Mourning the lost

 

A friend of mine and I were drinking and the conversation turned to the disaster that is the former Ottoman province of Palestine. We both agreed that it was all just hell and fucking disaster and that neither of us could see a way out.

I mourned that I as an Army-mad kid had idolized the Tzahal, the Israeli Defence Forces. I'd repainted my little plastic model Sherman and M3 halftracks in IDF colors to wargame the Six Day War with the Israelis as the heroes, and that it hurt to see my old heroes fighting women and kids and guys who just wanted the land they, too, grew up in.

My friend replied that he had been raised to see Israel as heroic as well, as a vision of strength for a kid growing up Jewish. But even more, that he - as a child and an adult - had been confident that Judaism was different from the other religions. That the long history of persecution, that the long tradition of thoughtful rabbinical exegesis surrounding the Torah, would defend his faith from the sorts of sectarian horrors that had so often visited so many other religions. That Jews would be better.

"It turns out..." he mourned, "...that we aren't. We just lacked the opportunity."

My ancestors were used by their English masters to help them run their apartheid state of Ireland. That's what "Scots-Irish" means; Scottish imported to Ireland to be reliable Protestant muscle for the English project to keep the Irish down. I'm the spawn of the "settlers" of 17th and 18th Century Ireland, no different from some ultraorthodox swinging dick gunning for Arabs in the West Bank.

My gaffers didn't lack the opportunity, either.

I was lucky; some time along the road my clan escaped that ugly cycle, came here to the US where the earlier wave of "settlers" had done the ethnic cleansing of the original natives for them, so no need to bloody their own hands.

Is that what we are? Is that all we are? Just one wave of conquerors after another? One more round of oppression and murder and rape and ruin and merciless hatred?

I honestly don't think I want to know the answer.

I do know this; no matter how much killing Hamas has done this past week it will not kill the problems of the people of Palestine.

And no matter how much killing my old heroes of Tzahal will do in the coming weeks it will not change the problems of Israel with the people of Palestine.

And yet the killing will go on and on.

I can do no better than Wright did, ending his long discussion with a quote from Miller's Canticle for Leibowitz:

“Listen, are we helpless? Are we doomed to do it again and again and again? Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall? Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Carthage, Rome, the Empires of Charlemagne and the Turk: Ground to dust and plowed with salt. Spain, France, Britain, America—burned into the oblivion of the centuries. And again and again and again. Are we doomed to it, Lord, chained to the pendulum of our own mad clockwork, helpless to halt its swing? This time, it will swing us clean to oblivion.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

Dunnage

 

So.

Turns out that the "silence" of the night, the cease-fireworks I mentioned yesterday?

Had nothing to do either with the City rules or the fire-safety inclinations of the good people of Portland, but, just like in the movies, the "it's quiet...too quiet" silence before the French and Indians attack.

Last night the first ranging shots were fired before sundown, and by full dark the streets were exploding with all the illegal-goodness I thought the City had shut down. 

Mortars, Roman candles, fire fountains...all the bounty of mainland China was bursting in air to celebrate the 247th birthday of the Land of the Free.

Which, by the way, I remarked only through the front windows. It was a hot sultry night, and I wasn't arsed enough to go sit out in the heat and mosquitoes to watch the fire-for-effect. It was pretty ferocious, though, as the traditional scattering of dunnage at the intersection of North McKenna and Amherst Streets testifies.

Which kind of got me thinking about the whole "why-do-I-hesitate-to-wave-the-flag" thing I also wrote yesterday.

Because I opened up the phone today to read something about how some Republican nitwit had lead off his Fourth paean to Ammurica with a made-up Patrick Henry quote about how we owe our independence to Christians.

"America is a Christian nation".

How many times have you read some "conservative" saying or writing that?

By which they mean that if you're NOT "Christian" (or something their idea of "Christian" hates, like queer or poor or Samaritan or liberal or something...) you're not really "American".

Which is, well, just shitty.

The entire promise of this country is based on an idea, not a religion or a language or a kind of food or clothing. The idea of "equal justice under law"; that if you believe in and defend the rights of all your fellow citizens who are equally committed to the ideals of the nation as expressed in the founding documents then you ARE an American.

So you can be an atheist-American, or an otaku-American, or a gay-, lesbian-, liberal-, conservative-, Rule34-American. If you buy the ideals expressed in things like the Declaration and the Constitution, you're an American.

Period.

That's something pretty awesome, when you stop to think about it.

There are people who have lived in Japan for generations and still aren't considered "Japanese" by the majority of Japanese.

There are people who have lived in Great Britain, or Poland, or Argentina who aren't considered, or treated, as true citizens of those nations, because they look or speak or act "differently" from the Platonic Ideal of a Briton or a Pole or an Argentine that's fixed in the public mind.

But the promise of the United States - and I say "promise", mind, not "reality" - is that if you believe in the promise you can be American.

The Founders made sure of that by making sure they didn't write religion in to those promises.

Too many of their ancestors had beat cheeks out of Britain because of the ugly remnants of the 16th and 17th Century Wars of Religion had made their kinds of "Christianity" (or lack of Christianity) something between rebellion and treason.

And they'd seen what the unholy marriage of political power and religious sectarianism had done to both politics and religion.

It was bad. 

For both.

So yes; a hell of a lot of the people who were responsible for the design of this country were Christians.

But no; they explicitly designed the country to include all blends and shades of belief - including no belief at all - by making religion a personal, not a political, choice.

Which leads me back to yesterday.

It seems to me that we are on the cusp of having to make a hard choice, a choice foisted upon us by people like the Republican nitwit cited above (Josh Hawley? Sound like the sort of Christopathic fathead who would say something like that).

We the People can choose to become the nation our Constitution promises us we can be; a nation open to all who believe in those promises.

Or we can become the nation people like Josh Hawley promise us; a nation open only to those who believe and act like they do.

I know which nation would make me proud.

Do We the People?

Of that, I am honestly unsure.

When you're unsure that your own country truly believes, and wants to make true, the promises that you love about that country?

It's hard to be vigorous about waving its flag.

All you can do is police up the dunnage.

And hope.

Fight them or be destroyed. Because they will not spare you.

Thoughts knocking around in my head today:

What’s frustrating about my current job situation is that I have several deadlines bearing down on me but am wasting this morning doing monkey-brain grade dirt nanny work because we can’t seem to find and hire (and keep) field techs with more brains and energy than an actual monkey.

 

If the American Taliban thinks that the SCOTUS will “stop abortion” they’re as stupid as they are credulous. Humans have been DXing their spawn since before the hippies invented sex in the Sixties.

 

The difference is simply “will emptying my womb kill or injure me, or not?” be the question, and the wingnuts are happy to answer “Maybe. Take your chances, slut.” because the wealthy ones know their cash will ensure their mistresses and daughters will be safely surgically de-fetused and the others are some combination of stupid, delusional, high on their own supply, or just mean as goddamn weasels. 

Of course, it's not really about "stopping abortion". It's about killing sluts with coathangers, and jailing them, and ruining their lives.

 

And the ultimate irony? The real Abortion Doctor is their precious Nature’s God, who ends some ridiculously huge number of pregnancies with miscarriage.

 

But. That’s not the real goal. The sleazy Alito screed spells it out in letters of fire. It’s marriage equity and contraceptives and every other ruling that keeps the Bible-bangers’ noses out of your bedroom, your workplace, your life.

Because it's not really about "stopping abortion". It's about making everything that Republicans think is icky - men kissing men, women loving up women, people dressing "funny", people not listening to them talk about sex and how if those people aren't doing it their way they're doing it wrong. And that's evil. And evil must be destroyed.

 

So stop kidding yourself. You have a choice; fight them now and stop them. Or be crushed by them.

 

If you’re not prostrate before the Cross?

 

Those nice happy friendly Jesus people in the picture below? 

 

They're coming for your fucking heads.

 

Cite your sources

I get that this sort of thing has become so utterly bog-standard from the GQP/wingnut Right that the rest of us have gotten to the ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ phase and just kind of elide wingnuts and wingnut pols saying it;

Okay, so.

I've made it pretty clear where I stand on the whole business of theocracy. It's a bad idea, and - believe it or not - not just for those on the theocratic-outside. 

It's bad for religion and especially bad for whichever sect gets the whip hand. The whole sorry history of the European Wars of Religion make that clear. Becoming the state religion of Rome (and its successor states) was bad for the Roman Church.

But here's the part that I think we don't talk enough about.

One of the most troublesome aspects of theocracy (or any political system that depends on an unquestioned, received creed - Nazi-style fascism and Soviet-style and Mao-style Communism were others) is that they rely on the fundamental truth of the received narrative.

In other words, for Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism to "work" enough of the fundamental tenets of the creed, from Kapital through the diktats of Stalin, have to be "true". They have to reflect some fundamental political (and economic and social) reality that can be applied to the messy business of daily life.

If the fundamentals don' t work - if they're not really grounded in reality or something close to reality - then the chances of that theocracy of working IRL become significantly more difficult.

We saw that with Marxism.

The fuzzy guy had some interesting ideas. But it turned out that they were really difficult to turn into practice that didn't involve a whole lot of human misery.

Turns out that a LOT of Marxism was a sort of 19th Century political version of Scientology, and it turned out that running a civil society on them was really difficult to turn into anything that wasn't pretty punitive.

So.

What this led me back to was something I got to thinking about when I went and re-read my old battles piece on First Panipat.

When I wrote the original I hadn't gotten to the point of checking the original source materials. I did the usual "I did the research" thing on the Internet where I peeked at the first dozen Google hits and wrote based on what came up.

But the deeper I dug into the sources - especially for the events that occurred prior to widespread literacy and the printing press - the more I discovered that one of the biggest problems with the "accepted narrative" of these ancient events is that it is often 1) culled from a tiny handful of accounts that are often 2) lost in the original form and exist only as multiple-generations-removed from the original, and 3) afflicted with one or more "unreliable narrator" issues (where there are more than one contemporary source the sources contradict each other, sources state as facts things that we know from physical evidence are untrue, are written by authors that are unfamiliar with the physical realities of ancient or medieval warfare, i.e. monks writing military history...).

So, as it turns out, a lot of what we "know" about these past events - actual events we know really happened - turns out to be either untrue, or partially true, or (more often) simply impossible to accurately pin down.

And these are simple events! We're not talking about using them to set up a political system!

Which got me thinking about theocracy, and specifically Christian theocracy; what do we actually know about the actual events, people, places, and things that have been codified over centuries into the "Judeo-Christian ethic" that a lot of theocratic or theo-friendly politicians, pundits, and other authorities like to cite as the best form of human government.

Here's a little chart that displays the historians who wrote about the world of the Mediterranean littoral (including, obviously, what was then the Roman province of Judea) during the period that we interpret from the books of the New Testament that discuss it was the time of Jesus Christ:

As discussed above; this is perforce only a partial list of the people who may have written histories of this time. This is just those whose accounts remain to us!

As noted in the picture, though; none of these authors mention any of the things that are stated in the Gospels (and Acts) that you'd expect to have come to the attention of a diligent historian.

Many cultures around the 1st Century BCE/CE tended to place great import on astrological signs and symbols. Something like the "Christmas Star"? SOMEbody should have said something. Nope.

The "Massacre of the Innocents"; Herod I's supposed ratissage of newborn Messiahs? You'd think someone - particularly Josephus, who was pretty tuned into events in Judea - would have mentioned that. Nope.

The events surrounding the crucifixion - the darkening sky, the earthquake - should have caught the notice of someone writing from somewhere close enough (like Alexandria or Damascus) to have heard, felt, or seen them.

Nope.

I don't know if the whole basis of Christianity is as sketchy as Joseph Smith and his golden plates.

But if I was researching some event in ancient warfare?

I'd be utterly hesitant to place any confidence in that event - what happened, how it happened, even if it actually happened at all - if all the contemporary sources save one ignored it as if it had never existed.

If you want to govern me based on your love of Christian scripture...okay. That's your call.

But to insist that I accept that's any more of an inescapable "truth" than governance based on the events of the Twilight novels or the philosophy expressed in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic?

Sorry. That's not just a bad idea. It's a bad idea based on complete and utter bullshit.

And the fact that We the People don't laugh it out of the public square is...not a good sign.

The Senior Master Chief has a word with the Trumpeters

My maternal grandfather was a minister.

An odd sort of minister, though. He was an officer in the Salvation Army, in his eyes a soldier for the Lord in His fight against poverty and despair.

I think he'd have some choice words for His Fraudulency and his Trumpeters now vaunting their "Christianity" to the skies in their self-appointed role as Defenders of the Faith against the eeeeevil Muslim hordes, and I think those words would be very much like those of Isaiah, who also had little patience for those who paraded about in the garments of virtue sacrificing and praying loudly while afflicting the afflicted;

"Day after day they seek me
and delight to know my ways,
as if they were a nation that practiced righteousness
and did not forsake the ordinance of their God;
they ask of me righteous judgments,
they delight to draw near to God.
“Why do we fast, but you do not see?
Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?”
Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day,
and oppress all your workers.
Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight
and to strike with a wicked fist.
Such fasting as you do today
will not make your voice heard on high.
Is such the fast that I choose,
a day to humble oneself?
Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush,
and to lie in sackcloth and ashes?
Will you call this a fast,
a day acceptable to the Lord?
Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them,
and not to hide yourself from your own kin?
Then your light shall break forth like the dawn,
and your healing shall spring up quickly;
your vindicator shall go before you,
the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard.
Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer;
you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am.
If you remove the yoke from among you,
the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil,
if you offer your food to the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,
then your light shall rise in the darkness
and your gloom be like the noonday.

Isaiah 58

Biblical Soil Science

My work here in Everett has been postponed, so I'm sitting in the hotel waiting to hear from my temporary masters on what they need me to do for them, if anything, and idly surfing the 'net. And in so doing I came across Frank Moraes' essay on atheism and theology.

In it Frank concludes:

"One can’t be an atheist without knowing what it is to be a theist. And most atheists don’t seem to even know what God is supposed to be. What they seem to be against is ignorant people with childish beliefs. If that’s the case, we should call such people areligious. They don’t know or care enough to have an opinion about God, and thus don’t deserve to be called atheists."

Hmmm.

I guess I fit into one of these niches. I'm an atheist, or, at the very least, a "don'tgiveashit-ist". My feeling is that I have no fucking idea what is God, or gods, or what it or he or she or they do. Or whether they do anything. Or care, really.

(I should note that it seems to me that if what I see as human life, life on this planet, is really the province of a God, or gods, then those Powers are, at best, some pretty fucking capriciously feckless sonsofbitches and, at worst, some serious assholes).

If people did what those Higher Powers are accused, or credited, with doing in the physical world they'd get kicked from here to Armageddon.

Plagues? Floods? The Penn/Madonna Shanghai Surprise? WTF, deities? You got nothing better to do than eff with people bringin' that shit?

Moraes links to an earlier post of his that references S.J. Gould's idea of "non-overlapping magisteria"; the idea that science (or, at least, non-theological explanations for physical matters) can happily exist side-by-side with theological/philosophical/spiritual explanations of moral and ethical (and ontological) matters.

Moraes' problem is that, apparently, there are a group of atheists who are not content with the Gould idea but are directly attacking religious ideas of, well, pretty much everything. And that this attack is focused on the "worst" aspects of theology, the "Answers in Genesis" sorts of theology that insist that God created dinosaurs and humans and the one rode the other (or something; I never bother much with the AIG people). Moraes wants atheists to a) ignore the AIG dumbshit and b) learn genuine theology - at least, learn enough to understand it - if they want to debate it.

But as I commented on Frank's post, I think the biggest problem is this “worst theology” and how predominant it is over the “better”, and how destructive, and I think that's why the theists are attacking religion, not because they don't understand the higher thinking or care.

There was no Great Flood. We know that. "Know" as in know; the "flood" of Genesis and the Middle Eastern texts that preceded and fomented it were legends, stories, fictions. The textural references to it are stories made up by people who saw things they didn’t have the intellectual tools to understand.

There were no humans riding dinosaurs. "God" didn't give humans "dominion" over volcanoes and oceans and squirrels. That's "Answers in Genesis", the Bible (or Torah, or Quran) as soil survey manual. Iron Age superstition and ignorance dressed up in churchy clothes.

And you'd think there'd be no point attacking or debating that.

But, dammit, this sort of “Answers in Genesis” theologian are all over the fucking place, and their nonsense contributes mightily to the very real damage that religion does in the public square.

It's that sort of Vacation Bible School "theology" that permeates the GOP and helps them in their quest to free their patrons to resume dumping shit into Love Canal and crap into the sky and credulous nonsense (or canned "facts") into kid's brains.

It's that sort of simplistic "theology" that encourages We the People to make stupid choices based on what we've been told about God and Man and the world around us (and politics as God-bothering, another real problem).

THAT’s why the atheists go after them, I think.

Not because they’re a “worthy” opponent Moraes wants to engage...but because, as rubbishy as they are, the Answers-in-Gensis sort of “theology” is much more destructive than the theology of the "better" sort, the kind of theology of people of faith willing to start from the NOMA standpoint.

To put it in videogame terms, it’s all well and good to recommend going up against the boss in an epic struggle.

But it doesn’t help when the damn trashy little minions are running all over the place wrecking the joint.

(h/t to Gods Playing Poker for the comic...)

Ruby the Church Lady

Sometimes I can't resist the urge. It isn't nice, it isn't pretty, and it usually strikes me at the worst of wrong moments.

But I'm like Pavlov's dog whenever I run across someone using religion as a blanket excuse for Being an Asshole Whilst Assuming the Mantle of Righteousness.

I'm not big on religion in general, as you know. But when I run across someone using it to justify assholery, whether it's being mean to a gay couple or engineering a sectarian massacre, it makes me all kinds of stabby.

Yesterday it was that idiotic Indiana "Jesus Sez It's Okay to be Hatin' on Homos" law, and a friend's Facebook feed.

Another FB pal posted this link to some sort of anti-anti-gay-law protest and it drew the ire of someone I'll call Ruby the Church Lady.

This is a summary of what Ruby the Church Lady had to say:

"This is not an anti- gay law but a freedom of religion law. Why do people insist others go against their religious beliefs just because they don't agree? What about the rights of the ones on the religious side. I suppose they don't count, they're not important, because there are those who think they're wrong. They are protected by the Bill of Rights. This law is redundant. Are they suppose to go against their beliefs because someone doesn't like what they are doing?...I'm not saying they are right or wrong. However, what good is freedom of religion if the gov't makes you go against your beliefs? You can't have it both ways. You are either free to follow your convictions or you're not. I doubt very seriously that these people, (bakers, photogs, florists) ever refused an African American. Because of all the uproar about this these people are losing their businesses. Is that right? It's not as tho they are the only ones in town who do these services. Instead of raising a stink about it, go to a different business. That's what I would do... If I had to choose who I would answer to it would be God, hands down...I am NOT openly against the rights of the LGBT community. I have a gay granddaughter and I support her completely and love her partner."

Of course you do, Ruby! Of course you do!

Anyway, let's see what else you have to say on the subject...

"...This is not a matter of discrimination against them. It is a matter of the free exercise of religious beliefs. Either you have that freedom or you don''t. If you are made to go against your beliefs you do not have free exercise of that belief. You and the Supreme Court can spin it anyway you want but that is a fact. Like I said., it is not as tho they have no where else to go, they do. The only reason you or anyone else would insist that they do not have the right to refuse service is because you want everyone to think as you do. and will cause trouble for anyone who doesn't. They do NOT have to do that. That is what FREEDOM is. They have as much right to their beliefs as you do and the free exercise thereof..."

Of course you see the problem here.

Ruby is, not to mince words, being a pig-ignorant, hypocritical, theocratic Bible-banger on this issue.

She completely misses the point where her Crusade - or jihad - stops at the end of my nose. And, of course, part of that is the part where if she opens a shoe shop and sells shoes to the public then she's gotta sell shoes to, you know, the Public. Every spotty ill-washed rube, every drooling gomer with money in his, her, or its wallet.

Every homo.

Doesn't mean she can't enforce some rules. No shirt, no service (can't really go with the "no shoes" in this case since, gudDAMN, she's sellin' shoes and if they had shoes they wouldn't be coming to ol' Honest Ruby's Shoe Emporium, right?).

No profanity. No show tunes.

But she can't hang up a sign that says "no blacks" or "no queers". Why not? Because let's say she's the ONLY shoe store in town. And she doesn't want to serve me because I'm black. Or queer. Or, hell, a left-handed atheist pan-flute-playing goatherd. So no Ruby shoes for me and how the hell do I get anything on my damn feet, then?

So. Bottom line - in this country, anyway, where Equal Justice Under Law is written on the fucking front door of the Supreme Court - is that I'm the Public, and you're serving the Public, you gotta serve me the same as anyone else providing I'm within the law.

Then you can then go pester Jesus, or Allah, or Buddha, on your own dime and on your own time...AND you don't get to be the "good guy" here. You may claim dot you vere chust vollowing Gott's orders but someone, either you or your God, is being an asshole. The hypocrisy of pretending to be the Noble and Upright Christian pisses me off far beyond the mere assholery of being cruel and unreasonable to other people for who they are and not for what they're doing.

In other words, Ruby the Church Lady pushed nearly every one of my buttons and I drooled on cue. To wit:

"Actually, no, it's not that simple.

I may worship Moloch, but the damn state law prevents me from sacrificing babies. I may worship Tir, but intrusive and unreasonable state law prevents me from strangling my king and throwing his body in a peat bog (actually, I suspect that state law has something to say about the whole "king" thing, but, whatev...). I may follow Jainism but the rigid and oppressive state law forbids me from walking into my kids' daycare sky-clad.

Sucks to be me, but, there it is. There's all kinds of things that your religion says you have to do - or can't do - that the law forces you to refrain from, or to perform. So this isn't a "controversy, got it? The people who want to run a public business have to leave their racial, sexual, religious, etc. exclusionary beliefs at home and serve the public. If you insist that your religion should let you discriminate based on things that people are and not things that people do then either you or your religion are effed up and wrong."

Now Ruby didn't like this at all. She replied:

"You are really comparing not wanting to provide your services on religious grounds to sacrificing babies or strangling a king etc? That doesn't even deserve a response!"

Yep, I said, and is the comparison so inapt?

Tir, Moloch, Satan, Ayn Rand, Communism...all have their "religions". Human and animal sacrifice were a respected part of most religions for millenia. The reasons for sacrificing kings, babies, and goats seemed perfectly good at the time. So did the reasons for stoning adulterers. So, frankly, do these contemporary "reasons" refusing to admit homosexuals to the common lot of humanity.

It's just a whole lot of lovin' or hatin' on things for no real "reasons" at all; just what your or their or his or her invisible sky-wizard or Earth spirit or inner voice tells you is good or bad. Or that YOU tink is bad and icky and wriggle around trying to find something in your religion to justify, so you won't feel like a self-righteous asshole.

And in a nation like ours, where citizenship is a matter of believing not in a God, or a flag, or a race, or a language, but in a couple of pieces of paper that boil down to "Equal Justice Under Law" that law must, must, require you to park your prejudice at the door of your public accommodation.

You don't have to love me.

You just have to work for me if I hire you, same as you do for Pastor Jenkins.

It seems to me - and pisses me off no end - that instead of admitting that they're being assholes, that they're indulging themselves and cherry-picking their beliefs that people like Ruby the Church Lady and her pals just want to have it all. They want to be "cafeteria Christian" - pick the parts of their religion they want - like not baking a cake for a couple of gay guys - but still want to wear mixed fabrics, eat shellfish, and go golfing on Sunday...and be considered sweet, wholesome, corn-fed, upstanding pillars of the community and all around Good People of the Earth.

Instead of a mob of selfish, hypocritical, bilious old bitches and bastards with a hate-on for stuff they find icky.

I'd respect them more if they just came out and said honestly that they hate what they hate and stood up honestly as the hate-filled skinsacks they are instead of hiding behind "God".

It's not the hate.

It's the hypocrisy that really gets my goat.

Losing my religion

I've got a much longer post up at the Milpub on this subject, but suffice to say that the shootings at the Paris political magazine just reminded me of what a goddamn toxic thing religion is when you throw it into the political stewpot.

And, first, I want to throw out the idea that somehow this is "Islam", that somehow Islam and Muslims are uniquely violent.

Think about it. For hundreds of years Europe was torn up by Protestants killing Catholics, Catholics killing Protestants and everybody killing Jews.

Don't even get me started on atheists and witches.

Where you went to church (or whether you did..) was a killing matter in Europe for centuries. Google "Thirty Years War" sometime and read up on what it did to Germany, among other places. Wasteland. Total fuckstory. Trust me on this.

Believing you have a pipeline to the Almighty makes a hell of a great reason to kill people who are piped into a different Heaven, and that was enough reason for Christian Europeans to do some of the world's most enthusiastic killing for centuries.

And then we stopped.

We booted the preachers the hell out of our politics - most of us - and, though we may kill each other for secular reasons, decided it was louche at best to go crusading.

Sure, some idiots still want to return to the Good Old Days when killing infidels for Baby Jesus got you into Heaven. But for most of us where our neighbors go to church - or whether they go to church or not - is a matter of massive indifference. The notion that someone is scarey because he might be Catholic and take orders from the Pope (as was said of JFK) or a Jehovah's Witness or a Mormon or a Hindu or a Sikh seems ludicrous as the Blood Libel to us today. Outside of the Balkans (determined to be perverse as they have always been) religious skepticism, ignorance, indifference, and sloth is the rule in Western public life. It's considered rude (outside the Issa household) to parade your religiousity in public, let alone so much as upbraid anyone else for their infidelity.

We just can't be arsed to kill our neighbors or the random stranger anymore because they don't love our God not because we're better or kinder people but because we just don't give enough of a shit. Who cares what the Johnsons are doing Sunday morning? The fuckin' Vikes are playing, man!

As a whole, as a society, the West seems to worship - if it worships anything - sex and money and prettiness and fame. And while that in itself is a whole 'nother cluster of fuck it doesn't seem to be as lethal. Nobody seems to shoot somebody else over Hooters girls' tight shirts.

The occasional abortion doc, maybe. But, still.

So the last religion standing seems to be Islam, at this point. Which is pretty bizarre when you consider that in 1945 the idea of "political Islam" seemed like the height of lunacy.

All over the Islamic world secular governments were replacing the old colonial regimes. In fact the heartland of the current IS and AQ shenangans - Iraq and Syria - was largely run by "Baath" parties which were overtly and fiercely secular. The exemplar for the emerging Arab states was Turkey and the anticlericalism of the Young Turks.

But between the Western powers and Israel these secular states were shown up to their populations as either venal, weak, or both. Secular dictators were suborned with Western cash and weapons, or defeated by Israeli arms. The only groups that seemed to actually fight back effectively were the jihadis. The U.S. and the West also helped coddle a Saudi regime that nursed the Wahhabi madrassis that produced so many of these jihadi vipers. Charlie Wilson & Co. turned them loose on the Soviets which seemed like a damn fine idea at the time...and then cut them loose when the Soviets ran for cover.

The the world's deadest tall Saudi had the brilliant idea that if he goaded the American bull it's smash up the Middle Eastern china shop and it worked like a mechanical ass-kicker and and here we are.

It seems to me that the BEST answer to the jihadi problem would be the same thing that provided the solution to the Western Wars of Religion; indifference.

Everytime some TV preacher or some fatuous GOP fucktard starts ranting about how my country needs a healthy dose of Jesus or a return to "biblical values" my first thought is "Yeah, like witch-burning, adulterer-stoning, and crusades? The fuck we do."

We want to return to the Wars of Religion? We want to return to forced conversion and prosecutions for heresy and blue laws? My ass; the West voted with its feet - out the church door - a long time ago and it seems to me for all the flaws in Western civilization I can't but think that decision was a damn good one.

It seems to me that a big fat dose of fuck-you-preacherman would do the whole Islamic umma a hell of a lot of good, too.

But I have no idea what the hell you, or I, or anyone else on our side of the problem can do about that.

The Assassination of William the Silent

Four hundred and ninety-three years ago this month a German monk sent a letter to the Bishop of Mainz complaining about the Church practice of selling "indulgences"; that is, the forgiveness of earthly sins in return for hard, cold cash.

The result, eventually, was a series of rebellions, revolts, massacres, and wars that harrowed Europe from the gray coast of Dunnet Head to the sunny sands of the Côte d'Azur, from the dark headlands of Brittany to the dark forests of central Silesia. We will never know how many lives were taken amid what horrors of murder and rape and ruin and merciless hatred.

All because many people of the day couldn't agree whose church was Church and whose god was God.

Catholics and Protestants, and those who wanted to use Catholicism and Protestantism to advance their less-elevated ambitions, butchered and harried each other for over a century, from the "Peasant's War" in 1524 to the final bloody brutalities of the Thirty Years War in 1648 and the subjugation of Ireland in 1651. The hatreds bred bone-deep still linger along today; ask anyone in Belfast or, for that matter, in the stands at Ibrox or Celtic Park.

By and large the peoples of Europe - and here I exclude the turbulent breeds in the Balkans, which have learned nothing and forgotten nothing from the fucking Battle of Kosovo in fucking 1389 - no longer fight over religion.

The peoples of North America, having sprung largely from refugees of those fights or from fugitives from the very idea of such fighting, did not take their religions to the bayonet point before the modern nations of Canada and the United States were founded.

And, given that despite the lies you will often hear from those whose collection plates and political wherewithal grow from the ignorance of those lies both nations were founded largely by men with little or no use for a formal coupling of religion and the state, since the founding North America has largely been a place where religion, as Mark Twain described it, has become like dandruff; something that many people have "...and spend time and money on it and seem to derive considerable pleasure from fiddling with it."

But not to the point of killing other people over.

And that, to my mind, is a very good thing.

Religion, and its quiet companion, faith, can produce great things from the mind and the hands; art, music, and literature, love, forgiveness, and kindness, comfort and mercy.

But those same can - and only can - produce the blackest of human cruelty and pitiless destruction.

A good man or woman can do good from the heart within them; an evil man or woman can do evil from their heartlessness. Only belief that doing death and giving out pain is pleasing to a God can cause a good man or woman to do great evil.

Now bloodyhanded death is being reaped in the name of another religion, and it is even alike in that it has split into sects the better to hate and struggle against itself to kill, and maim, and rape, and hate, and destroy .

I'm going to suggest that we are seeing the Peasant's Revolt of the umma, the first violent spasms of the Islamic Eighty Years War; that the Muslim world has embarked on its own Wars of Religion, and for the next decades - and only decades, if we are lucky - we will see this war fought out amongst, and between, groups and nations wherever those professing one sort of Islam or another butt up against themselves.

Unfortunately, this will also mean that some of us living in the unchurched lands outside the Muslim world, the peoples and places that outgrew our infantile religious wars will be killed by the violent spray of this religious warfare.

Collateral damage, as it were, of the Islamic Wars of Religion.

We cannot "win" this war for the Islamic lands; there are not enough bullets cast to kill every living Muslim, which is what we in the Enlightenment West would have to do to "win" such a war.

Only those living within the places where the Muslim faith is practiced can, by doing what the West did and rejecting religion itself as temporal government, rejecting religious "law" as temporal law and religious mores as social strictures, do that. And that is what must happen - there is no middle ground. There can be no theocracy lite, no half-measures of an "Islamic State" any more than there could be compromise between the Catholics and the Protestants in the Holy Roman Empire in 1558.

Simply stated, Islam cannot stand half wahhabi and half free. The wahhabis, the jihadis, the rapists of unveiled women, the killers of unbelieving men, will not let it. It must become all one, or all the other.

We, the West, can help those who stand against these unholy holy men that kill for Allah as we stood - eventually, too late, far too late, but finally - against those who killed for Christ.

But if we respond to the barbarism of the jihadis by becoming ourselves Arnaud-Amalric we will lose even if we win. If we respond with panic, with fear, by sacrificing our laws and our liberties, we will defeat ourselves.

So we will simply have to learn to live with, and accept, that we will lose our lives, some of us, even the highest among us, in this war that is neither ours to fight nor to win. To accept those losses and go on without sacrificing ourselves to our panic fear.

On the evening of July 10, 1584 the then-leader of the Protestant revolt in the Low Countries of what is today's Belgium and the Netherlands was the Prince of Orange, William, first of that name and often called de Zwijger or "The Silent". He seems to have been a man of few words.

But of deeds, many. He was a leader in the Protestant rebellion against Catholic Spain and is still today revered in the Netherlands as a good ruler and a founder of the nation. But to a Catholic named Balthasar Gérard he was just a traitor to his Spanish king and a heretic to his Catholic religion.

So Gérard picked up a couple of wheel-lock pistols, the Desert Eagles of his day, infiltrated Delft, and met William as the Prince was leaving his house where he had just enjoyed a quiet dinner with a guy named Rombertus van Uylenburgh.

William got to the bottom of the stairs and Van Uylenburgh heard Gérard shoot William twice in the chest at close range. The Prince died on the pavement.

The Dutch set up a monument to the dead man and carried on.

As should we.

Let me help you with that

A friend of mine posted this little picture to her Facebook page:

To which she added "That's my guy..."

I looked at this and my immediate thought was:

"But a real, REAL woman would kick him square in the 'nards for being a pushy jerk who won't listen to her, so a real REAL guy will smile and have a couple of stiff drinks for her when she finishes up doing it herself..."

And that seemed like a frankly nasty and uncharitable reaction to what was intended to be a sweet tribute from a very good woman to her loving husband. So I sat and thought about that for a while. And after thinking about it I realized what it was about that trite little picture that pushed my feminist button.

It was the word "let".

Thing is, I don't "let" my Bride do or not do anything. There may be times that she does something and I offer to help her and there may be times she takes me up on that. But "let her" do something she wants to do herself? That presumes that it's my choice whether she does something. Which assumes that I'm the boss of her. And assuming that would earn me a solid kick in the 'nards were I foolish enough to try and insist on that.

And that kinda brings us right back to the irritation that I've been simmering in since the Hobby Lobby decision and its implications; that your gender - or your religion - lets you make decisions for someone else about what amounts to their life or their paycheck (see Lance Mannion for a nice discursion on this aspect of the issue...) so long as you're a man (or a Christian of the bible-clutching variety) and I'm a woman or married or emotionally or financially attached to one or some sort of not-your sort of Christian.

I wrote a post back in 2012 called "Looking for FitzUrse" which I ended with:

"One of the truly fundamental principles of the United States is that you're only allowed to pester people with your whacko religious ideas to the degree and extent that your powers of persuasion allow. The U.S. government, by its constitutive documents, is forbidden from allowing - much less encouraging - one religion or other to enshrine its prejudices and preferences into civil or criminal law. For the good reason that the United States is supposed to be a land where the public forum is open to people of all religions, or none, and the moment you let the pope's nose into the lawbook that freedom is doomed.

This does not, has not, and will not prevent prelates of various sorts from trying to do this. Repeatedly, patiently, relentlessly, mercilessly.

Which is why the steps of the Capitol must, must always be guarded by fitzUrse with his naked sword in his hand.For that pious, humble, saintly man Tom Becket is the black enemy of public freedom and always will be."

And I see no reason to alter or retract that statement. You are free to follow your inner religious nut to the tip of my nose, and, in the public forum, are allowed to advocate for your religious nuttery and, if elected, let it guide your personal decisions.

What you're NOT free to do is use the levers of civil or criminal law to force ME to follow your religious nuttery.

This country has seen an explosion of magical thinking in its politics in the past thirty years. Belief is allowed to trump logic, desire commonsense, ridiculous ideas like "trickle-down economics" over fiscal experience, nonsensical opinion outweigh rational inquiry.

Like the idea that because I have external genitalia or a mystical inside line to an invisible magical sky wizard I have the power to "let" my inamorata "do something herself" or decide for someone else what they can or can't do with their money?

I'm really fucking sick and tired of people who think like that and, worse, who are trying to get me and those like me to think, or act, like that.

Just fucking sick and tired.

Duck and Cover

I got more than a little bit of a laugh out of this:

"Robertson, the patriarch of the backwater Louisiana clan on the reality show about hunting, fishing and domestic squabbles, was put on indefinite "hiatus" by A&E for his remarks to GQ magazine characterizing homosexuality as sinful behavior."

But it did bring a couple of things to mind that I wanted to throw out for the comment-hounds to gnaw on.

First, I think that the Snarky Penguin^TM has the right overall take on this whole ridiculous magilla:

"Phil Robertson is who he is, and always will be that person. He could have been steered towards realizing why his statements were offensive to so many people, and perhaps even apologized, but now that A&E has canned him for the exact same reason they hired him, well. Guess that teachable moment didn’t last too long, did it?"

Ol' redneck bible-banging dude believes stuff that ol' redneck bible-banging dudes often believe?

Whoa! Stop the presses! Film at 11!

Second, what is kind of irritating to me is how this brings up, again, how many "Christians" seem to have a bug up their ass about who goes up whose ass (or who's licking whose coochie, if the "whos" are lady-whos) or who is vacuuming out little blastocyst- and embryo-Americans as a feature of their faith.

Now I'm as unchurched as a mole rat but my gaffer, my mom's father, was a Salvation Army officer, a hardcore Jesus-pesterer with a degree in Jesus-pestering to prove it. Somewhere I've still got the awesome old King James Bible he gave me as a kiddo and I even read the thing (mostly for the smutty parts of the Old Testament but, still...) and I don't recall Jesus ever saying anything to the effect "Cursed are the faggots, for they bone each other up the butt and made me cry when I was a baby."

He doesn't even mention suctioning babies out of ladies' insides probably because, well, back in those days the ol' man just took Rebekah out behind the manger and kicked her in the belly to abort the little sprog (or she whipped up some nasty sort of abortifacient which killed either her child or her - either way the family didn't have another mouth to feed, which was often the point...)

Either way, the Reason for the Season didn't have much to say on either point.

Rich people, though?

Powerful people? The Galilean 1%? The Son-o-God has a pantsload to say about those fuckers and none of it good.

"You cannot serve both God and Money" he says. "There is one thing you lack. Go and sell everything you own and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me." and then adds:

"My children," he said to them, "how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." They were more astonished than ever. "In that case," they said to one another, "who can be saved?" Jesus gazed at them. "For men," he said, "it is impossible, but not for God: because everything is possible for God... Many who are first will be last, and the last first."

No question there - The Christ is telling his believers; you want riches? You want power? You want to be a Big Star?

Forget me, then. I'm the guy who pals with lepers, prostitutes, and sinners.

You need to worry more about your poor brothers and less about where your next million is coming from.

So. Given his boss's directives, who did the old crackerfamilias (God love Charles Pierce, I tell ya...) tell his interviewer were going to Hell? Let's roll tape:

"Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers—they won't inherit the kingdom of God. Don't deceive yourself. It's not right."

So the Robertson Hell Bucket List includes: three sexual offenders (adulterers, whores - but only rent-boys, and homos), idol worshippers (you know how those Baal-bangers are such a PITA nowadays), two economic offenders (greedheads and swindlers), drunks, and slanderers.

So Phil didn't let the wealthy off completely but his ire at those rich men his personal Savior says won't be there when He returns in Glory is outnumbered 6-2 by his irritation with people who put their totem pole in the wrong donut hole or who are sacrificing to Athena.

WTF?

I guess that's what irks the shit out of me about this.

My take on the New Testament is pretty clear; the whole deal is about Christ and his sacrifice. And central to Christ's teaching is the notion that the Lord loves him some poor and humble. That the single easiest way to earn yourself a one-way ticket to the Lake of Fire is to be a rich, selfish dickhead.

But...all the furor I hear, all the billboards I see, all the T-shirts, the televangelist rants, the Fox News crap, the whacko Rightwingnut books, the Teatard tricorn-hat-waving, and now even duck guy interviews...all the heat seems to be on things sexual.

So I guess my ultimate take on Phil Robertson and his stated beliefs is; dude, if you're more worried about doin's of "Adam and Steve" than the greedy, grasping Servants of Mammon?

Christianity; U R doing it Wrong.

Oh, and just as a parting observation:

I learned to hunt from the Master Chief, who himself learned to hunt growing up back in the Depression, when a 10-cent shotgun shell meant dinner that would cost half a buck at the butcher's shop. I'm really a terrible shot, and nobody but me at the Fire Direction Center likes duck, and the first lessons the Master Chief taught me about wingshooting were 1) kill cleanly, and 2) don't kill what you can't eat. So I don't hunt a hell of a lot.

But I enjoy hunting. I love the dawn light, the birds coming in over the dekes with their wings cupped for landing, the satisfaction of making a tough shot, and the taste of mallard breast fresh from the field. So every so often I drag out the waders and the deke bag and go.

And here's the thing.

From twenty years of observation and practice, I've kinda figured out that a fucking duck call is a fucking duck call.

A duck call is an extreme case of the operator being a thousand times more critical than the equipment.

I've seen a great caller coax greenheads down out of a bluebird sky onto a half-assed set of decoys under a blind that wouldn't have fooled a retarded scaup.

I've also heard a shitty caller quack his lungs out while the birds sail past overhead, probably making high-school-level-duck-jokes about the voice of that duck-derp on the pond down there.

You don't need a goddamn one-hundred-and-eighty-fucking-dollar duck call to call fucking ducks.

You need to know how to call ducks.

So if this is ol' Phil's racket?

Shaking down wanna-be Nimrods with more money than sense with 180-buck duck calls?

He should probably stop and have a little chat with his buddy Jesus. His Savior-pal might have something fairly cutting to say about those piling up riches here on Earth.

All's I'm sayin'.

Planet of the Apes.

My friend Labrys is ruminating on Pascal's Wager:

"Blaise Pascal made it famous…that bet on God; but he could never have conceived of the takers of that bet trashing everything in the here and now. His idea was that belief could not hurt….but acting as if an entire planet and anyone not agreeing with your belief is disposable? Even Pascal would have skipped THAT gamble! I walked away from dogmas that dismiss the world and ALL its people. But yes, I do believe it is the duty of love to fight FOR that world….and as pagans in daily life and action, both mundane and magical. And I would suggest that it is the invisible, the unseen attitudes and fear, that must change before the visible can be altered."

While I agree that eighty-sixing the notion that there's a magical Sky Daddy that has the power to take the worst of your crimes and "forgive" them

(and I should note that almost ALL religions add a little kicker about "go forth and sin no more" which is almost always ignored - the religious Get Out Of Jail Free card always seems to be used to allow the sinner to continue to, if not actually recommit the sin, to bloviate about his or her speshul snowflakery with regard to how the beam in their eye doesn't require them to be shutting the piehole about the mote in yours, especially if you are poor, or an uppity woman, or a negro wearing your pants down around the bottom of your ass, or a "taker", or...)

would be a good idea I'm not sure I agree that it would do much to mitigate the fairly amazing rate at which we're fucking up the only planet that will take us or the lives of our fellow humans.

Thing is, I'm afraid that the problem is as much to do with what we are as what we "believe".

And, basically, that's a sort of jumped up nasty little hairless monkey.

Us hairless monkeys still act like we're pretty much hardwired for monkey-thought: Grab the food, as much as I can, as quick as I can, ALL of it if I can. If there's a hole (or a pole) jump on it. Other-monkeys-are-scary. When in doubt, scream, jump around and fling poop.

That worked fine when were were just another omnivore trying to get by on the Serengti.

Hey, it's hard out there for a chimp.

But give us planet-cracking technology and the ability to change everything from weather to our own bodies?

We'll tend to use it, and not like gods or heroes, but like the gibbering little monkeys we still are above the neck.

I think the genius of the GOP (and the bible-humpers) has been to take this sort of monkey business - that (at least since the Enlightenment and/or the scientific revolution that accompanied it) we are supposed to be ashamed of and trying to suppress - and pull it out into the daylight, celebrate it, and make it acceptable.

Selfish? Greedy? It's OK - Ayn Rand says so! Hate the poors, uppity wimmens, gays, liberal poofies nagging you about being narrowminded, greedy, spiteful shitheads? Wonderful! Awesome! God says you SHOULD! Convinced that Big Gummint will take your FREEDOM but that Big Corporatism is FREEDOM? You're exactly right, my friend because...FREEDOM!

Not surprisingly, this appeal to the worst sorts of monkey-fuckery in human nature has won them the approval of...wait for it...narrowminded, greedy, spiteful shitheaded monkeyfucks.

Which still comprise a surprisingly large portion of humanity (if you're surprised that humans are like the meanest fucking chimp in the woods and not more like cheerful bonobos actually-fucking their cares away).

So while I agree that ditching religion and the nasty habits it reinforces wouldn't hurt, I'd still be surprised if that did much to make humanity better at long-term, humanist, sensible thinking.

The Inner Chimp will always tend make us reach for the poop first and think later.

Meddlesome priests.

I was reading Pierce today on the latest revelation in the ongoing saga that is the Roman Catholic Man-Boy Love Association and had a brief vision of the sainted Thomas a' Becket.

Because like that irritatingly martyred man the Church cannot seem to see the beam in it's eye for the mote in other people's. Worried about its ability to speak commandingly on what it considers sins it overlooks the inevitable predation of the strong on the weak that will occur when you give the strong the sanction of holy authority and fail to place limits on their acts.

It's not an "if".

It's a when.

For the simple reason is that most men are not saints. And even most saints are not "saints" but, rather, men like Thomas Becket who prize their own authority, their own power and the power and privilege of their organization above the welfare of others.

The good people among them will, at least, do no harm - although, like Becket, may well do harm to others or to the commons in their zeal to do what they see as good to what they see as "theirs".

But the bad people among them will be monsters.

And the worst part about a religion is that it settles an armor of God (or gods) on the monsters, so that their monstrosity is concealed or, worse, is exalted into heroism. Thus can an Arnauld Amalric say “Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius" (Kill them all for the Lord knoweth them that are His) deeming himself a pious man doing the good work his Lord has commended him to.

This is not a failing of the Catholic Church. It is not a failing of religion in general. It is a human failing.

But...it is a failing of religion - and the Catholic Church in this case - to fail to recognize that humans will use the tenets of their church to excuse, or hide, or enable their own failings if they are not strictly overseen. The power of holiness, the assumed mantle of godliness, will give those among them without scruple a weapon of terrible strength.

So the first duty of any cleric, from the humblest acolyte to the mightiest heirophant, must be to remain unsleepingly vigilant to the danger of that weapon. To be merciless in uncovering the abuse of trust and faith. To be self-sacrificing in publicly punishing the guilty and redeeming the victims. To place the faithful above the object of their faith.

But as any of the faithful would tell you; the path of duty is narrow and steep; the path of conformity, sloth, and luxurious power that leads to Hell broad, easy, and gentle.

So the fact that the fathers of the modern Church are no different in their loyalty to their own than Becket was nine centuries ago should come as no surprise to any of us.

Deus vult

I have gotten to a point where it is almost impossible to number the things about the United States (and much of the larger sphere of humanity, circa 2013) that drive me fucking crazy.

It seems incomprehensible to me that, given the options we have, that we seem bound and determined to drive this goddamn bus back into political and economic oligarchy, social inequity, and intellectual credulity and irrationality. But that seems to be the case in a fairly broad swath of the American and global publics.

Idiocies, ranging from tantrums of anti-science to an apparent longing for Dickensian unregulated capitalism, abound. People whose world-views range from simplistic to outright delusional find it childishly easy to convince the public to elect them to high office. Even our political "scandals" seem more boneheaded and ginned-up than the scandals of just a couple of decades ago...perhaps because we chose to deliberately obscure and forget those earlier scandals rather than look on them with critical eyes.

Obviously a hell of a lot of this that's happening in the U.S. has to do with the congealing of what's called "movement conservatism" in this country.

The U.S. GOP as currently constituted is less a political party as it is a cult. The GOP of my young adulthood believed in things like free markets, low taxes, strong armies, and "personal responsibility" as social goals and legislative objectives.

The current GOP believes in them as dogmas, the difference being that if you have a political position you can reasonably modify it or negotiate over it with people who don't agree with it to find as much of a compromise as you can but if you have an article of faith then it is either that or damnation. You would rather be dead, and your opponent be dead, and everything around you flaming wreckage than accept anything less than everything you demand.

But I think that this is just a symptom of a larger disease; the resurgence of fundamentalism.

The GOP is just one of the organizations that has been taken over by - or has deliberately absorbed within itself - people whose outlook is irrational based on belief rather than reason and conviction rather than questioning.

Human life has always been hard. Human problems have always been difficult; usually complex, often prone to messy, unsatisfactory, unpleasant outcomes. Humans have always been contrary, irritating, perverse, unruly creatures who tend to defy commonsense and logic in pursuit of unreachable and unreasonable desires.

And reasoning or questioning your way through this mess is damn deadly difficult.

It's difficult to acquire bits of evidence, it's difficult to sift through evidence to discern fact from perifact and outright fiction. It's difficult to assess our own best interests to apply this evidence to our potential courses of action to decide on the one or ones that will produce the best outcomes for us. And even more difficult is then trying to apply this to our group; our family, our village or town, our region, our nation, our world. Instead of answers you get more questions. Instead of comfort you find more trouble. You end up feeling small, and alone, and helpless, especially if you're a person who is troubled by things you don't understand or don't like going on around you. You WANT to feel strong and untroubled. You WANT answers, not more questions.

That's where "fundamentalism" helps.

Having a simplistic creed makes those decisions a hell of a lot easier. You don't have to worry about the moral or spiritual or economic or political complexities of your actions; God (or Marx, or the free market, or Allah...) says it, you believe it, that settles it.

There's only one teensy-weensy problem with that; it makes you functionally insane.

If you choose not to apply human reason to human problems, if you choose to instead effectively print yourself a set of punch cards with a small range of standard answers to the Big Questions on them, then you have made yourself into a sort of meat computer and if your inputs are wrong then your outputs will be wrong.

David Atkins does a good job of summing up the immense problems with this approach to human life and human issues:

"Fundamentalism of any nature causes extraordinary harm. Fundamentalists believe that the ends justify the means, and that their ideology cannot fail--only people can fail their ideology. Christian and Islamist fundamentalists alike attribute any ills befalling the world as a sign of inadequate obeisance to their God, and do whatever it takes to remake the world more in keeping with their scriptural dogma. Market fundamentalists elevate the "free market" as a divinely infallible authority, attributing even the most obvious market and corporate failures to intrusions of "big government", and offer up only more deregulation, tax cuts and the occasional military coup as a solution. Even Marxist fundamentalists exist, looking at the failures of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot not as refutations of their dogma, but as inadequate implementations of their ideology. The end result of all of these fundamentalist beliefs is mindless tragedy, violence and death."

When I look around what I see as the basis of a hell of a lot of this Vortex of Fucking Crazy is more than a willingness; an intense desire, almost a need to retreat from cautious ratiocination into simplistic answers driven by "faith".

The problem I have with that is that "faith", by its very nature, is personal. I believe some things because I am who I am and I have seen and done and learned what I have; I cannot transfer that to you anymore than I can slide the scar on right hand I earned by shoving it through a plate glass window when I was eight off my hand and onto yours.

I can tell you about that scar. I can try and convince you that the scar is a good scar, and one that should shape the way you live your life.

But the moment I try and force you to bear that scar - whether by law or might or social pressure - I put myself in a dangerous place.

And more and more I see people who want to force others to bear their scars, for no better reason than that they believe in their scars strongly enough to want to force those others to bear them, too.

That drives me fucking crazy.

What's worse, I cannot see a way around it.

We know more now, and more of us know more, about ourselves, about our world, about the natural processes, about politics and economics and societies of every stripe.

And yet we, many of us, seem to insist not on using that knowledge but deliberately ignoring it; making others' and our own lives more difficult, meaner, crueler, less tolerant, more violent and random and loveless rather than kinder and more rational.

And I have absolutely no idea how - if all that information and knowledge and communications cannot - you change that.

The Good Rapist

There are some ideas that are really, really important to other people that I just don't understand.

Not in the "Gee, I can see you're upset about that but I just don't see it the same way..." sort of don't-understand but the "What the fuck did you just say...are you speaking English?" sort of don't-understand.

Kid beauty pageants. Most country music. Medical marijuana. Arguments about great bands of the Sixties.

Stuff like that fall under the "WTF?"-don't-understand category for me.

The obsessive concern about abortions - who has one, who does one, and preventing both - is another one.

First, I start from the position of being a callous bastard. In my opinion there's an assload of people out there fucking up the landscape and wasting perfectly good oxygen. Most of these oxygen-thieves are fairly harmless and so in my mind constitute nothing more than a nuisance.

I mean, damn, people, I was a soldier for 22 years. You don't do that sort of thing for a living because you love people like fuzzy-bunny-wuffies. So the notion that some proto-human might get flushed down the crapper like somebody's discarded baby alligator doesn't exactly fill me with horror and revulsion to a greater degree than the notion of any other human being turned into inert biomass.

Less; in my personal evolutionary scale once someone's actually born they begin to acquire more humanness every day. Up to that point we're all sort of like internal organs with lungs. Born people trump pre-born people in my mind.

And, second, I'm a great believer in leaving other people alone.

And that means that, to me, that if you get pregnant what happens is up to you and the person you did the hard work getting pregnant with. Since I don't have a DSL connection to the Big Sky Daddy I'm not going to pretend that I know better than you what you should do if you get pregnant or your lover gets pregnant.

Come to that, the BSD might not know better, either. Here's that well-known theologian Doghouse Riley on the subject:

"My own concern, though, is with God. What's up with Him, now? Fer chrissakes, the man had 66 books, at least three versions of the Ten Commandments, not counting the twenty or so that follow those and are generally ignored even more fully. He's got Seven Deadly Sins, an equal number of Virtues, thousands of historical exemplars, untold thousands more ahistorical exemplars, and the world's biggest sales force; He Himself gets to choose who becomes a writer, a painter, a composer, a scientist, a dialectician, plus he's fucking tax exempt. He Personally chose Al Gore to invent the internet, yet the internet is just a global porn factory. So I'm told.

Yet He never just came out and said "No abortions, ever. My will. Oh, except to save the life of the mother, once I allow the general acceptance of antiseptics, sometime in the 19th century. Got it?" For the sacred life of me, I can't understand why the central tenet of Christianity remained impenetrable for 19th centuries, especially with all those hair-splitters, pinhead-dancers, and secret coders poring over every Word. I mean, the Man's a fucking loon."

But here's the part about this entire conniption that I do agree with; if you believe, as this guy Mourdock and his supporters and about 69.8% of the GOP circa 2012 seem to believe, that Every Sperm Is Sacred, that life begins at conception, and that Jesus Loves Every Little Fetus...why should you agree that the mother's life...or the circumstances of the conception, for that matter...should make a difference?

The whole business of rape-exceptions and incest-exceptions and mother's-life-exceptions are really a farrago, aren't they? They're sort of an Enlightenment wallpaper over the cold stone walls of Solomon's Temple, a facade to hide the hard Biblical rules from the shrinking sensibilities of modern Westerners unused to notions like presenting your fiancee' with the foreskins of 200 dead Philistines as an engagement present.

So I don't have a problem with Mourdock and his ilk.

I get it.

They're pre-civilized Biblical savages, the direct intellectual descendents of the desert-wandering Jehovah-pesterers that descended on the innocent peoples of the eastern Levant like homicidal locusts and killed everything they didn't rape, carry away, or sacrifice.

I've said this before; I don't love the God of the Hebrews, the God of the Torah, but I can respect Him and his followers. They're at least philosophically consistent. Their God is a desert patriarch and they are His Tribe. What's good for them is Good, and if that's Bad for you?

Too fucking bad for you. Sucks to be you, eh?

So the idea of a happy little rapey family, rape-daddy, raped-mommy, and little rape-baby frolicking around?

Perfectly in keeping with the entire framework that this approach to life brings with it. Hell, in this context even married sex is, well...as Fred Clarke puts it, "kinda rapey":

"When we quarrel with the way the world is, we find that the world has ways of getting back at us."

(This being a quote from someone named Douglas Wilson, who apparently has written a book for devout Christians entitled: Fidelity: What it Means to be a One-Woman Man)

"In other words (Wilson continues), however we try, the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts. This is of course offensive to all egalitarians, and so our culture has rebelled against the concept of authority and submission in marriage. This means that we have sought to suppress the concepts of authority and submission as they relate to the marriage bed."

Um. Gee. Well.

Eeeeeeewwwwwwww!!!!!

Ick! Ick!

Okay, I'm going to have to go shower my brain to get THAT image out.

Colonizes? Plants? Suddenly my entire sex life history feels like the chronicle of the existence of the Borg. Next time I have sex with the wife maybe I should start the pillow-talk with "Resistance is Futile. You will be Assimilated."

Gak.

But, anyway, this is It. This is how these people think. This is what they want YOU to think. Or, at the very least, this is how they want you to behave.

Not surprisingly, most modern humans don't WANT to behave that way. There's a reason we no longer wander around deserts living in tents and collect people's foreskins for gifts. The sorts of people who DO still want to do this have probably figured this out.

So if they want to place themselves in a position where they can make the other people, all those other people who DON'T want this to DO this, they will have to...

...lie.

So while I don't doubt that they really feel all warm and lovey about little unborn babies, I suspect the main reason they most of them don't come right out and say, like their idiot pal Mourdock said, that they believe that little unborn rape-babies are as precious and special as ALL little unborn babies is because they understand that the rest of us will look at them like their heads had just spun all the way around like the creepy little girl in the old Exorcist movie.

But they DO believe that.

And because they believe that their God is the one that makes them believe it they want you and me and everyone else to live your life like that, too.

And that tells me everything I need to know about where I want to see them in the political life of my country.

Update 10/27: As always, The Rude Pundit says it better and more filthily:

"The ideologically inconsistent icing on this cake of religion and politics and the well-being of women? If that pregnant rape victim's life is in danger, then, according to Mourdock, she should be able to abort the fetus, God's rape gift be damned. If you point this out to Mourdock or any of the Jesus's wound-lickers of the evangelical right, they would say that we cannot know the ways of God or that everything is part of God's plan or some such shit. And then you might say that if we cannot know God's ways, then how do they know that the rape baby is a gift. And then they'll just give you that look that says they think you're crazy, and it just makes you wanna kick 'em in the taint. Hard."

Yep. What he said.