Jesus' Closest Approach to Santa Claus

JESUS' CLOSEST APPROACH TO SANTA CLAUS

Tues. Dec. 18th, 2018

Jesus' closest approach to Santa Claus is in Luke 11:13.  Here is the context in the King James Version:

Luke 11:11  If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone? or if [he ask] a fish, will he for a fish give him a serpent?  12  Or if he shall ask an egg, will he offer him a scorpion?  13  If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children: how much more shall [your] heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?

Verse 13 begins with the word If.  But the line of Jesus' argument implies that the answer is yes. Therefore we can leave out the word "if"; and changing "ye" to you all, we can derive:

            You all then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children.

That's where Santa Claus comes in.  My wife has set up a sign in the living room of our house that says:

Four Stages of Life

1. You really believe in Santa

2. You really don't believe in Santa

3. You think you're Santa

4. You look like Santa

The first stage is childhood; the second stage is teenage; the last stage is old age; but the third stage is parenthood.

Jesus said "You know how to give good gifts to your children" (even though you are evil).  In the third stage, You think you're Santa, because you know how to give gifts to your children; and Santa Claus presides over the gift-giving at Christmas time, because according to his story, Santa Claus is the supervisor of the toymakers and the deliverer of the toys to children.

The custom of giving gifts to children at Christmas time is a good custom. It is a custom which began in what the ancestors called Christendom, that is, the continents and regions where Christianity is or was the dominant faith.  Of course!  Because Christendom was where Christmas was first celebrated.  From Christians, the custom spread naturally to atheists, since many Christians have atheist children (whom I -- I walk by faith -- will see in heaven).

It will always be a good custom -- in other words, if Christians abandon this custom, and it is continued only by atheists, Muslims, Jews, and people of other faiths, it will still be a good custom!

But in Luke 11:13, Jesus, by implication, gives his followers permission to give their children presents.  It is the closest the Bible comes to referring to Santa Claus.

Frank Newton

The Laughing Blue Collar Worker: A Dream Quest for America

THE LAUGHING BLUE COLLAR WORKER: A DREAM QUEST FOR AMERICA

Written Tues. Dec. 4th, 2018; posted Sat. Dec. 8th, 2018

The Laughing Cavalier, a painting painted by Frans Hals in the 1620's, looks like this (if it works right on my blog):

Cavalier (from the Italian word for "knight") basically means a gentleman, or perhaps an army officer. 

My vision for America is of a laughing blue collar worker.  It is derived in part from a shirt advertisement by the Williamson-Dickie Mfg. Company (Dickies), which looks like this (copied from https://www.dickies.com/shirts/relaxed-fit-short-sleeve-chambray-shirt/WS509.html):

My vision here is not that blue collar workers are somehow the knights of America.  That is too romantic for me, or perhaps too obscure.  The vision is simply of American blue collar workers who are confident in the American economy.  That's a throwback vision or dream.

The term "dream quest" is used by anthropologists to describe a traditional Native American custom, of a youth who goes searching for a vision on reaching the age of puberty. 

The Native American custom is based, as it seems to me, on a simple but reasonable premise:

If you want to have a dream, you need to ask for one.

That is -- you need to ask your God, or my God, or higher powers, or whatever spirit is consid­ered most awesome and powerful in your world, even if it means calling upon the average wisdom of the average person (the original and etymological meaning of "common sense").

If we ask, stubbornly and repeatedly, for a vision of a confident blue collar worker, that will provide our best chance at obtaining such a vision.

I mentioned the word throwback, and you may be thinking, despite my remarks, that I am being too romantic.  But one of the things that modern people fairly consistently fail to take into account, is that the idea of change includes the idea of changing back.  "Them days is gone forever" is true about some things -- especially, at a certain point, the youthfulness of any given generation -- but it is not true about all things.  To grab an easy example, farming has made hunting less central to the human way of life; but nothing so far (in the last ten thousand years, that is) has made hunting disappear.

To narrow the picture down some, the vision is of and for someone who says, "I don't particu­larly want to become more educated than my parents were.  I would like to be able to get a job that will put food on the table for an average-sized modern family, after schooling which lasts no longer than a human childhood and adolescence, with some free years at the beginning of my childhood to play, the way children in other countries and in my country traditionally have done.  And I need my job to be an activity which does not destroy the environment for my children and my children's children."

The vision is of gainful employment and a living wage for people who don't want to become highly educated, such as was open to our ancestors.

When we consider this vision, we need to recall that the authors of the Declaration of Independence did not first conduct a study to determine if life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness was a workable and attainable goal.  Instead, they first articulated their vision and declared it as their goal, and then they fought for it.

I'm not asking for a rebellion, because the success of the American Revolution was a freak accident.  Most rebellions end like the rebellion in Spain, with all the rebels being killed.  But I am asking for a re-visioning..

Blue collar work involves growing things and making things.  The question is not whether we can re-involve human beings in these activities with wages adequate to support a family.  The questions is how.

People who have studied our nation's youth report that they need to become more resilient.  That means our youth need to become better at problem-solving, and more able to bounce back after setbacks -- more able to recalibrate and re-channel and re-try their dreams, instead of setting fire to what they have already attempted and giving up on the idea of having any dreams or visions whatso­ever.

In a nutshell, resilience is a fancy word for toughness.  What observers of our nation's youth are calling for is a national or international re-toughening -- a re-toughening without loss of mental fitness.

In the past couple of paragraphs, I have used several words with the prefix re-.  This basic­ally implies that we need, as a nation or as a species, to go back and do some things again which we have already done, or do some things which our ancestors used to do, perhaps inclu­ding some things that we thought we would never have to do again (like twisting off the heads of chickens).  Also, this re-toughening includes a re-toughening of our system of education.

I will try to add one last picture -- Norman Rockwell's painting Free Speech in his Four Freedoms series of paintings:

It's not a picture of me.  I'm an intellectual.  But it's a picture of someone that I want to be on the same team with, in terms of us having the same vision for our country and for the human beings in our world.

It's almost like looking at the jungle construction workers in India and Southeast Asia and say­ing, "Putting those elephants to work is not a bad idea, as long as we don't forget to ask 'What would Jesus do?' from time to time."  And then be honest about the answer, and try to do some­thing to make what Jesus would do happen.

Rockwell's painting is an extremely simple but effective picture of a blue collar worker standing up and speaking in a gathering of mostly white collar workers, who are paying attention to what he has to say.  This is a romantic painting, but it is not more romantic than the Declaration of Independence.  The website of the Norman Rockwell Museum (currently https://www.nrm.org/2012/01/norman-rockwells-four-freedoms/) says about the inspiration for the painting:

" . . . Rockwell wanted to do more for the war effort and decided he would illustrate Roosevelt’s four freedoms. Finding new ideas for paintings never came easily, but this was a greater challenge.  . . .  While mulling it over, Rockwell, by chance, attended a town meeting where one man rose among his neighbors and voiced an unpopular view. That night Rockwell awoke with the realization that he could paint the freedoms best from the perspective of his own hometown experiences using everyday, simple scenes such as his own town meeting."

Another website I looked at a while back (I have lost the reference) stated that the man  Rock­well saw standing up and speaking at a town meeting did not persuade the other people at the meeting, but was listened to with respect.  That may be, but it's still a useful painting.

In a poem, William Blake said "I will not cease from Mental Fight."  The American Revolution effectively began with the mental work of writing the Declaration of Independence.  All success­ful fighting begins in the mind.  We have pictured the first step in what is needed to revive the fortunes of blue collar work as a vision quest.

Closing

Three factors remain to be raised.  Firstly, the Declaration of Independence ends with the signers' pledge, "we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor."  The reference to our Fortunes was not empty.  The signers were wealthy in their day.  That is not to say that there were no wealthy people among the Loyalists.  But the vision we envision cannot succeed, unless a fair share of the rich people of today sign onto it.

Secondly, the signers were unhampered by a dreadful encumbrance which drags upon us: the encumbrance of addiction to illegal drugs.  In our country today, this addiction is endemic to all social classes: to the rich, to the middle class, and to the poor; and each of these three classes blames the curse of this addiction upon the bad example of the other two.  Today, addiction to illegal drugs is a major source of strife between the social classes.  If the vision is to succeed, a sufficient number of people of every social class must renounce this addiction.

It is not impossible.  The founders of our country were faced with demons of their own.  In the case of the demon of slavery, they managed to postpone the reckoning until a lifetime after their struggle was won -- an extremely powerful strategic move.  The contribution of Virginia leaders to American independence is well known.

Thirdly and lastly, the vision depends for success on an accommodation of feelings with a fourth class not yet mentioned, though routinely included among the poor, namely, the class of people who have no job at all, no prospects of one, and sometimes no desire for one.  What seems neces­sary to me is an accommo­dation based upon Jesus' approach to the poor in Matthew 25:37-40:

37  Then the righteous will answer Him saying, Lord, when did we see you hungry, and feed [you]?  Or thirsty, and give [you] drink?  38  When did we see you a stranger, and give [you] shelter?  Or without clothing, and clothed [you]?  39  Or when did we see you sick, or in prison, and visit you?  40  And the King will answer and say to them, In truth I tell you, Inasmuch as you all have done to one of the least of these my brothers, you all have done unto me.

Jesus is describing charity.  The insight of modern city-dwellers is that the government can help very efficiently with charity.  Welfare is charity; charity is love; love is what Jesus asks.  On this matter of efficiency, country-dwellers need to trust city-dwellers.  The least of these our brothers are not the working poor -- they are the people on the dole.  The issue here is for the working poor not to be consumed with envy for, or anger with, those on the dole.  The working poor are not the proletariat in the Latin meaning, which means those whose only contribution to the state is making babies.  The people on the dole are the proletariat in the Latin sense.  The eagle defecates in many different ways.  If you are eager to hold down a job without umpteen extra helpings of education, then you need to reach peace of mind and charity (an attitude of love and acceptance) with the fact that some people in your country, as well as in every other country, do not want to hold down a job, or are unfitted even for the jobs that require the least amount of education.  They may lack your physical strength.  Goal-oriented behavior may be beyond their reach.  Jesus' saying The poor you have always with you, is a saying about those on the dole, and the saying is addressed to the working poor. -- That is the accommodation needed to make this vision work.

You can call the ideas expressed in this essay simplistic, but to paraphrase what I've already written, then you would have to call the Declaration of Independence simplistic.

Frank Newton

Trump Slammed for Not Reciting Creed at Funeral

TRUMP SLAMMED FOR NOT RECITING CREED AT FUNERAL

Fri. Dec. 7th, 2018

A headline said Trump has been criticized for not reciting the creed at the funeral of President Bush the Elder (his middle initials can go jump in the lake; I regard them not).  I thought I would comment on that.  I'm going to take the discussion in a partly non-religious direction.

The president we have is the most un-intellectual president we've had in my lifetime.  I would put him up against President Reagan in that department.  I think the reason he didn't recite the creed at President Bush's funeral has nothing to do with religion.  I think it's because the creed is too hard for him to pronounce.

Pronouncing a long string of words at the same time everybody else in the room is pronouncing them is a difficult feat for many people.  I have changed my mind about pronunciation.  When I was a young linguist, I figured other linguists were right when they claimed or assumed that people get good at pronouncing their native language, because they get so much practice at it.  We speak our native language every day.  But I have changed my mind.  I have decided that English is hard to pronounce, even for native speakers.  But I'm going beyond that.  I now think that every human language is hard to pronounce, even for people who speak it every day.  It's a miracle that there are any people at all who can chatter rapidly and confidently in their own language, like the radio disk jockeys who are the most fun to listen to.

Think about it.  The Pledge of Allegiance is hard for people to learn.  The creed is longer than the pledge.  ("The creed" is a polite and reasonable abbreviation for "any of the various creeds which are in existence."  The Apostles' Creed is longer than the pledge, and the Nicene Creed is longer than the Apostles' Creed.  I don't know which creed they recited at President Bush's funeral.)  You don't have to memorize the creed.  It's written on a piece of paper which is in front of you when you're at church.  You just read it off the paper.  That's still hard for a lot of people.

I had an Episcopal friend who said "Episcopalians must think God likes to be read to."  I thought that was funny.  I grew up in the Episcopal Church, and I'm back in it now.  We Episcopalians read a lot of prayers out of a book in church.  I don't think God likes to be read to, but I do think it is good for me to read wholesome sentences about God out of a book over and over and over again until I die.  By the time an Episcopalian gets to be my age, he or she has fragments of the most common worship services floating around in his or her brain.  But the flip side of that is Episcopalians are a minority within Christians.  A story handed down in the Episcopal side of my family has two Episcopalians (one of them a college president) observing a church full of Baptists getting out.  The college president turns to her friend and observes "Baptists are so plentiful."

The point is that reading a lot of stuff out loud out of a book, in unison with a bunch of other people, is too troublesome for most believers.  And we all know what Jesus would say about that: the ones who are not good at reading have AT LEAST as good a chance of getting into heaven as the good readers!  We all know that.  I wouldn't say God likes to be read to, but God does hear the same stuff from Episcopalians over and over.  God simply has to be patient with Episcopalians.

This ties in with acronyms.  I hate acronyms, but everybody else loves them.  The reason people love acronyms is that they're easy to pronounce.  Try pronouncing a three-letter acronym out loud, and then pronounce a three-syllable ordinary word out loud.  Which is easier to pronounce?  Here are some to practice on.

            Acronyms                                            Ordinary Words

            you ess ay                                            digital

            you en cee                                           computer

            ay bee cee                                            acronym

            ell bee jay (a good president)              president

           

See what I mean?  A couple of generations ago the linguist Otto Jespersen said (if I remember rightly) that English words are short and manly, like length and strength.  But people would rather say ay bee cee dee ee eff gee than say The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.

In conclusion, I think that the people who are good at pronouncing their native language are actually in the minority.  I think those people are fun to listen to, but we can't all be like that.  Actually, that was just my first conclusion.  The real and final conclusion is, I don't mind the President keeping silent while the creed is being recited.  I'm sure it's a reflection on his tongue, not on his heart (assuming that the heart is the part of your body God writes things on).  You can't persuade me otherwise.

Frank Newton

Chant About Employability

CHANT ABOUT EMPLOYABILITY

Written Thurs. July 12th, 2018, posted Tues. Sept. 11th, 2018

All Americans need to be chanting the same chant, “We live in a humongously complicated world, but we all need to have a job and some work to do.”  We need to chant this together, and when the rich people chant it, they need to think compassionately about the poor people.

More about employability.  You may think the problem is about laziness, but it’s not.  If you think the problem is about laziness, you do not know enough about your fellow human beings, and you need to go back to the basics of studying what your fellow human beings are like. 

Joining a church works for some people, as a way to study what your fellow human beings are like.  In my case, it allows me to hang around with some mighty good people.  But joining a church does not always work, and what I really recommend (as a way to study what your fellow human beings are like) is volunteering.  Now you may hate the idea of volunteering – deep down in your heart, you may feel the same way as Bessie Smith, who said, “I’ve got what it takes, but it breaks my heart to give it away.”  Volunteer anyway.  If you volunteer, and if you sincerely try to understand things from the other person’s point of view (“Walk a mile in my shoes”), you are going to learn a hellacious amount of information about your fellow human beings, both from the people who need to be helped, and from your fellow volunteers, and that information will help you in your job.  Your fellow volunteers may see things a whole lot differently from you.  Try to understand where they’re coming from, and what motivates them.  I said it will help you in your job – it will help you be a better supervisor, it will make you more honest, it will give you better hunches on when to take a chance on a person, it will make you a better dealmaker.  Having a heart for your fellow human beings will do your heart good.

In conclusion, find a way to get some personal experience, which will help you get rid of the idea that the root of all unemployability is laziness.  That idea is not true.

By the way, the chant is about human beings.  I’m going to spell it out for you: computers are taking over, and we human beings need to have each other’s backs.

Frank Newton

Adult Sunday School and Not Batting an Eyelid

ADULT SUNDAY SCHOOL AND NOT BATTING AN EYELID

Written Wed. Sept. 5th, 2018, posted Fri. Sept. 7th, 2018

1. The Main Part

I don’t think there’s been a good discussion about not batting an eyelid.  Not batting an eyelid means seeing something unusual and acting as if you have not seen anything unusual.  Therefore, it has a lot to do with handicaps, and handicaps are a hot button in our country, aren’t they nowadays?  So, to give you an example, I’m going to go backward in time and pick a handicap you almost never see anymore: a wen.  A wen is a giant swelling on a person’s neck, right below the jaw.  A bulbous swelling.  Really big.  I haven’t read up on the cause of this old-time medical disfigurement.  But it is useful for thinking about the meaning of the expression “not batting an eyelid.”  “Not batting an eyelid” means seeing someone with a huge wen and acting as if you haven’t seen anything unusual.

Now I’m going to try to draw a connection between not batting an eyelid, and adult Sunday School.

 “Not batting an eyelid” is a behavior associated with the leisure classes.  The leisure classes have more time to think than the rest of the human race, and one of the things they MIGHT have had time to think about is this: If someone has a wen on their neck, it MIGHT NOT be their fault.  Because of that, a member of the leisure classes might see a person with a wen, and not bat an eyelid.

Now I come to a question I have never heard discussed.

Suppose you are NOT a member of the leisure class, and suppose you see a member of the leisure class not batting an eyelid, when they see somebody with a wen.  You might ask yourself this: They act as if it’s nothing strange when they see something strange; DOES THAT MEAN THAT WHEN THEY SEE SOMETHING EVIL, THEY WILL ACT AS IF THEY SAW NOTHING EVIL?

Have you ever thought about that?  One person sees a second person not bat an eyelid, and the first person wonders if the second person would react to a case of embezzlement in the same way that they react to a case of a wen!

That’s where adult Sunday School comes in.

Some members of the leisure class attend adult Sunday School classes.  Many others of the leisure class do not.  But let’s focus on those members of the leisure class who DO attend adult Sunday School.  What are they talking about, in their Sunday School classes?

I’d like to try to answer that question.  Part of what they are doing, is learning to distinguish between wens and embezzlements.  Wens are something you’re NOT supposed to bat an eyelid at.  Embezzlements are something you ARE supposed to bat an eyelid at.  It is actually useful, for adults to spend time distinguishing between physical disfigurements, disgusting things which God does NOT want us to bat an eyelid at, and moral disfigurements, disgusting things which God DOES want us to bat an eyelid at.

I’ve known adults who were very faithful at attending adult Sunday School, and serious about it, but they didn’t look or sound to me like they were having fun.  It was to me as if they were saying, “I have already learned about obedience to God.  Therefore, I do not know why I’m still coming to Sunday School.”

My answer to that is that the point of adult Sunday School is not to keep on studying obedience to God for the rest of your life.  It is to help you distinguish between the things God WANTS you to be disgusted at, and the things God DOES NOT WANT you to be disgusted at.  That turns out to be a lesson that people can study for the rest of their lives, and the studying of it never stops being useful and good.

2. Appendix

You could stop reading here, but I’m going to add a little more.  I go to adult Sunday School, and you might think it’s because I’ve been persuaded by the argument I’ve given above in the main part.  But actually, the reason I go to adult Sunday School is slightly different: because I ENJOY thinking about the boundary between right and wrong.  Mapping that boundary correctly.  Drawing the line between the things God DOES want me to be disgusted at, and the things God DOES NOT want me to be disgusted at, and drawing the line where God wants me to draw it, not where I want to draw it.

I think that has to do with the Bible verse about the person whose delight is in the law of the LORD (Psalm 1:2).  That verse pairs naturally with Psalm 122:1 -- I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the house of the LORD.  Psalm 122:1 is about the person who enjoys worshiping God.  Psalm 1:2 is about the person who enjoys studying God's law.  I am lucky enough to belong to both categories!  But there are many good Christians, I think, who do not delight in studying the law of God.  Once they have attached a meaning to a Bible verse, they are not interested in discussing the possibility that it might have other meanings.

Frank Newton

Open Microphone at Kind Coffee in Boiling Springs Wednesday Evenings

OPEN MICROPHONE AT KIND COFFEE IN BOILING SPRINGS WEDNESDAY EVENINGS

Tues. Sept. 4th, 2018

I read in a book that a hundred years ago on Tin Pan Alley in New York City there were people called song pluggers.  They eked out a living serving as publicists for songwriters.

I am an open microphone plugger!  If you have a pretty voice or an instrument, bring a song and a smile to Kind Coffee Wednesday evening 7 to 9 p.m. while school is in session!  I will have a good time, and I will keep my fingers crossed that you will have a good time, too!

“In a little café, just the other side of South Main Street . . .”

https://www.kindcoffeeshop.org/ 

Frank Newton

Liberal Christianity and the New Court of the Men

LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY AND THE NEW COURT OF THE MEN

Sun. Sept. 2nd, 2018

My longest blog yet, I think.

Part One.

There was a reason why the Temples of Zerubbabel and Herod had a Court of the Women and a Court of the Israelites (the latter with a masculine plural Hebrew suffix, which turns out to signify a Court of the Jewish Men).  The Court of the Women really signified the Court of the Women and Children.

The Court of the Men really meant the Court of the Grownups Who Have Temporarily Stepped Away from the Children.

Part Two.

The trick or deal was, that in Ancient Jewish religion, only the men were allowed to step away temporarily from the children.  This brings us to a point where I think the Romans were more advanced than the Jews.  The Romans did not create a history which turns out to have an equal number of emperors and empresses.  What the Romans did have, however, before they changed from a republic to an empire, was that women had the right to vote.

The war between the Romans and the Jews (66 to 70 A.D., some thirty years after Jesus was crucified) was a textbook case of a very bloody culture war, which ended with a crushing victory for one side and a crushing defeat for the other.  But I believe that in a culture war, neither side is one hundred percent right, and some kind of compromise is always superior to the outcome where you have a crushing victory for one side and a crushing defeat for the other.  So I will balance off my remark about the Romans being more advanced than the Jews in women's rights, by pointing to another area in which the Jews were more advanced than the Romans.  The area of crucifixion.

Crucifixion was invented by the Romans, and it is a cruel way to kill a person, aimed at criminals and slaves.  Martin Hengel in his book Crucifixion in the Ancient World and the Folly of the Message of the Cross -- please imagine quotation marks around the word "folly" because it is not an un-Christian book -- documents the recent existence of a little group of scholars with their pants on fire who believed that crucifixion was not all that painful.  Hengel proves that group of scholars wrong, and I'm with Hengel.

Part Three.

To regroup, we have suggested so far that the Jews in the time of Jesus did not have either advanced or admirable ideas about women's rights.  We then took off on a tangent to add that does not mean we think the Romans were  to be praised for their actions in Palestine.  We now return to the theme we have stated, that those two courts of the temple in the days of Jesus, the Court of the Women and the Court of the Israelites, performed a function which still needs to be performed in religion today: the function of creating a temporary separation, either during the time of worship or sometime near the time of worship, between adults who are with children, and adults who have temporarily stepped away from the children.

In the churches I've worshipped in, it is a difficult separation, surrounded by negotiations!  I will come back to the reason why it is worth doing.  First: something about the difficulty of doing it.  It reminds you of the story of the sisters Mary and Martha in Luke 10:38-42, doesn't it?  One sister Mary sat down and listened to Jesus's teaching, while the other sister Martha prepared dinner.  Martha said to Jesus, Mary needs to help me with the work of the house.  Luke writes that Jesus began his answer to Martha by saying her name twice.  Her name twice -- the gospel writer's way of indicating, that Jesus talked patiently to the two sisters.  His answer was like this: it is good that one listens to me, and the other one does the work of the house.  But there is so much between the lines -- if everything that is between the lines in the Bible were written down, it would be twice as long!  I calculate that Martha was trying to set a good example for Mary: Martha began by thinking to herself, if I do what is needful, then Mary will soon join me.  But Martha's idea, if I set a good example, Mary will follow me, did not work out.  So Martha changed her tactic: perhaps it is better to bring the division of labor out in the open.  But Jesus was more focused on giving Mary the chance to hear the rest of what He had to say, than He was on clarifying the division of labor for future believers.

I calculate that we liberal Christians do have a belief about the division of labor, namely this: turn about is fair play.  The Christian who is one day with the Grownups Who Have Temporarily Separated Themselves from the Children, will on another day be with the Grownups Who Are with the Children.  "Turn about is fair play" aims to liberate both Mary and Martha, and to draft the men as well to take turns being among the Adults Who Are with the Children.

(Parenthetically, the story of Martha and Mary reminds us that the big divide between liberal Christians and conservative Christians is not in the Bible, but in the commentaries.  If you read Luke 10:38-42 in the Bible in a conservative church and then read it in a liberal church, it's pretty nearly the same story.)

Back to the point.  One day an adult worshipper worships in the Court of the Adults Who Are with the Children, and another day the same adult worships in the Court of the Adults Who Have Temporarily Separated Themselves from the Children.  I sense that -- though there are many negotiations -- that is a step in the right direction.

Part Four.

Now as promised, we come back to the matter of why it is a good thing, that there should be a Court in the temple for Grownups Who Have Temporarily Stepped Apart from the Children.  Here it is: not all the Bible has to tell us, is written for children.  I will give you my example.  It is the almost-sacrifice of Isaac by his father Abraham in Genesis chapter 22.  The outcome of the story is contained in verses 10 to 18 (in the Revised English Bible version):

10  He [that is, Abraham] reached out for the knife to slay his son,  11  but the angel of the LORD called to him from heaven, 'Abraham! Abraham!'  He answered, 'Here I am!'  12  The angel said, Do not raise your hand against the boy; do not touch him.  Now I know that you are godfearing man.  You have not withheld from me your son, your only son.'  13  Abraham looked round, and there in a thicket he saw a ram caught by its horns.  He went, seized the ram, and offered it as a sacrifice instead of his son.  14  Abraham named that shrine 'The LORD will provide'; and to this day the saying is: 'In the mountain of the LORD it was provided.'  15  Then the angel of the LORD called from heaven a second time to Abraham  16  and said , 'This is the word of the LORD: By my own self I swear that because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son,  17  I shall bless you abundantly and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky or the grains of sand on the seashore.  Your descendants will possess the cities of their enemies.  18  All nations on earth will wish to be blessed as your descendants are blessed, because you have been obedient to me.'

Isaac wasn't Abraham's only son, because Ishmael was also Abraham's son.  It is a yucky Biblical bending of the truth.  But back to the point: The Bible is clear about the moral of the story.  Abraham is blessed by God because Abraham was obedient.

But I tell you this: we have to ask this Bible story the question which Micah asks of God's worshippers in his chapter 6 verse 8, What is it that the LORD requires of you?

O Bible story of Abraham and Isaac: what is it that the LORD God requires of you?

The LORD requires of you, that you teach that human sacrifice is wrong.

That is what Genesis 22 the first to fourteenth verses teach.  They taught Abraham, and they teach us, that human sacrifice is wrong.

In complete truth I tell you, that God did not enter into this Bible story to teach Abraham obedience.  God asked Himself, How will I teach my servant Abraham that human sacrifice is wrong, and how will I teach it to him unforgettably, so that he and his descendants will never forget it?

God answered Himself, I will pretend to tell Abraham to sacrifice his son, of whom I said to him in the last chapter 'it is through Isaac's line that your name will be perpetuated.'

And God said to Himself, If Abraham makes to obey me, I will stop him from killing his son; but if Abraham disobeys me, I will say to him, 'Blessed are you, Abraham, because you knew that human sacrifice was wrong before I told you.'  And God said to Himself, Either way, I will make known to Abraham that human sacrifice is wrong, in a way that his descendants will never forget.

WHAT THEN is Genesis 22:18?  "your descendants are blessed, because you have been obedient to me."  It is window dressing added to verses 1 to 14, because the children were listening.

Whenever the children are listening to the Torah, the lesson is always about obedience.

That is why St. Paul said that what is taught first to Christians is milk, and what is taught later to mature Christians is meat (or at the least translation, solid food!).

The grownups need to hear additional lessons, beyond the lesson of obedience.

Grownups sometimes have to be disobedient.  Grownups sometimes have to say "Can't do that, General!"  That is what Hugh Clowers Thompson Jr. said to William Calley at the My Lai massacre: "Can't do that, Lieutenant."  And Hugh Thompson went home justified in the eyes of the LORD.

That's a fine howdy-doody, turning a lesson about the wickedness of human sacrifice into a lesson about obedience!  And it's all the fault of the people who said, there are children present, therefore the leson HAS to be about obedience!

There!!  I came to my point.  There has to be a separate Court, so that, when the grownups have temporarily stepped away from the children, the grownups can get in some Bible study, where the lesson isn't always obedience, obedience, obedience!  Sometimes the lesson has to be about the wickedness of human sacrifice.  Sometimes the lesson has to be about what the poet and hymnwriter William Alexander Percy said, "The peace of God, it is no peace, But strife sowed in the sod. Yet brothers pray for but one thing -- The marvelous peace of God!"  (http://www.covert.org/georgetown.html but labeled by my computer "not secure."  Apparently I remembered it wrong -- I thought it was "Strife closed in the sod.")  Sometimes the lesson is a painful and scary point for grownups to ponder, when their health is good and their constitution is strong, and they are in the quiet moments between duties.

Part Five.

Now it's time to talk about the relationship between the children's Sunday School teachers, and the theologians.  I will tell you a parable.  The theologians wished to express their gratitude to the children's Sunday School teachers, so the theologians gave a banquet to which the children's Sunday School teachers were all invited.  The theologians asked the cooks to prepare a feast to honor the children's Sunday School teachers, and the cooks complied.  But the children's Sunday School teachers all thought that the invitation was for one of the others.  One of them made one excuse for not coming, and another one made another excuse for not coming.  So the cooks and the theologians had to eat all the food themselves.

The moral of the parable is that ain't right, and we know better!  I know a church where both the children's Sunday School teachers and the teachers of the adult Sunday School classes were invited to a banquet, and all of them who weren't sick came, and a theologian came and spoke to them, and the food was delicious, and the teenagers helped serve the meal, and God was glorified!

But in spite of that, there is more to be said.  In fact, the relationship between the theologians and the children's Sunday School teachers is not as beautiful as it could be, and as it ought to be.  We all know a fact about the children's Sunday School teachers which we ought to honor, but somehow, we fail to honor this fact.  What we all know is that the children's Sunday School teachers are the first teachers of the Bible.  Here and there you come across a child who learns his or her Bible from their parents; and here and there you come across a child whose parents give them a book of Bible stories, saying "Read this," and the child reads the book of Bible stories and learns about the Bible.  But in most cases, the Christian child's first learning about the Bible is from their children's Sunday School teachers.

Every generation of pedagogy goes into this universal and interdenominational Christian project of teaching the children about the Bible.  The Ancients say "children need heroes" and the Moderns say "learning must be age-appropriate," and it all gets included, and God is glorified.

The children's Sunday School teachers are doing an honorable job, and the theologians are doing an honorable job -- this is my testimony; I am speaking from personal experience here! -- but those two groups of grown-ups don't actually get around to honoring each other very often, and somehow all the other grown-up Christians don't notice the fact that, except at that wonderful once-a-year banquet when there is a sort of a truce, they didn't actually honor each other.

The truth about Sunday School is exactly the same as the truth about Monday to Friday school.  Say it!  The children's teachers don't have time to teach the children everything.  The problem is not merely, that not all teaching which could be done in theory, is age-appropriate.  No, the problem is bigger than that: God did not design us to stop learning at the age of eighteen, or at the age of twenty-two, or at any other age.  Adult Sunday school is useful and good because we all spend the rest of our lives plugging in gaps in our knowledge, and that's not some kind of embarrassment -- it's the way God intended our lives to be!

We believe that when children's Sunday School teachers have finished teaching the children, there is still more Christian education for the erstwhile children -- now teenagers -- to learn.  And when the teenage Sunday School teachers have finished teaching the teenagers, there is still more Christian education for the erstwhile teenagers -- now adults -- to learn.  We stop spending all the day long in classrooms, and we start earning our bread by the sweat of our brow, but we don't stop learning.

I will single out one particular area of teaching and growth for adult Christians. Namely, learning difficult and useful information about foreigners.  The information that many citizens of foreign countries believe in the same God you and I believe in, and what's more, that many of them are doing just as good a job as you or I in putting that faith we miraculously share across national boundaries into practice -- that information is specifically for grownups, or mature believers, to use St. Paul's word.  It is simply too hard for children to grasp.  And teenagers are busy living through the most hellacious period of a Christian's life -- if we set aside portions of old age, which are sometimes like a second teenage, or at least like being shot at.

FindamateGiveupyourlifeforyourcountrysomeofyouBythewaythepeopleontheothersideofthewararenotallbadEarnyourlivingbythesweatofyourbrow.  As the man said in the movie when he looked at the grotesquely unstylish house, DAMN.

But, the rest of us grownup Christians, who hadn't actually noticed that the theologians and the children's Sunday school teachers weren't actually honoring each other most of the year until I mentioned it a moment ago -- we can help.  We can help them honor each other.  This is my vision, or part of it.  We, not only the cooks, but all the grownups who simply aren't teachers -- if we are living our walk right, we go to the door of the children's Sunday School teacher, and we honor him or her, and we go to the door of the theologian, and we honor him or her -- we are like Martha, trying to set a good example.  But we can also spell it out.  We can encourage the theologians and the children's Sunday School teachers, to honor each other.  The one group are teaching the learners who need milk for nourishment, and the other group are teaching that special subset of the young adults who are the edgy advanced learners, the disciples of the theologians.  They are all involved in a giant complicated project planned out by God, to help learners in every stage of their journey.  As Chaucer said of the teachers, "And gladly would they learn, and gladly teach."

Part Six.

We are getting near the end of our essay.  I read a funny, funny piece of literary criticism in the magazine called The New Yorker fifteen years ago.  It said that Margaret Wise Brown's children's book Goodnight Moon with pictures by Clement Hurd was a book about death.  In the book, the grandmother rocks in the rocking chair in the child's room and lulls the child tired at the end of the day.  "And a little old lady whispering hush."  The literary critic said the little old lady was actually talking to the other old people in the family.  "We have to slow down.  We have to stop being fretful.  We have to go to sleep in a little while."  That's awkward y'all.  I said to my folks "No, Goodnight Moon is not about death!  It's about putting the children to sleep so the grownups can have a little bit of grownup time to themselves at the end of the day!"  Today, I am standing beside the me of fifteen years ago.  I'm agreeing with the me of fifteen years ago.  Goodnight Moon is about putting the children to sleep so the grownups can have a little grownup time to themselves at the end of the day.

The temple architects designed the Court of the Israelites -- which we have renamed the Court of the Grownups Who Have Temporarily Stepped Away from the Children -- for that same reason: because the grownup Christians need a little grownup Christian time to themselves.

Frank Newton

Newton's First Satire and Potpourri

NEWTON'S FIRST SATIRE AND POTPOURRI

Thanks and samples to Bobby Day, Chuck Berry, Little Richard (with a brown sugar ending)

Wed. August 29th, 2018

Rocks in the treetop all the day long,

Hoppin' and a-boppin' and a croakin' his song!

All the little birds on Republican Street,

Love to hear the Trumpin go tweet tweet tweet!

Dumpin Trumpin -- stumpin Trumpin --

Go Dumpin Trumpin, cause you're really gotta tweet tonight!

Beep bop a Trumpin, baleep boom bah!

Beep bop a Trumpin, baleep boom bah!

Dumpin Trumpin -- stumpin Trumpin -- pumpin sumpin --

Go Dumpin Trumpin cause you're really gotta tweet tonight!

Tweedly-deedly-dee, tweedly-deedly-dee,

Go Dumpin Trumpin, cause you're really gonna tweet tonight!

We gonna pump some sump tonight!

Pump some sump tonight!

Pump some sump tonight!

Go, Dumpin Trumpin, cause the sump pump's pumpin sump tonight!

Well the Trumpin started hopping, pretty soon it occurred,

He overslopped the buzzard and the great speckled bird!

Trumpin and Pumpin started a novelty shop.

Back up off the counter was the cream of the crop!

The Russians were a hackin and the ruckus was good

Till one day lo and behold

Special prosecutor stood --

Go Dumpin Trumpin, he won't catch up with you,

Go Dumpin Trumpin, he ain't special enough for you,

Go Dumpin Trumpin, use all the speed you got,

Go Dumpin Trumpin, you know you need a lot,

Go head on, Dumpin Trumpin,

Yo' hot stuff is really hot!

Go Dumpin Trumpin, cause you're really gonna tweet tonight!

Ba-dump, bah-dah-dumb,

Ba-dump, bah-dah-dumb,

Ba da da bump ba, ba da dump bump bump bum!

Frank Newton

A Vision Based on the Gratitude of Ayla Towards the Neanderthals Iza and Creb

A VISION BASED ON THE GRATITUDE OF AYLA TOWARDS THE NEANDERTHALS IZA AND CREB

Sun. August 12th, 2018

I am reading the saga of Ayla and Jondalar by Jean Auel.  The first book in the series is The Clan of the Cave Bear; the second book in the series is The Valley of Horses.  The series as a whole is called Earth's Children.  It is set in cave man days, and it has an interesting structure like Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (which is a saga about the relations between a species of beings who can live a hundred years, a smaller species of beings who can live one hundred and ten years, a third species of beings who live four hundred years, and a fourth species of beings who have two strangely paired capabilities, first, that they never die of old age, but second, that they can be killed in battle or killed by wild animals, or die any violent death if it happens upon them -- and these four species of beings -- which Tolkien calls the "speaking peoples" -- communicate with each other, and interact with each other in the world's history).

But the structure or premise of Auel's Earth's Children series of books -- six in all, and I have not finished the series -- is that the heroine Ayla, a Cro-Magnon, was orphaned when she was five years old when all the rest of her family died in an earthquake, and she was raised by Neanderthals.  That is, she was a member of the more advanced species of human beings, but was adopted and raised by the more primitive of the two species of human beings that existed side by side on this earth thirty thousand years ago.

I have gotten to the sentence in chapter 26 of The Valley of Horses, page 478 in the paperback edition, where Ayla is thinking about Jondalar, the first Cro-Magnon she has met since she became an adult and was sent off by the Neanderthals to live by herself. "He [that's Jondalar] hadn't noticed, and that pleased her more.  He was thinking of the Clan [that's the Neanderthals] as people.  Not animals, not flatheads, not abominations -- people!"

Ayla is thinking to herself: "For the first time, this Cro-Magnon man I have met is thinking of the Neanderthals as human beings."

Ayla herself is a Cro-Magnon, but raised by Neanderthals, and she is grateful to the Neanderthals who raised her and taught her how to survive in a harsh world, not too far south of the towering walls of ice which mark the northern edge of the habitable world in the prehistoric Europe of the Ice Age.  Ayla is a witness, before the Cro-Magnons, of the humanity of the Neanderthals.

James 1:17 says "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights . . ."  Gratitude is a good and perfect gift; it must be from God.  That is, the gratitude which people feel towards their parents and towards their step-parents -- if their parents or their step-parents raised them well -- is a gift from God.

Now this gift of gratitude, present in Ayla, which is, according to my lights, a gift from God -- it gives me a political vision.  It makes me dream a political dream.  Please imagine with me a conservative child raised by liberal step-parents, well-raised by them, and the conservative child is grateful to his liberal step-parents.  Now, please imagine with me a liberal child raised by conservative step-parents, well-raised by them, and the liberal child is grateful to her conservative step-parents.  Won't this child, raised by step-parents of the other political party, the other political denomination, the other political tribe or species, and grateful to the party, denomination, tribe, or species of their step-parents -- because they are grateful -- defend the political party, denomination, tribe or species of their step-parents when they are surrounded by their own political party and denomination?  Just as Ayla, out of gratitude, defended the Neanderthals in the presence of  her own kind, the Cro-Magnons?

Let us go back now for a time and a paragraph to the two species of human beings that existed side by side thirty thousand years ago, the Cro-Magnons and the Neanderthals.  And let me add a note to this discussion about my Christianity.  I am a liberal Christian, the type of Christian who believes that the Cro-Magnons and the Neanderthals belong to the realm of fact, or at least are endowed with all the high probability which modern science can confer on them -- these two kinds of cave men are not fake news.  Moving onward with that belief, then, we have to add that, in the end, the Neanderthals died out and the Cro-Magnons survived.  I cannot picture the end of the Neanderthals, but I fear it was characterized by a skrinking ability to do favors for the more advanced kind of human beings.  That is, events like the adoption and raising of an orphan Cro-Magnon by a group of Neanderthals may have become rarer as time went on.  It is painful to think about the end of the Neanderthals, but the cartoon movie named Ice Age, which treats the subject of woolly mammoths becoming rare (and ultimately extinct), gives us some glimpse into the end of a species. Darwin coined his phrase "survival of the fittest" to describe extinction.

Now returning to my vision, how should we unpack the metaphor of the vision?  Are the conservatives the advanced Cro-Magnons, making the liberals the less advanced Neanderthals?  Or are the liberals the advanced Cro-Magnons, making the conservatives the less advanced Neanderthals?

My answer is this: it does not matter how the comparison is drawn.  What comes before the throne of God is the gratitude.  The victory -- the win of one species or kind, and the loss of the other species or kind -- is not recorded in God's almanac or record book.  The gratitude is recorded in God's almanac.

Parents who raise their children well are creating resources for their country.  A well-raised child is a gift to the nation.  A well-raised stepchild is the same.

A child well-raised by parents or step-parents of the opposite political party, with their gratitude intact, is a special resource for the nation.  That is the last wing of my vision: we should seek them out.  We should interview them.  We should publish what children well-raised by parents or step-parents of the opposite political party can tell us in our magazines -- in Field and Stream, and in The Insurgent Sociologist -- and on the internet.  I have observed that their gratitude comes before the throne of God.  But human beings should notice, cherish, and study their gratitude, too.

Frank Newton

Heather Newton's Novel Under the Mercy Trees

HEATHER NEWTON'S NOVEL UNDER THE MERCY TREES

Mon. July 16th, 2018

I read Heather Newton's novel Under the Mercy Trees a couple of years ago and loved it!  (As far as I know, she and I are not related.)  Recently I read excerpts from two book reviews of Under the Mercy Trees on Amazon.com. 

Both reviews quoted on Amazon emphasize the sad aspects of her novel.  But that’s not what hit me about it!  It has a happy ending.  The hero of the novel in my opinion is the state of North Carolina.  Newton portrays a North Carolina in which liberals and conservatives are trying to get along with each other, and partly succeeding.  The main character is gay; his family is rural conservative.  One reviewer seemed to complain that the main character didn’t come out of the closet with his family.  My response to that is that he came out plenty enough for a conservative state like North Carolina.  If your brother calls you candy-ass in North Carolina, you're pretty much out.

Now, the real North Carolina is probably not as wonderful as the fictional North Carolina of Newton’s novel.  But Heather Newton has a beautiful vision of my home state (and hers).  Another thing I wonder, is that the relationship between liberals and conservatives in North Carolina may be more frayed and edgy now than it was seven years ago when Newton published her novel.  If so, then this year, we need to keep on conducting this struggle to communicate with each other more than ever. 

I have a vision of a future war in which a liberal American soldier and a conservative American soldier are in foxholes next to each other.  I hope they will trust each other, and I hope they’ll even have a little understanding of where the other fellow is coming from. 

Contrary to what everybody else is saying and thinking, we are not playing a winner-take-all game in this country.  I’m not saying we can’t have a disaster of Biblical proportions in the United States.  I am saying that even if we do have a disaster of Biblical proportions -- then after it happens, the fundamental things about needing to try to understand each other will still apply.

Jesus’ saying at Luke 3:8 “God can make children for Abraham out of these stones” is a response to many terrifying disasters beginning with Jericho -- a response which looks at disasters from the perspective of a long time after they occur.  I am going to spell out one application of His saying for my readers: even if all of us liberals are killed in a war, God will create new liberals.  That is Jesus' precise meaning, and I trust I'm not making this world a more gruesome place by pointing that out.  As the song says, "I don't want it."  But that is the reason, why I predict that the fundamental things about us needing to try to understand each other will still be true a thousand years from now.

Frank Newton

The Ingenuity of Languages; and Weeding in Libraries

THE INGENUITY OF LANGUAGES; AND WEEDING IN LIBRARIES

Written Sat. June 30th, 2018; posted Sun. July 8th, 2018

1. The Ingenuity of English

Different languages are ingenious in different ways.  When you study another language – some language other than the language you already speak – you will encounter some of this ingenuity.  The way to master the ingenuity, so you can wear it lightly, is to practice. “Wearing a language lightly” means carrying it around with you, without it feeling like a burden.

An example of the ingenuity of English is the distinction between sky and heaven.  Sky is the sky in general, whatever is above you when you go out of doors, without it being attached to the earth.  (For the purpose of this discussion, we will ignore falling objects.)  Heaven, in contrast, is the sky where you go when you die, if you have religious faith.  In many of the other languages of Europe – other than English, whose history makes it a language of Europe – there is only one word that covers the meaning of “heaven” and “sky.”

2. The Ingenuity of Menominee

An example of an ingenuity not found in English, and not found in European languages in general, but found in perhaps an eighth of the world’s languages, is a distinction between the exclusive and inclusive meanings of “we.”  “We” means “I and others.”  If the others include “you,” linguists call that kind of “we” “inclusive we” or “first person plural inclusive.”  If the others referred to by “we” do not include “you,”  linguists call that kind of “we” “exclusive we” or “first person plural exclusive.”  By leaving off the prefix ex- or in-, and adding a suffix, linguists derive the word “clusivity,” which can be explained as a noun which stands for a question.  “Clusivity” is a linguists’ word meaning “Does your ‘we’ include the person you are talking to?”

The sentence “Does your ‘we’ include the person you are talking to?” follows an American rule of writing, which is this: If a quotation contains another quotation inside of it, then the inner quotation is surrounded by single quotation marks, and the outer quotation is surrounded by double quotation marks.  The British rule of writing is the other way around, or the exact opposite of that.

Most of the languages which are spoken by large groups of people do not distinguish between exclusive and inclusive “we.”  A single word is used for “we” both exclusive and inclusive in the European languages, English, Russian, Spanish, French, German, and the rest.   Likewise, a single word is used for “we” both exclusive and inclusive in many other languages around the world, including Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Swahili, Turkish, and others.  But you find one word for inclusive “we” and a different word for exclusive “we” in Indonesian (a major world language) and in a third to a half of the Native American languages, and in almost all the native languages of Australia (most of which are endangered languages).

In Menominee, a Native American language of Wisconsin, the difference between exclusive “we” and inclusive “we” is expressed by a subtle interplay of prefixes and suffixes.  Here are the Menominee personal pronouns, from Leonard Bloomfield's two books The Menomini Language and Menominee Lexicon.  (Bloomfield used the spelling Menomini, but the tribe prefers Menominee.)

Person                   Menominee singular pronouns        Menominee plural pronouns

1st                         n-en-ah  (I, me)                             n-en-a' (we, us) [exclusive, not you]

1st & 2nd (inclu.)  -----                                                k-en-a' (we, us) [inclusive, including you]

2nd                        k-en-ah (you)                                 k-en-ua' (you all)

3rd                         w-en-ah (he, she, him, her)            w-en-ua' (they, them)

In Menominee, -en- is the root of all personal pronouns (meaning "this is a personal pronoun").  The prefix n- marks first person; prefix k- marks second person; and prefix w- marks third person.  The ending -ah marks singular pronouns; the ending -a' marks plural pronouns which include the first person; and the ending -ua' marks plural pronouns which do not include first person.  (The difference in pronunciation between -ah and -a' is not huge, but it reappears in other Menominee words.  The Menominees, when they spoke their native language, could pronounce an -h at the end of a word, something not done in English; it sounds like a short sigh after the vowel.  But the apostrophe represents a sudden choking off of the sound after the vowel, called a glottal stop.)  Here is how the prefixes and suffixes are combined: to make the pronoun for inclusive "we", one combines the second person prefix with the first person ending.  Since inclusive "we" includes both the first person (I) and the second person (you), there is a logic to having a prefix for one, and a suffix for the other!

3. Grammar as Generalizations and Patterns

That is certainty an ingenuity of language!  It is also what linguists mean when they talk about “grammar.”  In the experience of some people, “grammar” means “being ashamed of the way your mother and father talked.”  But for linguists, “grammar” means “putting into words the patterns which people usually follow when they speak their native language” or “analyzing sentences and words into their meaningful component parts, and specifying how those meaningful parts are combined.”

More specifically, what we just analyzed about the Menominee pronouns is “articulating in words one particular pattern which Menominee speakers follow when they speak their native language.”  When we articulate in words one particular grammatical pattern in a language or languages, linguists call that “capturing a generalization.”

4. Languages of the Past, and Universal Grammar

Now, what if in the future, people stop speaking the Menominee language entirely?  That leads us to discuss the relevance of well-described dead languages to universal grammar.

There is a rhyme used by English-speaking students who are studying Latin, which goes like this:

“Latin is a dead language, it’s plain enough to see:

It killed off all the Romans, and now it’s killing me.”

But, when linguists describe the grammar of an ancient or dead language, they (that’s the linguists) permit themselves to use the Present tense, which can be called the “eternal present.”  Here is an example: “In Latin, the direct object is expressed by the accusative case.”  (An example of what "accusative case" means is given at the end of this essay.)  Notice the word “is.”  That’s Present tense.  Regardless of whether people stop speaking Latin entirely; or stop speaking it entirely, then start speaking it again; or stop speaking it entirely, then start speaking it again, and then stop a second time – it is always going to be a fact about Latin grammar, that the direct object is expressed by the accusative case.  Something similar is true of Menominee grammar (with different particulars).  So, linguists use the present tense when capturing generalizations.  Linguists have studied the concept of a “possible spoken human language” fairly extensively -- but so far, linguists have shown no interest in the concept of a “possible future spoken human language.”  The idea that linguists appear to have been following is “once a possible human language, always a possible human language.”

In the abstract, linguists can believe in the existence of a prehistoric language of Europe or the Ancient Near East, a very distant ancestor of the Latin language, which did not have an accusative case to express the direct object.  If such a prehistoric language existed, then it would follow logically that there was some mechanism by which a language which does not have an accusative case can evolve an accusative case.  Now, linguists reason, if there was a mechanism by which a prehistoric distant ancestor language to Latin could have evolved an accusative case, then that same mechanism could operate again on some language or other in the future.  Such a mechanism can actually be glimpsed in Modern Spanish, where the Spanish word “a” which is equivalent in meaning to the English preposition “to” (as in “to the city”) seems to be evolving into a marker of the direct object, or accusative case.  This is an example of why linguists assume, or implicitly assume, “Once a possible human language, always a possible human language.”

One possible future linguistic scenario – no one knows for sure, not even the most brilliant linguist now alive can be certain – might be that the English language would continue influencing all other spoken human languages more and more, until at some point in the future a state is reached where there is not a single living spoken language which has different words for exclusive “we” and inclusive “we.”  But the assumption “Once a possible human language, always a possible human language” could still lead linguists to believe, that such a future state of affairs could in turn be followed by an even later stage in which English developed a new way to have separate  words for exclusive “we” and inclusive “we.”

That is the idea running in the background when a linguist or a grammarian -- it does not matter which -- uses what we have designated the “eternal Present “ in making this grammatical statement, “In Latin, the direct object IS expressed by the accusative case.”

5. Weeding in Libraries

Therefore, if a certain language ceases to be spoken, that does not mean that we can throw away all the grammars of that language.  The grammars of that language in the plural – meaning, the books or monographs written about the grammar of that language in the singular – have stored up and preserved information about one of the numerous eternally possible spoken human languages.

Generally, old nursing books and old law books are considered by librarians (and nurses and lawyers) to be creepy in a particular sense, meaning that if you follow the advice contained in them, you are not using up-to-date information, and as a consequence, you might hurt or harm yourself.  Old linguistic and grammar books never become creepy in this specific sense, and as a result, librarians should not make an effort to prevent people from reading old linguistic books and grammar books which are being taken out of the library to make room for newer linguistic books and grammar books.  In this sense, linguistics is one of the humanities, or to use the word in its singular form, linguistics is a humanity.  “Linguistics is a humanity” is a college administrator way of saying that linguistics, like literature and history and art and music and religion, is concerned with eternal and nearly eternal truths about human beings.  Walt Kelly the comic strip author remarked that “The things that make us human are always close at hand.”  Human language is one of the things that make us human, and wherever there are communities of people, human language is always close at hand.  Even though linguistics (or comparative grammar) does not feel like the study of an art form such as literature and visual art and music, nevertheless, linguistics is one of the humanities in the college administrator sense of the word humanities.  Linguistics (or comparative grammar) is the study of one of the things that make us human.

Thus, when we use the eternal present and say “In Latin, the direct object IS expressed by the accusative case” we are also implying, When librarians remove an old Latin grammar from the library to make room for some newer books or to make room for more computers so more people can read E-books at the same time, the librarians removing the old Latin grammar should not try in any way to prevent people from reading the old grammar book which is going out the back door of the library.  Old grammar books never become creepy in the specific and technical way in which old nursing and law books become creepy.

In conclusion, whatever it is that people mean when they say “linguistics is a science,” it does NOT mean “librarians should prevent people from reading old grammar books, when they go out the back door of the Library.”

Postscript. An Example of the Accusative Case in Latin

Mārcu-s vide-t.     [Latin for] "Mark sees."

Mārcu-m vide-t.     [Latin for] "He sees Mark" or "She sees Mark" or "It sees Mark."

The -m at the end of Mārcum is the ending of the accusative case.  As indicated above, the accusative case is used to mark the direct object in Latin.  So Mārcum is the object of vide-t (He, she, it sees).  By contrast, the -s at the end of Mārcus is the ending of the nominative case, used to mark the subject of the verb in Latin.

"Accusative" is certainly an odd word!  R. H. Robins in his book A Short History of Linguistics on page 35 says it came about from Romans misunderstanding an Ancient Greek word.

Frank Newton