Civil Commotion

Bruce Gerencser has prepared a nice précis of evangelical eschatology, explaining the importance of The Donald’s summary gift of the Golan Heights to Israel, concluding …

Still think religious beliefs aren’t harmful and don’t pose a threat to the rest of us? Still think Evangelicals are a bunch of irrational people with quaint, but irrelevant, beliefs? If you have read this far, surely it has dawned on you that Evangelical eschatological beliefs pose an existential threat to the future of humanity. I am not overplaying my hand here. God’s chosen people, Israel, and God’s city on a hill, the United States, both have nuclear weapons. So does Russia. Do you know that millions of Evangelicals believe that a war against the United States and Russia is prophesied in the Bible?

Gerencser is absolutely correct: Unreasoning belief in this crazy stuff is a menace to all of us. The faith, the belief without evidence, the suspension of reason, that preachers howl and bellow for and demand is an evil.

I am not as worried as Bruce, however. According to the Inerrant Bible, the Forces of Satan will arrive at the Battle of Armageddon on 200,000,000-horses. Well, as it happens, the world horse population has been in decline since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, and according to U.N. estimates it now stands at about 50,000,000. Years ago, I did the math: If the horse population begins today to grow at a rate of 5% per year, we’ve got about 30- to 35-years until the Big Showdown. I’ll be dead and disintegrated when that happens. I suppose it’s possible that an Invisible Wizard will reassemble me and somehow restore the unique complex of genes and memories and electrical impulses which comprise my consciousness in order to torture me for eternity, but there are obvious practical problems with that and I am unable to feel any real worry.

What do you know? The Jehovah’s Witnesses have kept a database of accused child abusers for more than 2-decades. It hasn’t done much good, though.

Rooted in Deuteronomy 19:15 — “No single witness may convict another for any error or any sin that he may commit” — the two-witness rule states that, barring a confession, no member of the organization can be officially accused of committing a sin without two credible eyewitnesses who are willing to corroborate the accusation. Critics say this rule has helped turn Witness communities into havens for child molesters, who rarely commit crimes in the presence of bystanders.

Don’t take your kids to church on Sunday morning; take them to the park, instead.

Also, though it’s incidental to the thrust of the story, notice what happened when one of the husbands refused to go to church any longer.

That November, as he and Kimmy were preparing to spend the weekend at a friend’s house, Mark suddenly stopped packing and told Kimmy he couldn’t maintain the facade anymore. He never attended another meeting.

Though Kimmy kept going to meetings, her Witness friends pressured her to leave her marriage. “They would just come out of the blue with unsolicited advice,” she told me. “‘Don’t forget, Kimmy, Jehovah comes first!’ ‘At some point, you’ll have to make your choice!’”

Again, then: The 1^st-Century church was a cult, and the New Testament is the literature of a cult. The thing that saves Christianity from itself is that most people have too much sense and decency to be good Christians. Read the entire piece for a view of what life is like amongst those who don’t.

It appears to me that Donald Trump has, finally, got the Attorney General he wanted — a lawyer who thinks his client is Donald Trump rather than the United States of America. If that is so, it’s a deep, fundamental breach of faith on Barr’s part and an incandescent threat to the rule of law.

So I’m wondering: What do y’all think?

Much has been made of Robert Mueller’s decision — as reported by the Barr memo — not to make a decision in connection with whether or not the Trump administration committed obstruction of justice. Astonishingly, I have yet to hear on television, or read on the Washington Post or New York Times opinion pages, the explanation that occurred to me immediately: Most of the obstruction (but certainly not all) was directed at Mueller himself, and it would be unethical for him to pass judgment on a matter in which he is a party.

Unless there is some ethical rule guiding Special Counsels that I just don’t know about, it seems clear to me that he had no choice but to pass those instances of obstructive behavior to others. And, after eating horseshit for two years, I’d love to know what Mueller thinks of Barr’s and Rosenstein’s (the author of the memo used to dismiss Comey) summary declaration that Trump did not obstruct justice.

They’re planning vengeance over in the fever swamp and, since William Barr has abandoned his client and joined Trump’s legal defense team, it would be a mistake to expect more than the forms of justice. Look out, everybody.