Trying to start a religious war... Higgins is a radicalized religious extremist complaining about radicalized religious extremists.
Irony and a dash of fear for so many conservative-christians wanting to bring back the Crusades and wage holy war against a group of radicals who also want a holy war. Two peas in the same pod
Liberals Against Conservative Propaganda shared a link.
Christianity is the Problem
We keep hearing people express amazement that so many good Christians could support the Donald. He has expressed sexual interest in his own daughter! He maligns Mexican immigrants! He lies incessantly!
The problem with this argument is that it always rests on the claimant’s understanding of the bible. But the bible is a huge, floppy text that, to my knowledge, has never once stopped any group of people from committing any atrocity they put their minds to. That I know of, the commandment says, “Thou shalt not kill,” not “Thou shalt not kill, except for Jews,” or “except for Protestants if you’re Catholic,” or “except for Catholics if you’re Protestant,” or “except for the natives of whatever foreign land you happen to be invading in the name of Jesus,” or “except for whoever you happen to claim to own as a slave,” or — most importantly just now — “except for Muslims.” Yet, good Christians have repeatedly set about assiduously killing members of all of those groups over the course of several hundred years.
There is virtually zero evidence that the bible serves as an effective moral constraint on anyone.
The place to look if one wants to understand Christians is their history, and to take a step back and look at Christianity from a philosophical perspective. On that view, it should come as no surprise to anyone that lots of good Christians support the Donald. There is enormous variation among “Christians,” especially in the United States. One thing we are good at is proliferatingflavors of Christianity. Perhaps the most common objection one hears is that “Not all Christians believe that.” But, either “Christianity” denotes a set of propositions that all adherents assent to, or it’s meaningless. It actually is meaningless in the history of the United States because, no matter the major issue in the history of the Republic, one can find persons on either side of it who claim to be good Christians. To take the most obvious issue in U.S. history, slavery, the first people to call for immediate emancipation of the slaves — an idea that most people considered crazy at the time — were Quakers who articulated their opposition to slavery explicitly in terms of Christian belief. Most slave owners, however, in this heavily Christian nation, were also Christians, and they found justification for slavery in the bible.
It is the intellectual, if not literal, descendants of the slave owners, who make up the bulk of Trump’s Christian supporters, and the key problem is their attitude towards authority. Christian conservatives, in particular, are explicitly committed to the principle that they are supposed to listen to the man in the pulpit and believe whatever he says, no matter how obviously divorced from reality. So, the leap from believing the lies of the pastor to believing the lies of a President is not very great at all.
This is increasingly a fundamental division in our culture. Obviously, humans are quite capable of making mental peace with conflicting propositions. There are plenty of scientists who persist in Christian belief. But empiricism, the philosophical foundation of scientific research, has never been kind to Christian belief, and vice versa. The Catholic Church persecuted Galileo for publishing the results of his empirical research that led him to realize that the earth revolves around the sun, which contravened official Christian belief at the time.
Happily, empiricists and scientists persisted and have, since Galileo, produced an ever more impressive series of realizations about how the world we live in works, such that we now have amazing technology that allows us to cure an ever growing list of diseases, live in increasing comfort, stare at our cell phones, and explore space beyond the earth and even beyond our solar system, to unimaginable distances. David Hume, a Scottish empiricist philosopher, continued the fight between empiricists and Christians when he pointed out that, in his experience, humans never come back to life three days after they die, so he saw no reason to believe the Christ myth.
The Christ myth, of course, is the center of Christianity. Doubt it, and the whole structure falls apart. Human belief being what it is, lots of people choose to continue to believe in the myth and the whole structure, and ugly historical precedent — much of it in the form of Christians killing each other — finally taught the Founders of the United States that the best way to keep the peace among warring factions of Christians, and, by extension, between Christians and everyone else, is to prevent government from taking sides in the issue at all. And so, our Supreme Court has endorsed the proposition that major federal statutes do not apply to certain of the internal activities of churches, just as our Constitution, in Article VI, flatly prohibits religion as a test for public officials.
So we have no way, and no good reason to try, to control anyone’s religious beliefs.
The problem that creates is that sometimes people’s crazy religious beliefs lead them to support a crazy person for President. All we can do is resist with all of our might, and keep in mind that the crazies are not the majority, they just got lucky this time.
Or so they think.
No comments:
Post a Comment