Kevin Rhodes Fascism and Religion, Uncategorized

Since Government Can’t Govern, How About This Instead?

The Democrats think politics is about policy, which is why the Biden administration is in full failure mode and the next three and a half years will be an endless rewind/repeat of the Obama Obstructionist years.

In the meantime,  the federal government is in lockdown, and won’t get unlocked anytime soon. So how about the Democrats try something new?

President Joe and Senator Joe (why is Joe Manchin always the one who gets mentioned in the news? Because he’s male? Because Kyrsten Sinema is too… random?) agree that politics is about compromise and collaboration, the way politics used to be, because that’s how we get… wait for it… bipartisan policy solutions.

Only right now, Senator Joe has the upper hand as the lead obstructionist for the Republican Christian National Fascist QAnon Party. Never mind that the RCNFQP’s former leader – guy named McConnell – has openly declared that it will never work with the Bidenites and in fact has two agendas:  (1) obstruct everything the Bidenites want to do, and (2) keep RCNFQP supporters in a froth until they can install The Donald as King for Life.

In the meantime, RCNFQP governors and legislatures around the States (no longer the “United” States) are busy passing New Era Jim Crow voting laws to make sure American democracy has lived to see its dying day.

As a result, nothing will get done until the mid-term elections, which the RCNFOP will win by claiming that President Joe (a) didn’t do anything and (b) whatever he did was designed to destroy democracy. Then they’ll pass a slew of their own legislation and we’ll see if President Joe is willing to veto it – or maybe they’ll have enough of a majority to override his veto so who cares. Or maybe we’ll just stay in lockdown and the government won’t do any governing, which is what the Republican Free Market Libertarian Party has wanted all along.

Any way you slice it, we’ll have a nominal government, just not a functioning one. Also not a democratic one.

Welcome to the future of the USA. Your future, and mine.

So here’s a thought. Since Senator Joe is going to make sure the administration of President Neville… er, I mean Joe… is a total waste of time at time when the country has no time to waste, then how about if the organization formally known as the federal government does something else with all that time that’s going to waste — something completely un-political?

How about if, instead of governing, which they won’t be able to do anyway, they use the failure of American politics and the consequent failure of American democracy as an opportunity to talk about… well, the failure of American politics and the consequent failure of American democracy. Talk about it incessantly. Talk about nothing else. Nothing about it until everybody notices that’s all they ever talk about.

Well for starters, of course politicians don’t do that. It would be against the Code. They talk over the real issues. They posture. They spout platitudes. They fundraise. They keep up our flagging, demoralized, despairing spirits by filling us a steady line of bullshit about… well, you  know, compromise and collaboration and… wait for it… bipartisan solutions.

But what if the Chamberlains — er, I mean the Democrats — broke the rule against straight talk about what’s really going on and talked straight about… well, what’s really going on?

What if they spent the next three and a half years patiently, consistently, and meticulously putting forth their legislative agendas, and then just as patiently, consistently, and meticulously detailing everything Senators Joe and Krysten and their RCNFQP colleagues do to oppose it?

Build a record, in other words. Create it, declare it. Make it impeccable. Write the history of America’s final decline as it’s happening.

The end of American democracy and the installation of The Donald as King for Life is going to be an apocalyptic event anyway, so how about if the Chamberlains turn the Big Lie into the Big Reveal? Corruption needs darkness, secrecy, and ignorance, so be sure to keep the lights always on and the mics always hot. Keep an exhaustively detailed chronicle. Curate videos and sound recordings. Name names.

They could give the project a cool name — I’d vote for “The Book of Revelation.” (I know that’s been taken, but that book is really, really old and besides, I’m pretty sure it should be in the public domain by now – assuming that anything set aside for the benefit of the public still exists.)

Revelation:  all files opened, classified access breeched, proprietary information violated, everything hacked, all open source, no secrets anymore, nothing hidden, nothing unknown, the seals all broken, all safes cracked, all containers ransacked and their contents strewn across a million conference tables, all motives revealed, all missing links discovered.

Take out full-page ads of voting records. Talk constantly about who said what when, where, and to whom. Share it with the Universities. Share it with Hacker Nation and WikiLeaks. Share it with friend and foe. Share it until everybody’s sick of it. Put it in the public domain. Make it open source. Start a new WikiBookofRevelation. And make sure it’s backed up to the Cloud, on its own blockchain, copies proliferated everywhere, coded so that any time somebody tries to shut it down it replicates itself a zillion more times. Bury it in silos, shoot it into space (send it to Mars with Elon), hide it on the moon, send it out of the solar system on a new Voyager. Whatever – just make sure everybody knows everything, forever.

If the Bidenites can’t govern, it will give them something useful to do. They can at least make a contribution – as opposed to, for example, muttering and mumbling and reminiscing about the good old days when the government governed, when the citizens voted for representatives to transact the business of the shared interests of the nation’s communal life.

When was that, exactly?

I know it sounds like I’m being sarcastic, but I’m not. I honestly think it would be a good use of the Bidenites’ time – probably the only use of their time, much more useful than waiting for the RCNFQP to play nice, which everyone but the Bidenites know is never ever ever not in a million American years ever going to happen. (Not that there are ever going to be a million American years, since we have at most three and a half left.)

History would thank them.

Just think what it would be like to have a steady source of open, factual, credentialed, accountable documentary. I know – too much to ask, way way too much to ask.

And who knows… if that’s all they ever talked about, maybe somebody somewhere might actually start to wonder why.

So that’s my advice for what to do with a government that can’t govern. I realize nobody asked for my advice, that I’m not qualified or authorized to give it, and nobody will read or pay attention to it anyway, so why do I bother?

Because sometimes you just have to take a moment to scream into the void.

Even though you never, ever, ever get an echo back.

Kevin Rhodes Belief Systems and Culture, Knowledge, Conviction, and Belief, The Long Reads

Beliefism [6]: Christianity and Self-Help Do The Impossible

I was a Christian for two and half decades and a self-helper for a few years after that. Both had the same source code for doing the impossible. Jesus was the original coder and pitchman:

“All things are possible for one who believes.” Mark 9:23 ESV

“Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him.” Mark 11:23 ESV

This is classic mind over matter – or more accurately, heart over matter. Ask “Where’s your heart?” and most people would point to the place in your chest and throat where you feel strong emotion. The belief that moves mountains is something you feel strongly. Plus you need to not doubt. Doubt is when you switch the channel to your intellect and wonder if it’s really going to work. Finally, you have to believe that the thing you want “will come to pass.”

“Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.” Mark 11:24 ESV

That’s classic power of positive thinking – no surprise that self-help is all over it:  visualize, use “affirmations,” create vision boards, keep it fresh by buy buy buying more books, classes, seminars, and conferences, and if you’re really serious, hire a coach.

Jesus, on the other hand, preferred to ramp up the emotional commitment with inspirational stories about being persistent (the widow who pestered the judge, the guy who pestered his neighbor, etc.) and about going all in on your heartfelt ideas (the pearl merchant who sold his entire inventory to buy one perfect pearl).

Let’s give this a try.

One night a circuit-riding evangelist told our campus Christian group we could use all that believing in our hearts, not doubting, and believing we had already received it to heal anything we wanted. I was nearsighted. Next day I put my glasses in my pocket and sailed out across campus. People kept saying hi and I didn’t know who they were. I felt stupid and antisocial, and was getting a headache. I put my glasses back on.

When it Doesn’t Work

Beliefism’s response when the mountain doesn’t move is…

  • It’s all your fault.

You don’t have enough faith. You’re doubting. You don’t actually think it’s going to happen./

As in Jesus’s stories, belief only has one solution:  go deeper, further, invest more, take a bigger risk. Belief seeks its own perfection through the elimination of doubt — that’s why extreme belief always  ends up as fundamentalism. Once you’re in, you need to get further in, and you can’t look back and start questioning, because that would be doubt. Trouble is, if it didn’t work the first time, it’s probably not going to work the third or the thirtieth – you can double down, triple down, quadruple down, but nothing is ever enough. You’re trying to move a mountain – or walk across campus without your glasses – which is something you’ve never done before, and of course you’re going to be wondering if it’s going to work or not. But as soon as you start wondering, that’s doubt, and doubt means it’s over. So cover your ears and eyes and plunge forward.

Rewind, repeat.

How much faith do you need?

Jesus makes it sound like it shouldn’t have to be that much.

“For truly, I say to you, if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you.”[a] Matthew 17:20 ESV

Most of us have never opened a package of mustard seeds to see what size they are, but we assume from the context that a mustard seed must be small, so when it comes to believing things, small is beautiful. That’s how this advice was rendered when I was a Christian.

Nothing like a little false consolation on Sunday morning.

Start talking about mustard seeds and now you’re trying to measure faith. Christians did that all the time. “I don’t have enough faith.” “I need to pray harder.” “I wish I had more faith.” “I need to stop doubting.” Things like that. It’s crazy-making.

One thing is sure:  the buck stops with you. If the thing you want doesn’t happen, you fail. You didn’t believe enough, you’re doubting, etc. etc.

But there is something else you might try….

Schmoozing the Old Man

“Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son.” John 14:13 ESV

“Be sure to use my name when you ask my dad for stuff,” Jesus advises, “he likes that, because he likes to take the credit for what happens.” That advice is why Christians end prayers with “in Jesus’ name, amen.”

But wait… we started with Jesus saying we could tell themountain to move. Now we’re fussing about asking.

Read the fine print, I guess.

One of Jesus’s disciples refined it further:

 And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us. And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him. 1 John 5:14-15 ESV

So if we want to be confident – i.e., not doubt – we need to ask “according to his [God’s] will.” As a friend used to say, we need to ride the horse in the direction it’s already going. This is Belifism’s second response when the impossible doesn’t’ happen:

  • The thing you want has to be God’s will.

The impossible we want has to be something God already has in mind, otherwise it’s not going to happen. Even Jesus wasn’t couldn’t get a free pass on this one.

We’ll talk about that next time.

Kevin Rhodes Fascism and Religion, Uncategorized

My Wife Thinks I Should Give Up Following Politics

She’s probably right.

It’s not like I’m in a rage about it. I don’t do rage. That’s for the other side. I do despair instead. That’s what my side does — despair over how the USA’s federal government actually works. For example, I never knew that one Senator – ONE SENATOR – could completely shut down a newly elected President’s entire legislative agenda. The entire agenda of a newly elected Presidential administration defeated by one Senator – ONE SENATOR….

I mean, didn’t we just have an election that the newly elected President won? Popular vote:  81,282,916 to 74,223,369. Electoral College vote:  306 to 232. Does that qualify as a win? Only if you voted for the winner. If you voted for the loser, no. If you lost, the other guy didn’t just win, he stole it from you. Talk about a sore loser.

But the fortunately for the sore losers, the newly elected President (the one the rest of us actually think did in fact win) isn’t a sore winner. He and his cronies think that, now that we’ve put Tweet-Whatever-You-Want-As-Long-As-It-Keeps-Stoking-The-Rage behind us, politics can get back to what it was in the good old days, when Democrats and Republicans worked together for the good of the nation and compromise was king (not some  power and… um, other things… grabbing lunatic).

So when exactly was that?

I mean, politics has been politics for a long time – like when Strom Thurmond pulled his epic solo all-nighter filibuster of the Civil Rights Act of 1957, and a relay team of ramblers kept the Civil Rights Act of 1964 at bay for 60 Senate work days.

Yep, those were the good old days alright.

I’m sure I would have been throwing fits then, too, if I’d been old enough to notice or to care. It’s just that now feels different, like there’s more at stake. It feels like back then people were trying to replace bad stuff with good stuff — you know, like we shouldn’t have separate “Colored” entrances and seating areas and that kind of thing. But now we’ve got half of Americans and their Nutcase-Conspiracy-Theory-Fascist-Christian-Believe-Anything-You-Want-And-Say—Anything-You-Want Party doing their best to dismantle democracy and install their King For Life (or at least 12 more years) right in front of our very eyes, and somehow that doesn’t create any political urgency to get some things done before that can actually happen — which it will if we don’t.

Seems like dinking around with self-congratulatory God Bless America bromides might be missing the moment.

Plus, we’ve got all these… well, um, issues…  that seem pretty big and daunting, and that if we could do something about them we might make the USA into something other than the Capitalist-Militarist-Speak-Loudly-And-Hit-‘Em-With-A-Big-Stick regime it’s become  — you, know, the kinds of issues that currently paralyze the bottom 90%, so that we have only two response options left to us – rage or despair. Plus it seems like if we made some adjustments we could seriously change a lot of things for a lot of people and maybe avoid an inevitable descent into the New Dark Ages, and meanwhile the billionaires could keep enough to be able to feel like nothing fundamentally changed and it would still be okay that Trickle Down never did.….  

There’s a long list of those adjustments that might possibly enable us to take a step back from the edge of the Abyss:

  • Healthcare
  • Education
  • Student loans
  • Economic equality
  • Downward mobility
  • A living wage
  • Affordable housing
  • Infrastructure
  • Accessible internet for all
  • Voting rights
  • Immigration
  • Climate change
  • Mass incarceration
  • Police racial killings
  • Domestic terrorism
  • Gun (mass killings) control
  • Campaign finance
  • The fleecing of the middle class
  • The end of science
  • Runaway defense spending
  • Nationalism/populism
  • Plastics, plastics everywhere
  • The systematic end of parks, public lands, and open spaces
  • Reparations for slavery
  • Reparations to native Americans
  • An end to misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia
  • Gender identity acceptance and kindness
  • A return of public discourse based on intelligence, reason, science, truthfulness, ethics…

And I’m just getting warmed up. That’s only the stuff on the surface. Let’s not even talk about the worldviews and ideologies and belief systems and cultural norms underneath all of that.

“Socialism,” is the one word That-Settles-It-Talk-To-The-Hand response of the Weirdest-Conspiracy-Theory-Ever-By-A-Long-Shot Party. (Well, that and “Trump in 2024” — but that’s three words assuming “2024” counts as a word.)

Meanwhile, the sole plank in their platform is, “Trump at all costs.” Impressively expansive thinkers, those Republicans….

I just never thought we’d be here, that’s all. I have this ridiculously persistent idea that we’re supposed to have a government to “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”  Preamble to the Constitution of the United States of America

I just never knew we didn’t.

We already lived through eight years of Obstruction Politics. That should be enough for one lifetime – enough to stomp the hope and change right out of the most Yes-We-Can hearts. At the rate we’re going, the Obstructionist Party — bolstered by all of its friends in the states who are busy passing anti-voter laws — is going to be ramrodding through its own legislation two years from now.

It’s like we should all be happy that the Nutcase Fascist Christian Etc. Man-Who-Would-Be-King-And-Is-Royally-Pissed-He’s Not isn’t officially President anymore. We actually had a few weeks there without the several times a day onslaught of Don’t Bother With The Truth… and people like me were kind of feeling like maybe we could kind of relax a little. But then Marjorie Taylor Greene stepped into the role and now we all know her name and… well, does anyone else think she’s positioning herself as the Nutcase Heir Apparent? If that sounds too pessimistic then, okay, maybe she’s just really and truly that far off the rails. But no matter, people like me definitely can’t relax anymore.

All because one Senator – ONE SENATOR – has taken it upon himself to keep Trump in power by making sure Biden can’t do anything. It would take that one Senator’s vote, together with his 49 Democratic Party Senate colleagues to end the Era-Of-Obstruction-Is-Our-Game- Until-We-Can-End-This-Democracy-Thing-For-Good.

One lousy stinking vote.

Not going to happen.

So never mind the election we just had. And never mind who won or who had it stolen from them. All that relief? All that daring to hope? We dared to feel relief and hope back in 2008. It didn’t get us anywhere then, what were we thinking this time around? I mean, really… what were we thinking?

All that thinking we might get past a federal government and its autocratic leader who thinks it’s really okay to turn the U.S.’s Don’t-Mess-With-Us military against its own citizens, and if you don’t think that’s where the Nutcase Fascist Christian Etc. Party will take us if their King returns triumphantly to the throne… well then, you seriously haven’t been paying attention.

All because one Senator – ONE SENATOR – won’t vote to trash the filibuster – assuming the newly elected President would ever ask his colleagues in the Senate to do it, which he’d rather not. After all, he has a campaign promise to keep, which means we have miles to go before we sleep. “Nothing will fundamentally change,” he promised a crowd of donors back in 2019. Right on, Joe. Looks like you’re going to keep that one.

But the rest of us, we were just kind of hoping, that’s all.…

Kevin Rhodes Belief Systems and Culture, Knowledge, Conviction, and Belief, Religion, The Long Reads

Beliefism [5]: The “Do the Impossible” Gospel

Reality. Illusion. Delusion. Possible. Impossible. How do you know which is which?

Did that really happen?!

In 1983 David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty disappear in front of a live television audience.

Except he didn’t. The statue was still there, it just looked like it wasn’t.

A magician manipulates our attention – we follow the decoy and miss the trick. An illusionist manipulates our perception – we look right at it but don’t see it. David Copperfield was performing as an illusionist – he didn’t change reality, he changed the audience’s perception of it. They only thought he did something impossible.  

Impossible can’t happen, by definition. The odds against it are infinite. If something impossible happens, the realm of possibility expands to take it in. The thing we declared was impossible wasn’t impossible after all – we only thought it was.

Christianity and self-help share the same “do the impossible” gospel. Can they actually pull it off? Let’s look at the self-help version first.

Self-Help Does the Impossible

Roger Bannister breaking the “impossible” four-minute mile barrier has become a self-help gospel trope. You can find a version of the following just about anywhere — I found it on a job website:

“Bannister broke the psychological barrier that had held back the greatest runners for over a century. Other runners now believed wholeheartedly that it was possible. It is no surprise then that within a few years, several other runners broke the four-minute mile too.

“For the majority of us who will never attempt to break a running record, the four-minute mile represents the limiting beliefs of what we think is possible to achieve in our lives.

“We tend to limit our goals in business, relationships, finance, health and profession within the realm of what society says is possible or impossible. But throughout history, there are a handful of people like Bannister, who break the limits of what’s possible and leave a lasting legacy.

“What makes them different isn’t their talent, skills or resources, but their belief system. They’d rather take the lead, step outside their comfort zone and risk failure, than wait in their comfort zone for permission from others to achieve the impossible.

“Followers wait for leaders to show them what’s possible. Leaders break the barriers of what’s possible.

“Which one will you choose?”

Talk about rewriting history to match your sales pitch….

Raise your hand if you think limiting beliefs and comfort zones and the rest of the self-help mumbo-jumbo was going through anybody’s minds at the time.

Me neither.

Now raise your head if you think all the other runners suddenly “believed wholeheartedly” that they could do it, too.

Me neither.

That was 1954. Roger Bannister was a competitive runner – of course he “would rather take the lead.” Duh. But now, we’ve got the four-minute mile self-help gospel memorized. Want something that feels impossible? The problem is your limiting beliefs. Believe you can have it, then go for it — break out of your comfort zone, take a risk. Ta da! – you did the impossible!

Don’t you wish.

Christianity Does the Impossible

Self-help has deep roots in Christianity – the original believe-the-impossible-into-existence religion. Here’s what Jesus said:

“All things are possible for one who believes.” Mark 9:23 ESV

“Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him.” Mark 11:23 ESV

“All things.” Nothing left out. Carte Blanche . Believe what you want, don’t doubt, and it’s yours. You can move mountains.  Nothing will be impossible for you.

Raise your hand if you’ve done the impossible that way, or seen it done that way — live and in person, in real space and time.

Me neither. But that didn’t stop me from trying for over two decades.

Reality. Illusion. Delusion.

The idea of doing the impossible plays with our notions of how much “reality” is objective — the thing is really there, whether we think so or not – vs. subjective – the thing is only there because we think it is. If we only think it’s there, we can think it somewhere else. But if it’s really there, well now that’s a different story.

Current neuroscience says it’s both and neither. There’s external (on the other side of our skin) stimuli coming at us, but we don’t have any way to actually find out what’s “out there” because our experience of it is entirely shaped inside the hot, wet biology of our bodies and brains (inside our skin). So people like celebrity neuroscientist Beau Lotto think there’s no such thing as delusion, because everything is an illusion – reality isn’t out there, it’s in here, it’swhat we make up inside ourselves. (Yes, there is such a thing as a celebrity neuroscientist, and yes, that’s what Beau Lotto is. For lots more, check out and his book, TED talks, and Lab of Misfits.)

I get that… I think… sort of… at least the part about internally processing external stimuli. But I still think there’s such a thing as delusion – especially if the topic is doing the impossible – mostly because I’m quite sure I was delusional about it for all those years.

“Then I’ll get on my knees and pray/ we don’t get fooled again!”

I became a Christian as the 1960’s rolled into the 1970’s. It was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, and the Jesus Freaks fit right in. Their Jesus served up counter-cultural radical ideas like turning the other cheek (“all we are saying/ is give peace a chance”) and loving your neighbor (“c’mon people now/smile on your brother/everybody get together/try to love one another right now”). Their Jesus tossed out predatory capitalism and invited us into charity and community and trusting our “Heavenly Father” for food, clothing, and shelter. Their Jesus upended our assumptions about what was true and how the world worked, and taught us to believe the impossible into existence. Their Jesus was always sticking it to the Man and liked to hang out and party with the losers (freaks) of his day. I was 19 and ripe for a way to be a Hippie without being stoned all the time. Of course I joined up.

Eventually I cut my hair and got a real job, but stayed committed to proving that Jesus’s counter-cultural, new truth, do-the-impossible vibe worked in primetime adult life. I wore a suit and tie (!) to work, but still pushed the Jesus Freak agenda to the max, and might still be doing that if I hadn’t gotten lucky and got myself kicked out of the “church renewal movement” I was part of for doing exactly what I’d been taught. (A story I’ve told elsewhere and won’t repeat here.)

On the way out of Christianity, I stumbled into self-help. It lacked Christian ecclesiology, iconography, doctrine, vocabulary, and historical trappings, so for awhile I thought it was some kind of new psychology-based way to successful living – which is precisely what the self-helpers want us to think. But after awhile, it was all too familiar. “God” was often still “God” but more often “the Universe.” The Bible was misquoted in pseudo-Biblical sound bytes. Jesus was mentioned now and then – usually with the lame “good teacher” title —  and sometimes was completely reinvented — like when The Secret declared that he was a millionaire. And on it went. Before long it was clear that self-help was a wannabe substitute religion for Christianity. Its belief dynamics were identical. Like Christianity, it declared that doing the impossible could become the new normal if we just believed. Both religions claimed they could show you how believe effectively enough to get the impossible things you wanted.

As far as I can tell, Plato was the first one to write, “wisdom is what works.” I pushed the “do the impossible” gospel to the point where it finally failed the “wisdom is what works” test so completely I couldn’t make excuses for it anymore.

If that’s not delusion, it’ll do till the real thing comes along.

Now I’m in recovery. I’m done with doing the impossible. That shit is toxic to me now. I can’t go anywhere near it.

Next time, we’ll look at the beliefism source code for both religions.

Kevin Rhodes Belief Systems and Culture, Socialism, The Long Reads, Uncategorized

“Nobody wants to work anymore.” Oh please…

“Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do.” — Oscar Wilde

The April jobs numbers are out, they’re lower than forecast, and the Republicans are crying “Socialism!”

“Nobody wants to work anymore.” Somebody who is capable of saying that believes a few essential things: 

  1. “Nobody” – that is, people in general — are lazy, unmotivated, irresponsible, and ignorant. They don’t get it. They don’t get that working at a job is the essential fuel that keeps the USA’s economic fires burning. The USA is nothing without a bull market IPO unicorns free privatize everything social Darwinism free market capitalism on steroids funning at full tilt. In fact, our nation is here on the Earth to carry this torch. We must hold it high. That’s our destiny, our plan, our purpose.
  2. Because people are lazy, unmotivated, and all the rest, we can’t help them out when they’re trying to not starve and not become homeless while surviving a pandemic (um.. “pandemic” means worldwide, like all around the world, the whole planet…) that has killed nearly 600,000 in the USA alone. Even if they needed some help with basic survival, we need to yank the rug out from underneath them in order to fire up our economic engine  — which by now everyone knows isn’t built to help them out, it’s capitalism built to benefit capitalists, Since they won’t do it willingly, we need to force them back into survival, scrambling-to-somehow-make-it mode. That’s when things get done around here.
  3. If we do that, we will build their character. We will make them strong. They will be the rugged individualistic stock that built America. They will sustain this great country into its glorious manifest destiny city on a hill future.
  4. And, I – the speaker — am exempt from all my own accusations. I am above it all, I am of better character than the great unwashed “nobody.” I am justified in arrogantly pronouncing that “nobody wants to work anymore.” I am right and true and noble and visionary when I label any policy “socialism” that would molly-coddle the lousy lazy bastards — without bothering to understand what “socialism” actually is, that it is not in fact synonymous with Communism, that the “free market” is not and has never been free, that tax breaks and pro-monopoly, anti-union, anti-minimum wage, and all the rest are a warped version of socialism in action). Not me. I am better. I am pure. I am on the top of the heap, a member of the club of what all true Americans would be if they would just get a job.
  5. And I – the speaker — can get away with insulting the “people” because they also believe I’m not actually talking about them, I’m not calling them lazy, unmotivated, irresponsible, and ignorant.” They, like me, believe they are also above it all, they are willing to fight for their own survival and they don’t need any stinking help from the government, and that’s the American way. I am my constituents are united in outrage, united in our belief that the problem is Them—the Mexicans and Asians and Moslems and Blacks and anybody else whose skin color isn’t classified as “white” – all those and immigrants and other lowlifes and people from shithole countries who are responsible for all this mess and who believe that there really was (and still is) a pandemic and that getting vaccinated is a good idea.

The April jobs data might have more to tell us than the average brainless if-you-don’t-understand-or-like-it-call-it-socialism Republican is capable of processing.[1] The problem is not that we’re lazy and don’t want to work and therefore need a good swift kick in the butt to get out there and show some character and initiative for a change. The problem is that the Republicans still live in a reality where The Job is everything. The Job is what made American a militarist fascist heartless capitalist powerhouse. The Job is the USA’s gift to mankind. The Job is the cornerstone of civilization.

It never would occur to a true believer in The Job that the great unwashed nobodies aren’t all that excited about working long hours, barely making enough to get by (if that), never having time off, sacrificing family and social life to work-induced zombie-ism. Or that The Job is the lifeless icon of a “free” market that is utterly failing at providing affordable housing, affordable higher education, affordable healthcare, or affordable anything else to the majority of the Americans.

The problem with The Job is that it’s crappy work with crappy hours for crappy pay. The only reason the benefits aren’t also crappy is because there aren’t any benefits. Which is pretty crappy.

The Job sucks. That’s pretty much a guarantee. The Job sucks because the boss probably sucks, and so does the corporation that pays its CEO a gazillion times more than The Job will pay America’s lazy slobs throughout their only-in-your-dreams lifetimes.

The Job sucks because the capitalist free market has been twisted and turned and distorted and warped to the point that capitalism only benefits capitalists. Capitalists don’t make a living at The Job, they make money by having capital – money, lots of money – something people with The Job will never have. And they make lots of money by making sure the lazy slobs of the world have to make a living at The Job. The Job fuels the capitalist engine, and never mind that technology is rapidly making The Job obsolete, so that one day those who work at jobs will become one more non-recyclable waste product loser of competitive zero-sum capitalism. But don’t tell anybody – let ‘em keep believing.

The politicians are good with all that. Let the lazy little fuckers work, don’t they see we’re busy here in Washington making the world safe for capitalism and militarism and totalitarianism? Don’t they see we’re busy making it as hard as possible for people to exercise their last bit of democratic power – the right to vote? People want all this quality of life bullshit – that’s socialism, and it would be the end of America. Socialism gives people stuff to make them happy! That’s as bad as it gets, my friends. Now get back to work. Get off your lazy butt and do your part. Go get The Job.

There never was a Golden Era of The Job. Radio journalist Studs Terkel interviewed hundreds of people for his 1974 book Working. Here are a couple quotes from it:

“Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.”

“Most of us have jobs that are too small for our spirit. Jobs are not big enough for people.”

The Job hasn’t changed since Working came out. A few years back, a professor named David Graeber got more than 15 minutes of fame from his On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs:  A Work Rant (2013):

“In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshalled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.”

Why has it become inflammatory to suggest that boring, meaningless work might not be a good thing? Because of the widespread “truths” about work that have become culturally sacred – and not just to Republicans. Another professor, James Livingston, also gave The Job a thorough shredding a few years back in his book No More Work:  Why full employment is a bad idea(2016)::

“Work means everything to us. For centuries–since, say, 1650[2]–we’ve believed that it builds character (punctuality, initiative, honesty, self-discipline, and so forth). We’ve also believed that the market in labor, where we go to find work, has been relatively efficient in allocating opportunities and incomes. And we’ve also believed that even if it sucks, the job gives meaning, purpose, and structure to our everyday lives–at any rate we’re pretty sure that it gets us out of bed, pays the bills, makes us feel responsible, and keeps us away from daytime TV.”

“Those beliefs are no longer plausible. In fact, they’ve become ridiculous, because there’s not enough work to go around, and what there is of it won’t pay the bills–unless, of course, you’ve landed a job as a drug dealer or a Wall Street banker, becoming a gangster either way.”

“[Work] no longer functions as either a moral calendar or an economic calculator. You will learn nothing about character by going to work at the minimum wage because the gangsters or the morons at corporate headquarters control your opportunities; you will learn nothing about the rationality of the market because the same people determine your income.

“When we place our faith in hard work, we’re wishing for the creation of character; but we’re also hoping, or expecting, that the labor market will allocate incomes fairly and rationally. And here’s the rub:  they do not go together. Character can be created on the job only when we can see that there’s an intelligible, justifiable relation between past effort, learned skills, and present reward. When I see that your income is completely out of proportion to your production of real value, or durable goods the rest of us can use and appreciate (and by “durable” I don’t mean just material things0, I begin to doubt that character is a consequence of hard work.

“When I see, for example, that you’re making millions by laundering drug cartel money (HSBC), or pushing bad paper on mutual fund managers (AIG, Bear Stearns, Morgan Stanley, Citibank), or preying on low-income borrowers (Bank of America), or buying votes in Congress (all of the above)–just business as usual on Wall Street–while I’m barely making ends meet from the earnings of my full-time job, I realize that my participation in the labor market is irrational. I know that building my character through work is stupid because crime pays. I might as well become a gangster like you.”

The Job was already in trouble long before our government dared to soften the impact of a vicious pandemic – despite the Republican President and the rest of the Republicans and their supporters protesting — still to this day, after nearly 600,000 USA deaths (geez, people, what does it take??!!) — that it was all a hoax, it would go away if we ignored it, and getting vaccinated is a Commie plot, and as for the pandemic (worldwide) part, who cares about the rest of the shithole world and those pompous-ass European snobs anyway, we got MAGA.

So what happened while people actually got a few hundred dollars a week to save them from starvation and homelessness (yes, things were… and still are… that dire for millions of people), they got enough relief from The Job to see how crappy it really is. Be in a hurry to go back to that crap? Maybe not.

What we’re seeing from the crappy low jobs numbers is that The (Crappy) Job is a dying American institution. Wave the flag all you like, but The (Crappy) Job ain’t coming back. People who can think have been saying that for awhile, but it took a worldwide plague to reveal that to the rest of us (Republicans excluded). Reveal – revelation – is at the heart of what the word “apocalypse” means. The Republicans missed the revelation. American workers had an apocalypse, but the Republicans were too busy ignoring reality to notice. They’re still blind. They still believe in The (Crappy) Job. They’ll never get it. Never. Just like they’ll never get what socialism really means, that it’s not synonymous with Communism, that it does in fact co-exist nicely with private enterprise, and that yes, it thinks “We The People” deserve more from life than The (Crappy) Job.

How can you say, “Nobody wants to work anymore” without gagging on your silver spoon?

I guess they learn that in Republican school.

[1] See, e.g., ‘No one wants to work anymore’: the truth behind this unemployment benefits myth | US unemployment and employment data | The Guardian (May 7, 2021).

[2] 1650 is the year René Descartes died.

Kevin Rhodes Atheism, Belief Systems and Culture, Knowledge, Conviction, and Belief, The Long Reads

Beliefism [Part 4]: Believing is Seeing/ Belief Turns Toxic

Believe your way into a new reality – visualize it, set an intention, create a vision board… soon you’ll manifest it! You’ll get the mansion, the corner suite, the all-inclusive beach vacation! That’s how life works – it’s the law.

So goes the self-help gospel, and guess what? It works. Well sort of. The world does conform to what you believe. You actually do see what you believe. Belief creates worldview, worldview creates reality, and there it is – right in front of you.

Only trouble is, it’s a self-validating loop. You are in fact seeing what you’re believing. And that’s a problem.

Behold Your Algorithm

Belief works like the Algorithm Gods. You shop something online, now it’s all over your feeds. You think, oh come on, that’s so obvious. But algorithms are dumb, they don’t know any better, they just crunch the data. You looked at some ads, you must want to see more, and never mind that you already bought it — algorithms are slow to get to message. Our brains process belief the same way – they’re fleshy lumps of responsiveness. Once you believe something, your brain is on it. Get interested in that car and it’s all you see on the road — it’s the same dynamic, except once you buy it, your brain is quicker to move on.

Join the Club

The Algorithm Gods offer up social media support to keep you focused and happy so you’ll tithe that five-star review. Our brains have been doing the same thing for a long, long time – long before the Algorithm Gods were a gleam in some techie’s eye, since the human race developed language about 150,000 years ago. You tell somebody what you believe, and their brain zips through the dummy algorithm belief thing, and now there’s two of you with neuropathways installed and running the same outlook on life. Then the two of you then share it with a bunch of other somebodies who share it with more, and soon everybody’s brains dutifully line up and you’ve got a group, team, tribe, cult…

When communal belief goes viral, it consolidates, strengthens its grip on all those brains. They share a similar outlook, which creates similar experience, which reinforces similar outlook, and around it goes. All that similar outlook and experience builds institutions, creates cultural norms, myths, and symbols. Now you’ve got law, government, economics, religion, literature, history….

The process is known as emergence:  what starts inside (as belief) takes on external shape; the word becomes flesh and dwells among us until we share worldview and reality. If you don’t see it the way the community does, it’s because you don’t believe. Change what you believe, and you’ll get with the program.

Beliefism 101

I was immersed (baptized – literally) into this communal belief dynamic when I went back to college after becoming a Christian during a gap year. At first I hung out with my old friends in party central, but it  was boring, listening to Led Zeppelin when everybody else was taking hits when the joint went around. So I hung out on my new dorm floor, which was not a party animal zoo, and we got busy doing the non-party things you do at college.

I’d see my new Christian friends at meetings, say hi around campus, sometimes join them for lunch… but before long I got the word:  I needed to be around more. I needed to stay “in fellowship,” needed to sit with the pack at meals, that sort of thing. I was new at the Christian gig, so I complied. I complied so well that pretty soon I’d been selected to be “discipled” by the leadership, so I could help take over and run the fellowship after they graduated.

That was the end of my new friends in my new dorm. My roommate was a nice guy from Iowa, a serious student who’d lived — , mostly as a spectator — in party central where I did the year before my gap year. After I got my calling into campus Christian leadership, I became the Christian Roommate From Hell – never around, always too tired from being up late every night “doing ministry,” nothing to talk about anymore, always doing something weird, apparently too uppity to hang out and do the usual dorm stuff. It never occurred to me to change course – my new Christian life was too important.

Sigh.

Beliefism is the same, no matter the object of belief.

What I experienced was communal belief in action – the power of a shared belief system to control thought and behavior – what I now call “beliefism.” I have since converted back out of Christianity, where I’ve learned that what I experienced back then would have been the same if I had joined a different belief system (such as the campus Communists, which my roommate accused me of doing). Beliefism readily swaps belief in this for belief in that — religion, humanism, capitalism, fascism, extraterrestrials, self-help, past lives, you name it, it’s all the same.

Beliefism also doesn’t distinguish fact from fiction, truth from madness, clarity from delusion. Reason and discernment only enter the frame once beliefism has built its self-referential judgments about what is reality and how things really work – that’s when they get busy codifying what conforms and what doesn’t, what to encourage and promote vs. what to punish or eradicate. They also start keeping a list and naming names of who’s with the program and who isn’t, who belongs and who doesn’t, who’s friend and who’s foe, who’s us and who’s them.

Communal belief and its institutions manage entrances and exits, enforce conformity, and punish dissent, resulting in a special kind of brain shutdown known in other circles as “mind control” as “brain washing” – terms coined in the Korean War and developed in the Cold War, when American fingers pointed at China and the Commies because we’re the good guys and we would never do that! Yes we would. We do it all the time. It’s an everyday, worldwide experience – it’s what happens to the human brain and to human culture when we build individual and cultural identity around beliefs.

Brain Shutdown

Beliefism shuts down nonconforming brain activity. There are some places we just don’t go – they’re out of bounds, they don’t conform. We don’t see them because we don’t believe them. Our mental options are now limited – like what was going on in the mind of the street evangelist I heard once who made a pitch for Creationism. “The universe is way too complicated for me to understand,” went his pitch, “so there must be a God who does.” That was his proof for the existence of God, and for Creationism. He could have understood the complicated universe if he took the time to learn the math and physics, but instead he took the shortcut:  he believed instead of knowing. But then beliefism led him to take another step:  he started knowing what he believed it was The Truth, with two capital T’s. His reality was True; the rest of us unsaved people waiting for buses needed to get clued in.

He wasn’t in possession of all that Truth and Reality, his brain was possessed by it – his brain was running it over the requisite neural pathways, supported by the requisite brain chemicals. That’s why he was certain that he knew something else the rest of us didn’t. Being a decent sort of a guy, since he was now in possession of the Real Reality Forever and Ever Amen, it was worth lugging his amp and microphone to the street corner across from the bus station to tell the rest of us about it. He was there on the street corner to help us out, because part of his pitch was that if we didn’t get it right, we’d all go to hell. But the good news was, all we needed to do was believe what he believed and we’d be good, no problem.

The Path to Toxic Belief

It’s not hard to see how belief’s mind control goes toxic. Beliefism runs in stealth mode:  we see the things we believe and all the doctrines, ideologies, societal structures, institutions, and practices that support it, but we don’t see beliefism at work. Like a friend of mine used to say, “The trouble with blind spots is you can’t see them.” We don’t notice or examine the worldview our beliefs have created, or how that worldview creates and sustains our world. Instead, we see the emergent reality and accept it as The Way Things Are, Forever and Ever Amen. We believe in the things we believe in until we know them. And when we know them, we defend and promote them, we become faithful believers, we become evangelists.

At that point, belief becomes ideology – honored and held sacred to the point where the risk/return matrix gets warped and passionate belief becomes mass delusion and unchecked ambition, where belief’s communal mind-control becomes way too powerful for its own good — a clear and present rolling on, gaining momentum because there’s nothing to check it, no outside reference, no commitment to an external ethical standard, nothing to keep it honest, nothing to validate it except its own good opinion of itself. Belief-as-ideology consolidates its power, crowns itself with its own authority until we’re left with only what is belief-approved – the standard, authorized version.

That’s when belief takes its final shape as fundamentalism and fanaticism, committed to the eradication of its longtime nemesis doubt. Power becomes domination becomes oppression, and belief opposes, bans, shuns, shames, punishes, tortures, and murders doubters and unbelievers. It becomes nationalistic and militaristic, launches campaigns of domestic and international terrorism and genocide. The faithful march off on the Crusades. They seek the purity of the race. They drink the Kool-Aid. They storm the Capitol. They repeat history. They replay the western civilization biograph in the name of the western God. And they call it all “progress.”

And to think it all began as a release of brain feel-good hormones in satisfaction of an evolutionary survival urge to band together and share information. We needed that, all those 150,000 years ago. We still do. Which is why belief still gives usa sense of purpose and meaning and mission, still provides incentives and rewards, still makes us feel inspired and enthusiastic, fired us up to try to do great things.

But now this….

Continued next time.

Kevin Rhodes Atheism, Belief Systems and Culture, Religion, The Long Reads

April Fool and the Easter Scandal

Noel Paul Stookey was the “Paul” of the legendary folk trio Peter, Paul & Mary. They were my musical heroes – I learned to play guitar listening to their vinyl – over and over, groove by groove, wearing out the record, wearing out the needle. After their 1960’s success, Paul went off on his own for awhile to become a Christian. I was doing the same thing at the same time, so he became my Christian musical hero. He did a song called “April Fool.”

“April Fool
You wear your heart on your sleeve
And though they laugh when they leave
You call it Love and I believe (you)
April Fool
Why must you always play the clown?
You have the edge you laid it down
You give it up without a sound…

“Oh April Fool
How can they say ‘love is cruel’?
They catch the ring but drop the jewel.
Like a teardrop in a pool…

“April Fool
As the heart shows through the eyes
Before you were born you were recognized
And unto the losers comes their Prize.

“Oh April Fool
Even as the hands were washed, you knew
We’d free the thief instead of you
April Fool
You said the Father was in You
You said we know not what we do
Forgive us…April Fool.”

It’s an Easter Song, and the “April Fool” is Jesus. It’s also an artistic and accurate restatement of the foundation another Paul – the Apostle – laid for the Christian religion.

Christian belief requires a commitment to foolishness.

You can’t get to God by being worldly wise, Paul wrote in a letter to the fledgling church in Corinth. Instead, you need to get foolish about it.

 “For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.  For it is written, ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.’

“Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?  For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. 

“For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.”[1]

When I was a new believer, people said you had to check your mind at the door to be a Christian. We protested, but I see now that they understood something essential – I mean, it’s in the Bible, after all – that we Christians didn’t get:  Christina faith only makes sense once you crosse the foolishness threshold.

Paul’s “foolishness of God” vs. “wisdom of the world” creates an airtight apologetic for Christian belief, in which Christian faith is a closed system of circular, self-reinforcing logic. You can’t get started on the Christian faith unless you leave your old thinking behind. Then, once you cross the foolishness threshold, you need to stay there, otherwise you’ll start to think the old way, which will lead you to doubt. If it looks like you checked your mind at the door, it’s because you did.

The Crux

At the crux (word chosen advisedly) of Christian foolishness is Christianity’s iconic symbol, the crucifix. To your old, “worldly” way of thinking, the cross is abhorrent, disgusting, revolting… one of the most truly horrible, indescribable awful instruments of torture the most despicably horrible and awful worst of human nature has ever designed. Further, the crucifix features a human being with a crown of thorns jammed on his head, being tortured to death on a cross after having been beaten bloody and flogged to tatters. And there’s more:  that human being tortured to death is the “Son of God,” which means that the “Father” in Stookey’s song is the Son of God’s dad.

Just stop there for a minute.

If my dad or your dad did that, they’d put him away for good.

But on the other side of the foolishness threshold, it’s okay for God the Father murder God the Son because they worked it out ahead of time. The whole thing was a reenactment of a scene from thousands of years earlier that involved the patriarchal ancestor of the ancient blood-sacrifice religion that Jesus grew up in. (The ancestor’s name was Abraham, and he is the “father” of the three “Abrahamic religions – Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.) All those thousands of years ago, Abraham actually almost did it, he almost murdered his own son (Isaac) out of obedience to that angry blood-lusty God (nobody called God a “Father” back then), but God let him off by providing a lamb stuck in a nearby bush for Abraham to slaughter instead. Therefore, at the crucifixion, Jesus was playing the role of the “lamb of God” — the human sacrifice that finally set the whole Abraham-Isaac thing to right.

“Unto the losers comes their prize.”

Trouble is, God’s gift of salvation through the lamb of God came as a big surprise to us – an April Fool. Sin made us a bunch of “losers” who didn’t recognize our “prize” for what it was. As a result, we protested our innocence, which made us as bad as Pontius Pilate, ceremoniously washing his hands, trying to claim he wasn’t responsible for the crucifixion that the mob demanded. (“Even as the hands were washed, you knew/We’d free the thief instead of you.”)

That seems to be the problem with sin:  our perspective is so warped by it that we don’t even know it’s a problem. Countless theologians have spent countless centuries filling countless volumes in countless libraries trying to explain what sin is and why we’re guilty of it, but the bottom line for most of us is that we never have quite understood what we did that was so awful – kind of like the time I was playing in the backyard and my mom came roaring out and smacked my behind because my sister told her I broke a vase inside the house.

“Forgive us…April Fool”

But, understand sin or not, we’re guilty of it, which means we (not God) are responsible for Jesus dying. Even though we weren’t there, we’re what the law calls “vicariously liable” –guilty by proxy. None of us knew that we were guilty or what we were guilty of, which makes it hard to follow the proper procedure of asking forgiveness, but God had that covered, too:  Jesus asked his murdering father to forgave us since he knew we didn’t know what we were doing. (“You said we know not what we do.”) God, on the other hand, knew exactly what He was doing, but since God was… well, God… He got off, too.

Got all that?

I did, when I was Christian, I had it down cold, all the details, the permutations, the rationalizations. I bought it all. I owned it, it owned me. Now I look at it and I wonder, Do any of us actually pay the slightest bit of attention to the things we believe? By now, you know the answer:  we do, but what we see when we pay attention depends on which side of the foolishness threshold we’re on.

I’m obviously writing from my current outlook on the pre-crossing side of the foolishness threshold. From here, the “foolishness of God” is foolish indeed — as mind-numbingly convoluted and fantastical as any of the nutcase conspiracy theories currently making the rounds.  The crucifixion was “the wisdom of God” when I was a Christian, now it’s a “stumbling block.” The Greek word used in the Bible text that’s translated “stumbling block”  is “skandalon” – scandal. The cross is scandalous to my worldly outlook —  a thing monumentally ugly and awful — all that blood, all that death, all that vicious punishment for a mystery infraction.

But the scandal doesn’t stop there. There’s one last piece.

Love is Cruel

The culmination of the Easter story is that the whole horrible thing is actually the greatest form of love. “For God so loved the world,” says John 3:16, “that He gave his only son, that whoever believes in Him may have eternal life.”

So, let me see if I’ve got this straight… God’s love is a bloody, horrifying human sacrifice to keep Him from wiping out the human race.

Seriously.

The only way you can believe something so totally outrageous if you’ve crossed the foolishness threshold., You have to check your mind at the door.

“How can they say ‘love is cruel’?” Well, Paul, because if that is love, then love is as cruel as it gets.

Foolishness for the Foolish

Paul the Apostle adds one last piece to his apologetic:  the foolishness of God is especially designed for foolish of the world – the people he calls the “low and despised in the world.” Paul the folksinger calls them “losers.”

“ For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth.  But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong;  God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are,  so that no human being might boast in the presence of God.  And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption,  so that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”

No liberal elite in God’s Kingdom. It’s time for the “low and despised” and the “losers” to have their moment.

When I was a Christian, we used to brag about being “fools for Christ.” We were proud of it; we rallied around our outcast status. There’s something strangely prideful and empowering about identifying with a crowd that struts its outcast stuff. I know what that feels like — I lived it for 25 years. Which is why – I hate to admit it — I know what it felt like for the “Proud Boys” and alt-right “Deplorables” who stormed the Capitol with prayers, crosses, and shouts of Jesus. Their over-the-foolish threshold minds really truly believed that they were, in that moment, the foolish wisdom of God in action, God’s fools ready to tear down the reign of the worldly-wise elites and bring God’s Kingdom to the USA and from here to the rest of the world.

It was their highest moment, the best day of their lives.

Seriously..

The Legacy of Foolishness

Belief on the other side of the foolishness threshold is why an estimated 2.5 Billion people – roughly one-third of the Earth’s population – will parade the crucifix once again this Easter, and recite once again the mind-numbing assertion that this is what God’s love looks like. Some of them will be “powerful” and “of noble birth”  – elites saved in spite of themselves. Others will be the “low and despised” and the “losers” for whom God’s foolish wisdom was intended. And all of them will perpetuate millennia of war and brutality in the name of the Abrahamic God.

In the year 1651, Thomas Hobbes described the human condition in his work Leviathan. His description is still shockingly applicable today:

“Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withall. In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Hobbes’ solution is that we need human government and societal institutions to keep us from regressing into our nasty human instincts. Great idea, but when those institutions are backed up by Western civilization, which in turn is backed up by Biblical worldview and its institutionalized brutality sanctioned by a blood-lusty authoritarian ruler (God, represented by his “Anointed One” here on Earth), with a mob of thugs at his disposal who truly, honestly believe they’re in their finest moment, what are we going to get? We’re going to get the 21st Century, when life is still “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.” It’s still that way because human beings and their institutions are still that way. Our Western Biblical worldview reigns on the other side of the foolishness threshold, and as long as it does, we will keep fooling ourselves into our own entrapment, and every Easter we will continue to celebrate what we’re doing.

“You call it Love and I believe (you)…”

“April Fool.”

[1] Bible passages in this article are from 1 Corinthians 1:18-31 ESV.)

Kevin Rhodes Atheism, Belief Systems and Culture, Knowledge, Conviction, and Belief, Religion, The Long Reads

Beliefism [Part 3]: Evangelists on the Rebound/ Belief is Biological

Evangelists on the Rebound

Life without God offered plenty of substitutes:  self-help and its academic sibling positive psychology, “New Thought” churches that tried to make a science out of religion; Age of Enlightenment intellectuals, rationalists, humanists, skeptics who were determined to purge our thinking of nonsense, materialists who think “the meat thinks,” and an assortment of New Agers, vortex-finders, shamans, psychics, dietary supplement pushers, energy healers, kinesthesiologists, life coaches, “alternative healers,” magical thinkers, and miscellaneous gurus. They were a free-for-all of mixed motives and monetization strategies — confident, happy, friendly, an doften rich , And unlike me — the Christian evangelist failure — they  had no problem evangelizing like crazy. Part of that was a sign of the times — evangelizing was trendy back then, corporations were in the first wave of creating job descriptions like “brand evangelist,” which meant a salesperson on a higher plane –credentialed, trustworthy, cool.

Plus there was all this God-talk. In my Christian days we were careful about too much God-talk, lest we scare off the lost/unchurched. These Christianity substitutes didn’t have that problem. They were religions claiming they weren’t religions because they didn’t use religious vocabulary  — xcept for the ubiquitous “God,” which eventually morphed into “the Universe.” Free of old religion language meant they were free to carry on like that good ol’ time religion – for example the atheist group that met on Sunday mornings for music, teaching, and fellowship. Seriously.

One of the more fascinating new religions was atheism. I was just starting to suspect I’d become one of them when I discovered the “new atheists” and their “four horsemen” (Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett). I thought this will be great, these new atheists will help me with my new atheism. I sampled a couple of Sam Harris’s books, and they were ferociously evangelistic. They and the other atheists, humanists, rationalists, and skeptics I came across always seemed to be looking for a fight  – they were out to convert you. (One exception:  Christopher Hitchens and his book Mortality. I read it twice, and we’ll talk more aboutthat topic another time.)

I suppose it was like being on the rebound – having just left one broken faith relationship, it was tempting to bounce into another, but for me the temptation wasn’t hard to resist. I wasn’t ready, all that similarity made me wary. So I kept my foot on the brake, watched, studied, took notes. After a few years, I started to see that the issue wasn’t God vs. non-God, religion vs. non-religion, it was believing in the first place. Like Christianity, these new religious substitutes all started with things you couldn’t know, you could only believe (or not). The whole structure grew from there.

I was seeing Beliefism in action. As I said last time,

Beliefism is about the dynamics of belief –what happens to us individually and when we believe things in groups.

Belief always works the same way, regardless of the thing believed.

Beliefism 101:  Belief is Biological

If there’s anything we need to understand about belief, it’s that belief is all in your head. The phrase usually comes with an eye roll:  you’re out of touch, delusional. Strip out the accusation and the more precise version is, “At this moment, your brain is creating different beliefs about reality than what my brain and the other brains in our cultural context are creating.” Belief is both individual and communal, and it happens in our heads.

Belief is biological. We believe with our brains.. Our brains are cells, tissues, differentiated regions, pathways, circuits, hormones…. That’s where beliefs, ideas, dreams, visions, things we imagine, causes we support, ideals we embrace come from. They’re all biology in action.

We weren’t taught that; we don’t think that way. Instead, we think beliefs come from an alternate reality – Someplace Other that’s not made of the same cosmic stuff we are. Beliefs aren’t grungy like the here and now, they’re elegant and aloof, enduringly above the rabble. They have classy names like Mystery, Eternity, Heaven, Somewhere Else, Up There, The Other Side of the Veil. Beliefs give us Spirit and Past Lives and The Universe, the Eternal Soul, God and gods, Angels and Archangels. (Devil and Demons, too, which you’d think we could do without, but not so fast – the bad guys have their own useful purpose.)

If we’re going to have there and here, them and us, we need passageways and communication links. Trips back and forth (round trip for supernatural beings, one-way for humans) are invested with special solemnity, fear and reverence, and communications come with special zest and fervency – they’re not just more spam, they’re revelation, awakening, inspiration, conversion, flashes of brilliance and insight, dramatic impact. We’re taking Moses and the Ten Commandments, the voice from Heaven, the disembodied fingers writing “mene, mene, tekel, parsin” on the wall.

All those connections engage and empower us, connect us to Truth and Higher Power. They line us up with all the meaning and purpose that all the supernatural beings and ancestors and wise ones who live in that invisible realm of spirit, soul, truth, celestial glory and power are a position to offer us – all of them “up there” who “look down on us” and care enough to magically set things in motion to teach us a lesson or even give us a hand now and then. We want all that, and we’ll go to great lengths to get ourselves properly aligned to keep the channels open.

All for the sake of something that happens in our brains. All that transcendent, invisible, spiritual, mysterious realm that accompanies us through life exists in the spongy stuff inside our heads. Belief in God is generated by the same biology that distinguishes a tree from a toadstool.

Belief is biological.

Got that?

We need to get that.

We almost never do.

There’s a piece of lab equipment they call “the God helmet.” The lab tech puts it on you and zaps a certain area in your brain (the same area that’s responsible for epileptic seizures), and you have a religious experience. They tested it on a group of nuns. Their response was, “Isn’t it wonderful that God put a receptor in our brains so we can communicate with him!” Science can create religious experience, but nobody – scientist or not – can prove or disprove God or anything else that exists in the realm of belief. You can only believe it or not, and when you do, you bring it into existence. You become the belief’s God, it’s creator and lord. So, brain-zapping lab tech or not, if you want to believe it’s God making your religious ecstasy happen, you’re going to believe ii.

Most people like it that way. Too much “it’s all in your head” makes us feel small. We’d rather follow the grand tradition of dressing up the Other and what it has to say with poetry, and writing it in a book:

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord.
“As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
Isaiah 55:  8-9

And then, having said that, we fill up the book with God’s thoughts, having just said we’re not capable of knowing them.

Anybody else see a problem with that?

How can we do that? Easy:  God and God’s thoughts both exist in our brains. They sit in there not far from each other, with highspeed wiring linking them together. Belief makes the trip from “I can’t do this” to “I can do this” in a nanosecond.

Belief becomes Beliefism when it grows up. We’ll talk more about it next time.

Kevin Rhodes Fascism and Religion

Congress and the President: 2021 Explained

Want to know why…

  • The covid relief payment went from $2,000 immediately to $1,400 taking forever?
  • Plus it’s also going to be income limited?
  • Along with lowered unemployment benefits?

And why…

  • Raising the minimum wage never had a prayer?
  • Neither does free universal health care?
  • Same for student loan “forgiveness.” (Forgive? Did we do something wrong, taking out student loans, that we need to be forgiven?)

Or why…

  • Two Democratic Senators have decided to strut their stuff by joining the TNDP (Trump Nationalist Fascist Party — formerly the Republicans) in stonewalling the Biden Administration?
  • Bombs got dropped on Syria in what has to be the most pointless, blatant act of militaristic bullying ever?

Or why…

  • The Biden Administration is otherwise making a great start on a note-perfect cover of the demoralizing fall from hope and change to politics as usual in the Obama years?

Have I left anything out? If so, add it now. Don’t be shy — we’re on a roll here — the explanation will cover them, too. Okay, how about why…

  • Reparations for slavery and racism will never, ever, ever see the light of day?
  • Same with reparations for the genocide of American’s indigenous inhabitants?
  • And same with the U.S. policy of incarcerating people who dare try to move to the “Land of the Free,” along with locking up their kids?

Why all those things?

Because the job of the United States government is not to do nice things for its people.

What fools we were to think otherwise. We’ve known better since we first learned to pledge allegiance to the flag in grade school. But we forgot, so now we have to learn all over again.

Why would a $15 minimum wage be a good idea? Because the people working for minimum wage would make more money.

Why would universal health care be a good idea? Because it would be good for people’s health.

We could go on, but let’s not bother. That’s not what government is for. At least not ours, not here in the USA.

So that’s the why re: all those things listed above. Why not is also important: 

Because it would be bad for us if the government did nice things for us.

A government can’t go around willy-nilly doing things that make its citizens happier and make their lives better. It would be bad for our moral character. Civilization would end. Progress would stop marching.

Says who? Says the people we elect to run the government. Something else we learned in grade school is that we the people are too dumb to know what’s good for us, so we need to elect people who are smarter and know better to run the country for us — people like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz and the rest of the TNFP and their two honorary Democrat members, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. (I almost called them “Democratic” members, but you can’t use that word because it’s too much like “Democracy,” which is a bad word in the TNFP. Words like “president for life” are much nicer.) But let’s not be too hard on them, because bipartisan compromise is the American way, and never mind that “bipartisan” has become “bipolar” and that “compromise” means the Democrats caving in — this time, courtesy of two Senators with a case of TNFP envy.

All those smarter, better than the rest of us people know, for example, that capitalism is for capitalists, and if you’re not part of the tippy top that controls all the world’s wealth then you’d better suck it up and get a job. And if that job includes being one of the people working for minimum wage who’ve been keeping the country going for the past year, then you ought to be happy you’ve at least got a job, And don’t get to uppity about the unemployed people, because we’re going to stick it to them, too — we give all those suckers more money, we’re sunk as a country. Before you know it, we’ll be taxing the rich who get richer while the poor get poorer. And then we’ll be cutting our defense budget in half, and never mind that we would still spend more on better ways to bomb Syria than any other country in the world.

All those smarter than us people also know that if you want to get the college education that’s required to hold one of those minimum wage jobs it sure as hell better not be a freebie, because if they make it too easy on you then by God that’s socialism, which is this absolute worse thing that could ever happen. Bettter to take out massive loans from the government itself (the government obviously has a sweet deal) that you’ll never be able to pay off.

They also know that it’s good to be role models for the rest of us morally corrupt dummies as to how we, too, can be controlled by the most moronic conspiracy theories ever devised (which is saying a lot, lot, lot) and believing in the kind of Christian Nationalism that explains why America gets to trample on human rights and commit war crimes as its leads the civilized free world in the march of progress to the Heavenly City.

This is the 21st Century, isn’t it?

Just checking.

All those smarter than the rest of us people also know that it’s good to incessantly rev up all the not as smart as they are people they pretend to love until the only outlet they’ll have for all that frustration and rage will be to storm the capitol and brag about how much they love Jesus. Let ’em have their moment, then we’ll throw ’em in jail.

No, the minimum wage thing is not a matter of what’s good economic policy and what’s not. Go ahead, do the research: whether raising or lowering the minimum wage is good or bad for the economy is inconclusive. Hurt of harm? Depends who you ask — what they’ll tell you depends on who’s side they’re on. Then what’s the minimum wage thing about? C’mon class, we just went over this: it’s about how people in Washington are smarter than the rest of us about how much poor people should get paid. And we sure as hell aren’t going to pay them more just to help them out. Just think how bad things could get.

Why would canceling student debt  be a good idea? Um, because it would be good to relieve aspiring people who want to learn things and make a contribution and get ahead in life from the despair and financial impossibility of a punishing debt load? Just an idea….

And why would it be good not to bomb people in Syria just to let them know that the USA is the baddest war-mongering ass around?

Do you really need to ask?

As for why we probably won’t whine too much about having our post-election euphoria dashed on the rocks of four years of Obama-style disenchantment — well, at least it’s not four more years of the other guy. “Blue no matter who” might be lame, but it’s way better than the alternative.

So let’s review: Improving the lives of the country’s citizens — that’s not what government is for. It would be bad for our moral character, an affront to freedom, and would generally undermine all those smarter-than-the-rest-of-us people we keep electing.

And thank their Imperialist God that we do, because can you imagine what else we might want to do in the name of making our lives better if we were left to our own devices?

Kevin Rhodes Atheism, Belief Systems and Culture, Religion, The Long Reads

Beliefism [Part 2]: Evangelicals and Evangelizing

Believers had a double duty:  to be evangelical (believe the right stuff) and to evangelize (tell everybody about it – also known as “witnessing”). The first part came naturally — I was a good student,. The second part, not so much. Of all the things I ever did as a Christian, witnessing was hands-down the most awkward and humiliating. I was a total witnessing failure from the get-go. That was a problem because if you were in love with Jesus you’d want to tell everybody, wouldn’t you? (Well, um, no, not really. I mean, my wife and I, we just sort of… dated. Which means I spent a lot of years wondering if I really loved Jesus after all.)

Witnessing

Early on, I met some Baptists for whom witnessing was their highest and best good. That’s how they fulfilled the “Great Commission” — where it says in the Bible we’re supposed to preach the gospel to the ends of the earth. I was still wondering if it was okay to smoke marijuana now that I was born again when they pushed a stack of “Four Spiritual Laws” tracts into my hand and said, “There’s a Billy Graham movie in town next week. You can be a counselor.” (Apparently if you’re a newbie it strengthens your faith if you start witnessing right away.)

My job as a counselor was to execute the basic Billy Graham evangelistic closing strategy. The movie would end with an “altar call” – an invitation to “go forward” and “give your life to Christ.” A few of the counselors would go forward right away (one at a time, so it didn’t look preplanned), so it looked like they were answering the call, and then crowd psychology would kick in and make it easier for other people to join them. Then the counselors would work the crowd and share the Four Spiritual Laws with the sinners so they would “come to Jesus.”

One night the only person who went forward was one of the counselors. He stood there alone for a long, awkward time before the lights finally went up. I thought about joining him like I was supposed to, but I went with some of my “unbeliever” friends and… well, I just didn’t feel like it. I have a vague memory of going forward and “sharing the gospel” only once, talking to a guy while his girlfriend looked on, and never closing the deal. Like I said — a total witnessing failure.

The Surprise Exit Strategy

As it turned out, being a witnessing failure turned out to be my exit strategy.

Evangelizing wasn’t optional — everybody needed to pitch in to help save the lost because for one thing the Second Coming wouldn’t happen until we finished the job, and besides you were a total loser if you didn’t. Nobody wanted to talk about it, but a lot of us were witnessing failures, so we looked for approaches that didn’t involve cold calling or the Four Spiritual Laws.

The last nondenominational denomination I belonged to was founded by a former L.A. music producer named John Wimber who looked just like Jerry Garcia. He got “saved hard” and figured out how to start a church for ex-Jesus Freaks who’d tried to grow up and get real jobs but missed that 1960’s vibe. He called it Vineyard Christian Fellowship, which became “the Vineyard” (which was confusing, because there was a wine shop by that name) and it went viral (before “viral” existed) in the 80’s. It started as a “church renewal,” but that didn’t last long – people got tired of trying to renew a church that already had to live through the 70’s and really wasn’t in the mood for more of that, so Wimber and the Vineyard settled on“church planting” as its Great Commission fulfillment strategy.

Church planting meant putting together a good soft-rock band, funny sermons, recovery groups, food banks, “newly single” Bible studies, and generally being hip and young and trendy and cool enough to draw a crowd to your converted freshly painted former warehouse with an awesome sound system. Plus, we weren’t trying to save the lost, we were trying to make it cool for the “unchurched” – a more clinical, managerial term – to come to church. Same dif but hey, words matter.

“Church planter” was the highest level of cred in the Vineyard, so of course I had to be one. I bailed on my career, sold our house, loaded the family into the minivan, and followed the moving van 1500 miles to plant a new church for the unchurched. My wife starting crying before we left the Denver city limits, and kept it up all across Kansas. If ever there was a sign from God for how my church planting mission was going to go, that was it.

Turned out I was a victim of my own success:  I was good enough at drawing an unchurched crowd that I got blacklisted for “sheep stealing.” The problem was that they weren’t all unchurched — some of them came over from the sponsoring church, and the pastor was pissed that I was “sheep stealing.” Never mind that Wimber’s official church planting policy was don’t worry about that, they don’t belong to anybody, they’re all God’s sheep. (Christians like to talk about how people are like sheep. It’s a Bible thing – the book was written when counting sheep was like counting money.) Official church planting policy or not, sheep stealing still got me kicked out, and that’s what got things rolling on eventually getting me all the way out.

Once I was out, the good news was, I didn’t need to evangelize anymore. The bad news was, my life was ruined. But the truth was, I was the one who had ruined it by believing what I believed. I’d been playing by the believer rules, but they’re set up so the house always wins — you’ll never get it right and when you don’t it’s always all your fault. (Duh – that’s what “sin” is all about, right? Note to self:  maybe you’re free to believe what you like, but there are consequences if you act on what you believe – as some of the mob that stormed the Capitol found out when they went home and got a knock on the door and it wasn’t Jesus standing on the other side.)

Faith on the Rebound

Between life with God and life without God, I ran across lots of church substitutes:  self-help, positive psychology, “New Thought” churches, intellectuals. rationalists, humanists, skeptics, and materialists; and an assortment of New Agers, vortex-finders, shamans, psychics, dietary supplement pushers, energy healers, kinesthesiologists, life coaches, “alternative” healers, and miscellaneous gurus. They were a free-for-all of mixed motives and monetization strategies, and they all evangelized like crazy – plus there was more God-talk than in my Christian days. (We were always careful about too much God-talk, lest it scare the lost and unchurched away.)

The most obnoxious evangelists were the “four horsemen” of the “new atheists” – Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett. I thought this will be great, they’ll help me with my new atheism,, but I only made it partway through a couple of their books. (One exception:  Christopher Hitchens’ book Mortality, which I read all the way through twice. We’ll talk more about its theme later on in this series.) The same was true of the other atheist offerings I came across –associations, conventions, websites, books, webinars, video series, TV specials, interviews. It was always the same menu:  arguments for and against God and why life without God was better. Like you could argue God and a better life in or out of existence.

From what I could tell, the whole mixed up crowd of Christianity substitutes was a lot of people on the rebound — rushing from one broken faith relationship to another. They were religions claiming they weren’t religions because they had a different vocabulary – like one atheist group I came across that met on Sunday mornings for music, teaching, fellowship…. Seriously.

The issue wasn’t God, it was the believing part.

In time, it became clear that the issue wasn’t God vs. non-God, it was believing in the first place. Belief always works the same way, regardless of the thing believed. Years of wandering through the land of religion substitutes and studying how they worked revealed they all shared the same dynamics, which I’ve come to call beliefism.

Beliefism is about the dynamics of belief –what happens to us individually and when we believe things in groups.

More next time.