Civil Commotion

Some of you have probably wondered from time-to-time, “What’s with Michelle Bachmann these days? Does she still say painfully stupid things?”

Oh, man … yes, she is still around, and she still says things so stupid it makes your ears hurt.

I would encourage pastors to start preaching on this issue of climate change and God’s view of climate change. The very covenant was established by God and Noah. And that covenant was that sin was so gross in the world that God had to bring about judgment, and then he had to bring about salvation, and from there came Abraham. God put a rainbow in the sky as a sign of his covenant and he said very clearly to the entire world, ‘Never again will there be judgment, never again will the world be flooded.

“You can take it to the bank, that’s God’s word. And what is it these frauds tells us with climate change? That the world’s going to be flooded. Isn’t it interesting they’re saying it’s going to be another catastrophe, it’s flooding, we’re going to be flooded? God says we will never be flooded.

I want to challenge every pastor listening, would you please give a sermon on climate change and God’s view of climate change? This isn’t being political, this is being biblical, and I am begging the pastors who are listening, be biblical on issue after issue after issue. Be biblical because God’s people are perishing because of lack of knowledge, and the greatest antidote to deception is knowledge. And that’s why we need the pulpits to prepare people with what the Bible says about truth.

There you go: Some Bronze Age anonymity’s Invisible Friend told him ‘no more floods,’ so not to worry. Alternatively — and more sensibly, I think — you should now be really worried because you live in country where an awful lot of people don’t know that Michelle Bachmann is a hopeless moron, and she earns good money being stupid.

I’ve sat through exactly one sermon in my life that I got something worthwhile out of — the sermon when the pastor read out a list of writers whose books no decent, godly person should allow in his home. I can’t remember the entire list now, but there was only one writer whose books I didn’t already have: Friedrich Nietzsche.

So I picked-up a copy of Twilight of the Idols next time I was at Barnes & Noble, and I’m glad I did. Nietzsche was a true freak-of-nature genius, and his frank contempt for pious buffoons is endlessly refreshing.

• Plato was a bore.

• Here the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire.

• He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.

• In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.

• To the sort of men who reach out for power under Judaism and Christianity, — that is to say, to the priestly class — decadence is no more than a means to an end. Men of this sort have a vital interest in making mankind sick, and in confusing the values of “good” and “bad,” “true” and “false” in a manner that is not only dangerous to life, but also slanders it.

• The ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ is a condition of the heart — not something that comes ‘upon the earth’ or ‘after death’.

• The very word “Christianity” is a misunderstanding — in truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.

• “Faith” means not wanting to know.

• The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.

• A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.

• In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.

• There are no moral facts.

• Christianity destroyed for us the whole harvest of ancient civilization, and later it also destroyed for us the whole harvest of Mohammedan civilization.

• I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct for revenge for which no expedient is sufficiently poisonous, secret, subterranean, petty — I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind.

You get the idea. Nietzsche was the first to grasp — or, at least, to say aloud — that Christianity could not possibly survive the confluence of the revival in the 1850s of critical scholarship applied to the ancient texts which comprise the Bible, and Darwin’s theory of evolution; events have proved him correct.

That is why the Pious have ever since blackened his name. Reality always has the last word, however.

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This post is re-published annually on October 15^th.

This video was shown this weekend at a conference of Trump supporters that was held at a Miami-area golf course owned by Trump, and apparently was well-received.

This goes past tasteless; after all, numerous news outlets have been forced to hire bodyguards to protect their journalists at Trump rallies. Can there be any realistic doubt that many of Trump’s supporters fantasize about violence against reporters? No, there can’t be any doubt; didn’t one of them make a video depicting exactly that?

Though this video has been a headline for more than 24-hours now, Trump has yet to tweet his dismay at being represented killing journalists.

The Museum of the Bible appears to have acquired not merely texts of uncertain provenance, but texts that were affirmatively stolen.

Last year the Egyptian Exploration Society (EES), the non-profit organization that owns the Oxyrhynchus papyri collection deposited at the Sackler Library University of Oxford, had just announced a new discovery and publication: a late second- or early third-century Common Era fragment of the first chapter of the Gospel of Mark. It was a huge announcement: Scholars possess very few early copies of the New Testament, thus, any newly discovered fragments from the first few centuries of the Common Era is inherently important and inherently valuable.

The discovery was shrouded in controversy because despite its announcement as “news,” academics had known about this fragment for over five years. It had been mentioned in connection with representatives of the Green Family, the owners of Hobby Lobby and the founders of the Museum of the Bible, in Washington, D.C. Last year the EES said in no uncertain terms that the papyrus had never been for sale. If that was true, we and others asked, how did so many people at the Green family know about this fragment and why did they think they had acquired it?

Now Michael Holmes, Director of the Museum of the Bible’s Scholar’s Initiative, has made a shocking accusation: that one of the academics involved in the original publication of the fragment, distinguished Oxford scholar Dirk Obbink, appears to have sold a papyrus that belonged to the EES to Hobby Lobby in 2013.

The Green family plunged into the antiquities market with a lot of money to build a collection for its Museum of the Bible, and so it probably shouldn’t be a surprise that there were sellers willing to cut corners to make a quick buck.

There apparently is a lot of loose stuff out there, too. After all, there were a lot of texts left lying around, and state and scholarly interest in protecting them is relatively recent. Fragments, some quite large, were brought home by visitors to the Middle East, passed to friends and family and eventually made their way to the attic — a forgotten souvenir that nobody quite knew what to do about. I see nothing inherently improper about acquiring those texts, even if their origin and an ownership chain cannot be comprehensively documented.

Clearly, though, the Museum didn’t exercise the level of care expected of serious scholars.

Once you actually realize how degrading Christianity really is — Y’all are no damn good! — you can’t un-hear it. Worse, Christianity’s degrading premises are so deeply embedded in its thought and expression that it tends to pass unnoticed unless you’re alert to it.

I was thinking of these things yesterday when Dawn and I attended a memorial for the mother of a friend, which was held at a local Baptist church that broke with the Southern Baptist Convention during the serial indecencies of the so-called Conservative Resurgence (fundamentalist takeover, more precisely, kind of like what has happened to the GOP). So, at least with respect to the SBC, this would probably be characterized as a liberal church.

One of the hymns chosen for the service was that beautiful staple, Amazing Grace. But look at the lyrics:

Amazing Grace, How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me
I once was lost, but now am found
T’was blind but now I see

T’was Grace that taught my heart to fear
And Grace, my fears relieved
How precious did that grace appear
The hour I first believed

Through many dangers, toils and snares
We have already come.
T’was grace that brought us safe thus far
And grace will lead us home,
And grace will lead us home

Amazing grace, Howe Sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me
I once was lost but now am found
T’was blind but now I see

Was blind, but now I see.

Is there anything — anything — in this hymn that lifts up? I was particularly struck by the opening of the second verse: “T’was Grace that taught my heart to fear.” Right: How very fortunate that an Invisible Friend filled the author’s heart with terror at the prospect of justice for being an utterly worthless heap of dung.

And this is one of the most beloved hymns in all of Christendom.

No, thanks. I’m with the closing words of Bertrand Russell’s famous lecture, Why I Am Not A Christian.

We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world—its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is, and be not afraid of it. Conquer the world by intelligence, and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it. The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men. When you hear people in church debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners, and all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings. We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages. A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past, or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time towards a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create.

Surely that’s healthier than singing about being a terror-filled wretch.