Category: Religion
Cognitive Clarity: Why Religion is Declining in Modern Societies
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.
The allure of tribalism in dangerous times
Here’s the link to this article.
by ADAM LEE NOV 06, 2023
Overview:
Moral codes based on tribalism—defining the in-group and the out-group, whether by culture, religion or race—offer no solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict or any of the other wars wracking our world. The only path to peace is a morality based on empathy and universal humanity, yet it seems further from our grasp than ever.
Reading Time: 5 MINUTES
[Previous: An ouroboros of hate: How religion makes peace impossible]
Israel’s invasion of Gaza is raging across the Middle East like a wildfire. And like any other blaze, it’s sending up embers that fall back to earth, where they ignite new violence.
In Russia, bottled-up social pressure and discontent has found an outlet in the form of antisemitic hate. Last week, we saw terrifying video of an angry mob storming an airport in the Dagestan region, hunting for Jews on a just-arrived flight from Israel. They didn’t find any, but that’s all that stopped this from becoming a pogrom.
But we shouldn’t be so quick to look down on backward nations like Russia. In both the US and Europe, there’s been a rash of antisemitic attacks under the bigoted logic that all Jews everywhere bear collective responsibility for what the Israeli government does.
At the same time, it’s not only Jews who are targets of hate. The editor of a scientific journal was fired for quoting a satire from The Onion that implicitly criticized Israel. In Illinois, a 6-year-old Palestinian boy was murdered and his mother was stabbed. At Stanford University, a driver hit a Muslim student with his car in an apparently deliberate attack.
The government agencies that track such things report an uptick in both antisemitic and anti-Muslim bias crimes. Who should we sympathize with, when there’s ample evidence of persecution and victimization everywhere we look? Do we have to choose who to support based on who’s suffered the most, like some grotesque Olympics of pain?
Our moral codes weren’t built for this
What we need is a moral code built on recognition of our common humanity. We need an ethics that treats all people as fundamentally alike, and all deserving of equal rights, whatever their culture and whichever side of the border they happen to be standing on.
Most moral codes don’t do this. For the most part, the moral codes that guide us today come from times when the family or the village or the tribe was the only unit of society. They’re small and parochial, looking no further than the next hilltop. In those times, the outside world was a strange and frightening place. Banding together promised safety, and to be outside the group spelled doom.
This kind of thinking is the animating idea behind nationalism, religious orthodoxy, and cultural tribalism. These concepts of morality are different on the surface, but underneath, they’re fundamentally alike. They’re all about the in-group versus the out-group. The only thing that varies is the criteria for who’s in and who’s out.
This mindset splits the world into binary opposites. Everyone is either an ally or an enemy, a good person or an evildoer, a saint or a sinner. It’s appealingly straightforward, which makes it satisfying. Tribalism is one of those tendencies that just hits the right buttons in the human brain.
(We often conceive of justice as a set of scales, but I fear that metaphor can lead us astray into dangerously simplistic thinking. After all, scales tip one way or the other. There’s no outcome in between.)
But when we encounter a case that crosses those tidy lines, it creates uncomfortable cognitive dissonance. What happens when a person, or a people, is a genuine victim of persecution, but also an oppressor? What happens when “our side” is inflicting harm, or when there are kind, innocent people on the other side?
That doesn’t fit into a framework of right-or-wrong, in-or-out tribalism. So, these moral systems don’t try to account for it. Instead, they steamroll it into a convenient two-dimensional portrait. Whatever harm the bad guys commit is further evidence of their wickedness. Whatever harm the good guys commit is rational and justified (or alternatively, lies and propaganda made up by the enemy in a bid for sympathy).
The flattening tendency of tribalism obliterates nuance from every conflict. No one wants to be in the middle, where every side is lobbing bombs at you. Thus, everyone gets pushed to pick one side or the other, to join a team, to declare our allegiance and wave the flag.
And, the longer these debates go on, the more entrenched all sides become. The battle lines are drawn, positions harden, and resentment curdles. People start to believe, not just that they’re on the right side, but that the right side is obvious. They start to believe that everyone who doesn’t see the world the same way as they do is a puppet of imperialists, or an apologist for genocide, or a settler colonialist, or a secret Nazi.
Empathy gymnastics
Whenever I consider what’s to be done, I always go back to empathy. I said in my last column that it doesn’t offer an easy solution to this conflict. And yet, it’s the only guide we have. If there’s any way out, it will only be discovered by the embrace of mutual understanding. It will never be achieved by force of arms on either side.
Israel is the refuge of a people who were expelled from their ancestral homeland and endured centuries of brutal persecution. The Jews were scattered across the earth, forced to live among those who despised them. They were scapegoated by vicious conspiracy theories, prevented from owning land, often forbidden to practice their own religion. Ultimately, they were targeted for extermination in the worst slaughter of the 20th century.
You can’t understand Israel without grasping that bone-deep history of trauma. You can’t grasp the roots of this conflict without hearing the echo of “Never again” in the back of every Jewish person’s mind. They have very good reason to want to protect themselves, without ever having to rely on anyone else’s mercy or goodwill.
At the same time, Israelis need to understand that their current situation is of their own making. Israel will never be safe until it learns to live together in peace with its neighbors. Not only have they not done that, they’ve forced the Palestinians to live under hellish conditions.
If there’s ever going to be an end to these conflicts, the Palestinians need a realistic hope of a better future. Just as the Jews do, they deserve safety, stability, and the chance to control their own destiny. They can’t stay confined and oppressed forever, with no chance of things ever getting better for them.
Otherwise, no informed observer of human nature would expect them to respond with anything other than destructive nihilism and religious zealotry. Historically, the Jews rebelled many times against oppressive foreign rulers. How can they not expect others to do the same?
This is less a perspective flip than a perspective cartwheel. Whichever side you look at it from, it demands the overturning of sacred beliefs. It’s a gymnastic feat of empathy, and perhaps most people aren’t capable of it. But if we’re not capable of it, then this bloodshed will go on forever.
A crutch we no longer need
In the olden days, one could argue, tribalism was the only option. After all, belief in universal brotherhood was no good to anyone if the invaders from over the next hill didn’t share that view. When culture and language and religion were much deeper rifts that separated humans from each other, cleaving to the tribe was the only way to survive.
But that survival instinct is a crutch we no longer need. We live in a world where anyone can travel anywhere, learn about any culture, translate any language. We know more about each other than we ever have. We no longer have any excuse for treating other humans as aliens or dangerous creatures. By all rights, we should find it easier to get along.
Instead, millions cling fiercely to their tribalisms, even when we no longer have any need for them. Because of these imaginary distinctions, real human beings are hating each other, shedding blood, waging war, killing, and dying. It’s a tragic absurdity that should have no place in a rational world.
Christianity’s Addiction to Magical Thinking
Here’s the link to this article.
By David Madison at 11/03/2023
Churchgoers don’t even notice or care
A thousand years from now, will there be people—with as little grasp of history as contemporary Christians—who worship a goddess named Minerva, because they believe that Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter stories was real? What magical powers she had! She could change herself instantly into a cat, and multiply food supplies. Will there also be a goddess Hermione, based on Hermione Granger in Harry Potter, who created a magic potion that allows the person who drinks it to assume the physical appearance of another person? Will the Fairy God Mother in Cinderella be worshipped as well, because she used a magic spell to turn a pumpkin into a splendid coach?
The New Testament authors used exactly this kind of razzle-dazzle to bring converts to the Jesus cult. These authors borrowed freely from miracle folklore of the ancient world: they depicted Jesus healing a blind man by smearing mud on his eyes; a woman was healed by touching the hem of Jesus’ garment. He transferred demons from a man into pigs, fed thousands of people with just a few loaves and fish, turned water into wine, raised a man from the dead by voice command, recommended magic potions—drinking his blood and eating his flesh—to gain eternal life. He cured a paralytic by forgiving his sins. Jesus glowed on a mountaintop while chatting with Moses and Elijah—and the voice of Yahweh came from water vapor (a cloud). Jesus walked on water and controlled with weather. At the end of his story, he floated up and away, disappearing in the clouds.
There’s magic as well in the letters of the apostle Paul. He taught that by believing in your heart—and saying with your lips—that Jesus was raised from the dead, “you will be saved.” That’s a magic spell. Paul also was sure your sexual desires are cancelled (or, as he put it, crucified) if you “belong to Jesus.”
The New Testament is a handbook of magic. Any one of these Jesus stories told from the pulpit evokes a feeling of awe, “Wow, wasn’t Jesus wonderful!” But a responsible study/analysis of scripture means that even the most devout readers must consider probabilities, based on how we know the world works. Which is more likely—that Jesus did such awesome things, or that the gospel authors fashioned their stories from the fantasy folklore of the time? If your favorite priest or minister claims to have pulled off miracles similar to these Jesus-deeds in the gospels, only the most gullible would be convinced. In this era of cell-phones, many churchgoers would ask for evidence: “Let’s see the pictures.” But when they believe—and adore—the magic stories in the Bible, they waive the request for evidence.
There is very little curiosity about what it was like to live at the time the New Testament was written, or a grasp of how little knowledge of the world and the universe most people at that time possessed, e.g., that we live on a planet whose crust consists of seven continents and vast oceans—with a molten core at its center; that we are in a solar system that orbits the galactic center, along with billions of other solar systems. The Bible authors didn’t even know what stars are.
Nor is there much curiosity among the devout about the authors of the New Testament. Who were they, after all? But it is hard to satisfy this curiosity because the gospels were written anonymously, and so many of the epistles were forgeries. Because of the apostle Paul’s own seven authentic letters, we have an abundance of information about him—which, unfortunately, is not a good thing! But from what the New Testament authors wrote, we can figure out a lot about their mind-sets—which, also unfortunately, is not a good thing. The church has done a good cover-up job by positioning these authors as saints, and this has deflected attention from the superstitions and magical thinking that they embraced and promoted.
Scholars have researched and debated these realities for a long time, with devout scholars trying to put the best possible spin on ancient beliefs that should be trashed. Religions have always thrived on the appeal to belief without evidence. That’s the whole point of the story of Doubting Thomas, found only in John’s gospel (20:24-29). When the other disciples told Thomas that the resurrected Jesus had appeared to them—Thomas wasn’t there when it happened—his skepticism kicked in. A week later, Thomas was present when Jesus showed up again. He invited Thomas to touch the sword wound in his side, and that convinced him: “My Lord and my God!” And then he got a scolding from Jesus: “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”
Religions rely on this gimmick: believe what the preachers claim to know about god(s).
For in depth study of this issue, I recommend an article published here last November by John Loftus, Paul’s Christianity: Belief in Belief Itself. This is actually the full version of the Foreword that Loftus wrote for Robert Conner’s excellent book, The Jesus Cult: 2000 Years of the Last Days.
What are we up against when we face belief-in-belief? Loftus reports this encounter: “I asked one woman whether she honestly wanted to know if her faith was false. She said she didn’t, that she was happy, and that was that. She knew the implications if she concluded it was false. It would involve some adverse social repercussions she didn’t want, so she chose not even to consider whether she was wrong.”
Which means that most churchgoers would not want to deal with the issues that Loftus discusses in this article. He opens with a quote from the Conner book: “…the greatest threat is the core feature of the Christian cult: belief in belief, the conviction that the Christian narrative is literally its own proof.” (p. 2, The Jesus Cult)
Hence churchgoers today—like the woman Loftus mentions—couldn’t care less how Christian theology emerged in the ancient world; their simple answer is sufficient: “Jesus the son of God was born, did his magic tricks—proof for sure he had divine powers—was sacrificed to atone for our sins, rose from the dead. This is what we have to belief to live with Jesus forever.” The heavy magic component here isn’t noticed—or more correctly, it is embraced as willingly as Harry Potter fans cheer on their hero. Conner is blunt:
“Christianity was a cult as presently understood from its inception, a toxic brew of apocalyptic delusion, sexual phobias and fixations, and a hierarchy of control, control of women by men, of slaves by masters, and society by the church.” (p. 2, The Jesus Cult)
This toxic brew of apocalyptic delusion got a jump start in the writings/teachings of the apostle Paul. The devout don’t seem to notice how much their religion has been damaged by Paul’s bad theology. No surprise. If few Christians make a practice of reading the gospels with full curiosity and skepticism engaged, I suspect far fewer read Paul’s letters. The gospels at least have stories, but Paul wrote extensively about his theological certainties based on his visions. It is obvious he had little—if any—knowledge about Jesus of Nazareth.
Why doesn’t this example of Paul’s bragging shock churchgoers: “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.” (Galatians 1:11-12)
So, Jesus spoke to Paul directly from the spiritual realm? Here we go again with magical thinking, similar to the commonly accepted notion that gods speak to humans via dreams. Loftus notes that this is detached from reality:
“Hearing and heeding imaginary voices in one’s head as if they came from someone else, a god, angel, or deity, is not the mark of a sane person. Period. This insanity should be acknowledged if the voices command things that are harmful and dangerous, deceptive and false, and control much of a person’s life. That’s what we see throughout the Bible, in both the Old and New Testaments.”
The Old Testament prophets claim that the word of Yahweh “came to them” and Joseph supposedly learned about Mary’s pregnancy in a dream. This is yet more magical thinking.
There has been a lot written about Paul’s state of mind, and Loftus sums up the conclusions of many secular thinkers: “I can affirm with a great deal of confidence that Paul was functionally insane, if he were living among rational people. But in a rational society Paul wouldn’t function well at all. He would be that homeless guy on the city street corner who proselytized with bullhorns and signs to no one, calling on people to ‘REPENT! FOR THE END IS NEAR!’”
Robert Conner also wrote an essay, “Paul’s Christianity,” for Loftus’ 2019 anthology, The Case Against Miracles. Conner’s conclusion, at the end of his 25-page essay: “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)
Loftus draws attention to Gerd Ludemann’s book, Paul: The Founder of Christianity. This title might puzzle many of the devout, who don’t appreciate New Testament chronology. That is, Paul’s version of the faith was preached long before the gospels were written, and much of their content might, in fact, be derived from his thought. On this, see especially, Mark Dykstra’s book: Mark Canonizer of Paul.
I’ve just scratched the surface of Loftus’ essay. It is worth careful study, especially by Christians who are inclined to ignore the origins of their faith—to protect their beliefs. Their belief in belief. Loftus also references Richard Carrier’s article, Kooks and Quacks of the Roman Empire: A Look into the World of the Gospels, in which he states:
“From all of this one thing should be apparent: the age of Jesus was not an age of critical reflection and remarkable religious acumen. It was an era filled with con artists, gullible believers, martyrs without a cause, and reputed miracles of every variety. In light of this picture, the tales of the Gospels do not seem very remarkable. Even if they were false in every detail, there is no evidence that they would have been disbelieved or rejected as absurd by many people, who at the time had little in the way of education or critical thinking skills.”
Christianity’s addiction to magical thinking guarantees that its foundations are incredibly weak.
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.
I’ve Written Three Books On How To Honestly Seek the Truth
Here’s the link to this article.
By John W. Loftus at 11/02/2023
[First Published August 2022] I’ve written three books to educate believers on how to honestly seek the truth and defend it: 1) The Outsider Test for Faith: How to Know Which Religion is True. In it I show honest believers how to approach their faith consistently without any double standards or special pleading.
2) How to Defend the Christian Faith: Advice from an Atheist. In it I show Christian apologists how to correctly defend their faith, if it can be defended at all. Apologists should read it before writing another sentence in defense of their faith. In it I challenge apologists to stop doing what they’re doing if they’re honest about defending their Christian faith. The risk is that if they stop it they cannot defend their faith at all. But the risk is worth it if they’re serious about knowing and defending the truth.
3) Unapologetic: Why Philosophy of Religion Must End. In it I show philosophers of religion and other intellectuals how to properly discuss and debate religious beliefs. What I cannot teach however, is to desire the truth. That comes from within. Taken together these three books are the antidote to the faith virus. The problem is almost none of them desire the truth, comparatively speaking. Here’s hoping a few honest believers are reading who desire the truth.
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John W. Loftus is a philosopher and counter-apologist credited with 12 critically acclaimed books, including The Case against Miracles, God and Horrendous Suffering, and Varieties of Jesus Mythicism. Please support DC by sharing our posts, or by subscribing, donating, or buying our books at Amazon. Thank you so much!
Trump and ‘our religion’ demonstrate evangelicals’ ongoing endgame crisis
Here’s the link to this article.
Donald Trump knows how to get white evangelicals all het up.
by CAPTAIN CASSIDY OCT 31, 2023
Overview:
In recent months, Donald Trump has been talking about bringing back the anti-Muslim immigration ban from his single term in office.
His white evangelical fanbase loves it. Almost ten years into their decline, they are more touchy than ever about losing credibility and cultural power.
Say whatever you like about Donald Trump. If it’s negative, it’s probably true. But don’t say he doesn’t know how to work a sympathetic crowd. In recent campaign speeches, Trump has been telling his crowds of followers about how he plans to handle immigrants from, presumably, Muslim-dominated countries: he’d keep out those who “don’t like our religion” and “hate America.”
This flatly illegal, completely unconstitutional, human-rights-violating promise appears to have played well to his fanbase, who are overwhelmingly white evangelical Christians who claim to adore the rule of law, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. They certainly haven’t rejected him on the basis of that promise! It demonstrates well their priorities amid their religion’s ongoing decline: to defend what turf they can, and grab what temporal power they can before their cultural power fades too much to grab anything with it at all.
Donald Trump and the last screech of white evangelicalism
In his current rallies, Donald Trump looks back on his anti-Muslim travel ban as a “beautiful” and “wonderful” thing, despite the utter chaos it wreaked. He now promises to bring that ban back and institute ideological screenings of all immigrants:
“I will implement strong ideological screening of all immigrants,” the former president vowed. “If you hate America, if you want to abolish Israel, if you don’t like our religion (which a lot of them don’t), if you sympathize with jihadists, then we don’t want you in our country and you are not getting in.”“Trump Says He’ll Ban Immigrants Who ‘Don’t Like Our Religion’,” Ryan Bort, Rolling Stone
The idea of “ideological screening” should alarm any American who cares about human rights. This is a religion test, which our laws specifically do not allow. But the kind of people who support Donald Trump don’t care. For all their fetishizing of America, its Founding Fathers, its history, and its laws, somehow his fanbase is totally fine with this kind of screening.
I’m not surprised. Donald Trump’s entire existence as a political candidate is predicated entirely on his biggest fanbase’s complete hypocrisy.
Donald Trump is still pandering about ‘our religion’
For months now, Donald Trump has been making the rounds at political rallies. He wants to be president again. That means he needs to raise support in the only real core fanbase he has: white evangelical Christians.
This group comprises somewhere between 5%-35% of Americans depending on who you consult, but they are reliable voters. According to Pew Research, he received 77% of this group’s votes in 2016, then 84% in 2020. Obviously, lots of other sorts of people also voted for him, but they tend to be the understanding sort who don’t mind him pandering so hard to this one group.
In May this year, he went off the rails ranting about immigration. Again. That’s always been a concern for conservatives generally, and white evangelical Christians in particular. Considering their stated beliefs, it’s ironic in the extreme that they’d oppose immigration and despise immigrants like they do. In fact, one 2015 evangelical-run study discovered that 90% of evangelical respondents didn’t base their beliefs about immigration on the Bible at all. (Franklin Graham even drilled down on this exact point in 2017. In response, the Washington Post humiliated him with a Bible study. Other Christians have written similar rebukes.)
Here as elsewhere, evangelicals’ unstated beliefs speak far more loudly than any vocal belief statements they could ever issue. They don’t want a Pastor-in-Chief. No, they want a tribalistic strongman who will prevent more non-Christians from entering the United States, since such immigration only dilutes their numbers and power. They want a ruler who flouts behavioral rules, flaunts his degeneracy and ignorance, and says out loud all the horrific stuff they dare not whisper.
Most of all, they want a ruler who will raise them to the rulership over America that they think they deserve, and one who will punish their enemies until they are strong enough to do it themselves.
As he did almost ten years ago, Donald Trump promises to be that ruler.
When ‘our religion’ is only the religion of a shrinking percentage of Americans
As noted earlier, the percentage of evangelicals in America is very far from a majority. Depending on the definition you use and the authorities and studies you consult, they range from 5% of Americans to 35%. But they vote very reliably. That fact makes them a desirable bloc to own for conservative politicians.
Most desirably of all, they respond extremely well to fearmongering, fake news, and tribalistic jingoism. In their own minds, they’ve got a lot to be afraid of—their own increasing cultural irrelevance most of all.
Christianity itself is cruising quickly toward losing its majority status in America. At present, about 63% of Americans claim Christian affiliation. When Pew Research modeled religious switching in future decades, though, they found that most estimates had that percentage dropping to 35-46% by 2070. Meanwhile, the percentage of “Nones” (the religiously unaffiliated who claim “none of the above” as their religion) only continues to rise. In Pew’s model, they go from 30% currently to 41-52% by 2070.
Add non-Christian immigration to the mix, and white evangelicals become irrelevant even more quickly. So I can easily understand why white evangelicals bitterly oppose immigration, even if it clashes hilariously with their stated beliefs in a literal, inerrant, completely timeless and divine Bible.
Donald Trump knows that white evangelicals don’t want no meltin’ pots
Kristin Kobes du Mez, a brilliant writer whose work I adore, linked evangelicals’ opposition to immigration to “militant masculinity” in 2018. It’s not in me to gainsay her. She’s got a deep understanding of that exact facet of white evangelicalism. As she wrote:
It is incredibly difficult to disrupt a cohesive worldview of this sort, particularly one that is inherently suspicious of opposing views and is fueled by a victimization narrative, one backed by a multi-billion-dollar spiritual-industrial complex, and one that has direct and exclusive avenues of communication to hundreds of millions of eager consumers.“Understanding White Evangelical Views on Immigration,” Kristin Kobes du Mez, Harvard Divinity Bulletin
I’d just add this: That “cohesive worldview” is not just militantly macho. It also reflects white evangelicals’ increasing sense of tribalism.
In sociology, it is not a good thing for a group to behave in tribalistic ways. Such a group tends to be dysfunctionally authoritarian. That means that it cannot fulfill its own stated goals, nor even protect its own members from in-group abuse. Instead, the group is a conduit for power. Its followers cluster around a chosen charismatic leader who dispenses power to those lower on the power ladder. Those below the leader jockey and infight for favor.
To maintain their hold on power, the leaders of these groups need to flex their power often. They do this in a variety of ways:
- Betraying those who are no longer useful
- Visibly disobeying the group’s rules and allowing favored underlings to disobey them as well
- Painting outsiders to the group as their mortal enemies
- Stomping on critics and apostates with both feet
- Being inconsistent with rule enforcement and creation
- Destroying any heretics’ reputations and relationships as they leave the group
- Making followers do things they don’t want to do, from church chores to abusive sexual favors
(See also: The lessons authoritarians learn.)
But this flexing works best if group members feel they can’t ever leave. If they’re sure they’ll never recover emotionally or financially from such a move, then they’re far less likely to take the risk.
So in a lot of ways, tribalism in Christianity works best in an environment where the local tribe leaders wield a lot of cultural power. If their power gets too diluted, people feel safer in leaving. And the more non-Christians enter the United States, the more diluted white evangelicals—along with their vision of ideal American culture—become in the population as a whole.
The last thing tribalistic white evangelicals want is a melting-pot America. Rather, they desire a solidly Christian America (full of their own preferred kind of Christian, naturally) that turns non-Christians of all kinds into pariahs until they bend the knee.
Compassion and empathy destroy tribalism
Another serious problem evangelicals have with immigration is simply the way that knowing people from the outgroup can destabilize a dysfunctional-authoritarian ingroup. Right now, Trump can frighten his fanbase by identifying Muslim immigrants as terrorists. He can paint them as scary Others who don’t know how to America right.
But once Americans get to know outsiders, they stop being outsiders.
By now, there are about 3.85 million Muslims in the United States, according to a 2023 Pew Research report. In the past 20-ish years, the number of mosques has grown from 1209 to 2769. (And, as they always have, Republicans tend to think they, as a group, face more discrimination than Muslims do.) Muslims are also running for—and winning—public office. They’re far more visible now than they ever were. A 2017 Pew Research survey even found that most Americans were significantly warming up to Muslims, though the war in Israel might now be changing things for the worse.
Still, that visibility has to be scaring the knickers off of white evangelicals. They don’t want to see Muslims praying on their knees on public sidewalks, or to take college classes alongside women in headscarves, or see their kids making friends with Muslim kids.
(I can’t think of evangelicals encountering headscarves without thinking of that cringey side plot from the first “God’s Not Dead” movie involving a young Muslim convert who adores Franklin Graham—who if you’ll recall is very anti-immigration.)
White evangelicals don’t want any reminders that they no longer represent the cultural standard of America, nor are even its Designated Adults. What they want is quiet, effortless mastery and recognized superiority, not having to share and play nicely with the other children on the playground.
Even if it destroys their witness, to use the Christianese, they can’t let go of their tribalism. Jesus’ direct orders be damned! Bible blahblah is all well and good, but this is real life we’re talking about. Like everyone else, white evangelicals know that when real life starts happening, they have to step into the real world to deal with it.
The new age of evangelical power-grabs
Over the past few years, I’ve noticed a sharp change in how white evangelicals present themselves and sell their only product (active membership in their own group).
Just a decade ago, evangelicals tried to engage outsiders in one-sided non-versations. They traveled to schools to deliver sales pitches. They ran pseudo-charity efforts like Beach Reach that were really about indoctrination. Online, they seemed acutely aware that they were selling something. Sure, very few people cared to buy it anymore. But they still felt compelled by Jesus to SELL SELL SELL WITHOUT MERCY.
To an extent, they still do that stuff, yes. But they’ve really shifted their emphasis. Now, they seem much more like an overtly theocratic, totalitarian political group with a thin coat of Jesus frosting. Aware that nobody wants to buy their product on its own merits, they have turned from wheedling and fake non-versations to outright insults and sneers toward those who reject their control-grabs. This behavior seems to bolster their own self-image, even as it wrecks their tribe’s credibility every time they act out.
When I encounter them, I can’t help but think that my first pastor, a genial old Pentecostal leader in our denomination, would have had their hides for mistreating people the way they do.
Again, this is real life we’re talking about, though, not Bible blahblah. Evangelicals may give lip service to Jesus’ sheer power and miracle-working all they like. In the real world, they’re aware that if they don’t punish their enemies, Jesus sure won’t do it for them.
I’ve known this about evangelicals for a long, long time. In a way, I’m glad Trump has come along to unmask them.
I suspect that the further white evangelicals decline in cultural power and credibility, the more and the worse they’ll act out. I just hope the rest of the world is ready to listen when they tell us who they truly are.
Christian nationalists: Drop Mike, hold on to your Johnson
Here’s the link to this article.
by JONATHAN MS PEARCE OCT 31, 2023
Overview:
Move over Mike Pence, Mike Johnson is in the big chair—and in a position to try to enact all of his Christian nationalist dreams.
Reading Time: 5 MINUTES
The challenge of Christian nationalism has resurfaced over the last week with a tale of two Mikes. The first concerns conservative Christian Mike Pence dropping out of the race for president. The charisma black hole that is the former vice president under Donald Trump never really stood a chance, even against the aging Joe Biden. Sometimes reality is unassailable.
But while Pence was debating with himself whether to continue his campaign, another Mike was throwing his hat into the political ring. It got to a point where congressional Republicans were keenly aware of the embarrassing situation of not having a majority leader in the House of Representatives. After a number of potential candidates failed to get enough support, including the controversial Jim Jordan, it appears that the GOP lawmakers ran out of patience. The first person to come along who appeared to be a safe pair of hands would command quite an advantage.
Appearances can be deceptive. Dangerously so.
It is amazing how much a calm voice, a pair of spectacles, and a nicely tailored suit can do for a politician. (I am reminded of the book Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work including the chapter, “The Case of Dave: Would a Snake Wear Such a Nice Suit?” Not to cast aspersions…) He seems such a sensible person, and his voice is so moderate!
That’s his physical voice, not his political voice. The tone of his speaking belies a now rather typical MAGA-style conservative Christian agenda. So much so that controversial MAGA frontman Matt Gaetz said of Mike Johnson in an interview given to Steve Bannon, “If you don’t think that moving from Kevin McCarthy to MAGA Mike Johnson shows the ascendance of this movement and where the power in the Republican Party truly lies, then you’re not paying attention.”
Don’t be entranced by the slippery gyrations of “MAGA Mike.” This cobra has a very poisonous bite.
Former Biden press secretary Jen Psaki dropped her own mic on her MSNBC show: “Another deeply religious conservative Republican just ascended to the speakership… The problem with Johnson isn’t at all his faith. He is entitled to his personal beliefs as everyone is…even if they come from the 18th century.”
Ouch.
The problem, as she points out, is when those beliefs encroach on the rights of others. Christian nationalism in a pluralist society is something of a headache in a secular country. This might be Roe v. Wade, which Johnson believes “gave constitutional cover to the elective killing of unborn children in America. Period.” He believes that if women were able to bring more “able-bodied workers” into the world to foot the bill, then politicians wouldn’t need to slash Social Security and Medicare:
He even blames school shootings on abortion, as Irin Carmon sets out in the New York Magazine:
At the time, Johnson was a lawyer defending Louisiana’s abortion restrictions — purported safety regulations designed to shut down clinics — in court and had just been elected, unopposed, to the State House of Representatives. I remember thinking how anodyne the office was, like a small-town personal-injury firm, as he cheerfully told me that soon the pro-lifers would outnumber the pro-choicers who aborted all their babies. I no longer have a recording, just a 27-page transcript, but my memory is that he kept his voice smooth and pleasant as he said, “Many women use abortion as a form of birth control, you know, in certain segments of society, and it’s just shocking and sad, but this is where we are. When you break up the nuclear family, when you tell a generation of people that life has no value, no meaning, that it’s expendable, then you do wind up with school shooters.”
He has also supported legislation to limit the teaching of race-related topics in schools, and Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. His blend of Christian nationalism looks very much like a white one: He has also often repeated promotion of the “Great Replacement Theory.” Usefully, Politico have released a piece detailing where he stands on many political issues.
Beware the quiet man. When he addressed his colleagues on the first day of being the new Speaker in the US House of Representatives, Johnson shared the following: “I don’t believe there are any coincidences. I believe that scripture, the Bible, is very clear that God is the one that raises up those in authority, he raised up each of you, all of us. And I believe that God has ordained and allowed us to be brought here to this specific moment and time.”
This should come as no surprise to anyone who has been following him. In 2016, he said, “You know, we don’t live in a democracy . . . It’s a constitutional republic. And the founders set that up because they followed the biblical admonition on what a civil society is supposed to look like.” And very worrying to those of us who find the separation of church and state crucial to the political operation of the United States, he added: “Over the last 60 or 70 years our generation has been convinced that there is a separation of church and state . . . most people think that is part of the Constitution, but it’s not.”
He has also expressed his belief that the founders wanted to protect the church from the state, not the other way around, and that the US is indeed a nation with Judeo-Christian roots under threat from secular forces.
In case anyone was in any doubt, Johnson confirmed his moral-political worldview in an interview with Fox News: “I am a Bible-believing Christian. Someone asked me today in the media, they said, ‘It’s curious, people are curious, what does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?’ I said, well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.”
Same-sex marriage is also another talking-point issue where Johnson appears to be on the wrong side of history but the right side of the Republican Party. As Time reports in their piece “The Christian Nationalism of Speaker Mike Johnson“:
As an attorney working for the Alliance Defense Fund, now known as Alliance Defending Freedom (founded by leaders with similar Christian nationalist commitments, like James Dobson, D. James Kennedy, and Bill Bright), Speaker Johnson opposed the decriminalization of homosexual activity through Lawrence v. Texas in 2003 and in 2004 proposed banning same-sex marriage.
He argued how both will “de-emphasize the importance of traditional marriage to society, weaken it, and place our entire democratic system in jeopardy by eroding its foundation,” and that “experts project that homosexual marriage is the dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic
As the same article points out, “Americans who embrace Christian nationalism are more likely to support anti-democratic tactics and approve of political violence if an election does not return favorable results.” It is wholly unsurprising, then, that Johnson was a pivotal figure in the attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential elections. He wasn’t shy of repeating debunked Dominion voting machine claims and even wrote an amicus brief for a case concerning Texas having results thrown out.
There is enough to worry about when surveying the world’s democratic backsliding—seeing institutions and mechanisms, checks and balances, being repealed and pulled down— without having to worry about the corridors of power in the US Capitol.
In a time of growing pluralism, the only sensible map to navigate this increasing diversity is secularism of the sort envisaged and enshrined by the founders. But pluralism and diversity, difference and understanding, are not the purview of Christian nationalists. And it appears very obvious indeed that Mike Johnson is a staunch Christian nationalist. This should be of grave concern. Time finishes their article as follows:
It is critical to recognize the influence of Christian nationalism on Mike Johnson’s vision for the US. “Christian nationalism” isn’t a political slur. It’s a term that accurately describes an ideology that is antithetical to a stable, multiracial, and liberal democracy—an ideology clearly guiding the now-ranking Republican in the US House of Representatives.
Political polarization and division are more pronounced than they ever have been. It appears that the Republicans have not changed tack after the 2020 elections or the fallout to Dobbs v. Jackson but instead have doubled down, piling into culture war issues and divisive policies.
It appears that now more than ever, the nonreligious and secular need to be on their guard. Now more than ever, constitutional foundations must be secured and supported. Now more than ever, the quiet man must be listened to. Every single word.
Don’t lean too close, though. That snake can bite.
For God So Loved the Whales
Here’s the link to this article.
By Daniel Mocsny at 11/01/2023
In her book, The Not-So-Intelligent Designer: Why Evolution Explains the Human Body and Intelligent Design Does Not (2016), Abby Hafer gives a by turns amusing and horrifying account of numerous obvious goofs in the human body that any competent designer would fix. (Or be sued by the victims.) These are all elegantly explained by evolution, and count as evidence for it. Since evolution typically proceeds by small increments of genetic change, which are often as small as a change to a single nucleotide, the corresponding changes to the phenotype are also often small adjustments to what is already there. Evolution cannot “see” that a better solution may be far away in the design space, requiring large-scale modification of the genome at many positions simultaneously. What’s worse, these modifications would have to occur in multiple individuals at the same time, to maintain a breeding population! For more about the evolutionary design space, see Daniel Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995).
An egregious example of bad evolutionary “design” is the recurrent laryngeal nerve, which is a bad-enough mistake in humans, but reaches comical proportions in giraffes. As all tetrapod vertebrates have a similar arrangement, it would have been even more comical in the longer-necked sauropod dinosaurs. The nerve would have been as long as 28m (92 ft) in Supersaurus, almost all of which was an unnecessary detour.
Other popular books on evolution mention this remarkably bad design, including: Why Evolution Is True (2009) by Jerry Coyne; The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (2009) by Richard Dawkins; and Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body (2008) by Neil Shubin.
But I’ll focus on whales today, specifically their superhuman resistance to choking and cancer, two serious killers of humans.
Hafer explains how whales have two completely separate tubes for breathing and swallowing, respectively. Humans, in contrast, breathe and swallow through a shared tube, the pharynx, and must correctly route air, food, and liquid to the proper branch (the trachea which sends air to the lungs, and the esophagus that sends food and drink to the stomach). A moveable flap of cartilage called the epiglottis stops food from entering the larynx. That is, when everything works. But it’s very easy for people to accidentally inhale food, causing them to choke. Without some prompt means of clearing the airway, the choking human can rapidly suffocate and die. Whales don’t have this problem; they can’t choke on anything entering through their mouth. They’d have to introduce foreign objects into their blowhole. That isn’t a typical risk for a whale, whereas humans court death with every meal. According to Bard, “an estimated 5,057 people died from choking in the United States in 2020. Of these deaths, 78% were adults aged 65 years or older. Food was the most common cause of choking deaths, followed by small objects such as toys and coins.”
Hafer mentions cancer in other contexts, but she doesn’t mention Peto’s paradox. (I first learned about that by reading Principles of Evolutionary Medicine (2016) during my book version of pandemic doomscrolling. Incidentally, emerging fields of science such as evolutionary medicine, evolutionary psychology, etc., show that science creates actual value – there are no creationist counterparts.) According to the English Wikipedia, Peto’s paradox is “the observation that, at the species level, the incidence of cancer does not appear to correlate with the number of cells in an organism. For example, the incidence of cancer in humans is much higher than the incidence of cancer in whales, despite whales having more cells than humans. If the probability of carcinogenesis were constant across cells, one would expect whales to have a higher incidence of cancer than humans. Peto’s paradox is named after English statistician and epidemiologist Richard Peto, who first observed the connection.” Also see Bard’s take on cancer in humans and whales. Whales apparently have several different adaptations that make them far more resistant to cancer than humans are. Researchers are trying to figure out the whales’ advantage, with the goal of giving humans what God neglected to give them. Cancer is considered a disease of aging, in that cancer rates tend to increase rapidly with age, although cancer can strike humans of any age, including, cruelly, children. (Theodicy is a whole ‘nother challenge for folks who believe in an omni-God, addressed in other blog posts and in John W. Loftus’ books, but I’ll stick to whales here.) Some whale species have long lifespans, with the bowhead whale able to live for over 200 years. For a whale to live that long, it must have robust and durable systems for resisting cancer, far outclassing the human’s endowment.
Before modern science, human thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle flattered themselves with their scala naturae (“Ladder of Being”). The notion was further developed by medieval Christians as their great chain of being. That is “a hierarchical structure of all matter and life, thought by medieval Christianity to have been decreed by God. The chain begins with God and descends through angels, humans, animals and plants to minerals.” Further, “the higher the being is in the chain, the more attributes it has, including all the attributes of the beings below it.”
Well, whales have some desirable attributes that humans clearly lack, such as their vastly superior resistance to choking and cancer. This is another example of how faith fails. Modern science began around 400 years ago, based on the radical idea that people should test their claims against evidence. It was radical then, and is still radical to a lot of people, although much of the educated class at least pays lip service to the idea. Before modern science, even educated people had some strange views of Man’s place in the universe. Jennifer Nagel explains how modern thinking is very different than medieval thinking. However, large chunks of medieval thinking persist in the faith community, which has become an odd chimera of the two. On the one hand, most persons of faith lead modern lives, consuming the benefits of technologies made possible by scientific thinking. At the same time, they function like cognitive fossils, bringing a medieval perspective where it suits them. It is both a strength and weakness of science that almost anyone can consume the benefits of science, including science deniers.
In any case, the next time you hear a person of faith claiming to have been “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:14) and presenting their own rockin’ body as evidence of God’s love for us, you can point out that when it comes to choking and cancer, God apparently loves the whales more.
Richard L. Fricks 
