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[ by Charles Cameron — any sufficiently advanced Stargate is indistinguishable from magic ]
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I spoke too soon. In a post yesterday, I wrote of Palmyra, the grief and the joy. I should have known better — there’s always an end-times element to the news, particularly when it touches on the history of the Middle East.

In my tablet-format DoubleQuote above, you will find dire prognostications of one group of the apocalyptically aroused [upper panel, above] believing that the installation of a replica of the destroyed arch of Palmyra’s Temple of Baal in New York’s Times Square will unleash who knows what forces of evil upon the city — — a city which has in any case earned the sobriquet “Babylon” [lower panel] from others similarly apocalyptically aroused —

In ancient times, child sacrifice and bisexual orgies were common practices at the altars of Baal, and now we are putting up a monument of worship to this false god in the heart of our most important city.

April 2016: The Temple Of Baal Will Be Erected In Times Square In New York City

A tip-of-the-hat, here, to Richard Bartholomew of the Batholomew’s Notes on Relighion blog, who pointed me in this direction.

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But there is yet time to take comfort, if you will, in the Dispensationalist theology supported by yet other end-timers discussed in this article, Are you ready for the counter-apocalypse? to which David Ronfeldt kindoy pointed me, proposing that things must inm any case “get worse before they can get better, theologically speaking —

Scofield, following Darby, taught that God governs and manages the world according to a sequence of distinct ages, or dispensations, each with distinct sets of rules and expectations. Each meets some kind of catastrophic end. In the Bible, as in Scofield’s life, things always got worse before they could get better—for instance, by Noah’s flood, or the destruction of Jerusalem’s Temple, or whatever social degeneracy we observe around us. Fear not, for God is in control. The job of believers is to accept whatever dispensation they’re in and await, like eager spectators, the next catastrophe.

Understanding sacred history like this has consequences for the present. Justice and peace need not be strived for now; we’re not in the right dispensation yet. Dispensationalists have held that even the beloved commands of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount can be neglected—love your enemies, give what you have to those in need, do for others what you’d have them do for you.

As one of Scofield’s later followers reasoned, “Every businessman would go bankrupt giving to those who ask of him.” Dispensationalism permits a dose of pecuniary sense to some of the Bible’s more demanding social teachings.

This theology spread in tandem with modern corporate capitalism, aided by Gilded Age benefactors like California oilman Lyman Stewart. A later follower of Scofield’s imagined that Christians who persevere through the present tumult will get to serve as a “ruling aristocracy, the official administrative staff” of Christ’s corporate kingdom to come. The bureaucrat, thus, is the model believer: Play by the rules you’re given, as excellently as you can, and even as the planet is engulfed in flames rest assured that all is well.

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I’d have far less to write about — and we’d all live in a safer world — if we recognized that the outrageous varieties of apocalyptic expectation just might be the multi-headed beast St John of Patmos was talking about in Revelation, ahem.

[ by Charles Cameron — an MIT physica professor works in language games on biology ]
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Both a tree and a solar panel absorb and transform solar energy, and dump heat into their environment. How would a physicist explain why only the tree is alive?

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I’m posting this because of one sentence:

When you refuse to let go of two things that are divergent in the way they cause you to talk,” he says, “it forces you in the direction of translation.

I found it in an intriguing article, How Do You Say “Life” in Physics?

After a brief intro to MIT physicist Jeremy England, the article touches on interdisciplinary translation — which, when you think about it, is a very Koestlerian sort of bisociative process:

Different fields of science, too, are languages unto themselves, and scientific explanations are sometimes just translations. “Red,” for instance, is a translation of the phrase “620-750 nanometer wavelength.” “Temperature” is a translation of “the average speed of a group of particles.” The more complex a translation, the more meaning it imparts. “Gravity” means “the geometry of spacetime.”

Then we get theological, with a twist:

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth …” Here, the Hebrew word for “create” is bara, the word for “heavens” is shamayim, and the word for “earth” is aretz; but their true meanings, England says, only come into view through their context in the following verses. For instance, it becomes clear that bara, creation, entails a process of giving names to things; the creation of the world is the creation of a language game. “God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” God created light by speaking its name. “We have heard this phrase so many times that by the time we are old enough to ponder it, we easily miss its simplest point,” England says. “The light by which we see the world comes from the way we talk about it.” That might be important, thought England, if you’re trying to use the language of physics to describe biology.

Finally, we get the basic bisociation laid out in plain words:

As a young faculty member at MIT, he neither wanted to stop doing biology, nor thinking about theoretical physics. “When you refuse to let go of two things that are divergent in the way they cause you to talk,” he says, “it forces you in the direction of translation.”

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I hadn’t thought much about translation as a form of semblance until now, but it opens vistas..

An interesting article.

The tree and the solar panel — there’s much food there for analogical thought.

[ by Charles Cameron — what eye do you use when there’s more going on than meets the eye? ]
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Twice in one day, a week or so ago, I had reason to look up the meaning of “aman” in Islamic law. My source here was M. Reichberg and Henrik Syse, eds., Religion, War, and Ethics: A Sourcebook of Textual Traditions, p. 307, under the heading Aman (Pledge of Safety):

Aman is a temporary pact of security whereby visitors from an enemy territory were conferred a certain level of protection from hostile acts (on life, liberty, and property) during their stay in the opposing community. Classical jurists agreed such a pact could be granted by Muslims to non-Muslims, and vice versa. Concerning protection given to non-Muslims, the overwhelming majority of jurists agreed that an adult free man may grant aman to a non-Muslim and that such an aman was to be respected by the entire Muslim community. Once granted aman, these non-Muslims were guaranteed protection for the duration of their visit on Muslim territory, and if an imam wished to retract the aman, he was obliged to guarantee protection until the non-Muslim had been escorted away.

Jurists also examined the obligations of Muslims who had been granted aman in a non-Muslim territory. Most agreed that if a Muslim entered enemy territory on the basis of an aman contract granted by non-Muslims, guaranteeing his life and property, this agreement should be mutually respected, such that for the duration of his stay the Muslim would not be permitted to harm the non-Muslim enemies. For example, as later detailed, al-Shafi’i argued that Muslim men whose women and children had been taken captive were not allowed to free them by attacking their non-Muslim captors, if this would entail a violation of an aman agreement. It would be preferable, al-Shafi’i maintained, to ask for a retraction of the aman than to save the captives by its violation.

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One of the items that sent me scurrying towards this text was a long and fascinating discussion of the Japanese (also German and Italian) internments during World War II, which Michael Lotus opened up on FaceBook. I’m not sure whether this FB convo will be accessible to everyone, but if it is, you will find it here.

The other occasion was a paragraph that caught my eye in Jenny Taylor‘s blog post You cannot fight religion with atheism. I’ll give you the full paragraph for a bit of context, but it’s the remark about the secret covenant that I’m interested in here. Jenny ts discussing the British response to IS and how it will be perceived from different angles:

And I’m not sure I see it the Church’s way either. That’s because none of it has a proper mandate from the people; the people who will inevitably suffer on the streets of London and other cities once the secret ‘covenant’ Britain’s MI6 have had with international Islamists is revoked by what will be seen as a declaration of war. [And if you don’t believe me about that, read Islamic State: The Digital Caliphate just out.]

Abdel Bari Atwan‘s book to which Jenny links is highly regarded by folks such as Peter Bergen, so I went looking for a mention of MI6 in its pages, and found:

Musab Al-Suri confirmed to me that a tacit covenant was in place between MI6 and the extremists…

— after which, he talks about Saudi entities and indivisuals funding al-Qaeda. I was intrigued, and checked in Atwan’s earlier book, The Secret History of al-Qaeda, and read this equivalent but slightly longer passage:

I believe there was an unwritten truce between bin Laden and the Al Saud based on the understanding that so long as al Qaeda did not target the royal family or Saudi nationals, the regime would shut its eyes to the organization’s activities. The truce would have collapsed after 11 September 2001, when the US put enormous pressure on the ruling family to purge itself of terrorists and cut off sources of funding for their activities.

Atwan also quotes Abu Musab al-Suri in his Secret History:

London was the centre for communications between Islamist groups and groups opposed to the governments of their own countries. We maintained communications with jihadi leaders outside Britain, in particular Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri who used to call me regularly and I would take his calls in a telephone box in the London suburbs … John Major’s government was very clever and served the security of Britain and the interests of its people by accepting our truce by which we meant that we would never target Britain … as long as the security forces left us alone … When Tony Blair came to power in 1997 he tore up the unwritten understanding and stabbed the mujahedin in the back by changing the laws and harassing us.

Note that there is no specific mention of MI6 here, and the reference is to an “unwritten understanding”.

This is all hearsay, in fact — Atwan describing al-Suri’s thoughts rather than direct quotes from al-Suri — so I’m left wondering whether anyone actually offered the British a truce, or whether what’s really going on here is that al-Suri mentioned to Atwan that the British were taking advantage of aman protection against jihadists attacking a country (in this case, the UK) which had given them shelter.

Is this secret, tacit and unwritten truce really a truce at all, or just a mutual recognition of the existing limits of warfare under Islamic jurisprudence?

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Consider in this context how Bin Laden himself chastizes Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square bomber, 9n this excerpt from Letters from Abbottabad: Bin Ladin Sidelined? p.41:

You have perhaps followed the media trial of brother Faisal Shahzad, may God release him, during which the brother was asked to explain his attack [against the United States] in view of having taken an oath [not to harm it] when he was awarded his American citizenship. He responded that he lied [when he took the oath]. It does not escape you [Shaykh `Atiyya] that [Shahzad’s lie] amounts to betrayal (ghadr) and does not fall under permissible lying to [evade] the enemy [during times of war]…please request from our Pakistani Taliban brothers to redress this matter…also draw their attention to the fact that brother Faisal Shahzad appeared in a photograph alongside Commander Mahsud. I would like to verify whether Mahsud knew that when a person acquires an American citizenship, this involves taking an oath, swearing not to harm America. If he is unaware of this matter, he should be informed of it. Unless this matter is addressed, its negative consequences are known to you. [We must therefore act swiftly] to remove the suspicion that jihadis violate their oath and engage in ghadr.

It’s interesting that Dr Fadl, aka Sayyed Imam Al-Sharif, the prominent Jihadist ideologue whom Lawrence Wright terms an “Al Qaeda mastermind” makes a very similar claim in his Refutations, in whichb he retracts his previous suppoort for AQ on grounds of religious law:

Fadl acknowledges that “terrorizing the enemy is a legitimate duty”; however, he points out, “legitimate terror” has many constraints. Al Qaeda’s terrorist attacks in America, London, and Madrid were wrong, because they were based on nationality, a form of indiscriminate slaughter forbidden by Islam. In his Al Hayat interview, Fadl labels 9/11 “a catastrophe for Muslims,” because Al Qaeda’s actions “caused the death of tens of thousands of Muslims—Arabs, Afghans, Pakistanis and others.”

The most original argument in the book and the interview is Fadl’s assertion that the hijackers of 9/11 “betrayed the enemy,” because they had been given U.S. visas, which are a contract of protection. “The followers of bin Laden entered the United States with his knowledge, and on his orders double-crossed its population, killing and destroying,” Fadl continues. “The Prophet—God’s prayer and peace be upon him—said, ‘On the Day of Judgment, every double-crosser will have a banner up his anus proportionate to his treachery.’”

As Hannah Stuart comments in Critiquing Radical Islamist Claims to Theological Authenticity on the respective views of Bin Laden, Dr Fadl and others:

While their interpretations differ, it is testament to the strength of the Islamic obligation to honour an oath that senior al-Qaeda figures view perceived transgressions with such severity.

[ by Charles Cameron — on the (Pythagorean) arithmetic of morals ]
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Sendan Kendatsuba, one of the guardians of Buddhist law, banishing evil, Tokyo National Museum

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What’s right is generally supposed to be positive, while what’s wrong is seen as negative — and as they saying goes, two wrongs don’t make a right.

In effect, that’s saying two negatives don’t make a positive. And if you add them, that’s correct.

But if you multiply two negatives, you get a positive — hunh?

So two wrongs can indeed make a right — that’s the mathematics of vengeance — multiplicative:

And thine eye shall not pity; but life shall go for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.

— Deuteronomy 19.13

And it is also true that two wrongs don’t make a right — that’s a mathematics that denies vengeance — additive.

And then there’s the mathematics of forgiveness :

Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.

— Romans 12.21

Patient men, desirous of the Face of their Lord, who perform the prayer, and expend of that We have provided them, secretly and in public, and who avert evil with good — theirs shall be the Ultimate Abode

— Qur’an 13.22

And what’s most interesting to me in all this, is that the mathematical formulations, additive and multiplicative alike, don’t make a feature of time — where as their moral equivalents tend to introduce time into the equation / situation — in each case, it’s the response to evil, real or potential, that is considered.