Tag: jesus

παρθένος

Posted in Culture & Society, language, morality, perception, philosophy, psychology, religion, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

A Christian bloke was arguing morality with me in regard to a recent post. I am considering a fuller response, but let’s focus on this one aspect for the time being.

Being a Christian, I wanted to argue on his own terms. The topic was statutory rape and the ages of consent more generally. I’m no Christian, but I have read the Bible. I’ve done much coursework in comparative religion, so I’m no stranger to their philosophies. A major criticism I’ve heard from Christians of Islam’s Muhammad is that he had a 9-year-old bride. Reading the account of the God and Mary encounter reminds me of another Bible verse:

Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye, but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own eye?

Audio: Unrelated to this article, I was looking for cover art by Bouguereau. I chose another of his work, but I happened upon La Vague that shares namespace with this painting. This is an aolean piece over a drum loop I wrote several decades ago on some evening. I hadn’t thought of it in years, but I still like it.
Image: William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905) – La vague (1896)

In any case – moving on…

I asked my sidekick, ChatGPT, this question:

Given Biblical accounts, how old must Mary have been at the conception of ‘Jesus’?

It provided a verbose response after a terse:

Short answer: uncomfortably young by modern standards, entirely unremarkable by ancient ones. Yes, civilisation is fun like that.

Again, I believe this account is a contradictory ahistorical account, but he believes it, so I’ll charitably treat it as truth.

It continues:

Based on historical scholarship on Second Temple Judaism:

  • Girls were typically betrothed shortly after puberty.
  • Puberty for girls in antiquity is generally estimated around 12–14.
  • Marriage and consummation often followed soon after betrothal.

Mary is described as:

  • a παρθένος (virgin)
  • betrothed to Joseph, not yet living with him
  • living under her father’s authority

All of that places her very squarely in the category of an early adolescent.

Ok, but not good enough. I clarify: I thought that translating παρθένος as virgin is disputed in hermeneutics. [NB: Be careful to specify and contradict to ensure your answer is solid and not hallucinated.]

Yes. You’re right. The translation of παρθένος as “virgin” is absolutely disputed in hermeneutics, and the fact that this still gets presented as settled is… revealing.

What παρθένος actually means

In Koine Greek, παρθένος primarily means:

  • a young woman
  • of marriageable age
  • socially defined by unmarried status

Sexual inexperience is not intrinsic to the term. It can imply virginity in some contexts, but it does not denote it by default.

If Greek wanted to be anatomically explicit, it had other tools. This word is social, not gynaecological.

The Hebrew word in Isaiah 7:14 is ʿalmāh, which means “young woman”, not “virgin”. The unambiguous Hebrew term for virginity would be bətûlāh, and Isaiah does not use it.

When the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek in the Septuagint, ʿalmāh became παρθένος. That choice is defensible linguistically, but disastrous theologically. Once Matthew reads Isaiah through the Septuagint, the mess is locked in.

So the prophecy pipeline looks like this:

Hebrew ambiguity → Greek ambiguity → Latin certainty → English dogma

A masterclass in semantic drift hardening into doctrine.

Luke doesn’t fix this. He inherits it.

Luke uses παρθένος for Mary because:

  • she is unmarried
  • she is betrothed
  • she is under paternal authority

All perfectly ordinary descriptors for a teenage girl in Second Temple Judaism. None of this requires sexual inexperience as a metaphysical state.

The later insistence that παρθένος = virgin in the modern, anatomical sense is not exegesis. It’s doctrinal backfilling.

Why this keeps getting defended

Because once you admit that:

  • παρθένος ≠ virgin by necessity
  • Isaiah wasn’t predicting a miraculous conception
  • Luke may be narrating status, not biology

…a great deal of theology loses its keystone. So the translation is defended not because it’s airtight, but because it’s load-bearing.

Images: Bry circa 2014. Song circa 2004.
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Written by Bry Willis in a dialogue with ChatGPT 5.2

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Perspective Is Everything

Posted in equality, identity, language, modernism, morality, perception, philosophy, podcast, politics, power, psychology, religion, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
2–3 minutes

This clip of Rachel Barr slid into my feed today, fashionably late by a week, and I thought it deserved a little dissection. The video wouldn’t embed directly – Instagram always has to be precious – so I downloaded it and linked it here. Don’t worry, Rachel, I’m not stealing your clicks.

Video: Neuroscientist Dr Rachel Barr discusses Charlie Kirk and gun violence.
Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/DOd3LnjDUW8

Now, the United States. Or rather, the United States In Name Only – USINO. A nation perpetually rebranding itself as a “union” whilst its citizens claw at each other like alley cats in a bin fire. Yes, divisions abound – economic, racial, ideological, pick your poison – but some fissures cut to the bone. Today’s example: Charlie Kirk and the rabid congregation of defenders he’s managed to cultivate.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

The Competing Liturgies

To hear one camp tell it, Kirk is no hater at all. He’s a gentle, God-soaked soul, brimming with Christian love and trying – halo tilted just so – to shepherd stray sheep toward Our Lord and Saviour™. A real Sunday-school sweetheart.

But this is not, shockingly, the consensus. The other camp (my camp, if disclosure still matters in a post-truth age) see him as a snarling opportunist, a huckster of hate packaged in the familiar varnish of patriotism and piety. In short: a hate-merchant with a mailing list.

Spectacle as Weapon

I’ve watched Kirk at work. He loves to stage “debates” – quotation marks mandatory – where a token dissenter is dropped into an amphitheatre of loyalists. It’s the rhetorical equivalent of feeding Christians to lions, except the lions roar on cue and the crowd thinks the blood is wine. He laces misogyny, racism, and reheated premodern dogma into cheap soundbites, and the audience laps it up as though they were attending a revival. For the believers, it’s a festival. For everyone else, it’s a hostile takeover of public discourse.

Deaf Ears, Loud Mouths

Here’s the rub: Cohort A doesn’t perceive his words as hate because they already share the operating system. It’s not hate to them – it’s common sense. Cohort B, meanwhile, hears every syllable as the screech of a chalkboard dragged across the public square. Same words, two worlds.

And when I dare to suggest that if you can’t hear the hatred, you might just be complicit in it, the pushback is instantaneous: Stop imposing your worldview! Which is rich, since their worldview is already blaring through megaphones at tax-exempt rallies. If my worldview is one that insists on less hate, less dehumanisation, less sanctified bullying, then fine, I’ll take the charge.

The deeper accusation, though, is almost comic: that I’m hallucinating hate in a man of pure, lamb-like love. That’s the gaslighting twist of the knife – turning critique into pathology. As if the problem isn’t the bile spilling from the stage but my faulty perception of it.

Perspective is everything, yes – but some perspectives reek of wilful blindness.

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Outraged at Evil

Posted in language, morality, nature, perception, philosophy, politics, power, psychology, reality, science, societyTagged , , , , 1 Comment

I’ve recently picked up Kurt Gray’s Outraged!, and it’s got me thinking about metaphysics—more specifically, how the implausibility of metaphysical constructs like “evil” shapes our understanding of harm and morality. Gray’s central thesis—that everyone wants good outcomes for themselves and their society but focuses on different objects of harm—is intriguing, but it hinges on some deeply problematic assumptions.

Take, for instance, his argument that the vitriol between Democrats and Republicans is less about genuine malice and more about divergent harm perceptions. Democrats, he suggests, see harm in systemic inequalities, while Republicans focus on the erosion of traditional values. Both sides, in their own way, think they’re protecting what matters most. But here’s where it gets murky: how do we square this with the fact that these perceived harms often rest on fantastical and unfounded worldviews?

Audio: Podcast speaking on this content

Gray recounts a childhood experience in Sunday school where the question of what happens to unbaptised people was posed. The answer—Hell, of course—was delivered with the enthusiasm of a child parroting doctrine. This made Gray uncomfortable at the time, but as an adult, he reflects that his step-parents’ insistence on baptism wasn’t malicious. They genuinely believed they were saving him from eternal damnation. He argues their actions were driven by love, not malevolence.

On the surface, this seems like a generous interpretation. But dig deeper, and it’s clear how flawed it is. Hell doesn’t exist. Full stop. Actions based on an entirely imaginary premise—even well-intentioned ones—cannot escape scrutiny simply because the perpetrator’s heart was in the right place. Good intentions do not alchemize irrationality into moral virtue.

This same flawed logic permeates much of the political and moral discourse Gray explores. Consider anti-abortion activists, many of whom frame their cause in terms of protecting unborn lives. To them, abortion is the ultimate harm. But this stance is often rooted in religious metaphysics: a soul enters the body at conception, life begins immediately, and terminating a pregnancy is tantamount to murder. These claims aren’t grounded in observable reality, yet they drive real-world policies and harm. By focusing on “intent” and dismissing “malice,” Gray risks giving too much credit to a worldview that’s fundamentally untethered from evidence.

Which brings me to the notion of evil. Gray invokes it occasionally, but let’s be clear: evil doesn’t exist. At least, not as anything more than a metaphor. The word “evil” is a narrative shortcut—a way to denote something as “very, very, very, very bad,” as a precocious toddler might put it. It’s a relic of religious and metaphysical thinking, and it’s about as useful as Hell in explaining human behaviour.

Take the archetypal “evildoers” of history and society: Adolf Hitler, Jeffrey Dahmer, or (for some) Donald Trump. Are these people “evil”? No. Hitler was a power-hungry demagogue exploiting fear and economic despair. Dahmer was a deeply disturbed individual shaped by trauma and pathology. Trump is a narcissist thriving in a culture that rewards spectacle over substance. Labelling them as “evil” absolves us of the responsibility to understand them. Worse, it obscures the systemic conditions and societal failures that allowed them to act as they did.

Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem gave us the concept of the “banality of evil,” and it’s a helpful corrective. Arendt’s point wasn’t that Eichmann was secretly a great guy but that his actions weren’t driven by some metaphysical malevolence. He was a cog in the machine, an unremarkable bureaucrat following orders. The atrocities he committed weren’t the result of extraordinary wickedness but of ordinary systems enabling ordinary people to do extraordinarily harmful things.

This insight cuts to the core of the issue. If “evil” is banal—if it’s nothing more than the mundane processes of harm scaled up—then it never really existed to begin with. It’s a construct, a tool of storytelling that obscures far more than it reveals.

So, where does this leave us? For one, we must abandon “evil” as an explanatory framework. It’s analytically lazy and morally dangerous. Instead, let’s focus on precision. Rather than labeling someone “evil,” we can describe their actions: harmful, exploitative, cruel. These words invite inquiry; “evil” slams the door shut.

By rejecting metaphysical constructs like evil, we gain a clearer, more grounded understanding of harm and morality. And perhaps that’s what Outraged! inadvertently teaches us: the real outrage isn’t malice; it’s the stubborn persistence of unexamined beliefs masquerading as moral clarity. If we can let go of those, maybe we can finally move forward.

Jung and Catholic Ritual

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I was chatting with some Catholics on Social Media, responding to a post about the need to grow their base. I sympathised that it must be difficult because the product of organised religion was not exactly tailor-fit. Protestants have provision for roll-your-own, but not Catholics. This led me to a discussion about what Jung wrote about rituals – that it doesn’t matter if the underlying rationale was remembered because some people like ritual for its own sake – candles, incense, wafers, whatever.

(I studied Jung intensely in the mid-’90s, and while I still find him useful as metaphor, I don’t take his broader metaphysics seriously anymore – too mystical for my tastes. But this particular insight about ritual sticks.)

Follows are the unedited results.

Yes, and Jung was being quietly subversive about it. He was pointing to something most modern institutions would rather not hear.

For Carl Jung, ritual doesn’t need to be true in the propositional sense to be effective in the psychological one. Its power doesn’t reside in correct belief, historical accuracy, or even conscious assent. It resides in repetition, form, symbol, and the way those elements bypass the rational gatekeeper and go straight for the nervous system.

Which is precisely why ritual unnerves modernity.

Once you accept Jung’s claim, you’re forced to concede that meaning is not the primary engine of human orientation. Function is. A ritual can continue to stabilise, contain, and organise psychic life long after its original metaphysics has decayed, been forgotten, or become frankly unbelievable. The candles still work even if God has quietly slipped out the back.

This is deeply inconvenient for Enlightenment-descended sensibilities, which insist that symbols must justify themselves, that practices require reasons, and that belief precedes action. Jung flips that on its head. We act first. We kneel first. We chant first. Understanding, if it arrives at all, comes later as a kind of aftercare.

Which helps explain your mate’s conversion without invoking any sudden metaphysical awakening.

Catholic ritual functions even when belief wobbles. Protestantism, having stripped ritual back to avoid superstition, leaves belief carrying all the weight. Once belief falters, there’s nothing left to hold the structure together. No choreography. No inherited muscle memory. No symbolic surplus. Just a sermon competing with the rest of the week’s content.

Jung saw this coming. He understood that modern people would continue to need ritual even as they lost faith in the stories that once justified it. His worry wasn’t that people would abandon religion. It was that they would abandon ritual competence and then wonder why anxiety, fragmentation, and compensatory myth-making flooded in through the cracks.

From that angle, Catholicism’s current crisis looks different again.

The conservatives think ritual must be defended because it encodes truth.
The progressives think ritual can be loosened because truth can be updated.
Jung would have said both are missing the point.

Ritual persists because it does work that language cannot do. It orders time. It disciplines the body. It makes the invisible feel locally real. Strip away the incense, the repetition, the inherited forms, and you don’t get a purer faith. You get an exposed psyche scrambling for substitutes.

So when someone says, “I’m drawn to Catholicism because of the candles and incense,” they’re not being shallow. They’re being honest in a way theologians and sociologists often aren’t. They’re admitting that humans are not primarily convinced creatures.

They are conditioned ones.

Jung didn’t romanticise that fact. He warned about it. But he understood it well enough to say the thing modern institutions still resist admitting:
you can drain a ritual of meaning and it will still shape lives long after the doctrine has stopped persuading anyone.

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The Scapegoat and the Spectacle

Posted in economics, equality, healthcare, identity, language, modernism, morality, perception, philosophy, politics, power, psychology, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Girardian Lessons from a Violent Reckoning

The assassination of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson is more than just a shocking headline—it’s a vivid tableau of modern society’s darkest impulses. For some, Thompson’s death represents long-overdue justice, a symbolic blow against the machinery of corporate greed. For others, it’s an unforgivable act of chaos that solves nothing. But as the dust settles, we’re left with an unsettling truth: both sides may be acting rationally, yet neither side emerges morally unscathed.

It’s not just about one man or one system—it’s about the cycles of conflict and violence that have defined human societies for millennia.

This event takes on deeper significance when viewed through the lens of René Girard’s theories on mimetic rivalry and the scapegoat mechanism. It’s not just about one man or one system—it’s about the cycles of conflict and violence that have defined human societies for millennia.

Mimetic Rivalry: The Root of Conflict

Girard’s theory begins with a simple observation: human desires are not unique; they are mimetic and shaped by observing what others want. This inevitably leads to rivalry, as individuals and groups compete for the same goals, power, or symbols of status. Left unchecked, these rivalries escalate into social discord, threatening to tear communities apart.

Enter the scapegoat. To restore order, societies channel their collective aggression onto a single victim, whose sacrifice momentarily alleviates the tension. The scapegoat is both a symbol of the problem and a vessel for its resolution—a tragic figure whose elimination unites the community in its shared violence.

Thompson as Scapegoat

In this story, Brian Thompson is the scapegoat. He was not the architect of the American healthcare system, but his role as CEO of UnitedHealth made him its most visible face. His decisions—denying claims, defending profits, and perpetuating a system that prioritises shareholders over patients—embodied the injustices people associate with healthcare in America.

manifesto of a society pushed to its breaking point

The assassin’s actions, however brutal, were a calculated strike against the symbol Thompson had become. The engraved shell casings found at the scene—inscribed with “Deny,” “Defend,” and “Depose”—were not merely the marks of a vigilante; they were the manifesto of a society pushed to its breaking point.

But Girard would caution against celebrating this as justice. Scapegoating provides only temporary relief. It feels like resolution, but it doesn’t dismantle the systems that created the conflict in the first place.

The Clash of Rationalities

Both Thompson and his assassin acted rationally within their respective frameworks. Thompson’s actions as CEO were coldly logical within the profit-driven model of American capitalism. Deny care, maximise profits, and satisfy shareholders—it’s a grim calculus, but one entirely consistent with the rules of the system.

sacrifice one life to save countless others

The assassin’s logic is equally clear, though rooted in desperation. If the system won’t provide justice, then justice must be taken by force. From a Consequentialist perspective, the act carries the grim appeal of the trolley problem: sacrifice one life to save countless others. In this view, Thompson’s death might serve as a deterrent, forcing other executives to reconsider the human cost of their policies.

Yet Girard’s framework warns us that such acts rarely break the cycle. Violence begets violence, and the system adapts. The hydra of modern healthcare—the very beast Thompson represented—will grow another head. Worse, it may become even more entrenched, using this event to justify tighter security and greater insulation from public accountability.

“An Eye for an Eye”

Mahatma Gandhi’s warning, “An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind,” resonates here. While the assassin may have acted with moral intent, the act itself risks perpetuating the very cycles of harm it sought to disrupt. The scapegoat mechanism may provide catharsis, but it cannot heal the underlying fractures in society.

Moving Beyond the Scapegoat

To truly break the cycle, we must confront the forces that drive mimetic rivalry and scapegoating. The healthcare system is just one manifestation of a larger problem: a society that prizes competition over cooperation, profit over people, and violence over dialogue.

The hydra story looms in the background here, its symbolism stark. Slaying one head of the beast—be it a CEO or a policy—will not bring about systemic change. But perhaps this act, as tragic and flawed as it was, will force us to reckon with the deeper question: How do we create a society where such acts of desperation are no longer necessary?

The answer lies not in finding new scapegoats but in dismantling the systems that create them. Until then, we remain trapped in Girard’s cycle, blind to the ways we perpetuate our own suffering.

There Are No Accidents

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There are no accidents, or so claimed Carl Jung in his work on synchronicity, positing that events may be connected causally or by meaning. Some people see this as the work of some karmic force whilst others use it to suggest that a person is being passive-aggressive.

Karma

In the karmic sense, this means that there is no escaping fate, and, as with Santa Claus, he is constantly watching you, like some personified panopticon. See the short post on karma, too.

I’m not sure if the bible story of Judas and Jesus is really a karmic anecdote, but under this paradigm, everything is a no-fault situation. Judas was fated to betray Jesus. And despite this lack of responsibility, Judas still committed suicide once he realised what he had done and despite it not being an accident.

Passive-Aggression

In the passive-aggressive sense, it is to say the event A may be caused by something in person B’s unconscious mind—and not by some collective consciousness or a Universal Overseer. So, secretly, if Person B accidentally backed into your parked car, it may not be by some conscious volition; rather, it’s because or some deep-seated anger or other ill-will harboured and directed for you.

The problem is that if you accept that there are no accidents, then you—intentionally or otherwise—parked your car in a place where it would necessarily be hit by someone—by anyone. It just happened to be this other person for whom there are also no accidents. So, both parties are blameless. But people love to blame, and they like to defer responsibility.

Verdict

The bottom line is that both of these concepts are a bit sketchy. In a world of no free will, the karma situation might be plausible, but this wreaks havoc on moral-ethical systems. I discuss that in most post on karma.