psalm (from the heart) makes us more liable to submit to authority by increasing our familiarity and pleasure with a humble spirit. An army of the obedient will always win against an army of the strongwilled. Individual weakness (or the factual recognition of such) promotes collective strength, and this only increases as technology increases.
Living is experientially horrible at least sometimes for everyone, and more often than that for too many people. The psalm allows a man to suffer while still remembering his communal belonging and allegiance, which is beneficial lest you drift too far away from civic obligation & shared memory from excessive sorrow. Hence: Yet you are holy, enthroned in the praises of Israel. In you our fathers trusted; they trusted and you delivered them. To you they cried and were rescued; in you they trusted and were not put to shame. And: I will tell of your name to my brothers; in the midst of the congregation I will praise you: You who fear the LORD, praise him! All you offspring of Jacob, glorify him, and stand in awe of him, all you offspring of Israel! The psalm also allows the sufferant to externalize and dramatize his feelings, which may be cathartic, or at least enjoyable as complaining always is. (Perhaps another example of “redirecting an activity to the Common Good” is the Song of Songs: if it is really just a thinly-veiled allegory for sex, then it perfects the act of sex and flirting — dare I say gooning — by presenting it within the terminology of the Collective: You are beautiful as Tirzah, my love, lovely as Jerusalem, awesome as an army with banners. Turn away your eyes from me, for they overwhelm me— Your hair is like a flock of goats leaping down the slopes of Gilead. If you are going to be horny anyway, at least remember how awesome the Sacred is in the process, so that when you’re no longer horny, your memory of it has improved by 0.05%; perhaps, even, your interest in Jerusalem has increased because it has been associated with a beautiful woman?
For the person singing the psalm, the memory of suffering is shifted toward a struggle of good and evil, a dimension which it may not have previously had. When (or if) his health returns, he has a newfound hatred of evildoers and love for the good.
The psalm-singer will interpret his return to health as his plea being answered by the Almighty, and regardless of whether this is materially accurate it will promote an array of good behaviors. His vows must now be thankfully fulfilled: praising in the congregation; telling others of the goodness of God; perhaps some resources distributed to the poor as suggested by God elsewhere; perhaps more honest dealings in business; etc. The importance of conveying the goodness of God to others is not just so that the Temple’s income is increased, but so others will read the tropological stories of the Bible, fear evil, gather prosocially, etc. But the priests getting some extra meat doesn’t hurt either, after all they are literate and somewhat learned.
Humility, in at least one of its manifestations, is the valuation of other people more than yourself, and this implicitly makes our fulfillment of socially-good acts more satisfying. If you don’t follow other people highly, how satisfying is it to do good to them? But if you value them highly, more than yourself, then it is deeply satisfying and memorable. If you want to promote a society where the rich share resources with the poor, and the healthy help the sick, and the sane the insane, etc, it is helpful to promote humility even just because of the fruit of social peer value salience. Hence: I am a worm and not a man (and He will love you even if you are a worm).
Awe and trust are good in themselves, especially if there is nothing you can really do, like someone suffering in antiquity. Even if the psalm-singer dies, he is dying with trust and awe, which is preferable to dying in agony. If we have to pick our poison it should be the sweetest poison.
I enjoy unconventional theology, and so I am not Trinitarian, but IMHO Christ championing this Psalm does two things (apart from the obvious fulfillment of prophecy):
It inoculates the Christian from doubt and anguish. The Son of God, the Everliving Lord, experienced real doubt (in my view). The Christian then, when doubting, can look at the Perfect Lord and be strengthened in commiseration.
This greatly increases the tragic dimension of the crucifixion, which is an angle I find compelling lately as the grounds for the most impactful atonement theory. “Substitution” doesn’t quite cut it, IMO. There is a lot of power in the notion that God wants us to behold the very nature and consequence of sin by looking at the crucifixion; we can grasp, in a way, how God sees the invisible outcome of our evil intentions and misdeeds, through the hyper-salient Sacrifice of Christ. God, being all-wise, sees no difference between the evil of someone kicking a puppy and the evil of someone gradually introducing commensurate pain in the lives of others through the accumulation of small errors (calling your brother a fool; being unforgiving; being greedy and lazy; etc). We do not see it this way, because have limited human understanding, but this doesn’t quite absolve us of all responsibility. Christ, for our sake, became “sin”, clearly, in its full evil, so that we can see all the unseen pain that sin introduces in others. For this theory to work, though, the suffering of Christ must be perfect. He must experience genuine alienation, hopelessness, and despair, because these are some of the worst pains a human can experience (more than the physical!). And so Christ’s genuine doubt, and His genuine unwillingness (let this cup passeth), magnify the suffering, which magnifies evil, which magnifies errors, which magnifies our aversion to committing such errors beginning from the heart.
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If she tells you her labia's gone kaput from too much torque, you're either doing it very wrong or very right. I hope they her calling you a runt and asking you to move was expressed with affection too.
This appeared in my janitor queue and I marked neutral because although it's adolescent and unfunny, so what. Reading it in context I think it's adolescent, unfunny, and a shitty comment. Take this as a remark on the imperfection of the janitor system. (I know I can check context by opening a different window, and often do, but it's annoying to do on mobile.)
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I often see this line of thought from both the pagan right and more progressive Christians, but I'm not sure we -and Nietzche for that matter- aren't reading modern understanding of the world into ancient peoples heads. Jesus was not only literate but had rahbitical training iirc. He was a skilled craftsmen who did carpentry, he never had to grow his own food in a word that was 80%+ illiterate sustenance farmers. I just dont think Jesus was particularly wreched by the standards of the ancient world, although his execution was usually reserved for the less fortunate.
We certainly don’t believe the same way they did thousands of years ago. Few years back I caught by background surprise some YouTube interviews of the OT scholar Joel Baden. He pointed out something I used to have thoughts about but never spent anytime to polish and formalize the notion of.
Back a millennia, the early communities of Judaism absolutely ‘believed’ the ‘Torah’ but they didn’t have modern ideas about it. One of the struggles of dating ancient documents of that time period more generally, is that these books continuously evolved, underwent multiple redactions and revisions, were compiled differently, edited differently, etc. So asking when these documents were “written” is a fallacious question, because these books aren’t singular, unified compositions.
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