Civil Commotion

If you can stomach it, listen to the podcast upholding the historicity of Adam and Eve. Notice, especially, the perverse, cart-before-the-horse reasoning: Basically

• Christianity is true, and …

• Its doctrines rely upon Adam and Eve, so …

• Therefore, they must have been real people.

<< SIGH >> After all these years, I’ve unhappily accepted that some people really are just too stupid to understand why that’s backward and all wrong. There is nothing to be done but push them out of the way.

Defense lawyer’s pants catch fire during trial in Miami

Never forget: Y’all are no damn good. A pack of Bronze Age goat herders said so, so you know it’s true.

The Iraqi army has reclaimed a portion of Mosul, and permitted The Associated Press into the Mosul Museum for a look around.

The antiquities museum in the Iraqi city of Mosul is in ruins. Piles of rubble fill exhibition halls and a massive fire in the building’s basement has reduced hundreds of rare books and manuscripts to ankle-deep drifts of ash.

[ … ]

IS captured Mosul in 2014 and released a video the following year showing fighters smashing artifacts in the museum with sledgehammers and power tools. The voice narrating the IS video justified the acts with verses from the Quran referencing the prophet Mohammed’s destruction of idols in the Kaaba.

“These statues and idols, these artifacts, if God has ordered its removal, they became worthless to us even if they are worth billions of dollars,” the narration said.

It is somewhere in Mesopotamia that the first hunter-gatherer tribes organized themselves into villages, and then cities, and then states, and so the destruction of the museum is an irrevocable loss of a portion of humanity’s history. We will manage along without it, no doubt; after all, most of us can scarcely remember what we had for lunch — so who cares what happened thousands of years ago amongst people on the far side of the earth? The proper attitude, I suppose, it to be grateful that at least some people probably avoided summary execution while the Devout were busy smashing statues.

I am reminded, too, of the Christian suppression of Epicurus’ writings, and Aristotle’s, in the first few centuries anno domini.

I keep trying to put my finger on the exact reason these sorts of things so offend me, and I keep coming back to the blatant intellectual cowardice of it. After all, ISIS, and the early church fathers, claimed to possess Eternal Truth, delivered into their hands by the Creator Of The Whole Big Universe — and that Eternal Truth is threatened by ancient tokens of erroneous beliefs, and the scribblings of backwater thinkers?

Please. The truth is that the censor is a coward who know he can’t prevail in a fair fight.

I linked earlier today to a story about an 18-year old kid who murdered and beheaded his mother. According to early reports, he has a well-documented history of mental illness, and is on a (lately neglected) regimen of psychotropic medicines.

Well. Wouldn’t you know it? The family are illegals from Honduras and, naturally, the kid had little choice but to be living with his parents. So how does the Washington Times — somewhere to the right of Steve Bannon — headline the story?

Illegal immigrant charged with murder in N.C. after his mother beheaded

Strictly, that’s accurate, but on the day newspapers are reporting the re-implementation of the Muslim travel ban, and given ISIS’ well-documented taste for beheadings, wouldn’t that headline have caused you to expect to read about crazed Muslims?

So this story that probably ought to be about aspiration and tragedy, with perhaps a sidelong look at the dismal state of mental health care in this country, becomes a narrative about dangerous immigrants.

I guess the perpetrator will enjoy the distinction of being the first entry in our brand new database of immigrant crime, too.