Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Karen Armstrong has written again about St. Paul (she covered this ground in 1983 in THE FIRST CHRISTIAN). In this year's book, even more straightforwardly titled ST. PAUL: THE APOSTLE WE LOVE TO HATE, she treats the conversion of Saul into Paul, and the rise of Christianity itself, as a text within the context of the conflict between Greek speaking and Aramaic speaking Jews, the conflict over assimilation that one associates with Hanukkah. For pre-conversion Saul, she writes, "the Hellenistic followers of Jesus were insulting everything he believed to be most sacred, and he greatly feared that their devotion to a man executed so recently by the Roman authorities would put the entire community at risk. Paul ... would have been horrified to learn that Jesus had desecrated the Temple and argued that some of God's laws were more important than others. For a Pharisee with extreme views, like Paul, a Jew who did not observe every single one of the commandments was endanger...

I began my blog entry here for July 26 by reflecting on President Obama's statement to entrepreneurs, "You didn't build that." This led me in time, through an associative train the station stops of which I won't here reproduce, to the words of William James on the moral philosopher and the moral life. On the final station of that roadway, I quoted James thus: "See everywhere the struggle and the squeeze; and ever-lastingly the problem of how to make them less. The anarchists, nihilists and free-lovers; the free-silverites, socialists, and single-tax men; the free-traders and civil-service reformers; the prohibitionists and anti-vivisectionists; the radical darwinians with their idea of the suppression of the weak, -- these and all the conservative sentiments of society arrayed against them are simply deciding through actual experiment by what sort of conduct the maximum amount of good can be gained and kept in this world." In reflection...