Civil Commotion

The Steele Dossier was a work-product prepared for a Republican candidate for the presidential nomination. When that candidate dropped-out of the race, Steele peddled the file to the Clinton campaign; so far as that goes, it’s nothing unusual — and the FISA Court was notified of the file’s provenance.

Trump and his sycophants are lying. They make things up out of thin air, they distort everything else, and they repeat it until it becomes “true.” This is exactly the Big Lie propaganda technique of Joseph Goebbels — live, in real time, right in front of our eyes.

Do your duty, Congress.

That’s because they [Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan] read polls, including an astonishing one that SurveyMonkey just did for Axios. It revealed that 79 percent of Republicans approved of Trump’s sycophantic performance at the news conference with Vladimir Putin, while 85 percent deem the investigation of Russian intrusion into our elections a distraction. They bear less and less resemblance to the followers of a coherent ideology and more and more to the members of a cult. That word is gaining currency in our political discourse for excellent reason.

Frank Bruni

Yep — and I’ve been talking about this since before the inauguration.

When a congregation learns that Pastor Bubba is raping its children, the all-but-invariable response is to rally around the pastor and re-victimize his victims, to double-down on loyalty and obedience to Big Daddy — to the strongman; that certainly fits the description of ‘authoritarians.’ Now recall this: The Japanese believed before World War II that the emperor was a god — and when Douglas MacArthur was appointed military governor of Japan following Japan’s defeat, they simply transferred their loyalty and obedience to the new Big Daddy, the new strongman; the Japanese lined the streets and cried unashamedly when MacArthur left.

Cult is not too strong a word. I imagine psychologists have a name for it, but the simple account of what has happened is this: The unreasoning, uncritical loyalty that usually is reserved for religion has been transferred to The Donald. When you hear clowns like Robert Jeffress and Jerry Falwell et. al. speaking of Trump as a Savior, the Big Daddy figure who is going to save them … they believe it.

Attorney General Bill Schuette, a Republican candidate for governor, has determined that existing state laws do not bar discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

In a legal opinion sure to reverberate through his campaign for governor, Republican Attorney General Bill Schuette on Friday deemed “invalid” a new agency interpretation that had extended anti-discrimination protections to gay and transgender Michigan residents.

It’s difficult to imagine a more profound repudiation of history. After all, Michigan is the home of the labor movement, an important supporter of the civil rights movement; there is probably no one organization that did so much as the U.A.W. to help minorities, especially blacks and immigrants, into the middle class.

So now in Michigan, the home of some of the world’s finest universities (including my alma mater, Michigan Tech), you can lawfully discriminate against the innate trait of sexual orientation, but you cannot discriminate against the chosen imbecilities and character failures of religion.

Don’t look for Michigan to restore itself to the first tier of economically important states any time soon.

Robert Ingersoll had a much more clear-headed view of the Bible, I think.

This book is the enemy of freedom, the support of slavery. This book sowed the seeds of hatred in families and nations, fed the flames of war, and impoverished the world. This book is the breastwork of kings and tyrants—the enslaver of women and children. This book has corrupted parliaments and courts. This book has made colleges and universities the teachers of error and the haters of science. This book has filled Christendom with hateful, cruel, ignorant and warring sects. This book taught men to kill their fellows for religion’s sake. This book funded the Inquisition, invented the instruments of torture, built the dungeons in which the good and loving languished, forged the chains that rusted in their flesh, erected the scaffolds whereon they died. This book piled fagots about the feet of the just. This book drove reason from the minds of millions and filled the asylums with the insane.

This book has caused fathers and mothers to shed the blood of their babes. This book was the auction block on which the slave- mother stood when she was sold from her child. This book filled the sails of the slave-trader and made merchandise of human flesh. This book lighted the fires that burned “witches” and “wizards.” This book filled the darkness with ghouls and ghosts, and the bodies of men and women with devils. This book polluted the souls of men with the infamous dogma of eternal pain. This book made credulity the greatest of virtues, and investigation the greatest of crimes. This book filled nations with hermits, monks and nuns—with the pious and the useless. This book placed the ignorant and unclean saint above the philosopher and philanthropist. This book taught man to despise the joys of this life, that he might be happy in another—to waste this world for the sake of the next.

I attack this book because it is the enemy of human liberty—the greatest obstruction across the highway of human progress.

Let me ask the ministers one question: How can you be wicked enough to defend this book?

I’m with Ingersoll: How can you be wicked enough to defend this book? No matter how it is spun, no matter what pious nicety is employed, the bottom-line remains unchanged: Abraham’s god was an incandescent sociopath.

Bruce Gerencser has up a nice post about living His will; mercifully, it almost always turns out that what He wants is identical to what the believer wants. As I never tire of saying, most people have too much sense and decency to be good Christians.

I was a part of the Christian church for fifty years, and I was an Evangelical pastor for twenty-five of those years. I know a good bit about submitting oneself to the will of God, and I watched countless Evangelicals suss out God’s will for their lives. I found that in almost every circumstance, God’s will coincided with what people wanted to do. Christians love to gussy up their decisions with spiritual sounding statements such as; yielding to Christ, following in his footsteps, etc., but no matter how the picture is painted, one fact remains: God’s will and human desire are one and the same.

It’s good to hear a former pastor acknowledge that, even if it has always been incandescently obvious to those of us who don’t belong to the club.

Gerencser takes up something else I’ve discussed often through the years — that, taken seriously, Christianity demands no less than self-annihilation.

Throughout the New Testament, Paul reminds Christians of the importance of dying to self; of crucifying the flesh; of giving oneself totally, completely, and without reservation to God. Christians are commanded to give themselves as living sacrifices to God.

Or, abandon self-interest and self-direction because your self is putrid, guilty, depraved, no damn good.

Think carefully, and you’ll realize you’ve never in your life gone to church without hearing some variation of that; it is Christianity’s only truly indispensable claim. After all, if you don’t believe that you’re no damn good and need salvation, then Christianity has nothing on offer but the opportunity to spend Sunday mornings with, generally, mild, insecure, and uninteresting people who all believe that they’re b-b-b-bad to the bone.