Christian nationalists: Drop Mike, hold on to your Johnson

Avatar photo 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.

What is ‘woke’? It’s my trigger word

Here’s the link to this article.

Avatar photo by JONATHAN MS PEARCE

AUG 19, 2023

Overview:

“Woke” is either the new “libtard” or it means nothing. Either way, it triggers me…

Reading Time: 7 MINUTES

Woke is the mot du jour. It’s everywhere. It’s what Tucker Carlson, formerly of Fox News, uses incessantly. It’s what presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis platforms against with his “anti-woke” campaign agenda. It’s what my father-in-law uses when he’s angry with, in his own mind, some new nonsense—“Oh what’s that word…yes, that’s it, bloody ‘woke’!” It’s what the Daily Mail rails against. It’s what the BBC supposedly is. Or Disney. Or Goodyear.

There is real confusion about what this now-surprisingly-common word actually means. So much so, indeed, that the conservative author Bethany Mandel recently had a car crash of an interview where she froze, completely unable to define what “woke” means. This is somewhat surprising given that she is an author of a book against “wokeism” (Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation) in which she attacks “wokeness” as “a new version of leftism that is aimed at your child.”

It seems commonplace that people on the right accuse the left of “wokeism” that underwrites a “cancel culture” instituted by the left. The reality is somewhat different, as I argued against evangelical Christian and 2016 presidential candidate David French on Premier Christian Radio.

Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis said in 2021, “What you see now with the rise of this woke ideology is an attempt to really delegitimize our history and to delegitimize our institutions, and I view the wokeness as a form of cultural Marxism. They really want to tear at the fabric of our society.”

I am probably the them to his us, the sort of person who wonders why “social justice” has become something bad to aspire to.

So what does “woke” actually mean?

In this general context, not what it originally did.

In its earliest iteration, woke was part of the phrase “stay woke”, being a phrase used within Black communities referring to being awake and “alert to the deceptions of other people.” It was “a basic survival tactic.” The phrase appeared in a 1938 song “Scottsboro Boys,” a protest song by blues musician Huddie Ledbetter (known as Lead Belly)—a reaction to nine Black teenagers accused of raping two white women. Lead Belly said of it, “I made this little song about down there. So I advise everybody, be a little careful when they go along through there—best stay woke, keep their eyes open.”

At the same time, “stay woke” also literally meant to stay awake, in Black vernacular. in 2008, R&B artist Erykah Badu released a politically themed album with the song “Master Teacher” that included the phrase being used in several different contextual meanings, bringing the phrase back to the fore.

Fast forward to 2014, when Michael Brown was shot by police in Ferguson, Missouri, and the phrase came back to life. Needs must.

The context of the subsequent Black Lives Matter movement saw the phrase, now shortened to “woke”, being associated with anything to do with racial equality. It was only a hop, skip, and a jump to it representing anything and everything liberal in the world.

Because racial equality is the purview only of the left?

A Black person on a BBC show where you might not expect to see them? Woke. (Think the new Little Mermaid film or the recent Lord of the Rings series.) Silicon Valley Bank collapsing? Woke. Yale physician advocating sensible Covid policies? Woke (a “mind virus attempting to destroy civilization,” according to Elon Musk). It’s rather dizzying, keeping an eye on the myriad uses of the term.

In fact, here linked are more than 200 things conservative TV channel Fox News has labeled as woke. A few examples might help to show how woke has become the bogeyman of the right. And it’s a little embarrassing now.

So on and so forth. It’s a long list. And when you look at every subject included in that list, you quickly realize that “woke” is a very large umbrella term. Gathered under the protection of this term is every single liberal. And every single centrist. And every single person who happens to hold an opinion that someone angrily hopping about on the far right doesn’t agree with.

When you use a term so much, in so many contexts, to attack so many ideas and so many people, it loses any coherent meaning or utility. In economics, this is the Law of Diminishing Returns. The first pint of water in the desert is very useful and rather refreshing. The 31^st? Somewhat less so. We are now at a point that the term “woke” is empty, vacuous. It is the new “libtard”. If that’s where we are at, count me out.

It’s a very lazy term.

And the label now triggers me. If anyone mentions it, I take an instant dislike to their politics, to their morality. Because it says more about them than it does about me or their intended target. I can very often successfully sum up someone’s political positioning with their single use of that term in the same way that I can if they use the pejorative “libtard”. It carries about the same degree of nuance.

If you have issues with the use of pronouns and gender identity (and let’s face it, it’s something of a complex philosophical battlefield), then let’s have a reasonable debate. The same goes for climate change. And pandemic responses. And equality—racial, sexual, or otherwise. And…and…

However, if you are going to add into your debating rhetoric the use of the word “woke”, then you have lost me because not only is it completely simplistic, but it is a pejorative: It is used as a term to insult the opposition.

If I was to call every position or person I disagree with “fascist” or “Nazi” then these terms would lose their strength and utility and I would rightfully not be taken seriously. For “woke” I would prefer the term to be replaced with “progressive” in many of the cases because the intention of the target people or ideas is to make the world progressively better. The use of the word “woke” does a real disservice to the original meaning. When used as a pejorative like this, it becomes crass.

I am a socially liberal, economically centrist philosopher and politically motivated person. In the political psychology underwritten by the work of psychologists such as Jonathan Haidt (and his moral foundations theory), there are traits that are more associated with liberals than conservatives and vice versa. For example, liberals tend to be more inclined to an openness to new experiences, and fairness, whereas conservatives (the clue is in the name) tend towards conserving the status quo, being driven more by tradition.

We can see how some shifts in modern society might irk conservatives and motivate liberals. Some of these ideas are consistently seen as the beating heart of “wokeism”—perhaps gender identity, critical race theory and suchlike. (And so often, they are completely blown out of proportion.) Unfortunately, much of the problem comes when every other idea that (conservative) critics don’t agree with also get incorporated into the label.

We must remember that it is often ill-advised to listen to those with the loudest voices. The UK is following America’s lead when it comes to the right shouting about culture wars issues. All you need to know is that when politicians and pundits shout about the war on Christmas, or transgender restrooms, or political correctness gone mad, or the woke BBC, then they really have nothing substantial to talk about. Culture wars discussions belie a fundamental lack of policy.

We have seen this in successive US elections and it is starting to creep into UK campaigning. One side is serious about governing, and the other side has nothing in the locker but a woke checklist.

Do not be fooled.

The bandwidth of political discourse is being strangled with culture wars whinges about woke, and it helps nobody. We have existential crises facing us the likes and scale of which humanity has never faced: climate change and ravaging wildfires, the reignition of the Cold War into a very hot one, population, pandemics, wealth inequality, healthcare, and education. The list is long and worrying.

But when the right distract you with the woes of woke, they are deceiving you. They care little about these other topics, let alone have any actual workable policies on the matters.

There’s an awful lot of work to do without being misdirected by a shoddy magician’s sleight of hand.

It’s probably a tad inappropriate here, but the words of British comedian Kathy Burke (unlikely to be labeled “liberal elite”) are apropos: “I love being ‘woke’. It’s much nicer than being an ignorant fucking twat.”

If I was to be less abrasive and confrontational, I would simply say, “I’m woke. And?” Or, better still, “I’m nuanced. Challenge me on substance rather than throwing about lazy, childish labels.”

The progress towards a better future will be fraught with bumps in the road. We won’t always get things right, but shouting “woke” at anything and everything will end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Simply put, if someone brings up wokeism at the beginning of a political discussion, then they have their priorities firmly in the wrong place.

Welcome to the Transhumanist Party

Here’s the link to this article.

Avatar photo by JONATHAN MS PEARCE

JUL 30, 2023

AI-generated image by ArtificialArtist on Pixabay

Reading Time: 7 MINUTES

There are some new kids on the block, and they’re pretty cool. You know, into tech and everything.

They are the transhumanists, and they’re living forever—or at least much longer than we do right now.

Transhumanism isn’t really a new thing—it’s an idea that has interested philosophers in different ways for quite some time. But in a time when technological advance seems to be gaining at a record-breaking pace, is there a place for it front-and-center in a worldview—or in a political party?

There are differing definitions of transhumanism, and each has its advocates. Let us defer, for simplicity’s sake, to the Encylopaedia Britannica:

transhumanism, philosophical and scientific movement that advocates the use of current and emerging technologies—such as genetic engineering, cryonics, artificial intelligence (AI), and nanotechnology—to augment human capabilities and improve the human condition. Transhumanists envision a future in which the responsible application of such technologies enables humans to slow, reverse, or eliminate the aging process, to achieve corresponding increases in human life spans, and to enhance human cognitive and sensory capacities. The movement proposes that humans with augmented capabilities will evolve into an enhanced species that transcends humanity—the “posthuman.”

Before you think that transhumanism might be something that applies to other people, check yourself. Everyone is a transhumanist to some degree. We all use technology in some way to enhance our lives, our behaviors, our health, or our performances.

I wear glasses. I experience the world on a daily basis, almost every minute of it, through that bit of really quite vital technology. I have relatives with stents and pacemakers, friends with titanium bolts holding bones together, fellow multiple sclerosis sufferers who use leg braces, walking aids, and buggies.

The question is, as ever, how far along the continuum do we go…should we go?

I recently interviewed a number of members of the US Transhumanist Party (“putting science, health, and technology at the forefront of American politics”), including their presidential candidate. It was a fascinating chat:

There is certainly a lot of crossover between transhumanism and humanism, such that the movement is often called humanism+. Science, rational thinking, evidence: all of these ideas are solid common ground. And, in the interview, I also asked whether nonbelief in God is a prerequisite for transhumanism.

Although transhumanists are generally less religious and more scientifically minded, said Tom Ross, the Transhumanist Party’s Presidential candidate, “We do have very active Christian transhumanists, Mormon transhumanists, and they’re growing all the time.” It is not necessarily an either/or.

Being who you are, plus

But given that liberals have been found to be more open to new experiences, the challenge and potential benefits of technology (such as artificial intelligence [AI]) are things that liberals are more inclined to embrace.

Tom Ross’s campaign manager Maura Abad told me, “It’s keeping who you are, it’s being true to yourself plus enhancement. One of the themes that blew my mind is that you can have any other religion plus you can be transhumanist. Life is not about one or another, life can be both—there is space for everything. Sometimes, we sell ourselves short: Do you want this or do you want that? What if you can have it all? It’s our own limitations; sometimes we say ‘We are our own worst enemy.’ There is no one or another, it is all together. It’s who we are. Embrace it.”

There is definitely an inclusivity to this approach, a move away from the “us and them” mentality we see in so many other political contexts, and that is refreshing.

The question for me that stands out concerns how you get from transhumanism to politics. Or more precisely, how do you develop a manifesto? Politics is morality writ large across society. So on what is the moral basis of the movement founded? To be fair, outside of theocratic political movements, the diktats are not found in holy books. But they might be found in other schools of thought and works, from Karl Marx to Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman to John Rawls.

There is certainly the basis of humanism, which can be seen as follows: A humanist is someone who…

trusts to the scientific method when it comes to understanding how the universe works and rejects the idea of the supernatural (and is therefore an atheist or agnostic)
makes their ethical decisions based on reason, empathy, and a concern for human beings and other sentient animals
believes that, in the absence of an afterlife and any discernible purpose to the universe, human beings can act to give their own lives meaning by seeking happiness in this life and helping others to do the same.

Although some transhumanists might step away from the overtly nonreligious framing of the last statement.

Indeed, the core ideals that the Transhumanist Party are guided by have a similar feel:

Ideal 1. The Transhumanist Party supports significant life extension achieved through the progress of science and technology.

Ideal 2. The Transhumanist Party supports a cultural, societal, and political atmosphere informed and animated by reason, science, and secular values.

Ideal 3. The Transhumanist Party supports efforts to use science, technology, and rational discourse to reduce and eliminate various existential risks to the human species.

It could be that, like with any other political party, there will be a phase of finding their feet, of working out where they stand in domains such as defense and education, social welfare, environment, and healthcare. At the moment, the Transhumanist Party is interested in the big ideas and how embracing technology can help.

Current parties ‘don’t meet the minimum requirements for what’s coming’

“One of my initiatives,” Ross tells me, “is to elect, to create, a Secretary of Singularity seat. The Republicans and the Democrats don’t meet the minimum system requirements for what’s coming. We have the economic singularity on its way faster than we were expecting. We have the technological singularity. We need a whole executive branch focused on this.”

We are at a period in time where AI and AGI are taking off. AGI is artificial general intelligence, a concept whereby an autonomous system can surpass human capabilities to perform the majority of economically viable tasks. The potential scenario is one where we could see a mass displacement of human beings with automation take over.

“I think there is going to be a lacuna of time where we are going to have to grapple with these things. There will probably be a lot homelessness and a lot of people laid off from their jobs and I think it’s going to be happening within the next 18 months within this campaign.” This is a note of warning, perhaps the result of the law of unintended consequences, with regard to the development of technology to aid humanity. Tom Ross is well aware of this. “So a big part of our campaign is coming up with ideas to help people who will be displaced. To put the human back into transhuman that way to give people a practical solution. We need to be really focused on this. The Republicans and the Democrats are not thinking about these very serious issues. That’s what brought me into this party because they were discussing policies that will affect me now and my children and children’s children over the next hundred years.”

There is something to be said about run-of-the-mill politics, where fighting and infighting concerns merely a four-year cycle without thinking to look to the horizon.

Daniel E. Twedt, who lost to Tom Ross in the vote for Presidential candidate and who would take a Vice President role, talks of the need for politicians and parties to embrace futurism: “I think government has dropped the ball on all the futurist impending issues. It’s time for the citizen scientist to step forward and use these voluntary institutions that we haven’t used yet, and use the geographic part of the information revolution we haven’t used yet…”

Of course, the biggest challenge for the Transhumanist Party is the same challenge any party has in an overtly two-party political system: the problem is the system.

“This is a pretty historic election season,” continued Twedt, “because the disenfranchised, the independent, the undecided voter are now effectively the majority, and they’re not being allowed to the table. If we can form these coalitions with all the other factors, the minor parties, to hammer away at the rank-choice voting issue, and not just that but the non-political avenues…”

This is, sadly, easier said than done. It is no small coincidence that the US remains an incredibly narrow manifestation of democracy. For a nation that talks big about free-market economics, they certainly don’t apply those ideals to politics. The barriers to entry for political parties and players are prohibitive. No one else has a chance, especially given that in often tight races, the third party will usually steal votes from one party as opposed to another. The Green Party being on the ticket will be unlikely to cause problems for the Republican Party, after all.

In other words, changing the system to benefit pluralism and citizens’ better representation is an existential threat to the very people who can change those rules. So changing those rules is a huge uphill battle.

To change rules, though, people need to understand that there is a problem in the first place. People need to understand the challenge to epistemic security. Truth is the first victim in political war, especially in a society where it has been shown that fake news travels faster and more effectively than truth.

Jason Geringer sees education as a key, setting up education groups within the party. “Education is the key to dealing with the problem—getting people to be media literate.”

There is nothing to disagree with there. Perhaps countries can take a leaf out of Finland’s book. The nation has formalized learning in schools about misinformation.

Climate change is another increasingly important area of concern (an understatement for “existential threat to humanity”). I liked Geringer’s analogy here: “Even with climate change, our Party’s position is that we will use technology to clean it up. Because, honestly, it’s like trying to ask the world to go to rehab. It’s not going to happen.”

Nonetheless, for the Transhumanist Party to succeed, there really does need to be root and branch change to the electoral system. That said, we are starting to see this, with rank-choice voting shifting outcomes in Alaska, and changes in other places such as Maine.

Daniel Twedt doesn’t cup his hand over his eyes to survey the political landscape, he would rather be peering through the James Webb telescope. “I see the transhumanist movement’s job is to be the next evolution of the internet and to keep the American experiment open-sourced. Make it a civilization-wide experiment, and a solar-system experiment, and a galactic-wide experiment eventually…”

His background is the American flag, but where 50 stars would otherwise be placed in an ordered set of lines, on his flag sits the spiral beauty of a galaxy.

The realist in me defers to the old adage, “You can’t learn to run before you can crawl.” But you can dream of running, and you can put things in place so that when you do need to run, you’re pretty swift.

As for taking those initial steps, here we are. The Transhumanist Party are in that game and we are talking about them.

Welcome to the Party.

Trump and his cult of cognitive dissonance

Here’s the link to this article.

Avatar photo by JONATHAN MS PEARCE

JUN 13, 2023

Trump and his cult of cognitive dissonance reduction | Top secret docs — Via Pixabay

Overview:

Trumps is in legal hot water. But what will be more interesting for observers is not his reaction but that of his fervent followers.

Things are looking bleak for former President Donald Trump’s future freedom. He is in trouble. 37 criminal charges of trouble. Though his present indictment woes were amply evident when it was unsealed, with a very strong, evidenced case weighing against him, Trump is still facing an array of cases going forward.

The classified documents case really is strong. Remember the case against Hilary Clinton concerning her emails? Trump was President and the evidence to be brought into play, and the charges’ seriousness, are orders of magnitude greater than Clinton’s.

But what will be most interesting to watch is not Trump and his eminently predictable reaction—a performance of bravado and flat denial written in capitals—but his followers. From Rep. Jim Jordan down to the grassroots MAGA base, there will be an air of desperation as well a sense of entrenchment. We can easily imagine a scenario where few of them will fall by the wayside.

After all, we know as well as anyone how difficult it can be to give up on God.

The tales of deconversion that many writers and readers have experienced here at OnlySky and at any number of repositories for skeptical and secular folk are chock full of psychological and sociological anguish. For those MAGA fans, that potential anguish is far less desirable than fighting like an injured bear backed into a corner.

We should expect some serious guttural roaring and flailing of paws.

The problem is, those paws can flail and do some damage. Let us hop that there is no violence that comes from such an indictment in the way we observed on Jan 6th. They’ve got form.

As I have said before, Christian theologians and apologists have one job: to maintain the primacy—the moral perfection—of both God and the Bible. Everything they do is to maintain both at the apex of reality. Such believers hold to a presupposition of the goodness of God and his awesome revelation.

Whether it be in dealing with slavery or rape in the Bible, or understanding suffering and evil in the world, one “truth” must be held: the Bible and God are untouchably awesome and simply cannot be at fault. Theology is then created to muddy the waters, claim that atheists have no right to make moral judgments, blame humans for God’s design and creation faults, and ultimately get God off the hook.

Because God cannot be anything but morally perfect.

Trump is a divine member of the MAGA pantheon, positioned just above Yahweh, and just below…no other entitity in human conception. When Trump is so obviously in trouble because he has so obviously broken a list of rules longer than one of his golf courses, then his followers have to engage in mental gymnastics just as theologians do to explain ebola in light of their supposedly all-loving God.

This is cognitive dissonance reduction. Cognitive dissonance is the disharmony we experience in our minds when we hold a core belief and are then confronted with evidence against that belief. Our brains do not like disharmony and so go through a number of mental processes in an attempt to harmonize the contradiction.

The overarching lesson to be learned here is that people will go to extraordinary lengths to maintain a core belief. This might mean experiencing one of the following:

Adapting the core belief marginally.
Ignoring the contrary data—burying one’s head in the sand.
Compartmentalizing the contrary data and core belief.
Adapting the contrary data.
Denying the contrary data.
Delegitimizing the source of the new data.
Reducing the importance or value of either the contrary data or the core belief.
Whataboutism.
Attacking the messenger of the contrary data.

The recent indictment won’t touch the die-hard believers—data bouncing off the impenetrable Trumpian rock of core belief like morality trying to enter into the mind of their leader. There are stark similarities between Trump and God, or, more accurately, between the die-hard supporters of Donald J. Trump and Christian apologists.

Trump is their god, and cannot be budged from the zenith of political worship. Therefore, for the Trump apologist, conspiracy theories muddy the waters, whataboutery obfuscates by pointing at faults in others, blame is apportioned to Clinton, Obama, Biden, and, well, anybody else other than Trump and… (refer to the list above). Because Trump, to them at least, cannot be anything but morally perfect.

This is no better witnessed than at Trump rallies—political megachurches, if you will—where he whips his supporters into a political fervor. And just as the poor attendees of megachurches so often overlook the obscene wealth of their church leaders, and overlook their often multitudinous moral shortcomings, so too do Trump cultists.

The next few months, especially if further court cases being to gain traction, will be a mighty test for the cognitive dissonance reduction abilities of so many in the GOP, from Marjorie Taylor Greene to Matt Gaetz, and from your neighbor to your work colleague. Humans are strange things, and the likelihood is that Trump’s overtly criminal behavior (that they wouldn’t, for a second, have stood for had it been committed by a Democrat politician) will most probably be excused by so many of his followers.

Perhaps a Trump 2.0 will turn up and allow those cast adrift on the rotten ship Trump, drifting on the currents of borrowed time, to wholesale escape to a new vessel.

And yet the USS DeSantis sunk before it could even leave port.

The problem is, even if Trump sinks, all of those aboard will have no option but to jump ship. But they can all swim. And when they finally get ashore, they’ll be angry as hell.

Then what?

Asking forgiveness from…God?

Here’s the link to this article.

by JONATHAN MS PEARCE

JUN 06, 2023

Overview:

Human harms should require forgiveness to come from human victims. With belief in God, believers can end up being morally lazy.

Crimes or harm to others can take on many different forms, but some can be particularly heinous. Far be it for me to constrain your imagination in detailing any such horrible harms. Instead, let us more closely consider the ramifications of causing harm to others.

Forgiveness is often defined as something like “a conscious, deliberate decision to release feelings of resentment or vengeance toward a person or group who has harmed you, regardless of whether they actually deserve your forgiveness.”

The problem for believers is that God is at the center of everything. Everything.

So when a harm is leveled against another human, it’s really leveled against God. Ultimately. A “sin” against a human is more importantly a sin against God, and it’s God from whom we supposedly want forgiveness. As a typical apologetics website claims:

To be forgiven by God means that your sins have been removed, and restoration has taken place. By God’s gracious gift of forgiveness through Christ, any wrong you have done is not held against you. God is eager to forgive and provides forgiveness to you through faith in Jesus Christ. It’s your choice to receive it.

Rape, murder, genocide, racial abuse…whatever the harm, it is not to the victims or their families that we turn to for forgiveness, but to the real victim: God.

Seeking forgiveness from God, then, is arguably a cop-out and morally lazy…

There is something thoroughly distasteful in this. The concern for what God thinks rather than the real and tangible victim seems rather unsavory. And this is made all the worse by the fact that, if we did believe in such a deity, we would still never know if it had actually forgiven us. Instead we ourselves, or the local priest, would assure us that God had done so to assuage us of guilt and make right the horrific harm we might have done.

To another human. That harm, sin, crime, wrong, was done to a fellow human. Who might still be suffering and far from being in a place to forgive us themselves.

Seeking forgiveness from God, then, is arguably a cop-out and morally lazy because it essentially involves making stuff up. And it can also excuse habitually uncorrected behaviors, “It’s okay, God will forgive me.”

I often wonder about sex-abusing priests: Do they really believe in God given that they continually commit such crimes? Most probably, because forgiveness is easy when it is essentially the perpetrator deciding by proxy that God has given them forgiveness. This then excuses the harmer from ever properly facing their crimes in the form of their victim. The “real victim” is God—that abstract entity that exists in their mind.

Thus, seeking God’s forgiveness can act as an excuse for not having to deal with the human realities of causing pain and harm to others.