Screenshot by Dandelion Salad via Flickr
Watch the video below
Dandelion Salad
December 24, 2014
with Chris Hedges
David Alexander Bullock on Dec 25, 2018
Rev. Chris Hedges and Rev. David Bullock discuss the real meaning of Christmas with Paul Jay.
Excerpt:
Hedges: …I think, [the] fundamental message of the Gospel is anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist. Remember when Jesus is taken to the desert by Satan and Satan offers him not only riches, but control of land, which is empire? And that is a condemnation. The Gospels are such a clear condemnation not just of the Roman Empire, but of empire.
[…]
Bullock: But the other layer of this is that it’s easier to speak truth to the powerless. And so I would maybe disagree and say that those who are left behind have not been written off. They have been anointed to the status of whipping boy and whipping girl. And so the holiness message, right, is a weekly opportunity to speak truth to the powerless which purges the preacher’s impulse to speak truth to somebody. And so every week the preacher is then free from the guilt of having not whooped somebody. Jesus whipped the money changers. Preachers whip their members.
And so there’s an interesting dynamic in the black church, where many ministers will say things to their members–don’t steal–but they won’t say “don’t steal” to Wall Street. Right? But if stealing is wrong for Leroy, right, then stealing ought to be wrong for the corporate banker. But you don’t get that connection.
[…]
Jay: Alright. Really fast, Reverend Hedges, final words for Christmas?
Hedges: We have to, as the consumers that we have conditioned, been conditioned to be, recognize that all of these things have to be brought before the manger holding the baby Jesus and abandoned if we’re going to recapture what that gospel message is about.
[…]
Bullock: I would simply say there’s a song that says must Jesus bear the cross alone and all the world go free; know there is a cross for everyone and there is a cross from me. So if the baby was born to bear a cross, then let us not just admire him, but let us follow him.
Message of the Day
http://heartlandspirituality.org/dailyseed.html
And when we give each other Christmas gifts in His name, let us remember that He has given us the sun and the moon and the stars, and the earth with its forests and mountains and oceans—and all that lives and move upon them. He has given us all green things and everything that blossoms and bears fruit and all that we quarrel about and all that we have misused—and to save us from our foolishness, from all our sins, He came down to earth and gave us Himself.
— Sigrid Undset
From the archives:
Christmas Dawn: The Shepherds Glorified God For All They Had Seen
The Socialist Alternative to a World of Injustice by Danny Katch
Chris Hedges: Strategies for Revolution
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Reblogged this on Puppet Master's Slave Market and commented:
Hedges is legion. The guru of critical thinking and revolutionary strategy.
“…as the court system becomes a wholly owned subsidiary of the the corporate state, they have to ramp up this image of charity…an ideological facade…”
How true.
You don’t have to be a literal biblical believer however, to see through the hypocrisy and vulgarity of this depraved imposture, the obscene abomination of consumer religion ~ with its blatant perversion of all those core values most associated with classical Aristotelian civic virtue.
For in fact, quite the contrary is the case; because this system of “predatory capitalism” is ironically enough, historically rooted precisely in those Calvinist dogmas that supposedly purport to incarnate veritable gospel ideas…whatever these may allegedly be held to mean, or by whom…yet this neo-liberal cult fails miserably to exercise any such ethical instruments as may be inferred from that highly contentious, indeed, scholastically controversial, metaphysical dispensation.
As Bertrand Russell suggested in his magisterial (1945) A History of Western Philosophy, in the chapter on Jewish Religious Development, where he writes (pp 319-20 of the Simon & Schuster 9th printing, paperback edition) :
‘…Take, for instance, “The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs,” written between 109 and 107 B.C. by a Pharisee who admired John Hyrcanus, a high priest of the Hasmonean dynasty. This book in the form in which we have it, contains Christian interpolations, but these are all concerned with dogma. When they are excised, the ethical teaching remains closely similar to that of the Gospels. As the Rev. Dr R.H. Charles says: “The Sermon on the Mount reflects in several instances the spirit and even reproduces the very phrases of our text: many passages in the Gospels exhibit traces of the same, and St. Paul seems to have used the book as a vade mecum” (op.cit., pp. 291-2)…’
Personally, I am not in the least impressed by any augmented moral authority attributable to Chris Hedges now as an ordained baptist minister.
In fact I much preferred him when he was still wisely citing the Dao De Jing; no, I am only persuaded by the cognitive integrity of his discourse; & primarily attentive therefore to the rational analyses and coherent arguments he presents ~ as these are always motivated by the highest principles in my estimation, and exemplify the finest quality of intellectual discernment.
The “gospels” are stories. The Chenosboskion Gnostic collection (Najʿ Ḥammādī library) introduced 52 additional papyri, discovered in the Egyptian desert in 1945. Notwithstanding the esoteric significance of those, the existing biblical typologies have been meticulously and exhaustively mapped (primus inter pares) by that Titan of Canadian letters, the awesome Northrop Frye; arguably, further extrapolated by his celebrated American pupil Harold Bloom.
These literary remains may be read as political allegories, but it is less than wise to base one’s entire epistemological consciousness on metaphysical events that may or may not have occurred in any literal sense. What we want to believe and what is demonstrably factual, do not always coincide.
It is for that reason that the consequences of religious belief should never be interpreted as plausible experiential fact in any profane sense. Did the Prophet Mohammed really ascend to heaven on a white horse? Who witnessed that? Can such an intimate personal vision ever be construed as objective fact? I don’t think so, no matter how significant it may be for the gifted visionary subject concerned. Are the metaphysical outcomes of ceremonial Ayahuasca or Iboga rites demonstrably factual? Of course they are not, but they may be neuro-phenomenologically profound and life-changing.
The only thing that is truly significant is the quality and precision of the symbolic information ~ the spiritual import or subjective relevance of the coherent messages encoded in any such legitimately transcendent, “imaginal” mystical experiences.
Everything else is political inference.