Fish for Friday

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Edited by Morris Dean

[Anonymous selections from recent correspondence]

And in the beginning, and in times since, Americans have always created a god who suits their purposes: "5 ways America changed God." Excerpt:

5. The Billy Graham effect
    As the country sought healing after World War II, Americans began searching for hope in the God-smorgasbord that Christianity had laid out, from Bible-believing fundamentalism to Holy Ghost-inspired Pentecostalism, from education-minded Roman Catholicism to progressive-leaning high church spiritualism.
    One man seemed capable of connecting across church and denominational lines: Billy Graham.
    Unrestrained by the limitations of a home church, Graham’s God evolved into a deity that a variety of Americans wanted to know. Graham’s God wooed conservative and charismatic believers alike, and didn’t offend most Catholic and Episcopalian believers....
    In many ways, Graham was the first to unleash the power of GOD®. And that changed everything.
    Today, most Christians can’t distinguish between God and GOD®, which has made America’s deity into a superpower, an almighty deity that can be mixed with just about anything, from enterprise to politics, from hate campaigns to promises of prosperity.
    Here in America, God is constantly changing. It’s a divine story that we edit and manipulate—sometimes innocently and sometimes intentionally—into our own narratives.
    We create a most powerful God who serves our own agendas, whether they be cities built on hills or presidential elections.

Joseph Campbell lives!

Throughout the Orient the idea prevails that the ultimate ground of being transcends thought, imaging, and definition. It cannot be qualified. Hence to argue that God, Man, or Nature is good, just, merciful, or benign, is to fall short of the question. One could as appropriately – or inappropriately – have argued, evil, unjust, merciless, or malignant. All such anthropomorphic predications screen or mask the actual enigma, which is absolutely beyond rational consideration; and yet, according to this view, precisely that enigma is the ultimate ground of being of each and every one of us – and of all things.
    The supreme aim of Oriental mythology, consequently, is not to establish as substantial any of its divinities or associated rites, but to render by means of these an experience that goes beyond: of identity with that Being of beings which is both immanent and transcendent; yet neither is nor is not. Prayers and chants, images, temples, gods, sages, definitions, and cosmologies are but ferries to a shore of experience beyond the categories of thought, to be abandoned on arrival; for, as the Indian Kena Upanishad states: "to know is not to know, not to know is to know"; and the Chinese Tao Te Ching: "Those who know are still."
    "Thou art that," declares the Vedic sage; and the Japanese: "It is your true self."
    "O thou," states a basic Buddhist text, "who art gone, who art gone, who art gone to the yonder shore, who at the yonder shore hast disembarked: Enlightenment! Hail!" –Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Volume III: Occidental Mythology, p. 3-4

For goodness sake, Morris! ["Thor's Day: A new proof for the non-divinity of Jesus or the errancy of the Bible"] We were given control over the animals, and some were meant to be eaten. Where would even vegetarians like you get milk, if not from cows?

Evolution used the same tools to shape humans, worms, and flies: "Evolution used similar molecular toolkits to shape flies, worms, and humans." Excerpt:

Although separated by hundreds of millions of years of evolution, flies, worms, and humans share ancient patterns of gene expression, according to a massive Yale-led analysis of genomic data.
    Two related studies led by scientists at Harvard and Stanford, also published Aug. 28 in the same issue of the journal Nature, tell a similar story: Even though humans, worms, and flies bear little obvious similarity to each other, evolution used remarkably similar molecular toolkits to shape them.

Somewhere​,​ someone will say this was god's punishment for having ​sex, and ​children, without being married: "Chicago church laments after falling gargoyle kills woman."
    If you have ever been curious about why a church would have demonic looking creatures as part of its motif, read Wikipedia on "Gargoyles."​

Robert Reich dreams:

The biggest story of our era is the shift of power to large corporations and their top executives, Wall Street, and a handful of billionaires. There is no longer countervailing power in our system. Small businesses have morphed into franchises of giant corporations; local and state banks are now extensions of Wall Street; state and local political organizations have become funding arms of national parties; national parties themselves are being displaced by billionaire SuperPACS and secret 401-c-3 political front groups; trade unions are disappearing from the private sector and under siege in the public sector; and 65 percent of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. If the presidential election of 2016 is to be about anything significant, it must be a rallying point for restoring economic and political power to the American people.

Robert Reich's report card on labor on Labor Day 2014:

Jobs: B-. The official unemployment rate is 6.2 percent but if you include everyone working part-time who’d rather be in full-time jobs, and all those too discouraged even to look for work, the real rate is closer to 12.5 percent.

Wages: D. According to a new reform from the Economic Policy Institute, hourly wages dropped for nearly everyone from the first half of 2013 to the first half of 2014 (except for a small gain in the bottom 10 percent because of minimum-wage increases in 13 states this year).

Job security: F. A higher proportion of jobs are part-time, temporary, contract, or otherwise with unpredictable wages and hours than at any time on record.

Bargaining power: F. Most workers have none. After-tax corporate profits comprise their highest share of the economy in almost half a century, while worker pay the lowest share since 1948.

The so-called “recovery” has bypassed most Americans. At the least, we must raise the minimum wage, expand the EITC, exempt the first $15,000 of income from payroll taxes and take the cap off income subject to it, invest in infrastructure and schools, and end austerity economics. What else?

Limerick-inspired verse of the week:

"$2.37 dry cleaned and pressed" –
Prob'ly for a tie, the bus'ness man guessed;
    he went in to find out,
    and returned without doubt:
money'd been laundered – the sign was but jest.

Copyright © 2014 by Morris Dean