Christianity’s Sick Obsession with Sex

The following is the bare-bones version of Chapter 10 in 24 Reasons to Abandon Christianity, which will be out in a little over year. I’ll add to it considerably over the next few months, but this’ll give you a good idea of where I’m going with it — I’ll basically be adding more documentation and illustrative passages and quotes.

For now, here ’tis:

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10. Christianity’s morbid preoccupation with sex

Since its inception, Christianity has had an exceptionally unhealthy fixation on sex, to the exclusion of almost everything else (except power, money, and the infliction of cruelty). This stems from the numerous “thou shalt nots” relating to sex, and the calumnies heaped upon it, in the Bible. To quote only a few of the many passages maligning sex and warning against it:

“”Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul.” — I Peter 2:11

“Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanliness, lasciviousness.” –Galatians 5:19

“For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.” — Romans 8:6

The church fathers echoed these views:

“We Christians regard a stain upon our chastity as more dreadful than any punishment, or even death itself.” –Tertullian, Apologeticus

“The children of the flesh can never be compared to the glory of holy virginity.” — St. Augustine, On Holy Virginity

“Nothing so much casts down the mind of man from its citadel as do the blandishments of women, and that physical contact without which a wife cannot be possessed.” — St. Augustine, Soliloquies

“Nothing is so much to be shunned as sex relations.” –St. Augustine, Soliloquies

And lest we forget:

“It is time to cut down the forest of marriage with the ax of virginity.” –St. Jerome, Epistle 123

All of this prudishness and calumny stems from Christianity’s most basic scriptures, especially the Ten Commandments.

That the Ten Commandments (enumerated in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5) command keeping the sabbath, forbid taking the Lord’s name, and forbid coveting one’s neighbor’s wife, but do not even mention, let alone forbid, slavery, rape, incest, torture, or cruelty—all of which were abundantly common in the time the Commandments were written. This speaks volumes about their writers’ preoccupation with sex (and women as property), as well as the pettiness of the Judeo-Christian deity.

Over the centuries, Christian religious leaders have echoed and amplified the perverted morality espoused in the Ten Commandments and the rest of the Bible. To cite but two examples from relatively recent popes:

“When Christianity is rejected, marriage inevitably sinks into the slavery of man’s vile passions.” –Pope Leo XIII, Arcanum divinae sapientiae (1880)

“You cannot belong to Christ unless you crucify all self-indulgent passions and desires.” –Pope Benedict XVI (as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prior to ascending to the papacy), Pastoral Letter on the Care of Homosexual Persons (1986)

Today, judging from the pronouncements of many Christian leaders, one would think that morality consists solely of what one does (more precisely, doesn’t) in one’s bedroom. For a completely bonkers example of this, let’s turn to a prominent televangelist and former GOP presidential candidate who has posited that tolerance of homosexuality is the cause of hurricanes:

“If you wanted to get America destroyed, if you were a malevolent, evil force and you said, “How can I turn God against America? What can I do to get God mad at the people of America to cause this great land to vomit out the people?” Well, I’d pick five things. I’d begin to have incest. I’d begin to commit adultery wherever possible, all over the country, and sexuality. I’d begin to have them offering up and killing their babies. I’d get them having homosexual relations, and then I’d have them having sex with animals.”

–Pat Robertson, quoted in The San Francisco Chronicle, September 7, 1986

The Catholic Church, though less flamboyant than Robertson, is the prime example of sex negativity, with its moral pronouncements rarely going beyond the matters of birth control and abortion, and with its moral emphasis seemingly entirely on those matters.

Also note that the official Catholic view of sex—that it’s for the purpose of procreation only—reduces human sexual relations to those of brood animals. Many of the Church fathers (and later popes) were quite explicit about this, with Augustine, in his work Conjugal Adultery, stating: “Intercourse with even a lawful wife is unlawful and wicked if the conception of offspring be prevented.”

Thus it’s no surprise that for centuries the Catholic Church has been the driving force behind efforts to prohibit access to birth control devices and information—to everyone, not just Catholics.

The Catholic Church, however, is far from alone in its sick obsession with sex. The evangelical hate campaign against gay people is probably the most prominent current manifestation of this perverse preoccupation. Even at this writing, condemnation of “sodomites” from church pulpits is still very common—with Christian clergymen wringing their hands as they piously proclaim that their words of hate have nothing to do with gay bashings and the murder of gays.

Christianity produces sexual misery

“[Planned Parenthood] is teaching kids to fornicate, teaching people to have adultery, every kind of bestiality, homosexuality, lesbianism — everything that the Bible condemns.” –Pat Robertson (12)

In addition to the misery produced by Christian intrusions into the sex lives of non-Christians, Christianity produces great misery among its own adherents through its insistence that sex, except the very narrow variety it sanctions, is evil, against God’s law. Christianity proscribes sex between unmarried people, sex outside of marriage, homosexual relations, bestiality, and even “impure” thoughts. Indulging in such things can and will, in the conventional Christian view, lead straight to hell.

(One indication of the Christian obsession with sex is the repeated mention of bestiality in medieval ecclesiastical writings. One 8th-century penitential [list of sins and punishments] quoted in A.A. Hadden’s Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents states: “If a cleric has fornicated with a quadruped let him do penance for, if he is a simple cleric, two years, if a deacon, three years, if a priest, seven years, if a bishop, ten years.” All this leads one to wonder just exactly how common this practice was in the medieval church.)

Given that human beings are by nature highly sexual beings, and that their urges very often do not fit into the only officially sanctioned Christian form of sexual relations (monogamous, heterosexual marriage), it’s inevitable that those who attempt to follow Christian “morals” in this area are often miserable, as their strongest urges run smack dab into the wall of religious belief. This is inevitable in Christian adolescents and unmarried young people in that the only “pure” way for them to behave is celibately—in the strict Christian view, even masturbation is prohibited. (Philip Roth well described the dilemma of the religiously/sexually repressed young in Portnoy’s Complaint as “being torn between desires that are repugnant to my conscience and a conscience repugnant to my desires.”) Thus the years of adolescence and young adulthood for many Christians are poisoned by “sinful” urges, unfulfilled longings, and intense guilt (after the urges become too much to bear and are acted upon).

Even after Christian young people receive a license from church and state to have sex, they often discover that the sexual release promised by marriage is not all that it’s cracked up to be. One gathers that in marriages between those who have followed Christian rules up until marriage—that is, no sex (and often no sex education) at all—sexual ineptitude and lack of fulfillment are all too common. Even when Christian married people do have good sexual relations, the problems do not end. Sexual attractions ebb and flow, and new attractions inevitably arise. In conventional Christian relationships, one is not allowed to act on these new attractions. One is often not even permitted to admit that such attractions exist. As Sten Linnander put it, “with traditional [Christian] morality, you have to choose between being unfaithful to yourself or to another.”

The dilemma is even worse for gay teens and young people in that Christianity never offers them release from their unrequited urges. They are simply condemned to lifelong celibacy. If they indulge their natural desires, they become “sodomites” subject not only to earthly persecution under religion-inspired laws, but to being roasted alive forever in the pit. Given the internalized homophobia Christian teachings inspire, not to mention the very real discrimination gay people face, it’s not surprising that a great many homosexually oriented Christians choose to live a lie and feign heterosexual marriage. In most cases, this leads to lifelong personal torture and gross unfairness to their spouses, who deserve someone who desires them sexually. But such internalized homophobia can have even more tragic results.

A prime example is Marshall Applewhite, “John Do,” the guru of the Heaven’s Gate religious cult, whose members committed mass suicide in 1997. Applewhite grew up in the South in a repressive Christian fundamentalist family. Horrified by his homosexual urges, he began to think of sexuality itself as evil, and eventually underwent castration to curb his sexual urges. Several of his followers took his anti-sexual teachings to heart and likewise underwent castration before, at Applewhite’s direction, killing themselves.

One strongly suspects that Applewhite, given his fundamentalist upbringing, was aware of and took to heart Christ’s words in Matthew 19:12: “For there are some eunuchs which were so born from their mother’s womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be some eunuchs which have made themselves for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it.”

Finally, the astounding level of sexual hypocrisy displayed by Christian clergymen and politicians is mute testimony to Christianity’s impossible-to-meet “moral” demands and the misery they produce. It’s also of note that the sexual behavior of repressed Christians often leaks out in incredibly unhealthy ways. The Catholic Church’s ongoing pedophilia scandal is exhibit A. A church that preaches abstinence for the unmarried, celibacy for clergy, and sex within marriage only for procreative purposes, has harbored myriad pedophiles, has shielded them from prosecution, and has made it a routine practice to shuffle them from parish to parish – thus providing them with one fresh set of victims after another.

Protestants have nothing to brag about regarding sexual hypocrisy, either. Exemplary Protestant hypocrites include the Rev. Ted Haggerd, whose meth-and-male-hooker scandal occurred while he was spiritual advisor to George W. Bush; Rev. Jimmy “I have sinned!” Swaggart, whose involvement with female hookers led to his defrocking by the Assemblies of God; homophobic Republican senator Larry “Wide Stance” Crane, who was arrested for soliciting sex in an airport bathroom; Rev. Jim Bakker, who was involved in orgies with members of both sexes – though he went to jail for financial fraud involving his Heritage USA Christian theme park; and family-values Republican senator David “Diaper Man” Vitter, who was re-elected after his hooker scandal came to light.

All of this hypocritical, sordid behavior points to one thing: Christian sexual “morality” produces so much misery that even its most ardent advocates often find Christian “morals” impossible to follow.

The Republicans’ Phony Patriotism

(First off, not all of those who voted for Trump in 2016 fall into the following category, only 75% to 80%. The remaining 20% to 25% were justifiably disgusted with the do-nothing policies of Obama/Biden/the Clintons that had left them totally screwed over economically, and just wanted to shake things up. If you’re among them, please realize that you are not who I’m talking about. I’m talking here about the real true believers, Trump’s personality cultists. There’s no reasoning with them, and it’s time to call them out for what they are.)

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We’ve all seen ’em, assholes driving around in land-raper pickups wearing MAGA hats, flying huge American flags. Using the symbol that’s supposed to stand for individual freedom and equal opportunity as a stand-in for preening jingoism, butt kissing of their glorious leader, and intimidation of those they disagree with.

They’re utter, total phonies. They systematically betray everything America is supposed to stand for.

Let’s look at specifics:

• Freedom of speech. They beat protesters at Trump rallies, and show up bearing assault weapons at anti-Trump demos to intimidate protesters (as at Charlottesville — and thank god for Redneck Revolt showing up equally well armed to oppose them). On a more mundane level, Trump routinely attacks the press — about the only real check on the misdeeds of the powers that be — as “enemies of the people,” and god help you if you refuse to participate in the mass domination/submission spectacle at the start of ballgames.
• Equality of Opportunity/Self-reliance. We’re talking about a moron who managed to bankrupt casinos, who had a silver spoon protruding from every orifice at birth, and who started receiving an “allowance” or $200,000 a year at age three — and in all a total of over $400 million from his dad. Trump is the proverbial entitled brat who was born on third base and has been bragging ever since that he hit a triple. And his sycophantic followers admire him for it.
• Independence. Republicans/Trump supporters (there’s almost no distinguishing between them at this point) are slavish members of a personality cult. Trump famously bragged that he could murder someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and his base would continue to support him. He was right, but it’s worse than that. He could strangle a puppy and sodomize its corpse on national TV, and his base would praise him for it, saying how “out of the box,” “what a different kind of president” he was. If sucking up to Dear Leader and excusing every one of his crimes is “independence,” Trump’s supporters would win a gold medal.
• Mercy. Trump puts children in cages and separates them from their parents. The members of his personality cult applaud this vicious behavior precisely because it is so vicious. All too many of them like to hurt people. They do it vicariously through Trump, and feel self-righteous about it.
• Your Tired, Your Poor. Somehow the powers that be and their tools have convinced idiot Trumpistas that people even poorer and more powerless than they are are the cause of their misfortunes. These fear-driven dumbasses actually believe that desperate people fleeing horrendous conditions in Central America are somehow threatening them. (Many of the refugees are fleeing Honduras — thank Hillary and Obama for that one with their support of the coup there in 2011, and the installation of the narco Hernández regime)  Trump’s followers concentrate their hate on these powerless scapegoats who just want work and safety for their families, while supporting a billionaire parasite who’s never done a single day’s work in his life.
• Fairness. Republicans support a system in which the three richest men in the United States own more of the wealth than the bottom 50% of the population combined, and in which unearned income is only taxed at half the rate or earned (through work) income. They support a system that is rigged in favor of the rich. They’re also so deluded that they think that a billionaire con man is somehow on their side, and that he somehow personifies the American spirit. To quote a sign I saw yesterday (carried by a goofball at the corner of First Avenue and Ft. Lowell), “God delivered Trump to us.” If so, the Westboro Baptist Church must be right, and god really must hate America.
• Loyalty. The orange cancer just capitulated to Turkish Islamist tyrant Erdogan and betrayed America’s only true ally in the Middle East, the Kurds. They lost over 11,000 soldiers fighting ISIS, and Trump just sold them out. As a result, there are already mass civilian casualties, over 100,000 have fled the Turkish invasion/bombardment, ISIS captives have been freed en masse, and America’s reputation is in shreds. Of course, the bootlickers in his personality cult will somehow find a way to praise him for this.
• Courage. Then there’s Cadet Bonespur’s draft exemption during the Viet Nam War. There were reasons in abundance to avoid involuntary servitude during that imperialistic crime against humanity. Somehow, one suspects, Trump’s draft avoidance had nothing to do with principled reasons. On a more contemporary level, Trump routinely doesn’t even have the guts to take responsibility for his own actions. The latest example is his refusal to take responsibility for betraying the Kurds, insisting, even after his capitulating phone call to the Turkish thug whose tanks then rolled into northern Syria, that he’s somehow not responsible for that, and in fact opposes it. If he’d actually opposed it, he wouldn’t have pulled back US troops and wouldn’t have told Erdogan it was okay to invade Syria. (It’s a very good bet that most Republicans in both the House and Senate are well aware of this and are disgusted by it. But they’ve placed their own political fortunes, currying favor with the Trump cultists, above what’s good for the country. How patriotic.)

Trump’s cultists are the seamy underside of America: they’re the authoritarian 25% or so of the American people who give lip service to American ideals, wrap themselves in the flag, and then betray everything the flag is supposed to stand for. Their motto might as well be “Sieg Heil Y’all.” (with a tip of the hat to the late Molly Ivins, who ages ago came up with that most apt phrase)

 

 

 

 

What We Need to Face

(First off, apologies to our long-term subscribers who were used to regular posts. Ill health, especially long-time insomnia, made regular posts difficult. I finally thought I had a remedy for this after being diagnosed with severe sleep apnea six weeks ago. Unfortunately, I’m among the approximately 20% of sufferers for whom the usual remedy, a CPAP (continuous positive air pressure) machine, does no good. In fact it made the problem worse. I’ll be returning the machine tomorrow, after a month of near torture trying to make it work.

The following comes after several zero-to-four-hour nights of sleep. Please forgive any lapses in logic. Please, and I mean please, check out any assertions from the following — I might make an occasional slight lapse, but overall I think I’m dead on. I’ve undoubtedly missed a lot of things — if you see anything , please point it out.

• The first thing we need to face is that approximately 25% of the voting public in the US are evangelical theo-fascists, who simply want to impose their warped “morality” on the rest of us; and they enjoy hurting us — they’re sadists;
• The second thing is that they’re utter hypocrites. They say they’re pro-family, but they support a thug who breaks families apart and causes irreparable harm to child victims, and death to children;
• They are NOT patriots. While they wrap themselves in the colors, make a spectacle of their supposed patriotism (as at their role-playing ballgames) they betray every decent thing America is supposed to represent: a welcome to all fleeing persecution; freedom of speech; freedom of opportunity; individual freedom to partake or not partake in “patriotic” spectacles;
• They’re so brainwashed (thanks Fox/State “News” and the Facebook echo chamber) that they don’t even recognize it;
• To be blunt, for them a day of exercise consists of an afternoon of repeated knee bends and bending over to kiss (Trump’s ample) butt, followed by an evening of goose-stepping, all to the romantic light of very fine people bearing tiki torches;

Beyond that, there are a lot of ugly truths to confront:

• Real wages peaked in 1972-1973. Productivity per hour has roughly doubled since then;
• Corporations have exported jobs overseas for decades as long as they could save 25 or 50 cents an hour;
• Those savings were made real by tax laws favoring overseas “investments”;
• Rather than understand this and confront their real oppressors, many racist idiots have attacked even more powerless victims than themselves — victims that their corporate overlords set up as scapegoats;
• Those scape-goating tools are thugs for the corporations — racists who attack scapegoats, and work to empower their own oppressors;
• And some continue to proudly ruin the environment with smoke-belching trucks while they deny that blatant problems exist;

Then there’s the unspoken problem:

• Overpopulation is a major cause of ecological problems. Yes, there are ways to make this problem less severe, but it’s a major problem nonetheless;
• Why even have overpopulation?
• There are three interconnected reasons:
• 1. Patriarchal religions encourage overpopulation as a means of increasing revenue/power/adherents;
• 2. Patriarchal religions encourage overpopulation as a means of female submission (what else can do they do with dozens of kids but take care of them and then seek solace at church?)
• 3. Overpopulation makes all the above worse, so it produces more and more desperation, and more and more dependence on the “word of God” (and it’s interpreters) — and more and more adherents and “offerings.”

The conventional “good guys” are not the saviors.

• Since the 1980s, at least, the Democrats have been the “good guy” in the good-guy/bad-guy mugging of the working class while the parasitocratic 1% picked their pockets;
• Bill Clinton once said “we’re all Republicans” — referring to his corporatist-subservient agenda;
• After the Republicans crashed the economy in 2008, Barack Obama rescued the banks, but not the millions upon millions of average Americans who lost their jobs and/or homes;
• He didn’t do shit for ’em (myself included — lost more than half my income in the following year);
• He did not prosecute a single one of the criminals responsible for the greatest financial crime in world history — not one;
• He also had pledged “the most open administration in history” and then delivered the least open in history, with vicious persecution of whistle blowers;

Both Republican, Democratic, and social democratic parties have conspired to suppress real, democratic alternative structures that might have solved the above problems/crises:

• In the 1900s/1910s/1920s the U.S. and state governments outlawed and then imprisoned on a mass scale members of the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) who advocated the takeover and management of industry, and elimination of “moralistic” laws, by self-managed unions. Thousands of IWW members languished in prison for years as a result;
• In 1918-1921, the Bolsheviks hypocritically advocated and then destroyed the self-managed “soviets” in Russia, followed by mass murder of anarchist and other self-management advocates;
• In the 1930s, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and the Spanish Falange, destroyed, along with the active complicity of the authoritarian USSR, the most important real alternative to authoritarian organization of society: the CNT (Confederación Nacional Del Trabajo/Federación Anarquista Ibérica), that lasted over two years on a mass scale — including the self-managed operation of the most heavily industrialized region of Spain, Catalonia;
• In the early 2010s, the authoritarian Obama regime coordinated the suppression of the Occupy Wall Street encampments that had sprung up nation wide; these were self-managed camps, where for the first time in their lives a hell of a lot of people experienced control over their own lives. And Obama and his minions were so frightened that that “contagion” would spread, that they crushed the encampments.

This just goes to show how frightened they are — and how much power that we potentially have.

We can self-organize the economy. We can self-organize the world. Don’t mourn, organize.

 

 

Trump Reveals What He Is

Trump backed down. He backed down from systematic child abuse and holding abused children hostage to his demand for a useless-as-tits-on-a-boar-hog border wall.

That he would even consider, let alone implement, a policy that traumatizes children and uses the abused children as hostages tells you all you need to know about him.

Add to that the fact that he wasn’t man enough to take responsibility for his horrific actions and attempted to blame others for what he did, and you really begin to understand what Trump is. (Come up with your own epithets — they’re almost certainly accurate.)

But Trump’s actions reveal more than his lack of character, they reveal the “character” of the scared-shitless Republicans in Congress who wouldn’t denounce the pure evil of deliberate, organized child abuse and holding children hostage. They wouldn’t, and won’t, stand up for what’s right if it threatens their self-interests.

As for Trump’s supporters, the most charitable explanation is that they’re brainwashed, frustrated fools (via Fox “News” and Facebook) who take the Glorious Leader’s every word as gospel, no matter how obviously false and self-contradictory. The less charitable interpretation is that they’re fear-driven, vicious racists.

I take a more charitable view:  they’re simply focused on their own economic survival, are too dumb to understand that Trump is not on their side, don’t care about the suffering of others, and are primed to blame scapegoats for their problems.

How can we reach them?

It is possible. At least in some cases. The corporate Democrats (and Republicans) systematically screwed over the white working class over the past four decades, leaving jobless, rotting, hopeless communities in their wake as they catered to the corporate overlords who funded their identity-politics, elitist campaigns. Who can blame people for being pissed off? And who can blame them, given the pathetic job the corporate media does, for being grossly misinformed?

What might bring at least some of them around is how obviously they’re being screwed by Trump and his Republican enablers. Their friends and family members will begin to die shortly, if they haven’t already, because of inadequate or nonexistent healthcare coverage. And things will only get worse — more and more people will die needlessly — as long as the Republicans are in charge and focused on ensuring profits for big pharma and the parasitic (apologies for the redundancy) healthcare insurance industries.

This is the most obvious point of attack. But the corporate Democrats (Nancy Pelosi, Diane Feinstein, Chuck Schumer, et al.) won’t even consider attacking it. They’re beholden to their corporate funders, have betrayed the white (and black, and brown)  working class for decades, and think they can continue to get away with it, simply because Donald Trump is, very obviously, a cancerous polyp on the rectum of humanity.

Pelosi, Schumer, et al. have got to go.

Offer suffering people some real relief, and they might turn away from the vicious demagogue and hypocrite Donald Trump, and his enablers.

Donald Trump seems to be gambling that the real pieces of human shit in his base, who enjoy seeing the abuse of immigrant children, will be motivated to get out and vote for his Republican minions in the midterms.

We can only hope that the forces of human decency are stronger.

 

 

 

Quote of the Day 4-8-18 (Thomas Frank)

“I don’t like Amazon, and I don’t like Donald Trump either. I would approve enthusiastically if a president started enforcing antitrust laws, but that’s not what Trump is proposing to do. What we are being offered instead is a choice between the worst president of our lifetimes and one of the most rapacious corporate enterprises in the country. And, eagerly, we are lining up with one or the other.

“This in turn seems to me an almost perfect representation of the wretched choices available to Americans these days, as well as the megadoses of self-deception we are swallowing in order to make them. It is everything that is wrong with our politics, and it extends from the most sweeping matters of state right down to the individual reader.

“. . . [T]his [is] where we are now in the world’s greatest democracy. We have the billionaire Republicans, with their bigotry and their war on all things public, and the billionaire Democrats, with their oblivious ideology of globe and technology. To the common people, assembled in all our majesty, the momentous question is posed: who do you hate more?”

— Thomas Frank, in his wonderful piece in The Guardian, “Trump’s enemy is not your friend“

(U.S. readers might not be aware of this, but The Guardian [formerly  The Manchester Guardian] is the single best news source on the Internet, including sources hidden behind a paywall [e.g., New York Times or Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post]; The Guardian is the best source, period. I like them enough that I occasionally contribute money to them. The only other news outlet that I would unreservedly recommend is The Intercept, which due to lesser financial resources posts fewer stories than The Guardian, but whose journalism is arguably of even higher quality. For opinion mixed with news, you won’t do better than Truthdig.)

Review: How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt

(How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt: Crown, 2018, 312 pp., $26.00)

 

It’s often worthwhile to point out the obvious, as Levitsky and Ziblatt have done here: the U.S. is undergoing a stress test of its democratic institutions, the increasingly authoritarian Republican Party is primarily responsible for the stress, and the means used by authoritarian parties to destroy democracy tend to be quite similar across the world.

The authors do a good job of outlining the commonalities of would-be dictators:

1. Rejection of (or weak commitment to) democratic rules of the game;
2. Denial of the legitimacy of political opponents;
3. Toleration or encouragement of violence;
4. Readiness to curtail civil liberties of opponents, including media.

The authors cite several examples to illustrate these points, including the Erdogan regime in Turkey, the Chávez regime in Venezuela, and the Trump regime (more politely, the Trump Administration) in the U.S.

They also cite three common tactics employed by authoritarians undermining democracy:

1. Capturing the “referees” (especially the courts);
2. Sidelining opponents (e.g., via slanderous charges and trumped-up criminal charges);
3. Changing the rules (e.g., restricting the right to vote).

Again, they provide numerous examples, and again Trump and his Republican enablers are prominent among them.

These examples, these case studies of the attitudes and tactics of authoritarians, are the most valuable part of the book.

As for the analysis of why things have gotten so bad in the U.S., not so much. The authors are conventional liberals who see nothing fundamentally flawed in what, from its start, has always been a weak democracy with, almost from the start, a two-party duopoly under the control of the rich. (The authors don’t mention it, but George Washington, for all his virtues, was the richest man in the 13 colonies.)

While they’re not entirely uncritical of America’s past — for example, they include a good but quite brief history of the political aspects of Jim Crow in the wake of Reconstruction — they paint a remarkably rosy picture of America’s “democratic” past, with “backroom candidate selection . . . keeping demonstrably unfit figures off the ballot and out of office.” And this in reference to Warren G. Harding(!), arguably the most corrupt and incompetent U.S. president until Trump.

The authors are also rather obtuse regarding the underlying economic reasons for the current crisis in what passes for American democracy. They blame post-1975 “economic growth slowing” plus increased ethnic diversity as being the reasons for the current breakdown of political norms.

This is simply wrong. Since real wages peaked in 1972-1973, productivity growth has averaged roughly 1.75% per year, while wages have grown not at all. This means that the amount of goods and services produced per hour worked have approximately doubled over the last 45 years, with almost all of the gains going not to those who do the work, but to those who own the corporations. As well, there has been a distinct redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top over the same period, with the top 1% now owning nearly 50% of the nation’s wealth — a trend which Obama didn’t even try to address, and which is worsening under Trump.

Is it any wonder that people are fed up? That so many voters are so fed up with their stressful economic state and the corporate-controlled two-party duopoly — essentially a choice between evil and greater evil — that 41% of those eligible to vote in the last election didn’t even show up at the polls? Is it any wonder that so many feel so much economic pain that they’ll listen to demagogues who scapegoat minorities?

The authors’ prescription to put U.S. democracy back on the rails? To oversimplify, a return to civility between Democrats and Republicans. That might involve (they say this is a remote possibility) a reformed Republican party casting out the white nationalists and other authoritarians (good luck on that), plus the Democrats fighting Trump et al. in court and on the ballot, and the Democrats advocating a few minimalist common-sense reformist measures, such as universal healthcare coverage and a significantly higher minimum wage.

In the end, the authors see nothing fundamentally flawed in the present system. If you’re looking for bold strategies to address the fundamental inequities, injustices, and outright horrors in present-day America, you won’t find it in How Democracies Die.

The book’s value, though, lies in its clear presentation of the attitudes and tactics of dictators and would-be dictators, and its many case studies of authoritarian figures and regimes.

Recommended.

Who’s responsible for this political disaster? (revised & considerably expanded)

I’ve written a lot about how the Clintons, Obama, and the the other corporate Democrats have paved the way for the current political catastrophe. How they sold us out, deliberately betrayed us.

Let’s briefly outline how all of the other equally guilty parties have  totally screwed us. This covers so much territory that it’s necessarily schematic. If you doubt any of this — it’s a matter of abundant public record — please, please investigate everything I say here. Facts are facts, “alternative facts” are just lies.

Here we go.

• Racism. The Voting Rights Act of 1964 severed the Dixiecrats from the Democratic Party. Almost immediately, the Republicans instituted their racist “southern strategy.” Until recently, it was mostly implemented via dog whistles: Willie Horton, “welfare queens,” etc. The Republicans have now reverted to overt racism. Who knew that the racism of the Christian South ran so deep? The Republicans did. LBJ thought the Democrats would lose the South for a generation because of the Voting Rights Act. He was wrong. It’s been more than half a century.
• Anti-intellectualism. To put it more baldly, pride in being ignorant, pride in being easy for scumbuckets to manipulate. To put it in Republican-speak, pride in not being a “pointy-headed intellectual.” Pride in stupidity ain’t a good thing, folks. But it’s a dominant trait in America. Admiration for Donald Trump, a dumbshit real estate heir with a fourth-grade vocabulary, an IQ probably in the 90s, and a transparently phony “I’m on your side” schtick, provides a good illustration of this.
• Industrial-Strength Ignorance. Decades ago, George Carlin said, “Think about how stupid the average person is, then realize that half of them are stupider than that.” He’d have been equally right if he’d substituted “ignorant” for “stupidity.” As an example of this ignorance, an appallingly large percentage of the population thinks that the American military is weak — while that military accounts for nearly half of world military spending. They’re ignorant enough  to buy the obvious bullshit assertion that the way to create jobs is to give ever more money to “job creators” (corporations and the top 1%). They evidently think that rich jerks, upon receiving taxpayer largesse, say to themselves, “Yeah, first thing I’m gonna do with this is drive up my labor costs by hiring more people.” (News flash here, folks: Demand drives job creation; tinkle-down economics doesn’t. (hat tip to Jim Hightower)
• Assaults on Higher Education. Thirty years ago the U.S. had the highest proportion in the world of adults with college degrees. At last count, the U.S. ranked 17th, largely because of the skyrocketing costs of higher education (annual increases averaging three times the rate of inflation). Why would the Republicans, with the collusion of all too many Democrats, permit, indeed foster, this? In general, the less educated people are, the easier they are to manipulate. As Donald Trump put it, “I love the poorly educated.”
• Disinformation. Manufactured “news.” This has been going on for years. Let’s start with the Acorn deliberate disinformation campaign, accusing this in-part moderate voter-registration campaign of fraud. The Republicans produced no evidence of this, but Fox “News” destroyed this voter-registration campaign in large part because the corporate Democrats were too gutless to call them on it. Trump has now escalated his disinformation campaign to not only routinely lying, but — without a shred of evidence — labeling all honest reporting on his vicious, irresponsible, and often moronic conduct as “fake news.”
• Voter Suppression. The prime example beyond the Acorn debacle is the utterly evidence-devoid charges that there has been massive voter fraud at the ballot box. Again, no evidence whatsoever. The result? Voter ID laws that have resulted in the disenfranchisement of millions of poor, mostly nonwhite, and elderly people. (My mom, who died last year at 99 , and who never had a driver’s license, would have had to produce ID.) At the same time, Bush stole the election in 2000, and Dumbshit lost the election by almost three million votes in 2016, while claiming, again without a shred of evidence, that millions of “illegals” were responsible for his popular-vote loss.
• Taxation without representation. Millions of people in the U.S. are disenfranchised, largely because they’ve been sentenced to prison time despite having done nothing to hurt others. We’re talking about drug “offenders” here, folks. The assertion that they “forfeited” their rights by doing or selling drugs is no more valid than the assertion that their self-righteous accusers “forfeited” their rights by being authoritarian assholes. In other words, prove the assertion. Goddamn it. Prove it.
• An Undemocratic Voting System. People here have a choice between bad and worse. Is it any wonder that 41% of eligible voters chose not to vote in the last election? A proportional or ranked voting system would have encouraged participation. As is, the voting system discourages participation. One minor example of this is that voting happens on a Tuesday with no provision for people to take time off from work to vote. Are you kidding me? Do you want people to vote or not? (The question answers itself.) And let’s not even get started on the Electoral College–a national disgrace for over two centuries that gave us both George W. Bush and Donald Trump.
• Koch Whores. At this point, money buys elections. Here in Tucson, Kock Brothers’ money bought a house seat for Martha McSally (who’s now running for the senate). Same thing across the country. The corporate Democrats with their superpacs and deep-pocketed corporate donors aren’t much better than the Republicans — overall, they just get less money.
• Authoritarianism. Probably around 30% of the American electorate are desperate for a “strong man” to goose step behind, and Trump has supplied them with one. Authoritarians want easy answers, want to abandon their responsibilities as independent, decision-making adults, and quite often are driven by sadistic, bullying impulses, which the “strong man” allows them to vent vicariously.
• Religious Fundamentalism. By its very nature, fundamentalism — blind acceptance of the commands in a “holy book” or from a “holy man” — is authoritarian, anti-intellectual. It demands blind faith and discourages, all too often physically, free inquiry and a questioning attitude. It’s no wonder fundamentalists are such enemies of free thought and free people, and want to impose their views on others: a moment’s consideration shows that their beliefs are contradiction-riddled insupportable bullshit. Is it any wonder that they flock to mean-spirited, slimeball charlatans who screw them (and their kids and neighbors) economically, but promise to impose their theocratic “moral” dictates on others. In the last election, 81% of American fundamentalists voted for Donald Trump. Trump received the votes of 26% of those eligible to vote (Clinton got 28%, and over 41% didn’t vote at all), and almost half of his 26% came from fundamentalists. Nearly a century ago, Clay Fulks, in Christianity, A Continuing Calamity, nailed it:

 

Having fundamentalists in a nation is like having congenital imbeciles in a family–it’s a calamity. Allow their mountebank, swindling leaders enough control over society and though religious faith would flourish fantastically, society would revert to the sheep-and-goat stage of culture . . . Wherefore it is perfectly irrelevant whether your fundamentalist is honest or utterly hypocritical in his religious beliefs . . . It just doesn’t matter. The question of his intellectual integrity will have to wait until he grows an intellect. In the meantime, however, what the forces of reaction are doing with him constitutes a continuing calamity.

 

 

 

Another Good Old Fashioned Religion Roundup

Things have been popping in the wild and wacky world of religion recently. Here are a few interesting, horrifying, and amusing things from the last few weeks:

• Yes, there’s now MormonWikiLeaks, for whistleblowers who want to expose the LDS Church’s secrets. One particularly useful feature of the site (on its front page) is its detailed information on installing and using the Tor browser (for secure, anonymous browsing and communications).
• Speaking of Mormons, Good4Utah.com reports six members of the horrific cult known as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS) reached a plea deal on Wednesday with federal prosecutors over a four-and-a-half-year SNAP (food stamp) scam in which FLDS members defrauded the federal government of over $12 million dollars in SNAP benefits, and handed them over to FLDS leaders who shockingly enough didn’t use them on food. The plea deal let all of the fraudsters skate, without jail time, probation or paying restitution. This might seem unjust, but one can rest assured that, in the land of “equal justice under the law,” the “punishment” would have been the same had the criminals been Muslims or atheists.
• Truthdig has a good piece titled The Truth About Jesus, which explores the historical background of Jesus and his followers and considers the historicity of the deeds and words attributed to Jesus in the Bible. The piece relies fairly heavily on the work of the Jesus Seminar, a colloquium of over 200 Protestant Bible scholars, mostly employed by religious colleges and seminaries, who undertook in 1985 a multi-year investigation into the historicity of the deeds and words attributed to Jesus. They concluded that only 18% of the statements and 16% of the deeds attributed to Jesus in the Bible had a high likelihood of being historically accurate.
• “Family values” South Carolina Republican representative and Confederate flag waver Chris Corley was arrested the day after Christmas for first-degree domestic violence. According to the arrest report, he beat his wife on the head and in the face with a closed fist before threatening her with a gun — in front of their eight-year-old daughter, who was recorded on the 911 call pleading, “Just stop Daddy. Just stop…Daddy, why are you doing this?” Earlier in the year, Corley voted to, yes, increase the punishment for domestic violence.
• In another heartening example of religion inspiring ethical behavior, the Detroit Free Press reports that Eaton Rapids, Michigan resident Kyle Craig was arrested last month for erratic driving, hitting several vehicles, and hit-and-run involving injuries to victims. Why — and do we even need to ask? — did he act so irresponsibly? Craig was powerless — he said that the devil made him do it. The Free Press reports: “Craig said he didn’t get much sleep the night before the crashes because he was reading the Bible, and was ‘sucked right in’ while he was driving.” Craig also thanked God for saving him from injury even though he wasn’t wearing a seat belt. Craig, however, had no explanation for why God didn’t save his victims from injury. (And yes, we know, God moves in mysterious ways — much as a blind, wildly swing swordsman moves through a kindergarten.)
• Finally, in a story that has no obvious connection to religion, though it certainly seems that it should, Deadspin has published its annual list based on emergency room reports, “What did we get stuck in our rectums last year?” There are some real gems, both figurative and literal, in the list. Enjoy!

Quote of the Day 12-20-15 (Jeb!)

“It’s liberating to run against a guy who’s not qualified to be president.”

–Jeb! Bush (the supposedly smart one)

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