Civil Commotion

Published in England last year, Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age is likely to be greeted when it is published in the United States in April as Candida Moss’ The Myth of Persecution was: Rage from the pews, whose occupants know very little about Christian history besides sentimental nonsense — and yawns from bona fide historians, who will note that the book is merely a popularization of things they’ve known all along.

When the Roman church seized control of the western half of the failed Roman empire, it took to heart Augustine’s advice that it is a kindness to remove error from the view of the hoi polloi, lest they be led into temptation and burn forever. Thus began the systematic destruction of the classical world.

A few well-known examples:

• Epicurus knew that the earth travels around the sun, and that the moon travels around the earth, and had worked-out a theory of evolution. All that remains of Epicurus’ work is a handful of letters, however, and a brief collection of aphorisms found hidden in the Vatican library in the 14^th-century. What we know of Epicurus comes chiefly from criticisms of him published by the early church fathers, especially Lactantius, and Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things (itself suppressed and discovered deep in the recesses of a monastery in southern Germany in the early 1400s).

• Democritus was an accomplished mathematician, believed that all matter was reducible to atoms, and his speculations on early civilization agree closely with modern anthropology.

  Democritus was also a pioneer of mathematics and geometry in particular. We only know this through citations of his works (titled On Numbers, On Geometrics, On Tangencies, On Mapping, and On Irrationals) in other writings, since most of Democritus’s body of work did not survive the Middle Ages. Democritus was among the first to observe that a cone or pyramid has one-third the volume of a cylinder or prism respectively with the same base and height.

  His work on nature is known through citations of his books on the subjects, On the Nature of Man, On Flesh (two books), On Mind, On the Senses, On Flavors, On Colors, Causes concerned with Seeds and Plants and Fruits, and Causes concerned with Animals (three books). He spent much of his life experimenting with and examining plants and minerals, and wrote at length on many scientific topics. Democritus thought that the first humans lived an anarchic and animal sort of life, going out to forage individually and living off the most palatable herbs and the fruit which grew wild on the trees. They were driven together into societies for fear of wild animals, he said. He believed that these early people had no language, but that they gradually began to articulate their expressions, establishing symbols for every sort of object, and in this manner came to understand each other. He says that the earliest men lived laboriously, having none of the utilities of life; clothing, houses, fire, domestication, and farming were unknown to them. Democritus presents the early period of mankind as one of learning by trial and error, and says that each step slowly led to more discoveries; they took refuge in the caves in winter, stored fruits that could be preserved, and through reason and keenness of mind came to build upon each new idea.

  Democritus held that originally the universe was composed of nothing but tiny atoms churning in chaos, until they collided together to form larger units — including the earth and everything on it. He surmised that there are many worlds, some growing, some decaying; some with no sun or moon, some with several. He held that every world has a beginning and an end and that a world could be destroyed by collision with another world.

• Aristotle wrote extensively in both science and ethics, and also became the target of suppression. Happily, a set of his works was carried to Arab scholars early in the 6^th-century; his work was unknown in the West for 700-years.

Ethical thought did not begin with Jesus, and science was not born in the Christian academy: they survived Christianity — accidentally.

Imagine a world in which the Classical Era’s gains in science, philosophy, and the arts were not driven nearly off the earth for almost a millennium, and you grasp an appalling fact: the Roman Church secured and maintained its power with an epochal crime against humanity — and the Loony Right, animated by the exact same teachings, means to reprise that crime, today, with its endless attacks on science.

Wayne LaPierre’s unhinged speech at this year’s CPAC gathering, followed the next day by a Trump speech only slightly more grounded in reality, appears to have been a sort of tipping point for those Republicans who hoped the GOP could someday be restored to sanity or, at least, ordinary human decency. I think the sane wing of the party have figured-out that what used to be the lunatic fringe now is the Republican Party, and the party of Lincoln, Roosevelt, Eisenhower, the Gipper, is irretrievably gone.

Mona Charen was once a writer at National Review, a speechwriter for Nancy Reagan, a staffer in Ronald Reagan’s White House, and a speechwriter for Jack Kemp; by any sane reckoning, her conservative bona fides are in good order. She was booed violently for saying that Republicans shouldn’t turn a blind eye toward the predatory sexual conduct of such as Roy Moore and The Donald, and convention security was made so uneasy by it that they insisted upon escorting her when she left the stage. She writes about the experience at the New York Times.

I’d been dreading it [her CPAC speech] for days, but when it came, I almost welcomed it. There is nothing more freeing than telling the truth. And it must be done, again and again, by those of us who refuse to be absorbed into this brainless, sinister, clownish thing called Trumpism, by those of us who refuse to overlook the fools, frauds and fascists attempting to glide along in his slipstream into respectability.

I spoke to a hostile audience for the sake of every person who has watched this spectacle of mendacity in disbelief and misery for the past two years.

The Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne has seen enough, too.

It is time to read last rites over the American conservative movement. After years of drifting steadily toward extreme positions, conservatism is dead, replaced by a far right that has the Republican Party under its thumb.

[ … ]

The movement toward extremism has been gradual, so it has not been sufficiently acknowledged. But if those who still believe in moderation don’t face up to it now, they will be complicit in the far right’s ascendancy.

And Max Boot:

I spent years writing for conservative publications such as the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Commentary magazine and working as a foreign policy adviser for three Republican presidential campaigns. Being conservative used to be central to my identity. But now, frankly, I don’t give a damn.

[ … ]

The career of Dinesh D’Souza is indicative of the downward trajectory of conservatism. He made his name with a well-regarded 1991 book denouncing political correctness and championing liberal education. Then he wrote a widely panned 1995 book claiming that racism was no more, and it was all downhill from there. In 2014 he pleaded guilty to breaking campaign finance laws.

[ … ]

If this is what mainstream conservatism has become — and it is — count me out.

Years ago, noting how the party is structured and that the loonies had seized control of the party at the precinct level, I hazarded the guess that it would not be possible for responsible national-level leaders to drive-out the crazies. What do you know? The same bottom-up strategy that destroyed the Southern Baptist Convention was deployed to seize control of the GOP (by a lot of the same names and faces, incidentally) — with the same result: The brand is ruined, and all that is left are the loonies.

I don’t believe the GOP can be restored to health or, more importantly, that a winning percentage of Americans will ever trust them again, for the simple reason that the base is so steeped in malice and conspiracies and Christian Nationalism that they lack, as Robert Burns put it, “the gift to see ourselves as others see us.” They know they’re outcasts, that a solid majority of their fellow citizens recoil from them in disgust, but they don’t know it’s because they’re crazy and destructive. No. They think it’s because they’re Righteous.

America needs two healthy parties, a yin and a yang to oppose and balance each other — and there has not been a conservative party for years. Ambitious conservatives — John Kasich, Jeb Bush, Lindsay Graham, add your names here: _____ — need to organize a third, soon second, party.

I found out years ago that the problem of sex abuse in church is an endless stream of sewage, so I rarely link nowadays to stories about it. But this story drives home a point that I’ve made often through the years:

Prosecutors said Baird is a “deceiver, a manipulator and a sexual predator” who groomed the girl for abuse, sent her sexually-suggestive messages and groped her multiple times at the Life Church between January and September 2015. The teen testified during the trial she refused Baird’s unwanted sexual advances and told him what he was doing was wrong on more than one occasion.

[ … ]

The girl and her family said they have been “shunned” by the church since they came forward. They said the teen’s childhood friends were “stolen” from her and she was mocked and ridiculed by people she once considered family.

Right. Church … family. This is the same spirit of indulgence, and hostility for his enemies, that these morons exhibit for Donald Trump.

This would not be a bad time to remember, then, that the 1^st-Century Christian church was a despised cult — like Scientology today, say — and the New Testament is the literature of a cult. When you get that fixed in your head, and understand that Christianity is merely a cult that made it big, none of this should be a surprise.

Italy is still struggling with a shortage of exorcists, so people with a knack for spewing nonsense with an air of gravitas might want to look into it.

The Vatican has had to set up exorcism training courses to cope with demand after the number of requests for their services tripled in Italy over the space of a few years.

[ … ]

Palilla blamed the rise in demand on a growing number of people seeking the services of fortune tellers and Tarot readers. Such practices “open the door to the devil and to possession“, he claimed. However, he noted that many cases were not actually related to demonic possession, but to spiritual or psychological problems.

Priests, fortune tellers, and Tarot readers are all in the same business, of course — peddling the idea that they have access to special cosmic knowledge that can be used to align your life with the Mysterious Forces Which Rule Our Universe.

And I love the remark that, sometimes, the matter is not that a sulfurous demon has taken up residence in your vitals, but merely a psychological problem. That’s a good one: It lends an air of medical expertise to the scam, and demotes actual professionals, without the possibility of objective testing. I repeat: It’s the exact same business as a carnival fortune teller, but with a far more clever execution.

I wonder whether Pastor Panzer recognizes the irony of trusting police, rather than Our Invisible Friend, to assure that the blessing ceremony is safe?

A church in northeast Pennsylvania is telling couples to bring their semi-automatic rifles to a blessing ceremony next week.

[ … ]

“We are inviting local and state police to be on the premises, so that everything goes safely.”

This is exactly the sort of thing that convinces me that religion is about belonging to a tribe rather than a judgment about the facts of reality.