It is so because I wish it to be. That is the mindset of our current president. His backers believe deeply in “American Exceptionalism” . . . which is why we need to “Make America Great Again?” Apparently our exceptionalism is in not being great?
Clearly religious thinking has prepared us for Trumpism.
I saw a demand that Mark Zuckerberg reinstate some of the curbs that were in place to dampen right-wing attacks upon their normal targets, e.g. anyone not like them.
Uh, I don’t understand. We want this asshole to keep his customers? Why not just abandon his playgrounds so the right-wing trolls only have each other to whip into a frenzy?
Actions have consequences. Boycotting businesses which don’t behave well is normal behavior. So, fuck ‘em.
I have not shopped at Wal-Mart, Target, or Chick-fil-A in well over a decade because I do not approve of their labor practices. If I don’ like them, I don’t do business with them. (This is pure Adam Smith, btw. My “invisible hand” has an upright middle finger.) If they alienate most of their customers, they go out of business. Let’s bring back good corporate citizenship, or just watch them die.
DJT promises to deport all of the “illegal aliens” from this country. Millions by his count. It is universally claimed that these people pay taxes, do not claim as many public services as citizens, and commit fewer crimes than citizens. They are also often doing jobs citizens will not do, picking crops via back breaking labor being the most common example.
If there were just some example of the consequences of such an action to learn from . . . I wonder?
In my memory is a story, I believe told by Thomas Sowell, but don’t quote me on that, my memory is not what it used to be. It involves Indonesia. When Indonesia got out from under the thumb of Great Britain, it didn’t quite get all the way out. The upper class affected British attitudes, toward manual labor, and “immigrants.” The upper echelon Indonesians looked askance at the Chinese immigrants in their country and realized that they had cornered the rice market and were doing very, very well financially because of that. The “overseas Chinese” everywhere they landed avoided politics, kept their heads down, worked like dogs and succeeded. They had, indeed, cornered the rice market via work that WASPS would extoll. They didn’t cheat. So, the British trained Indonesians expelled all of the Chinese. And the economy collapsed. None of the hoity-toity Indonesians wanted to do the stoop labor necessary to planting and harvesting rice and they ended up having to import vast quantities of it. So, they were driven to invite the Chinese they had expelled back into the country. When they did the economy revived and all was good, so lesson learned, right? No.
This scenario was repeated twice more over the coming decades, with the exact same results and the exact same humiliating capitulation on the part of the ruling classes.
Your turn, Donald.
Mr. Trump is neither a student of history or economics or really anything else and is not inclined to use any other countries experiences to guide his, so I am waiting for the expulsions . . . and the recession/depression to follow. Trump will claim it was the Deep State or some other fiction which is the cause because he only claims good results. His co-dependent Republican supporters have no such mechanism, although they are trying to learn how Trump does it. We will vote them out, eventually, and get some sanity back but will we fully recover from our Grand Experiment in Trumpism? I wonder.
I one was invited to an art exhibit that happened to be in a church and since it was summer and hot I was wearing a straw hat. After observing some of the paintings, a church busybody asked my host to ask me to remove my hat while in the main chamber as it was disrespectful. Not being an asshole and not wanting to embarrass my host, I took my hat off. (The church had nothing so civilized as a cloakroom where I could deposit my hat, so I carried it in hand.)
Now, in Jewish synagogues wearing a hat is required. So, which version of these two identical gods is more powerful, the one who can see through hats and the one who cannot?
It still strikes me that most religious observances are pretentions, meaning “attempting to impress by affecting greater importance, talent, culture, etc., than is actually possessed.”
In the religious case, it is by observing completely meaningless rituals and practices, and in the secular case, the same.
In both cases there is something unsaid behind many of the practices. Consider the simple act of bowing ones head. This is the start of a progression the ends in the kowtow or complete prostration of the person, but let’s just address the head bow here. Bowing one’s head is a submissive posture. It is one we take when we submit to a higher authority, power, whatnot. When I am with Christians and they are praying over a meal, I keep my head up and my eyes open while they close their yes and bow their heads. Bowing one’s head and closing one’s eyes are not steps in preparing to fight or even intellectually contest another. They are acts of submission and you are immediately at a disadvantage when you do these things.
Take note of the number of things one is supposed to conform to to be a member of a club, be it religious or secular. The pope wears funny costumes, people kiss his ring (?), bow to him, etc. Priests are referred to as “father” by supplicants and “brother” by equals and superiors. Religious titles include the word reverend (Right Reverend So and So, Reverend Mother, etc.) so you know what your attitude must be, no nonsense such as being able to recognizing them for yourself. These borrowings of the language of family were quite deliberate in Christianity, as in their nascent period they were setting up new families in opposition to the “traditional” families of the Roman occupiers. It was a subtle form of opposition to the occupation of their land. Of course, you only display such signs to other members of the club.
Consequently clubs accepted all kinds of pretentious actions: secret handshakes, code words and phrases, rules of behavior, unusual garb, etc.
These pretentions rose in the ranks until they became sacred, “Hey, take your hat off!” “Bow your head!” and so on. And to those who strove to impress others as to their loyalty to the party/club, they took things to ridiculous levels: “Obama didn’t wear an American flag in his lapel! Outrageous!” “Obama wore a tan suit,” “Obama took his suit coat off in the Oval Office!” “Michelle Obama wore a sleeveless blouse!,” “Look at how those people dressed to come to church, tsk, tsk.”
Our secular and religious institutions seem to be built on foundations of pretentiousness.
I ran across the hoary old conundrum again, mentioned in this quote: “I’m talking about a metaphysical mystery that hides in plain sight, the question of why there’s something rather than nothing.”
In order for this question to be posited, the universe must consist of something, quite a few things, as a matter of fact. Basically it could not be asked were the universe a whole lot of nothing.
And why is the question multiple choice, but only between something and nothing? Why not a few more choices, such as “less of something” and “more of something.” Or maybe “access to other universes containing a wide spectrum of somethings”? I know a number of you are enamored of the multiple universe hypotheses/many worlds hypotheses, but there is no evidence for their existence, so they are mere conjectures imagines as a way to solve theoretical holes in current theories, another set of ad hoc theory fixes, like those clogging up the “Big Bang Theory,” aka L-CDM theory. Sure, they might fix the theories . . . if they were only real.
Then there is the problem of nothingness. There is no place under our observation of a region in space in which there is nothing, so basically nothingness does not exist. It is a philosophical extreme posited to give philosophers something to talk about, like truth, beauty, goodness and whatnot. They even conjectured gods so as to have something that possessed such attributes (“Why do you call me good? Only the Father is good.”)
This question is like the gotcha questions immature religious theists, aka trolls, ask on the Internet. We need a term for these, like Steven Colbert’s “truthiness,” being something that sounds true but stops at that point, for something that sounds profound but is actually quite stupid, maybe “profoundy” or actually specious works, being “superficially plausible, but actually wrong” or “misleading in appearance, especially misleadingly attractive,” hallmarks of our current federal administration.
He had time to rename the Gulf of Mexico, so didn’t he even have a concept of a plan to “hit the ground running” with those promised tariffs?
Cowboy Don, all hat, no cattle.
Also, how much influence will Lame Duck Don have? I wonder.
And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence. — Bertrand Russell
I have often commented that a god which is complete in itself, needing nothing, would hardly create a sentient species of animal to serve and worship it. That sounds very, very needy to me.
Then I ran across Russell’s quotation above. According to this god’s many spin doctors, the god’s hiddenness is part of his plan. So being invisible, immaterial, and beyond space and time is part of this god’s plan, so why would be punish people for not believing in a god they could not see, find, photograph, video, or interact with at all? If this god wanted willing servants and willing worshippers, should not it appear before us and cause us to drop to our knees in awe? This seems a more likely path to what it is claimed we were created for.
But those self same spin doctors explain this by telling us “No one can know the mind of God!” but unfortunately this occurs right before they tell us exactly what their god is thinking and what it wants us to do.
Sad.
Many people often refer to “the bible” meaning the Holy Bible, including myself. I own quite a number of versions, some even electronic (and so easily searchable), but what is actually meant when someone refers to “the bible?”
So, I asked the Google, “How many different English translations of the Holy Bible are there?” (English because that is the lingua franca of this country, and I know there are versions in hundreds of other languages).The answer? Well it is 450-900, maybe, kinda, sorta. You didn’t expect an exact answer, did you?
You are aware, I am sure, that many Christian fundamentalists/evangelicals swear by the King James Version. (Why seventeenth century English is preferred is beyond me. Maybe it just sounds old.) Other churches have adopted other versions and swear that theirs is the “one and only authentic version.” If you are confused, there is no “one and only authentic version” of that book.
And, you might ask, why were all of those other translations made? It is far from an easy or inexpensive task to translate an ancient book. Various experts need be hired, especially experts in those ancient languages. Then there is the problem that there are no “authentic” manuscripts of the books making up this compilation. Plus, the task is complicated by not knowing who wrote those books. To fully understand a book, you need to know who the author was, what their contest was, and what their aims/biases/whatever were. We have none of that. So, I suspect that all of these translations were fueled by people who want scripture to say a certain something. For example, when the King James version was commissioned (It was King James’s idea, shocking the prelates he was working with at the time.), the Good King absolutely hated witches and wanted scripture to condemn them, and so it does . . . in the KJV. Prior to that there was no mention of witches in those scriptures.
This is complicated by the insistence of Protestants that we “don’t need no pope, no priests, to tell us what the bible says and means.” This precept was even given a name, “Sola Scriptura,” which in English means the “Bible Alone.” The Catholics are very proud that they do not believe this and that they have an Apostolic Tradition in their past, claiming various apostles told them things not written down. I recall, however, that traditions are just “the ways we always have done things” and have value only in that they have stood the test of time and, one would hope, had passed all tests. For example, traditional crafts, such as weaving were taught/handed down, and the recipients tried those techniques and damned if they didn’t work, so they passed them on to their apprentices. How one “tests” an apostolic tradition is quite beyond me.
Note—You can find Wikipedia’s long list of English Bible Translations here.
Uncommon Sense 
When You See a Pattern Repeated Over and Over . . .
Tags: Christianity, conservatives, corruption, politics, religion
Someone or something is trying to tell you something and you aren’t listening. (Hint: when people are telling you who they are, don’t interrupt.)
For example, Judaism, in its monotheistic mode and maybe even earlier involves an unrelenting series of conquests by more powerful nations: Egypt (several times), the Hittites, the Assyrians, the Babylonians (several times), the Romans, the Christian Crusaders, the British, and on and on. Each time, the religion’s chief mythmakers told the people that this had nothing to do with the rapacious nature of those conquerors and were, instead, punishments by Yahweh for any number of causes: faithlessness, kings worshipping other gods, and so on. (Yes, classic blaming the victim tactic and they aren’t done with that one.)
And, of course, Yahweh forgave them and even turned on a few of the conquerors, supposedly sent by Yahweh in the first place as his instrument of punishment, and whipped their asses.
But Christianity changed all of that, right?
Right?
Consider the following:
Same pattern, no?
An epic failure, blamed not on somebody else and a “heavenly” promise to rectify things in the future. And the heavenly promise of the Return of the Son of Man still hanging undone.
The students learned well from their masters.
The subtitle of the post referred to: “How Christianity built its theology on a foundation of broken promises” seems spot on, but a certain cleverness was learned over the years, centuries, etc. The promise of “eternal life” only is fulfilled when you die. You have to die to live . . . interesting. This is spun as “the old sinful you has to die so the new sinless you can be born.” Right. The important part here is that this promise cannot never be verified or challenged. It is a little like gods being “hidden” in trees and streams, and oceans, then in deep caves, then in mountaintops, then in the sky, then above the sky, in the “heavens” but all of those places could be reached, were reached, and no gods were found. So, now “God” is “beyond space and time” a place that cannot be checked. The Spin Doctors of the Church eventually end up in an uncontestable place for their promises to be enacted, but they still are largely unfulfilled and they have additional excuses at the ready as to why that is so: yes, Jesus promised to come back, but God’s sense of time differs from human expectations or that the delay is due to God’s patience, etc.
Postscript The Trump administration is backing Israel’s claim to the land of Palestine (due to the Bible, of course) but history tells us that all of those conquerors have as good a claim or better than Israel’s, making their claim a political fiction used to give cover to their presence. I better argument could be made were they to claim the right of conquest, as they did, but they don’t like that mantle, even though they display all the attributes of the realms that conquered those lands throughout history.