You may recall that an earlier psalm purported to be the last Psalm of David, but as we know, the current Book of Psalms is actually a compilation and the editors just didn't delete that. There are more psalms attributed to David and we've come to two of them today. Psalm 101, attributed to David,  is a sort of oath of office. Psalm 103 is a song of praise, which gives God several attributes that he clearly doesn't have. No, he doesn't heal all diseases (v. 3), doesn't renew youth (v. 5), doesn't work vindication and justice for all who are oppressed (v. 6) and most certainly is not ..read more

That's actually the name of a street in Philadelphia where my paternal ancestors lived, but it seemed like a good title for this post. If I still had the energy to keep up the Windham County blog I would have put it there, but for now I'll just leave it here. Living in the temperate zone we do have to get through the winter, but our reward is spring, which you can't have otherwise. I got a load of horseshit from my neighbors last fall and now I'm starting to spread it around. I planted a Concord grape next to my front porch, with a decent scoop of manure in the hole, and my idea is that it wi ..read more

We now get a run of (mercifully short) songs of praise. Again, there are multiple gods but our god is the biggest and baddest. Yes, he is also the creator, but that's sort of a contradiction. If the Big Y created the heavens and the earth, where did all these competing gods come from? This is never explained. There is some weird imagery in these, with geographic features engaging in anthropomporphized activities. As a final note, these were evidently written during times of victory and prosperity. They obviously don't pertain to the exilic situation in which the book was compiled. 98 O ..read more

In the previous post I listed some structural and contingent reasons why the relationship between voting and any idea of popular sovereignty is problematic. I didn't even mention some of the specific kludgy features of the U.S. system, such as the overrepresentation of small states in both the Senate and the Electoral College, which is itself an unwieldy and dangerous anachronism; gerrymandering; and obstacles to voting. However, let's assume we had none of those problems. In fact, propose a fantasy world in which we either had direct democracy -- all legislation by referendum -- or that repre ..read more

This post will be in two parts -- or maybe I'll just get to one part now and do the second part separately, we'll see how it goes. The first part is some empirical true facts about elections and electoral democracies, or republics if you prefer to use that term for representative systems such as ours. I don't want to get hung up on vocabulary. The second is philosophical -- how should we understand democracy, popular rule, We The People? How does that work and how can it work and how should it work? So, Part One. Many people assume that elections and the resulting legislative and executive (a ..read more

I always do my best to write clearly and precisely, but it seems I don't always manage to get my meaning across. So let's try a couple of ideas again. Please read carefully, and think about what I actually write, not what you think I might think or what other people think.   The First Amendment applies only to government. It constrains what government can do, it does not place any constraint of any kind on any other entity. The courts have interpreted it a bit more broadly than its literal language. If "congress shall make no law . . . " then the executive cannot have any legal authority ..read more

Now we get some (mercifully short) songs of praise. The fun thing about these is that they cast Yahweh as the greatest among a pantheon of gods. That's how people thought about gods in the time most of the Tanakh was written. You've got your god, we've got ours, but ours is the baddest baddass of all the gods. This is somewhat different from polytheistic religions. All the Roman or Norse gods were gods of the Romans or Norsemen, although Jupiter and Odin were the head honchos.  So the basic structure of the Deuteronomistic history is that when the Israelites please God, he gives them vic ..read more

Apparently realizing that they were caught on the horns, as it were, the dumpsters handlers wrote a statement for him in which he tried to split the baby by saying that abortion policy should be left entirely up to the states. Presumably he agreed to this although his dementia is too far advanced for him to have written the statement. The whole issue has never been anything but opportunism for him. He proclaimed himself to be a strong supporter of abortion rights until he decided to run for president as a Republican, and then he had a very difficult time articulating exactly what he thought a ..read more

We now have three fairly short pieces, all of which are in the same vein. The righteous will prosper, the wicked will have their downfall. Sad to say, it just ain't so, and repeating it every Saturday won't make it true. If we want the righteous to flourish, and the wicked to have their downfall, we need to make it happen ourselves. God is of no help. A Psalm. A Song for the Sabbath. 92 It is good to give thanks to the Lord,     to sing praises to thy name, O Most High; 2 to declare thy steadfast love in the morning,     and thy faithfulness ..read more

This is a topic I address from time to time, but it seems a new post is needed now because of various nonsense that's going on. First, let me make one thing perfectly clear, as a man we would all like to forget used to say: free speech and academic freedom are not the same. Legally, the only meaning of Free Speech™ is the First Amendment, as interpreted by the courts. Originally it applied only to the federal government, but the 14th Amendment extended the protections of the Bill of Rights to the States, so it now applies to all government entities within the United States, and that includes y ..read more