Civil Commotion

A new study from the CDC finds that, like every other social and family pathology known to man, the greatest risk of contracting HIV is in south.

Correlation and causation are not the same things, but it can hardly be a coincidence that sexually transmitted illnesses, drug abuse, illegitimacy and familial violence are most acute where the churches are most influential.

Pay no attention to the marketing lies about love-love-love; listen, instead, to what the churches actually tell people: You’re no damn good. The whole aim of Christian teaching is to crush the spirit, to reduce people to passive submission. Once you understand that, you understand why every dysfunction flourishes where the churches are strongest.

I’ve been preoccupied the past few days but, just so’s you know, this country’s Right is still stark raving mad.

• Kevin Drum wonders what’s up with the Republican announcement that they aren’t even going to hold hearings on any Supreme Court nominee put forward by President Obama.

  The obvious question is: Why refuse to even hold hearings? That just makes Republicans look sullen and obstructionist. Why not hold hearings normally, drag them out a little bit, and then vote down whoever Obama nominates? The result is the same, but Republicans look more like senators and less like small children throwing a temper tantrum.

  Oh, I can explain that: Their base hates Obama more than it loves their country. A Nigra! And a Moozlim! From Hahverd! In OUR WHITE HOUSE!!

• Albert Mohler is distressed by Pope Francis’ remarks suggesting it might be permissible for couples in the Zika-zone to use contraceptives.

  Once you make human conscience, the individual conscience, the determining issue in terms of a moral decision or, for that matter, a theological question, then every conscience can become a law unto itself.

  And, obviously, it undermines society the church if people go around making their very own judgments about things. So … shut-up and do as the theologians tell you to do, for y’all are no damn good.

• Michelle Bachmann, blinking-neon loony, has a cozy conversation with David Barton, bona fide pseudo-historian. Seriously: Don’t gag on the smarmy unctuousness.

• Alex Jones is locked in a titanic death struggle with the demons determined to assassinate Donald Trump, or something like that. The good news is that Vladimir Putin is on his side.

I’ve wondered for years: Are these guys crazy, or are they cynical whores who specialize in servicing the crazy?

And let us not underestimate the calamity which crept out of Christianity into politics. Today nobody has the courage any longer for privileges, for masters’ rights, for a sense of respect for oneself and one’s peers — for a pathos of distance. Our politics is sick from this lack of courage.

The aristocratic outlook was undermined from the deepest underworld through the lie of the equality of souls; and if faith in the “prerogative of the majority” makes and will make revolutions — it is Christianity, beyond a doubt, it is Christian value judgments, that every revolution simply translates into blood and crime. Christianity is a revolt of all creatures that creep on the ground against everything that is lofty: the gospel of the “lowly” lowers …

Friedrich Nietzsche; The Antichrist, §43

ISIS has beheaded a 15-year old boy for listening to Western pop-music.

According to Kurdish media reports, the jihadist group that has captured wide swaths of Syria and Iraq beheaded a 15-year-old boy in Mosul for the crime of listening to Western pop music.

Reports cite officials in the northern Iraqi city as saying that the boy, Ayham Hussein, was discovered by ISIS henchman as he was listening to a portable compact disc player.

Hussein was detained by ISIS operatives as he sat inside a shop owned by his father in an open-air market in western Mosul. The boy was beaten and tried in a local sharia court, which sentenced him to be executed.

Even as we marvel at the indecency and savagery, we would be foolish if we failed to understand that these barbarians are doing exactly what is demanded by every preacher in Christendom: They have surrendered ordinary human decency and intelligence to faith, trusting that their sacred texts are what the Holy Men claim them to be — the word of an Invisible Friend.

Now, don’t bother huffing that they are following the Quran, but Christians follow the Bible; it’s a distinction without a difference. Not only is there plenty of savagery in the Bible (the Jews of the Old Testament are indistinguishable from ISIS; read Numbers), once you cease asking for proof, once you are guided by unreasoning belief, by faith — anything is permissible so long as it enjoys the imprimatur of a Holy Man’s reading of ancient texts written by goatherders. The moral evil is faith itself.

Faith, by the way, should not be confused with educated confidence. It is one thing to persevere in overcoming great difficulties, confidant that you have the ability to achieve your goal, and quite another thing to believe and act upon blinking-neon nonsense just because you found it in a ridiculous old book.