Civil Commotion

What do you know? A North Carolina-based televangelist has been indicted for tax fraud.

North Carolina televangelist Todd Coontz – author of numerous books on faith and finances – has been indicted on charges of tax fraud spanning more than a decade.

“As a minister, Coontz preached about receiving and managing wealth, yet he failed to keep his own finances in order,” Jill Westmoreland Rose, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of North Carolina, said as she announced the charges. “Coontz will now receive a first-hand lesson in ‘rendering unto Caesar’ that which is due.”

Yeah, well — ho-hum; there’s plenty more where that came from.

In her magisterial account of Adolf Eichmann’s trial for war crimes, Hannah Arendt tells the story of the Allied search for lesser criminals. Even after the story of the Nazi death camps was well-known, investigators were astounded to learn that the majority of Nazi war criminals had simply returned to their homes after the war and resumed their lives without any public opprobrium whatever. Indeed, their families and friends rationalized that it had unfortunately been necessary to kill the Jews, because they were dirty and carried diseases and raped children … on and on ad nauseum.

Even after the needless death of tens of millions of people all over the world, and the ruin of their own country, an extraordinary number of Germans simply could not face the truth that they had been gulled by an amoral cynic — Hitler — and participated in mind-cracking barbarisms.

I was reminded of that dismal story as I watched this morning’s round of television news shows and the attempts to discuss the Senate health care bill — the bald evasions of legitimate questions, the subject-changing, the plain lies. The Republicans are not the Nazis, of course, but they have utterly abandoned the indispensable elements of civilized society — ordinary decency, common sense, and reality itself. We are in uncharted waters, and piloted by madmen.

A report in the Guardian says that Turkey has banned the teaching of evolution in secondary schools.

Turkish schools to stop teaching evolution, official says

Evolution will no longer be taught in Turkish schools, a senior education official has said, in a move likely to raise the ire of the country’s secular opposition.

Alpaslan Durmuş, who chairs the board of education, said evolution was debatable, controversial and too complicated for students.

Oh, boy.

First, notice the phrase “secular opposition.” This decision undoubtedly is animated by wrongheaded religious beliefs, but secularism is merely the belief that government must be religiously neutral; it implies nothing regarding the conclusions of science. Many religious people believe in evolution, too. But the enemies of modernity are redefining secularism as “hostility to religion.” Seriously: Listen to some nitwit Baptist preacher in this area, and you will hear ‘secularist’ used routinely as a pejorative.

Second, evolution is not debatable, controversial, or too difficult for schoolchildren; those are lies intended to cast this backward-looking decision as informed by concern for children, though of course the goal is to arrest the progress of modernity.

What is afoot — globally, including in this country — is an epochal paradigm shift. The Bronze Age mythologies have lost their explanatory power, which has passed to science. The implications touch upon the norms of everyday life — technology, governance, ethics. And the people who are confronted with an evolving world they can no longer understand are reacting against it.

Of course, we’re talking about The Donald. I wouldn’t be surprised a bit if someday a microcasette is discovered in a bottom drawer of his desk which is indeed a recording of the conversation between Trump and Comey, and which shows that Trump did try to bludgeon Comey into ending his investigation of Flynn.

Following the link, you read this:

Twenty-one surgeries by age thirteen. Years in the hospital. Verbal and physical bullying from schoolmates. Multiple miscarriages as a young wife. The death of a child. A debilitating progressive disease. Riveting pain. Abandonment. Unwanted divorce.

Vaneetha Rendall Risner begged God for grace that would deliver her. But God offered something better: his sustaining grace.

In The Scars That Have Shaped Me, Vaneetha does more than share her stories of pain; she invites other sufferers to taste with her the goodness of a sovereign God who will carry us in our darkest of days.

I swear: If I live to be one-hundred, I will never understand these characters who thank an Invisible Friend for saving them, instead of the doctors who did the actual work, and give Our Invisible Friend a pass for all the bad things that happened to them. There is something perverse about the operation of these people’s minds.