Civil Commotion

My engineering career began in 1979, the same year that Jerry Falwell launched the Moral Majority, the same year that the so-called Conservative Resurgence began in the Southern Baptist Convention. My professional life has been exactly coincident with the Evangelical Right’s successful, malign, and toxic attack upon modernity, upon expertise, upon knowledge itself.

Now, as I idly contemplate purchasing a summer home on the shores of Lake Superior in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, I can hardly say what pleasure it gives me to see them in disarray, reeling from …

• Steady growth of the ‘nones’ …

• Declining church attendance …

• Declining receipts …

• Closing churches …

• Growing public disdain for Holy Men on documentation of tens of thousands of instances of predatory sexual behavior…

• Scientific and Biblical research which establish dispositively that the Inerrant Bible is shot-through with grotesque errors …

• Coronavirus — I mean, where’s Our Invisible Friend when you need him? And how it must gall the Pious to see scientists — Scientists! Educated experts! Mostly atheists! — standing front and center as a skittish public looks for guidance.

Seriously: But for a dwindling handful of emotionally-disturbed eccentrics, who cares a hoot what Pastor Bubba thinks about anything nowadays?

The coronavirus pandemic represents a perfect storm for the far right, for intellectually corrupt evangelicals, for their darling First Felon — and the facts in plain sight make undeniable that they aren’t up to the challenge. Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving bunch.

Every now and then some noisy evangelical preacher accidentally gets it right.

Shame on every European full gospel church, bunch of sissies, that shut down during this thing. Catholic Church not having holy water in the lobby — how holy is the water then? That should be a sign to you that your whole religion’s a fraud. Any faith that doesn’t work in real life is a fake faith. Totally fake.

Jonathan Shuttlesworth

Of course, clear-headed thinking people don’t spend their time in church anyhow. But, even so, this guy has a valid point: How holy is the water, then?

Surely an Awesome God who created The Whole Big Universe is up to dealing with some crummy little viruses and protecting His People?

Until just now, I thought the administration’s response to the coronavirus contagion was merely, and characteristically, inept. But I’m having a difficult time thinking-up a benign reason for this.

The White House has ordered federal health officials to treat top-level coronavirus meetings as classified, an unusual step that has restricted information and hampered the U.S. government’s response to the contagion, according to four Trump administration officials.

The officials said that dozens of classified discussions about such topics as the scope of infections, quarantines and travel restrictions have been held since mid-January in a high-security meeting room at the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS), a key player in the fight against the coronavirus.

Staffers without security clearances, including government experts, were excluded from the interagency meetings, which included video conference calls, the sources said.

I can’t make sense of this. After all, if the outbreak is expected to be worse than publicly acknowledged, then the smart thing to do is to go public with strong warnings as quickly as possible in the hope of arresting activities that promote spreading the virus. And am I the only person who has failed to notice pre-emptive defenses — drug caches and personnel moved into place, testing and other medical supplies ordered, leaves and vacations cancelled, urgings against large public gatherings?

The look of things is that the adminiatration held multiple secret meetings and did … nothing.

Granted, the First Felon is vain, buffoonish, incompetent. But even he can see, surely, that an aggressive response is better than dilatory silence? Or is it the case that, Southern Baptist-like, there is no bad news in the Trump universe? Ho-ho. It may turn out that the coronavirus shows Americans how dishonest and incompetent Trump actually is, and does so far more effectively than the tedious documentations of “fake news.” After all, the dozens of lies and screw-ups every single day happen somewhere else — but the empty seat at the dinner table is in the same room.

New research points toward the likelihood that The Gospel of John is a forgery.

When it comes to the authorship of this story, Christian tradition attributes the Gospel to an apostle, known in the text as the disciple “whom Jesus loved” and identified by early church writers as the disciple John.

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Since the 1960s many scholars have argued that ‘John’ (it might have been a different disciple because the text doesn’t give a name) founded his own community and wrote the Gospel. Academics, who have recognized that the Johannine letters are thematically similar but stylistically distinct from the Gospel, don’t think that they were written by the author of the fourth Gospel but that they were nevertheless the product of the same “Johannine Community.” The picture painted here is one in which a community of followers of Jesus, led and founded by someone who knew Jesus personally, produced all of these texts. There are numerous academic books and articles out there that try to chart the history of this community, its literary output, its social structure, location, and origins.

A provocative and well-argued article published this week in the Journal for the Study of the New Testament threatens to turn this argument on its head. Hugo Mendez, an assistant professor of religious studies at UNC-Chapel Hill, argues that the so-called “Johannine community” never existed and that the Johannine literature are forgeries that claim to be written by a disciple even though they were not.

Well … who knows? More than anything else, this story reminds us how little we know about the ‘inerrant’ Bible, and the corresponding intellectual dishonesty of the entire theological enterprise.

For some reason, the Buffoon-in-Chief is alluding to Nero fiddling as Rome burned.