Civil Commotion

I alerted y’all a few days ago that He had used the Superbowl halftime show to let Scriptural cogniscenti know that the Antichrist would be arriving just about any time now. The instrument of this warning was none other than Beyonce.

Sorry. That was premature.

Turns out that Ted Cruz has defended, this very day, accepting the endorsement of a Holy Man who says that Oprah Winfrey is the harbinger of The Antichrist.

So: Obama –> Beyonce –> Winfrey. Who knows? The best rule, I suppose, would be for True Believers to be suspicious of any successful black person. Except for Steve Harvey, I mean; he’s solid.

Heidi Cruz, y’all will be dismayed to learn, is even crazier than her husband. If ol’ Ted is elected president, she says, he will “show this country the face of the God that we serve.”

Recalling Cruz’ enthusiasm for carpet-bombing, I’m guessing it’s the Old Testament god, the old man with the long beard who was such a big genocide guy.

I can’t think why any decent adult would permit the Christian god into his home, never mind the White House, so as far as I’m concerned that pretty much settles the question of whether or not I ought to vote for Cruz.

Listen for yourself:

Germany is trying as an accessory to murder a 94-year old man who served as a guard at Auschwitz.

A 94-year-old former guard at Auschwitz is set to come face to face with camp survivors, as he goes on trial in Germany — accused of being an accessory to the murder of at least 170,000 people.

This is first of four such court cases, but could also be the last, due to the very old age of the defendants.

Reinhold Hanning was 18-years old when he joined the SS, and 20-years old when he was made a guard.

“It is better,” Socrates said, “to suffer an evil than to commit an evil.” But for 2000-years the Christian church has said, “Shut-up and do as you’re told; your clergy and your government leaders are appointed over you by You-Know-Who.”

It is easy to agree that Adolf Eichmann was guilty, and morally responsible for the depravities he masterminded — but, then, Eichmann was a grown man. Hanning, on the other hand, was scarcely out of childhood in a world gone mad and, probably, philosophically still ill-formed; it isn’t likely that, at that age, he had ever given any serious thought of his own, or read broadly about, questions of right and wrong or to the nature of morality and personal accountability.

This is interesting, don’t you think? Eichmann made, essentially, a Christian defense — he did as he was told by the leaders appointed over him; we don’t know yet what Hanning will say; and most of us want to hold them both to Socrates’ dictum: It is better to suffer an evil than to commit an evil.

The gist of it seems to be that in some vague way, however uncertainly sensed or stated, we expect people to grow past Christianity, to leave behind the blind obedience demanded by clergy and to make their own judgments about right and wrong.

The matter is just as I have long insisted, then: Most people have too much sense and decency to be good Christians; it’s the ones who don’t that you have to watch.

Pope Francis is talking a good game, but the official position of the Vatican remains that Bishops do not have a duty to report sexual abuse to police.

Catholic bishops not obliged to report clerical child abuse, Vatican says

The Catholic church is telling newly appointed bishops that it is “not necessarily” their duty to report accusations of clerical child abuse and that only victims or their families should make the decision to report abuse to police.

As St. Paul instructs, they are “in the world, but not of the world.”

To imagine themselves outside the rules of society, accountable to only the pleasure of an invisible phantasm, is the behavior of a cult — which is exactly what the first century church was, and what the canonical gospels urge. Practically, the Pious are mentally ill, as sick and deluded as the morons who followed David Koresh and Jim Jones, who today follow Warren Jeffs and the charismatic preacher in your town. They are not stable adults competent to live in the real world.