Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“The people's fault, their core mistake, is that "they do not know Yahweh." They do not recognize how God has been patient and forgiving with them, nor have they learned how divine love operates. They still presume, as we all do in the absence of a vital spiritual experience, a rather universal reward. punishment logic.”

“The 'conquest of political power by the proletariat' (the winning of democracy') is 'the first step in the workers' revolution', and the future of society hinges on the subsequent political actions of the new regime...The commitment to politics is what, historically, distinguished Marxian socialism from the anarchists... those socialists whose rejection of all political action the Manifesto specifically condemns.”

“His [Jesus] teaching sets in motion what I would like to call the biblical pattern of "anti-scapegoating," or preemptive self-criticism, a learned capacity to see your own shadow.”

“those in the larger group almost always blame the ones they consider "less than" for whatever they are lacking, a tragic tendency we now call "blaming the victim." Failure in almost any form is considered "your own fault" in any upwardly mobile or fully capitalistic society. "The poor" live with a double indemnity. They are blamed not only for their own...failings but...for the larger group's problems and sins.”

“Those in the remnant carry the mostly hidden truth forward despite—or probably because of—their rejected or marginal status. It is a loser's script leading from Sarah to the Israelites and all the way to Jesus, but neither group—Israel or Christianity—ever really wants to play the part. We preferred Zionism and Christendom.”

“In just about every society those who are not rich, famous, or at the top carry an undue stigma... The unspoken assumption is, you are surely wrong and at fault because you belong to the wrong subgroup, have no wealth, do not work hard enough, or have not made it to the celebrity list. And yet the Bible breaks this pattern by preferring the barren wife, the forgotten son, the enslaved Israelites.”

“The normal power systems of our world worship themselves and not God. That hardly needs any proof at this point in history, after we have witnessed so so many corrupt institutions in both church and state. For that reason, prophets almost never hold official positions, like that of a king, priest, or elder. However, neither do they dismiss the proper roles that kings and priests play... ”

“Without this ego-defeating tactic of the critical mass, Christianity always becomes what we now call civil religion, where the powerful assume they have the authority of the truth, simply because they are in power.”

“The critical mass in biblical theology is always the small, "edgy" group that carries history forward almost in spite of the whole.”

“God is saving all of history and all of humanity, but only with the direct, conscious help of a faithful few. I am sure prophets tried to widen this circle of the faithful, as all preachers hope they are doing.”

“This tradition of the remnant is central to the whole Bible God's message and messengers—and often the hearers—all tend to be outliers to "the way everybody thinks." Thus, when we respect the loved and rejected outsider, the "little ones" become the indication that we are on a tangent of divine love and not just our inherited and natural love of family, sameness, greatness, and ego advantage.”

“The whole group never gets the message, but a smaller group (the "remnant") carries the love and hope of restoration forward after each purification (that is, after the trials and tribulations the people endure)... Power distorts truth, so God plants and develops it at the edge, where the power-hungry least expect it.”

“Every viewpoint is a view from a point, and we had best know our own. Where you start largely determines the questions you ask (or don't ask), the trajectory you set, and the goals you hope to achieve. Truth does not appear like an apparition of low-hanging fruit in a celestial garden. It always comes wrapped in the society and historical moment that produced it.”

“Peter Drucker was famous for saying, "Culture eats strategy for breakfast." In a similar way, I believe that culture eats religion for lunch. By that, I mean our beliefs are determined much more by our dominant ways of life and our surrounding cultural influences than by what we say we believe religiously. In every country where I have taught, it was culture that was running the show far more than religion.”

“Hard-heartedness, or what Zechariah and other prophets called "hearts of flint," prevented the people from hearing the law and the words that Yahweh had sent by the Spirit. A heart of stone cannot recognize the empires it builds and the empires it worships. Lamentation does. It moves us through anger and sadness, empowering us to truly hear and respond to the always-tragic now.”

“Forgiveness of reality—including tragic reality—is the heart of the matter. All things cry for forgiveness in their imperfection, their incompleteness, their woundedness, their constant movement toward death. Mere rage or resentment will not change any of these realities. Tears often will, though: first by changing the one who weeps, and then by moving any who draw near to the weeping.”

“Anybody who's on the edge, disadvantaged in some way, or barred from a position of hegemony or power will naturally understand the tears of the prophets, with their gut-level knowledge of systemic evil, cultural sin, and group illusion. Black Americans might have seen white people act nice or speak of human equality, for example, but they knew we lived behind a collective lie.”

“Prophets and mystics recognize what most of us do not—that all things have tears and all things deserve tears. They know that grief and sadness are doorways to understanding life in a non-egocentric way. Tears come from both awe and empathy, and they generate even deeper awe and deeper empathy in us. The sympathy that wells up when we weep can be life-changing, too, drawing us…into communion with those around us.”

“There is an inherent sadness and tragedy in almost all situations: in our relationships, our mistakes, our failures large and small, and even our victories. We must develop a very real empathy for this reality, knowing that we cannot fully fix things, entirely change them, or make them to our liking. This "way of tears," and the deep vulnerability that it expresses, is opposed to our normal ways of seeking control…”

“We see this up to our own time in the universal attraction to and the valorization of war, even when we are clearly acting in our own interests... Why does the commandment "Thou shalt not kill" suddenly not apply? Only Quakers, Amish, Mennonites, and recent teachers of nonviolence have had the courage to even ask this troubling question.”

“All transformative religions are, each in their own way, trying to defeat the imperial ego and reveal the always camouflaged shadow self. Yet we need to be bathed in the assurance of infinite love before we can risk such ego deflation. ... You see, as the prophets knew so well, we like our illusions, we like having enemies, and we are quite accustomed to our wars and prejudices, as much as we insist the contrary.”

“The prophet's job was always spotting where the problem really lies: in the accusing ones themselves and in the delusions of the collective. … For spotting the hidden, communal, and disguised nature of sin and evil, the Jewish prophets have no parallels.”

“Religion worldwide, it seems, remains committed to making something or somebody a sacrifice in every age so that the status quo can be maintained. In our time, it is immigrants at the border; in other times it was Black people in the American South or Indigenous people being driven from their lands.”

“The undoing of this tendency would be the task of any would-be savior for humanity and our continually fragile history. Yet it largely remains hidden in plain sight. The Christian religion has sought to achieve its own innocence rather than act in solidarity with suffering and sinners.”

“René Girard wrote that the Bible is unique in all world literature in spotting this universal human avoidance of our own dark side. Girard calls this projecting of our own faults and fears onto others "the scapegoat mechanism." It is present in all cultures, but the Bible alone…sees clearly how scapegoating works. Girard insists that scapegoating is…"the [universal] sin of the world" (John 1:29)”

“For example, the American political party that most blatantly hates law and order is invariably the one that loudly repeats the words law and order at every convention. Meanwhile, the party that knows it should be for immigrants acts as though it does not really want them in their backyard.”

“As Isaiah put it, "Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness, who substitute bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter" (Isaiah 5:20). He is describing how all of us use words and feelings to deceive ourselves and others.”

“We must be eternally conscious of this fact: For the untransformed self, religion is the most dangerous temptation of all. Our egos, when they are validated by religion, are given full permission to enslave, segregate, demean, defraud, and inflate—because all bases are covered with pre-ascribed virtue and a supposed hatred of evil. This is what the prophets expose…”

“the plague was bound to leave traces in people's hearts”

“And he knew, also, what the old man was thinking as his tears flowed, and he, Rieux, thought it too: that a loveless world is a dead world, and always there comes an hour when one is weary of prisons, of one's work and of devotion to duty, and all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart.”