Kevin Rhodes Belief Systems and Culture, Fascism and Religion, Uncategorized

Dobbs Isn’t About Abortion

Protestors act like the overthrow of Roe v. Wade is about the law—about Constitutional rights, privacy rights, women’s rights, reproductive rights, etc. It’s not.

The Democrats and progressives have taken up the cause on that basis. They’re wrong.

The demise of Roe v. Wade isn’t about anybody’s legal rights. It’s about the Bible. And since the people thumping Bibles in the USA’s public arena these days are Christians, it’s a Christian issue.

Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is about the Christian Right’s takeover of American law and culture.

That’s it. That’s the whole story.

We need to get that.

Argue all you want about laws and rights. Go ahead, occupy the outrage high ground. But do that and you miss the point entirely. The point is that the Christians have overrun the gates, gotten inside the walls, and now they’re running the government.

Just like they planned to do on Jan. 6.

Only this time they pulled it off.

That’s not just anti-Christian rhetoric, it’s what the Christians themselves think. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization supporters are celebrating because the case puts God back in charge of the U.S.—the way God always intended it to be.

If you’re going to protest and debate and argue and make your case, talk about that.

Talk about that openly and in public. Talk about it like people who have retained the ability to think might actually hear what you’re saying.

Everything else misses the central point.

To the Christian mind, Roe vs. Wade stood for the scandalous idea that pregnancy is biological. That’s not Christian. Pregnancy is not a biological issue, there’s a living soul in there—it’s a human life. So now we’ve got one human lifeoccupying space inside another human life, and pitting one against the other is wrong. They both have The Right To Life. To think otherwise is to plot murder. Murder has been against the law ever since God wrote “Thou shalt not kill” with his finger on a stone tablet and handed it to Moses. Roe put the mother’s rights over the baby’s, but God meant it when he said “Thou shalt not kill,” so Roe made God really, really mad, and he’s been punishing the U.S. ever since. And for just as long, Christians have been doing their duty to restore God’s law, which they finally achieved when their delegates on the Supreme Court adopted Dobbs. God’s law is back in charge, which is why women who get abortions are now criminals.

I swear I’m not making that up. Go back and listen and read what the Christians are saying and doing about Dobbs, and you’ll be convinced.

All of that is so disgusting that I can hardly stand to write it, and you can hardly stand to read it. But it’s what Christians think. The Christians who don’t think that way are heretics, and they know it.

I know that’s what Christians think because I was a Christian myself.

For the past five decades the Christian Right has been meticulously advancing, imposing, and enforcing their Biblical worldview on USA law, economics, and social life. The Christian Right movement began in response to Roe v. Wade. That’s a fact. Really. You can go back and trace it. Prominent evangelical luminaries such as Jerry Falwell and Francis Shaefer led a counter-revolution against what they perceived to be a decline in Bible-based social morality. Their initiative encouraged evangelical Christians to become politically active and offered popular support and funding. The initial goal was to make Biblical worldview normative. The end game was Christian Nationalism – a return to the USA’s beginnings as a “Christian nation.”

Now they’ve won their end game. And, drunk on their victory, they’re looking for more messes to clean up in the name of God. Just take a look at Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion.

Trump holding the Bible in front of St. John’s Church was the perfect iconic moment for the Christian Nationalist agenda. Pundits miss the point when they snicker about whether Trump knows what’s in the Bible. He doesn’t need to know—all he has to do is brandish the Bible, and the gesture says everything that needs to be said.

“Bible – that’s who we are. We are here to divide and conquer. We are here to create winners and losers, us and them, sheep and goats, wheat and weeds. We do as the Bible does – we separate and polarize, we advance our worldview and agenda at the expense of yours, and we are not afraid to act like the Bible’s people of God and use force if we need to. We have God on our side, but just in case we also have guns.”

Back in the day. I and my fellow Christians cheered for the Christian Right (not called that yet), prayed for them, believed in them. God forgive us, we didn’t know what we were doing. We had no clue that what we were cheering for would morph into fake truth and Christian Nationalism and believe-whatever-conspiracy-theories-you-want-and-the-more-bizarre-the-better. We didn’t see that a greedy, selfish, delusional mindset would take over the American mind, turn us to self-absorption and stupidity and the loss of community and the common good and pit us irreconcilably against each other.

Anti-Dobbs protestors think they’ve got such an airtight case that the Christian Nationalist social agenda is in open defiance of Constitutional rights such as voting, gender equality, and the separation of church and state that they don’t even need to talk about it. I mean, everybody knows that.

They need to talk about it. Everybody doesn’t know that.

That these things are an issue at all is because of a fatal flaw in the system. Our very Constitution was flawed in its creation by the Biblical Western Civilization European White Male Dominance that saturates its worldview. Racism, misogyny… its all in there. We were taught differently when we went to school, and we learned our lessons well. And now, the Christian Right, drunk on its newfound power, wants to make sure we can’t teach our children what really happened back then.

Democrats and progressives don’t talk about these things. They’re afraid to. I have never understood why. I mean, what’s the point if you can’t get to the real issues in your speeches? What’s the point of always cowering, being afraid of the hack job the media and the bigots are going to make of what you say?

You’d think we’d be sick of it and ready for something new. But no—Christianity’s new power to control the public ideological framework keeps our brains small and stupid, makes sure we never grow up, never talk about things that matter, never get past the psychological maturity and emotional intelligence of middle school.

We need to talk about things that matter.

And the Christian overthrow of our government matters.

Kevin Rhodes Atheism, Belief Systems and Culture, Fascism and Religion, Religion, The Long Reads, Utopia/Dystopia

The Religion of Polarization

It’s no mystery that extreme political polarization has coincided with the rise of the Christian Right and its Christian Nationalist agenda.

The Bible offers a polarized worldview:  God’s side is good and true; the other side is evil and wrong. Biblical worldview was formulated thousands of years ago in the desert sands by a warlike and ambitious nomadic tribe and is grounded in their tribal God’s like and dislikes — who’s great in God’s kingdom and who’s not, what it takes to be commendable and what gets you in serious trouble, and on it goes, an exhaustive rule book of celestial surveillance and human compliance.

Christianity furthers Biblical polarization.

Us and Them.

Sheep and goats.

Wheat and weeds.

With us or against us.

Children of God and children of the Devil.

Sons of God and the Sons of Perdition.

Saved and unsaved.

Born again and born in sin.

Spirit and “the flesh.”.

Redeemed and enslaved.

Righteous and unrighteous.

Taken and left behind.

And on it goes for a couple thousand Biblical pages.

Worldview creates culture — culture is worldview embedded in the minutiae of daily life – all the tangible and intangible institutions, norms, expectations, assumptions we rely on to define “reality” and keep things “normal.”

For the past five decades the Christian Right has been meticulously advancing, imposing, and enforcing their Biblical worldview on USA law, economics, and social life. The Christian Right movement began largely in response to Roe v. Wade, as prominent evangelical luminaries such as Jerry Falwell and Francis Shaefer led a counter-revolution against what they perceived to be a decline in social morality. The initiative encouraged evangelical Christians to become politically active and offered popular support and funding. The initial goal was to make Biblical worldview normative. The end game was Christian Nationalism – a cultural return to the USA’s beginnings as a “Christian nation.”

The end game is now within reach. Trump holding the Bible in front of St. John’s Church was the perfect iconic moment for the Christian Nationalist agenda. Pundits miss the point when they snicker about whether Trump knows what’s in the Bible. He doesn’t need to know – all he has to do is brandish the Bible, and the gesture says everything that needs to be said:  “Bible – that’s who we are. We are here to divide and conquer. We are here to create winners and losers, us and them, sheep and goats, wheat and weeds. We do as the Bible does – we separate and polarize, we advance our worldview and agenda at the expense of yours, and we are not afraid to act like the Bible’s people of God and use force if we need to. We have God on our side, but just in case we also have guns.”

Lately, Texas and Florida have aggressively pushed the Christian Nationalist social agenda in open defiance of Constitutional rights such as voting, abortion, and gender equality. Texas has further introduced the Biblical enforcement technique of deputizing citizen vigilante enforcers. (For the Biblical version, check out the chilling story of Phineas in the list of Bible verses at the end of this article.)

The ripening of the Christian Right into Christian Nationalism and its normalization in federal and state culture has become so normal that we don’t see its polarizing assumptions. I didn’t see them when I was a Christian — I just accepted them as the truth about how life is. Christianity is based on belief, and its Biblical worldview assumptions come with the belief package. If you’re a believer, it doesn’t occur to you to step aside and think about them. You don’t ask, “Is life really this way?” “Does life really need to be this way?” You don’t question if we’re better off for being divided up into Biblical categories of who’s in and who’s out.

Biblical worldview and its package of polarizing assumptions have been operating in western culture for millennia – little wonder, then, that history keeps replaying the same old same old. More division. More us and them. More I got the truth and you don’t. More draw a line in the sand and dare you to cross it. More enemies. More war.

You’d think we’d be sick of it and ready for something new, but no — Biblical worldview evokes nostalgia and stokes rage – sad and mad that things aren’t good like they used to be. Belief in that worldview keeps us small and stupid — makes sure we never grow up, that the cultures of our societies and enterprises never get past the psychological maturity and emotional intelligence of middle school.

There’s a popular misconception that Jesus was somehow not part of the ancient Biblical worldview — with its murderous God and blood-thirsty religion — that he was born into. I used to think that way when I was a Christian. All of us did – Christians still do – there’s this perception that the Christian God had been reformed somehow, that he was kinder and gentler. But now that I’m not a Christian, I don’t see through the lens of belief anymore, and instead see Jesus not as the negation of that worldview, religion, and God, but the epitome of them.

Gentle Jesus meek and mild? No way. Jesus was a rabbi in a religion that loved to quibble endlessly about every “jot and tittle” of religious practice, reducing devotion to its minutiae. Jesus went around provoking the religious establishment, picking fights. He was defiant, feisty. He was a master of the verbal smackdown. He prodded the crowds to choose sides. He lambasted the minutiae lovers, scolded his followers, berated his own mother, flipped off his own family. The angels descending in a heavenly chorus were wrong – this guy wasn’t about peace on earth, goodwill toward man – he came with a sword – he said so himself.

He came to divide.

He came to agitate civil war and family division.

He came to taunt the Roman Empire.

He came to win in the name of God.

And the religion that others founded in his name has carried on what he started.

No I’m not a utopian. No I don’t believe in world peace. No I don’t think there’s any chance at all I’ll ever see anything but dismal divisive Biblical worldview during my lifetime. I’m not trying to promote something better – I don’t think there is such a thing. It’s just that sometimes I get in a mood where I can’t help but wonder….

What would life be like if our outlook wasn’t so unthinkingly invested in polarization?

What if conflict and competition weren’t the dominant energies running the world?

What if we were willing to do the hard work of dealing with complexity and contradictions instead of storming and rampaging?

Would life really be all that boring, would the economy really tank, would all of us suddenly lose our good character if we didn’t have to always know who’s side you’re on, who’s got more money and bombs, who owns that land and those resources that the rest of us have to pay for?

And on and on… so many obvious questions we never ask.

We don’t because it would take species-wide brain surgery to get us to the point where we think to ask them and do the hard work of finding meaningful answers. Not going to happen. Not ever. We’ll go extinct first. A liberal arts education would help, but it won’t be enough, and besides who can afford it anyway?

I used to wonder how the Christian Right could be so supportive of a President who so obviously wasn’t Christian – at least not what I used to believe was a Christian. But then I understood how the Christian Right that began when I was a Christian has now devolved into the Christian Nationalism we thought was such a good idea back then. Now that the goal of “restoring” the USA to its intended status as a Christian nation is within reach, the drive to the prize is irresistible, so that political leaders and their news media start to act just like God acted in the Bible as he carried out his nationalist agenda. Authoritarianism, nationalism, militarism, racism, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia, brutality, war, law and order, genocide… it’s all there in the Bible.

And once you get to that point, you’re “free” to create whatever Christian Nationalist “truth” you need to attain your final goal of imposing your political will on national culture. So now we’ve got truth the Biblical way – truth you believe into existence, assumed truth, unthinking truth, it’s-okay-to-believe-whatever-you-want truth. The Big Lie truth. QAnon truth. Fox News truth, Texas and Florida truth. “Freedom” truth.

It makes me sick truth.

Polarization is the rule of the day. It became normative thanks to the Christian Right and the Christian Nationalists. They didn’t make it up, they just made the Bible the new American political rulebook.

Sucks for the rest of us.

Just a few of thousands of examples:

 Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters.” Matthew 12:30 ESV

Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household. Matthew 10:34-36 ESV

When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left. Matthew 25:31-33 ESV

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’ Matthew 7:21-24 ESV

“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left… Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his anger… And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”  Matthew 25:31-46 ESV

He put another parable before them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field, but while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds[a] among the wheat and went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also. And the servants[b] of the master of the house came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have weeds?’ He said to them, ‘An enemy has done this.’ So the servants said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ But he said, ‘No, lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them. Let both grow together until the harvest, and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, “Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.”’” Matthew 13:24-30 ESV

You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies. John 8:44 ESV

Then an Israelite man brought into the camp a Midianite woman right before the eyes of Moses and the whole assembly of Israel while they were weeping at the entrance to the tent of meeting. When Phinehas son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron, the priest, saw this, he left the assembly, took a spear in his hand 8 and followed the Israelite into the tent. He drove the spear into both of them, right through the Israelite man and into the woman’s stomach. … The Lord said to Moses, Phinehas son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron, the priest, has turned my anger away from the Israelites. Since he was as zealous for my honor among them as I am, I did not put an end to them in my zeal. Therefore tell him I am making my covenant of peace with him.  He and his descendants will have a covenant of a lasting priesthood, because he was zealous for the honor of his God and made atonement for the Israelites.” Numbers 25: 6-13 ESV

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

War:  Religion’s Religion

Christianity’s religion is war.

Christianity believes in war, worships it, celebrates it, builds shrines to it, collaborates with empires to advance it.

Christianity’s roots run deep into an ancient religion that christened its God as “A Man of War.”

“The Lord is a man of war; the Lord is his name.” Exodus 15: 3 ESV

A Man of War is the perfect God if you’re a band of nomads that wants to destroy other tribes to make room for itself. Create that God and give Him a singular goal of genocide, and you’re home free. First you terrorize the people you want to destroy, then you attack and take no prisoners. Finally you install a national leader (God’s “Anointed”) who will act just like God, and enforce laws and social norms that punish any civic slacking.

“The peoples have heard; they tremble;
pangs have seized the inhabitants of Philistia.
Now are the chiefs of Edom dismayed;
trembling seizes the leaders of Moab;
all the inhabitants of Canaan have melted away.
Terror and dread fall upon them;
because of the greatness of your arm, they are still as a stone,”
Exodus 15:  14-16

“When the Lord your God brings you into the land that you are entering to take possession of it, and clears away many nations before you, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations more numerous and mightier than yourselves, and when the Lord your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them, then you must devote them to complete destruction. You shall make no covenant with them and show no mercy to them. You shall not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your sons, for they would turn away your sons from following me, to serve other gods. Then the anger of the Lord would be kindled against you, and he would destroy you quickly. But thus shall you deal with them: you shall break down their altars and dash in pieces their pillars and chop down their Asherim and burn their carved images with fire.” Deuteronomy 7:1-26

“Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord and against his Anointed, saying, “Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us.” He who sits in the heavens laughs; the Lord holds them in derision. Then he will speak to them in his wrath and terrify them in his fury.” Psalm 2:1-12

“You are my hammer and weapon of war: with you I break nations in pieces; with you I destroy kingdoms; with you I break in pieces the horse and his rider; with you I break in pieces the chariot and the charioteer; with you I break in pieces man and woman; with you I break in pieces the old man and the youth; with you I break in pieces the young man and the young woman; with you I break in pieces the shepherd and his flock; with you I break in pieces the farmer and his team; with you I break in pieces governors and commanders.” Jeremiah 51:20-26 

“Cursed is he who does the work of the Lord with slackness, and cursed is he who keeps back his sword from bloodshed.” Jeremiah 48:10

Those were Jesus’s roots. His own arrival was heralded in a way that made it look like there was going to be a 180º turnaround:

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying: “Glory to God in the highest, And on earth peace, goodwill toward men!” Luke 2:13-14 NKJV

There was no 180º turnaround. “Peace on earth goodwill to men” might be the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on the human race. Here’s what Jesus had to say after he grew up and got famous:

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.” Matthew 10:34-37 ESV

Talk about bait and switch.

Sounds just like the USA two millennia later.

Jesus went on to lay out his plan for a glorious future.

“He went on his way through towns and villages, teaching and journeying toward Jerusalem. And someone said to him, ‘Lord, will those who are saved be few?’ And he said to them, ‘Strive to enter through the narrow door. For many, I tell you, will seek to enter and will not be able. When once the master of the house has risen and shut the door, and you begin to stand outside and to knock at the door, saying, Lord, open to us, then he will answer you, I do not know where you come from. Then you will begin to say, ‘We ate and drank in your presence, and you taught in our streets.’ But he will say, ‘I tell you, I do not know where you come from. Depart from me, all you workers of evil!’ In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, when you see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God but you yourselves cast out.” Luke 13:22-28 ESV

And again Jesus spoke to them in parables, saying, The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding feast for his son, and sent his servants to call those who were invited to the wedding feast, but they would not come. Again he sent other servants, saying, ‘Tell those who are invited, “See, I have prepared my dinner, my oxen and my fat calves have been slaughtered, and everything is ready. Come to the wedding feast.”’ But they paid no attention and went off, one to his farm, another to his business, while the rest seized his servants, treated them shamefully, and killed them. The king was angry, and he sent his troops and destroyed those murderers and burned their city. Then he said to his servants, ‘The wedding feast is ready, but those invited were not worthy. Go therefore to the main roads and invite to the wedding feast as many as you find.’ And those servants went out into the roads and gathered all whom they found, both bad and good. So the wedding hall was filled with guests. But when the king came in to look at the guests, he saw there a man who had no wedding garment. And he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding garment?’ And he was speechless. Then the king said to the attendants, ‘Bind him hand and foot and cast him into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ For many are called, but few are chosen.” Luke 13:22-28 ESV

“Weeping and gnashing of teeth.” “Bind him hand and foot.” “Cast him into outer darkness.” All because some poor dude didn’t come in black tie.

Remind me not to go to that wedding.

I didn’t think that way about the God of Ancient Israel and His “Son” Jesus when I was a Christian. Honestly, I just never saw it. I read the Bible cover to cover several times, read some passages dozens, hundreds of times… and never saw God the Sociopath that I was supposed to tiptoe around and do everything I could not to piss him off. Like any sociopath he was likeable when he was in a good mood, and I guess I just figured it was always going to be that way. There were some people who were more afraid of the weeping and gnashing and binding stuff than I was, and their appeasement came at a high price. But I never thought that way. I wholly bought into the “peace on earth goodwill to men” fraud.

Back in my willfully-blind-and-ignorant-in-the-name-of-Jesus days, I even bought into George W. Bush’s installation of a new Christian religion in the USA that was even more Biblical than any of us realized at the time. 9-11 was the trigger point, and suddenly it was the Crusades all over again. I confess, I felt warmed and filled when W promised we would take out all those infidels who hated us just because we existed. He was on a mission from God – God “told” him to “fight these terrorists in Afghanistan.” And so he did, and I was among those who cheered as our tanks rolled into Baghdad.

My delusional ignorance was helped along by the fact that I didn’t know anything about the history of Christendom (and the other Abrahamic religions). They didn’t teach us that at school – I only got the saccharine and sanitized version of mostly American history — not the dismal recitation that if you publish a book about it today, your book will have a good chance of being banned from the public library (not to mention the school’s or the university’s). It’s only because about a decade or two ago I woke up to an awareness that I had no clue about the world my kids were growing up in, and started to study and research in order to find out.

Amazing what a few years of intense study will do for you. You might even start thinking again.

Christianity isn’t the only religion whose religion is war. I wonder if there are any religions that don’t worship war. Religions tend to ally with nationalism — nation-states have all the people and money and tools of war, and religions have the power to make sure God is on our side, so it’s a good match.

Here in the USA we’re not supposed to have a state religion, but twenty years after W we do. It’s called Patriotism. The Patriotic God is basically the Christian God with special icons – mainly the U.S. flag, best displayed in the back of a pickup with other patriotic flags (Trump, the Confederate flag). Plus there are football field sized American flags, since football is the official U.S. Patriotic sport – the NFL version comes with its own month-long homage to the military-industrial complex, which the coaches honor by wearing camo.

Christmas 2021 – the first official Patriotic Christmas – gave us Christmas cards with photos of families proudly displaying Patriotism’s most bad-ass icon – the assault weapon. In time, the cards themselves will no doubt become religious icons as well – along with the slogan “Kill a Commie for Christ,” which I swear I’m not making up.

And then there are the central patriotic doctrines — such as “one nation under God” and “in God we trust,” both of which Pres. Eisenhower thought we needed to have during the Joseph McCarthy anti-Commie days. (Eisenhower also warned us about the military-industrial complex in his farewell address. Was he having second thoughts? It would make me happy to think he was.) And speaking of Presidents, USA Patriotic religion requires that every Presidential speech must end with a routine invocation of the Patriotic daily double of God and the military — “God bless our troops, and God Bless the United States of America” – a grand tradition dutifully carried out for as long as I’ve been paying attention. Oh and let’s not forget political “prayer breakfasts,” where there never seems to be any praying going on, unless you count speeches as prayers.

But now I’m just being fussy.

We even have a Patriot Pope — he who shall not be named – who held up The Book in what might be the most pathetic, brainless, insulting, and scary gesture ever made in the name of Christian Nationalism. And we have Patriotic hymns (mostly C&W), and even though we’re out of Afghanistan (after having betrayed our friends – another Christian tradition), we still have a Patriotic Holy War against that other warlike Abrahamic religion and its followers (even if they are mostly peaceful, as even W had to admit).

Finally, we have a Patriotic religious code word — “freedom” — which believers can chant as a way to instantly identify each other – kind of like how the ancient believers used their fish symbol. And once they know who’s on their side, they can form “freedom” truck convoys to screw up the supply chain more than it is already and further drive up inflationary prices while they’re at it – all so they don’t have to get a shot or wear a mask in the middle of a pandemic that so far has killed a million of their fellow citizens.

But who’s counting?

I always wonder, if they cut themselves on a rusty rim changing a tire, would they get a Tetanus booster?

And on it goes.

War is a human survival skill – driven by the same male dominance instinct that gives us rams head-butting and bulls rutting. War is instant proof that we’re still creatures, still deeply, inconsolably afraid to live, so we have to figure out ways to kill and die, and fantasize about imaginary states where we can live forever and get to do blissful things (maybe do donuts in our big-ass pickups on the tundra, without some wussy liberal whining that it’s bad for the environment).

And as for the losers who will be hanging out in the outer darkness weeping and gnashing their teeth, well, they deserve it.

We’ll never get over war. There will be wars until our species is no more – at least, as long as our species includes males, which is pretty much the same thing. We are doomed with perpetual war. Religion tries to dress up the whole depressing, toxic, criminal mess and mostly succeeds in the minds of its believing but unthinking members. And “peace on earth” still gets trotted out at Christmas, along with the Second Amendment munitions stash.

All of which gives a whole new meaning to “Peace out, dude.”

Peace out… as in extinguished.

Forever.

In the name of God.

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

A Boomer History, Confession, and Apology

“Okay Boomer” is already passé, but there’s still this feeling that we Boomers owe the world (and especially our kids) an apology. It’s hard to apologize for your own life, but I’ve given it a lot of thought, and I think I’m onto something.

 First some history, to set the context.

From the 60’s to today, as fast as I can.

I lived through it, read a lot about it (so have you), watched the Ken Burns 60’s series way back when it first came out (have you seen it?) but I still don’t get how we got from V-J Day to Haight Asbury. Something to do with the Commies and Joseph McCarthy… also Elvis, James Dean, and ’56 Chevvies. Also “I Like Ike” buttons (I remember asking my dad who “Ike” was).

Mostly I wasn’t there. I started to be there around JFK and Khrushchev and fallout shelter signs on buildings and articles in the paper telling you how to build a backyard bomb shelter. But instead of nuclear holocaust we had the British Invasion, Dylan, Berkeley, Timothy Leery, Abbie Hoffman, Zeppelin, and 1968. And pot — don’t forget pot. And Woodstock. Pot and Woodstock. And the Establishment, and movements to overthrow it – civil rights, anti-war, women’s rights. LBJ on TV telling us how many more dead in Vietnam. Neil Armstrong moonwalking live on TV.

How long were the 60’s?

Not as long as the 70’s, which a cynical and insightful friend summed up as, “What was that decade about?!” Yeah, pretty much. It blasted out with two bestsellers – The Late Great Planet Earth, about how the Christian Apocalypse would go down, and Future Shock, about how technological innovation was scrambling the world’s collective brains.

It was the decade of iconic helicopter photos:  the Saigon rooftop embassy scramble and the famous helicopter that was later donated to Broadway; Nixon’s helicopter taking one last nostalgic swing by the Capitol that almost made him seem human; and the three crashed helicopters on the failed Iranian Hostage rescue attempt.

Nixon ended the draft, which saved my butt since I had a low number. I was also the first-ever conscientious objector in my small rural town. Gerry Ford and Jimmy Carter took over for Nixon — nice guys but inept. Carter was the first President I voted for. I remember his campaign speeches– how he would flash that smile and it never seemed to be related to anything he was saying — like a facial tic. Creepy, but not Nixon creepy. I also remember that he turned “impact” into a verb, which to an English major was fingernails on a chalkboard. And let’s not forget beer-drinking barbecue brother Billy Carter (how do some people become media darlings?). Plus Jimmy was a God-fearing, Bible-knowing man, and that becomes important later.

The 70’s also gave us Roe vs. Wade and the scandalous idea that pregnancy was biological and it wasn’t a soul in there. Also the OPEC oil embargo — our first serious wake up call from the environment, but we didn’t think of it that way, we just thought those Arab guys who dressed like Lawrence of Arabia had gotten too greedy. Lines around the block at the gas pump and keeping the thermostat at 68 in winter were obvious signs that Late Great was right about how Middle East oil would ignite the Second Coming. Plus, speaking of petroleum, don’t forget polyester leisure suits. And bell bottoms. But how about we all agree to forget 70’s mustaches?

We made it to the 80’s, when we all turned 30 and couldn’t be trusted anymore. If we had all resigned like we should have, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. But we didn’t, and instead tried to grow up, have careers, start families – you know, the usual, except that we invented “participant” ribbons so our kids would know that they were all special. We didn’t do participant trophies in my household. Probably explains a lot.

Ronald Reagan swept in with great speeches – the first we’d heard since JFK and MLK. Besides his Gipper act, he ended Smiling Jimmy’s double-digit inflation, freed the hostages, fired the air traffic controllers, and appointed Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics as a substitute Treasury Dept. As for rock and roll, it was “Springsteen, Madonna, way before Nirvana/There was U2 and Blondie/And music still on MTV.” (Bowling for Soup – go ahead — sing along). (I missed all that great music – even ABBA. I was too busy trying to grow up.) Then Gorbachev and Chernobyl and Berlin brought over four decades of the Constant Commies to an end for good, which proved that capitalism is obviously superior.

When the Clintons and Gores got elected we had our very own President, complete with jamming a sax on SNL. Tipper gave us lyric warning labels on CD’s while Bill was busy taking the 60’s sexual revolution a bit too far. He and Tony Blair on the other side made up for it by cleansing the world of welfare queens, and by the time they were done, the Treasury Dept.’s vision of the privatizing and monetizing everything was well on the way to becoming the new normal – an expression that hadn’t been created yet.

The 90’s started with the 2000 Millennium Bug no-show, and by now the pace of growing up had slowed enough that I could finally discover all that great 80’s rock n roll I missed. “Cool” made a resurgence as “kewl,” which you could put together with “like” and “dude” to make a complete sentence. Like, kewl dude. The dot.com bubble made geeks into millionaires, then flabbered out like a whoopee cushion. “Okay” made a resurgence, along with making declarative statements with a rising intonation, so they sounded like questions? Kind of kewl, but maybe a hint that things weren’t really all that okay. “The kids are  alright,” The Who assured us in the 60’s. Not anymore. Now we had a new kind of crime — school shootings — that would become an American mainstay. 

Somewhere in the decadal seams there were PC’s, cell phones, and internet dial-up connections. Lots of Future Shock. We’d been warned. It didn’t help. Then something came with no warning and changed things forever:

The twin towers fell.

One of the most spectacular crimes ever committed. Nothing like the legalized crime of two world wars, Korea, Vietnam, nothing like the Holocaust or Hiroshima. But we weren’t there for those. Now we had people hating us just for existing, and they had broken into our house.

My kids’ ages were still in single digits when they held a memorial service in our living room. Post-9-11 is the only world they’ve ever known – security lines, Homeland Security, the Patriot Act and the surveillance state….

All of us remember where we were and what we were doing when we heard about it – like we do with JFK’s assassination (as Dylan reminded us a couple years ago. Dylan! 17 minutes of Dylan! In the midst of a pandemic!)

9-11 gave W a chance to launch his righteous war that we will never, ever get out of. We kicked ass in Desert Storm – which unlike the Vietnam War was fun to watch on TV (remember the Scud Stud?). Then came the phantom WMD’s and the advent of “truthiness” (Colbert) and some White House staff guy (everybody thinks it was Karl Rove but he denies it) who said, “guys like me were in what we call the ‘reality-based community’ – [people who] believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality… That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

Truthiness and “we create our own reality” were the serious beginning of the end. Mark that on your calendar. It wasn’t the Late Great Apocalypse, not yet anyway, but it was unquestionably the end, and the main reason why we Boomers owe everybody (especially you) an apology. I’ll clarify that in a moment, but first — and I’ll speed it up now – I need to mention that hope made its last public appearance when we danced in the streets at Obama’s election. But too soon the party turned into The Civics Lesson They Never Taught Us – that one man in Congress who shall not be named (oh, that reminds me, I forgot to mention Harry Potter back in the 90’s) can block an entire Presidential agenda.

One man.

Remind you of anybody?

By now, the new Millennium was turning into the new Disillusionment – a trend  emphatically reinforced when the economic bottom fell out with the “Great Recession” which wasn’t so great unless you worked on Wall Street, in which case your firm got a huge bailout because you were too big to fail and you and all the other account exec’s got humungous bonuses.

You gotta love capitalism.

Yes, somehow we got affordable healthcare legislation, which we needed because Clinton and Blair had privatized the world so that consumers had to fend for themselves, which the Friedman Chicago Treasury Dept. had been telling us was a good thing because the top 1% can’t get rich enough fast enough if the government has to pay for stuff. The Republicans are still pissed that Obamacare snuck past them, so it’s been on the chopping block ever since — along with Obama’s birth certificate.

And after that there was Occupy (a.k.a “The Millennials Last Stand”) and in the aftermath came Trump and Covid and… and… and I guess I just don’t feel like completing the list, okay? We all know it by heart anyway.

Which brings us up to “okay Boomer” and our kids’ generation (you) demanding an apology.

You deserve it. Not that it will do anybody any good. We’re way too far lost in the land of Trump-Republican-Libertarian-Fascist-End-of-Democracy-QAnon-Insurrection-Anti-Vaxxers-Climate-Change-Deniers-And-All-The-Rest for it to do any good. But I’ll try anyway.

Here’s the worst thing I think we did that screwed everything up:

We believed.

Really. That was our biggest, most enduring sin. We believed so much that we gave the world belief metastasized – something I call “beliefism” — my version of “truthiness” and “we create our own reality.”

  • Belief creates worldview, worldview creates reality, and reality is whatever belief makes it.
  • Belief is biological. Our brains are wired to believe.
  • Belief doesn’t distinguish fact from fiction, truth from truthiness, clarity from delusion. As far as belief is concerned, all reality is alternate reality.
  • Belief is powered by hormones, chemicals, and electrical charges. Those things make us feel good.
  • The more we believe, the more belief we can tolerate. The more we tolerate, the more we believe. That’s called “addiction.”
  • Belief is both individual and communal. We share perspective with each other, we create shared reality.
  • Belief takes on substance. We build things together to support and perpetuate the reality we create together — institutions, architecture, art, economics, law, government, religion, norms and customs, rituals and practices, metaphors and icons.
  • Belief provides purpose and meaning and mission, lays out incentives and rewards, hypes us into feeling inspired and enthusiastic and fired up to do great things.
  • Belief should come with a warning — “Handle With Care.” But it doesn’t, and we just go along believing things like it’s no big deal.
  • We believe things, then our brains get busy proving that what we believe is the way things really are. Hence the silos we live in.
  • All of that is a set up for beliefism.
  • Belief’s enemy is doubt, which is caused by thinking.
  • Belief always takes its war against doubt to the extreme – pushes its own agenda to the exclusion of alternatives, silences reasoned discourse to the point that we lose the power to think for ourselves.
  • At that point, belief metastasizes into beliefism.
  • Beliefism is self-referential, therefore unaccountable and unethical. It runs on a repeating loop of self-reinforcing “logic” that polarizes and builds silos.
  • Beliefism radicalizes belief into fundamentalism, extremism, cultism.
  • Beliefism runs on neurological and social conformity – for the sake of personal identity and survival, for group cohesiveness. Cults, nations, corporations, religions, academic disciplines, societal institutions — anything believed into existence — is built on mind control.
  • Beliefism runs in stealth mode. We don’t notice or examine what beliefism is doing to our perspective, worldview, reality. We don’t see it because we can’t.
  • Beliefism removes belief from reason, examination, and critical thinking until unmoored belief bloats into delusion. We become a danger to ourselves and others. Our risk/return matrix warps. We drink the Kool-Aid, storm the Capitol, flock to super-spreader events.
  • Beliefism makes fantasy and foolishness logical.
  • Beliefism corrupts and is corrupted. It equivocates, luxuriates in hypocrisy. It takes bribes, is enticed, falls for the temptation. It justifies, exempts itself. It isolates, withdraws, banishes, protects, secures, seizes the greater share while denying the lesser. It harvests where it has not sown, builds where it does not own. It taunts, bullies, lies, cheats, steals, curries to the strong, the rich and the powerful while chastising, blaming, and afflicting the weak, hungry, homeless, and despairing.
  • And more. So much more.

Confessions of a believer.

We really thought we were on the brink of the Age of Aquarius, that Peace Love Prunes and Woodstock could last forever. Jesus Freaks like me repurposed all that as the Kingdom of God. We started believing with Jimmy and kept believing right through Reagan and the Berlin Wall and Bill and Tony. I personally started dropping out at W and the Not-so-Great Recession bailouts and bonuses, but by then the Truthiness Train already had too much momentum.

Back in the day, I was the most advanced form of believer — a Christian. Nothing happens in Christianity without belief. Nothing. Not even God. I cheered for the Christian Right (not called that yet), prayed for them, believed in them.  I never knew. My generation never knew. We had no clue that beliefism, truthiness, and “we create own reality” would morph into fake truth and Christian Nationalism and believe-whatever-conspiracy-theories-you-want-and-the-more-bizarre-the-better. We didn’t see that a greedy, selfish, delusional mindset would take over the American mind, turn us to self-absorption and stupidity and the loss of community and the common good – and even more privatization and monetization in an economy so skewed that the world’s billionaires could see their net worths rise by over 60% — with estimates as high as $4.0 TRILLION – during a frickin’ pandemic.

Future Shock didn’t warn us about this, but we could have known — this kind of crap has happened before, and hasn’t ended well – but we were too full of ourselves ,too busy asserting our “self-efficacy” and “agency” to think history had anything to teach us.

Yes, we were children of our own times. Yes, we were at the beck and call of Future Shock and Late Great and movements and megatrends that swallowed us up. Yes we were victims, the tools of Fate. None of that is any excuse. We were also the perpetrators, the “free” moral agents (who weren’t free at all) making bad choices, full of the kind of hubris that guarantees a tragic end. Looking back, our arrogance and ignorance were stunning. We were blind and unaware of history and of ourselves, and in that state we created the reality in which we and you now live.

We did this. Our belief was corrupted, we squandered our inheritance and sold what was left to the highest bidder. And now opportunity and fairness are a thing of our parents’ past. And you? We left you with the side hustle. Good luck. Hope you can survive.

And now you want an apology.

Okay. You and I both know it’s not worth the digital 00’s and 01’s it’s written with, but I assure you it’s heartfelt.

I’m truly sick about the mess we created.

We made this mess. We did this – by our belief and in the name of God.

If there were a God, I would petition him for mercy.

If there were a God, and if he had any decency and ethics and self-respect, he would petition us to forgive him for allowing it to happen.

But I’ve lost all my old faith that there’s a God to forgive me, and God has never gone on record to ask our forgiveness.

We did this – we Boomers all, and especially those of us who did it in the name of God.

Guilt, shame, grief, regret… Yes, I’ve experienced all of that. But it’s not enough. All I have left to offer are two totally inadequate words:

I’m sorry.

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

The God Syndrome: How the Puritans Destroyed Democracy

Would you buy a used car from this God?

Or share a beer with him?

Or marry him?

Or want him to be your dad?

Or run your company?

Or your country?

Well it depends.… What God are we talking about?

Ask “Do you believe in God?” in the U.S., and most people will say yes they do. (The current percentage ranges from 64% to 87% depending on how you tweak the question. See this Gallup poll.) Back in the postwar 1940’s through the 1960’s, the percentage was steady at around 97%. (See this Time Magazine summation.) But what God were those polls asking about?

  • The God of the Bible?
  • The God of “Christendom” — the loose amalgamation of European/American countries that had roots in The Church with a capital T and C?
  • Or are we talking about the God of this or that denomination, non-denominational parachurch, megachurch, lone-tree independent Bible church, living room Bible study, or men’s warrior weekend retreat?
  • Or can God just be some kind of mystical or transcendent spirit for the “I’m spiritual but not religious” crowd?
  • Or maybe a neighborly “Look, I’m kind of busy here, but okay, I’m not a religious person but yeah I think there’s a God”?

Baby Boomers like me grew up with a sort of Age of Enlightenment/ socially acceptable God. Miracles and taking the Bible literally had taken a hit back around the time the USA was declaring itself into existence. The Church survived thanks to its centuries-old institutional dominance and because people in the Western world still needed to believe in God to give meaning to their lives and structure to their societies. (Even Nietzsche worried that doing away with God would throw the human race into despair and anarchy.) As a result, God went with the flow, branching out like a river finding different courses that eventually take on prefixes like the “north fork,” “middle fork,” “south fork.”

One fork followed a course set in the late 1900’s by less conventional thinkers, who created a hybrid pseudo-scientific God that carried on the Age of Enlightenment preference for science and rationality while embracing the newly emerging social sciences, particularly psychology. That fork eventually drifted toward a more generalized “universal spirit” that became today’s “the Universe” as a God substitute.

The USA’s Roman Catholic loyalists and “mainline” Christian Protestant denominations hung onto ritualistic form while entertaining new substance. If church-going folk noticed, they were probably too busy to care:  from the mid-nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century, the human races’ addiction to periodic savagery kept the citizens busy alternately patriotically supporting wars and cleaning up their messes. While the theologians and academicians reinvented God, the people kept showing up on Sundays and putting cash and weekly “pledge” envelopes in the offering plates.

In time, Christians could be Christians without ever having read the Bible, society could still function, the march of progress could still charge ahead, and the average paycheck-earning, family-raising American could still belong to a religious institution that took care of weddings, babies, and burials without making too many demands on anybody’s personal piety. Christianity became nominal – an American birthright, like citizenship – which is why I could go to college in the 1970’s and ask my new roommate what church he went to – a routine part of making acquaintance. (“I’m Jewish,” he replied. Oh brave new world!)

But for some, all this rational humanistic scientific touchy-feely religion was a serious problem. They were the Remnant – the Bible-believing literalist true believers, the true sons of the Protestant Reformation and worthy descendants of their Puritan New World early adopter forebears. Mostly, they were carrying the torch lit long ago by a New England hellfire and brimstone evangelist named Jonathan Edwards who set off an anti-Age of Enlightenment insurgency known as the “First Great Awakening” in 1741 with his signature sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” (The Second Great Awakening came a century later in a storm of tent revivals.)The Jonathan Edwards fork of the God flow gave us a steady supply and worldwide legacy of revivals, “church renewal” movements, Baptists and fundamentalists, early 20th Century tongue-speaking Pentecostals and the 60’s and 70’s Gifts of the Spirit “Charismatics,” and a whole host of fervency-generating events and movements that were big enough to be noticed but that mostly stayed around the edges of the mainstream.

And then a miracle happened.

In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court handed the Remnant their stamped ticket to cultural dominance.

Along with belief in God, most Americans in 1973 believed that humans are “living souls” – each person an immortal divine personality placed in a mortal human body by the specific touch and intent of God. (A lot of Americans still believe that, it seems.) As a result, Roe v. Wade wasn’t about procreative biology, it was about the murder of God-given souls. The Remnant rose up in God-snorting fire-and-brimstone unity — the newly emerging Evangelicals morphed into the Christian Right, and God’s will became a political juggernaut.

All you really need to know about the Jonathan Edwards fork of the God flow is the signature title of his sermon. But consider also Edwards’ famous conclusion that “There is nothing that keeps wicked men at any one moment out of hell, but the mere pleasure of God.”

I.e., if God is in a mood to feel charitably inclined toward us, we’re good. But if not…. we’re toast.

Burnt toast.

Literally.

The Remnant’s God is the Biblical God, which the “Good Book” describes as…

  • A “man of war.”
  • When he goes to war, the objective is genocide — men, women, children — no survivors. Except for the women kept alive for the soldiers to rape.
  • He’s misogynist, xenophobic, homophobic.
  • He is a most emphatically a “He” – a male — an iron-fisted patriarch.
  • He rules as an obsolete authoritarian. He is answerable and accountable to no laws, no moral or ethical codes – to nothing and no one. What He says goes and if you don’t like it you die – or suffer for a long, long time… forever, actually.
  • He doesn’t just want to be revered and worshiped, he demands it.
  • He has absolutely the lowest opinion of both those who revere and serve him and those who don’t. He teaches them that they’re flawed from birth, that no matter what they do, they can never please him. Each of them is born under a sentence of condemnation. But He expects them to try to make Him happy anyway. Good luck with that.
  • He has planned the total destruction of the Earth and all its people, has the means to do so, and threatens to do so at any moment.
  • After He destroys everything, if you’re on his bad side – which nearly every is – your fate is to be tortured and tormented forever. Of all the billions of people who’ve ever lived, only a few will be exempt from this destiny.
  • And all of that is a good thing.

Oh, and did I mention that the Biblical God is merciful and kind, and that He loves us?

There’s more where all that came from – lots more – all of it from the Bible, the source code for the three “Abrahamic” religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Muslim). Christianity adds an addendum – the “New Testament” – which describes, among other things, how:

  • God arranged to have his “son” beaten, whipped, and tortured to death, even though he begged for mercy.
  • The purpose of which was to “save” the few “chosen” to “glorify” Him forever.
  • That was an expression of God’s “mere pleasure,” I guess.

The Remnant was created in this God’s image.

And it gets worse.

The Remnant has now become radicalized – turned into an armed cult, a belligerent, raucous, enraged mob ready, willing, eager, and able to do the bidding of the one they believe is God’s “Anointed” leader. Since the final year of the 2020 Presidential campaign through today, the Remnant has been openly at war with the USA’s democracy, intent on replacing it with their own fascist, authoritarian ideology, with the enthusiastic backing of their heroes in Congress and Commerce (the rise of the Christian Right perfectly coincided with the evangelistic overthrow of economics by the Friedman Free Marketers, giving us today’s Social Darwinist version of capitalism).

What we’re seeing is the Revenge of the Puritans.

The Founding Fathers convened in the context of the Jonathan Edwards vs. the Age of Enlightenment fight to the finish. They thought they had forged a new republic with appropriate safeguards to prevent the creation of the kind of God-sponsored theocracy their ancestors had escaped.

They were wrong.

If took nearly 250 years, but the Founders have finally lost. They can’t answer the Liberty Bell any more. It’s not just cracked, it’s been melted into swords along with the plowshares.

The Angry God and the Sinners in His Hands have overrun the gates of reason and science, ethics and the rule of law, all notions of community and “We the People,” and everything else in the Founders’ even-handed attempts at envisioning an enduring republic. They fawn over this God and his Anointed, reveling in his love and pleasure, carrying on as countlessothers have done for thousands of years, making sure that life is never anything other than solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

This God has been the face of Western Civilization for thousands of years — as long as written history – and still is. This God’s story is Western history — and not just Western history, but World history. And now, this God has entirely hijacked the USA’s history as well.

This God has poisoned the individual and collective minds of our entire species for so long that we can’t imagine life without Him.

This God is why the world’s dismal history keeps repeating itself.

We need to hold this God accountable. The trial would last an eternity. We don’t have time for it. We need to ban Him now, exile Him beyond discovery, beyond reclamation.

It will take time.

We have no time.

We need to get over this God. He has done unimaginable, incomprehensible damage to individual and collective lives for far too long. We need to write him out of our laws, our nations, our lives. We need to cleanse and detox our bodies and brains of Him.

The God Era needs to be over. We need to get over our God Syndrome.

We can’t imagine it.

We need to imagine it.

Because unless we banish this God, we cannot reinvent life to meet the challenges of the 21st Century and beyond. Because if our minds and cultures remain polluted and poisoned by our thoughts of this God and all the institutions and structures and… everything… the human race has created in His name from time immemorial… we will be unable to create anything other than in His image, as we have already done for millennia.

No of course there’s no hope that this could ever happen.

There needs to be hope that this could ever happen.

Because hope that it could ever happen is our only hope.

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 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 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 Fascism and Religion

Blueprint for Fascism Part 5

This series has been looking at fascism’s Biblical worldview and narrative. Last time, at the close of Part 4, I said we would look next at “Christianity’s claim that God and His genocidal directives don’t apply to New Testament religion.” On reflection, that topic is irrelevant to this series, so I’m going to wrap up without it.

I was showing my age. When I was part of evangelical/fundamentalist Christianity, there was an assumed theodicy that the New Testament God had somehow superseded the Old – He was kinder and gentler, and so was the gospel. (“Theodicy means vindication of God. It is to answer the question of why a good God permits the manifestation of evil, thus resolving the issue of the problem of evil.” Wikipedia) I was shown the door out of that world over 20 years ago. It took most of those years for me to get re-situated until I could say, “Hey, would you look at that – I’m an atheist now!” In the meantime, the world I left behind changed to the point where it no longer needed its kinder, gentler God and kinder, gentler gospel.

The churches I’d been associated with were only peripherally related to the rising new Christian Right, although in hindsight I can see that we were less peripheral than we wanted to think. The shift was already underway by the time I got out – it was a product of the times, moving in sync with the USA’s economic, political, and cultural shift. Under the new militant nationalist regime, the old theodicy was unnecessary.

I didn’t see this happening while it was going on around me. I think most of us didn’t. I’ve only become aware of it because about 4-5 years ago I realized that I didn’t know how life works any more, and started reading and writing to try to catch up. Because I was detached from the church, my worldview hadn’t moved with the times. I was on the outside looking in. I had become part of the new fascism’s Other and didn’t even know it.

As I tried to understand the brave new world I was now living in, I made the faulty assumption (one of many) that the Christianity I once knew was still the same, and therefore I couldn’t understand how it had suddenly rallied behind Trump and the Republicans and their new American fascism. Turns out there was nothing sudden about it, and the Christianity I’d left behind wasn’t the one that had done the rallying. But I didn’t notice, and that’s why I was about to write this Part 5 on a topic that wasn’t relevant.

Instead of doing that, I’ll end this series by referring you to an article I read just this weekend by someone I follow on Medium who has been paying attention: Dear Christians: We Need to Talk, by Manny Otiko Medium (Jan. 15, 2021). In addition, if you’re interested in generally learning more about the rise of the Christian Right, here’s a list of short histories told from a variety of viewpoints:

Christian right – Wikipedia.

The Real Origins of the Religious Right – POLITICO Magazine. 

Movements | Religious Right | Timeline | The Association of Religion Data Archives (thearda.com). 

The Christian Right, The Twentieth Century, Divining America: Religion in American History, TeacherServe, National Humanities Center. 

Religion and Right-Wing Politics: How Evangelicals Reshaped Elections – The New York Times (nytimes.com)

Kevin Rhodes Fascism and Religion, War

Blueprint for Fascism – Part 4

Fascism at War

Part 3 of this series looked at how fascism uses gaslighting, cult indoctrination, and patriotic nationalism to install the Biblical/Fascist Narrative as the country’s new normal. The narrative mandates war against Them – those fingered for the nation’s fall from grace, defined racially, ethnically, nationally, politically, and otherwise. In this Part 4, we’ll see that fascism at war is domestic and international terrorism.[1]

Legalized Crime

War is legalized crime:  it legalizes what is culturally unacceptable and morally abhorrent. It returns humanity to a state of raw survival, where life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”[2]

“War… preys on our most primal and savage impulses. It allows us to do what peacetime society forbids or restrains us from doing:  It allows us to kill.”[3]

International Law

International law imposes limits on war’s legalized criminality.

“’We have had a system of international governance since World War II that reflects the ascendance of a set of commitments to individual rights and protections rooted in the U.N. system…,’ says [Jeremy Weinstein, a political science professor and director of the Stanford global studies division], who served as deputy to the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 2013 to 2015.” [4]

International law is grounded on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights[5] and is backed up by criminal enforcement in the International Criminal Court[6]. These structures were put in place in 2002 via The Rome Statute, a treaty negotiated under U.N. auspices. The Rome Statute established four types of international crimes: genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes of aggression. The ink was barely dry when the United States announced its non-compliance with the treaty.

“One month after the International Criminal Court (ICC) officially came into existence on July 1, 2002, the President signed the American Servicemembers’ Protection Act (ASPA), which limits U.S. government support and assistance to the ICC; curtails certain military assistance to many countries that have ratified the Rome Statute establishing the ICC; regulates U.S. participation in United Nations (U.N.) peacekeeping missions commenced after July 1, 2003; and, most controversially among European allies, authorizes the President to use “all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release” of certain U.S. and allied persons who may be detained or tried by the ICC.”[7]

India, Indonesia, and China have also rejected these international law standards.

“As of January 2019, 123 states are members of the Court. Other states that have not become parties to the Rome Statute include India, Indonesia, and China. On May 6th, 2002, the United States, in a position shared with Israel and Sudan, having previously signed the Rome Statute formally withdrew its signature and indicated that it did not intend to ratify the agreement.”[8]

Fascism at War

Fascism at war adheres to the Biblical-Fascist Narrative. [9]

Altered Narrative/Altered Reality. “The myth of war creates a new, artificial reality. Moral precepts — ones we have spent a lifetime learning — are jettisoned. We accept, if not condone, the maiming and killing of other as the regrettable cost of war. We operate under a new moral code…. I learned early on that war forms its own culture. The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug… It is peddled by mythmakers — historians, war correspondents, filmmakers, novelists, and the state — all of whom endow it with qualities it often does possess:  excitement, exoticism, power, chances to rise above our small stations in life, and a bizarre and fantastic universe that has a grotesque and dark beauty. it dominates culture, distorts memory, corrupts language, and infects everything around it, even humor, which becomes preoccupied with the grim perversities of smut and death. Fundamental questions about the meaning, or meaninglessness, of our place on the planet are laid bare when we watch those around us sink to the lowest depths. War exposes the capacity for evil that lurks not far below the surface within all of us. And this is why for many war is so hard to discuss once it is over.”

Victimhood of Us at the hands of Them.  “The cultivation of victimhood is essential fodder for any conflict. It is studiously crafted by the state. All cultural life is directed to broadcast the injustices carried out against us. Cultural life soon becomes little more that the drivel of agitprop. The message that the nation is good, the cause just, and the war noble is pounded into the heads of citizens in everything from late-night talk shows to morning news programs to films and popular novels. The nation is soon thrown into a trance from which it does not awake until the conflict ends. In parts of the world where the conflict remains unresolved, the trance can last for generations.”

They must be destroyed. “War is not a uniform experience or event … war usually demands, by its very logic, the disabling of the enemy, often broadly defined to include civilians… While we venerate and mourn our own dead we are curiously indifferent about those we kill. Thus killing is done in our name, killing that concerns us little, while those who kill our own are seen as having crawled out of the deepest recesses of the earth, lacking our own humanity and goodness. Our dead. Their dead. They are not the same. Our dead matter, theirs do not.”

Nationalism.  “Lurking beneath the surface of every society, including ours, is the passionate yearning for a nationalistic cause that exalts us, the kind that war alone is able to deliver. It reduces and at times erases the society of individual consciousness. We abandon individual responsibility for a shared, unquestioned communal enterprise, however morally dubious…. There is little that logic or fact or truth can do to alter the experience. Moreover, once this crusade is embraced by the nation, the myth predetermines how the world is perceived. It is only after the myth implodes, often as suddenly as it descended, that one can again question the motives and the actions of the state.”

Religious Sanction.  “Armed movements seek divine sanction and the messianic certitude of absolute truth. They do not need to get this from religions, as we usually think of religion, but a type of religion:  Patriotism provides the blessing. Soldiers want at least the consolation of knowing that they risk being blown up by land mines for a greater glory, for a New World. Dimensions, questioning of purpose, the exposure of war crimes carried out by those fighting on our behalf are dangerous to such beliefs. Dissidents who challenge the goodness of our cause, who question the gods of war, who pull back the curtains to expose the lie are usually silenced or ignored…. Once we sign on for war’s crusade, once we see ourselves on the side of the angels, once we embrace a theological or ideological belief system that defines itself as the embodiment of goodness and light, it is only a matter of how we will carry out murder.”

“The Lord is a man of war”

In Biblical Fascism, God is a totalitarian ruler and unaccountable sovereign, free to wage war if, when, and how He sees fit. The Bible identifies God this way:  “The Lord is a man of war.” (Exodus 15: 3) And God is not just a “man of war,” but a terrorist:

“The peoples have heard; they tremble;
pangs have seized the inhabitants of Philistia.
Now are the chiefs of Edom dismayed;
trembling seizes the leaders of Moab;
all the inhabitants of Canaan have melted away.
Terror and dread fall upon them;
because of the greatness of your arm, they are still as a stone,”
Exodus 15:  14-16

God’s “Anointed” – the one who leads his chosen nation – is similarly above human legal, moral, and ethical accountability. God backs up His Anointed and uses his chosen nation as his “hammer and weapon of war,” to impose his will on the non-chosen. He does so with derision and contempt.

“You are my hammer and weapon of war: with you I break nations in pieces; with you I destroy kingdoms; with you I break in pieces the horse and his rider; with you I break in pieces the chariot and the charioteer; with you I break in pieces man and woman; with you I break in pieces the old man and the youth; with you I break in pieces the young man and the young woman; with you I break in pieces the shepherd and his flock; with you I break in pieces the farmer and his team; with you I break in pieces governors and commanders.” Jeremiah 51:20-26 

“Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord and against his Anointed, saying, “Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us.” He who sits in the heavens laughs; the Lord holds them in derision. Then he will speak to them in his wrath and terrify them in his fury.” Psalm 2:1-12

God expects the same ruthlessness from his nation:

“Cursed is he who does the work of the Lord with slackness, and cursed is he who keeps back his sword from bloodshed.” Jeremiah 48:10

Little wonder, then, that the best way to deal with God is to be afraid of Him. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” Proverbs 9:10.

Holy War

Israel went to war, Islam went to war, Christianity went to war — against each other and amongst themselves. They still do. For God’s people, every war is holy war — God is always on your side, your cause is always just. The Church, steeped in centuries of holy wars and pogroms, supported Mussolini in his day, just as the Christian Right supports Trump and the Republicans today. Same God, same Bible, same worldview, same cause, same justification.

Genocide

When God sends his nation to war, the object is genocide.

“Observe what I command you this day. Behold, I will drive out before you the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. Take care, lest you make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land to which you go, lest it become a snare in your midst. You shall tear down their altars and break their pillars and cut down their Asherim (for you shall worship no other god, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God)”. Exodus 34:11-14

“When the Lord your God brings you into the land that you are entering to take possession of it, and clears away many nations before you, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations more numerous and mightier than yourselves, and when the Lord your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them, then you must devote them to complete destruction. You shall make no covenant with them and show no mercy to them. You shall not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your sons, for they would turn away your sons from following me, to serve other gods. Then the anger of the Lord would be kindled against you, and he would destroy you quickly. But thus shall you deal with them: you shall break down their altars and dash in pieces their pillars and chop down their Asherim and burn their carved images with fire.” Deuteronomy 7:1-26

“And you shall consume all the peoples that the Lord your God will give over to you. Your eye shall not pity them, neither shall you serve their gods, for that would be a snare to you.” Deuteronomy 7:16 

“You shall surely put the inhabitants of that city to the sword, devoting it to destruction, all who are in it and its cattle, with the edge of the sword.” Deuteronomy 13:15 

“You shall surely destroy all the places where the nations whom you shall dispossess served their gods, on the high mountains and on the hills and under every green tree. You shall tear down their altars and dash in pieces their pillars and burn their Asherim with fire. You shall chop down the carved images of their gods and destroy their name out of that place.” Deuteronomy 12:1-32 

“But in the cities of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you for an inheritance, you shall save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall devote them to complete destruction, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, as the Lord your God has commanded,” Deuteronomy 20:16-17 

“And we captured all his cities at that time and devoted to destruction every city, men, women, and children. We left no survivors.” Deuteronomy 2:34 

“And we took all his cities at that time—there was not a city that we did not take from them—sixty cities, the whole region of Argob, the kingdom of Og in Bashan. All these were cities fortified with high walls, gates, and bars, besides very many unwalled villages. And we devoted them to destruction, as we did to Sihon the king of Heshbon, devoting to destruction every city, men, women, and children. But all the livestock and the spoil of the cities we took as our plunder.” Deuteronomy 3:4-6

“The people went up into the city, every man straight before him, and they captured the city. Then they devoted all in the city to destruction, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys, with the edge of the sword.” Joshua 6:20-21 

“Israel struck them down, until there was left none that survived or escaped. And all who fell that day, both men and women, were 12,000, all the people of Ai.” Joshua 8:22-25

“Joshua struck the whole land, the hill country and the Negeb and the lowland and the slopes, and all their kings. He left none remaining, but devoted to destruction all that breathed, just as the Lord God of Israel commanded.” Joshua 10:40 

“Go and strike the inhabitants of Jabesh-gilead with the edge of the sword; also the women and the little ones. This is what you shall do: every male and every woman that has lain with a male you shall devote to destruction.” Judges 21:10-12 

“And the men of Israel turned back against the people of Benjamin and struck them with the edge of the sword, the city, men and beasts and all that they found. And all the towns that they found they set on fire.” Judges 20:48 

“Thus says the Lord of hosts, ‘I have noted what Amalek did to Israel in opposing them on the way when they came up out of Egypt. Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.’” 1 Samuel 15:2-3 

“And that night the angel of the Lord went out and struck down 185,000 in the camp of the Assyrians. And when people arose early in the morning, behold, these were all dead bodies.” 2 Kings 19:35 

“And Elijah said to them, ‘Seize the prophets of Baal; let not one of them escape.” And they seized them. And Elijah brought them down to the brook Kishon and slaughtered them there.’” 1 Kings 18:36-40 

“And they entered into a covenant to seek the Lord, the God of their fathers, with all their heart and with all their soul, but that whoever would not seek the Lord, the God of Israel, should be put to death, whether young or old, man or woman.” 2 Chronicles 15:12-13

“Go up against the land of Merathaim, and against the inhabitants of Pekod. Kill, and devote them to destruction, declares the Lord, and do all that I have commanded you. The noise of battle is in the land, and great destruction!” Jeremiah 50:21-22 

Sometimes, instead of killing everyone, Israel’s soldiers were authorized to capture and rape the women survivors.

“Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man by lying with him. But all the young girls who have not known man by lying with him keep alive for yourselves.” Numbers 31:17-18 

“This is what you shall do: every male and every woman that has lain with a male you shall devote to destruction. And they found among the inhabitants of Jabesh-gilead 400 young virgins who had not known a man by lying with him, and they brought them to the camp at Shiloh, which is in the land of Canaan”. Judges 21:10-12 E

Sometimes, God’s hostility was turned against His own people.

“And he said to them, ‘Thus says the Lord God of Israel, ‘Put your sword on your side each of you, and go to and fro from gate to gate throughout the camp, and each of you kill his brother and his companion and his neighbor.’ And the sons of Levi did according to the word of Moses. And that day about three thousand men of the people fell.” Exodus 32:27-28 

“Then the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many people of Israel died.” Numbers 21:6-35 

“And the Lord said to Moses, ‘Take all the chiefs of the people and hang them in the sun before the Lord, that the fierce anger of the Lord may turn away from Israel.’” Numbers 25:4 

“Their infants will be dashed in pieces before their eyes; their houses will be plundered and their wives ravished.” Isaiah 13:16 

“And if anyone again prophesies, his father and mother who bore him will say to him, ‘You shall not live, for you speak lies in the name of the Lord.’ And his father and mother who bore him shall pierce him through when he prophesies.” Zechariah 13:3

“Ephraim’s glory shall fly away like a bird— no birth, no pregnancy, no conception! Even if they bring up children, I will bereave them till none is left. Woe to them when I depart from them! Ephraim, as I have seen, was like a young palm planted in a meadow; but Ephraim must lead his children out to slaughter. Give them, O Lord— what will you give? Give them a miscarrying womb and dry breasts. Every evil of theirs is in Gilgal; there I began to hate them. Because of the wickedness of their deeds I will drive them out of my house. I will love them no more.” Hosea 9:11-16 

“Then the Lord said to me, Though Moses and Samuel stood before me, yet my heart would not turn toward this people. Send them out of my sight, and let them go! And when they ask you, ‘Where shall we go?’ you shall say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord: Those who are for pestilence, to pestilence, and those who are for the sword, to the sword; those who are for famine, to famine, and those who are for captivity, to captivity.’ I will appoint over them four kinds of destroyers, declares the Lord: the sword to kill, the dogs to tear, and the birds of the air and the beasts of the earth to devour and destroy. And I will make them a horror to all the kingdoms of the earth because of what Manasseh the son of Hezekiah, king of Judah, did in Jerusalem.” Jeremiah 15:1-4 

“I will make Mount Seir a waste and a desolation, and I will cut off from it all who come and go. And I will fill its mountains with the slain. On your hills and in your valleys and in all your ravines those slain with the sword shall fall. I will make you a perpetual desolation, and your cities shall not be inhabited. Then you will know that I am the Lord.” Ezekiel 35:7-9 

“And to the others he said in my hearing, ‘Pass through the city after him, and strike. Your eye shall not spare, and you shall show no pity. Kill old men outright, young men and maidens, little children and women, but touch no one on whom is the mark. And begin at my sanctuary.’ So they began with the elders who were before the house. Then he said to them, ‘Defile the house, and fill the courts with the slain. Go out.’ So they went out and struck in the city.” Ezekiel 9:5-7

“Whoever is found will be thrust through, and whoever is caught will fall by the sword. Their infants will be dashed in pieces before their eyes; their houses will be plundered and their wives ravished. Behold, I am stirring up the Medes against them, who have no regard for silver and do not delight in gold. Their bows will slaughter the young men; they will have no mercy on the fruit of the womb; their eyes will not pity children”. Isaiah 13:15-18 

“Samaria shall bear her guilt, because she has rebelled against her God; they shall fall by the sword; their little ones shall be dashed in pieces, and their pregnant women ripped open”. Hosea 13:16 

“Prepare slaughter for his sons because of the guilt of their fathers, lest they rise and  possess the earth, and fill the face of the world with cities.” Isaiah 14:21 

This endless onslaught of holy venom represents more than an historical account of a brutal, savage, ancient nation and its brutal, savage, ancient God. They also display the state of mind fascists and theirsupporters once they are fully immersed in and indoctrinated into the Biblical-Fascist Narrative.

Next time, we’ll look at Christianity’s claim that God and His genocidal directives don’t apply to New Testament religion.

[1] The Rome Statute, Articles 6 and 8

[2] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)

[3] Hedges, Chris,War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002).

[4] Patton, Jill, An Existential Moment for Democracy? As American leadership falters, scholars say, autocrats are on the rise, Stanford Magazine (December 2019)

[5]The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights – Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

[6] The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights — Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

[7] U.S. Policy Regarding the International Criminal Court (ICC), Congressional Research Service (July 9, 2002 – August 29, 2006) 

[8] Wikipedia –the United States and the International Criminal Court.

[9] All quotations in this section are from Hedges, op cit.