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

The Trouble is, We Believe

Belief is something humans do.

Beliefism is belief metastasized — belief unmoored, unhinged, runaway, with no object but its own self-referenced purification.

Every belief carries the seed of beliefism– the potential to grow into something toxic, with no purpose but to propagate more of itself.

Which is why…

Belief is a clear and present danger.

Belief should come with a warning — “Handle With Care.” But it doesn’t, and so we don’t — we just go around believing things like it’s no big deal. What we believe is a big deal. We should be more careful.

We’re probably careless because belief makes life feel better. It provides purpose and meaning and mission, lays out incentives and rewards, hypes us into feeling inspired and enthusiastic, fired up to do great things.

Belief is how we get to act like God.

Belief is how we create worlds, build civilizations, found nations. Belief anchors us in collective and individual identity, defines who’s us and who’s them, carves out space for us in the world. Our brains are wired to value those things.

Our brains are wired to believe.

Belief is indiscriminate. It doesn’t care what’s believed, what’s fact or fake. As far as belief is concerned, all reality is alternate reality. Our brains have a bad case of “whatever.” If we want to believe it, they’re good with it.

Belief isn’t choosy.

Belief doesn’t distinguish fact from fiction, truth from madness, clarity from delusion. It’s amoral, indiscriminate, undiscerning. Belief only makes self-referential judgments — what conforms to the thing believed and what doesn’t, what to encourage and promote vs. what to punish and ban.

Our brains don’t discriminate.

Our brains readily swap belief in this for belief in that — religion, science, humanism, capitalism, fascism, extraterrestrials, self-help, past lives… they’re all the same.

Belief is fun.

Beliefism is about getting inspired, believing impossible dreams, going for it, realizing your unique calling, becoming your authentic self – all those things that make Hollywood and self-helpers and entrepreneurial heroes rich and famous.

Sound familiar?

Belief has been king in the New World for 400 years. The New World brought it from the Old World, where it was king for millennia. Belief is America’s root religion. It gave us the Puritans. Now it gives us the self-helpers, alternative healers, life coaches, and evangelizing Christians and atheists. We do belief in the USA. We’re belief experts. We got it down.

But there’s more:  belief morphs into beliefism.

Beliefism is when belief goes public. It’s the Unicorn IPO, the blockbuster premiered. In psychological terms, beliefism is when belief emerges – moves beyond internal subjectivity and takes on form and substance in external human reality, becomes ideology, builds institutions, develops its own mythology and metaphors, becomes law and economics, dictates cultural norms.

Beliefism turns what’s believed into knowledge.

Beliefism is evident in a street evangelist’s pitch for Creationism. “The universe is way too complicated for me to understand,” he said, “so there must be a God who does.” He could have understood but he didn’t. He took a shortcut – he believed instead of knowing. Then he reversed the order:  his belief became knowledge — he knew what he believed.

Beliefism is unethical.

Belief creates worldview, worldview creates reality, and reality is whatever belief makes it. Beliefism has no ethics – it runs in a circle; there’s no outside reference, no checks and balances, nothing to keep it honest, nothing to validate it. Belief is unaccountable, therefore unethical.

Beliefism polarizes.

Beliefism separates who belongs and who doesn’t, who’s friend and who’s foe. It manages entrances and exits, reinforces conformity, and punishes dissent.

Beliefism radicalizes.

Once it’s got a cause, beliefism takes it to an extreme. Belief becomes fundamentalism. If you’re not with us you’re against us. No neutrality. You go to the edge or you suffer and die.

Beliefism trends to fundamentalism

Fundamentalism decrees doctrine, prescribes ritual; banishes and punishes discourse, doubt, and dissent. It builds silos and hunkers down; lobs bombs at them. Fundamentalism can be religious or secular – same dynamics either way.

Beliefism practices mind control.

Beliefism runs on brain conformity – for the sake of personal identity and survival, for group cohesiveness. Cults are built on mind control. Every belief-fueled cause is a cult in the making. Nations, corporations, religions, academic disciplines, societal institutions… they’re all built on mind control. None of them exist if we don’t believe them into existence. The process of entering and sustaining membership is the same no matter what.

Beliefism lives in our blind spots.

Beliefism runs in stealth mode. Like a friend of mine used to say, “The trouble with blind spots is you can’t see them.” We don’t notice or examine what beliefism is doing to our perspective, worldview, reality — we just know the reality that emerges from it.

Beliefism promotes delusional thinking.

Beliefism removes belief from examination and critical thinking. Unmoored belief trends to delusion. You become a danger to yourself and others. Your risk/return matrix warps. You drink the Kool-Aid. You storm the Capitol. You flock to super spreader events.

There’s good neuroscience behind beliefism.

Beliefism works because we’re biological beings. We’re powered by hormones, chemicals, electrical charges. We believe from the inside out — our bodies and brains construct our reality from what’s around us, including how other people are constructing reality. We share perspective with each other and a shared reality emerges. We build things together to support and perpetuate that reality — institutions, architecture, art, economics, law, government, religion, norms and customs, rituals and practices, metaphors and icons. The “higher” portions of our brains dream all this up, the “lower” portions keep it rolling.

That warning label idea is no joke.

Beliefism has hurt a lot a people for a long time. It still does. It hurt me. It might be hurting you.

Maybe we should talk about it.

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 Racism and Reparations, The Long Reads

Reparations [4]:  The Essential Doubt

And so you see I have come to doubt
All that I once held as true
I stand alone without beliefs
The only truth I know is you.

Kathy’s Song[1]
Paul Simon

We saw last time that the U.S. government could waive its legal defense of sovereign immunity to pave the way for slavery reparations. It would take more than a legal reckoning for that to happen. Law lies on the surface of society, readily visible, but it has deep roots in history and ideology, national identity and mission, values and beliefs, ways of looking at the world and how life works.[2] These ancient root systems invoke fierce allegiances deeply embedded in human psyche and culture. Because the legal doctrine of sovereign immunity is grounded in Biblical doctrine,[3] laying it aside requires doubt and dissent of the highest order – national treason and religious apostasy in a single act.

Doubt of that magnitude is rare beyond description but not without precedent. Consider, for example, Germany’s reparations for World War II, which required not only the international banishment of Nazism, but also the German people’s moral renunciation of Nazism’s philosophical and political roots stretching back to the 19th Century.[4]; In comparison, the USA”s roots of slavery (and hence racism) extend back to the earliest New World settlements, which imported English common law, including the divine right of kings and its nationalistic version, sovereign immunity. Renouncing the latter to pave the way for slavery reparations would require a similar American moral renunciation of centuries of related social, economic, and political ideology and set new terms for a post-racism American state.

That, in turn, would require a reckoning with the “first cause” roots of the divine right of kings and sovereign immunity.

The First Cause Roots of Sovereign Immunity

A “first cause” satisfies the human desire for life to make sense by assigning a cause to every effect. Trouble is, as you trace the cause and effect chain to its remotest origins, you eventually run out of causes, leaving you with only effects. That’s when a first cause comes to the rescue. A first cause has no prior cause – it is so primary that nothing came before it but everything came after it. Since knowledge can’t reach that far back, a first cause is a matter of belief:  you take it on faith, declare the beginning into existence, and go from there.

Western civilization’s worldview historically identified God as the ultimate first cause.

“First cause, in philosophy, is the self-created being (i.e., God) to which every chain of causes must ultimately go back. The term was used by Greek thinkers and became an underlying assumption in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Many philosophers and theologians in this tradition have formulated an argument for the existence of God by claiming that the world that man observes with his senses must have been brought into being by God as the first cause.

“The classic Christian formulation of this argument came from the medieval theologian St. Thomas Aquinas, who was influenced by the thought of the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle. Aquinas argued that the observable order of causation is not self-explanatory. It can only be accounted for by the existence of a first cause; this first cause, however, must not be considered simply as the first in a series of continuing causes, but rather as first cause in the sense of being the cause for the whole series of observable causes.

“The 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant rejected the argument from causality because, according to one of his central theses, causality cannot legitimately be applied beyond the realm of possible experience to a transcendent cause.

“Protestantism generally has rejected the validity of the first-cause argument; nevertheless, for most Christians it remains an article of faith that God is the first cause of all that exists. The person who conceives of God in this way is apt to look upon the observable world as contingent—i.e., as something that could not exist by itself.”[5]

God is the ultimate Sovereign from which all lesser sovereigns – the king, the national government — derive their existence and legitimacy. God’s first cause Sovereignty justifies God’s right to rule as God sees fit. The king and the state, having been set into place by God, derive a comparable right of domination from God. The king and the national government are to the people what God is to them.

The Divine Right of Kings

When kings ruled countries, their divine line of authority took legal form as the Divine Right of Kings.

“The divine right of kings, divine right, or God’s mandate is a political and religious doctrine of royal and political legitimacy. It stems from a specific metaphysical framework in which the king (or queen) is pre-selected as an heir prior to their birth. By pre-selecting the king’s physical manifestation, the governed populace actively (rather than merely passively) hands the metaphysical selection of the king’s soul – which will inhabit the body and thereby rule them – over to God. In this way, the ‘divine right’ originates as a metaphysical act of humility or submission towards the Godhead.

“Consequentially, it asserts that a monarch (e.g. a king) is subject to no earthly authority, deriving the right to rule directly from divine authority, like the monotheist will of God. The monarch is thus not subject to the will of his people, of the aristocracy, or of any other estate of the realm. It implies that only divine authority can judge an unjust monarch and that any attempt to depose, dethrone or restrict their powers runs contrary to God’s will and may constitute a sacrilegious act.”[6]

The Divine Right of Kings was a favorite doctrine of the first King James of England, who commissioned what would become the King James Version of the Bible partly in response to Puritan challenges to the Church of England’s doctrine of an ordained clergy that could trace its lineage to the original Apostles.

“Divine right of kings, in European history, a political doctrine in defense of monarchical ‘absolutism,’ which asserted that kings derived their authority from God and could not therefore be held accountable for their actions by any earthly authority such as a parliament. Originating in Europe, the divine-right theory can be traced to the medieval conception of God’s award of temporal power to the political ruler, paralleling the award of spiritual power to the church. By the 16th and 17th centuries, however, the new national monarchs were asserting their authority in matters of both church and state. King James I of England (reigned 1603–25) was the foremost exponent of the divine right of king….”[7]

“While throughout much of world history, deified potentates have been the rule, in England, absolute monarchy never got a solid foothold, but there certainly was the attempt. Elements of British political theory and practice encouraged absolutism—the idea and practice that the king is the absolute law and that there is no appeal beyond him. Several movements and ideas hurried along the idea of absolute monarchy in England. One of those ideas was the divine right of kings,

“In England, the idea of the divine right of kings will enter England with James VI of Scotland who will come and rule over both England and Scotland as James I in 1603 and will commence the line of several ‘Stuart’ monarchs. James had definite ideas about his role as monarch, and those ideas included the divine right of kings. Here are just a few of James’ statements that reflect his view that he ruled by divine right:

      • Kings are like gods— “…kings are not only God’s lieutenants upon earth, and sit upon God’s throne, but even by God himself are called gods.”
      • Kings are not to be disputed— “… That as to dispute what God may do is blasphemy….so is it sedition in subjects to dispute what a king may do in the height of his power.”
      • Governing is the business of the king, not the business of the subjects— “you do not meddle with the main points of government; that is my craft . . . to meddle with that were to lesson me . . . I must not be taught my office.”
      • Kings govern by ancient rights that are his to claim— “I would not have you meddle with such ancient rights of mine as I have received from my predecessors . . . .”
      • Kings should not be bothered with requests to change settled law— “…I pray you beware to exhibit for grievance anything that is established by a settled law…”
      • Don’t make a request of a king if you are confident he will say “no.”— “… for it is an undutiful part in subjects to press their king, wherein they know beforehand he will refuse them.”

“James’ views sound egotistical to us today, but he was not the only one that held them. These views were held by others, even some philosophers. For example, the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote a work called Leviathan in 1651 in which he said that men must surrender their rights to a sovereign in exchange for protection. While Hobbes’ was not promoting the divine right of kings per se, he was providing a philosophy to justify a very strong absolute ruler, the kind that the divine right of kings prescribes. Sir Robert Filmer was a facilitator of the divine right of kings and wrote a book about it called Patriarcha (1660) in which he said that the state is like a family and that the king is a father to his people. Filmer also says that the first king was Adam and that Adam’s sons rule the nations of the world today. So, the King of England would be considered the eldest son of Adam in England or the King of France would be Adam’s eldest son in France.”[8]

King James, Witch Hunter

King James had no impartial academic interest in a Bible translation that supported his divine right:  during his reign, the “Cradle King” accumulated a long list of covered offenses that included mass murder, torture, injustice, tracheary, cruelty, and misogyny.

“The witch-hunts that swept across Europe from 1450 to 1750 were among the most controversial and terrifying phenomena in history – holocausts of their times. Historians have long attempted to explain why and how they took such rapid and enduring hold in communities as disparate and distant from one another as Navarre and Copenhagen. They resulted in the trial of around 100,000 people (most of them women), a little under half of whom were 
put to death.

“One of the most active centres of witch-hunting was Scotland, where perhaps 
4,000 people were consigned to the flames – 
a striking number for such a small country, 
and more than double the execution rate in England. The ferocity of these persecutions can be attributed to the most notorious royal witch-hunter: King James VI of Scotland, who in 1603 became James I of England.

“Most of the suspects soon confessed – under torture – to concocting a host of bizarre and gruesome spells and rituals in order to whip up the storm.… James was so appalled when he heard such tales that he decided to personally superintend the interrogations… while the king looked on with ‘great delight’.

“James’s beliefs had a dangerously misogynistic core. He grew up to scorn – even revile – women. Though he was by no means alone in his view of the natural weakness and inferiority of women, his aversion towards them was unusually intense. He took every opportunity to propound the view that they were far more likely than men to succumb to witchcraft…. He would later commission a new version of the Bible in which all references to witches were rewritten in the female gender.

“Most witchcraft trials constituted grave miscarriages of justice…. If the actual facts of a case were unsatisfactory, or did not teach a clear enough moral lesson, then they were enhanced, added to or simply changed.”[9]

When the new King James Bible substantiated the King’s divine right to carry on these activities, and when the USA imported the king’s divine right into its legal system as sovereign immunity, both acknowledged God as the first cause of these legal doctrines. Like the King, the U.S. government also has a long list of covered offenses:  the treatment of slaves during the reign of legal slavery mirrors King James’ obsession with brutalizing, lynching, and murdering witches.

In the U.S., where a 2019 Gallup Poll found that 64% – 87% of Americans believe in God  (depending on how the question was asked), there remain many ”Christians [for whom] it remains an article of faith that God is the first cause of all that exists.[10] As a result, we see in the USA’s current social and political climate both explicit and implicit affirmation of the following Bible passages (which the online source appropriately expresses in the King James version) to substantiate the ability of national leaders to avoid accountability for acts of governance that sponsor this kind of horrifying treatment of citizens.[11]:

“Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation. For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same: For he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil. Wherefore ye must needs be subject, not only for wrath, but also for conscience sake.” Romans 13:1-5, KJV

“Lift not up your horn on high: speak not with a stiff neck. For promotion cometh neither from the east, nor from the west, nor from the south. But God is the judge: he putteth down one, and setteth up another.” Psalms 75:5-7, KJV

“Daniel answered and said, Blessed be the name of God for ever and ever: for wisdom and might are his: And he changeth the times and the seasons: he removeth kings, and setteth up kings: he giveth wisdom unto the wise, and knowledge to them that know understanding:” Daniel 2:20-21, KJV

“This matter is by the decree of the watchers, and the demand by the word of the holy ones: to the intent that the living may know that the most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever he will, and setteth up over it the basest of men.” Daniel 4:17, KJV

“I have made the earth, the man and the beast that are upon the ground, by my great power and by my outstretched arm, and have given it unto whom it seemed meet unto me.” Jeremiah 27:5, KJV

“The king’s heart is in the hand of the LORD, as the rivers of water: he turneth it whithersoever he will.” Proverbs 21:1, KJV

“For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry. Because thou hast rejected the word of the LORD, he hath also rejected thee from being king. And Saul said unto Samuel, I have sinned: for I have transgressed the commandment of the LORD, and thy words: because I feared the people, and obeyed their voice. Now therefore, I pray thee, pardon my sin, and turn again with me, that I may worship the LORD. And Samuel said unto Saul, I will not return with thee: for thou hast rejected the word of the LORD, and the LORD hath rejected thee from being king over Israel.” 1 Samuel 15:23-26, KJV

“And upon a set day Herod, arrayed in royal apparel, sat upon his throne, and made an oration unto them. And the people gave a shout, saying, It is the voice of a god, and not of a man. And immediately the angel of the Lord smote him, because he gave not God the glory: and he was eaten of worms, and gave up the ghost.” Acts 12:21-23, KJV

The Ultimate Focus of Doubt:  God

In “Abrahamic” cultures — Jewish, Muslim, and Christian – the Biblical God is the first cause of the divine right of kings and sovereign immunity. The full force of patriotic nationalism and religious zeal therefore originates with God – which explains why a surprising number of European nations had blasphemy laws on the books until not that long ago, and why some nations still do.[12]

“Blasphemy is the act of insulting or showing contempt or lack of reverence to a deity, or sacred objects, or toward something considered sacred or inviolable.”[13]

God, it seems, like kings and sovereign nations, has much to be excused from. Aside from the Biblical God’s sponsorship of war, genocide, mass murder, rape, torture, and brutality to humans and animals, a list of modern labels would include misogynist, homophobe, and xenophobe. But of course you don’t think that way if you’re a believer, because that would be blasphemy, often punishable by death, often after the infliction of the kind of cruel and unusual punishment reserved for the faithful and unfaithful alike. As for the latter, the Bible makes it a badge of honor for the faithful to suffer in the name of God:

“Some were tortured, refusing to accept release, so that they might rise again to a better life. Others suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were killed with the sword. They went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, mistreated—of whom the world was not worthy—wandering about in deserts and mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth. And all these, though commended through their faith, did not receive what was promised,” Hebrews 11:  35-39.ESV

Transformation Made Possible by Doubt

Nonbelievers not vexed with these kinds of rights of the sovereign and duties of the governed are free to doubt God’s first cause status and its derivative doctrines, laws, and policies. In the USA, doubt embraced on that level would open the door to any number of contrary beliefs – for example:

    • The state does not enjoy superior status — historically, legally, morally, or otherwise – that gives it a right to act without consequence.
    • The people governed are therefore not bound – theologically, morally, or otherwise – to submit to government that is not responsible for its actions.

Once you’re no longer worried about breaking faith with God as the first cause of your national institutional structure, a while new “social contract” (also discussed last time) between government and the people becomes possible – a contract that would, in effect, not be satisfied with paying only descendants of slaves “damages” for past harm, but would look to establish a fresh national vision of the duties of those who govern and the rights and freedoms of the governed. The result, it would seem, is the possibility of ending the USA’s institutionalized racism for good.

[1] Who was Paul Simon’s Kathy? And whatever happened to her? See this article from The Guardian.

[2] See the Belief Systems and Culture category of posts in my Iconoclast.blog.

[3] The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American, Andrew L. Seidel (2019). Although the USA was not founded as a Christian nation, its core values and beliefs, like those of other Western countries, are Classical and Biblical in origin.

[4]  See Alpha History and The Mises Institute on the historical origins of Nazism.

[5]  Encyclopedia Britannica. See also New World Encyclopedia and the Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy.

[6] Wikipedia – The Divine Right of Kings.

[7] Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia.. See also the New World Encyclopedia

[8] Owlcation

[9] Borman, Tracy, James VI And I: The King Who Hunted Witches,  History Extra (BBC Historical Magazine)  (March 27, 2019)

[10]  Encyclopedia Britannica. See also New World Encyclopedia and the Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy.

[11] “Bill’s Bible Basics.”

[12]  Wikipedia – Blasphemy law.

[13]  Wikipedia – Blasphemy.