Theocrat Chat with Tommy Taterhead

 

I beg this very stupid man's entirely irrelevant pardon, but how does he think in this day and age that folks in Central American have not heard about Jesus? Just hordes of uncontacted tribes "with languages nobody heard before" I guess. https://t.co/n1LFvvPmJE

— Vixen Strangely (@VixenStrangely) March 1, 2024

There is a lot going wrong here in just a few brief sentences. The first thing I take issue with is that we need "God" in government at all. Individuals might take something from having the presence of a deity in their lives and have comfort and strength in their faith, but government itself--our government, is made of laws. Our country's population is made up of people with many different faiths. I think that the First Amendment to our Constitution is the remedy against the sectarian wars and religious persecutions our forefathers were well aware of in Europe--and Tuberville here completely demonstrates why the Christian nationalist desire to get God in government is folly.

Whose God? Because the various immigrants crossing the border aren't ignorant of the concept of God. It seems to me that Tuberville is concerned that they might be followers of the "wrong" God. All of my ancestors came from countries where Protestants and Catholics clashed. Does Sen. Tuberville think Papists follow the Whore of Babylon? Or has he been misguided into thinking "foreigners" are probably some sort of untutored heathens? Is he unaware that Protestant evangelism has penetrated Central and South America? The same religion, roughly, he himself follows? 

This is a man who should be very careful indeed whom he considers to be untutored. I've met many a non-Christian whose grasp on theology is very likely better than the Senator's grasp on anything. 

Jesus, Guns, Babies, and American Exceptionalism

 

Rep Brian Babin (R-TX): "The United States of America has always had guns. It's our history. We were built on the Judeo-Christian foundation and with guns" pic.twitter.com/vldB0ODaS7

— Jason Campbell (@JasonSCampbell) May 25, 2022

When Senator Ted Cruz got visibly disturbed during an interview and walked away after the words "American Exceptionalism" were spoken, something snapped into frame for me:  so much of American history seems to assume our current status in the world is the result of faith and superior firepower. The idea of the gun as a sacral part of our national religion isn't really just a metaphor for some of us--it is reality. 

The religious right has long suggested that if "they" (a tyrannical leftist, probably godless Communist, government) come to take the guns away, the Bibles are next. It always sounded like fear-mongering to me of the typical "Red Scare" tropes, but it also resonated as tangentially white supremacist to me because gun-grabbing was the impetus of the uprising in the neo-Nazi classic The Turner Diaries. I'm starting to see it, though, as an artifact of our founding myths, and it defines the divide in our politics--what makes the US unique or great? Are we a creedal nation or a story of blood and soil? And was any of this especially ordained by God? 

Leave it to the "Jesus, Guns, Babies" lady for clarifying this for me--even though she lost her bid for the GOP gubernatorial nomination (or did she? Mike Lindell is asking, so, uh, there's that). The quick capsule review of American history that a lot of people seem to have absorbed goes a little something like this: 

Christopher Columbus discovered the promised land in 1492, then the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock to form a shining city on a hill, so America overthrew British tyranny, had a civil war over states rights, freed the slaves, conquered the West (by killing most of the people previously living there) and then kicked everyone's ass in WW2 because we have nukes now, so thank you Jesus and Smith & Wesson. 

          And they called it manifest destiny. And it was good.

I may be exaggerating, but I don't think I'm off by that much. This is why CRT and the 1619 Project have set the usual suspects off--it challenges their post-Columbian chapters of the American Bible. It's like arguing against creationism.  It fiddles with a worldview where American primacy is founded in freedom and God has always been on our side. They don't see the past is existing outside of the formalized, handed-down from Mount Rushmore version*, and then continue to operate as if might made right. 

And that's where the guns come in. The iron rod is how the faithful Americans earn their New Canaan. The land is purified in blood, because we're in times of tribulation. Wars. Rumors of wars. Pestilence. Famine. You know. Same shit, different century. So you have to be morally and militarily prepared. 

And how do the people in the Church of American Exceptionalism mentally cope with the violence? It's supposed to happen.  It's the Abrahamic sacrifice to show fidelity in order to get that which has been promised. The Lord provided a sheep for the holocaust--and it's hopefully other people's babies. 

That sacrifice is supposed to make us exceptional and give us the freest and most prosperous country on earth. It's why people all over the world want to come here, after all, whether we want them to or not.

Not Even Feet of Clay

 

I'm moved by Madison Cawthorn's sermon on the Capital mount to do a little bit of sermonizing myself, because as I have previously discussed, "I speak jive."  I get that many not-evangelical-adjacent people have assumed that earthen vessels pertain to women, specifically, as if indicating that their wombs only take on special value if imbued with the light from God--maternity. But that is not exactly it: humans are all sons and daughters of Adam, the original being formed from clay.

(He once was a little red ball of Clay! Adam! You should see what Adam can do today--ADAM! Name all the creatures of the field, with his little pal Evie, too. If you have human blood then mud is a part of you!) 

You just don't think a person who would also rhapsodize about the Eagle's Nest would be so apt a pupil to talk about mud-people, but here we are. The first time I was told about mud-people, it was from a proud son of Polish immigrants who liked Pat Buchanan. But I'm deeply skeptical of Cawthorn, so I'm taking the most uncharitable interpretation of his words--he isn't just talking about women who refuse to bear children because that was God's plan for them. He's also hinting at the "emptiness" of the vessels (the human pottery) who are refusing to do God's (or his conception thereof's) work on earth. 

Just pottery. Just beings full of Jezebel spirit, trying to do their own Lucifer shit instead of what G-D determines--to be decided by a court of people inclined to think you are already foul and fallen. 

But that isn't my religion. Not at all. 

So Charlie Kirk's Doing Prophecy Now?

Charlie Kirk warns "God will not honor the challenge and the outright rebellion to his authority here on earth," adding "There will be justice for what they did to this country and it's coming very soon" pic.twitter.com/IgUx4GN2sP

— Jason Campbell (@JasonSCampbell) October 28, 2021

Seeing TPUSA's Charlie Kirk threatening about what his big, omniscient and all-powerful sky-friend is going to do while standing in front of a backdrop that reads, "Exposing Critical Racism Tour", reminds me that the way of life in the antebellum period that included slavery was considered a part of God's order and that peculiar institution was defended in the pulpit. And the segregation and degradation of Black people in the US was maintained by white Christian churches. 

Slaveholders were very afraid of "rebellion" amongst their human assets. There is reason to believe that the 2nd Amendment was inspired by fears of slave rebellion. Politicians have used theology as a tool to justify codifying unjust and racially discriminatory laws. And one theory regarding the historical study of how racism was codified into our laws is...critical race theory. Which Charlie Kirk, who has no degree in anything but grifting, is currently on tour being mad about, since it is the well-paid astroturf big concern thing of the moment. 

And now, Charlie Kirk wants to tell us that "they" (Commies, George Soros, Democrats, shitlibs, whoever) will get justice because God says so. And maybe that's a a suggestion was to what God thinks should happen next--? That could might happen eventually wink wink nudge nudge?

It always strikes me as funny that people who say they've read the Bible will go ahead and bear false witness and take the Lord's name in vain on the regular. Like they never considered what "false witness" and "taking the Lord's name in vain" really meant. But "lying about what actually happened" is a good way to say "false witness", and "taking the Lord's name in vain" is a not-very opaque way of saying "God is not your imaginary hype man". Deciding to just say something you think out loud and saying Jesus is your +1 on that is kind of blasphemous, right? Same with false prophecy.

Your Optics Aren't True From Every Angle

Because I try to understand things that seem wrong to me as if they were puzzles to which I'm missing pieces, I wanted to understand a phenomena that mystified me: folks who sympathized with Brett Kavanaugh. One of my cousins (a fundamentalist, I guess) posted to Facebook something that disturbed me about how clearly, Democrats were accepting money from somebody to destroy this great guy personally because....evil. Clearly, to my fundie cousin, liberals are just evil enough to destroy a guy because internet video of a half minute of one Democrat passing another something that they allege is an envelope of cash. Or maybe it looks like a note. And if it was an envelope of cash, why would it be flush in the middle of some C-Span televised shit?

Right.

I don't do politics on Facebook. I'm on the verge of deleting my profile for all the bullshit. But I do have this blog--and for what it is worth, I know the exact white women who might even have a #MeToo story to tell, and are not even privileged, and never will be, and still and all sympathize, not with Dr. Ford, but with the poor, put-upon, beleaguered, President of these United States and the Majority Leader in the Senate and of course, this pro-life dude, with a family and going to church and all that.

It is difficult for me to actually see what they see when they look at Brett Kavanaugh. I see a dude who came off during his response to Dr. Ford's testimony like a guy who had a bad reaction to being named second runner-up in a Bill O'Reilly look-alike contest. He was partisan, and aggressively so. He doubled down on the persona that brought his privileged ass to the very hearing he was at--the anti-left wing culture warrior who tried it with the Clintons. He called the Clintons out by name in his opening statement as if and because it was effective partisan rhetoric, but it in fact had not one thing to do with who he was before Clinton was elected. And his response suggested to me the state of mind he had when he was a jackass teenage son: it was still who he was today--only now bigger and meaner.

Christine Ford nee Blasey isn't a culture warrior--she doesn't come across as political (like I sure as hell do) and she is educated, intentionally, to understand her own mind and its trauma. It deeply affected me that she served as her own expert witness, mentioning how she knows and retains the things that imprinted on her own brain. Kavanaugh unquestionably is a culture warrior. He has been described as a Republican Forest Gump.  He has George W. Bush hanging up the brush he uses to paint the war dead to stump for his Senate votes. Blasey-Ford's family is extremely reticent to speak out. I sympathized with her because I paid attention to the record of Kavanuagh's many petty mistruths: his lie about the drinking age when he was carousing, because it was illegal for those under 21 when Brett was still 17 (a thing he should have known), the commonly-known definitions of terms used in his yearbook (devil's triangle and boofing) which are unsatisfactorily responded to, and the ridiculous "Renata Alumnius" lie, about a girl multiple schoolfriends of his and himself were alleging they basically "scored" with.

To me, a public school kid who seldom drank before HS graduation, who never would have dreamed of Ivy League regardless of whatever scholarship I could have gotten for all the reasons, and who has seriously seen more penises than I ever asked to before I graduated college, yeah I believe Christine. I believe Deborah Ramirez. I believe Julie Swetnick, because this culture has been documented.

But I guess I can also maybe understand why some women don't want this to be true and won't believe it. I know they are wrong (and I have no trouble saying it, but it means nothing in the broader sense of how it politically impacts anything) and they also have no use for those bitches who slandered Trump, also, too. They think these bitches are snitches, and snitches get stitches.  They are exactly out of all fucks for anyone who interferes with the utopia of RW Valhalla.

 Not all misbelievers are heaven-hoping Endtimers, tho'. I think some are just hacks. Or probably relatives of Brett Kavanaugh because here is a picture:

that sets aside the partisan filter for a minute.

There is a picture shared amongst the Left of gape-mouthed Caucasian sisters surrounding an angry Brett. But the picture shows his sympathizers, not detractors. They are allies to him, and their consternation is because he is upset, not because they disagree with the reasons he is upset.

It is probably not true that this debacle has mobilized all the women to vote--it isn't recognized universally as a debacle of a SCOTUS choice and not all women will feel like they need to vote for people who will curtail Trump's crappy SCOTUS and other Federal bench choices.

I wish it were so. But I am resigned it is not. Which is why I encourage all liberals to by all means vote for Dems who will try to block RW bench extremists. But keep in mind, there is another side. There are people who think nothing like you do. They like this kind of partisan signifying. And they are why you always need to vote strategically.

Of Course Trump Wants to Exit the Paris Accord

President Trump revealed a small digital representation of the actual knowledge he even has about the state of the environment and the fucks he has to give about it, a Venn diagram of a perfect circle on the head of a pin.

Numerous people have weighed in, worldwide, about the ploddingly predictable announcement President Trump made today in a celebratory announcement that yes, the US would join Syria and Nicaragua in being out of the Paris Agreement. Trump has made an awful lot of noises about coal country and how he's bringing coal back. Right now, solar energy employs more people than coal, oil, and gas combined. Combined.  Talking up coal is like talking about building a bridge to the 19th century. And he's also talked a lot over the years about his belief that climate change is a hoax. Sadly, the only hoax about climate change is the hoax where people think climate change is a hoax. Ocean acidification, desertification of land, increased flooding, prolonged droughts, and storm severity have all measurably increased over an observed timeframe, and CO2 and the mechanisms that could be predicted from understanding of the greenhouse effect (understood since the 19th Century, come to think of it) have pretty much established to the minds of the majority of scientists that this is a real thing, and it's happening now. (Just Google "Strangely Blogged" and "Climate Sunday", and you'll see all kinds of examples.)

But Trump is a very special case. He is a Fox News low-info voter that somehow got into a job that requires a lot of information. And when he goes for additional data--he goes to Fox News' Kimberley Guilfoyle, not necessarily to science, to bolster his POV. And to the extent that he relied on any science at all--he got it wrong.

He's wrong on this in lots of ways. It's scientifically wrong. It's economically wrong (many business leaders oppose this decision). It's bad foreign policy (it weakens our ability to say we negotiate in good faith, and we aren't going to get another negotiation for a deal where we set our own targets, basically--what a dumb demonstration that Trump doesn't even know the agreement he is now rejecting). He's not even correct about the demographic he's supposedly appealing to--for one thing most Americans agree with staying in it. But he made the asinine statement that he makes decisions based on Pittsburgh, not Paris. Well, Pittsburgh PA went for Hillary Clinton, and Pittsburgh's mayor called BS on Trump's claim right away.

But or course, Trump has his supporters, who like this decision based on, basically, liberals not liking it? Or based on arguments so pathetically stupid you know they aren't about actual beliefs, but some weird tribal signifying.

Take Rick Santorum, my former Senator, a grandchild of a PA coal worker:

.@RickSantorum stuns CNN panel while mansplaining renewable energy: The Sun is not ‘reliable’ or ‘consistent’ https://t.co/4mRyP4XOt2 pic.twitter.com/09ScMLn0fA

— Raw Story (@RawStory) June 2, 2017

If the sun was actually unreliable, we'd have more problems than whether the freaking lights turned on at night (like, the original solar battery is plants that we eat to live so if the sun refused to shine?). But he's actually submitting the idea that clouds mean that solar is untenable. Clouds. As fellow Pennsylvanian Andrea McArdle sang in the role of Annie--the sun will come out, tomorrow. Leaping lizards, you guys.

Or take the delightful old "God will provide" stylings right here.  It's bad science and maybe even worse theology. Was it not written, "Do not tempt the Lord your God"? Putting the name of the Lord in your mouth to say he will clean up after you like a housemaid is a form of saying the Lord's name in vain. I'm agnostic and rusty, but my understanding of this passage is: He doesn't stop bullets or gravity for any one, and so He won't stop climate change if it comes through man's continued carelessness--and where in the world is the idea of earth stewardship and loving one's neighbor in this selfish false piety?  (Noted conservative pundit Erick Erickson is on the same trash tip. I suspect E.E. isn't totally stupid, but signifying--but what a waste! If your fellow human is starving, or their kids are dying of hunger and plague because of climate change--if people are drowned or displaced because of flooding, if they become adrift because their home was burned out in wildfires--I just don't know any interpretation of Christian doctrine where that isn't your business. )

And so on--bad science, conspiracy theory, and trash theology all thrown at a problem that has such a simple,  not even immoral accommodation required: Find a better way, and do that! And there are better ways, and we've found them, and they aren't prohibitively expensive, and the reasons not to do them are just...dumb. Trump is unknowlingly (or maybe even knowingly?) ready to trash the environment and the economy and world opinion of the US--for spite, I think. Sad! I don't know the remedy for the RW to unscrew themselves from this intellectual finger trap where they continue to deny climate change even as evidence mounts and the situation grows more dire, as if they just mean to save face for themselves and not allow the liberals to score one. Reasoning and scolding are both useless. Maybe more sinkholes need to open up at various golf clubs and resorts.

Former Rep. Joe Walsh is Very Entertaining

Or he would continue to be about the money changers in the temple and turning the other cheek and be totally accepting of what His Father's children needed for comfort and healing because he too was persecuted and oppressed? Also, he would continue to share loaves and fishes because he being a Son of Man hungered also. And the sharing of meals would be the sharing of his body, because the creation of the Father was for all of us. What does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? (Nothing--the world is nothing you can keep, your soul is all you have.)

I'm an atheist and got this much catechism down. Bro, do you even lift Scripture?

The 2014 Strangely Blogged Roundup

This is a traditional thing I do where I recap the year that was by finding 5 posts of mine that summed-up whatever I was on about. This year was difficult. This blog became harder to write even though I think I posted more this year, just because I confronted harder themes. I also strived to make my blog more inclusive and confront some of my assumptions more directly--a thing I will try to make a habit of.

So, to kick things off,  I will point out that as of January, I was clear about where I stood on the War on Women, insofar as I opposed posers who didn't even know what it is like to get, be, suspect oneself of being pregnant.

As of March, I was utterly enjoying the Seth MacFarlane/Neil Degrasse Tyson Cosmos reboot.

I addressed misogyny in the form of mass-killer Elliot Rogers with a lament on how society blinds itself to the violence inherent in the hatred directed at 50% of the population.

This was the year I saw young men die--I am still heartbroken over the deaths of Mike Brown, Kajime Powell, Akai Gurley, and Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, and a hell of a lot more names I have been introduced to. I also know young women die because of brutality. And I will come back to these tragedies again so long as they happen.

Also, my blog took some philosophical turns as I covered interesting questions with regular commenter, Formerly Amherst. This blog is about getting to the truth of things, and sometimes, it can take an esoteric turn.

I also covered the rise of ISIS and my hope that it falls, my opinions about torture, and my ever-present concern about the class war between rich and poor. I also tried to keep up with posting about global warming.

All in all, it wasn't a great year for news, what with the missing Asian airliners, the rise of ISIS,  the deaths of some great comedians I absolutely admired, and other missteps of fate. But I realize I don't like anything better than my rapport with my readers. You give me reason to keep going.

Roko's Basilisk & Pascal's Wager

Slate Magazine gave me some Food for Thought with a "Downworthy"-ish title:

The Most Terrifying Thought Experiment of All Time.

Dare I click?  (Duh, of course I did.)

Was it terrifying? (Well, no, it's a cybernetic version of Pascal's Wager, which should occur to most well-read people.)

Here at Strangely Blogged, I try to be pretty cool about spooky thought-experiments. (Right now I'm reading a really chill book by Brad Warner titled There Is No God and He Is Always With You which is helping reambiguate my relationship with That in Which I do Not Believe, Whether it Exists or Not.) But when my reading makes me wonder if there is good cause for a full-on freaking-out, well--I don't. I'm not sure how I missed this discussion at Stross' blog, but I get the basic idea of why this might provoke a crisis of consciousness for the cyber-inclined: living with the idea for so long that an information Omega Point might create an equivalent of the Christian Heaven, long after liberal theology has dispensed with the concept of a literal Hell, getting back to the idea of a material Hell (or material-enough for a simulated You, which you don't have a choice about) created by a potential superintelligence , one might be shocked to think that consequences for Thought Crimes might be inescapable.

The best system of living, whether one is subject to a computer simulation, the whims of a deity outside of time and space, or nothing at all, seems to be to just do your best. You can't know yourself for sure if you're really pissing off some God, or some evil computer, because most people aren't even aware that they piss off customer service reps, retail clerks, their co-workers. Start with friends, family, and your waitstaff, if you want to know how to be "good". Do them right. Work your way out. Be aware.

Of Bogeymen and Babes in the Wood

When I was an adolescent, I liked horror movies. The more disgusting, the better. I liked slasher movies like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Friday the 13th movies that blended the sick with occasional flashes of surreal humor. I was mildly fascinated by real-life stories of mass murderers like John Wayne Gacy or lesser-known local weirdos like Gary Heidnik. I listened to the kind of satanic metal that sounded vaguely like it was already being played backwards and pretty much openly mentioned Satan. (The PMRC was the one thing that really messed me up with regards to supporting Al Gore...) I thought about executing grisly revenge on the daily as a nerdy-ass bullied teen.

In other words, I was a completely normal, wholesome American teenager. That's why the story about two Wisconsin girls stabbing their friend because they wanted to become "proxies" of a fictional bogeyman didn't actually surprise me. Exactly. But some of the implications are actually horrifying. Let me get one thing out of the way--I am not scared of the bogeyman, but adolescents are pretty scary.