Lesser Evil, Be Thou My Good!

Some right-wing frother (the brother of a friendly co-worker, as it happens) has been posting anti-Muslim propaganda on Facebook in support of Trump's highly selective Muslim ban.  (If Muslims are really so uniformly violent, why is Trump willing to let in Saudi, UAE, Bahraini, Egyptian, etc. Muslims?)  Today he posted a video clip of Bill Maher denouncing the supposed cluelessness of liberals about "radical Islam."   I knew I had seen some objections by Maher to the ban, so I did a little digging and found this one to toss at him, with a reminder that Maher is also vocally anti-Christian.  But how funny:

Will those who called Hillary "lesser of 2 evils"admit how wrong u were? Muslim ban, Betsy DeVoss, Pruit, Perry in charge of nukes...please.

— Bill Maher (@billmaher) February 2, 2017

Is Maher really as stupid as this tweet makes him seem?  Well, yes, probably, but leave that aside for the moment.  To say that Clinton was the lesser of two evils means that she wouldn't have done as many bad things as Trump is doing.  It also means that the person calling her a lesser evil intended to vote for her, and probably did.  It's hard to know what Maher and liberals mean when they throw tantrums over the term, but it appears that they think it means "exactly the same" or "far worse", and that is not what "lesser evil" means.  Democratic loyalists will even use the lesser-evil claim to try to persuade reluctant voters, perhaps chiding them for demanding perfection from a candidate, until a voter actually says the word "lesser evil," and then they stamp their feet and cry "The Devil told you that!"

Maher isn't the brightest pencil in the box anyway, and it's mildly entertaining (though also thoroughly depressing) to watch both the far Right and the near Right citing his foolishness to support their views.

Jeez, You Two, Get a Room!

I just saw a link to an interview President Obama gave to Bill Maher on religion in public life. As usual, Obama was vacuous and dishonest. He acknowledged that an atheist would have trouble being elected to public office in the US, and said that "we should foster a culture in which people’s private religious beliefs, including atheists and agnostics, are respected." This is the same kind of gaseous platitude he routinely uses to discuss gay people or feminism (or race, for that matter), and I'm not gratified.

I suppose the key word here was "private," since Obama himself has expressed disrespect for people's "private religious beliefs," presumably because those beliefs were publicly stated and acted on.  (Martin Luther King Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi, for example, were nice guys but a couple of unrealistic idealists who didn't understand the cold hard facts of life as Obama does.  They didn't keep their religious beliefs "private" either.)  And most of Obama's fans do the same. So does Maher, whom I hold in contempt. (Why? Because he's contemptible.)  But no one is obligated, under either the First Amendment nor the more general principle of toleration, to respect anybody else's beliefs. Nor, under the same principles, is anyone obliged to keep their beliefs "private." (I'll start doing so when liberal Christians start.) What we are obliged to respect is people's right to hold beliefs and express them -- even publicly -- though we are free to disrespect and criticize them.  Maybe that's what he meant, but it's not what he said. Thanks, Mr. President, but no thanks.

I have the impression that when most people use the word "freedom," they're thinking of a comfortable and easy condition, perhaps because they're thinking of their own freedom, not of others'.  Living in a free society will be comfortable in some ways, but often very uncomfortable in others.  Not only you, but other people have the right to express their views, hold their opinions, and attend the church (or no church) of their choice.  And since other people's beliefs are often highly offensive, it can be uncomfortable not to be able to silence them.  But being uncomfortable won't kill you.

(And if anyone is distressed because I disrespected the sacred person of Our POTUS, I can only say that if he doesn't want to be criticized, he should keep his "private" opinions [and his religious beliefs, which he has often talked about in public] private.)

Back to the Future, Part LXIX

From Wil Wheaton's blog (he calls it "the coolest picture you'll see all day," and he may be right, but you never know) via Homo Superior (in my interior, but from the skin out I am Homo Sapien too).



Also with a curtsey to Homo Superior, this amusing little screed from the San Francisco Chronicle:

To the educated mind, it seems inconceivable that millions of people will choose rabid ignorance and childish fantasy over, say, a polar bear. Permafrost. Rocks. Nag Hammadi. But they will, and they do. Faced with this mountain of factual obviousness, the bewildered fundamentalist will merely leap back as if you just jabbed him with a flaming homosexual cattle prod, and then fall into a swoon about how neat it is that angels can fly.

But it's not just the fundamentalists. This Rule of Idiocy also explains why, when you show certain jumpy, conservative Americans the irrefutable facts about, say, skyrocketing health care costs that are draining their bank accounts, and then show how Obama's rather modest overhaul is meant to save members of all ages and genders and party affiliations a significant amount of money while providing basic insurance for their family, they, too, will scream and kick like a child made to eat a single bite of broccoli.

Remember, facts do not matter. The actual Obama plan itself does not matter.

Indeed, it's not just the fundamentalists! So how do I talk to a complete idiot like this one (again, merci a HS)?

We have a pretty good idea of the Republican plan for the next three years: Don't let Obama do anything. What kills me is that that's the Democrats' plan, too.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-maher/new-rule-if-america-cant_b_299383.html

It's useless to confront idiots like this with mere facts, like Obama's coziness with the corporate elites, his eagerness to make sure that Change You Can Believe In doesn't inconvenience them in any way, his readiness to pander to and appease the Republicans (however futilely -- what do you call it when someone keeps trying to please someone whose whole existence is dedicated to rejecting him? anyone? anyone?), his continuation of Bush II policies and personnel. They just know that the Little Father is trying to do the right thing, but the Evil Boyar won't let him.

Or a complete idiot like this (do we detect a pattern here?):

[Sarah Palin's] emergence revealed that America is in a period of decadence and unseriousness, even as its decline as an economic and world power accelerated and its moral authority crumbled.

Okay, I know that Sully is like too young to remember someone like Spiro Agnew, but he's old enough to remember Dan Quayle. And leave aside the minor point that the US has never really had any moral authority (slavery, the genocide of the pre-Columbian Americans, and all the succeeding imperial adventures from the Philippines to Iraq and Afghanistan), and the even minor-er point that Sullivan's own career (and that of other empty-headed young rightwingers in the supposedly liberal media) is testimony to the decline of American journalism and intelligence if you want to believe in such a thing. The thing to remember is that Palin's emergence showed that Americans aren't all that dumb: they rejected her and her doddering running mate decisively, along with the party that nominated them. And even now, with Fox News and HarperCollins and other interests that hope to make a buck from her even if she never holds political office again, and despite the wishful thinking of the faithful, she's not doing as well as you'd expect (via) if she really epitomized the present state of American culture. I wouldn't want to misunderestimate her, but I think Sully was inflating her significance for his own alarmist reasons. And in doing so, he extended her life in the media. As Oscar Wilde said, The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. Keep it coming, idiots!

Finally, this public service announcement, thanks to Wil Wheaton.

Topics for Further Research: Religulous

Last night I was browsing in my neighborhood video store while Bill Maher's Religulous was playing on the display set. The segment I overheard excited my interest in only a negative way, though: Maher was questioning some Christian believer on Jesus' credentials as a deity. He mentioned that all around "the Mediterranean" for a thousand years before the Christian era, gods had shared certain traits and experiences. Krishna, for example, according to Maher, had been hanging around the Mediterranean for a thousand years before Christ, and was also a carpenter. The Persian god Mithras was around the Mediterranean for a thousand years before Christ, was born on December 25, died and rose from the dead on the third day. Maher mentioned a couple of other examples of gods from the Mediterranean who were also born on December 25, died and rose on the third day, and were born to virgins.

Or something. I promise I'll watch the damn movie soon and take notes. But what I heard last night indicated serious problems with Maher's polemic. Where did he get his "facts," I wonder? I'm not an expert on Hinduism, but I know a little and did some quick checking, and I can't find that Krishna was thought of as a carpenter. It's certain, however, that Krishna was never part of the Mediterranean pantheons -- he's an Indian god, from a good distance away from the Mediterranean.

Numerous gods, especially those associated with the sun, were said to have been born on December 25, around the time of the winter solstice when the days start getting longer and the sun 'conquers' winter darkness. Jesus acquired some sun-god traits as Christianity assimilated itself to Roman paganism, just as he acquired a priesthood and other accoutrements of Roman religion, and that may be why he was assigned a birthday in common with Dionysos, Apollo, and even Zeus. Wikipedia says,

According to the Judeo-Christian tradition, the date of creation was considered to be on March 25^th. The early Christian writer Sextus Julius Africanus (220 A.D.) thought this dating plausible and suggested that Christ became incarnate on that date. According to Julius, since the Word of God became incarnate from the moment of his conception, this meant that, after nine months in the Virgin Mary's womb, Jesus was born on December 25^th.

Whether his followers borrowed the date from other gods or by speculation about the date of Creation, December 25th didn't become Jesus' birthday until a century or so after the New Testament was written. The biblical writers didn't know the year he was born, let alone the day.

I'm skeptical about the other similarities Maher ascribed to Mithras. It's not certain that Mithras had been around for a thousand years when Jesus was born. Mithras' cult left behind no written material, unlike the early Christian churches, so everything you hear about Mithras is speculation based on the imagery -- sculpture and murals -- in sites devoted to his worship. Some modern scholars have speculated that he was born on December 25, but I will have to see what basis these guesses have. One of my readers pointed me to claims that the cult of Mithras, like that of Jesus, involved drinking the blood of the god, but this turned out not to be true: Mithras killed a bull, and the blood of a bull was used was used in the Mithraic initiation rite, but it's not clear that the initiate drank the blood, or that the blood was identified with Mithras. (In the Christian cult, the god's literal blood isn't consumed, unless you consider Jesus to be a wine god.)

Other gods, like the Egyptian Osiris, died and were resurrected, but usually in different ways than Jesus, whose story was rather historically specific. Osiris, for example, in some versions was murdered by his brother Set and brought back to life by his devoted wife/widow Isis. If it was so normal for gods to die and rise, why did the early Christians encounter such derision for saying that theirs had done so? A lot of people work hard to find correspondences between Christianity and other religions, but many of the supposed parallels collapse under examination.

Maher was more confident in the claims he made than the facts warrant. It doesn't look like he's in any position to criticize Christian believers for gullibility or carelessness about the truth. I'll watch Religulous soon and post more about it.