Civil Commotion

Every time I get to thinking that the traditional Christian storyline is so bizarre, so self-evidently ridiculous, that nobody could possibly believe it, that religion has more to do with community and group identity than actual belief, along comes a story like this:

Though race, ethnicity, abortion, sexual identity, on and on, are all predictable flashpoints, I grow more and more convinced as the years go by that the great dividing line in American life is education. And I don’t mean by that merely the accumulation of bald facts and analytical habits of thought; I mean the self-confidence that goes with a good education, the sense of fitness it engenders. What but a sense of helplessness before a world gone out of control could lead to the deranged idea that a toddler is possessed by a supernatural demon that must be starved to death?

John Dowd, until this morning the head of Trump’s legal team, has resigned.

The president’s lead lawyer for the special counsel investigation, John Dowd, resigned on Thursday, according to two people briefed on the matter, days after the president called for an end to the inquiry.

Mr. Dowd, who took over the president’s legal team last summer, had considered leaving several times in recent months and ultimately concluded that Mr. Trump was increasingly ignoring his advice, one of the people said. Under Mr. Dowd’s leadership, Mr. Trump’s lawyers had advised him to cooperate with the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, who is investigating Russia’s election interference and possible ties to Trump associates as well as whether the president obstructed the inquiry.

My recollection is that there was a lot of churn on Richard Nixon’s Watergate defense team, as well, though I’m unable to find any online reference.

In spite of the jokes, the lawyers of my acquaintance have always exhibited high ethical standards. We don’t really know what happened between Trump and Dowd, and probably won’t, but I have no difficulty imagining that Dowd is happy to have washed his hands of Trump.

Bill Donohue takes up the report I discussed yesterday, which further evidences that Christianity is in decline throughout Europe. He has too much sense to deny what everybody knows, but takes a predictable cheap shot.

Who saw this all coming? Pope Benedict XVI. He saw the effects of multiculturalism as clearly as anyone, showing how a contempt for moral truths that adhere to the Judeo-Christian ethos has led to “a peculiar Western self-hatred that is nothing short of pathological.”

The de-Christianization of the West has yielded such fruit as record high levels of abortion, out-of-wedlock births, homosexuality, divorce, sexually transmitted diseases, pornography, prostitution, drug abuse, depression, and suicide. This is the natural outcome of a civilization that has allowed moral relativism to triumph over Christianity. Just as Pope Benedict XVI said it would.

As I’ve shown repeatedly through the years, the family– and social-pathologies he names are in almost all cases most intense where the churches are strongest — here in the so-called Bible Belt.

And what on earth is that quote from Pope Benedict XVI supposed to mean? Christianity deliberately, and ruinously, cultivates self-hatred — the beliefs that you’re no damn good, that you can never be any damn good, that the only way to escape the eternal torture that you were born deserving is to join their ridiculous club.

Has Donohue ever actually thought about Christian teaching, its indispensable metaphysical claim: Original Sin? The evidence of his remarks is … No.

Bah.

The Christian Post reports:

The man suspected of being behind a series of deadly package bombs in Austin, Texas, was a Christian who was homeschooled and advocated for socially conservative views.

Mark Anthony Conditt, 23, an unemployed resident of Pflugerville …

More:

Schultz said they were both involved in a group called Righteous Invasion of Truth (RIOT), a Bible study and outdoors group for homeschooled kids …

[ … ]

RIOT events also included 30 minutes to an hour of Bible study, Schultz said.

She said she attended Bible study at Conditt’s parents’ home. She described the family as “more conservative, strictly religious.”

This saddens more than surprises; it’s been obvious for a long time that many on the the Evangelical Right are on the edge of violence, and many churches have been preaching what can only be called sedition for a long time.

This is going to get worse before it gets better, because the carefully cultivated irrationality of the Evangelical Right affirmatively rejects reason. That is, you can’t reason with people like Conditt because they believe reason itself is Satan’s instrument of trickery and deceit — to think is a moral failing. Inevitably, then, as they are moved toward the margins by the evolution of society, their alienation is ratcheted-up. This reaction against modernism is what has happened all over the world as the Abrahamic religions have lost their influence, and is at the root of a lot of domestic and international turmoil.

Austin police were zeroing-in on a man named Mark Conditt and preparing to arrest him when he committed suicide by detonating a bomb inside his car.

Mark Anthony Conditt, who police say was behind a wave of bombings in Austin and south-central Texas, killed himself early Wednesday in what investigators described as an explosion inside his car, leaving them scrambling to determine whether any bombs remain and if he acted alone.

Conditt detonated a bomb in his vehicle before dawn on the side of Interstate 35 in Round Rock, north of Austin, as police approached him, authorities said.

Conditt appears to have been an Evangelical Right loony.

Conditt was homeschooled as a child and attended Austin Community College from 2010 to 2012, though he didn’t graduate. A series of blog posts he wrote for a U.S. government course at the college provide a glimpse at Conditt’s political views. The Austin-American Statesman reports that Conditt wrote about his opposition to gay marriage and abortion, and his support for the death penalty. He also advocated for the abolishment of sex offender registries.

“Just look at the male and female bodies,” he wrote in one post. “They are obviously designed to couple. The natural design is apparent. It is not natural to couple male with male and female with female. It would be like trying to fit two screws together and to nuts together and then say, ‘See, it’s natural for them to go together.’”

Meet my neighbors; I can hardly go outdoors without tripping over somebody with this educational– and belief-profile, right down to the hare-brained natural law argument against same-sex marriage.

There’s still a lot to learn about Conditt, and he will doubtless yield a more 3-dimensional appearance as a fuller picture develops, but the little bit now available points strongly toward an ordinary, off-the-shelf, far-Right nutjob.