Religion – HystericallyBored

2024-02-202024-02-21

Spinoza Would be Appalled

I read this today in the letters section of the New York Times in response to this article on Spinoza.

If one were adhere to the worldview of Spinoza as defined here, you would be very saddened by the way democracy is practiced in this country today. The founders viewed liberty and freedom as the bedrock of a self-governing country. We have become over the last century or more a country whereby unelected unknown individuals working for the government have taken control of aspects of our lives for our supposed own good. Spinoza would be appalled as would the founders over how we have lost much of our liberty to think and run our lives.

I responded thusly:

@bill walker Your comment stopped me. Really? So you wanted to read a controversial book and couldn’t find it? You wanted to go to any church at all and someone prevented you? You wanted to see a movie, attend a lecture, take part in a political rally, and were held back? You couldn’t choose a doctor or go to a private or public school or drink from a public fountain or change your gender or post a letter to the editor because “unelected unknown individuals working for the government” were out to limit your freedoms? Spinoza, if he were here today, would be plainly astonished at the amount of freedom we have. Objectively, no people have ever been more free to express their wishes as we are today. It’s not those unelected unknown people who want to limit your freedom: is those elected MAGA stooges who forced libraries to remove dictionaries because they define words that describe bodily functions. In other words, they are us, if we let them.

2024-01-042024-01-17

This is who you are

I have recently read and heard from Christian apologists who assert, in one form or another, that the Evangelical Christian community that passionately supports Donald Trump actually understands that he is an unworthy person of bad taste and style who is nevertheless God’s chosen vessel to restore America to holiness and conviction and the purity of our bodily fluids.

All right– sarcasm aside, some Christians say that while they are disgusted with Trump’s personal character they support him because he appoints anti-abortion judges, stands up for gun rights, opposes same-sex marriage and homosexuality, and resists the world-wide conspiracy to replace white Americans with people of color.

In other words, they believe that a man who is a serial womanizer, a materialist, a liar, a bragger, and vulgarity incarnated somehow, when it comes to issues that matter to the Christian community, acts in a way that Jesus would approve of.

I don’t believe they really believe that. They might say they do, but the evidence is overwhelming: they don’t. Trump is the evangelical community unmasked. He is what they are. Vulgar. Grasping. Materialistic. Cruel and dishonest.

They do not see Trump as a corrupt vessel of God’s will; to them, he really is God’s chosen messenger, an avatar of all the values and beliefs that they hold dear but don’t want to publicly acknowledge, a bully and thug who they really like because he is a bully and thug. The main body of Evangelical Christians will deny that they embrace Trump the corrupt vessel because he exposes them for what they are: raging hypocrites who have demonstrated over and over again that they never did really believe in the teachings of Christ or the bible.

A political scientist at Furman University, Jim Guth:

White evangelicals share with Trump a multitude of attitudes, including his hostility toward immigrants, his Islamophobia, his racism, and nativism, as well as his “political style,” with its nasty politics and assertion of strong, solitary leadership. Indeed, Trump’s candidacy may have “authorized” for the first time the widespread expression of such attitudes.

The Evangelical Christian community has always been pro-gun. They love guns. They have always been generously forgiving of war criminals like William Calley, Paul Slough, Evan Liberty, Dustin Heard and Nicholas Slatten, if they are Americans. They have consistently rejected the Bible’s clear mandate to care for creation as obedient stewards, not as exploitive pirates. They preach abstinence and self-denial but indulge in every possible form of acquisitiveness of property and worship church leaders who brag about their private jets and access to political leaders. They claim to admire integrity and character but they hated the two presidents with the most integrity and character in the past 50 years, Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama.

As they sit there in their pews, chanting and singing, reciting from scripture, and folding their hands in prayer, they know, deep in their hearts, that what they like about Trump is precisely his pettiness, his vindictiveness, his vulgarity, his bullying, his meanness, and his materialism. They do not quietly accept him and hold their noses: they bless him and admire him and scream and cheer him when he is at his most divisive and vulgar.

He is you. And he has revealed to the world the truth of what it means to be an evangelical Christian in the United States in 2024.

Nothing.

I take note of a recent confirmation of this point.

Little Richard’s Revisionism

Suppose a notorious prostitute gave up her profession, joined a church, went to seminary, became a preacher, established a church, built up it’s membership so that it was able to build a lovely new sanctuary, and then retired. And suppose that after her retirement, a large group of former customers decided to give her an award for being the best prostitute in the business.

She would refuse, right? She would prefer that people not even know about her past, but if they did, she would certainly renounce it. She would publicly return all the money she earned from prostitution to a charity for unwed mothers (or something).

Suppose it was discovered that she financed her new church sanctuary with money she had earned as a prostitute?

Suppose that hundreds of young women read books and articles about her early career and announced that they wanted more than anything to become great prostitutes.

Yes, a very weird story, isn’t it? It is the story of Little Richard. Yes it is.

Let me make absolutely career: Little Richard’s rock’n’roll career was not in any manner really prostitution or like prostitution. I am saying that Little Richard himself, by his own standards as a Christian preacher, came to regard it as such. Insofar as it goes…

Little Richard was perhaps the greatest genius of the early rock’n’roll era. If you have never seen a good video of one of his early performances– and I don’t mean just a clip– you must see it. He is utterly remarkable. Here’s another. And another. He was a whirling dervish of dance and vocals and whoops and hollers and piano, and absolutely mesmerizing. He excited people so much they sometimes broke into a riot.

Watch Paul McCartney sing for the Beatles in the early years. You are watching Little Richard. Watch Mick Jagger, Elvis, David Bowie, Prince, Madonna– all owe an enormous debt to the original, Little Richard. Even Bob Dylan, someone you would not immediately think of as influenced by Little Richard, listed, in his high school year book, the ambition of joining Little Richard’s band.

And then Little Richard got religion.

Little Richard, who had been brought up in the church, of course, always believed in scripture, in Jesus, in the Ten Commandments and the Holy Spirit, but he didn’t care at first. He was flamboyant, charismatic, and absolutely homosexual. He lived the way he wanted. But in the early 1960’s, he embraced the religion of his upbringing and repudiated rock’n’roll. He refused to sing any of his hits. He sang gospel tunes, spirituals. Sometimes he would spice them up with a performance that suggested if not replicated his early career, but mostly he stood on stage in a suit and sang into a microphone while barely moving his body.

He says he gave up homosexual relationships. I’m not sure I believe him. He was still surrounded by gay men at times. It’s very hard to tell because Little Richard was not known for his honesty or candor when it came to his personal history.

The point is, Little Richard believed that his early career was a sinful expression of a sinful lifestyle– like the prostitute in my fable above. He begged God to forgive him. He tried to go straight and reform.

But…

As the documentary, “Little Richard: I am Everything” makes clear, unlike the prostitute of my fable, he wants it both ways. He demands recognition for the very things he repudiated in his later life. He demands honors and money for behaviors he now condemns, in his earlier self, and, by implication if not directly, in others.

He complains bitterly about not being paid for his sinful expressions.

I found the last half hour of the documentary a bit offensive because of that. That, and the the rather clumsy attempt to blame everything that was denied to Little Richard on homophobia, as if the Beatles, and Elvis, and Tom Petty, and Joni Mitchell, and everyone else go their due, except for poor old gay, black Little Richard. It’s simply not true. Little Richard did not get compensated fairly for his work because the music industry systematically rips off every young artist whatever their color, religion, or sexual orientation.

Do you think there’s a whole lot of straight male artists out there who were paid fairly and who feel that the industry treated them well? Or contemporary female country artists?

Leonard Cohen, incidentally, did the smart thing and retained control of his publishing rights… until his agent talked him into selling the entire catalogue to Sony Music and then pilfered the money forcing him to resume touring again.

Farting on Sacred Scripture

I don’t think politics can get much more stupid than this.

A Democratic politician has been taking bibles from tables in the lounge and hiding them under the seat cushions. In one case, he put one in the fridge. Some Republicans were horrified to discover that their asses actually rested on holy scripture. Some of them may even have farted. As we know, hell is full of miscreants who farted on holy scripture.

The Republicans apparently believe the Bible has some kind of weird voodoo power that can be transmitted up through the anus and into the larynx and cause otherwise rational politicians to defecate on Reason and Rationality and Intelligence and try to expel a Presbyterian Minister (Stahl Hamilton) who likes to play mild practical jokes. The vote was 30-28, a majority, but not enough. A two-thirds majority is required to expel a member.

Hamilton was apparently trying to make the point that religion and politics should be kept separate. The fact that the Republicans almost voted him out of office for tampering with their totemic texts tells you that he is absolutely right.

2023-05-25

Senator Tim Scott

During the summer 2011 debate over raising the U.S. debt ceiling, Scott supported the inclusion of a balanced-budget Constitutional amendment in the debt ceiling bill, and opposed legislation that did not include the amendment. Before voting against the final bill to raise the debt ceiling, Scott and other first-term conservatives prayed for guidance in a congressional chapel. Afterward, he said he had received divine inspiration for his vote, and joined the rest of the South Carolina congressional delegation in voting No. Wiki

The New York Times columnists seem to think highly of Mr. Scott, if not as president, then as VP.

I don’t think much of anyone who has the unmitigated arrogance to declare that he has the ear of God and the authority to relate unto us mere peons what the will of the almighty is. In this case, the stupid idea of compelling the national U.S. government to balance its books every year. There are very sound economic reasons why this is a preposterously unfeasible way to manage the national budget. Even more preposterous is the idea that the Republicans would not immediately break their own rule in order to increase the military budget without having to actually raise taxes in order to do it.

This is a man who has laid the theoretical foundation for making all abortions illegal, terminating Social Security and Medicare, and abandoning the United Nations. God told me to. And if I tell you that that is what God thinks, I am right you are wrong. There can be no debate with God. There can be no compromise.

Tim Scott appears to be a decent man– by Republican standards. He is civil. No personal scandals that I know of. And here’s an oddity, like Lindsay Graham, he is unmarried. Born in 1965, which makes him about 60, and unmarried. What does that mean? Does it mean what I think it means in regard to Lindsay Graham? I feel free to speculate because there is nothing wrong with being gay, but he is opposed to homosexual marriage, which would raise a host of fabulous intricacies in the perception of his social values.

His Justice Reform Bill, which got 55 votes in the Senate (not enough to bypass the filibuster) is not all bad. It’s not enough, but it’s a step in the right direction. He wants to rescind the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something more anodyne to Republicans, a nod to the fact that the act has actually become pretty popular. How to reduce the phenomenal growth of health care costs? Tort reform. It’s the “Mental Health” red herring for health care: something that will have virtually no impact on the problem it is supposed to solve but makes it sound like the Republicans are doing something about it.

He rather pathetically dodges reporters’ questions on the abortion issue but says he is against it but would sign a national 20-week ban if he was president. That is really a very odd position. He knows he desperately needs the votes of the most hypocritical demographic in the nation– evangelical “christians”– so he can’t be in favor of abortion rights, which makes a national ban at 20 weeks problematic. So he says he defers to state governments on the issues, which is the very epitome of passing the buck, equivocating, and, frankly, lying.

We know how Republicans handle deficits. When we have all the reigns of government (as they were in the first two years of the Trump Administration) they cut taxes which balloons the deficit and refuse to cut program spending because they know how unpopular that would make them. So the deficit is suddenly not a problem. (Trump added more to the deficit than any previous president).

It is only when the Democrats have the White House that their crocodile tears appear. I don’t expect Scott to be any exception. If he won, by some ridiculous sequence of events, like every other republican president in the past fifty years, he will do nothing about it.

2023-03-15

Pope Francis’ Deficiencies

Ross Douthat writes as if there is a real core Catholic faith that is being smothered by Francis’ liberal leanings. But after decades of evangelicals proclaiming themselves to be the party of spirituality and faith and integrity and humility and all the other values derived from the example of Christ and then stampeding into the arms of the most repugnant narcissist to ever run for office, one might be forgiven for regarding Douthat’s tears about the state of the Catholic church as disingenuous as best. Thanks to this embrace of Trump, and the sexual abuse scandals, and the residential school scandals, and the Magdalene laundries scandals, and so on and so on, it is very, very hard to regard any religion as anything more than a charade, a club, an exclusive confederation of self-righteous hypocrites. I gaze at these pious individuals in wonder and ask myself, what do you really believe? Anything, other than gaining advantage for the members of your club? Francis should declare that the era of Big Church is over and leave every locality to indulge in their own preferred hypocrisies.

2023-02-27

Oh My God! We’re Getting More Anxious

Ross Douthat of the New York Times— the token conservative commentator on the opinion page– accepts the results of a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that show that teenagers today– especially–omygawd! girls– are more anxious, more depressed, and more unhappy than ever before.

By “social liberalism” I don’t mean the progressivism that took off in the Trump era — antiracism and diversity-equity-inclusion and #MeToo. I mean the more individualistic liberalism that emerged in the 1960s and experienced a second takeoff across the first decade of the 2000s. Its defining features were rapid secularization (the decline of Christian identification accelerated from the 1990s onward) and increasing social and sexual permissiveness — extending beyond support for same-sex marriage to beliefs about premarital sex, divorce, out-of-wedlock childbearing, marijuana use and more.

And it’s all because of the liberals! Douthat doesn’t think gun violence should depress anyone, or the cut-throat competitive nature of the U.S. economy, or the fear of being bankrupted by medical expenses, or the fact that a sexual predator and psychopath was elected president in 2016. Oh no. It’s the widespread availability of sex, gay or hetero, as a woman or a man or neither, and, of course, drug use. Have we heard this before?

I have two points. First of all, we hear about these studies all the time– and I mean ALL the time. Sociologists and social scientists just love asking teenagers if they are happy. Now, imagine for a moment you are a teenager. And life is not great, but it’s not all bad either. You’re kind of getting through it. You have some hopes and dreams and know you might have to work hard to achieve them. You have friends. Then someone comes along and asks you if you are happy or depressed or anxious. They ask you again an hour later. They ask you again the next day, and the next, and the next. You read articles in the New York Times or see pieces on CNN that tell you that a big problem today is that teenagers are not very happy. You start to wonder. Maybe I am unhappy. Maybe I’m depressed.

I don’t deny that it might be true. What I question is the assumption that these numbers represent a net change from previous eras, like the 1940’s, the 1950’s, and 1960’s. How would we know? It’s a great question to thoughtfully ask yourself: how would we know?

Nobody studied issues like this in the same comprehensive, systematic way in the 1950’s as we do now. We didn’t have the internet, obviously, or social media, and even television and radio was completely different than they are today. We didn’t have as many books or magazines or records or films. We didn’t have as many family photographs or recordings, let alone video. We had numerous wars around the world, and the U.S. itself was embroiled in Korea, and about to get embroiled in Viet Nam.

We had a lot of obvious racism, whites only schools, whites only restaurants and drinking fountains. We had a lot of drunk driving and date-rape, both of which now are severely punished, but were not back then. In fact, the consensus on rape seemed to be to not report it at all. We had a lot of teen pregnancy, “shotgun” weddings, and groping and petting. We had a society that blindly worshipped the military and the police. (It is no coincidence that Douthat, a conservative, would harken back to an era of such “stellar” values even if he doesn’t make explicit those particular values).

I suspect that a big part of our perception of the 1950’s has been shaped by unrealistic media portrayals, most emblematically, in “Happy Days” and the movie “American Graffiti”. Have a look at “The Last Picture Show”, “Diner”, “Rebel Without a Cause”, or “Badlands” for a corrective.

Secondly, Douthat clearly implies that enthusiastic membership in a church is a viable corrective. If only we had a study that showed that teenagers who are active members of churches are happier, less depressed and less anxious, and happier, than those who are not. We have no such study.

What studies we do have that compare church-going folk with non-church-going folk seems to show that we are all largely the same, holy or profane, saved or damned. We all indulge in porn. We all cheat and lie. (But only one side votes for Trump and loves guns and only one side believes you may have been born to the wrong gender and the world is warming.)

Even for Douthat, this column is unusually contrived in his desperation to find some way to blame liberals and progressives for the sad state of America. Like all conservatives, he knows that his side, the side of regressive, low tax, deregulated economies, benefits by promoting a sense that we are on the brink of catastrophe. Nothing new. We’ve been on this brink according to the Douthats of the world since Elvis first gyrated his hips.

2022-11-042022-11-04

Permission to Vent

Did you know that in the 1960’s, while all of the mainstream media devoted their sports sections to professional baseball, football, basketball, stockcar racing, and hockey, the sport that attracted the most actual fans– in person, in stadiums– was…. ready for it? Demolition derbies.

In politics, the whacky far right is the demolition derby of ideologies. Until recently, relegated to the back pages of history.

In spite of all the think-pieces about polarization in American politics, I really think the issue comes down to something much simpler.

Firstly, there has not been a massive change in attitudes or beliefs over the past 70 or 80 years. A large segment of the U.S. population has always held stupid ideas about culture, education, leadership, the military, and the police. And, of course, race. They love guns, hate affirmative action, can’t bear the thought of giving up their massive V-8 powered pick-up trucks, fear black people even if they don’t see themselves as racist (and some aren’t), and hate the idea of foreigners coming into the country and taking away their jobs while they themselves are unwilling to work hard for long hours to get ahead and there is a labour shortage in most areas of the country. They believe that good manufacturing jobs have been shipped over-seas even though 85% of them were lost to automation. They believe Republicans when they say they intend to reduce the deficit even though, when in office, they never have and never will. They seem to think that cutting taxes on the rich will benefit them, because, fuck it, some day I might win the lottery.

Until recently, people with toxic beliefs about society have intuited that they shouldn’t openly express those views because the consensus among politicians, the media, and other leaders is that those views are, in fact, untrue, toxic, and counter-productive, and ignorant.

They always believe crime is on the increase. Always. Try to explain to them that if crime was always increasing it would eventually reach 100%, so there must be times when it is actually decreasing (in fact, the crime rate is up only in year-over-year statistics. Over a longer period of time, it is down, by a clear margin).

They think that somehow making the bail system rational increases crime: no study has shown this. Not one.

Newt Gingrich came along, and Alex Jones, and Rush Limbaugh, and then Donald Trump, and they all publicly expressed massive approval of these toxic beliefs. The internet broke the consensus among major media outlets to not give play to ill-founded, idiotic conspiracy theories. Now every ignorant, ill-informed jack-ass in the country can search online to find that the cause of the wild-fires in California is Jewish space lasers or sun spots.

Try to explain to these people that international trade agreements, on the whole, benefit them. (Essentially, the lower cost of imported goods frees capital within the local market to pay for more goods, services, and other items which you otherwise could not afford. Free trade is a net benefit to the average American worker and consumer. Tariffs take money out of your pocket and give it to the government which in turn subsidizes corporations to the benefit of wealthy shareholders.)

People haven’t changed. They are just louder and more outspoken and more than happy to enlighten you as to their brilliant insights into the nature of reality and the truth about Biden and the international child porn conspiracy and Hollywood’s Jewish cabal and they way young school-children in small towns all across Iowa are being provided with litter boxes so they can “identify” as a transgender kitten.

Perhaps the most bizarre characteristic of these people is their close identification with Christianity. Do any of them actually read the Bible? Do they really see something in Jesus reflected in Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity? Do they really think God blesses them as they storm the capitol building and threaten to hang Mike Pence?

2022-09-07

To the “Christians” who Voted for Donald Trump

Millions of people who claim– like you– that Jesus Chris is their model, their leader, their hero— voted for and embraced Donald Trump.

Your religion obviously means absolutely nothing. Not a thing. It’s the badge of a private club you belong to that only seeks to further the material interests of its members. Nothing you ever proclaimed about virtue or sin or spirituality or loving your neighbor or blessing the meek or not casting stones– nothing!– can be even remotely connected to this crass, self-serving, pussy-grabbing, materialistic, manipulative, liar.

Say no more. Your actions have proclaimed the truth about your church and your religion. It is an empty shell.

2022-07-17

The Coming Convergence and the Blessings of Being a 10-year-old Mom

I am surprised by the views expressed by “pro-life” individuals in this survey and interviews in the New York Times.

What is striking is how flexible these individuals are about when abortion should be legal and when not. Years ago, Right to Live declared that the minute a sperm fertilizes an egg, you have a human life that is entitled to the full protection of the law, even in cases of rape or incest. They still declare that, but real people– real Republicans– don’t believe it. They seem to be open to the idea that there should be “reasonable” limits– even up to 12 weeks. And they believe that abortions should be allowed in cases of rape.

They are also under the mistaken belief that a mother’s life is more at risk of death or serious injury in an abortion than she is in child birth. That is flatly not true. Stunningly, even the pro-choice panel the New York Times convened for the same purpose believed it. That messaging from Right to Life has taken hold.

How stupid are the Republicans? Well, I bet Mitch McConnell understands that the Republicans need to embrace a “safety-valve” on the issue: tolerate some flexibility and some exceptions so they can say they haven’t banned all abortions. But other hot-heads in the party seem determined to take a hard line, even when it comes to that 10-year-old girl (perhaps, one commentator asserted, she doesn’t appreciate the blessings of being a mother).

What remains to be determined is just how much of a factor this might be in the coming mid-term elections. Probably, the economy will matter more, even when the perception that the economy is in a mess is wrong. Inflation is a problem, but employment, consumer spending and confidence, hiring, and productivity are all favorable. Nobody cares: they want to believe that Biden is a feeble old man who is out of his depth, so they insist that the economy is a disaster.