Civil Commotion

So says a hard-corp Trump supporter. The obliviousness of these yahoos is unbelievable.

Real Clear Science reprises an old argument: Does the size of the universe prove god doesn’t exist?

The short answer is … No. The immensity of the universe does not prove there was no Creator. The argument poses reasonable questions, however.

If God is human-oriented, wouldn’t you expect him to create a universe in which humans feature prominently? You’d expect humans to occupy most of the universe, existing across time. Yet that isn’t the kind of universe we live in. Humans are very small, and space, as Douglas Adams once put it, “is big, really really big”.

Scientists estimate that the observable universe, the part of it we can see, is around 93 billion light years across. The whole universe is at least 250 times as large as the observable universe.

What the size of the universe proves is the vanity of those goatherders who wrote the Old Testament. We are immeasurably small relative to the universe, and late arrivals, too. The notion that the universe exists for our benefit, and to enable us to praise the universe’s creator, is vain and childish.

Think of it this way: Halley’s Comet passes within the observable range of the earth once every 74– to 79-years. It is nothing but a colossal snowball transiting millions of miles of cold, dark, empty, space. Between appearances millions of people are born, and a very great many of them die without ever seeing the comet. Of those people who are alive each time the comet comes around, a very great many won’t bother to go outside to look for it.

Would a reasonable god bother to calculate all the variables necessary to launch such a spectacle as Halley’s Comet, and make certain the universe is big enough to accommodate it? And what, in the first place, could possibly be the point, since bazillions of people will come and go without the possibility of even seeing the comet?

The devout will simply do some hand-waving about His Mysterious Purposes and be content, but the rest of us are quite within our rights to think He went to a lot of needless bother to create us and our trivial li’l planet, and to give-up on humanity so easily after Adam and Eve were tricked by a talking snake into stealing a bad piece of fruit.

The Tennessee Baptists have overturned the welcome mat for a Baptist church which called a female pastor.

A 15-member committee tasked with credentialing messengers for the upcoming annual gathering of the statewide Southern Baptist Convention affiliate agreed Oct. 18 that a church with a woman serving as senior pastor does not fit the definition of a “cooperating church” as defined by convention bylaws.

[ … ]

“This is in essence the state convention saying that we are no longer welcome,” she said in her Sunday morning sermon. “They have taken this action because our congregation has a female senior pastor. To these institutions, our commitment to equal treatment of women and men in the church is the sum of what makes us ‘us.’”

Yeah, well — ho-hum. This has happened so often in the past that it isn’t believable that the church didn’t know what would happen when they hired a woman to preach. Personally, I think there is probably a lot to like about people who aren’t morally fit to belong to a club that includes Franklin Graham, Robert Jeffress, Perry Noble, Jerry Falwell, Jr., Albert the Pious … I could probably sit in that church without feeling that I had soiled myself by the bald fact of being there.

The headlines have been dominated this past week by Trump advisor George Papadopoulos’ efforts to establish contact between The Donald and Vladimir Putin. Just today, though Jeff Sessions is reported to have quashed the idea and said it should never be spoken of again, CNN is reporting that Trump was interested in the idea.

A former Trump campaign adviser says Donald Trump listened to George Papadopoulos when he presented the idea of a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“He heard him out,” JD Gordon, a campaign national security adviser who attended the March 31, 2016 meeting, told CNN Thursday.

Asked about the meeting on Friday, Trump told reporters at the White House, “it was a very unimportant meeting, took place a long time, don’t remember much about it.”

CNN reported Wednesday that Trump did not dismiss the idea of arranging a meeting with Russia’s president when it was suggested in a meeting with his campaign foreign policy advisers last year.

The look of things is that Trump privately authorized an end-run around his campaign pros using different people.

Remember this story from May?

Jared Kushner and Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak discussed the possibility of creating a back channel — a secret communication channel — between the Trump team and Russian officials, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.

And this one?

The United Arab Emirates arranged a secret meeting in January between Blackwater founder Erik Prince and a Russian close to President Vladi­mir Putin as part of an apparent effort to establish a back-channel line of communication between Moscow and President-elect Donald Trump, according to U.S., European and Arab officials.

The meeting took place around Jan. 11 — nine days before Trump’s inauguration — in the Seychelles islands in the Indian Ocean, officials said.

The Kushner meeting was in December, 2016, soon after the election, and the Prince meeting was in January, scarcely a week before the inauguration.

Clearly, Trump was impatient to have a talk with Putin and quietly put some diplomatic amateurs to work to make it happen.

• March, 2016: Papadopoulos tells Trump he can create a communications channel with the Kremlin. According to reports, Sessions quashes the idea, and says it should never be discussed again.

• June, 2016: Jared Kushner, Don, Jr., et. al., meet with a Russian lawyer who has close ties to the Kremlin to discuss ‘dirt’ they have on Hilary Clinton.

• November, 2016: The election.

• December, 2016: Kushner is tasked with setting-up communications with Putin, and fails.

• January, 2017: Erik Prince, a mercenary, is tasked with setting-up communications with Putin, and fails.

Given that Trump-buddy Roger Stone was in contact with the DNC hackers, and he and Trump clearly knew of pending Wikileaks dumps, it looks pretty clear to me what happened: Trump set-up some kind of private communications channel with the Russian intelligence services, end-running his own campaign pros using people outside their orbit, and thought it was time for he and ol’ Vladimir to get together for a meet-up after the election.

This isn’t going away, no matter how much Trump huffs and puffs.