Category: Reality

Cognitive Clarity–The Remnant: That evangelical need to feel picked-on and special

"Cognitive Clarity" blog posts are about cultivating a culture of thoughtful and informed discourse. They encourage readers to think deeply, question boldly, and approach the world with an open yet discerning mind.

Here’s the link to this article.

Funny how the remnant looks just like all the other power-hungry, privilege-grabbing hypocrites we’ve ever seen in evangelicalism

Avatar photoby CAPTAIN CASSIDY NOV 21, 2023

Overview:

In Christianese, ‘the remnant’ is a term to indicate the truest of all true Christians: themselves, of course. Other Christians, even other evangelicals, are fakers who are going to Hell. Only the remnant gets a free pass to Heaven.

Reading Time: 14 MINUTES

Avery important evangelical belief centers on the idea of the remnant. No, it’s not a horror movie title—though it very well could be in this case. Rather, it’s the belief that the very truest of all true-blue evangelicals constitute a tiny, utterly embattled and persecuted subset of Christians. Let’s unpack this belief and see where it comes from, how evangelicals use it, and why it means so much to them.

(In the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, “the Remnant” and “Remnant Theology” take on special meaning (archive). Here, we use the term in the evangelical sense.)

Christianese 101: The remnant

The concept of the remnant is upper-level Christianese. It’s an Extremely Important Word for evangelicals that relates to something they hold especially dear: themselves.

In the real world, a remnant in general is whatever’s left over after something has taken everything else away. So a small bit of cooking oil might be the remnant after the rest has been used. The word can also refer to a bit of unsold matter from a larger whole, like cloth or carpeting.

‘Remnant’ is an Extremely Important Word for evangelicals. It relates to something they hold especially dear: themselves.

The Old Testament generally uses the real-world sense of the word:

“But God sent me ahead of you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to save your lives by a great deliverance.” [Genesis 45:7, spoken by Joseph to his brothers]

. . . [the locust] has eaten the remnant of that which is escaped, which is left to you from the hail, and it has eaten every tree which is springing out of the field for you . . . [Exodus 10:5, spoken by Moses to the Pharaoh]

And the remnant of the meat offering shall be Aaron’s and his sons’: it is a thing most holy of the offerings of the LORD made by fire. [Leviticus 2:3, referring to offerings]

And the priest shall make an atonement for him as touching his sin that he hath sinned in one of these, and it shall be forgiven him: and the remnant shall be the priest’s, as a meat offering. [Leviticus 5:13, referring to animals sacrificed as sin offerings]

Occasionally, we’ll see the evangelical sense of the word used, like one of their favorite passages in Isaiah 10:20-22:

On that day the remnant of Israel and the survivors of the house of Jacob will no longer depend on him who struck them, but they will truly rely on the LORD, the Holy One of Israel. A remnant will return, a remnant of Jacob will return to the Mighty God. Though your people, O Israel, be like the sand of the sea, only a remnant will return.

In the New Testament, though, we see this sense of remnant almost exclusively:

And the remnant [of invited guests] took his servants, and entreated them spitefully, and slew them. [Matthew 22:6, the Parable of the Banquet]

“Lord, they have killed Your prophets and torn down Your altars. I am the only one left, and they are seeking my life as well?” And what was the divine reply to him? “I have reserved for Myself seven thousand men who have not bowed the knee to Baal.” In the same way, at the present time there is a remnant chosen by grace. [Romans 11:3-5; divine reply refers to 1 Kings 19:18]

And the same hour was there a great earthquake, and the tenth part of the city fell, and in the earthquake were slain of men seven thousand: and the remnant were affrighted, and gave glory to the God of heaven. [Revelation 11:13]

As you can see, it’s a whole thing in Christianity, particularly for evangelical culture warriors. If you see a church called “Remnant,” like the one started by weird fundie weight-loss guru Gwen Shamblin (archive), you can be absolutely assured that it’s an evangelical church whose members are way into the culture wars.

The remnant in the wild

Evangelicals take this remnant stuff very seriously. To them, it means more than being the leftovers or the last bit unused. It’s more about being the only real true believers out of all the rest of the fakey-fake pseudo-believers.

For example, a Calvinist church in Tacoma exhorts its congregation to “think like a Remnant”:

To consider oneself part of the remnant today sounds and feels proud and conceited. To declare oneself part of the faithful minority as opposed to being lumped with the unfaithful majority smacks of arrogance. We remind ourselves it is God who gets to dole out labels.“Thinking Like a Remnant” (archive)

But weirdly, it’s this god’s self-appointed spokespeople who actually do the doling-out. Nobody’s ever heard their god say a thing, most especially including his own followers!

This doling-out isn’t just a fun, overly-flattering little descriptor, either. It’s a statement of condemnation of all other flavors of Christianity and all Christians who disagree with these folks. Out of every single flavor of Christianity over its almost-2000-year-long history, these particular Christians are the only ones who finally got Jesusing right.

“Jesus is so lucky to have us!”

“Thinking like a Remnant” also involves feeling super-duper-persecuted for such superior Jesusing, as this church’s site reminds the flocks:

Outnumbered? Scorned? Misunderstood? Disliked? Yes, we are. But we have been redeemed.“Thinking Like a Remnant” (archive)

That’s not why people “scorn” these Christians, of course, nor why they “dislike” them. Their imaginary redemption has nothing to do with that. However, it’s clearly much more comfortable to pin the tail on a strawman than consider the boorish and cruel behavior that actually constitutes the reasons for society’s reactions to them.

The remnant: The best of the best of the BEST, SIR! With honors!

Famous evangelical leader A.W. Tozer (1897-1963) had much the same things to say about the notion of the remnant some years ago:

I am alarmed because it has been true since Pentecost that such a vast number of people who call themselves Christians-the overwhelming majority-are nominal, and only a remnant is saved.“The Remnant. Who are they? Are you part of the Remnant?” (archive)

Tozer didn’t like knowing that many Christians felt perfectly peaceful about their faith. To him, that meant they were fakey-fake fake Christians, not the real true believers who were really going to Heaven after death:

Either we take ourselves for granted and have a sham peace or we get disturbed and then we pray through and find true peace. Most believers take themselves for granted and have a false peace. If they did what the Bible taught, they would be bothered and alarmed about themselves and would go to God with an open Bible and let the Bible cut them to pieces and put them together again, then give them peace. And the peace they had when they had been chopped to pieces by the Holy Spirit and the Sword of the Spirit-that peace, then, is a legitimate peace. [. . .]

So at the second coming of Christ, it will be as it was in the days of Noah; and in those days, Noah, the eighth person, was saved by water, by the ark. The rest of the population drowned.“The Remnant. Who are they? Are you part of the Remnant?” (archive)

Even the comments sound like people who take themselves entirely too seriously and think entirely too much of themselves.

It all reminds me of that hilarious scene from Men in Black, where Jay is trying to work out the purpose of a big meeting:

YouTube video

At least “Captain America over here” had objective reasons for thinking so highly of himself. As a group, evangelicals have none. But somehow, they think even more highly of themselves.

The weighty implications of being part of this glorious remnant

“Thinking like a Remnant” involves being part of the evangelical culture wars, according to Crosswalk:

One of the things we must be aware of is that if you are in Christ you are part of the present day remnant. Jesus calls you salt and one of the functions of salt is to preserve, which is what the remnant does. We are called to preserve God’s standard in the earth regardless of what we see happening in our society.“What Does Remnant Mean in the Bible?” (archive)

It’s also yet another way for Christians to lord their superior Jesusing over others. Over and over again, we see Christians using “the remnant” (archive) to refer to themselves as the real-deal true Christians—while slamming all other kinds of Christians as fakes who are doomed to Hell for their insufficient, incorrect Jesusing:

Today the church serves as God’s chosen people.[citation needed] And like the children of Israel, the church has become a sinful nation, comprised of believers laden with iniquity. They are a seed of evildoers, with children who are corrupter. They have forsaken the Lord and have provoked the Holy One unto anger. [citation needed] They have gone away backward. But despite the state of the church, God has once again left a small remnant.[citation needed] A remnant that is far from perfect, but a remnant that trust God.[citation needed]“Who is God’s remnant?” (archive)

And, amusingly enough, we also see Christians policing each other’s use of the word itself:

Claiming to be the remnant is a sign of arrogance. To excuse a church’s lack of growth on being a remnant is to claim that we are more right than others. [. . .]

You are not part of the remnant because you have stricter standards than the bigger church across town. You are not a part of the remnant because you are more separated than other churches.“Are We the Remnant?” (archive)

Of course, as that last quote illustrates, being part of the remnant implies a serious obligation to recruit more people into the fold:

This is your message, the vital message, and if you won’t carry it, who will?

We will carry it. We the few, the remnant, the believing church of Philadelphia in the time of the lukewarm church of Laodicea.“A Message to the Remnant of Believers in the World Today” (archive)

Other Christians lean hard on this concept to frighten believers about the Endtimes:

In this generation, we’ve seen the final jubilee that will happen in our generation. The next one to take place during a feast will happen in 500 years. We have seen the last one. Therefore, we are the remnant generation. We are the generation that have seen Matthew 24 to come to pass, the rebirth of Israel, Daniel 12:4 come to pass, we have seen technology and science increase. Most of the people don’t know the times we are living in. Only a remnant does. Why? Because they can read the signs. When you know why these signs are happening, you will have peace and no fear because you know our redemption draws near.“End Times Chosen Remnant” (archive)

As you might already have noticed, Calvinists seem particularly enamored of remnant ideology:

The elect are not many but few—only a remnant. Jesus said, “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to [eternal] destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it” (Matt. 7:13–14). And Paul said, “Isaiah cries out concerning Israel: ‘Though the number of the Israelites be like the sand by the sea, only the remnant will be saved’” (Rom. 9:27). We are the remnant; we are not many.“Jesus Prays for Us” (archive)

Using remnant ideology to feel persecuted

One of the weirdest ideas to come out of evangelicalism is the notion that “the world,” meaning everybody but their own narrowly-defined tribe of real true Christians, despises the remnant and wishes to oppress and persecute everyone within it. In reality, if evangelicals actually reliably did even a tenth of what Jesus commanded his followers to do and consistently refrained from doing even a fraction of the stuff he ordered them not to do, nobody’d ever have any problem with them.

But where’s the fun in being kind, respectful, and charitable? In comforting the grieving, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked? Where are the sadistic thrills in turning the other cheek, giving everything you have to the poor, giving someone the shirt off your back when they ask for your coat, and treating everyone, including your worst enemies, with kindness and love? What power accrues while accepting whatever horrible things someone else wants to do to you, and enduring it with nothing but smiles and blessings on your lips?

And if you’re not swanning around ostentatiously Jesusing at everyone, how will they even know you’re Jesus’ very special prettiest princess?

No, anyone involved in modern evangelicalism isn’t there to do all that boring stuff, nor to refrain from doing the gratifying stuff that really revs their motors. They’re there to get a free ticket out of Hell—and to mistreat others with Jesus’ permission.

(See also: Permission slips.)

They’ve declared themselves the best, truest, most incredibly Jesusy Jesusers who ever Jesused the Jesus-Jesus. Along with that declaration, they’ve also decided all other Christians are fakers and the outside world hates them jus’ fer’ bein’ KRIS-chin.

The stage is set for them to assume that literally any pushback at all to any of their control-grabs is actually persecution of the most shocking and egregious kind. Because obviously, fakers and heathens totally hate and fear the purity and godliness of the remnant. Gosh, they’re just far too divine to handle!

Sidebar: The Spiritual Ruler strikes again

Way back in college, I was a sprightly, bright-eyed Pentecostal lass. I had a lot of friends on-campus from a number of different evangelical groups. And because I thought Pentecostals were the remnant, I regarded every one of them as well-meaning but missing the mark (archive), to use the Christianese.

For one thing, every one of them was a Trinitarian. Pentecostals rejected the Trinity, instead embracing Oneness Theology. Back then, my tribe considered Trinitarianism a filthy papist doctrine that incorporated paganism into the one true monotheistic faith.

Only the remnant understood and embraced Oneness. And spoke in tongues just like on the Day of Pentecost in the Book of Acts. And maintained a ferocious separation from the outside world’s secular ways. Etc., etc., etc.

Truly, Jesus was so lucky to have us!

The funny thing, though, is that it’s almost impossible for one Christian to persuade another that they’re dead wrong about a major doctrinal belief. They can both swear up and down that they only want to believe what’s correct and most Jesusy, and they can both pray the same prayers and study the exact same Bible verses. But they’ll only see their own beliefs confirmed and other beliefs disavowed.

Even those papist Trinitarian pagans had entire books full of reasons to reject Oneness Theology, just as Pentecostals did to debunk Trinitarianism.

I came out of Christianity with a real affection for mockingly calling particularly-pompous Trinitarians heretics. But really, every Christian who’s ever lived is a heretic to some other Christian somewhere. There’s no way to win this squabble because there’s no consistent objective standard with which Christians may compare themselves. The Bible is a laughably poor resource in that respect; its many verses can be twisted and turned to suit any interpretation imaginable—as my college friends and I discovered many, many times.

The problems with declaring themselves the prettiest, most important princesses at the ball

We’ve already seen one Christian leader chide his flocks for using remnant ideology to excuse their lack of recruitment success. We’ve also already seen another Christian leader preen and strut about how it’s totally not arrogant at all to declare oneself as the remnant. No, not at all—if he does say so himself!

It’s not just arrogant, though. It’s not just a tidy excuse, either, for a small church’s congregation size.

Posing as the realest, truest Christians ever, the only ones who are actually going to Heaven, has a marked effect on those claiming it. Remnant ideology becomes a satisfying narrative for them. The flocks greedily consume it—and then use it to rationalize their control-lust and tribalistic impulses.

That’s how Mike Johnson, the new extremely evangelical Speaker of the House, can say with such conviction (archive) that the literal only reason why his tribe’s power is being curtailed is because everybody just hates them and persecutes them fer jus’ bein’ KRISchin. I’ll bet you just about anything that the guy thinks he and his like-minded tribemates constitute the remnant.

(Author’s note: Suddenly intrigued by this idea, I went a-searching. And yes. According to Rolling Stone (archive), Mike Johnson sure does think that: “He speaks at length about a devoted Christian “remnant” — or keepers of the true faith — who can help save America from retribution.” If you’re wondering, saving America means evangelicals fully controlling Americans’ lives, Handmaid style. It’s alarming to hear Johnson further claiming (archive) that the separation of church and state is a “misnomer.”)

It’s funny to watch these Christians get mad when nobody else honors them as the pretty princesses they think they truly are.

The politics of the remnant

Once Christians declare themselves the best of the best of the best, SIR, with honors, then they start to look at everyone else as poor widdle heathens in need of fixing up, people far too stupid and naughty to know what’s best for themselves, who need Designated Adults to step in and force them onto the right path (through actual enslavement if need be, according to Pastor Joe Morecraft in 2013), who most of all might not even be fully human or experience normal human emotions due to their lack of correct Jesusing. They use their self-declared label as a rationalization for trying to rob others of their rights.

History is replete with examples of what happens when this process is allowed to go too far. From slavery to the war crimes Japan committed against the people they called “logs,” from separate-but-equal laws to the designation of women as men’s property, nothing but harm and cruelty comes of such thinking.

Members of such a declared superior group invariably start mistreating the ones they consider inferior. And the people they mistreat usually have no recourse whatsoever, and no hope of finding justice in a system dominated by that superior group.

That’s why Paige Patterson lost his cushy seminary presidency in 2018: He systematically silenced sex-assault victims to protect the reputation of his school, and he told female domestic violence victims to meekly endure that abuse so their husbands would get convicted (ashamed, but in a really Jesusy way) enough to stop and become real true Christians at last.

Of course, the rest of that tribe still honors him as a great man and inspirational leader who got rousted unfairly out of his powerful position by lesser Christians who couldn’t understand his Jesus-osity. And boy oh boy, do they ever hate the guy who succeeded him!

The remnant might not actually be in churches anymore

Ten years ago, evangelicals gloated about the relatively faster decline of mainline and progressive churches. It’d never be them, they sneered, since they were so incredibly Jesusy that Jesus would always bless them with growth.

That smugness sure didn’t last. As it turned out, their rigid authoritarianism only held down a few extra butts in pews (BIPs, a measure of evangelical power) for a few extra years. Their rigid authoritarianism had made church membership seem a lot less optional than it really was. As the decline continued, year after year, even the most devoted evangelical BIPs realized that they could leave, and there was just nothing whatsoever that their church leaders could really do about it.

That’s when evangelicals’ decline began to keep up with and sometimes even outpace that of other flavors of Christianity.

Oh, I mean those leaders could write angry blog posts and books (archive) about their congregations quietly melting out “the back door.” Of course, the advice to church leaders was—and still is—always to drill down harder on authoritarian demands (archive) to make membership feel less optional. But in terms of real-world Christian love retaliation, most of those leaving were generally safe for the first time in modern American history.

And, too, those leaders could write angry blog posts and books about how the remaining BIPs were the remnant, the truest of all true Christians, the realest-deal of everyone, while the departing members were the fakey-fake “Cultural Christian” fakers (archive) that everyone was happy to see leave.

But sooner or later, even the BIPs had to question that wisdom. It sure seemed like the people leaving had been extremely devoted. Many of those who’d left were happy to say exactly that. (You can often find them commenting on blog posts discussing that exact situation.) They became churchless believers, Christians who’d left church culture behind because it had first left them behind.

And now, the prettiest of the prettiest princesses!

The most arrogant evangelicals seem now to consider themselves the remnant of the remnant. Out of an already small number of pretty princesses, they’re the very prettiest of the pretty. As one pastor preached in 2015 on YouTube,

Within the remnant there is even those numbers that are even fewer.

So a remnant in the natural means a small portion of the original. Say you are making a dress. Those offshoots are a remnant of the original fabric that you’re using to make that dress. But here, we see God is saying ‘remnant of the remnant’. What is happening here?

See, the mark of a wise church is not how many people go to that church, but how many people fear the LORD and live differently as a result of being in that church. [. . .]

Are you the remnant of the remnant? He is coming back for the remnant of the remnant!“THE REMNANT OF THE REMNANT – PST ROBERT CLANCY” 2015, about 2:50-5:00

Strangely enough, though, this remnant of the remnant always looks like the usual grabby, power-maddened hypocrites we’ve always seen. Calling themselves lofty things doesn’t change who they are. It just makes them look worse. Calling themselves something even loftier only makes things even worse.

What’s next? The remnant of the remnant of the remnant, with honors, sir?

(Don’t ever think that we’ve hit rock bottom with evangelicals. They’ve always got a burning desire to dig ever-deeper. Sooner or later, that phrase will become evangelical reality.)

These remnant evangelicals don’t realize something important, though

If today’s evangelicals are what Jesus really wants, he’s welcome to them. I don’t believe an afterlife exists, but if Heaven did exist it sure wouldn’t be paradise with the remnant of the remnant there.

As for me, I’d rather be part of the vibrant, ever-unfurling tapestry of the human experience than a little piece cut off from it. I want to plunge into those colors, revel in the stitchery, glory in the smooth imperfect perfection of each hand-made stitch. I want to be part and parcel of the tapestry, to be part of the human situation, to be here now. That’s what I want: to mindfully watch its creation and add to it in any way that I can. However its last stitches get added, I want to be part of the whole.

For years now, it has astonished me that evangelicals can look at that tapestry, turn their noses up at it, and insist that they’re separate from it and far better than it could ever be. They’ve been making their own burlap abomination of a fake tapestry for years. They call this fake substitute perfect and praise it nonstop, while the real one flows behind them and past them and beyond them.

It’s just so picayune, so small, so petty. It’s looking at the glorious universe, its billions of years, the Laniakea supercluster, the filament threads flowing through the entire cosmos, and knowing that on a tiny sun-blasted, parched bit of rock, a Johnny-come-lately desert godling has ordered his tiny, ants-to-an-ant mortal followers not to get overly familiar with their own genitals for the 70 years or so that they’ll be alive.

The remnant are welcome to their Jesus, just as he’s welcome to them. I’d rather have reality. On this lovely Thanksgiving week, I’m thankful that so too, it seems, do growing numbers of other folks.

Cognitive Clarity–Abortion travel bans: Coming soon to a red state near you?

"Cognitive Clarity" blog posts are about cultivating a culture of thoughtful and informed discourse. They encourage readers to think deeply, question boldly, and approach the world with an open yet discerning mind.

Here’s the link to this article.

Avatar photoby ADAM LEE NOV 27, 2023

A tattered American flag behind a barbed-wire fence | Abortion travel bans: Coming soon to a red state near you?
Credit: Pixabay

Overview:

Despite one stinging defeat after another, religious conservatives keep trying to outlaw abortion—now, by making it illegal to travel out of red states to places where it’s legal.

Reading Time: 6 MINUTES

Abortion is a losing issue for Republicans.

The evidence is beyond a reasonable doubt. In election after election, they’ve been slapped down.

Kansas voted down an abortion ban. Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s support for a “reasonable” 15-week ban cost him the Virginia legislature. Gov. Andy Beshear won reelection in Kentucky with a devastating ad about how his opponent would have forced a pre-teen girl raped by her stepfather to give birth. The people of Ohio passed a constitutional amendment protecting abortion rights, infuriating the state’s Republican legislators (who’ve already announced they intend to try to nullify the will of their own voters—more on this soon, no doubt).

Are they giving up? No.

Despite these blistering rebukes from voters, Republican politicians refuse to relent. They’re preparing an even more draconian set of laws to strip reproductive freedom away from the American people.

The right to travel

So far, America’s federalist structure has kept the full weight of abortion bans from crashing down on women. While red states seized on their chance to outlaw or heavily restrict abortion, most blue states have protected and expanded abortion rights. People in red states who need an abortion can travel to the nearest safe haven (assuming, of course, that they have the money, the resources and the time). In fact, U.S. abortion rates have increased since the Dobbs decision.

Religious conservatives in red states are disgruntled by this, and they’re trying to stop it. They can’t control what blue states do—but they want to make it illegal to travel out of state to get an abortion, and prosecute those who help women do this.

For example, in Alabama:

Alabama’s Republican attorney general said in a court filing that he has the right to prosecute people who make travel arrangements for pregnant women to have out-of-state abortions.

In a court filing Monday, attorneys for Attorney General Steve Marshall wrote that providing transportation for women in Alabama to leave the state to get an abortion could amount to a “criminal conspiracy.”“Alabama attorney general says he has right to prosecute people who facilitate travel for out-of-state abortions.” Andy Rose, CNN, 31 August 2023.

And in Texas:

Commissioners in Lubbock County, Texas, on Monday voted to outlaw the act of transporting another person along their roads for an abortion, part of a strategy by conservative activists to further restrict abortion since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

The move makes Lubbock the biggest jurisdiction yet to pass such a restriction on abortion-related transportation since the June 2022 end of Roe, which had granted a nationwide right to abortion. Six cities and counties in Texas have passed the bans, out of nine that have considered them.

A few hours north, the Amarillo City Council on Tuesday will weigh its own law, which could lead to a future council or city-wide vote.

Lubbock and Amarillo are both traversed by major highways that connect Texas, which has one of the country’s most stringent abortion laws, to neighboring New Mexico, where abortion is legal.“Fight over Texas anti-abortion transport bans reaches biggest battlegrounds yet.” Julia Harte, Reuters, 24 October 2023.

In Missouri, too, an anti-abortion travel ban has been proposed by state lawmakers. Idaho has made it a crime—”abortion trafficking”—to take a minor out of state for an abortion.

The logic, such as it is, of these religious conservatives is that abortion is illegal in their states, and even if the act itself occurs where it’s legal, traveling out of state constitutes the crime of “conspiracy to obtain an abortion”. Thus, they believe they can criminally prosecute both women who get an abortion and anyone who helps them travel to do so.

States’ rights

If these anti-abortion travel bans are allowed to stand by the courts, the result will be national chaos. It would be a backdoor for each state to enforce its policy preferences on all the others.

What if a red state decided to outlaw gambling, and sought to arrest people who go on a weekend trip to Las Vegas? Could Utah, a famously dry state, ban alcohol and prosecute people who crossed state lines to go to a bar, for “conspiring” to obtain booze? Could enthusiastic book-banning states like Texas make it illegal to read books on their blacklists, even in a library in another state?

It works the other way, too. What about anti-gun blue states? Could California, New York or Illinois outlaw firearms and make it illegal to travel on state roads to go to an out-of-state shooting range?

Historically informed readers will notice a parallel. Southern apologists claim the U.S. Civil War was fought to protect “states’ rights”, but in fact, the opposite is true. The slaveholding states wanted to enforce their beliefs on all states, whatever the people in those other states thought about it.

They tried to achieve this with laws such as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which decreed that an enslaved person who escaped and made it to a free state didn’t become free. On the contrary, it (attempted to) require people in free states to help capture the runaways and return them to slavery.

These laws stirred up massive outrage from people in the North, who resented being told that they had to enforce an oppressive legal regime they didn’t vote for or agree with. It was one of the major sources of enmity that led into the Civil War.

How would you enforce a travel ban?

For all the yelling they do about freedom, anti-abortion conservatives are eagerly starting down a short path to dictatorship. To prevent women from traveling out of state for an abortion would require a truly dystopian apparatus of surveillance and control.

Every red state would have to become a mini-Gilead, with checkpoints at every airport, harbor and interstate road. They’d have to hire an army of brownshirts to detain and interrogate women about where they were going and why (or, in the most nightmarish scenario, forcibly administer pregnancy tests), and force them to go home if their answers weren’t convincing enough.

Anyone who could get pregnant would be under perpetual house arrest. They’d be unable to set foot on any public sidewalk or road without a pass from a husband or an employer. No airline or taxi or bus company would be willing to transport them, for fear of prosecution. It would be a theocratic prison state like Saudi Arabia or the Taliban.

The good news—such as it is—is that it doesn’t seem Republicans have any plans to do this. At least for the time being, that would be too intrusive and extreme even for them to swallow.

Instead, it’s more likely that travel bans will be used as a tool of fear and arbitrary enforcement. They’ll make examples of a few cases that come to their attention, mostly poor and minority women turned in by jealous ex-partners or controlling relatives, while the rich and the well-connected get off lightly.

There’s historical precedent for that. It’s exactly how the nineteenth-century Comstock Act was enforced:

The Comstock Act had sweeping potential when it passed in 1873, able to be interpreted to cover information, drugs, and devices related to abortion or contraception, as well as anything else deemed obscene. But in the 19th and early 20th centuries, law-enforcement officers and postal inspectors didn’t have access to the reams of digital data available today. Catching those who published newsletters or put information on the outside of an envelope was easy; most people sending abortion or contraception materials quickly learned to use sealed envelopes. And to open an envelope, investigators needed a warrant.

But anti-vice crusaders found two ways around this problem. First, they tapped into a network of tipsters and detectives—people who deceived potential abortion providers, pretending to be patients or their loved ones to gather evidence for potential prosecutions. Anthony Comstock, a former dry-goods salesman and anti-vice activist who lobbied for the law named after him (and who became a special agent for the U.S. Postal Service in enforcing the act), perfected the art of decoy letters and disguises, looking for evidence that could be turned over to postal inspectors or police.

Second, they relied on personal vendettas and animosities: angry ex-lovers, controlling husbands, business rivals, and others who used the law for their own ends. Countless people weaponized the law in their own personal conflicts. Victorians who sent “vinegar valentines,” cards that insulted or humiliated their targets, were turned in for Comstock violations. So were men who harassed women, a flirting couple who arranged potential rendezvous, and wives who wrote angry letters to their husbands’ mistresses.“Harsh Anti-abortion Laws Are Not Empty Threats.” Mary Ziegler, The Atlantic, 10 November 2023.

Of course, this is bad enough. And if Republicans were able to achieve that much, we can be sure it wouldn’t stop there. Contrary to the soothing lies of politicians like Glenn Youngkin about compromise, every victory only emboldens them to demand more. The once-unthinkable has already become routine in America, and their fanaticism for more and harsher restrictions on women has only grown.

Cognitive Clarity–Reality Check: What Must Be the Case if Christianity is True?

"Cognitive Clarity" blog posts are about cultivating a culture of thoughtful and informed discourse. They encourage readers to think deeply, question boldly, and approach the world with an open yet discerning mind.

Here’s the link to this article.

By John W. Loftus at 11/27/2023

In 2011 I did a series of posts called “Reality Check: What Must Be the Case if Christianity is True?”  I put some of them in the third chapter in  The End of Christianity, and the first chapter in God and Horrendous Suffering.

Below I’ve put together thirty of them that most Christians agree on and why they are all improbable:

1) There must be a God who is a simple being yet made up of three inexplicable persons existing forever outside of time without a beginning, who therefore never learned anything new, never took a risk, never made a decision, never disagreed within the Godhead, and never had a prior moment to freely choose his own nature.

2) There must be a personal non-embodied omnipresent God who created the physical universe ex-nihilo in the first moment of time who will subsequently forever experience a sequence of events in time.3) There must exist a perfectly good, omnipotent God, who created a perfectly good universe out of a desire/need to glorify himself by rewarding in heaven the few human beings who just got lucky to believe by being born at the right time and place, and who will condemn to hell those who do not believe.

4) That the highest created being, known as Satan or the Devil, led an angelic rebellion against an omnipotent omniscient omnibenelovent omnipresent God, and expected to win–which makes Satan out to be pure evil and dumber than a box of rocks.

5) That there was a first human pair (Adam & Eve) who so grievously sinned against God when tested that all of the rest of us are being punished for it (including animals), even though no one but the first human pair deserved to be punished. If it’s argued that all of us deserve to be punished because we all would have sinned, then the test was a sham. For only if some of us would not have sinned can the test be considered a fair one. But if some of us would not have sinned under the same initial conditions then there are people who are being punished for something they never would have done.

6) That although there are many other similar mythological stories told in Ancient Near Eastern Literature that pre-date what we read in the Bible, the stories in the Bible are about real events and real people.

7) That although we see completely different perspectives and evolving theologies in the Bible, including many things that are barbaric and superstitious to the core, it was authored by one divine mind.

8) That when it comes to verifiable matters of historical fact (like the Exodus, the extent of the reign of David, Luke’s reported world-wide census, etc) the Biblical stories are disconfirmed by evidence to the contrary as fairy tales, but when it comes to supernatural claims of miracles that cannot be verified like a virgin birth and resurrection from the grave, the Bible reports true historical facts.

9) That although a great number of miracles were claimed to have happened in the different superstitious cultures of the ancient world, only the ones in the Bible actually happened as claimed.

10) That an omniscient God could not foresee that his revealed will in the Bible would lead believers to commit such atrocities against others that reasonable people would conclude there is no divine mind behind the Bible. I call this The Problem of Miscommunication.

11) That God created human beings with rational minds that require evidence before they accept something, and yet this same God does not provide enough evidence but asks them to have faith instead.

12) That although people around the world are raised in different cultures to believe in their particular god(s) there is only one God and he will judge all people based upon whether or not they believe Jesus is Lord.

13) That Jesus fulfilled Old Testament prophecy even though there is not one passage in the Old Testament that is specifically fulfilled in his life, death, and resurrection that can legitimately be understood as a prophecy and singularly points to Jesus as the Messiah using today’s historical-grammatical hermeneutical method.

14) That although there were many false virgin birth claims about famous people (like Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, Plato) mythical heroes (like Mithra, Hercules) and savior gods (like Krishna, Osiris, Dionysus) in the ancient world, Jesus was really born of a virgin.

15) That while there is no rational explanation for how a person can be 100% man and 100% God, and although ancient pagan superstitious people believed this can take place (Acts 14:11-12; 28:6), Jesus was incarnate God in the flesh.

16) That while the results of science are assured when it comes to chemistry, physics, meteorology, mechanics, forensic science, medical science, rocket science, computer science, and so forth, when it comes to evolutionary science that shows all present life forms have common ancestors, or when science tells us that dead bodies do not arise from the grave because total cell necrosis is irreversible, the results of science are wrong because the Bible says otherwise.

17) That although there is no rational explanation for why Jesus had to die on the cross to atone for our sins, his death atoned for our sins.

18) That although historical reconstructions of the past are are notoriously difficult because they depend on the poor evidence of history, and even though historians must assess that evidence by assuming a natural explanation for it, and even though historical evidence can never establish how to view that evidence, the Christian faith can be established historically anyway. My argument is that when it comes to miraculous claims, yesterday’s evidence no longer can hold water for me, for in order to see it as evidence, I must already believe in the framework that allows me to see it as evidence. In other words, in order to see yesterday’s evidence as evidence for me, I must already believe the Christian framework that allows me to see yesterday’s evidence as evidence for Christianity.

19) That although there is no cogent theodicy that can explain why there is such ubiquitous and massive human and animal suffering if a perfectly good omnipotent God exists, God is perfectly good and omnipotent anyway.

20) That while scientific tests on petitionary prayers have produced at best negligible results and at worst completely falsified them, God answers these kinds of prayers anyway.

21) That even though Christianity shows evidence that it is nothing but a cultural by-product of human invention there is a divine mind behind it anyway.

22) That Jesus is the Son of God even though the textual evidence in the New Testament conclusively shows that the founder of the Jesus cult was a failed apocalyptic prophet who prophesied that the eschaton would take place in his generation, which would involve a total cosmic catastrophe after which God inaugurates a literal kingdom on earth with the “Son of Man” reigning from Jerusalem over the nations.

23) That although there can be no moral justification for the sufferings of animals in this created world, a perfectly good God created this world anyway. We don’t even see God’s care for the lower animals in his supposed revealed word, which is described in Psalm 119 as his “perfect will.” Think otherwise? Then read what I wrote here.

24) That although the only method we have for determining the truth in factual matters is methodological naturalism, which assumes a natural explanation for any phenomena, and although this method is the hallmark of the sciences, the phenomena of the Bible can be exempted from this method as applied through Biblical Criticism, and believed anyway.

25) That although God’s supposed revelation in the canonical Bible is indistinguishable from the musings of an ancient, barbaric, superstitious people, the Bible is the word of God. As SilverBullet recently said: “…the lord doesn’t work in mysterious ways, but in ways that are indistinguishable from his non-existence. It seems to me that there is nothing in the Christian scriptures, no sentence, paragraph, or idea, that couldn’t be anything more than the product of the humans alive at the time that the apparently divinely inspired scriptures and ideas were “revealed”. Sure, its possible for a god to reveal himself in an inspired book, and throughout history, in ways that are indistinguishable from the work of human minds and human minds alone. But how probable does that seem to you?”

26) That although it’s claimed God got the attention of Abraham, Moses, the Pharaoh, Gideon, Mary, Joseph, and Saul (who became Paul) and that he knows how to get the attention of anyone and everyone, there is no objective evidence he’s trying to get the attention of the billions of people who don’t believe. In fact, Christians are much more concerned than God is that non-believers are converted. Just compare the lengths to which Christians will go in order to convert non-believers, with a God who has the means to convert everyone and yet does nothing to help them do this. If you say God is helping to convert non-believers then tell us how to objectively know God is actually doing this.

27) Christianity is a faith that must dismiss the tragedy of death. It does not matter who dies, or how many, or what the circumstances are when people die. It could be the death of a mother whose baby depends upon her for milk. It could be a pandemic like cholera that decimated parts of the world in 1918, or the more than 23,000 children who die every single day from starvation. These deaths could be by suffocation, drowning, a drive-by shooting, or being burned to death. It doesn’t matter. God is good. Death doesn’t matter. People die all of the time. In order to justify God’s goodness Christianity minimizes the value of human life. It is a pro-death faith, plain and simple.

28) That God’s punishments are good, right, and just, even though it means sinners are thrust into a surprisingly dangerous world, and in death will be blindsided by an eternal punishment in hell, which is “Christianity’s most damnable doctrine.” In this world how do you think human beings first learned that venomous creatures like certain kinds of spiders, snakes, ants or scorpions could kill us? People/children had to die, lots of them. How do you think human beings first learned that polluted water or lead poisoning could kill us? Again, people/children had to die, lots of them. It was inevitable since God never told us what to avoid in order to stay alive. We had to learn these kinds of things firsthand. The same thing can be said for hell. People do not know their choices will send them to an eternal punishment in hell. For if we knew this, and if it was possible not to sin at all, we wouldn’t sin. Do you doubt this? Then consider that if you knew with certainty that by crossing a line drawn in the sand you would get beaten to a pulp by a biker gang, you would not do it!

29) When believers like Christians or Muslims contend their faiths are based on reason, one may simply object that this can’t be so because their god in fact doesn’t allow it. Using reason to arrive at any other belief than the correct one will earn you an eternity in hell. Thus, reason is an evil to be avoided….Blind, unquestioning, and unexamined belief is what the theist’s retributive god truly desires, not a belief grounded in reason. And yet they maintain Christianity is reasonable.

30) The Christian thinks there is an objective absolute morality that stems from their perfectly good God, which is both eternal and unchangeable. But the morality we find in the Bible is something quite different than what they claim. Morality has evolved. What we find in the Bible is not something we would expect from a perfectly good God, but Christians believe there is a perfectly good God anyway. So Christians must choose, either 1) hold to a philosopher’s god divorced from the historical realities of the Bible, or 2) continue to worship a moral monster.

Cognitive Clarity–The Magic Self-Authenticating New Testament, Robert Conner

"Cognitive Clarity" blog posts are about cultivating a culture of thoughtful and informed discourse. They encourage readers to think deeply, question boldly, and approach the world with an open yet discerning mind.

Here’s the link to this article.

By David Madison at 11/21/2023

It can be asserted with little fear of contradiction that every literate

adult the world over has a mental image of Jesus of Nazareth. After all, Christianity is the largest religion — an estimated 2.4 billion adherents — and has existed for 2000 years. For centuries, laymen and scholars alike assumed the gospel stories were history and that Jesus and his apostles were verifiably historical characters like Caesar Augustus (Luke 2:1), Herod the Great (Matthew 2:1), or Tiberius Caesar and Pontius Pilate (Luke 3:1-2). However, in the early twentieth century, when German scholars began to question the reliability of the New Testament texts, that assumption came under challenge, particularly after 1909 when the philosopher Christian Heinrich Arthur Drews published Die Christusmythe, The Christ Myth, that claimed there was no reliable independent evidence for the Jesus of the gospels — Jesus, Drews asserted, was a product of the imagination. Could Drews have been right all along?

Whatever one may think of Drew’s claims, one is certainly true: there is no independent evidence for Jesus outside the text of the New Testament. As always, scholars are divided about specifics, including about when Jesus died — assuming Jesus was a real person to begin with. The majority opinion, based on the gospels, favors a date between April, CE 30, and April, CE 33, but as Helen Bond has argued convincingly, the gospel accounts were meant to establish early Christian theology, not to record Jesus’ history.[1] There is little evidence to suggest the gospel accounts contain any eyewitness testimony: the gospel writers never name themselves within their texts, speak in the first person, suggest that they were either observers or participants in the events they relate, or cite their sources. Matthew and Luke clearly depended on the gospel of Mark — Matthew quotes or paraphrases 600 of the 661 verses in Mark and follows Mark’s timeline. Luke followed suit, using about 65% of Mark as his source.

At this point the Christian apologist will typically cite the historian Josephus, particularly the crown jewel of Historical Jesus texts, the endlessly debated Testimonium Flavianum of Antiquities, Book 18, Chapter 3, 3: 

“About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was one who performed surprising deeds and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many of the Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Christ. And when, upon the accusation of the principal men among us, Pilate had condemned him to the cross, those who had first come to love him did not cease. He appeared to them spending a third day restored to life, for the prophets of God had foretold these things and a thousand other marvels about him. And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared.” 

Two recently published analyses of the Testimonium come to radically different conclusions. Based on a comparison of the Testimonium and the writings of the church official Eusebius, Ken Olson concluded, 

“Both the language and the content [of the Testimonium] have close parallels in the work of Eusebius of Caesarea, who is the first author to show any knowledge of the text…The most likely hypothesis is that Eusebius either composed the entire text or rewrote it so thoroughly that it is now impossible to recover a Josephan original.” 

Olson concludes that the Testimonium “has its most plausible Sitz-im-Leben in the pagan-Christian controversies of the fourth century.”[2]

On the other hand, Gary Goldberg performed a meticulous comparison of the Testimonium and Luke 24:18-24, documenting “thirty-one ordered content parallels” between the two texts. Goldberg concluded, “…by the simplest estimate (a normal distribution), the probability that the Emmaus-TF correspondences are due to chance is about one in ten thousand…The study shows Josephus closely following a Christian source…”[3]

In short, two close examinations of the text of the Testimonium have concluded that (1) it is a Eusebian forgery invented to bolster the early Christian claim of Jesus’ divine status, or (2) it is a word-for-word paraphrase of the Road to Emmaus story in the gospel of Luke. Quite clearly, the Testimonium is not an independent historical confirmation of the Jesus of the gospels. Additionally, as I have noted elsewhere, “…competent scholars arguing in good faith often reach radically different conclusions based on the available evidence…The evidence, such as it is, is textual; later historians who reported that Jesus had been crucified were repeating what they’d read or been told, not what they’d seen.”[4] The problem of flimsy evidence within the New Testament text, including outright forgery, is now so well documented as to need no further comment.[5] The evidence for Jesus is the New Testament. Full stop.

New Testament scholars are in wide agreement that Mark was the earliest gospel, written around the year 70 CE, decades after Jesus’ death. As if a lapse of 40 years between the life of Jesus and the composition of the first known gospel wasn’t problem enough, according to the church historian Eusebius, “[Mark] had not heard the Lord, nor had he followed him.”[6] On the best evidence, the gospels were not even composed in Palestine where the events they purport to relate took place. It is conjectured that Mark was written in Rome, Matthew in Syria, and John was perhaps composed in Asia Minor. 

Even worse for the study of Christian origins, in 66 CE the First Jewish-Roman War resulted in the destruction of Jewish towns in Galilee and Judea which culminated in the destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple in 70 CE. By the time the war ended with the fall of Masada in 73 CE, the Jewish population of Palestine, obviously including potential eyewitnesses to the career of Jesus, had been decimated, scattered, and enslaved. Even assuming Jesus of Nazareth was a historical person, time and circumstances were working overtime to eradicate any evidence of his life and career. What would his soi-disant biographers do to fill this memory hole? A close reading of the gospels suggests they invented their stories.

Unlike history, the gospels are written from the standpoint of an omniscient narrator — like a novelist, the gospel writer knows not only the actions of his characters, but their inner thoughts and emotional state, as well as the content of their private conversations. Matthew, writing an estimated 85 years after Jesus’ birth, ostensibly knows the circumstances of Jesus’ conception, including the contents of a dream. (Matthew 1:20) Not to be outdone, Luke claims that, “Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.” (Luke 2:19) Matthew claims to know the precise event that led the Pharisees to withdraw and begin to plot Jesus’ death, (Matthew 12:14) and John — writing 70 years after the fact — is mysteriously informed that the Pharisees “…said to one another, ‘See, this is getting us nowhere. Look how the whole world has gone after him!’” (John 12:19)

So where did Mark — his true identity is unknown, but following convention we’ll call him Mark — get his information? Decades ago, when I was studying the New Testament at university, the standard answer to “where they got it” was still “oral tradition,” but given the proven unreliability both of memory and oral transmission, scholars have questioned that explanation and suggested a different source: the theology of Paul of Tarsus. 

The number of scholars who have proposed this connection is quite impressive and appears to be growing: Pérez I. Díaz,[7] Hollander,[8] Eurell,[9] Smith,[10] Nelligan,[11] and particularly Richard Carrier[12] to name but a few. However, using Paul to get to Jesus presents a problem very nicely summarized by David Madison: 

“In the earliest of the New Testament documents, penned long before the Gospels, Jesus of Nazareth isn’t there. That is, the epistles of Paul and others don’t speak at all about Jesus of Nazareth. Their focus is a divine Christ. There seems to be no awareness of Jesus’s preaching and parables, his miracles, his disputes with religious authorities, or even the Passion narratives. It’s almost as if the real Jesus hadn’t been invented yet, which would not happen until the Gospels had been created. The focus of the epistles — with Paul being the giant presence — is salvation through believing in a resurrected Jesus. Inexplicably, they skip over everything else.”[13]

The first person known to have mentioned Jesus is Paul of Tarsus. And regarding the source of his information, Paul is perfectly clear: “visions and revelations from the Lord.” (2 Corinthians 12:1) After his conversion — which he never describes — Paul did not hie himself to Jerusalem to confer with Jesus’ family or followers. His ego on full display, Paul claims, 

“…when God, who set me apart from my mother’s womb and called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son in me so that I might preach him among the Gentiles, my immediate response was not to consult any human being. I did not go up to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before I was, but I went into Arabia. Later I returned to Damascus.” (Galatians 1:15-17) 

Paul didn’t need no stinking history: “I want you to know, brothers, that the gospel I preached is not of human origin. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ.” (Galatians 1:11-12) Unlike generations of New Testament scholars assiduously questing after the “historical Jesus,” Paul declares, “Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer.” (2 Corinthians 5:16) This is hardly the sort of attitude that would favor the loving preservation of Jesus’ every word and deed.

Paul believed that Jesus had previously existed “in the form of God…but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being made in the likeness of men.” (Philippians 2:6-7) According to Paul, God “…promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures regarding his son, who as to his earthly life was a descendant of David, and through the spirit of holiness was appointed the son of God in power by his resurrection from the dead.” (Romans 1:2-4) When he rose from the dead, Jesus “became a life-giving spirit” and returned to whence he had come: “the second [Adam] is from heaven.” (1 Corinthians 15:45, 47) The earliest Christians believed Jesus had descended from heaven: “He who descended is the very one who ascended higher than the heavens.” (Ephesians 4:10) The man known as Jesus had a previous existence in heaven: “The Son is the image of the invisible God…He is before all things…” (Colossians 1:15, 17) 

Paul is certain he and his fellow believers will soon be joined with their Lord, “for the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality.” (1 Corinthians 15:51-53) In short, Paul has precisely nothing to tell us about “historical Jesus.” Paul was convinced that the time remaining until Jesus’ return was so short that married Christians should live as if celibate: “the time is short. From now on those who have wives should live as if they do not…” (1 Corinthians 7:29) Given the urgency of the moment, what possible reason could there be to preserve the details of Jesus’ career, assuming that anyone clearly remembered them?

As noted by Madison, “Proving the Bible’s authenticity by quoting from the Bible is closed-loop reasoning…no matter how high the level of confidence in the Bible in a particular part of the world, no document on the planet can be self-authenticating.”[14] In all likelihood, the Judean church and its members were swept away in the maelstrom of the Roman invasion; like the epistle ascribed to James, Paul’s letters are addressed to believers “scattered among the nations.” (James 1:1) The earliest Christians for whom we have evidence lived in expectation of imminent deliverance[15] and evince no interest in “authenticating” the life and career of Jesus of Nazareth. The stories of the gospels cannot be verified by any contemporaneous sources. Insofar as anyone can confirm, they are pious confections written for the edification of credulous believers. We are left with a stark conclusion: the entire evidence for the life of Jesus is the magic self-authenticating New Testament.Robert Conner is the author of The Death of Christian Belief; The Jesus Cult: 2000 Years of the Last Days; Apparitions of Jesus: The Resurrection as Ghost Story; The Secret Gospel of Mark; and Magic in Christianity: From Jesus to the Gnostics. 

[1] Helen K. Bond, “Dating the Death of Jesus: Memory and the Religious Imagination,” New Testament Studies, 59/4 (2013), 461-475.

[2] Ken Olson, “A Eusebian Reading of the Testimonium Flavianum,” in Eusebius of Caesarea: Traditions and Innovations, Helenic Studies Series 60 (2013) 97-114.

[3] Gary J. Goldberg, “Josephus’s Paraphrase Style and the Testimonium Flavianum,” Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus, 20/1 (2021) 1-32.

[4] Robert Conner, The Death of Christian Belief (2023), 48, 56.

[5] Bart D. Ehrman, Forged: Writing in the Name of God — Why the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are, 2010.

[6] Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, III, 39, 15.

[7] Mar Pérez I. Díaz, Jesus in the Light of Paul’s Theology, Mohr Siebeck, 2020.

[8] Harm W. Hollander, “The Words of Jesus: From Oral Traditions to Written Records in Paul and Q,” Novum Testamentum 42/4 (2000), 340-357.

[9] John-Christian Eurell, “Paul and the Jesus Tradition: Reconsidering the Relationship Between Paul and the Synoptics,” Journal of Early Christian History, 12/2 (2022), 1-16.

[10] David Oliver Smith, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Paul: The Influence of the Epistles on the Synoptic Gospels, Resource, 2011.

[11] Thomas Nelligan, The Quest for Mark’s Sources: An Exploration of the Case for Mark’s Use of First Corinthians, Pickwick, 2015

[12] Richard Carrier, Jesus from Outer Spance: What the Earliest Christians Really Believed about Christ, Pitchstone, 2020.

[13] David Madison, Guessing About God, 144-145, Insighting Growth Publications, 2023.

[14] Madison, op. cit., 56-57.

[15] Robert Conner, The Jesus Cult: 2000 Years of the Last Days, 7-25, (2022)

Cognitive Clarity: Debunking Common Logical Fallacies: Navigating the Maze of Mis-Reasoning

In the quiet of my early morning, often accompanied by the gentle scratching of my pencil in the Pencil Pit, I find myself reflecting on the myriad ways our thinking can go astray. Today, I want to delve into a topic that’s crucial for anyone striving for the clarity of thought – logical fallacies.

Logical fallacies are like traps in reasoning: deceptive and often misleading. They’re errors in reasoning that can invalidate an argument, yet they’re persuasive enough to often go unnoticed. Understanding and identifying these fallacies is vital for anyone engaged in critical thinking and rational discourse.

Let’s explore some common ones:

  1. Ad Hominem (Attack on the Person): This fallacy occurs when an argument is rebutted by attacking the character, motive, or other attributes of the person making the argument, rather than addressing the substance of the argument itself. For example, “You can’t trust John’s opinion on environmental policy; he’s a high school dropout.”
  2. Straw Man: Here, someone’s argument is misrepresented to make it easier to attack. Instead of dealing with the actual issue, the arguer invents a weaker version of it and attacks that. Imagine debating school funding and someone says, “My opponent wants to shut down all public schools,” which is a gross misrepresentation of the original argument.
  3. Appeal to Ignorance (Argumentum ad Ignorantiam): This fallacy asserts that a proposition is true because it has not yet been proven false (or vice versa). For instance, “No one has ever proven that extraterrestrial life doesn’t exist, so it must exist.”
  4. False Dilemma (Either/Or Fallacy): This involves presenting two opposing options as the only possibilities, when in fact more possibilities exist. “You’re either with us, or you’re against us.”
  5. Slippery Slope: This is a fallacy of causation where one assumes that a very minor action will lead to significant and often disastrous outcomes. “If we allow students to redo this test, next they’ll want to redo every assignment, and then they’ll expect to pass the course without doing any work.”
  6. Circular Reasoning (Begging the Question): This occurs when the conclusion of an argument is used as a premise of the same argument. For example, “The Bible is true, so you should not doubt the Word of God.”
  7. Appeal to Authority (Argumentum ad Verecundiam): This fallacy happens when an argument is deemed true or false based on the authority of the subject, rather than the merits of the argument itself. “Well, if Einstein said it, it must be true.”

Recognizing these fallacies is the first step in clearing the fog in the landscape of debate and discussion. In our daily lives, especially in an era dominated by information overload, the ability to discern flawed arguments is not just an academic skill but a necessity.

As we navigate through complex discussions and debates, let’s arm ourselves with the tools of critical thinking. Let’s not fall prey to the seductive simplicity of flawed reasoning. Our pursuit of truth in The Pencil Driven Life demands no less.

Here are examples of logical fallacies from various articles:

Ad Hominem Fallacy:

  1. A Checkered Past: Voters dismiss a politician’s road safety campaign because he lied in the past, not considering the current campaign’s merits.
  2. Driving to Work: A doctor is deemed incompetent in his profession because he was seen driving badly, which is unrelated to his professional skills.
  3. They Must Have Done It!: Students accuse two classmates of theft because they are always late, not based on evidence related to the theft.

Straw Man Fallacy:

  1. Career Advice: At a high school graduation, a speaker presents only two career options: get an office job or end up homeless, ignoring the myriad of other career paths available.
  2. Climate Change: An argument is made that we must switch solely to solar energy to combat climate change, excluding other viable green energy options.
  3. Relationship Dispute: A girlfriend accuses her boyfriend of never wanting to go out because he doesn’t want to eat out one night, misrepresenting his stance.

Appeal to Ignorance Fallacy:

  1. Ghosts and Science: The claim that ghosts exist because science cannot prove that they don’t is an appeal to ignorance, as it relies on the absence of evidence as proof of existence.
  2. Holiday Time!: Jared suggests they can afford a vacation because his partner cannot prove they cannot afford it, shifting the burden of proof.
  3. No News is Good News: A tour guide assumes he is good at his job because he hasn’t received any complaints, without presenting positive evidence of his competence.

False Dilemma Fallacy:

  1. Eat Your Veggies: The argument is made that if you’re not a vegetarian, you must hate animals, presenting only two extreme positions on a complex issue.
  2. The Big Scoop: A rookie journalist is told he must follow the rules of advertising or leave journalism, suggesting only two career paths within the field.
  3. You Are Either With Me or Against Me: An army sergeant tells troops there are only allies or enemies, neglecting the possibility of neutrality.

Slippery Slope Fallacy:

  1. Lowering the Voting Age: Arguing that lowering the voting age to 17 will lead to babies voting extrapolates to an absurdity without evidence.
  2. Soothing a Crying Baby: The claim that picking up a crying baby leads to severe attachment issues assumes a direct and extreme causation without evidence.
  3. New Laws Lead to Lost Freedom: The assertion that any restriction on freedom of speech will lead to a totalitarian state is a slippery slope without causal evidence.

These examples illustrate how logical fallacies can appear in arguments and discussions, demonstrating the importance of analyzing and questioning the underlying assumptions and logic.

Cognitive Clarity–Christianity’s Embarrassing Apostle Paul Problem

Here’s the link to this article.

By David Madison at 11/17/2023

Hallucinations are not a credible foundation for any religion


The church gets away with a far, far too much because most of the laity don’t bother to read the Bible, let alone study it carefully.This failure enables the clergy to nurture an idealized version of the faith—indeed, an idealized version of Jesus—unhindered by so much of the nasty stuff in full view in the gospels and in the letters of the apostle Paul. The clergy are quite content that the folks in the pews don’t go digging about in these documents. Instead, ritual, sacred music, costuming, stained glass windows—church décor in general—allow the laity to savor a false version of the faith promoted by the ecclesiastical bureaucracy.
  

I have written extensively on the nasty stuff found in the gospels. Here I want to focus on the multiple embarrassments we encounter in the letters of the apostle Paul. Mainstream New Testament scholars believe that there are seven authentic letters of Paul—based on vocabulary, style, and ideas: First Thessalonians, Galatians, First & Second Corinthians, Romans, Philippians, and Philemon. These were all copied for centuries by hand, so they are spoiled by errors, omissions and interpolations, but for the most part, here we have what Paul taught. If the laity dip into the gospels from time to time, it’s probably a rarity for them to explore the Paul letters at any depth. But if they do, they encounter real puzzles—and bad theology, which is not hard to detect.  

Embarrassment One
 
Anyone who reads the letters of Paul, carefully, thoughtfully, will be stumped by his failure to mention the ministry, teachings, and miracles of Jesus of Nazareth. How can that be? Since there is no hint in the New Testament that Paul ever met or even saw Jesus, it’s not a big surprise. We’re familiar, of course, with the dramatic story of Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus, told three times in the Book of Acts. This is probably dramatic storytelling—like so much else in Acts—because Paul doesn’t mention it in his own letters. But after this life-changing conversion, wouldn’t Paul have wanted to pump the disciples for information about Jesus? The author of Acts reports that Paul did indeed head back to Jerusalem:   

“…he attempted to join the disciples, and they were all afraid of him, for they did not believe that he was a disciple. But Barnabas took him, brought him to the apostles, and described for them how on the road he had seen the Lord, who had spoken to him, and how in Damascus he had spoken boldly in the name of Jesus. So he went in and out among them in Jerusalem, speaking boldly in the name of the Lord.” (Acts 9:26-28)
 
But the author of Acts is caught in a lie here. He had not read Paul’s letter to the Galatians: 


“…nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were already apostles before me, but I went away at once into Arabia, and afterward I returned to Damascus. Then after three years I did go up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas [Peter] and stayed with him fifteen days,but I did not see any other apostle except James the Lord’s brother. In what I am writing to you, before God, I do not lie!” (Galatians 1:17-20)


Since we are so familiar with Peter as depicted in the gospels, we might imagine that Paul asked him a lot of questions about Jesus. But who was this Peter whom Paul visited? Chances are he wasn’t the guy who appears in the gospel accounts: we have no idea where those stories came from. They look too much like fantasy literature. In any case, whatever this Peter might have told him about Jesus didn’t end up in Paul’s letters. Paul never mentions the empty tomb, for example.

 
And why was Paul so emphatic (“I do not lie!”) that he didn’t mix with other disciples? He probably wanted to assure his readers that his knowledge about Jesus came directly from Jesus. That is, the risen Jesus in the spiritual realm. Earlier in Galatians 1 Paul had written: “For I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin, for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.” (vv. 11-12)


This is the essence of Embarrassment One: Paul’s ultra-certain faith is based on his visions. Today, the professionals who study brain science would say, his hallucinations. We all know that devout folks dismiss visions of other religions, e.g., Protestants even ridicule Catholic visions of the Virgin Mary, nearly everyone laughs off Mormon vision claims. So many devout people—scattered across different religions, with conflicting concepts of god—have been certain they’re getting glimpses of happenings in the spiritual realm. If it’s someone in your own religion—especially long ago—folks say, “Isn’t that wonderful!” But if it’s outside your religion: “Isn’t that ridiculous!” 

Devout New Testament scholars, holding out hope that the gospels contain some glimpses of history, argue that “reliable” oral traditions about Jesus were in circulation in the decades before the gospels were written. But Paul seems not to have been aware of such stories about Jesus, or just chose to ignore them. Again, his credibility among his followers was based not on “things he might have heard about Jesus”—but on his communications from Jesus in the spirit world. 

Reliable oral traditions may just be wishful thinking. There is little ethical teaching in Mark’s gospel. Matthew decided to correct that by adding The Sermon on the Mount, which Luke shortened—and changed the wording. The author of John’s gospel omitted it entirely, and added lengthy Jesus monologues found nowhere else.

We are entitled to wonder, by the way, if Paul was aware of the Jesus stories that we know from the gospels. Paul’s advice in Romans 13 is a major puzzle: 

“Let every person be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.”  (vv. 1-2)
 
He seems not to have known that Jesus was executed by Roman authorities—and, of course, this is simply bad theology: that all government authorities are divinely appointed. Paul was several stages removed from reality. He goes on to say, “For the same reason you also pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s agents, busy with this very thing. Pay to all what is due them: taxes to whom taxes are due, revenue to whom revenue is due.” (vv. 6-7) What a perfect occasion to quote Jesus’ famous advice in Matthew 22:21, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s…” But Paul simply wasn’t aware of anything Jesus taught. 

One comeback may be to point out that Paul quotes Jesus at the Last Supper (I Corinthians 11:23-26). How would he have known this? He wasn’t at the Last Supper, and bragged that he didn’t learn anything about Jesus from human sources. He states that “I received from the Lord” the famous words of the Eucharist, i.e., from his visions. When Mark created his account of the Last Supper, he probably quoted Paul’s version of the story.   

Embarrassment Two
 
Historians know very well that verifying anything about the life of Jesus cannot be done, because there is no contemporaneous documentation by which to do so. The gospels were written decades after his death, and the authors don’t mention their sources. Look at any modern biography of a person in history: at the back there will be pages listing the sources for the information provided in the book. We have none of that for Jesus.

But that kind of research—i.e., spending endless hours in libraries and archives—never occurred to Paul. His story of Jesus could be reconstructed from Old Testament texts. Committed to his particular vision-based theology, he was confident that his Jesus was foreseen in ancient texts. An article describing Paul’s approach, in considerable detail, was published here on the Debunking Christianity Blog on 10 November, by Greg G., How Did Paul Know What He Tells Us About Jesus? I recommend careful study of this article. At the outset he states:
 
“We often marvel at Paul’s lack of interest in the life and times of Jesus. He says Jesus was born of a woman but says nothing about his mother. He tells us Jesus was killed for the sins of others but tells us nothing about where the event occurred. He tells us that Jesus was buried but he tells us nothing about the gravesite. Did Paul not think the information was available in his time?
 
And: “Paul tells us over and over that he got his information from the scriptures.” But this is not how to write history. This is a form of ancient superstition: that a god’s secrets about the future can be gleaned from studying texts written long ago.  One’s theology is the key to figuring out these secrets. The author of Matthew’s gospel provides extreme examples of this misguided approach, e.g., he quotes Isaiah 7:14 to prove the virgin birth of Jesus—but Isaiah 7 has nothing whatever to do with the birth of a supposed messiah many centuries later. Matthew also quotes Hosea 11:1 to account for his farfetched story (found nowhere else), that Joseph and Mary fled to Egypt to keep Jesus safe. 
 
If you’re deep into Christian theology, you might think that Paul was on the right track figuring out Jesus from old manuscripts. But his faulty thinking here is a major embarrassment. 
 

On my YouTube channel, there is a playlist, “Please Stop Calling Him ‘Saint’ Paul”, with four videos:

       Number 1     Number 2     Number 3     Number 4      


Embarrassment Three
 
It’s no surprise, given the violent, abusive god we find in the Old Testament, that Paul bought this theology too. Hence in Romans 1, he includes gossips and rebellious children among those who deserve to die. In Romans 2:5-8, we find this: 

“But by your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath, when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed. He will repay according to each one’s deeds:to those who by patiently doing good seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life,while for those who are self-seeking and who obey not the truth but injustice, there will be wrath and fury.”
 
Churchgoers are most familiar with things Paul wrote on those days when he hadn’t forgotten to take his meds, and was in a good mood, e.g., I Corinthians 13, which includes the famous words, “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogantor rude…” But the fact remains, that for Paul, god’s default mood was wrath and rage. And a magical spell was a way to escape this: “…if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” (Romans 10:9)

For more insight into Paul’s thinking, I recommend John Loftus’ article, Paul’s Christianity: Belief in Belief Itself, which is a longer version of the Foreword he wrote for Robert Conner’s book, The Jesus Cult: 2000 Years of the Last Days. In this piece Loftus quotes from Conner’s third essay in his 2019 anthology, The Case Against Miracles:

“A more mature modern psychology with superior investigative techniques and tools can now question whether Paul of Tarsus was functionally, if not clinically, insane—and whether the religion he championed is based on delusion.” (p. 545)

This is a major embarrassment indeed.

Embarrassment Four
 
Just a brief mention of this one. Anti-gay fanatics focus on Paul’s rant against both male and female homosexuals in Romans 1:26-27. 

“There! Doesn’t that settle it!” They don’t seem to notice that Paul wasn’t thrilled about male-female sex either: “And those who belong to Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.” (Galatians 5:24) Not too many clergy quote this verse at wedding ceremonies! And they don’t mention I Corinthians 7:1: “It is good for a man not to touch a woman” or vv. 8-9:
 
“To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is good for them to remain unmarried as I am. But if they are not practicing self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion.”
 
Do the anti-gay fanatics follow Paul’s advice about straight sex? Get married in order not to be aflame with passion? Paul assumed that his lack of interest in sex was the ideal standard to live by. What a tortured soul, what an embarrassment. 
 
I suspect that if the New Testament were suddenly printed without the letters of Paul, many of the faithful wouldn’t notice or care. 
 
Wasn’t it a major blunder that the New Testament didn’t include letters written by Jesus himself? We can imagine Jesus’ Epistle to Saul of Tarsus, on how not to be a rogue apostle; his Epistle to Peter, on how to run a church without resorting to magical thinking; his Epistles to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, on how to avoid making up bad, mediocre, alarming Jesus-script; and Jesus’ Epistle to the Women of the World, on how to fight misogyny and arrogant patriarchy. 
 
With these letters, we’d have a much better New Testament. 


David Madison was a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, and has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. He is the author of two books, Ten ToughProblems in Christian Thought and Belief: a Minister-Turned-Atheist Shows Why You Should Ditch the Faith, now being reissued in several volumes, the first of which is Guessing About God (2023) and Ten Things Christians Wish Jesus Hadn’t Taught: And Other Reasons to Question His Words (2021). The Spanish translation of this book is also now available. 

His YouTube channel is here. At the invitation of John Loftus, he has written for the Debunking Christianity Blog since 2016.
 
The Cure-for-Christianity Library©, now with more than 500 titles, is here. A brief video explanation of the Library is here. 

The Gospel Grift: Always Be Closing, by Robert Conner

Here’s the link to this article.

By David Madison at 11/05/2023

A major challenge in this time of declining Christian belief is finding a

hot button issue that keeps gullible followers enraged and engaged and dropping their Social Security dollars here and there into collection plates. For decades, one reliable sales pitch for evangelicals and Catholics was the specter of the homosexual menace, but as recently noted, “When the Supreme Court declared a constitutional right of same-sex marriage nearly eight years ago, social conservatives were set adrift. The ruling stripped them of an issue they had used to galvanize rank-and-file supporters and big donors. And it left them searching for a cause that — like opposing gay marriage — would rally the base and raise the movement’s profile on the national stage. “We knew we needed to find an issue that the candidates were comfortable talking about,” said Terry Schilling, the president of American Principles Project, a social conservative advocacy group. “And we threw everything at the wall.” I’m sure Schilling really meant to say, “We threw everything at the wall after much prayer and deliberation.”

In any case, Schilling’s prayers were answered: the transexual panic “had driven in thousands of new donors to the American Principles Project, most of them making small contributions.”[1]

No question about it: money in politics gets things done. While initiatives to expand healthcare and childcare falter, and measures to prevent gun violence are shot dead at the local, state and federal levels—despite wide public support—the movement to advance Christian theocracy has achieved some stunning victories. A case in point is the rise of the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADL), launched in early 1994 by a coterie of evangelical leaders that included millionaire preachers D. James Kennedy, James Dobson, Don Wildmon and Bill Bright, founder of the Campus Crusade for Christ. The ADL, designated an “anti-LGBTQ hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, enjoys 501(c) tax exemption; it’s treated like a church, or in evangelical speak, a “legal ministry” whose basic purpose is to obliterate the separation of church and state. In 2011, tax filings pegged the ADL’s worth at $35 million which rose to $48 million by fiscal year 2015. By 2021, the ADL reported $104.5 million according to filings with the IRS.[2]

The Real Christian™ fixation on things sexual — divorce, pornography, abortion, and all things LGBTQ — is a boondoggle for lawyers, lobbyists, and “expert” witnesses. Case in point, Dr. Daniel Weiss, an endocrinologist, “said in a deposition that Do No Harm paid him about $8,000, at $325 an hour, for submitting written testimony in states like Indiana, Utah, North Dakota and Wyoming in support of bans on gender-affirming care for minors…The Indiana Attorney General’s office paid Weisss $49,691 for four weeks of consulting, according to records obtained by HuffPost.” Before its fascination with anti-trans legislation, Do No Harm “initially concentrated on fighting diversity efforts in medicine, bringing lawsuits against a health journal for offering an unpaid mentorship to people of color and challenging California’s implicit bias training for physicians.”[3]

The new anti-trans gold rush has drawn prospectors from the far corners of Baptistland. “The president of Trinity International University this week sent out a fundraising letter complaining about cultural acceptance of transgender people and linking acceptance to the recent mass shooting that left six people dead in Nashville, Tenn.” In response to Nicholas Perrin’s fanciful claim, David Cramer, a Trinity alumnus and seminary professor, said, 

“This letter is flippant, calloused and dangerous. It reads like a fundraising letter for a right-wing political action group instead of a place of theological education.”[4]

Noting that outfits such as the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Family Research Council and the American Principles Project “are behind a multi-million-dollar effort targeting LGBTQ rights,” a recent report details their strategy: 

“The groups have provided templates and support for similarly worded [“parents’ rights”] bills that seek to ban minors from attending drag shows, prevent trans youth from receiving gender-affirming care, and restrict their participation in high school sports.” 

The push to interpret human sexuality theologically has paid off: “Many Republicans have embraced that agenda, touting a ‘protect the children’ platform for 2024 that targets school policies on gender identity and how racial issues are taught.”[5] “Several states have introduced [Alliance Defending Freedom] model legislation requiring schools to get parental consent for any lessons about gender identity; a lawyer affiliated with A.D.F. helped draft a Florida measure that L.G.B.T. advocates call the ‘Don’s Say Gay’ law…In an internal briefing, the head of its legislative effort said that A.D.F. had ‘authored’ at least a hundred and thirty bills in thirty-four states last year; more than thirty were passed into law.”[6]As of this writing, 85 anti-trans bills have passed out of 583 proposed in 49 states. Clearly business is booming.

With espousing segregation now off limits as a campaign and fundraising tactic and 70% of the public — including 55% of Republicans — in favor of civil rights for LGBTQ Americans, religious fundamentalists appeared to score a long-awaited victory when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, but 85% of the American public supports abortion, in at least some circumstances which puts the theocrats in the awkward position of the dog that caught the car. 

So far the Dobbs decision has the makings of a pyrrhic victory; the prayer warriors need to pivot, but do they have anywhere left to go? Robert P. Jones, the CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, summed up the problem this way: 

“As someone who writes social science, I can’t tell you how many sentences I’ve begun with the words, ‘with the lone exception of white evangelical Protestants.’ Whether it is on immigration, LGBTQ issues, abortion — white evangelical Christians are increasingly outliers to the middle of the country, not just to the left…They have shrunk by nearly a third just over the last decade. Today, they are 14.5 percent of the population. And as they have shrunk, they have been hemorrhaging young people…It’s that dynamic that is driving the fundraising. There’s a kind of last-stand desperation, an apocalyptic feeling that if we don’t do something now, we will lose the country. And if we don’t do something to win it back, there will never be another opportunity.”[7]

Evangelicals — particularly those of pale complexion — understandably fear Elvis has left the building. Tidings from Western Europe and large parts of North America would tend to confirm their fears.[8] True to form, their response has been apocalyptic: burn it to the ground. Society will be reordered to reflect their “christendomic” view that the right wing of the fundamentalist church is the state and to achieve this end various “legal ministries” are quietly positioning lawyers. “Our research indicates that many of these individuals have clerked for multiple state judges, federal judges, state attorneys general, and are in the midst of working their way upwards in the echelons of government. While there does appear to be a fair gender balance amongst known Blackstone alumni, of the ones we were able to identify, they were overwhelmingly white and, of course, exclusively Christian.”[9] Current polling shows that 31% of white evangelical Protestants believe “true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country.”[10]

But even those who expect the unexpected didn’t see Mike Johnson coming. The new Speaker of the House — elected unanimously by his Republican colleagues — has an interesting history to say the least. “Few would especially remember the role he played within the larger story of Southern Baptist higher education in recent years.” Louisiana Christian University planned to open a law school “named after Judge Paul Pressler, one of the principal architects of the ‘conservative resurgence’ in the Southern Baptist Convention.” Johnson “was named dean of the forthcoming Pressler School of Law…clearly instituted to be a training ground of Christian lawyers who would unite constitutional originalism with social conservatism and the defense of religious privilege.” 

The Pressler School of Law never opened. The Southern Association of Colleges warned the school “for significant non-compliance with multiple standards of accreditation” and in 2012 “denied an ascent from Level III to Level V accreditation that would allow the proposed law school to confer degrees.”[11] Needless to say, Johnson’s appointment at the misbegotten not-a-law-school is unmentioned on his résumé.

Nevertheless, the newly elected speaker has quite the CV: “He defended Donald Trump at both of his impeachment hearings, helped plot the Jan. 6 attempted coup, and holds hardline positions on everything from abortion to LGBTQ rights. He worked for the [Alliance Defending Freedom] from 2002 until 2010, penning op-eds against marriage equality and endorsing briefs filed by the ADF meant to criminalize sexual activity between consenting adults.”[12]                                                                                                                                                                                                        No evangelical prayer warrior’s bona fides would be complete without a defense of “young Earth creationism” and Johnson can check that box as well. Johnson represented creationist Ken Ham, helping his Ark Encounter, which claims people and dinosaurs lived at the same time, “secure millions in state tourism subsidies.” Regarding Ham’s Ark exhibit, Johnson proclaimed it “is one way to bring people to this recognition…that what we read in the Bible are actual historical events” and praised the Creation Museum for “doing maybe the best work right now in our generation of pointing people to the truth.”[13]                                                                                                                                                                                                                                “Hours before the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021, Johnson posted on X, “We MUST fight for election integrity, the Constitution, and the preservation of our republic! It will be my honor to help lead that fight in the Congress today.” Later that day, Johnson was among the 147 Republicans that voted to overturn the election…Over a year after January 6, 2021, Johnson ‘continued to argue that he and his colleagues had been right to object to the election results’ on his religious podcast Truth Be Told. When asked in a press conference on Tuesday about his involvement in attempting to overturn the 2020 election, Johnson did not answer. The Republicans surrounding him ‘drown[ed] out [the reporter’s] question with laughter and booing.’”[14]                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       Whatever the eventual fate of American democracy, we can take at least some consolation, knowing as we must, that the stage is now set for more rounds of  Christian “fundraising,” and that the careers of preachers and pols, as well as other shysters and shills are, at least for the moment, secure.

Robert Conner is the author of The Death of Christian Belief; The Jesus Cult: 2000 Years of the Last Days; Apparitions of Jesus: The Resurrection as Ghost Story; The Secret Gospel of Mark; and Magic in Christianity: From Jesus to the Gnostics. 

[1] Adam Nagourney & Jeremcy W. Peters, “How a Campaign Against Transgender Rights Mobilized Conservatives,” The New York Times, April 16, 2023.

[2] Adam Gabbatt, “Revealed: Christian legal non-profit funds US anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-abortion organizations,” The Guardian, June 30, 2023.

[3] Molly Redden, “This Billionaire Hedge Funder Is Quietly Financing Anti-Trans Advocacy Across the U.S.,” huffpost.com, October 26, 2023.

[4] Mark Wingfield, “Evangelical university president seeks to raise money by casting blame on transgender people,” baptistnews.com, April 18, 2023.

[5] Russell Contreras, “The forces behind anti-trans bills across the U.S,” axios.com, October 23, 2023.

[6] David D. Kirkpatrick, “The Next Targets for the Group That Overturned Roe,” newyorker.com, October 2, 2023.

[7] Stuart Richardson, “Groups opposed to gay rights rake in millions as states debate anti-LGBTQ bills, nbcnews.com, March 23, 2022.

[8] Robert Conner, The Death of Christian Belief, 2023.

[9] Sofia Resnick & Sharona Coutts, “Not the Illuminati: How Fundamentalist Christians Are Infiltrating State and Federal Government,” rewirenewsgroup.com, May 13, 2014.

[10] Fiona André, “Poll: More religious Americans support the use of political violence,” religionnews.com, October 25, 2023.

[11] Christopher Schelin, “New speaker of the House once led never-opened Paul Pressler School of Law, baptistnews.com, October 25, 2023.

[12] Spencer MacNaughton, “Inside the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Anti-LGBTQ Org Where Mike Johnson Spent Almost a Decade,” rollingstone.com, October 29, 2023.

[13] Liz Skalka & Paul Blumenthat, “New House Speaker Thinks Creationist Museum Is ‘Pointing People To The Truth,” huffpost.com, October 26, 2023.

[14] Judd Legum, Tesnim Zekeria & Rebecca Crosby, “What everyone should know about the new House Speaker, Mike Johnson,” popularinformation@substack.com, October 26, 2023.

H Is for Hawk: Helen Macdonald on Love, Loss, Time, and Our Improbable Allies in Healing

Here’s the link to this article.

BY MARIA POPOVA

H Is for Hawk: Helen Macdonald on Love, Loss, Time, and Our Improbable Allies in Healing

Every once in a while — perhaps thrice a lifetime, if one is lucky — a book comes along so immensely and intricately insightful, so overwhelming in beauty, that it renders one incapable of articulating what it’s about without contracting its expansive complexity, flattening its dimensional richness, and stripping it of its splendor. Because it is, of course, about everything — it might take a specific something as its subject, but its object is nothing less than the whole of the human spirit, mirrored back to itself.

H Is for Hawk (public library) by Helen Macdonald is one such book — the kind one devours voraciously, then picks up and puts down repeatedly, unsure how to channel its aboutness in a way that isn’t woefully inadequate.

For a necessary starting point, here’s an inadequate summation: After her father’s sudden and soul-splitting death, Macdonald, a seasoned falconer, decides to wade through the devastation by learning to train a goshawk — the fiercest of raptors, “things of death and difficulty: spooky, pale-eyed psychopaths,” capable of inflicting absolute gore with absolute grace. Over the course of that trying experience — which she chronicles by weaving together personal memory, natural history (the memory of our planet), and literary history (the memory of our culture) — she learns about love and loss, beauty and terror, control and surrender, and the myriad other dualities reconciling which is the game of life.

British goshawk by Archibald Thorburn, 1915 (public domain)
British goshawk by Archibald Thorburn, 1915 (public domain)

Macdonald writes:

Here’s a word. Bereavement. Or, Bereaved. Bereft. It’s from the Old English bereafian, meaning ‘to deprive of, take away, seize, rob.’ Robbed. Seized. It happens to everyone. But you feel it alone. Shocking loss isn’t to be shared, no matter how hard you try.

Out of that aloneness a singular and paradoxical madness is born:

I knew I wasn’t mad mad because I’d seen people in the grip of psychosis before, and that was madness as obvious as the taste of blood in the mouth. The kind of madness I had was different. It was quiet, and very, very dangerous. It was a madness designed to keep me sane. My mind struggled to build across the gap, make a new and inhabitable world… Time didn’t run forwards any more. It was a solid thing you could press yourself against and feel it push back; a thick fluid, half-air, half-glass, that flowed both ways and sent ripples of recollection forwards and new events backwards so that new things I encountered, then, seemed souvenirs from the distant past.

This discontinuity of time in the universe of grief recurs throughout the book:

The archaeology of grief is not ordered. It is more like earth under a spade, turning up things you had forgotten. Surprising things come to light: not simply memories, but states of mind, emotions, older ways of seeing the world.

Rippling through Macdonald’s fluid, immersive prose are piercing, short, perfectly placed deliverances, in both senses of the word: there is the dark (“What happens to the mind after bereavement makes no sense until later.”), the luminous (“I’d halfway forgotten how kind and warm the world could be.”), the immediate (“Time passed. The wavelength of the light around me shortened. The day built itself.”), the timeless (“Those old ghostly intuitions that have tied sinew and soul together for millennia.”), and the irrepressibly sublime (“Looking for goshawks is like looking for grace: it comes, but not often, and you don’t get to say when or how.”).

American goshawk by Robert Ridgway, 1893 (public domain)
American goshawk by Robert Ridgway, 1893 (public domain)

Choosing a goshawk, a creature notoriously difficult to tame, became Macdonald’s way of learning to let grace come unbidden, a letting that demanded a letting go — of compulsive problem-solving, of the various control strategies by which we try to bend life to our will, of the countless self-contortion and self-flagellation techniques driving the machinery of our striving. Recounting the frustration of failing to get her goshawk, Mabel, to obey her commands — frustration familiar to anyone who has ever anguished over any form of unrequited intentionality — Macdonald writes:

I flew her later in the day. I flew her earlier. I fed her rabbit with fur and rabbit without. I fed her chicks that I’d gutted and skinned and rinsed in water. I reduced her weight. I raised it. I reduced it again. I wore different clothes. I tried everything to fix the problem, certain that the problem couldn’t be fixed because the problem was me. Sometimes she flew straight to my fist, sometimes straight over it, and there was no way of knowing which it would be. Every flight was a monstrous game of chance, a coin-toss, and what was at stake felt something very like my soul. I began to think that what made the hawk flinch from me was the same thing that had driven away the man I’d fallen for after my father’s death. Think that there was something deeply wrong about me, something vile that only he and the hawk could see.

Macdonald peers directly into the black hole of fury, a familiar rage directed as much at the rebuffer as at the rebuffed self:

The anger was vast and it came out of nowhere. It was the rage of something not fitting; the frustration of trying to put something in a box that is slightly too small. You try moving the shape around in the hope that some angle will make it fit in the box. Slowly comes an apprehension that this might not, after all, be possible. And finally you know it won’t fit, know there is no way it can fit, but this doesn’t stop you using brute force to try to crush it in, punishing the bloody thing for not fitting properly. That was what it was like: but I was the box, I was the thing that didn’t fit, and I was the person smashing it, over and over again, with bruised and bleeding hands.

And yet somehow, Macdonald unboxes herself as she trains Mabel into control and Mabel trains her into the grace of surrender, of resting into life exactly as it is rather than striving for some continually unsatisfying and anguishing version of how it ought to be. She captures this beautifully in the closing vignette — an earthquake, quite an uncommon occurrence in England, rattles her house and sends her panic-stricken into Mabel’s quarters, terrified at the thought that earthquakes alarm wildlife and often cause animals to flee. Macdonald writes:

I race downstairs, three steps at a time, burst through the door and turn on the light in her room. She is asleep. She wakes, pulls her head from her mantle-feathers and looks at me with clear eyes. She’s surprised to see me. She yawns, showing her pink mouth like a cat’s and its arrowhead tongue with its black tip. Her creamy underparts are draped right down over her feet, so only one lemony toe and one carbon-black talon are exposed. Her other foot is drawn high up at her chest. She felt the tremors. And then she went back to sleep, entirely unmoved by the moving earth. The quake brought no panic, no fear, no sense of wrongness to her at all. She’s at home in the world. She’s here. She ducks her head upside down, pleased to see me, shakes her feathers into a fluffy mop of contentment, and then, as I sit with her, she slowly closes her eyes, tucks her head back into her feathers, and sleeps. She is not a duke, a cardinal, a hieroglyph or a mythological beast, but right now Mabel is more than a hawk. She feels like a protecting spirit. My little household god. Some things happen only once, twice in a lifetime. The world is full of signs and wonders that come, and go, and if you are lucky you might be alive to see them. I had thought the world was ending, but my hawk had saved me again, and all the terror was gone.

H Is for Hawk is an unsummarizably spectacular read in its totality, the kind that lodges itself in your mind, heart, and spirit with equal gravity and grace. Complement it with these gorgeous 19th-century drawings of raptors, then revisit Sy Montgomery on how an octopus illuminates the wonders of consciousness and Maira Kalman on what a dog taught her about the meaning of human life.