Hateful

 

One of the worst things one can be called in today's America is "hateful." What does that term mean?

I got called "hateful" by a commenter in the live feed of my last podcast. I was expecting, even hoping, that this might happen, although the source was not what I expected.

After my show two weeks ago, titled "Did Muhammad Exist?" (the precise title of a book I was discussing), I figured the title would draw many people to sample it in Rumble, much more than my usual tame topics, and that I would get some angry blowback from Muslims or their white liberal enforcers. Perhaps I did, in the comments, but I never read those. Like the feedback forms from my students when I tought, I am so little interested in that. If someone tells me point blank they like my show, I will thank them, but I don't read comments. Many people who are Youtube streamers say the same thing, because their comments are sometimes extremely vicious and discouraging, and it is easy to get obsessed with one that is particularly negative.

Since I extended that question about the origins of Islam this last week, and I figured now I am the radar screen of people who police opinions that regarded as "Islamophobic," another word whose meaning we never define, but which we are supposed to understand as a guide to what is acceptable public behavior.

Such accusations as "hateful", "Islamophobic", and other ones have the potential to end people's public careers, stripping them of public stature and even their livelihoods---cheered on by a mob that includes the mainstream media.

Being a blissful nobody, I probably don't have much to fear. In fact, the absence of push back that I have received even as I broach certain controversial topics has indicated to me what little impact I have. Having "haters" is considered an inevitable consequence of any opinion expressed online that reaches a significant audience. My ego was bruised a bit, even as I dread strongly opinionated interactions online. I truly believe I could stand on stage in front of an audience of 100,000 and speak on any subject, and somehow connect with a good chunk of the audience. Yet these anymous asynchronous exchanges in comments and social media are things I find as palatable as sewage water. When I still on Facebook, I always regretted any comment that elicited a response.  I dreaded seeing a response to controversial opinion in general. It was typically one of my old high school friends, one who cared not at all for politics back in the day, but who had become a serious enforcer of liberal thought. Such a person would deem it necessary to "correct me", as if somehow I hadn't gotten the memo about what I was supposed to believe.  They were informing me out of respect for our friendship, that I needed to educate myself and reset my thought. 

This is why I got off Facebook two months before the 2016 election and never have logged in again. I could not bear to see people I loved descend in that kind of thought thuggery. Before I left I began to see my old friends begin to ignore, even celebrate, violence against people like me, even our extermination. They didn't know they were talking about their old friend Matt. It would never occur to them that someone they had considered a friend, who was sane and intelligent, could be that way. I have experienced the meltdown of several such people, coming to frantic years in my presence, as they discovered that I was one of those people. 

I forgive all of them, and pray for them.

On my show I know that even among our side, there are people who disagree strongly and passionately. Perhaps the biggest is the Protestant-Catholic divide, something that I have lived and experienced since the moment of my birth, perhaps before. So it is no problem for me to thread that needle, especially being raised as a "traditional" Episcopalian in a way that would now be part of the breakaway Anglican Church of North America (just because everyone back then was "traditional" by today's standards). On my how talk favorably about the Catholic Church very often, especially in regard to certain theology, liturgy, and traditions. Yet I know if I mention Mary, or any form of Marian devotion, it will provoke anger among certain evangelical Protestants who consider such things to be idolatry, and who cannot restrain themselves from denouncing it as such. I ran into such a woman at the Badlands conference last year, stumbling into the subject while being naive of the strength of many people's opinions. Again, I was simply considering the opinion Catholics (and Orthodox) hold about Mary without condemning it. But condemn it she did! I could sense she was offended that I mentioned it in a neutral fashion.

On my show, however, we have dived deep on my show regarding Church history. As many people know, once you start looking into early Church history, it becomes apparent that for a thousand years or so after Jesus was born, all Christians were Catholic/Orthodox, and followed practices of those churches now abhorred by many Protestants.  As I explore these topics on my show, I do so under the cover of neutral history, and so far it has worked. It helps that I have also been able to discuss other branches of Eastern Christianity, including the Church of the East and Oriental Churches, who also consider themselves to be apostolic, and which has an ornate liturgies and saintly devotions. 

Somehow it is easier for evangelicals to find common cause with these Eatern Churches, whereas the Catholic Church is worthy only of condemnation.  Thus I can sneak in talk about saints, and Mary, without offending them. It is hard to speak against churche which existed in ancient Hindu and long Muslimized lands, holding forth to the faith for a thousand years, all under the threat of extermination even up to the present. Who would tell the Maronite Catholics of Lebanon, who have seen their country reduced from being the only Christian-majority nation in the Middle East to one with a non-Christian majority in their own lifetime, that their devotion to Mary is actually worship to a Pagan goddess?

I enjoy pointing out that many present-day traditional Catholics think the current Pope has lost the faith, and some consider him downright Satanic. I have a friend who was reading Windswept House, a hard-to-find novel written by a priest that is a fictionalization of the satanic rituals in the Vatican and elsewhere by the modern factions whose have ought to turn the Church to the Evil One. I hear it's a tough read. 

Of course if you are a hard core evangelical, or even perhaps a Baptist or an old-style Lutheran, you might say that the turning of the Catholic Church towards Satan happened centuries ago. The Orthodox would not go so far as that, but only point that heterodoxy ultimately is a path to Hell, but perhaps not as steep a one as the evangelicals would attribute to Catholicism. The Anglicans---being a Church founded on the necessity of granting a divorce, but which quickly degenerated into a intolerant slaughter of English Catholics, would simply mumble and try to ignore the issue. Won't someone please consider our Holy Orders to be valid and apostolic?

But it was not anything like this that provoked the accusation of my being "hateful". What finally provoked that accusation came not from anyone commenting on my remarks about the origins of Islam or Christianity. Instead it was the fruit of my discussion of Jerusalem in the context of the Biblical archaeology of the Second Temple, the possible building a Third Temple, and the desire by many Jew and Christians to undertake a project in the near future.  I tried to give a balanced look at the topic, and simple try to become familiar with the Red Heifer controversy. I even mentioned the theory that the first and second temples were not at the location commonly ascribed to them, although I went only so far as to see that it is not considered to be reputable scholarly archaeology, which doesn't make it false, but there are apparently good arguments in favor of the current assumed location coincident with Al-Aqsa Mosque. If you are going to swim in those waters, like Jay Smith, you better fucking know how to be a scholar (pardon my French). You better fucking know to dot your eyes and tie your shoelaces. Otherwise you will get eaten alive for wasting people's fucking time (pardon my French again). Believe me, I know.

I think of Jay Smith, the American Christian pastor-scholar and Youtuber who has mostly strongly asserted claims the academic claims that Islam as we know it was invented out of a heretical Arian Christian breakaway that was ret-conned to be about an Arab prophet in a place that didn't even exist at the time he supposedly lived, but had the effect of making that place into a wealthy and powerful center of pilgrimage.

Did I ever tell you that I fucking love the history of the Late Middle Ages and the Dark Ages (Pardonne maye Medieval Frenche)

On my show, as part of the Temple discussion, I had occasion to discuss the 1973 Yom Kippur War, something I've done in previous shows, and pointed out again that n those harrowing days of October 1973, the Israelis feared running out of ammunition, and succumbing to the Egyptian-Syrian offensive. "The Third Temple is in danger," said Moshe Dayan, the famous eye-patch wearing Israeli minister of defense (see photo above).  

Fortunately for them the Americans came to their aid with giant transport planes bearing resupplies. Nixon had agreed to this on the condition the planes arrive at night, so as not to poke the eye of our Arab allies, who were willing to look the other way. But according to the story, weather delayed the planes in the Azores, and the U.S. Air Force planes with their big logos landed smack in broad daylight for the world to see. The Arab street was outraged. The Arab leaders were forced to act on appeaement of this, and this is how the 1973 Oil Embargo was born. This is the moment that the postwar period of American prosperity ended for good. We have never recovered from this. It set in motion the cycle of modern history in many ways.

Reviewing this again in my research for last week's, I had become fascinated with Moshe Dayan and had to learn more about him. He was quite a badass in the Israeli independence struggle, a subject I knew little about, expect for the broad outline of it, and having read Exodus twenty-five years ago (and boy, did I get shit for that later--but that's a story for another day).

Reading about Moshe Dayan and the activities of the Israeli "terrorist" operatoins against the British in 1944 brought to mind the curious fact that exactly as the British were fighting the Germans in Europe, the Jews were fighting the British.  This is an oddity of history that is not widely known outside Israel, nor even discused. Somehow it is considered inappropriate to point this out, even hateful.  Well, that's mind reading. I can at least asert a truth that  discussion of it is one of those things that opens one up to being called "hateful" in comments on a podcast.

I probably deserve it. Next time I will do better.