..Breaking News: The Ukrainian Government just said they weren’t pressured at all during the “nice” call. Sleepy Joe Biden, on the other hand, forced a tough prosecutor out from investigating his son’s company by threat of not giving big dollars to Ukraine. That’s the real story!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 23, 2019
This is a brazen lie by even Trump standards — and, encouraged by FOX News, the malice-eaten ignoramuses who are his cult are going to believe every word of it.
So it appears that the president might have used his official powers — in particular, perhaps the threat of withholding a quarter-billion dollars in military aid — to leverage a foreign government into helping him defeat a potential political opponent in the United States.
If Trump did that, it would be the ultimate impeachable act. Trump has already done more than enough to warrant impeachment and removal with his relentless attempts, on multiple fronts, to sabotage the counterintelligence and criminal investigation by then-special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and to conceal evidence of those attempts. The president’s efforts were impeachable because, in committing those obstructive acts, he put his personal interests above the nation’s: He tried to stop an investigation into whether a hostile foreign power, Russia, tried to interfere with our democracy — simply because he seemed to find it personally embarrassing. Trump breached his duty of faithful execution to the nation not only because he likely broke the law but also because, through his disregard for the law, he put his self-interest first.
The current whistleblowing allegations, however, are even worse.
Given the Trump administration’s determination to prevent the whistleblower report from being given to Congress, and Giuliani’s offhand admission on CNN that he tried to spur a Ukrainian investigation of Biden et. al., it appears to me that the basic story outline has to be accepted as true.
Trump has consumed all of the Congress’ discretion. They act now to defend the government against him, or surrender the American experiment in self-governance.
Harris claims that at least three professors believe in evolution (and one professor called Ken Ham a “charlatan”), that speakers are sometimes chosen because they give money to the institution, several professors advocate Molinism, and includes other problematic doctrinal stances.
It was creeping liberalism at SEBTS that played a role in triggering the so-called “Conservative Resurgence” w-a-a-a-y back in the late 70’s, and it looks as if SEBTS students are once again in danger of getting an education.
No less than the cost of liberty, apparently, the cost of pious ignorance is eternal vigilance.
U.S. Orders Duke and U.N.C. to Recast Tone in Mideast Studies
The Education Department has ordered Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to remake the Middle East studies program run jointly by the two schools after concluding that it was offering students a biased curriculum that, among other complaints, did not present enough “positive” imagery of Judaism and Christianity in the region.
In a rare instance of federal intervention in college course content, the department asserted that the universities’ Middle East program violated the standards of a federal program that awards funding to international studies and foreign language programs. The inquiry was part of a far-reaching investigation into the program by the department, which under Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, has become increasingly aggressive in going after perceived anti-Israel bias in higher education.
I’m with Gore Vidal: The Abrahamic monotheisms are the worst thing that has ever happened to humanity. I’ll add that only if you live inside the bubble of Judaism or Christianity can you believe that they are uniquely virtuous and Islam uniquely evil; all are an engine of human misery.
It probably seems hard to believe nowadays, but religious violence was not always a staple of life. As Jonathan Kirsch shows convincingly in God Against the Gods, it is very much the case that religious warfare was all but unknown in the pagan world. After all, if you liked to eat rutabagas, and your neighbor had a god that helped to grow rutabagas, you were more likely to borrow that god than kill your neighbor.
The United Methodist Church is trying to organize an amicable break-up over the status of LGBTQ members.
The UMC’s General Conference 2020, to be held in May in Minneapolis, will consider the structure of what church leaders hope can be an amicable, and orderly, breakup of a worldwide church that is the second largest Protestant denomination in the United States. The various plans come in response to a vote earlier this year by the church’s decision-making body to strengthen language barring LGBTQ United Methodists from ordination and marriage.
That decision came in February at a special session of the General Conference that approved the conservative Traditional Plan, which centrists and progressives in the church have rejected and adamantly resisted. The resulting chaos has led some churches to withhold money from the denomination or to call for schism.
What a lot of pointless heartbreak and expense. When scientific research has established dispositively that individual sexuality is the culmination of both genes and environment, this kind of turmoil has to be counted a direct consequence of the resolute ignorance, and character failure, of faith. Faith is not a virtue; it is a grave moral error.
