Civil Commotion

Prayers won’t fix this.

@chaddiedabaddie

All that the ridiculous claims Jesus makes for his God convince me of is that Jesus himself was, at best, deluded, and at worst, an utter fraud – a traveling salesman who promised the Earth and delivered absolutely nothing. His unfulfilled, empty promises are evidence enough that his God, like all the others, does not exist.

Bruce Gerencser

Heh — Gerencser is making a clever argument here and it ought to be dispositive: Jesus didn’t keep his promises, so why should he be taken seriously? Definitely, those verses and the citations are going to be added to my everyday-carry.

I always feel squeamish when I encounter the word “atheist” because the Evangelical Right’s insistence upon making religion central to our public conversation, though we are not supposed to criticize religion, has caused it to be used so many different ways; I’m never certain what people mean when they use it, and I’m never certain what people hear when it is used.

As coined by Thomas Huxley, “atheist” is a neologism formed from a used as a negative; an atheist is a non-theist, just as an amoral person is non-moral. On this definition, Hindus and Buddhists and Deists and Zoroastrians are atheists, though Hindus and Zoroastrians and Deists believe in a god (possibly many), and many Buddhists do also. An atheist isn’t necessarily somebody who believes in no god — though that is another common usage of the word, and the one I grew up with.

This confusion makes it worthwhile to occasionally enumerate the things one believes.

• I don’t know whether there are any supernatural beings. On that ground, I have always identified as an agnostic.

• I do know that nobody has ever adduced a scintilla of objective evidence in favor of thinking so that would stand-up in a half-decent high school science class and, after uncountable millennia of trying, I think the likelihood that anybody will produce evidence is vanishingly small.

• I do know that the Christian narrative is untrue; it is so full of blinking-neon contradictions and wild improbabilities that I don’t believe a properly functioning mind can reach any other conclusion. A mind that ridicules the idea of Muhammad galloping off to Heaven on a white horse, but doesn’t doubt that Jesus walked on water, is a dysfunctional mind and cannot be trusted.

• The Bible is a wholly human creation comprising pornography, journalism, spiritual reflections, and ordinary human finagling and politicking. It was not authored by, or inspired by, a supernatural being. Somebody who does believe that the Bible was inspired or authored by the same being that spun tens of billions of galaxies into orbit, each comprised of tens of billions of stars with their own orbit, ought to wonder why that being did such a rotten job of writing the instruction manual.

• If Abraham’s god is real, then he is a cruel sociopath and to worship him, to hope to spend eternity with him, is to disgrace oneself. There is no honorable course but resistance.

This is a must watch, a nice precis of how crazy the Evangelical Right actually is and their baleful effect upon the Republican Party.

I’ve read many accounts which suggest that she is a practicing witch, part of a witches coven at the very highest levels. I think she has a demonic hatred in her — her statement about the ‘deplorables’ revealed what was in her heart. I believe that if Hillary Clinton had become president of the United States, like Jezebel, she would have persecuted, arrested, fined, imprisoned and perhaps killed America’s pastors, she would have shut down the preaching of the gospel and the gates of hell would have broken loose on our nation.

Paul McGuire, Holy Man

This is crazy talk from the fever swamps, but a lot of devout Christians believe it — believe exactly this, minus the purple prose. It’s going to get worse, too, because the Christian narrative is demonstrably false and its decadent ethics are increasingly rejected.

There is no moral duty to submit to being eaten; that is a teaching that profits only Holy Men.

I rather liked what Hilary Clinton’s ‘deplorables’ remark revealed about her — that she recognizes the sickness at the heart of the Evangelical– and alt-Right subcultures, and she regards them with contempt. Good for her; we’d be a much healthier society if the Deplorable One-third were treated with the frank contempt they deserve.

Abraham is the father of our civic sicknesses

It’s 2018, and you see how open-minded many parts of the world are. But there are also many parts of the world where being gay is punishable by death, punishable by jail time. It’s a new world, and it’s also not, and I think that the only way to change perception is through visibility, through representation, and the more that we have that, the more normalized queer becomes, the easier it is for people to wrap their heads around it, and I think that the more we’ll see positive change.

Gus Kenworthy, gay Olympian

Kenworthy is pointing toward an observation I’ve made many times over the years: Much of our domestic and international turmoil arises from the loss of influence by the Abrahamic faiths — and gay rights is one of the big flashpoints for reaction by the devout.

We all know the story of Abraham. Ordered by Our Invisible Friend to make a blood sacrifice of his son Isaac (Ishmael in the Muslim version of the tale), Abraham went to what is now the Temple Mount and prepared to sacrifice him. He raised the knife. But then a celestial messenger tells Abraham that his willingness to do something so perverse, so unnatural, so anti-life, is enough to satisfy the Invisible Wizard Who Lives In The Sky, and Isaac is spared. Isaac is spared because Abraham’s manhood is broken and he has become a mere thing that obeys — an unthinking robot, an obedient dog.

This, according to Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Mormonism, is the ideal toward which men should strive.

I’m with Hitchens. The Abrahamic faiths rest on perversity and sickness, on self-abnegation at a level that can only be described as a death-wish, and I want nothing to do with them — or the debased and squalid people who admire Abraham’s surrender of his manhood.

The progress of gay rights is especially annoying to the devout, and much of the turmoil in the world arises out of their reaction against it, out of their accurate sense that they are losing control.

Let’s think about that for a moment. Somebody penned Leviticus, and ever since gays have been executed, or imprisoned or, at best, condemned to the outskirts of society. But scientific research has shown that sexuality — which is more than just plumbing — is innate, an expression of the interaction of our genes with the chemical environment of the mother’s womb. You are born gay, or straight, or transgender, and there is nothing to be done about it: That is who you are; you were born with those traits, and it bespeaks no moral failure.

The moral failure lies in giving primacy to the words of some Bronze Age anonymity over objectively collected facts and relying upon that to justify constricting the Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness of your blameless neighbor. There is the character failure that is at work here, and we need to get over the cultural insistence upon being polite to it, and instead call it what it is. Though Leviticus might have made a kind of sense in an age when humankind lived in tribes, and the tribe’s very survival and perpetuation relied upon regular reproduction, that teaching has been overtaken by science, and circumstance, and is now an instrument of needless pain.