Contempt

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Jefferson had borrowed the image of the “wall of separation” from Roger Williams (1604–83), founder of Providence, Rhode Island, who had been expelled from New England because of his opposition to the intolerant policies of the Puritan government.46 But Williams was less concerned about the welfare of the state than that of his faith, which he believed would be contaminated by any involvement with government.47 He intended Rhode Island to be an alternative Christian community that came closer to the spirit of the gospels. Jefferson, by contrast, was more concerned to protect the state from the “loathsome combination of church and state” that had reduced human beings to “dupes and drudges.”48 He seemed to assume—quite wrongly—that there had been states in the past that had not been guilty of this “loathsome combination.” It remained to be seen whether the secularized United States would be less violent and coercive than its more religious predecessors. Whatever the Founders wanted, most Americans still took it for granted that the United States would be based on Christian principles. By 1790, some 40 percent of the new nation lived on the frontiers and were becoming increasingly resentful of the republican government that did not share their hardships but taxed them as harshly as the British had done. A new wave of revivals, known as the Second Great Awakening, represented a grassroots campaign for a more democratic and Bible-based America.49 The new revivalists were not intellectuals like Edwards but men of the people who used wild gestures, earthy humor, and slang and relied on dreams, visions, and celestial signs. During their mass rallies, they pitched huge tents outside the towns, and their gospel songs transported the crowds to ecstasy. However, these prophets were not pre-Enlightenment throwbacks. Lorenzo Dow may have looked like John the Baptist, but he quoted Jefferson and Paine and, like any Enlightenment philosophe, urged the people to think for themselves. In the Christian commonwealth the first should be last and the last first. God had sent his insights to the poor and unlettered, and Jesus and his disciples had not had college degrees.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Determined to achieve sole supremacy, he campaigned against his coemperor Maxentius. On the night before their final battle at the Milvian Bridge near Rome in 312, Constantine had a vision of a flaming cross in the sky embellished with the motto: “In this conquer!” A dreamer and visionary, Constantine also saw himself as a “friend of God” and would always attribute his subsequent victory to this miraculous omen. That year he declared Christianity to be religio licita. Constantine employed the philosopher Lucius Caecilius Lactantius (c. 260–325) as a tutor for his son Crispus. Lactantius had been converted to Christianity by the courage of the martyrs who had suffered under Maximianus Daia. The state was, he believed, inherently aggressive and predatory. Romans might talk loftily about virtue and respect for humanity but did not practice what they preached. The goals of any political power, Rome included, were always “to extend the boundaries which are violently taken from others, to increase the power of the state, to improve the revenues,” and this could only be achieved by latrocinium, “violence and robbery.” 145 There was no such thing as a “just” war, because it was never permissible to take human life. 146 If Romans really wanted to be virtuous, Lactantius concluded, they should “restore the possessions of others” and abandon their wealth and power. 147 That might have been what Jesus would have done, but it was not likely to happen in Christian Rome. 6 Byzantium: The Tragedy of Empire In 323 Constantine defeated Licinius, emperor of the eastern provinces, and became sole ruler of the Roman Empire. His ultimate ambition, however, was to command the civilized world from the shores of the Mediterranean to the Iranian Plateau, as Cyrus had done. 1 As a first step, he moved his capital from Rome to the city of Byzantium at the Bosporus, the juncture of Europe and Asia, which he renamed Constantinople. Here he was greeted by Eusebius (c. 264–340), the bishop of Caesarea: “Let the friend of the All-Ruling God be proclaimed our sole sovereign ... who has modeled himself after the archetypal form of the Supreme Sovereign, whose thoughts mirror the virtuous rays by which he has been made perfectly wise, good, just, pious, courageous and God-loving.” 2 This was a far cry from Jesus’s criticism of such worldly authority, but in antiquity, the rhetoric of kingship had always been virtually interchangeable with the language of divinity. 3 Eusebius regarded monarchy, the rule of “one” (monos), as a natural consequence of monotheism.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  These agree in all the principal facts, even to unimportant details, but differ entirely in spirit and in judgment; Julian himself exhibiting the vanity of self-praise, Libanius and Zosimus the extreme of passionate admiration, Gregory and Cyril the opposite extreme of hatred and abhorrence, Ammianus Marcellinus a mixture of praise and censure. 1. Heathen sources: Juliani imperatoris Opera, quae supersunt omnia, ed. by Petavius, Par. 1583; and more completely by Ezech. Spanhemius, Lips. 1696, 2 vols. fol. in one (Spanheim gives the Greek original with a good Latin version, and the Ten Books of Cyril of Alex. against Julian). We have from Julian: Misopogon (Misopwvgon, the Beard-hater, a defence of himself against the accusations of the Antiochians); Caesares (two satires on his predecessors); eight Orationes; sixty-five Epistolae (the latter separately and most completely edited, with shorter fragments, by Heyler, Mog. 1828); and Fragments of his three or seven Books kata; Cristianw'n in the Reply of Cyril. Libanius: jEpitavfio" ejp j jIoulianw'/ , in Lib. Opp. ed. Reiske, Altenb. 1791–97. 4 vols. Mamertinus: Gratiarum actio Juliano. The relevant passages in the heathen historians Ammianus Marcellinus (I.c. lib. xxi-xxv. 3), Zosimus and Eunapius. 2. Christian Sources (all in Greek): the early church historians, Socrates (l. iii.), Sozomen (I. v. and vi.), Theodoret (I. iii.). Gregory Naz.: Orationes invectivae in Jul. duae, written some six months after the death of Julian (Opp. tom. i.). Cyril of Alex.: Contra impium Jul. libri x. (in the Opp. Cyr., ed. J. Aubert, Par. 1638, tom. vi., and in Spanheim’s ed. of the works of Julian). LITERATURE. Tillemont: Memoires, etc., vol. vii. p. 322–423 (Venice ed.), and Histoire des empereurs Rom. Par. 1690 sqq., vol. iv. 483–576. Abbé De la Bleterie: Vie de l’empereur Julien. Amst. 1735. 2 vols. The same in English, Lond. 1746. W. Warburton: Julian. Lond. 3d ed. 1763. Nath. Lardner: Works, ed. Dr. Kippis, vol. vii. p. 581 sqq. Gibbon: l.c. ch. xxii.–xxiv., particularly xxiii. Neander: Julian u. sein Zeitalter. Leipz. 1812 (his first historical production), and Allg. K. G., iii. (2d ed. 1846), p. 76–148. English ed. Torrey, ii. 37–67. Jondot (R.C.): Histoire de l’empereur Julien. 1817, 2 vols. C. H. Van Herwerden: De Juliano imper. religionis Christ. hoste, eodemque vindice. Lugd. Bat. 1827. G. F. Wiggers: Jul. der Abtrünnige. Leipz. 1837 (in Illgen’s Zeitschr. f. Hist. Theol.). H. Schulze: De philos. et moribus Jul. Strals. 1839. D. Fr. Strauss (author of the mythological "Leben Jesu"): Der Romantiker auf dem Thron der Caesaren, oder Julian der Abtr. Manh. 1847 (containing a clear survey of the various opinions concerning Julian from Libanius and Gregory to Gibbon, Schlosser, Neander, and Ullmann, but hiding a political aim against King Frederick William IV. of Prussia). J. E. Auer (R.C.): Kaiser Jul. der Abtr. im Kampf mit den Kirchenvaetern seiner Zeit. Wien, 1855. W. Mangold: Jul. der Abtr. Stuttg. 1862. C. Semisch: Jul. der Abtr. Bresl. 1862. F. Lübker: Julians Kampf u. Ende. Hamb. 1864.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  His apostasy from Christianity, to which he was probably never at heart committed, Julian himself dates as early as his twentieth year, A.D. 351. But while Constantius lived, he concealed his pagan sympathies with consummate hypocrisy, publicly observed Christian ceremonies, while secretly sacrificing to Jupiter and Helios, kept the feast of Epiphany in the church at Vienne so late as January, 361, and praised the emperor in the most extravagant style, though he thoroughly hated him, and after his death all the more bitterly mocked him.63 For ten years he kept the mask. After December, 355, the student of books astonished the world with brilliant military and executive powers as Caesar in Gaul, which was at that time heavily threatened by the German barbarians; he won the enthusiastic love of the soldiers, and received from them the dignity of Augustus. Then he raised the standard of rebellion against his suspicious and envious imperial cousin and brother-in-law, and in 361 openly declared himself a friend of the gods. By the sudden death of Constantius in the same year he became sole head of the Roman empire, and in December, as the only remaining heir of the house of Constantine,64 made his entry into Constantinople amidst universal applause and rejoicing over escape from civil war.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The ruling passion of Julian, and the soul of his short but most active, remarkable, and in its negative results instructive reign, was fanatical love of the pagan religion and bitter hatred of the Christian, at a time when the former had already forever given up to the latter the reins of government in the world. He considered it the great mission of his life to restore the worship of the gods, and to reduce the religion of Jesus first to a contemptible sect, and at last, if possible, to utter extinction from the earth. To this he believed himself called by the gods themselves, and in this faith he was confirmed by theurgic arts, visions, and dreams. To this end all the means, which talent, zeal, and power could command, were applied; and the failure must be attributed solely to the intrinsic folly and impracticability of the end itself. I. To look, first, at the positive side of his plan, the restoration and reformation of heathenism: He reinstated, in its ancient splendor, the worship of the gods at the public expense; called forth hosts of priests from concealment; conferred upon them all their former privileges, and showed them every honor; enjoined upon the soldiers and civil officers attendance at the forsaken temples and altars; forgot no god or goddess, though himself specially devoted to the worship of Apollo, or the sun; and notwithstanding his parsimony in other respects, caused the rarest birds and whole herds of bulls and lambs to be sacrificed, until the continuance of the species became a subject of concern.66 He removed the cross and the monogram of Christ from the coins and standards, and replaced the former pagan symbols. He surrounded the statues and portraits of the emperors with the signs of idolatry, that every one might be compelled to bow before the gods, who would pay the emperors due respect. He advocated images of the gods on the same grounds on which afterwards the Christian iconolaters defended the images of the saints. If you love the emperor, if you love your father, says he, you like to see his portrait; so the friend of the gods loves to look upon their images, by which he is pervaded with reverence for the invisible gods, who are looking down upon him.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The Swiss had in this controversy the best of the argument and showed a more Christian spirit. The result was disastrous to Lutheranism. The Palatinate, in part also Hesse, Bremen, Anhalt, and, at a later period, the reigning dynasty of Prussia, passed over into the Reformed Church. Hereafter there were two distinct and separate Confessions in Protestant Germany, the Lutheran and the Reformed, which in the Westphalia Treaty were formally recog-nized on a basis of legal equality. The Lutheran Church might have sustained still greater loss if Melanchthon had openly professed his essential agreement with Calvin. But the magnetic power of Luther’s name and personality, and of his great work saved his doctrine of the Eucharist and the ubiquity of Christ’s body, which was finally formulated and fixed in the Formula of Concord (1577). Joachim Westphal (1510–1574), a rigid Lutheran minister and afterwards superintendent at Hamburg, who inherited the intolerance and violent temper, but none of the genius and generosity of Luther, wrote, without provocation, a tract against the "Zürich Consensus," and against Calvin and Peter Martyr, in 1552. He aimed indirectly at the Philippists (Melanchthonians), who agreed with the Calvinistic theory of the Eucharist without openly confessing it, and who for this reason were afterwards called Crypto-Calvinists. He had previously attacked Melanchthon, his teacher and benefactor, and compared his conduct in the Interim controversy with Aaron’s worship of the golden calf.959 He taught that the very body of Christ was in the bread substantially, that it was ubiquitous, though illocal (extra locum), and that it was partaken by Judas no less than by Peter. He made no distinction between Calvin and Zwingli. He treats as "sacramentarians" and heretics all those who denied the corporal presence, the oral manducation, and the literal eating of Christ’s body with the teeth, even by unbelievers. He charges them with holding no less than twenty-eight conflicting opinions on the words of institution, quoting extracts from Carlstadt, Zwingli, Oecolampadius, Bucer, à Lasco, Bullinger, Peter Martyr, Schwenkfeld, and chiefly from Calvin. But nearly all these opinions are essentially the same, and that of Carlstadt was never adopted by any Church or any Reformed theologian.960 He speaks of their godless perversion of the Scriptures, and even their "satanic blasphemies." He declared that they ought to be refuted by the rod of the magistrates rather than by the pen.961 As his first attack was ignored by the Swiss, he wrote another and larger tract in 1553, in which he proved the Lutheran view chiefly from 1 Cor. 11:29, 30, and urged the Lutherans to resist the progress of the Zwinglian or, as it was now called, Calvinistic heresy.962 The style and taste of his polemic may be inferred from his calling Bullinger "the bull of Zürich," Calvin "the calf of Geneva," and à Lasco "the Polish bear."

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Jerome wrote, about 383, with indignation and bitterness against Helvidius and Jovinian, who, citing Scripture passages and earlier church teachers, like Tertullian, maintained that Mary bore children to Joseph after the birth of Christ. He saw in this doctrine a desecration of the temple of the Holy Ghost, and he even compares Helvidius to Erostratus, the destroyer of the temple at Ephesus.784 The bishop Bonosus of Sardica was condemned for the same view by the Illyrican bishops, and the Roman bishop Siricius approved the sentence, A.D. 392. Augustine went a step farther. In an incidental remark against Pelagius, he agreed with him in excepting Mary, "propter honorem Domini," from actual (but not from original) sin.785 This exception he is willing to make from the sinfulness of the race, but no other. He taught the sinless birth and life of Mary, but not her immaculate conception. He no doubt assumed, as afterward Bernard of Clairvaux and Thomas Aquinas, a sanctificatio in utero, like that of Jeremiah (Jer. i. 5) and John the Baptist (Luke i. 15), whereby, as those two men were fitted for their prophetic office, she in a still higher degree was sanctified by a special operation of the Holy Ghost before her birth, and prepared to be a pure receptacle for the divine Logos. The reasoning of Augustine backward from the holiness of Christ to the holiness of His mother was an important turn, which was afterward pursued to further results. The same reasoning leads as easily to the doctrine of the immaculate conception of Mary, though also, just as well, to a sinless mother of Mary herself, and thus upward to the beginning, of the race, to another Eve who never fell. Augustine’s opponent, Pelagius, with his monastic, ascetic idea of holiness and his superficial doctrine of sin, remarkably outstripped him on this point, ascribing to Mary perfect sinlessness. But, it should be remembered, that his denial of original sin to all men, and his excepting of sundry saints of the Old Testament besides Mary, such as Abel, Enoch, Abraham, Isaac, Melchizedek, Samuel,

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The beginnings of the Donatist schism appear in the Dioclesian persecution, which revived that controversy concerning church discipline and martyrdom. The rigoristic party, favored by Secundus of Tigisis, at that time primate of Numidia, and led by the bishop Donatus of Casae Nigrae, rushed to the martyr’s crown with fanatical contempt of death, and saw in flight from danger, or in the delivering up of the sacred books, only cowardice and treachery, which should forever exclude from the fellowship of the church. The moderate party, at whose head stood the bishop Mensurius and his archdeacon and successor Caecilian, advocated the claims of prudence and discretion, and cast suspicion on the motives of the forward confessors and martyrs. So early as the year 305 a schism was imminent, in the matter of an episcopal election for the city of Cita. But no formal outbreak occurred until after the cessation of the persecution in 311; and then the difficulty arose in connection with the hasty election of Caecilian to the bishopric of Carthage. The Donatists refused to acknowledge him, because in his ordination the Numidian bishops were slighted, and the service was performed by the bishop Felix of Aptungis, or Aptunga, whom they declared to be a traditor, that is, one who had delivered up the sacred writings to the heathen persecutors. In Carthage itself he had many opponents, among whom were the elders of the congregation (seniores plebis), and particularly a wealthy and superstitious widow, Lucilla, who was accustomed to kiss certain relics before her daily communion, and seemed to prefer them to the spiritual power of the sacrament. Secundus of Tigisis and seventy Numidian bishops, mostly of the rigoristic school, assembled at Carthage deposed and excommunicated Caecilian, who refused to appear, and elected the lector Majorinus, a favorite of Lucilla, in his place. After his death, in 315, Majorinus was succeeded by Donatus, a gifted man, of fiery energy and eloquence, revered by his admirers as a wonder worker, and styled The Great. From this man, and not from the Donatus mentioned above, the name of the party was derived.660

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  The cycle of drug-related stigma reinforces stereotypes and labels, which in turn reinforce stigma, which sets expectations about roles. These expectations lead to limited opportunities based on what people think a drug user is capable of doing, which in turn leads to internalized/reinforced expectations. It’s a series of diminishing returns that make it difficult for drug users—or really any marginalized community—to break free. It’s become easier to judge people who use drugs instead of seeing them as human beings who deserve love. For many, it’s easier to impose simplistic, moralistic expectations instead of asking ourselves, what if? What if someone is using as an attempt to mitigate the stress and impact of previous or concomitant trauma or mental health issues? What if someone comes from a community of people who use, and thus drug use is a cultural “norm?” What if drug use is part of a spiritual practice? What if drug use is a way to tap into an inner, creative self? What if a person uses drugs because they get great pleasure in doing so? What if people who use drugs are people first—people who are more than the sum total of their drug use? In most cultures, we judge a person who “loses control” over their substance use. They become “other,” a scourge reflecting the worst of humanity. We revile and even terrorize people who use drugs. Harm reduction is a way to change that narrative. The late Don McVinney, one of the “first wave” of harm reductionists in the States, often spoke about the American moral perspective on drug use, which at its core locates the problem in the person.73 According to Don, harm reduction “locates the problem [if there is one] in the relationship between the person and drug, because lots of people use substances and don’t do so problematically.” There are six basic principles of harm reduction—all centered around people who use drugs: Health and dignity—the right to be well and seen as a whole person Participant-centered services—meeting people where they are rather than where we want them to be Meaningful involvement of people who use drugs—both in the design of services and the ability to participate in the public policy dialogue Autonomy—the right and ability to make your own choices Socio-cultural competency—interacting with people in a way that values their customs, beliefs, practices, and experiences Pragmatism—not ignoring or minimizing the very real and potentially tragic harms associated with some behaviors These sensible and humane principles ground our work and are based in the realities of what people who use drugs experience on a daily basis: stigma, trauma, poverty, classism, race- sex- and gender-based discrimination, social isolation, and other social inequities that affect people’s vulnerability to, and capacity for, effectively dealing with harm.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  Eighteen months after buying Skype, Andreessen and his partners sold the company to Microsoft for $8.5 billion— three times what they paid. To some, Andreessen’s role as both an eBay director and an investor acquiring an asset from eBay seemed like a problem. “Andreessen, he’s screwed more people than Casanova, for Christ’s sake, and yet he goes and takes this attitude that he’s on the high moral ground,” activist investor Carl Icahn said on CNBC. Icahn complained that eBay had sold Skype for less than what it was worth and that eBay’s investors had been shortchanged. Andreessen said Icahn was “making up a fake conspiracy theory out of thin air.” The tech press sided with Andreessen. The story went nowhere. Andreessen is relentlessly optimistic and pounds away on the same message, which is that no matter how high the valuations of start-ups might go, this all makes sense. In May 2015 Andreessen explained to Tad Friend of the New Yorker that there was nothing to worry about. Sure, things got out of hand in the first dotcom bubble, and we had a crash, and now we were on the upswing again, but that didn’t mean another crash was coming. The crash of 2000 was an “isolated event,” Andreessen said, and the economy was heading into a “sustained boom,” almost the same phrase Doerr would use in Bloomberg a month later. Andreessen Horowitz has invested in some of the Valley’s most highly valued companies, including Pinterest, Airbnb, and Box, and enlists its publicity machine (both its own internal operation and its friends in the tech press) to further its interests. In the spring of 2014, when “software as a service” (SaaS) stocks went into a slump, and when Box was still hoping to go public but had started to look wobbly, Andreessen’s content factory sprang into action. The firm produced blog posts and podcasts explaining that SaaS companies were misunderstood. Investors failed to understand how profitable these companies were going to be. The podcast was loaded up with a dizzying barrage of jargon and acronyms and metrics that SaaS companies have invented to measure their own performance. Software as a service is still something of a new business, and it is difficult if not impossible to compare the performance of any one SaaS company to the others. The bottom line from pro-SaaS believers is that because SaaS companies use a subscription model, they will eventually become enormously profitable, despite incurring big losses in their early years. Whether that theory will be proven true remains to be seen. By June, shares in SaaS companies stopped plunging and started to claw their way back up, along with the rest of the market. This was good news for HubSpot, which by the summer of 2014 was borrowing money to pay its bills.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  Harris and Benioff perform a clumsy skit about how Harris has just returned from the year 2019 and brought back some software he found there, and that is what Salesforce.com will be announcing today. The truth is that Salesforce.com has little new to introduce. All of the stuff about hospitals and Haitians and Huey Lewis is meant to distract us from noticing that Benioff doesn’t really have much to talk about other than warmed-over versions of old products. The misdirection works. People whoop and clap. They nod their heads as if they totally understand phrases like the Internet of customers, where people make decisions at superhuman speeds, and companies operate at the speed of now, as well as at the speed of sales. What sales and marketing people must do, someone informs us with great urgency, is race into the future a little faster than our customers, and get to the future first, and be ready to greet them when they arrive. Before you can try to figure out what that means, Dreamforce rolls on. Over the next few days the show features some of the biggest names in tech, like Dropbox CEO Drew Houston, HP CEO Meg Whitman, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. Benioff has latched on to the “Women in Tech” crusade and made it his cause célèbre. “Powerful women” is a theme of the conference—yet oddly enough only four members of Benioff’s twenty-two member management team and only one member of his board of directors are female. Salesforce.com is run almost entirely by white men. But look—over there! It’s the prime minister of Haiti! And wait, hold on—is that thunder and lightning? Indoors? Is that a Tesla? From the future? On stage? Green Day plays a concert in AT&T Park, home of the San Francisco Giants. Alec Baldwin gives a talk. Tony Bennett and Jerry Seinfeld make appearances. It’s all part of what Salesforce.com describes as “dynamic programming to exhilarate the Dreamforce community.” Cavernous halls are lined with countless booths rented out by software makers hawking programs that work with Salesforce: add-ons, plug-ins, mobile apps. There’s a “connected devices playground” and a “Dreamforce hackathon.” There are more than a thousand breakout sessions and “success clinics,” where people can learn how to sell stuff. Two people dressed up in foam balls—the Salesforce.com mascots, SaaSy and Chatty—bounce around the conference, dancing awkwardly with legions of mostly white people. The final day features a speech by Deepak Chopra, noted charlatan and quack. He and Benioff are friends. Chopra rambles on about joy and meaning and interconnectedness and the importance of loving yourself. The old W. C. Fields line “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit” seems like the motto not just for Chopra but for the entire conference.

• From The Historical Jesus (Great Courses) (2000)

  Woe to you Chorazin, woe to you Bethsaida. For if the great deeds that have been done among you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago and sat in sackcloth and ashes. But it will be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon in the day of judgment than for you. And you Capernaum, you will not be exalted up to heaven will you? No, you will descend into hell. (Luke 10:13-15; Matt. 11:20-24) 2 . Note that Jesus’ response to his own rejection is couched here in apocalyptic terms of judgment, condemnation, and destruction. D. The widespread rejection of Jesus and his message would make sense of several other early traditions associated with Jesus. 1. In Q, he laments that even though foxes and birds have places to stay, he has nowhere (Matt. 8:20; Luke 9:58). 2 . In Mark and Thomas, he intimates that the reason the kingdom has such a small and inauspicious beginning is that most of his proclamation is falling on deaf ears (for example, the parable of the sower: Mark 4: 1-9; G. Thom. 9). 3. He claims, in a completely independent source, that he is “hated by the world” (John 15:18). E. Above all, Jesus was rejected by the religious leaders of his people. ©2000 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 31 1 . At the end of his life, as we’ll see, his rejection by the aristocracy that ran the Temple — the Sadducees and the chief priests — ultimately led to his execution by the Romans. 2. During his preaching ministry in Galilee, though, Jesus had no confrontations with the powerful Jews of Jerusalem’s Temple, but only with local teachers who belonged to the Pharisees. III. During his public preaching ministry, Jesus was harshly opposed by Pharisees and experts in the Jewish law (known as scribes), who thought that his teachings were wrong, that he misunderstood what God wanted, that he and his followers profaned the law, and that as a result, his powerful deeds could not come from God but were from the devil. A. The controversies Jesus had with these other Jewish teachers were not over whether the law of God should be followed, but rather over the proper interpretation of the law. These were internal Jewish debates, no more harsh or vitriolic than those going on between other Jewish groups, for example, between the Essenes and the Pharisees. B. Some of Jesus’ disagreements with Pharisees involved moral decisions that were made difficult by the fact that the Law of Moses was incomplete and ambiguous. 1. An example is the law concerning divorce. Moses allowed a man to divorce his wife (cf. Deut. 24:1^1), but what should be the permissible legal grounds? 2. Like some Pharisees, but unlike others, Jesus himself took a fairly radical stand, that the legal grounds provided by Moses were simply a makeshift measure and that God preferred people never to divorce (Mark 10:2-9).

• From Cultish (2021)

  The fitness industry’s maximalist ethos that throwing yourself wholeheartedly into a program—that working harder and faster, never quitting, and intensely believing in yourself—will give you flat abs and inner peace is uncannily reminiscent of the prosperity gospel. This Amway-esque ambiance is subtler in some studios than it is in others, but across platforms, a single promise resonates: Your body fat percentage will drop and your gluteus will elevate, and so will your life’s value, but only through sweaty, high-priced labor. You can hear swells of New Thought in CrossFit’s unswerving more-is-more rhetoric. Capitalizing on the athletic vernacular and warlike delivery of a drill sergeant, CrossFit trainers (or “coaches,” as they’re called on the inside) bellow slogans like “Beast mode,” “No guts, no glory,” “Sweating or crying?,” “The burden of failure is far heavier than that barbell,” and “Puking is acceptable. . . . Blood is acceptable. Quitting is not.” Invoking rituals like Hero WoDs (“hero workouts of the day,” move sequences named after fallen members of the military and law enforcement), they manufacture the atmosphere of soldiers in training. CrossFit boasts a staunchly libertarian atmosphere, derived from the personal politics of its founder, Greg Glassman , who has famously uttered quotes like “Routine is the enemy” and “I don’t mind being told what to do. I just won’t do it.” It’s no coincidence, then, that the CrossFit climate is one of lawlessness, where within the anarchical universe of the box, followers are not only allowed but encouraged to work out so hard they vomit, urinate, or end up in the hospital. Jason, a cancer survivor and ex-CrossFitter who joined his local box on a quest of self-empowerment after finishing chemotherapy, was forced to quit after developing chronic shoulder pain and a knee injury so severe, it required surgery. In a 2013 Medium post about his experience, he wrote, “The first year was exhilarating. . . . I began bragging about my lifting numbers, and quickly amped up the frequency of my visits from three to four, then five days per week. Without even realizing it, I became that evangelizing asshole.” But eventually, CrossFit’s ungovernable rhetoric, which conditions members to believe that pushing their bodies to injury is inevitable and even admirable, caught up to Jason. “The messed-up part is that injuries in CrossFit are seen as badges of honor, the price of getting righteously ripped, bro,” he revealed.* So when he complained to his coaches about the shoulder and knee pain he was experiencing, they gaslit him into thinking it was all his fault. “You’re supposed to push yourself to the limit,” Jason wrote, “but when you hit the limit and pay the price, you’re the idiot who went too far.” “No guts, no glory” may be a tagline, but it’s also among the thought-terminating clichés CrossFit might use to silence your grievances.

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  between us. All of the other parties to the meeting had understood that it was agreed that the tapes, or transcripts of them, or both, would be released. After the meeting, Skinner refused his permission. I feel the profession was cheated. I have come to realize that the basic difference between a behavioristic and a humanistic approach to human beings is a philosophical choice. This certainly can be discussed, but cannot possibly be settled by evidence. If one takes Skinner as of some years ago—and I believe this is his view today—then the environment, which is part of a causal sequence, is the sole determiner of the individual’s behavior, which is thus again an unbreakable chain of cause and effect. All the things that I do, or that Skinner does, are simply inevitable results of our conditioning. As he has pointed out, man acts as he is forced to act, but as if he were not forced. Carried to its logical conclusion, this means, as John Calvin concluded earlier, that the universe was at some point wound up like a great clock and has been ticking off its inexorable way ever since. Thus, what we think are our decisions, choices, and values are all illusions. Skinner did not write his books because he had chosen to present his views, or to point to the kind of society he values, but simply because he was conditioned to make certain marks on paper. Amazingly to me, he admitted as much in one session in which we both participated. My experience in therapy and in groups makes it impossible for me to deny the reality and significance of human choice. To me it is not an illusion that man is to some degree the architect of himself. I have presented evidence that the degree of self-understanding is perhaps the most important factor in predicting the individual’s behavior. So for me the humanistic approach is the only possible one. It is for each person, however, to follow the pathway—behavioristic or humanistic—that he finds most congenial. Saying that it is for the individual to decide is not synonymous with saying that it makes no difference. Choosing the humanistic philosophy, for example, means that very different topics are chosen for research and different methods for validating discoveries. It means an approach to social change based on the human desire and potentiality for change, not on conditioning. It leads to a deeply democratic political philosophy rather than management by an elite. So the choice does have consequences. To me it is entirely logical that a technologically oriented society, with its steady emphasis on a greater control of human behavior, should be enamored of a behavioristic approach. Likewise, academic psychology, with its unwavering insistence that “the intellect is all,” has greatly preferred it over the humanistic approach. If the university psychologist accepted the latter view, he would have to admit that he is involved, as a subjective person, in his choice of research

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  This improvement, also, in the external condition of the clergy was often attended with a proportional degeneracy in their moral character. It raised them above oppressive and distracting cares for livelihood, made them independent, and permitted them to devote their whole strength to the duties of their office; but it also favored ease and luxury, allured a host of unworthy persons into the service of the church, and checked the exercise of free giving among the people. The better bishops, like Athanasius, the two Gregories, Basil, Chrysosotom, Theodoret, Ambrose, Augustine, lived in ascetic simplicity, and used their revenues for the public good; while others indulged their vanity, their love of magnificence, and their voluptuousness. The heathen historian Ammianus gives the country clergy in general the credit of simplicity, temperance, and virtue, while he represents the Roman hierarchy, greatly enriched by the gifts of matrons, as extreme in the luxury of their dress and their more than royal banquets;150 and St. Jerome agrees with him.151 The distinguished heathen prefect, Praetextatus, said to Pope Damasus, that for the price of the bishopric of Rome he himself might become a Christian at once. The bishops of Constantinople, according to the account of Gregory Nazianzen,152 who himself held that see for a short time, were not behind their Roman colleagues in this extravagance, and vied with the most honorable functionaries of the state in pomp and sumptuous diet. The cathedrals of Constantinople and Carthage had hundreds of priests, deacons, deaconesses, subdeacons, prelectors, singers, and janitors.153 It is worthy of notice, that, as we have already intimated, the two greatest church fathers gave the preference in principle to the voluntary system in the support of the church and the ministry, which prevailed before the Nicene era, and which has been restored in modern times in the United States of America. Chrysostom no doubt perceived that under existing circumstances the wants of the church could not well be otherwise supplied, but he was decidedly averse to the accumulation of treasure by the church, and said to his hearers in Antioch: "The treasure of the church should be with you all, and it is only your hardness of heart that requires her to hold earthly property and to deal in houses and lands. Ye are unfruitful in good works, and so the ministers of God must meddle in a thousand matters foreign to their office. In the days of the apostles people might likewise have given them houses and lands; why did they prefer to sell the houses and lands and give the proceeds? Because this was without doubt the better way. Your fathers would have preferred that you should give alms of your incomes, but they feared that your avarice might leave the poor to hunger; hence the present order of things."154 Augustine desired that his people in Hippo should take back the church property and support the clergy and the poor by free gifts.155 § 16. Episcopal Jurisdiction and Intercession.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  orthodoxy of the great departed became in this way a vital issue of the day, and rose in interest with the growing zeal for pure doctrine and the growing horror of all heresy. Upon this question three parties arose: free, progressive disciples, blind adherents, and blind opponents.1534 1. The true, independent followers of Origen drew from his writings much instruction and quickening, without committing themselves to his words, and, advancing with the demands of the time, attained a clearer knowledge of the specific doctrines of Christianity than Origen himself, without thereby losing esteem for his memory and his eminent services. Such men were Pamphilus, Eusebius of Caesarea, Didymus of Alexandria, and in a wider sense Athanasius, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzum, and Gregory of Nyssa; and among the Latin fathers, Hilary, and at first Jerome, who afterwards joined the opponents. Gregory of Nyssa, and perhaps also Didymus, even adhered to Origen’s doctrine of the final salvation of all created intelligences. 2. The blind and slavish followers, incapable of comprehending the free spirit of Origen, clave to the letter, held all his immature and erratic views, laid greater stress on them than Origen himself, and pressed them to extremes. Such mechanical fidelity to a master is always apostasy to his spirit, which tends towards continual growth in knowledge. To this class belonged the Egyptian monks in the Nitrian mountains; four in particular: Dioscurus, Ammonius, Eusebius, and Enthymius, who are known by the name of the "tall brethren,"1535 and were very learned. 3. The opponents of Origen, some from ignorance, others from narrowness and want of discrimination, shunned his speculations as a source of the most dangerous heresies, and in him condemned at the same time all free theological discussion, without which no progress in knowledge is possible, and without which even the Nicene dogma would never have come into existence. To these belonged a class of Egyptian monks in the Scetic desert, with Pachomius at their head, who, in opposition to the mysticism and spiritualism of the Origenistic monks of Nitria, urged grossly sensuous views of divine things, so as to receive the name of Anthropomorphites. The Roman church, in which Origen was scarcely known by name before the Arian disputes, shared in a general way the strong prejudice against him as an unsound and dangerous writer. The leader in the crusade against the bones of Origen was the bishop Epiphanius of Salamis (Constantia) in Cyprus († 403), an honest, well-meaning, and by his contemporaries highly respected, but violent, coarse, contracted, and bigoted monastic saint and heresy hunter.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  While my mother prodded shrink-wrapped beef, thumbing the meat as if checking for its pulse, Dayi pushed me down an aisle wide enough for an airplane. The ceiling high as a church’s. I told Dayi this was a place of worship: sacred were the super-packs of socks on sale, so cheap we wished we had as many feet as a millipede. Holy were the baked hams, fat as infants, waiting to be adopted into our bellies. Dayi and I opened every door in the freezer aisle: peas, pies, poultry. Americans freeze everything, I said, and when she asked why, I said it was because their mouths were probably microwaves. Buy my casket at Costco, Dayi said. Better yet, don’t spend anything. Feed my body to the parking lot pigeons. The Costco pigeons landed on the pavement in bulk and panthered across the lot, pouncing on our feet. Outside, my mother bought us hot dogs with a coupon and we slicked them with mustard, eating the buns and feeding the meat to the pigeons. _ Dayi was born without blood. A doctor had to kill a goat and use tubes to siphon goatblood into Dayi’s empty veins. But the doctor accidentally pumped too much blood into her, turning her red-hard and bloated as an apple. When Ama bathed her in a bucket, she bobbed ass-up in the water. Every day, Dayi wore something red: a petal she slid under her thumbnail, a handkerchief, a red thread around her wrist, a scar on her belly where her blood was shepherded in. Even her favorite foods were red: pig’s blood cake, char siu buns, eels that grew scarlet gills after eating the corpsemeat of the drowned. Whatever she touched could only blush: Green guavas turned the color of biblical apples. Once, when she was a girl, a mutt that bit her on the ass became a bloodhound. When she drank out of the river, it unraveled like a ruddy ribbon all the way down to the sea. The missionaries called her blessed, a girl who could turn water to the color of wine, but Dayi never felt that way. Her molars grew in the color of raw meat, and her bathwater looked like a butcher’s sink. After Dayi touched three of her classmates by accident, the teachers told her to wear gloves to school. They were made of some animal’s hide, skin on the inside and fur on the outside. Dayi was converted by a Chinese missionary who wore two belts at a time—one to keep his pants up, the other to strip off and beat with. He taught the Bible in beatings: If they misspoke a verse, he flayed the brown off their backs.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  I called her a racist and told her that cutting down trees is a cultural thing, he said. What’s a “cultural thing”? I said. Like a funeral or a wedding, he said. Like you. This was how my mother came to thank Duck Uncle for keeping us in a house we couldn’t afford: My mother had seen him bury a key under the bush by his front door, so she knuckled into the soil, uprooting the key like a seed. With her fingers wet, she unlocked his front door and found his room, doorless with a skin-thin curtain. Behind the curtain, Duck Uncle was changing into his work clothes—a suit vest embroidered with his name—and my mother could map the whole city of his body. The wet street of his skin, the forehead greased into sky. Duck Uncle was not surprised to see her in his doorway: It was like looking at himself, like looking into water and seeing your own face stitched there. After that, we ate for free at Duck Uncle’s dim sum restaurant, which had a name so generic we never learned it. The food was so greasy it shot down our throats before we could swallow. My brother and I tried hating him, but Duck Uncle’s Sichuan accent was honky and high-pitched and made us laugh until our throats tied themselves into bows. He even promised to teach us to hunt ducks, cutting targets out of shoeboxes and letting us shoot them with his BB gun. My brother had the best aim out of the three of us, threading the pellet through the penciled-in eye. I was too afraid of backfire, so I only pretended to pull the trigger, making the gunshot sound with my mouth. Duck Uncle pretended to believe me, said I’d killed so many. But I’d aimed at nothing, the bullet unspent as our silence, the ducks just make-believe. _ In a past life, our city was a landfill. In the summers, the air smelled as if it had passed through our bowels, hot and sour and slurred. My brother and I debated if the stink was spoiled plums or our farts or our father expiring from the country. Before I was born, the city bulldozed over buttocks of garbage for the roads to be built. The landfill lived just below us, digesting itself, flexing its belly. The soil was too soft to stand on and every year the houses kneeled deeper in their dung. In the backyard, my brother and I dug down to find what was dying.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Before partition, Jamaat had concentrated on training its members to reform their own lives in the Greater Jihad; only by living an authentically Quranic life could they hope to inspire the people with a longing for Islamic government. But after partition, the movement split. Of its 625 members, 240 remained in India. Since only 11 percent of the population of India was Muslim, Indian Jamaat could not hope to create an Islamic state; instead, its members acquired a qualified appreciation of the moderate (as opposed to atheistic) secularism of the new state of India that forbade discrimination on the basis of religious belief. This, they declared, was a “blessing” and a “guarantee for a safe future for Islam in India.” 24 But in Pakistan, where there was a possibility of an Islamic state, Maududi and his 385 Jamaat disciples felt no such constraints. They became the most organized Pakistani political party, gained the support of the educated urban classes, and campaigned vigorously against the dictatorship of Ayub Khan (r. 1958–69), who confiscated all clerical property, and the socialist regime of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (r. 1970–77), who used Islamic symbols and slogans to win popular support but in reality had nothing but contempt for religion. Maududi, therefore, was still committed to the struggle (jihad) against jahili secularism, but he always interpreted jihad broadly in the traditional manner so that it did not simply mean “holy war”; one could “strive” to achieve God’s sovereignty by peaceful political activities, such as writing books or working in education. 25 It is a mistake, therefore, to brand Pakistani Jamaat as fanatically intent on violence; the fact that the party went in two such different directions after partition shows that it had the flexibility to adapt to circumstances. Maududi would have nothing to do with revolutionary coups, assassinations, or policies that stirred up hatred and conflict, insisting that an Islamic state could put down firm roots only if ends and means were “clean and commendable.” 26 The transition from a secular nation-state to a truly Islamic society must, he would always maintain, be “natural, evolutionary and peaceful.” 27 But in Pakistan physical force had become one of the chief ways of doing politics. 28 Leaders regularly came to power in military coups, and in their ruthless suppression of political opposition, neither Khan nor Bhutto could be seen as examples of benign, peaceable secularism. So prevalent was armed conflict in Pakistani society that a group that abjured it had little hope of success.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  The roots of your tree are canyoning me! The neighbor swore at her in Sichuanese, a dialect that sounded to me like ducks being deboned alive. Don’t be so racist, my brother said. It’s not racist if he’s a mainlander, I said. My mother’s dislike of mainlanders was medical: She claimed to develop a rash or lose a tooth every time she spoke to one. She rubbed my thumb against her silver fillings and said, This is what you get from kissing a mainlander, from marrying one. Remember: This hole in my tooth is the one you were born through. I said, But Agong was born a mainlander, and my mother said, Agong doesn’t even know he’s been born. Our mother’s teeth were brittle with lies. She earned all her cavities not from kissing our father but from working night shifts at a Baskin-Robbins when she was new in LA, back when she ate ice cream every night for dinner. We didn’t blame our mother for her lies: We loved them into littler truths. For instance, she was not the last granddaughter of a Tayal chief but descended from lower-ranked warriors, born with a shark’s tooth under her tongue. Another one: Our mother once ran from an entire army, climbing a tree so soft-boned that it collapsed, shish-kababing two soldiers and ending martial law on the island forever. The part about the tree is true at least. Her wrist wears a scar like a bracelet, where the bones battled out of her skin. She imagined the soldiers skewered and strung, her injuries dormant inside their bodies. My mother said, It’s like martial law on this goddamn street, when the mainlander moved in next door. He was a renter like us, but he paid his rent on time, while my mother spent whole months writing excuse notes: My husband is working on the mainland and the money was swallowed at sea. My husband is a raccoon and currently unemployed. My husband is a pilot and we plan to set the roof on fire to signal him home. Our Russian-speaking landlord survived an army too and gave us extensions out of sympathy. She and my mother traded stories as a truce, stories gouged of their truths. About husbands that grew trees to hang their mothers from. About soldiers with striped uniforms, dizzying the enemy to death. I like Chinese people. I love China, the landlord told us monthly, as if to assure herself we were worth the stories we’d sold her. Nicknaming our neighbor Duck Uncle, my brother and I made quacking sounds with our armpits whenever he spoke. When my mother threatened to hang raw meat from the branches of the tree to attract raccoons and coyotes and flies to his yard, Duck Uncle retaliated by stealing the knob off our front door, coaxing pigeons into our home, dressing a rake like a woman and staking her in the lawn, impersonating our ghosts.