THANKSGIVING

by William H. Benson

November 22, 2001

     Of the 101 people on board the Mayflower, 35 were Pilgrims, those who had separated from the Church of England.  Led by William Bradford and William Brewster, they wished to build a colony where they could worship unhampered by the Church’s heavy-handed authority.  Mid-way across the Atlantic on November 21, 1620, 41 men signed the “Mayflower Contract”–a social compact to provide for future government and “just and equal laws” based upon church teaching.  On December 11, 1620 those Pilgrims landed at New Plymouth.

     Ten years later Jonathan Winthrop and his fellow Puritans also landed at Boston Harbor.  The previous year Winthrop had sold his estate at Groton in England and had realized 5,760 English pounds that he then devoted to the Massachusetts Bay Company.  By 1629 Winthrop had came to the conclusion that England was over-crowded, irreligious, poorly governed, a lost cause, and that a newer version of England was the solution.  He wanted to purify the Church of England.

      Previous colonies had failed, Winthrop argued, because they were “carnal and not religious”.  Only an enterprise governed in the name of the reformed religion stood a chance.  He told his fellow Puritans that “we must consider that we shall be as a City upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.”  And so the colony became England but a better form of England–a New England.

     What they found in North America was abundance, indeed a Promised Land, an excellent mix of temperatures and rainfall and soil for growing crops, especially corn, the ideal cheap and easy food for an infant colony.  They discovered that the trees were loaded with nuts: chestnuts, walnuts, and hickory nuts.  They found wild plums, cherries, and mulberries.  And then there were the pumpkins, squash, beans, rice, melons, tomatoes, huckleberries, blackberries, strawberries, black raspberries, cranberries, gooseberries, and grapes, all growing wild.

     The sheer quantity of wildlife staggered these colonists.  There were turkeys, deer, bear, weasel, sable, badger, skunk, wolverine, mink, otter, sea-otter, beaver, squirrel, and hare.  Then, besides the seafood, over 200 kinds of freshwater fish were caught.  And then the timber for building homes and for fires astonished these immigrants who had left a continent where wood was scarce.  These New Englanders fell upon all this amazing natural inheritance with joy.

     What they did in New England, besides work for their livelihood, was read the Bible daily and intensely, both alone and silently as well as aloud and among families and in church.  Every home had a King James Version.  Constantly they sought direction for their lives and searched for that perfect knowledge of what the Scriptures meant for them individually.

     In New England religion became the overriding and powerful force in the colonists’s lives.  The Pilgrims and the Puritans were zealots, idealists, utopians, and saints, fanatical and uncompromising in their self-righteousness, immensely energetic, persistent, and courageous.

     Two centuries later Alexis de Tocqueville understood the Puritan’s influence and legacy when he said, “Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits aflame with righteousness did I understand the greatness and the genius of America.  America is good.  And if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.”

     For above all else what those early colonists found in America was the personal liberty to worship as they wanted, no matter how odd or strange or weird.  That yearning for the ideal form of worship had prodded them to liquidate estates and transplant themselves across an ocean. They happened upon self-government, a necessary ingredient for political freedom.  Then, in a serendipitous stroke of good fortune, they settled upon a land loaded with material abundance.

     It was then a quick step from that to gratitude–that inner appreciation of what they believed God had granted personally to them–in a word, Thanksgiving, that gentle virtue that makes life and living agreeable and pleasant.

     Late in this year of 2001 “we the people” are grateful for America, for its abundance, for its freedoms, for its people, for its churches, towns, and schools, for its parents and children, for its soldiers and sailors who are fighting a war to protect us from the evil doers, for its government, and for the food, clothing, and shelter that we are given.  Truly, we must be and we are grateful.

ARMISTICE DAY

by William H. Benson

November 8, 2001

     By the time World War I arrived, Harry Truman was already 35-years-old, and despite his age and poor eyesight and succession of business failures, his superiors recognized something in him and commissioned him as a battery commander in the 129th Field Artillery.  They sent him to France, and there he led his men with courage and skill.  He loved his gunners, and they loved him.  Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, stopped the carnage in the trenches, and Harry Truman came home a major.

     However, he chose to remain in the Army reserves and did not resign his position until he became commander-in-chief and President of the United States in 1945.  In a sense World War I made Harry Truman.  He appreciated the military’s discipline, the structure, and the organization.  He discovered he could lead, from the front and in the right direction.  He was an infantryman, an Army man of the first order. 

     In the 1930’s the U.S. and England looked with horror and outrage when Hitler’s Germany began the war by indiscriminate bombing raids upon Warsaw, then Rotterdam, Belgrade, and London.  By 1940 Churchill felt overwhelmed by the prospect of a Nazi occupation of Western Civilization–what he saw as a moral catastrophe, and so hesitantly he authorized a policy of mass bombing on German cities.

     One British military strategist called it “the Jupiter Complex”, the ability granted by the posssession of huge air forces to rain thunderbolts on the wicked.  The objective was to weaken the people’s resolve, end the war quickly, and minimize casualties.  The difficulty with the policy was that the bombs killed the innocent–civilians caught in the crossfire.  The democracies’ moral judgement had become distorted and corrupted by a war that Hitler’s Nazis had started.

     For example, on February 13 and 14, 1945 two waves of British bombers and a third by Americans destroyed Dresden, Germany.  The firestorm engulfed 85 square miles and killed 25,000 men, women, and children.  Because it was Shrove Tuesday, many of the dead children were still dressed in their carnival costumes.

     The Americans followed the same policy in the Pacific.  Late in the war and without much resistance, U.S. bombers sent wave after wave to bomb major Japanese cities.  On March 9 and 10, 1945 300 B29 Flying Fortresses turned Tokyo into an inferno, obliterating 15 square miles, killing 83,000, and injuring 102,000.  Truman’s decision in August to drop the atomic bombs upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a natural extension of the Jupiter Complex.

     Football season is here, and strategies are built around the question, “Do we run now, or do we pass?”  Super Bowl champions can do both equally well, pushing the defense continually off balance.  Harry Truman’s World War I was a ground game fought in the trenches;  his World War II introduced the aerial game.

     The new century and the new millennium are barely a year old, and we are now at war again.  Last week in Time magazine, Chalres Krauthammer called this war against Osama bin Laden “a war of necessity”, much like World War II, and not a war of choice, like Vietnam, Kosovo, or the Gulf War.  Because it is a war of necessity, he argues that it is time to put aside niceties and sensitivities, such as limiting air strikes on the the first Friday of the war in deference to Muslim sensibilities.  He asks, “Why such sensitivity?  We were attacked.  Our enemy chose the date.  We have no choice but to fight back–on our timetable.  The enemy cannot murder thousands of innocents then call time out for piety.”

    If this war is a war of necessity, look for our leaders to gradually put aside their sensitivity, (like Churchill, Roosevelt, and Truman did) readopt the Jupiter Complex, and begin bombing the innocent.  After all the Taliban are storing weapons in mosques and using schools as barracks.  Krauthammer writes, “Now the enemy is counting on American sensitivity to inadvertent civilian casualties to protect him–so he can live to slaughter American civilians again.”

     Also, look for the ground game to begin in earnest, on a massive scale.  D-Day is approaching.

FREIDRICH VON SPEE

by William H. Benson

October 25, 2001

     In 1631 Freidrich von Spee (pronounced Shpay) published his book Cautio Criminalis which means Precautions for Prosecutors.  In it he exposed the Church/State’s brand of terrorism against, what he believed, were those innocent men and women accused of practicing witchcraft.  For years he had the misfortunate job as the priest in the German city of Wurzburg of hearing the confessions from those being tortured.  He listened as they wrenched and writhed in agony while strapped to a rack or the thumb screws were set or boiling water was poured into their boots.

    Von Spee saw through the elaborate machinery designed to ferret out the witch, and so he objected to the torture, the forced confessions, and the demand for the names of other witches.  And so at great personal risk he wrote his book, and in it he wrote, “The judges must either suspend these trials (and so impute their invalidity) or else burn their own folk, themselves, and everybody else; for all sooner or later are falsely accused and, if tortured, all are proved guilty.”

    He saw it for what it was–a rolling, lumbering, heavily-loaded, out-of-control train pulling cars loaded with accusations, torture, conviction, confession, and just before death more accusations.  It was a vicious turning wheel geared to grab and then crush anyone nearby and eventually everybody in their proper turn.

     The authorites wanted to arrest and punish von Spee for his honesty; however he died of the plague before they had their chance, and so he found his escape.

     Much has been written of the Witch Trials in Salem, Massachusetts, but that was the tip of the iceberg when compared with what was happening in Europe, where the situation deteriorated throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries into a vicious witch hunt.  Indeed, the last execution for witchcraft in America was in 1692; but in France, 1745; in Germany, 1775; in Poland, 1793.  And the Church did not abolish inquisitorial torture until 1816.

     Why did it all end then?  Fortunately, what happened was that Western Civilization grew up.  Science expanded, and reason and skepticism struck at the very heart of superstition.

     Carl Sagan in his book The Demon-Haunted World — Science as a Candle in the Dark wrote, “The witch mania is shameful.  How could we do it? . . . If we’re absolutely sure that our beliefs are right, and those of others wrong; that we are motivated by good, and others by evil; that the King of the Universe speaks to us, and not to adherents of very different faiths; that it is wicked to challenge conventional doctrines or to ask searching questions; that our main job is to believe and obey — then the witch mania will recur in its infinite variations down to the time of the last man.”

     Halloween approaches.  It is a once-a-year moment when the trick-or-treaters come out, when the ghosts and goblins and witches make their appearance, when Orson Welles on the radio declares that Martians have landed, and when UFO’s abduct people and bring them back alive to tell about it.  It is a scary time, yes, but a harmless one–only a replica or a vestige of an ugly historical event in humanity’s history, at its moment of adolescence.

     When Shakespeare’s Hamlet sees the ghost of his murdered father, he cried out, “Angels and Ministers of Grace, defend us!”  A worthy request.  Truly, for humanity to survive and flourish, it needs more of the angels, especially the kind with two legs who walk upon the ground who think before lashing out, and less of the witches.  Plus, it needs more ministers of grace, of the variety such as Freidrich von Spee who can see through the inhumane behavior for whatever the reason, and less of the crazed and superstitious and powerful who are so determined to pounce upon the accused and the innocent. 

ROGER WILLIAMS – SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE

by William H. Benson

October 11, 2001

     Almost immediately upon his arrival in 1631 at Massachusetts Bay, Roger Williams argued with the colony’s governing church officials.  At first he pointed out that the church had not completely separated from the Church of England, and therefore he could not worship with them since he had converted to Separatism.  Then, later he argued that they had misappropriated illegally the land in Massachusetts from the various Indian tribes, which he believed were the rightful owners.  Finally, he disagreed with the way the church leaders punished the colonists for breaches of religious observances and for enforcing church attendance.

     Roger Williams went on to think deeper about the proper relationship between the church and the state and between theology and the law than did any other early American.  He believed they should be completely separated.  He spoke his ideas from the pulpit, and he wrote his ideas down on paper.  For the crime of heresy the Massachusetts Bay’s theocratic leaders brought him to trial on October 6, 1635, and on the 9th the fifty-man jury brought in a unanimous verdict of guilty.

     He was “enlarged out of Massachusetts” the next January into a blinding winter blizzard and only stayed alive by finding refuge with the Indians.

     Today the idea of separting the church from the state is an intricate and accepted part of American life.  It is the law.  But four centuries ago, it was heresy.  It was easy then to whip Colonial juries into a frenzy over a lack of religious piety or for heresy.  Roger Williams saw that and understood the danger inherent in linking theology and the law.

     What he perceived was that so many religions are steeped in an absolutist frame of mind–each convinced that it alone has a monopoly on truth and therefore eager for the state to impose this truth on others.  Practitioners of absolutist religions cannot see any middle ground or that truth can be drawn from seemingly contradictory doctrines.

     Roger Williams did not live to see the anactment of the Bill of Rights, which decoupled the church from the state.  James Madison, the writer of the Bill of Rights, recognized that a close relation between the government and any of the quarrelsome religions would be fatal to freedom and injurious to religion.  It would tend to destroy government and degrade religion.

     For the past month Americans have focused on Islam, what James Michener called the “misunderstood religion”.  He wrote that the one point that Americans frequently miss is that “Islam is not only a religion, it is also a body of law.  This law, known as the Shariat, has developed from the Koran and the traditions.  This system makes a Muslim’s religion somewhat more important to him that it would be in a western community.”  In other words in Islam the distinction between theology and law is muted, and often a Muslim does not separate the two.

     However, in his column last week, Dan Rather argued that the terrorist attacks of September 11th went way beyond adherence to the Islam religion.  “It seems apparent that the perpetrators’ true religion is fascism, that grim creed the earth never seems able to banish completely.  Their acts ‘can only be understood’ within the context of Islam only because Islam is the framework they have chosen for expressing their will to power.”

     The columnist Thomas Sowell asked the question, “What have we done wrong to arouse such hatred?”  He answers, “We have achievements that dwarf theirs.  We have succeeded.  The fanatics most often come from wealth, rather than poverty, and so they have time on their hands to brood and produce their brand of fanaticism.” 

     Why has Western Civilization, in America and Europe, succeeded and achieved so much?  There are a lot of immediate and obvious answers, however, I  would argue that the West has succeeded because of characters like Roger Williams who forgot about their own personal comforts, took a contrary position regardless of the threat of imprisonment or banishment, and argued that only the state should be the institution that creates and executes laws and not the church.

“It Ain’t Necessarily So”

by William H. Benson

September 27, 2001

     George Gershwin was born on September 26, 1898, and thirty-seven years later, almost to the day, his musical Porgy & Bess premiered in Boston.  One of the big hits from that musical was a song, “It Ain’t Necessarily So”.  The lyrics suggested that some of the things that we are told are true early on constitute a core assumption that we then later discover is faulty or even mistaken.

     It has been said, that the easiest was to avoid becoming a bore is to startle people by challenging some of their cherished assumptions.  (It is also an excellent way to make an enemy.)  However, there are certain things that human beings assume are true actually fall into the category of “It Ain’t Necessarily So”.

     For example, certain institutions tell us that we have to or we must or it is imperitive that we  believe a particular political or philosophical or religious belief as a path to personal happiness, a better life, or a future salvation.  But “It Ain’t Necessarily So.”  As a corollary, those same institutions tell us that if we do not totally commit ourselves–heart, soul, mind, and body, to their particular package of beliefs, we will experience life-long misery or, worse yet, an eternal hell.  But “It Ain’t Necessarily So”.

     When we take that set of beliefs–a hand-me-down version, without questioning all of its implications and far-reaching results, we perhaps bypass virtue and the moral good.  We have to believe that human beings possess enough intelligence to question passed-on and -down assumptions, and that humanity will not doom itself with a worn-out, torn up, washed out, and full-of-holes box of crazed beliefs that damages and kills human beings.

     To believe privately one way or one thing or another way or another thing is our own business, but when we as humans “act” upon those beliefs, those actions can then be either good or bad, benevolent or malevolent.  To translate belief into criminal actions misses the important thing–grace, the magnanimous action that benefits others.  To crush others, to inflict pain upon others, to enmesh others, and to trap others simply because they do not believe as we do is morally evil.  It necessarily is so.

     An example from Shakespeare.  Othello loves and then marries Desdemona.  In the wings waits Iago who despises the newly-weds’ happiness, and so he promises to “enmesh” them all.  Iago convinces Othello that Desdemona has been unfaithful, and acting upon that deception, the jealous Othello smothers his innocent bride, who, realizing what is happening, cries out “Lord! Lord! Lord!” and then dies.  When others inform Othello that Desdemona has not been unfaithful, but that Iago had lied, Othello can only cry out, “O! O! O!”, and then falls back onto his bed.

     This scene from Othello lets loose an intense pain that has stunned every audience each time it has been performed for the past four centuries.  There are perhaps some 600,000 words in the English language, and all Othello could say was “O!” three times.  At moments of excruciating pain and sorrow we hear or we offer up platitudes: “words fail us” or “words cannot express”;  Othello understood that, for speechless he was.

     Before his final act–suicide, he wanted to know “Why?”  Why had Iago deceived him?  Why had he lied?  Iago turned cold and said “Demand me nothing; what you know, you know:  From this time forth I never will speak word.”  And he never says another line throughout the play.

     On September 11, 2001 President Bush called “these folks . . . faceless cowards.”  They were Iago’s come to life to terrify our very existence.  Staring at the television screen that day all I and every other American could mutter was “O! O! O!”, while smoke billowed across lower Manhattan, and two skyscrapers collapsed, and knowing that thousands of Americans were trapped and doomed inside.

     Promiscuous hatred and envy does exist in human nature, and we want to know why, and we probe, wanting to know why this Iago is so hateful toward us.  Samuel Coleridge explained it best, “Iago is motiveless malignity hunting for the motive.”  In other words, Iago possesses no motive, no reason.  In his acts of rage and calculated deception, he is hunting for the reason, for the motive.  Iago’s hatred surpasses all possible explanations.  He simply does “dirt on life”.

     Because the characters on the stage of real life were so trapped and the ending was so very painful and so intense for them, we watched dumbfounded, speechless, and haulted in our affairs.

     Tuesday a.m., September 11, 2001.  Belief — actions — trapped — doomed — “Lord! Lord! Lord!” — dirt thrown into the very eyes of life — WHY? — “O! O! O!”.

     It need not necessarily have been.