Civil Commotion

It seems that October is Pastor Appreciation Month. I couldn’t care less, and I imagine that few readers of this blog care either, but I suppose some people do and here are some tips for making that special irritant feel wanted. I especially like this one:

Honor him as God’s ordained spiritual authority.

Uh-huh. We’re talking about a man whose life is devoted to the degradation of others, to convincing them that they’re no damn good and were born that way and can’t do a thing about it but join his club — and then exacting 10% of their income till the day they die. The only matter in which I concede their authority is bunco.

Ken Ham is taking a trashing just now for his claim that belief in a literal 6-day Creation is a test of Biblical authority.

It pains me to say it, because Ken Ham is a godawful con artist, but he’s right about this: The whole of the Biblical narrative and Christianity’s promise of salvation hangs on the historicity of the related tales of the Creation and the Fall.

To put the matter simply, the Church Fathers — Irenaeus and Augustine, especially — believed in the truth of those tales, and constructed a set of doctrines which rely on their historicity, and those doctrines go to pieces if you try to re-interpret them as allegory.

Consider, for instance, the incontestable certainties that Adam and Eve were not historical persons, and that there was no Fall.

No Adam and Eve –> No Fall –> No Original Sin –> No need for Salvation

Some believers try to evade this by resorting to something called ‘theistic evolution,’ the claim that evolution was God-directed toward the development of human beings. This fails theologically, and fails immediately; it is not on the obscure outer-reaches of Christian teaching that problems are encountered.

• There is still needed an act of disobedience, the guilt for which is genetically projected into eternity upon the descendants of … whom? And what was that act?

• So much for the claim that death was unknown prior to the Fall.

• And what ground is there for saying that God is good if his route toward the creation of his beloved pets — Us — entailed billions of years of needless animal suffering?

Christianity has nothing on offer without salvation from Original Sin — and Original Sin is nonsense. Christianity is not true, and its ethical teachings aren’t worth the human misery it has caused.

Inexplicably, Donald Trump has got something right.

Over and over again courts have said that there is nothing sinister in so arranging one’s affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everybody does so, rich or poor; and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands: taxes are enforced exactions, not voluntary contributions. To demand more in the name of morals is mere cant.

Judge Learned Hand, U.S. Supreme Court

The most important thing to understand is the egregious favoritism toward the wealthy that is built into the tax code — and anybody who imagines Donald Trump is going to change that is out of his mind.

The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.

Gore Vidal

We need a wide-ranging overhaul of the tax sytem, and the immigration system, and neither is going to happen with the Republicans in the White House or in control of either house of Congress.

This is what you get when inferior minds transform ill-considered allegories into ‘reality.’ Most importantly, there is no reasoning with characters like this; they must be defeated.

This lengthy review of the FBI form-302 interview records upholds what I’ve believed all along about the Clinton e-mail scandal: It has more to do with generational discomfort with e-mail and Internet technology than sinister self-serving.

The interviews—taken together and reconstructed for this article into the first-ever comprehensive narrative of how her email server scandal unfolded—draw a picture of the controversy quite different from what either side has made it out to be. Together, the documents, technically known as Form 302s, depict less a sinister and carefully calculated effort to avoid transparency than a busy and uninterested executive who shows little comfort with even the basics of technology, working with a small, harried inner circle of aides inside a bureaucracy where the IT and classification systems haven’t caught up with how business is conducted in the digital age. Reading the FBI’s interviews, Clinton’s team hardly seems organized enough to mount any sort of sinister cover-up. There’s scant oversight of the way Clinton communicated, and little thought given to how her files might be preserved for posterity — MacBook laptops with outdated archives are FedExed across the country, cutting-edge iPads are discarded quickly and BlackBerry devices are rejected for being “too heavy” as staff scrambled to cater to Clinton’s whims.

There is much to not like here, but they were errors of ignorance rather than deviousness — and are unlikely to be repeated.