Civil Commotion

Bruce Gerencser has up a thoughtful post about ‘feeling’ god’s presence and, since it goes to something I’ve thought about quite a bit through the years (though I can’t recall writing about it recently), it might be time to reprise the subject.

I now know that “feeling” God is as real as other emotional experiences I have had in my life. God need not be real for me to “feel” Him/Her/It. Practitioners of non-Christian religions can share similar experiences of “feeling” their God or being overwhelmed emotionally. Feeling such things are a part of our DNA. Sadly, Evangelicals think that their “feeling” God is objectively true, and all others are false; that there is a BIG difference between “feeling” God and the emotional experiences humans have through relationships and interactions with the natural world.

Well said. Talk to a devout believer, and he or she will invariably tell you they feel god inside them, et cetera, and they don’t care a hoot what anybody wants to say about it.

They are fooling themselves. Yes, there is a real emotional experience; No, it’s not due to the action of an Invisible Friend.

Bishop John Spong speaks often about “religionless religion.” He got the idea from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who got it sometime after John Dewey discussed the idea to death in A Common Faith. Dewey probably got the idea from his colleague Georges Santayana, and it was probably an old idea before he tripped over it.

The basic insight is a commonplace. Have you ever left church and heard somebody say something like, “What a fine sermon! I could feel God’s presence!”? As different as they are, people leave Protestant and Catholic churches saying the same thing, and Mormon Temples, and Jewish Synagogues, and Muslim Mosques, and Indian Sweatlodges. People who practice transcendental meditation will say things like, “I really connected with the Universal Mind.”

That is, people whose religions, whose beliefs, put them at each other’s throats describe nearly identical religious experiences of oneness with an Invisible Friend. How can that be?

Neurologists have got going on it, and have learned that the religious experience is accompanied by an excitation of the same portion of the brain as the psilocybin in peyote buttons acts upon. The architecture and iconography of religious structures are merely enculturated triggers for the religious experience — similar to the chemical action of psilocybin. Regular attendance at a place of worship causes devotees to associate the symbols, the artwork, the iconography with the religious experience and … Voila!

It’s all about the buzz. The buzz is real, but the rest is baloney.

Dawn and I are headed to the Outer Banks for a while; regular posting will resume after Memorial Day. ‘Friend’ me on Facebook for regular updates, including blurry, cliché photographs of sunsets, beaches, waves, lighthouses, et cetera, et cetera.

Trump told Russians That Firing ‘Nut Job’ Comey Eased Pressure From Investigation

The year 1968 didn’t merely launch Richard Nixon’s presidency and eventual impeachment, it launched two storied media careers: Roger Ailes’, and Joe McGinniss’.

Hired to produce commercials for Richard Nixon, Ailes re-created a stiff and uncomfortable candidate as someone who, if not exactly likable, was at least tolerable. Ailes later led FOX News to cable news supremacy and, after his termination for sexual harassment, worked as a media consultant to Donald Trump. McGinniss made his name by covering the Nixon campaign up close and writing all about it. Almost 50-years later, The Selling of the President, 1968 is sui generis, a classic work of both journalism and politics. He would later move into a fraternity house in Raleigh, North Carolina with Jeffrey MacDonald, accused of murdering his wife and two daughters. That resulted in Fatal Vision, a classic true-crime account that embroiled McGinniss in litigation until nearly the day he died. In 2008 he famously moved next door to Sarah Palin while researching a book about her.

The following vignette from Selling captures neatly the amoral cynicism of Roger Ailes.

Ailes was in bad pain. And tired. And facing four hours of live direction in the evening. And — as the only member of Richard Nixon’s staff who would have thought to jump from an airplane the day before the biggest TV production of the campaign — feeling quite alone. He sat with his foot in an ice bucket in the control room through the afternoon, wishing he were done and in Grenada, where he was going on vacation later in the week.

Frank Shakespeare and Paul Keyes got to the studio at three o’clock. Shakespeare was in his standard dark suit, Keyes in a sky blue turtleneck. Ailes struggled out to meet them.

“Watch,” he said. “Now they’ll rip the whole thing up and start again.”

The first change Shakespeare made was moving Julie and Tricia up from the second row to the first. Ailes had wanted them in the second row to make them seem simply part of the crowd, but Shakespeare and Nixon wanted to greet them as he entered and it would be awkward to have him leaning over other girls.

“And then he’ll walk over,” Shakespeare was saying, “and when he greets them I think he should kiss them.”

“Well, I think kissing is a bit much,” Paul Keyes said.

“But if he comes over, he’s got to kiss them.”

“No, it looks stagy,” Keyes said. “We’ll have him go right to his chair.”

“Have him kiss one of the other broads,” Ailes said.

Ailes was one of the primary shapers of our modern politics, especially its obsession with appearances and dismissive indifference to truth. If you wonder why so few substantial men involve themselves in public affairs — Roger Ailes and the culture he created is much of the reason.

Recall this related tweet, too.

Now think back to all the times you’ve heard some yahoo howling and bellowing for ‘brokenness,’ that someone be so battered by the slings and arrows of misfortune that s/he at last is broken and appeals to an indifferent cosmos for help.

Why … that’s what you should want for your friends!! You should be prepared to betray your friends, as Abraham resolved to betray Isaac!!

This is sick and degrading stuff, and it will inevitably lead to a deformed and misshapen character. Period. Stay out of church, and keep your children out of church.