Civil Commotion

Which brings me back to Schwarzenegger’s question — “What’s the matter with you?” It applies not just to the president but also all the people enabling him. Why do they so freely sacrifice their own reputations and their own integrity to defend a man with no integrity, a man who would sell each and every one of them down the river the second he decided it was in his interest? It is inexplicable to me.

At least Stormy Daniels got paid.

Thomas Friedman

Just so: I grew up Republican, but the last time I felt able to vote Republican was 2004 — and I had to hold my nose. I never imagined that the party of luminaries like Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower would someday be servile and craven before a tarted-up carnival barker like The Donald.

I suspect that what has happened to the Republican Party is what has happened to a great many Southern Baptist churches — the sane people have left, and only the crazies remain; there is no large, sensible middle to inhibit their lunatic impulses. If you’ve never read it, this would be a good time to pickup a copy of Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements.

What do you know? A book which purports to set out the truth about the deep-state conspiracy against Donald Trump is at #1 on Amazon’s Politics and Social Sciences list. The Donald, y’all will not be surprised to learn, is beside himself with joy.

Well, a conspiracy to frame the Buffoon-in-Chief is a grave matter; let’s see what this book has to say for itself.

Fox News legal analyst Gregg Jarrett reveals the real story behind Hillary Clinton’s deep state collaborators in government and exposes their nefarious actions during and after the 2016 election.

The Russia Hoax reveals how persons within the FBI and Barack Obama’s Justice Department worked improperly to help elect Hillary Clinton and defeat Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.

When this suspected effort failed, those same people appear to have pursued a contrived investigation of President Trump in an attempt to undo the election results and remove him as president.

The evidence suggests that partisans within the FBI and the Department of Justice, driven by personal animus and a misplaced sense of political righteousness, surreptitiously acted to subvert electoral democracy in our country.

The overwrought language and weasel-words tell you everything you need to know about the book — it isn’t journalism, it’s conspiracy-mongering advocacy.

The talking-snake crowd, the people who weep for the perfidy of a world that hates Poor Donald every time yet another of his indecencies is revealed, will probably break their years-long habit of avoiding books in order to make it a best-seller. The rest of us can safely ignore it.

I rarely write or tweet nowadays about stories involving sex abuse in the church environment because …

• Life is too short to spend it wading through sewage, and …

• It’s nonstop, and …

• Anybody who doesn’t know by now that church is a dangerous place for women and children is an inattentive fool who probably can’t be helped by exposure to facts anyhow, and …

• Sexual abuse in the church inheres in the innate degradations of Christian teaching, so there is more sex abuse in churches than elsewhere in society, and abusive churches and predatory pastors will persist till the last spire crashes to the ground.

Even so, a local story is worth noting.

“There’s this culture of fear and you have to obey the ultimate leader and authority,” said Cherith Roberson, 32, a former church member. “And it starts from the beginning.”

[ … ]

“It was taught, it was preached about, that you break a child’s spirit. And you do that by whatever means necessary,” she said.

Her little sister, Beka Foust, was just 5 years old.

“I knew this was not normal,” Foust said. I didn’t know what normal was.”

The sisters say all the children attended school at church. They say they were told what to wear, what to believe, and were not allowed contact with anyone on the outside.

“You were ostracized from everybody else,” Foust said.

I don’t doubt a word of any of that. I live in a seminary-dominated town, have known many seminarians through the years — and the most serious-minded of them believed and lived the same things. The difference between them and a ‘cult’ is a difference not of kind, but of degree.

This should not surprise anybody. The first century Jewish sect that became Christianity following the failure of the Jewish Rebellion was a persecuted cult, and the New Testament is the literature of a cult. When people are so foolish they take it seriously, there are bound to be problems.

Through-the-looking-glass crazy — and the Deplorable One-third are right there with him. How ironic that the loonies who for years have insisted that Clinton and then Obama intended to cancel elections are backing the first president in our history whose misconducts can plausibly be characterized as treason.

As the Senate considers the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, and confronts the very real possibility that Roe v. Wade will be overturned, the Evangelical Right is busy making certain that all right-minded people know that Our Invisible Friend hates abortion. Albert the Pious, for instance:

The early church was decidedly, vocally, and courageously pro-life and opposed to abortion. One of the earliest documents of Christianity after the New Testament is the Didache, dated to around AD 80–120. The teaching describes two ways: the way of life and the way of death. The way of life demands that Christians “shall not murder a child by abortion nor commit infanticide.” Both abortion and infanticide were common in the Roman Empire. Christians were forbidden to murder any child, born or unborn.

Mohler offers this, too:

The only consistent biblical logic is to affirm the sanctity and dignity of every human life from the moment of fertilization.

Where to begin? It is true that there were people going around calling themselves ‘Christians’ late in the first century, but to suggest that there was a settled Christian doctrine about anything at that time is wildly untrue — and it’s difficult to understand how Mohler wouldn’t know that. The best book — of my acquaintance, anyway — about the multiplicity of beliefs going by the name Christianity during that period is Bart Ehrman’s Lost Christianities.

There was not even agreement at that time about which texts comprised The Bible, which is inerrant et cetera, et cetera.

And, speaking of the Inerrant Bible, we learn there that Our Invisible Friend …

• Drowned all of humanity in a great flood, including suckling babies and mewling kittens.

• Happily accepted the sacrifice of Jepthah’s daughter.

• Sent bears to kill a couple dozen children for laughing at a bald prophet

• Blithely overlooked incestuous rape among Kind David’s children.

• And myriad other offenses against ordinary decency, all of which suggest indifference to the well-being of children.

Seriously: Why would Our Bloodthirsty Invisible Friend care about abortion? Because he misses out on the opportunity to torment those children later?

And what about the thousands of children He passively allows to die every single day of starvation, pestilence, disease … on and on? Mercifully, He at least does not torment those children or their frantic mothers with the Good News that the Creator Of The Whole Big Universe wants to ‘save’ them.

And another thing: Does Mohler know that a fertilized egg has to survive till implantation in the wall of the uterus in order for it to develop and someday be born — and a majority of fertilized eggs don’t make it?

I say again: The clergy are the most intellectually corrupt class of men in American life.