Civil Commotion

Increasingly these days, I find myself thinking about the Detroit riots of 1967, that awful civil eruption when rioters burned-down their own neighborhoods and the stores at which they shopped. When the fires were out and the smoke had cleared, the damn fools had nothing to show for it but more than 3-dozen deaths and that they had made their own hard lives harder.

The analogy isn’t perfect, certainly — but it’s damn close to what the white middle class is doing to itself today with its mad enthusiasm for Donald Trump. They are cheering the rollbacks of union influence, though it was unions that built the middle class. They are eager to see Obamacare rolled back, though hundreds of thousands of them will die prematurely for want of care. They enthuse for the crippling of the EPA, and forget how Ohio’s Cuyahoga River used to catch fire. They are happy to see OSHA strait-jacketed, and forget that it wasn’t so long ago that the rule-of-thumb was that there was one death per every million dollars of industrial productivity. They rejoice that contraception and abortion are more difficult to obtain, and yearn to force gays et. al. back into the closet, and never give a thought to those whose lives they upend or even pause to ask how their own lives will benefit. They applaud when banking laws are relaxed and their Internet privacy is sold to the highest bidder.

They are systematically dismantling the very institutions that exist to protect them.

I kid you not: In my book, Trump supporters are as stupid and short-sighted as those idiot rioters who burned-down their own neighborhoods. And, likewise, they can’t see that they’re making their own climb back more difficult, that the orgy of destruction puts them further behind the eight-ball and lengthens the odds of restoring their lost normalcy. Bah.

After all these years warning of the insane beliefs and malign effects of the Evangelical Right, it’s nice to see this piece in the New York Times: The Evangelical Roots of our Post-truth Society.

I earned the first of two engineering degrees in the year before Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority; my career has, literally, been coincident with the growth of the Evangelical Right and its relentless assault on science, reason, expertise.

If you think I exaggerate about the harm these morons have done, or the malice they bear toward people who are better educated and more capable than themselves, remember this: They enthusiastically voted for a real-estate buffoon who claimed to know more about ISIS than the generals who had spent years fighting ISIS.

It’s a very fine piece, and y’all should go read the entire thing.

Albert Mohler, The Very Mightiest Theologian Of Them All, addresses a reasonable question in today’s edition of The Briefing: If the Passover story is true, if Our Invisible Friend really did kill every first-born child in Egypt, then why on earth should any decent adult worship him?

This is a fair question. After all, would any decent adult welcome into his home the author of a similar, smaller-scale, contemporary indecency? Bashar al-Assad, say?

Mohler, y’all will not be surprised to learn, is ready to smack-down that impious quibble:

Now, here you have what is theologically described not merely as atheism, but as protest atheism. This became increasingly popular after the Second World War. Protest atheism says that this kind of God, the God of the Bible, not only does not exist but must not exist. It is not merely an argument about being, that is the argument that there is no such God. It is an argument about morality that there must be no such God.

There you go! The complainant is an atheist! If he were a good, decent, godly person, he would see that the story must be true, or our faith is in vain, et cetera, et cetera.

Unhappily, Mohler never addresses the root questions: What sort of god would do such a horrible thing, and what sort of person would want to spend eternity with that god?

As it happens, there is virtual unanimity amongst Biblical scholars that the Jews were never slaves in Egypt, that the entire story is make-believe:

The Book of Genesis and Book of Exodus describe a period of Hebrew servitude in ancient Egypt, during decades of sojourn in Egypt, the escape of well over a million Israelites from the Delta, and the three-month journey through the wilderness to Sinai. The historical evidence does not back this account.

So Mohler expects us to believe a tale for which there isn’t a scintilla of support in the historical record, but also to worship an amoral killer that most of us would never permit in our home.

Most people, I never tire of saying, have too much sense and decency to be good Christians; it’s the ones who don’t that you need to avoid. In the story of the Passover I think we have a good example of it. After all, Trump’s evangelical base was happy to learn of that shoot-em-up in Syria last week — and will go to church Sunday morning and pledge their undying loyalty to a god who has done vastly worse with neither apologies nor denials.

So: Which is it? Christians don’t actually believe those old tales, don’t actually believe that the Bible is inerrant, but say they do because it’s a shibboleth that goes with belonging to their ridiculous club, or are they so empty-headed they are unaware of the blinking-neon contradictions?

An honest politician is one who, when he is bought, will stay bought.

Simon Cameron Vladimir Putin

Because, you know, positive thinking interferes with a good, bone-deep understanding of your utter unfitness to exist, and your reliance upon Holy Men to s-t-e-e-e-r you right.