What does the God of the Crap Christians have against poor defenseless little animals?

If Fido, Rex, and Rover accept Macho Jesus as their personal

two-fisted savior, can they avoid being Left Behind?

"Pets don't have souls, so they'll remain on Earth. I don't see how they can be taken with you. A lot of persons are concerned about their pets, but I don't know if they should necessarily trust atheists to take care of them."

-- raptureready.com wackjob Todd Strandberg

by Ken

We already knew that the God of the Crap Christians has divinely kinky tastes, like the way he likes his hunky Christian boys to be all nice and buff so their bodies will look supercool all bloodied and broken when they get the stuffing kicked out of them. (Crap Christianity appears to have a significant degree of S/M cult built in.) But really now, what could the Big Dominator in the Sky have against poor innocent animals?

I have to admit that I never thought about this problem until this piece was forwarded to me, and maybe it's just me insensitivity to the well-being of animals always seems to me one of the surest and most repellent signs of inherent inhumanity, which is why it's the Nazi anti-pets ordinance that horrified me most of all the ghastly details we learned with the ultimate publication of the wartime diaries of Victor Klemperer (a first cousin of the great conductor Otto Klemperer, or "the musician Otto Klemperer" as Victor usually referred to him when his name came up in the diaries. Victor Klemperer, you may recall, was a romance languages professor who managed, just barely, to live through the Nazi regime in Dresden thanks to having a non-Jewish wife. As in a cheesy Hollywood melodrama, Victor and Eva were scheduled finally to be deported, presumably to a death camp, the morning after the fire-bombing of Dresden. In the chaos, they escaped the burning and melting city.

The diaries are filled with shocking documentation of the day-to-day horror of life in the Third Reich, as growing deprivations and indignities were heaped on Jews. and while lots of them, like the increasing restrictions on what Jews could own and what they could buy, growing in time into a near-total ban on Jews buying anything at any time. But none stick in my imagination as vividly as the ban that came down on Jews owning pets. Importantly, the ban wasn't limited to Jewish ownership of the little cutie pies. It was also illegal to give them away to non-Jewish owners. For animals like the Klemperers' beloved little cat, it was a death sentence. There's a special kind of sickness at work here.

So tell me, did you ever wonder about what happens to the pets of right-thinking Christians come the Rapture? The inescapable conclusion is that they're to be Left Behind with all us Jews and other heathens. Apparently the heaven of the Crap Christians is pet-free. What kind of mastering of the universe is that?

Well now, as I learned in this fascinating report that Noah passed on to me, a "Small Business feature from Business Week, an enterprising 61-year-old Christian entrepreneur in New Hampshire named Bart Centre has found a solution. It's the very solution that wasn't available to save the Klemperers' poor pussycat or any other Jewish-owned pets in Nazi Germany: placing the critters with Left Behind families.

For a fee, of course. If there's anything the God of the Crap Christians believes in, it's making a buck any way you can. Crap Christians understand that what the Macho Jesus-haters don't understand that so-called human "misery," which we always talk about as if it's a bad thing, is really an opportunity for some smart cookie to pocket some dough.

Caring for Pets Left Behind by the Rapture

For a fee, this service will place your dog or cat in the home of a caring atheist on Judgment Day

By Mike Di Paola

Many people in the U.S. -- perhaps 20 million to 40 million -- ”believe there will be a Second Coming in their lifetimes, followed by the Rapture. In this event, they say, the righteous will be spirited away to a better place while the godless remain on Earth. But what will become of all the pets?

Bart Centre, 61, a retired retail executive in New Hampshire, says many people are troubled by this question, and he wants to help. He started a service called Eternal Earth-Bound Pets that promises to rescue and care for animals left behind by the saved.

Promoted on the Web as "the next best thing to pet salvation in a Post Rapture World," the service has attracted more than 100 clients, who pay $110 for a 10-year contract ($15 for each additional pet.) If the Rapture happens in that time, the pets left behind will have homes—with atheiists. Centre has set up a national network of godless humans to carry out the mission. "If you love your pets, I can't understand how you could not consider this," he says.

Centre came up with the idea while working on his book, The Atheist Camel Chronicles, written under the pseudonym Dromedary Hump. In it, he says many unkind things about the devout and confesses that "I'm trying to figure out how to cash in on this hysteria to supplement my income."

Whatever motivates Centre, he has tapped into a source of genuine unease. Todd Strandberg, who founded a biblical prophecy Web site called raptureready.com that draws 250,000 unique visitors a month, agrees that Fido and Mittens are doomed. "Pets don't have souls, so they'll remain on Earth. I don't see how they can be taken with you," he says. "A lot of persons are concerned about their pets, but I don't know if they should necessarily trust atheists to take care of them."

This paradox poses a challenge for Centre. He must reassure the Rapture crowd that his pet rescuers are wicked enough to be left behind but good enough to take proper care of the abandoned pets. Rescuers must sign an affidavit to affirm their disbelief in God -- and they must also clear a criminal background check. "We want people who have pets and are animal lovers," Centre says. They also must have the means to rescue and transport the animals in their charge. His network consists of 26 rescuers covering 22 states. "They take this very seriously," Centre says.

One of Centre's atheist recruits is Laura, a woman in her 30s who lives near the buckle of the Bible Belt in Oklahoma, and who prefers not to give her last name. She has two dogs of her own and has made a commitment to rescue four dogs and two cats when—if—the time comes. "If it it happens, my first thought will be, 'I've got work to do,'" Laura says. "The first thing I'll do is find out where I need to go exactly."

The rescuers won't know the precise location of the animals until the Rapture arrives, at which time they will contact Centre for instructions. "I've got to get to [the pets] within a maximum of 18 to 24 hours. We really don't want them to wait more than a day." A day she believes will never come.

Centre doesn't think he will ever have to follow through on the service he offers. But he believes in virtuous acts. His Web site directs about $200 a month in proceeds from Google ads to food banks in Minnesota and New Hampshire. And to pet owners, he has already delivered something of great value: peace of mind, for just 92 cents a month. "If we thought the Rapture was really going to happen," Centre says, "obviously our rate structure would be much higher."

Somebody here is nuts, and I mean just plain crackers. I think you can guess who my candidates are.

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Crap Christianity is out there, it's evil, and I worry about "good" Christians who don't seem to notice

TARA: So all the people who thought he could talk to their loved ones on the other side, what's to stop them from falling for the next Dalton Rand?
NATE [after thinking a moment]: Not a thing.

-- from last week's episode of Leverage, after

Nate's gang has successfully exposed a fake psychic

by Ken

This is what comes of not keeping up to date on your TV-watching. Over the weekend I finally caught up with last week's episode of Leverage (i.e., not from this past Wednesday but from the week before), a show we talked about just recently, and out pops this nugget on the ceaselessly predictable gullibility of a chunk of the public. This might have come in handy the other day when I was replying to a commenter who had, I think, misread what I wrote on a favorite subject of mine, Crap Christianity.

Here's what commenter Mikbee42 wrote:

" aided and exhorted by the colluded forces of darkness around them, starting with the fortresses of mind-controlling Crap Christianity."

wtf ken?
how about starting with the mind controlling israeli-jewish crap media, wall street and zionist politicians a la lieberman.
the real cult of ignorance.
your bigoted blanket statement about "Christianity" is not what i expected from you or dwt.
lets keep it fair and balanced!

And here's what I replied:

Sorry I was unclear, Mikbee42, but I didn't make a "blanket statement about Christianity," bigoted or otherwise. I referred specifically to Crap Christianity, which I've written about here frequently: It's the virulent, exploding version, generally but not exclusively evangelical, that has infested the U.S. in, say, the last 50 years.

If this is the first time you're encountering my reference to Crap Christianity, I can see where you might not have gotten my meaning. Still, it seems to me quite a jump to reading that as a statement that Crap Christianity = Christianity. That's not only not what I meant but not, I'm pretty sure, what I wrote -- though again I can appreciate the possibility of confusion.

(There is, of course, the larger subject of the stupendous historical wreckage wrought proudly in the name of mainstream Christianity -- and of course by most religions that have had the opportunity. But that's a subject for another time.)

I don't think anyone could complain that DWT devotes too little attention to crap media or to crappy Joe LIeberman. However, I guess it would be my opinion that neither of these has had anything like the effect of the organizers of Crap Christianity in turning some 40 percent of the population into ungoverning and ungovernable mental zombies.

I don't know that anyone particularly cares about my views on religion, but in the interest of clarity, I don't believe it's inherently good or bad. Like most creations of humans, it's both -- it reflects pretty much the exact spread of motivations and behaviors, from the best to the worst, that we find in most human endeavors and activities. Religion can be used in the service of moral and humane ends, and it can be used to justify and promote the worst impulses of mankind.

By Crap Christianity what I mean, in case it isn't obvious, is basically the Christian Right, in which small groups of people seek to control the thinking and behavior of (they hope) much larger groups of people, in the interest of the controlling group's egos or thirst for power or greed for wealth. It is fundamentally an authoritarian system, and in all its facets it's about control.

Here's how I put it in what was basically a music post last September, "Bach's faith rouses devotion, not ennui (or ridicule), in this nonbeliever -- his Jesus isn't the Right's 'macho Jesus'":

Bach's belief in Jesus as a representation of the best in us, the fullest and most meaningful humanity of which we are capable, the Prince of Peace, doesn't require much of a stretch for me. In fact, that belief, not to mention the actual teachings of Jesus, is what makes me crazy in the incessant braying of modern-day crap Christianity. Longtime DWT readers have heard both Howie and me sound this theme frequently. The ignorant, lying, bellicose, immoral crap Christians not only seem blitheringly unaware of what Jesus actually preached, but represent something very close to the forces of oppression and inhumanity that were Jesus's lifelong antagonists.

By coincidence (or is it coincidence?), in the Introduction to Max Blumenthal's book Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party, I just encountered this remarkable description of the "macho Jesus" central to "the authoritarian mindset driving the movement that has substantially taken over the modern Republican Party: the Christian Right," as he experienced it personally in five years of interviewing hundreds of its leaders, attending dozens of rallies and conferences, listening to "countless hours" of radio broadcasts, and sitting "in movement-oriented houses of worship where no journalists were permitted."

As I explored the contours of the movement, I discovered a culture of personal crisis lurking behind the histrionics and expressions of social resentment. This culture is the mortar that bonds leaders and followers together. . . .

The movement's Jesus is the opposite of the prince of peace. He is a stern, overtly masculine patriarch charging into the fray with his sword raised against secular foes; he is "the head of a dreadful company, mounted on a horse, with a double-edged sword, his robe dipped in blood," according to movement propagandist Steve Arterburn. Mark Driscoll, a pastor who operates an alternative Christian rock venue from his church, stirs the souls of twenty-something evangelical males with visions of "Ultimate Fighting Jesus." This same musclebound god-man starred in Mel Gibson's blood-drenched The Passion of the Christ, enduring bone-crushing punishment at the hands of Jews and pagans for two hours of unrelieved pornographic masochism.

A portrait of virility and violence, the movement's omnipotent macho Jesus represents the mirror inversion of the weak men who necessitated his creation. As [psychologist Erich] Fromm explained, "the lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness [italics in original]. It is the expression of the individual self to stand alone and live. It is the desperate attempt to gain secondary strength where genuine strength is lacking."

No indeed, Bach's Jesus has nothing in common with this macho Jesus. And I imagine Bach's deep Christian faith must be an irrelevance if not an outright outrage to the crap Christian worshippers of macho Jesus. Indeed, having come this far with Max, we need to continue on at least one more paragraph:

The movement's macho Jesus provided purpose to Tom DeLay, a dallying, alcoholic Texas legislator transformed through evangelical religion from "Hot Tub Tommy" into a dictatorial House majority leader known as "The Hammer." Macho Jesus was the god of Ted Haggard, a closet homosexual born-again and charismatic megachurch leader, risen to head of the National Association of Evangelicals, preaching the gospel of spiritual warfare and anti-gay crusades. And he was the god of Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., an eccentric millionaire whose inheritance of massive wealth literally drove him mad, prompting his institutionalization, who found relief as one of the far right's most reliable financial angels. Macho Jesus even transformed the serial killer Ted Bundy, murderer and rapist of dozens of women, who became a poster child for anti-pornography activists with his nationally televised death row confessional. . . .

Although we now have a number of excellent books exploring the seamy world of Crap Christianity, Republican Gomorrah remains an excellent basic source, with its frighteningly consistent accounts of the twisted histories of the men (yes, they're all men) who made Crap Christianity such a commanding force in American politics. Not surprisingly, Howie has also devoted quite a lot of attention to this cancer on our body politic, and has also used Republican Gomorrah as a basic resource.

Crap Christians don't believe in Jesus or his teachings, on which they basically defecate. Not only have they manufactured their own Jesus, in all essential respects their "macho" Jesus is an Antichrist, clearly intended to undercut the actual teachings of Jesus. Now, in fact, the Crap Christians have undertaken to actually rewrite the Bible to conform to their fundamentally fascist vision, as Noah reported in awarding his "Why Do You Hate the Bible? Award" (among his year-end Scorn Awards) to Ned Flanders look-alike Andy Schlafly of Conservapedia --

for their Bible Project, which aims to “translate” the Bible into a conservative world view -- "to render God's word into modern English without liberal translation distortions" -- because in the demented minds at the Conservapedia madrasa, not only does real life itself have a liberal bias, but so does the Good Book. ("Liberal bias has become the single biggest distortion in modern Bible translations.")

Translation: The Bible needs to be pounded into the service of the ultra-right-wing vision of modern American Movement Conservatism.

Does Joe Lieberman serve the interests of Israel's Likudniks in the Senate? No question about it, and Howie in particular has written about that a lot. Has Joe Lieberman engaged in activities designed to control the minds of Americans? Well, actually, yes, most notably in his efforts to impose censorship on American music -- in league, of course, with the Crap Christians. I don't doubt that his heart is with them, but he hasn't personally done much to advance the cause.

Whereas the Crap Christians have converted, at conservative estimate, tens of millions of Americans into zombielike tools of their authoritarian religious-political vision, creating an electoral force beyond the reach of truth, reason, or even reality, thereby rendering the country increasingly ungovernable, unless perhaps by some eventual mind-controlling authority that's consistent with theirs.

Widespread human gullibility is the Crap Christians' marching weapon. Just this past Saturday Glenn Greenwald wrote a post called "Religious faith in government accusations," in which he noted:

[I]f one hears only the Government's unchallenged, untested accusations about detainees and others whom it labels Terrorists and Enemy Combatants, it semes clear and obvious that the person is an Evil, Dangerous and Bad Man. But when those accusations are actually subjected to scrutiny by courts, it turns out that -- in the overwhelming majority of cases -- there is virtually no reliable evidence to support them. Even beyond those cases, Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell, had access to detainee files and revealed that a huge number of Guantanamo detainees -- constantly accused of being the Worst of the Worst -- were, in fact, completely innocent, as even the Bush administration came to acknowledge.

Glenn went on to point out: "Despite those facts, a religious-like faith in government pronouncements continues to dominate debates over Terrorism and civil liberties."

It's no accident that far-right-wing government pronouncements are greeted by this segment of the population with "religious-like faith." Their faith has been brainwashing them to do so.

I used to feel a lot more anger than I do now toward the "good" Christians who look the other way. What's changed is that I've come to understand how under siege many of them feel in the face of the onslaught of Crap Christianity, which has the show-biz pizzazz and a savvy combination of the right mix of rewards and punishments to lure their people away. But when so-called good Christians deny the existence of or danger from the Crap Christian movement in this country, I have a real problem.

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Sunday Classics: Bach's faith rouses devotion, not ennui (or ridicule), in this nonbeliever -- his Jesus isn't the Right's "macho Jesus"

t
Baritone Matthias Goerne sings the second aria, "Schlummert ein," from Bach's Cantata No. 82, Ich habe genug, with the Salzburg Camerata Academica conducted by Roger Norrington.

Fall asleep, you weary eyes,
close softly and pleasantly!

World, I will not remain here any longer,
I own no part of you
that could matter to my soul.
Here I must build up misery,
but there, there I will see
sweet peace, quiet rest.

"If I were setting out to 'sell' Bach, or even to try to sketch the Bach who most matters to me, I would start with the secular music -- with, say, the Brandenburg Concertos and the solo-cello suites. But the cantatas may be the place where one comes closest to encountering the soul of Bach."

by Ken

Bach. Johann Sebastian Bach. If the very name doesn't strike awe, maybe you aren't listening carefully.

The sheer quantity of music Bach (1685-1750) wrote is all but unimaginable. Scholars have speculated doubtfully as to how long it would have taken one person just to write out all that music, without even considering the act of creation -- not to mention the quality of it.

Here's another way of measuring the quantity. A few years ago among the new listings from my indispensable Berkshire Record Outlet I noticed the Hänssler Classics edition of the complete works of Bach, all 173 CDs' worth (171 audio plus 2 data), at a price so low that not only could I afford to buy it, I didn't see how I could afford not to. Figuring that BRO couldn't have a lot of copies of this mammoth set, and that every BRO customer with a grain of sense would want one, I had the sense to pounce, placing an immediate order.

When I received a shipping notice, beyond my enormous relief, for some reason what caught my attention was the shipping weight: 18 pounds. Ever since, I've thought of the Hänssler set as "18 pounds of Bach."

As to the quality of the music, it is if anything more awe-inspiring than the quantity. I wish it were possible to point to a piece here or there that appears "dashed off." That might make Bach appear more human. Not only does the quality never seem to lag, but large chunks of that 18 pounds of Bach remain at the core of the repertories they represent. For the next couple of centuries it would be hard to find a major composer who didn't consider Bach the master of them all. Far from any of this music being dashed off -- though one sometimes gets the feeling that old J.S.B. could toss off a four-voice fugue in his sleep (writing in his sleep would help explain how the man got all that music on paper) -- a sizable portion of it is among the most intellectually formidable music ever composed.

It's possible, though, and regrettable, to get carried away with the extraordinary intellectual content of Bach's music. Like every great musician, he had a compulsion to communicate, and his musical curiosity seems to have been insatiable. Unlike his exact contemporary Handel (1685-1759; the closest the music world would come to having another year like 1685 was 1813, when both Verdi and Wagner were born), he hardly traveled. Yet he managed to stay abreast of what was being done in music all over Europe, absorbing what suited him into his own musical personality.

To offset, or at least temper, the image of Bach the intellectual giant, is it possible to write music more meltingly beautiful than we have in the opening clip, the bass aria "Schlummert ein"? For all Bach's formidable intellectual powers, and the defining fact that he was by profession a church organist and composer, it would be a shame to overlook how deeply people-oriented his music was. I do believe he felt he was performing and composing in the service of God. Nevertheless, I have to believe that a crucial part of the mission his God intended for him when he set pen to music paper was to communicate with his fellow humans.

I have a slightly funny history with Cantata No. 82, Ich habe genug, long one of the most performed of Bach's nearly 200 sacred cantatas, in good part because of its unusual configuration -- a sequence of numbers written entirely for one vocal soloist, a bass. (It's really a baritone, but the distinction between baritones and basses hadn't yet come into play, so as far as Bach was concerned, he was just writing for a high bass.) It happens to have a close kin in Cantata No. 56, Ich will den Kreuzstab gerne tragen, and with the dawn of the LP era they became natural, even inevitable disc-mates.

WHAT THE HECK IS A CANTATA ANYWAY?

cantata. A musical composition, often using a sacred text, comprising recitatives, arias, and choruses.

-- Answers.com

Well, there may be choruses or there may not. And there may also be duets, and purely instrumental movements (often including a "sinfonia," or overture). And there may be one vocal soloist, or two, or three, or four. The "often using a sacred text" point is important, because in Bach's case, going by the standard BWV numbering, all but a handful of Cantatas Nos. 1-200 are sacred, and then Nos. 201-216 are all secular. Other composers also wrote secular cantatas, but more often than not when we think of the form, we think of a setting, often written for a particular occasion in the church calendar, of texts either drawn from the Bible or commenting on it.

(Bach's cantatas, by the way, are generally known by a combination of their BWV number, which is to say the numbering in Wolfgang Schmieder's monumental 1950 Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis, or Catalogue of Bach Works, plus the first line of the first vocal number.)

One of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau's most successful early recordings was a 1951 coupling of Cantatas Nos. 56 and 82, with that fine baroque specialist Karl Ristenpart conducting. Throughout his career Fischer-Dieskau performed a great deal of Bach, and with the advent of stereo it was only natural that Deutsche Grammophon would want him to redo the baritone-cantata coupling. The remake was undertaken with the then-reigning baroque star conductor Karl Richter and his Munich Bach Orchestra.

About 1971 I acquired my first tape deck with pretensions to any kind of fidelity, a cassette deck. Naturally I felt the need to have cassettes to play on it, and among the titles I bought was the DG Archiv cassette edition of that Fischer-Dieskau-Richter Bach 56/82. I bought lots of other stuff, but it was when I put on the Bach tape that, despite what must have been a significant hiss level (DG cassettes weren't yet using Dolby noise reduction), I stopped listening to the medium and simply heard music.

For some reason the music that sticks in my head from those days isn't Cantata No. 56, which must have been on the "A" side, but No. 82. Here is what I remember being overwhelmed by: Fischer-Dieskau and Richter performing the opening aria, "Ich habe genug."

A NONBELIEVER AMID BACH'S SACRED WORLD

When I've thought about Bach in connection with Sunday Classics, it never occurred to me that I might write first about the cantatas. Certainly if I were setting out to "sell" Bach, or even to try to sketch the Bach who most matters to me, I would start with the secular music -- with, say, the Brandenburg Concertos and the solo-cello suites, music that is as personal to me as any music there is.

It was another accident that got me thinking about the Bach cantatas. I must have been feeling guilty about neglecting my "18 pounds of Bach," and one morning, when it was time to choose some music for the subway journey to work, I decided to pick something from it at random. It's packaged in overstuffed jewel boxes of four CDs each, and the one I grabbed happened to be of cantatas (Nos. 103-114, to be specific). I almost allowed myself a do-over, on the ground that the cantatas were the one portion of the compendium I had actually listened to complete and in sequence when I got it. But then I decided, what the heck? It's not as if I'd listened carefully to all those cantatas that first time through. So Cantatas Nos. 103-114 it was. And I found that once I was immersed in the world of the Bach cantatas, it was hard to un-immerse myself. The cantatas may be the place where one comes closest to encountering the soul of Bach.

The second time I had occasion to interview then-New York Philharmonic music director Kurt Masur, the subject was Bach, in connection with his upcoming performance of the St. Matthew Passion. This is kind of a funny story in itself, although not of the "ha-ha" funny sort.

Masur of course had a long history in Leipzig, which was and is above all Bach's city. As longtime music director of the city's historic Gewandhaus Orchestra, he had frequently programmed Bach's great choral masterworks -- the two great Passions, the St. Matthew and St. John; the B minor Mass; and the Christmas Oratorio. But in New York, he was told by the orchestra's management, he couldn't do that. New York, you see, is "a Jewish city." And while Masur is known to have presided over the orchestra with typical Germanic absoluteness, he does seem to have been bullied quite a lot by the management, and probably quite wrongly -- I think he knew a great deal more about musical audiences than they did. And finally he had been allowed to schedule the St. Matthew.

In the interview, the Bach association Masur talked about first went back to childhood, to his first aural memories: the sounds of Bach's organ music in his small hometown church. This was the soundtrack that played in his head as he grew up, and somehow I've never been able to get that aural image out of my head. (I suppose I'm envious.) For Masur the experience led naturally to a desire to play the organ, which he learned to do in that church, and then to become a pianist, which he was working toward when a hand injury put an end to that.

HIS SOUL FINDS VOICE IN THE ARIA

I imagine there's a good chance that in addition to Bach's organ music, Masur heard at least some of Bach's sacred cantatas performed in his church. That's what they were written for, after all -- some of them for special occasions in the liturgical calendar, others for ordinary Sunday-service use. And the church cantatas occupy a special place among the composer's output.

Bach wrote a staggering quantity of staggering-quality secular music, but I don't think there's any question that the spirit of the sacred imbues all his work -- that as a musician he always thought of himself as in service to God, and this is perhaps nowhere expressed more personally than in the many hundreds of arias he wrote for the intimate performance circumstances of the church cantatas.

Of course there are also stupendous arias throughout the "big" choral masterworks. I don't know a more beautiful vocal performance of anything than the 1929 recording by the baritone Friedrich Schorr -- the supreme Wotan and Hans Sachs -- of the bass solo "Et in Spiritum Sanctum" from the B minor Mass (included on Preiser's second Schorr CD).While there's no clear demarcation between the arias written for the "big" choral works and those written for the cantatas (and indeed there was a certain amount of shuffling of arias back and forth; for that matter, the Christmas Oratorio itself is in fact a set of six cantatas), still the cantatas, by virtue of the compact scale of their format and occasion, have a particular intimacy of utterance.

Bach's arias are basically familiar in form; they're more or less standard baroque arias of the A-B-A form familiar from our discussion of Handel's "Lascia ch'io pinga" (Whether it's Handel or Wagner, the good old "A-B-A" form mirrors real-life experience): a main section, a middle section, and a repeat of the main section -- with a very little bit of text made to go a very long way thanks to considerable repetition.

Bach's arias do, however, have one powerful distinguishing quality. Although we think of the aria, logically enough, as the ultimate solo form for singers, Bach's arias are by and large not solos but duets.

WHAT? THE ARIA AS DUET???

How does a solo singer have a duet? Who with???

Well, how about your friendly nearby flutist, or oboist, or fiddler? Somebody from the small group of instrumental soloists Bach has included in the instrumentation for this cantata. (That instrumentation, by the way, varies widely from cantata to cantata. Bach generally chose the forces he wanted with careful consideration of what he planned to do in that particular canata.)

By way of illustration, here is Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau again, now in 1974, singing the section "Aber wer gen Himmel siehet" from the aria "Ächzen und embärmlich Weinen" from Cantata No. 13, Meine Seufzer, meine Tränen, a bass-and-violin duet with Yehudi Menuhin playing the violin part and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich providing the bass continuo line, and Menuhin providing voice-over commentary. And here is soprano Christine Schaefer, giving a lovely performance of a soprano-and-violin duet, "Bereite dir, Jesu" from one of the better-known cantatas, No 147, Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben, with Nikolaus Harnoncourt and the Vienna Concentus Musicus.

Better still for our purposes, here is a soprano-and-oboe duet, "Die Seele ruht in Jesu Händen," from Cantata No. 127, Herr Jesu Christ, wahr' Mensch und Gott, sung by Barbara Schlick, with oboist Ofer Frenkel and the Accademia Daniel directed by Shalev Ad-El:

The soul rests in Jesus’ hands,
when earth covers this body.
Ah, call me soon, you death-knell,
I am unafraid of death,
because my Jesus will awaken me again.

Inescapably, immersion in Bach's sacred music means immersion in the teachings and person of Jesus. As I contemplated writing about Bach's cantatas -- or rather specifically about Bach's cantata arias -- I found myself reflecting on this oddity: that I, who have never been a Christian of any sort, and haven't for many decades even pretended to subscribe to any clump of religious superstitions, am so prepared to be swallowed up in the depths of Bach's unflinching religious faith?

I actually thought I would write a piece explaining this. Ha! I can't offer an explanation, just some observations relative to the subject.

"PRINCE OF PEACE" VS. "MACHO JESUS"

I once tried to explain to a friend, one of the wisest and most sensitive people I know, how it is that Handel's Messiah, which had once struck me as a pile of wheezy old religionist hooey, came to have deep personal meaning for me. In this space I took advantage of last Christmas season to express my wonder at Handel's sense of wonder at the miracle of birth (For Christmas Eve, savor the true miracle: "For unto us a child is born), and the sense of hope it brings, the sense of possibilities, of realizing who and what we can be.

Really, Handel gives us the feeling that that is the miracle: that a child is born (and a son given). Even when this particular child's future responsibilities are set out ("Wonderful counsellor, the mighty God, the everlasting Father), note how Handel italicizes the additional role: "the Prince of Peace."

I tried to explain to my friend that I don't need to believe in a Redeemer in the Christian sense to take personally the soprano's great aria "I know that my Redeemer liveth." The aria is just as powerful if for me that Redeemer refers not to some mysterious external force but to the spark of goodness inside us which drives us to be the best people we can be -- against considerable opposing forces, both within and without. And I guess Bach's faith energizes me in much the same way.

(Parenthetically, I find it fascinating that two composers as dominant in their age as Bach and Handel, in so many ways so different, nevertheless so often cross-reference, complement, and even explain each other.)

Bach's belief in Jesus as a representation of the best in us, the fullest and most meaningful humanity of which we are capable, the Prince of Peace, doesn't require much of a stretch for me. In fact, that belief, not to mention the actual teachings of Jesus, is what makes me crazy in the incessant braying of modern-day crap Christianity. Longtime DWT readers have heard both Howie and me sound this theme frequently. The ignorant, lying, bellicose, immoral crap Christians not only seem blitheringly unaware of what Jesus actually preached, but represent something very close to the forces of oppression and inhumanity that were Jesus's lifelong antagonists.

By coincidence (or is it coincidence?), in the Introduction to Max Blumenthal's book Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party,I just encountered this remarkable description of the "macho Jesus" central to "the authoritarian mindset driving the movement that has substantially taken over the modern Republican Party: the Christian right," as he experienced it personally in five years of interviewing hundreds of its leaders, attending dozens of rallies and conferences, listening to "countless hours" of radio broadcasts, and sitting "in movement-oriented houses of worship where no journalists were permitted."

As I explored the contours of the movement, I discovered a culture of personal crisis lurking behind the histrionics and expressions of social resentment. This culture is the mortar that bonds leaders and followers together. . . .

The movement's Jesus is the opposite of the prince of peace. He is a stern, overtly masculine patriarch charging into the fray with his sword raised against secular foes; he is "the head of a dreadful company, mounted on a horse, with a double-edged sword, his robe dipped in blood," according to movement propagandist Steve Arterburn. Mark Driscoll, a pastor who operates an alternative Christian rock venue from his church, stirs the souls of twenty-something evangelical males with visions of "Ultimate Fighting Jesus." This same musclebound god-man starred in Mel Gibson's blood-drenched The Passion of the Christ, enduring bone-crushing punishment at the hands of Jews and pagans for two hours of unrelieved pornographic masochism.

A portrait of virility and violence, the movement's omnipotent macho Jesus represents the mirror inversion of the weak men who necessitated his creation. As [psychologist Erich] Fromm explained, "the lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness [italics in original]. It is the expression of the individual self to stand alone and live. It is the desperate attempt to gain secondary strength where genuine strength is lacking."

No indeed, Bach's Jesus has nothing in common with this macho Jesus. And I imagine Bach's deep Christian faith must be an irrelevance if not an outright outrage to the crap Christian worshippers of macho Jesus. Indeed, having come this far with Max, we need to continue on at least one more paragraph:

The movement's macho Jesus provided purpose to Tom DeLay, a dallying, alcoholic Texas legislator transformed through evangelical religion from "Hot Tub Tommy" into a dictatorial House majority leader known as "The Hammer." Macho Jesus was the god of Ted Haggard, a closet homosexual born-again and charismatic megachurch leader, risen to head of the National Association of Evangelicals, preaching the gospel of spiritual warfare and anti-gay crusades. And he was the god of Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., an eccentric millionaire whose inheritance of massive wealth literally drove him mad, prompting his institutionalization, who found relief as one of the far right's most reliable financial angels. Macho Jesus even transformed the serial killer Ted Bundy, murderer and rapist of dozens of women, who became a poster child for anti-pornography activists with his nationally televised death row confessional. . . .

QUICK HITS: CANTATAS 56 & 82; "COMPLETE BACH"

Matthias Goerne's recording of Cantatas Nos. 56, 82, and 158 with Nikolaus Harnoncourt conducting is still available.

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau's stereo version of Nos. 56 and 82 with Karl Richter conducting, with one of the most famous of the cantatas, No. 4, Christ lag in Todesbaden, thrown in, is available as a mid-price CD.Fischer-Dieskau's mono version with Karl Ristenpart has been reissued on Hänssler's Profit label,with his 1950 Brahms Four Serious Songs accompanied by the fine pianist Hertha Klust thrown in.

The Hänssler complete Bach set is apparently currently unavailable. It's highly recommendable, but not for $599. Brilliant Classics has a 155-CD complete Bach,as usual assembled from a wide variety of sources, which you can find as low as $100. (Amazon lists it at present at $119.) The price is certainly right, but from the dabbling I've done in the set, the performance level is, shall we say, problematic.


SUNDAY CLASSICS POSTS

Here is the updated list.

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