Civil Commotion

Reverend Mark Creech, Holy Man, is troubled that a North Carolina mayor swore his oath of office on a copy of the United States Constitution rather than a Bible.

Mayor’s oath of office troubling

[ … ]

He spent ten years on the Franklin Board of Alderman.

Each time he was sworn into office he placed his left hand on the Bible to take his oath. But this year, which will make his second term as Franklin’s mayor, he decided to do something different. He decided he wouldn’t use the Bible, but instead swear upon a copy of the Constitution.

[ … ]

Regarding the office of any public official, [Bob] Scott also said, “We do not represent any religion, what we represent are the laws of the land. As far as I am concerned, there is no place in government for religion. I’m a secularist in that respect. I just don’t think there’s a place for any kind of religious doctrine in government because we represent everybody.”

The woeful ignorance of Scott’s view is breathtaking.

Good for the mayor.

Creech is one of the most influential pastors in North Carolina, and a Southern Baptist. They know their influence is in decline, that their days are numbered — and they aren’t going down without a fight. The first-century Christians were a cult; that’s the mindset which informed the authors of the Gospels, and that is where yahoos like Creech are returning as Christianity fails.

Cremations are expected to outnumber burials in 2015.

The decision to forgo traditional burial was in line with his father’s rejection of religion, Jim Underdown said. “He certainly didn’t want any churchiness surrounding his death.”

Choosing cremation is becoming more common every year in the United States, largely for similar reasons. According to estimates by the funeral industry’s main trade group, 2015 is on track to be the year that cremation surpasses burial for the first time, as a long-standing trend continues. A key factor driving this: decreased religiosity.

How can you not laugh? The incontestable falsity and degrading, death-wish, cult-ish ethics of the Abrahamic faiths has always doomed them — and the daily conniption fits of the culture warriors is undoubtedly hastening their end.

Religiosity is in steep decline in even the Bible Belt.

Prayers said and the closing hymn sung, tea-drinking churchgoers fill Marble City Grill for Sunday lunch. But hard on their heels comes the afternoon crowd: craft beer-drinking, NFL-watching football fans.

Such a scene would have been impossible just months ago because Sunday alcohol sales were long illegal in Sylacauga, hometown of both the actor who played TV’s Gomer Pyle and the white marble used to construct the U.S. Supreme Court building. While the central Alabama city of 12,700 has only one hospital, four public schools and 21 red lights, the chamber of commerce directory lists 78 churches.

Yet few were surprised when residents voted overwhelmingly in September to legalize Sunday alcohol sales. Churches lacked either the heart or influence to stop it.

Good. Religion has nothing to show for itself but Niagaras of bloodshed and tears, and the sooner men grasp that faith — unreasoning belief, belief without evidence, belief in spite of evidence — is a moral evil, and not a virtue, the better off we all will be.

The ridiculous story of that Wheaton College professor who was placed on leave for saying that Christians and Muslims worship the same god just keeps going. (My nephew, Ryan, has a nice story on this at The Guardian, and here is the story I linked to yesterday.)

Let’s be clear: This isn’t a close call. Islam is solidly, incontestably, an Abrahamic religion; of course Muslims worship the same god as Christians. Much of the Quran, in fact, was stolen wholesale, verbatim, from the Old Testament. They then did what every other religion on earth has done — they adapted those teachings to suit their particular needs in their particular time and their particular place.

Now, a column at the Washington Post weighs in:

Appealing in part to arguments in my book “Allah: A Christian Response,” Hawkins asserted that Muslims and Christians worship the same God. She did not insist that Christians and Muslims believe the same things about that one God. She did not state that Islam and Christianity are the same religion under a different name, or even that Islam is equally as true as Christianity.

All religions are human inventions, myths and stories made-up to explain the world in which people find themselves. That’s one of the points that Nietzsche makes in The Antichrist, that Christianity was born in a despised and abused underclass, and so it refashioned obsequiousness and poverty as virtues. Similarly, the Jews before them needed a warrior god in order to survive, as did the Muslims, and so we got the serial indecencies of Numbers and Islam’s “bloody borders.”

The real source of the dispute isn’t hard to find: If Muslims worship the same god as Christians … then maybe Christians don’t have the Eternal Truth nailed-down, maybe Christians aren’t so special and the others doomed to the eternal torture they deserve.

I am not, I should add, entirely sympathetic to Professor Hawkins; after all, anybody of ordinary intelligence is quite capable of figuring-out that it’s a bushel of nonsense, and so it is her own intellectual laziness or character failure that put her at Wheaton and set her up for pointless humiliation within the precincts of the pious. Bah. A pox on all their goddamn houses.

I can’t count the times, watching last night’s debates, that (a) my jaw dropped at the inanity or dishonesty of some remark, or (b) I wondered what the speaker actually thought he or she was saying.

• Donald Trump wants us to make those wicked moozlims stop using “our” Internet? Really? Does he know what the Internet is?

  The Internet is a collection of communications- and switching protocols designed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to insure that the government’s computers would be able to talk to each other in the event of a hostile nuclear strike that disrupted communications. The Internet exists to protect communications, to assure that messages get through chaos, and the only way we’re going to prevent ISIS from using “our” Internet is to cut every wire, and disable every wireless transmitter, that crosses its borders.

  And, of course, ISIS sympathizers outside the territory controlled by ISIS would remain able to propagandize on that criminal syndicate’s behalf, even as we diminished our own ability to intercept their messages.

  We would do better to setup a Web-based analog to the old Voice of America.

• How many times did one candidate or another stick a finger in the air and bravely declare that “we are at war”? To the degree that is true, it is in only a very narrow sense.

  ISIS is not going to anchor a fleet off Virginia Beach and wade ashore. ISIS is not going to launch a nuclear strike. ISIS-inspired freelancers are unlikely to ever equal the murderous record of the Weather Underground. They are not, in any meaningful sense, a military threat; as philosopher Robert Woolf remarked a while back, more Americans are likely to die of illnesses contracted in hospitals than they are of ISIS-inspired violence.

  Our greatest exposure is in the realm of electronic communications. Fortunately, that Internet thingy ought to survive their attempts at mayhem, too; remember, that’s what it is designed to do.

  ISIS’ grievances against America are ideological, and they are not directed exclusively at America; they are directed at the whole of modernity. Defending the modern world from the backward-looking monotheisms is going to be this century’s project, just as defeating communism was the last century’s project.

  We are talking about the work of generations — not 10-days.

This is fun: A Wheaton College professor has been placed on administrative leave because she says Christians and Muslims worship the same god.

“I love my Muslim neighbor because s/he deserves love by virtue of her/his human dignity,” she wrote on Facebook Dec. 10. “I stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the book. And as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God.”

You’re probably thinking something like this:

• Christians believe there is only one god.

• Muslims believe there is only one god.

• (Never mind all the other celestial fauna — the saints, angels, demons, seraphim, cherubs, and that 7-headed dragon.)

• There can’t be two One God Who is the Creator of the Whole Big Universe, and therefore the good professor must be correct.

Ho-ho! You actually thought grade school arithmetic could foil a theologian?

Albert the Pious explains (and protects his club’s claim to exclusive possession of the Eternal Truth): Moozlims ain’t Trinitarians! Moozlims deny that Jesus is the son of god!

Just so’s you know, then …

1. The doctrine of the Trinity didn’t formally become part of Christian thought until 325 A.D., following the Council of Nicaea. For the first three centuries, people believing all kinds of incompatible things were going around calling themselves Christians; that’s why the council was called — and the Doctrine of the Trinity was a political compromise that allowed them all to go home.

2. Though Jesus (if he actually existed, and if the Gospels are a faithful record of his activities) never explicitly denied that he was the son of god when others said so on his behalf, neither does he ever actually say that he is the son of god. He’s a Bill Clinton-ish figure who allows people to believe whatever they like, but blithely toodles along without ever settling the matter himself.

The unsorted, uncomplicated truth is that we don’t know much at all about Jesus; that’s why I consider theology to be such an intellectually dishonest undertaking. Historically, Jesus is a ball of putty shaped to the needs of every would-be prophet who came along.

The only thing we can say with certainty is that “one god” means “one god,” not a bunch of different gods.