Retrofitting Faith Warriors/Martyrs(PassTheMartyrPlease) from Maccabees to Here/Now

Prior to this "plunge" into the books "Maccabee," I had been doing some extra-curricular reading that per se tries to connect sociology and social science to the first events of the Jesus Movement; indeed this thrust seems to be vigorous at this time, starting with Gerd Theissen's Soziologie der Jesusbewegung (1977, Munich). Of particular interest among these several works perused was the work of a contemporary (historical) sociologist Rodney Stark, who in his The Rise of Christianity uses the researched material on religious cults of this period with the unfolding evolution of my faithwalk from rather vulnerable itinerate preacher ?Lord? Jesus of wee Nazareth to the Churchdom known in the early Middle Ages and later. It seems to be Stark's Thesis 1 is that the human nature with warp and woof of social dynamics remains essentially the same human nature, therefore that events which have been better studied of late can be used "retro" to the Christian situation(s) that developed from its initial charisma to then bureaucracy. Next, Stark expresses diss of the "armchair sociologists" of the 19th and 20th century (with unavoidable association in me with Emile Durkheim of the structuralists' camp as also to the Verstehen severals like Wilhelm Dilthey and more-prominently Max Weber) and prefers the more atheoretic and more comprehensive/systematic fact/evidence-based sociology, particularly of the American variety of soc. All of this leads me to a point that could channel this self-imposed labor, just prior to Hanukkah 2018, this work on the Maccabees.

I am not so certain that all portions of these Maccabees (4, note well) is completely uncontaminated with what in contemporary culture as "slant" in favor of one's social belongingnesses. Yes I would go so far as to posit that chunks if not most of these documents is "slanted" in the way that suits the particular Maccabee historiographer's "affiliations-political" (and indeed then politics and religion, combined with philosophy, were roughly the same in what journalists and evolutionary psychologists call "memes," the stuff of propaganda, the stuff of rumor warfare). Across the board, everywhere I for-penance turn to mass culture, the insistence on memes that not only are not-evidenced, but frankly are prima facie untrue; here it is commonest that the party/team-players preaching such fictions call evidenced material "fake" when in fact the most-raw fakes are what President Harry Truman called "The Big Lie," which told often enough makes a Credo for the suckers who value the alibi with "team spirit" for their community's ideology. I associate this trend as beginning with the Absolute Believers in Fundamentalism and as well the shadowy news tabloids like Sun (whom a former Mafioso turned fed protected witness told me is a Mafia publication); then there was a media uplift-- with big $ to pay the huge mass-media expense-- toward the Patsy Robberson 700KKKlub bunch,



and the Brother Hall Lindsay's of the for-shure-for-shure Rapture (fizzed in trial 1 some five years ago, remember Wholly RollerRulers of Political Correctness?) Now: Donna Trumpt,



beloved of Rupert Murdock (daddy of that Sun cosanostra-nik media empire of feke-news), and of the Fundamentalists and motorcycle gangsters and Grand Alt Right Party Republicans and rape-dating-anthropos. Now clearly the dynamic goes to those who tell the juiciest rumor (called Conspiracy as with paranoiacs) as Fact and FactAsFake; in other words, nothing matters besides making WordsThatWin, blocking justice, packing Courts with sex offenders we our team can blackmail; and

all that which closes my door but for the cops and the landlord, opens my purse for those beneath social class hereabouts who need eats and health and an agony that breaks addiction to "junk" and which

peeks from time to time at the billboards of "news," never from that cosanostra of the Sun Murdocks, but in so doing, reading the olds of the Bible when the news causes militant angering so here

I think if Stark and the soc people are correct in method, the waning truths of Fundamentalists and the Tabloid Dogmatists and the ur-paranoid Conspiracy theorists will teach me, if the points of comparison are dynamically true in both cases, that what makes Faith Warriors



 Now made-then in Maccabean martyrdom (pass the martyr, please) and those Posse Commitatus Revolutionists of Palestine wee-BCE and

Just before the time when Jesus jeezed around with miracles and conflicted pacifisms, whupping the changers of money Temple-wise who would break a Shekel into farthings 4U, and other ways to just say nice things about your team and just only say bad things about the Diabolics who do not agree with you...

THE MORE THINGS CHANGE, THE MORE THEY STAY THE SAME, that is, now and seemingly and convincingly Now