Let Your Yes Be Yes, and Your No Be No

Just a brief addition to yesterday's post.  On Sunday, Doonesbury's "Say What?" department posted this nugget from Sean Hannity:

This was supposed to be an outrageous idea.  My "say what?" reaction wss "Wait, doesn't the Pope get questioned?" I don't follow Vatican news, but what I remember are a lot of stories where Pope Francis had told reporters something that was taken to be highly liberal and inclusive, like pets going to Heaven, or that homosexuals have a right to be part of the family, or that in some lost video interview he'd endorsed civil unions for same-sex couples. In that last case it turned out that before he became Pope he offered to accept such unions in Argentina as a bargaining chip to stave off legal same-sex marriage. He failed to do so, but his fans (even non-Catholics) were ready to celebrate him as an ally anyway.  When he said we have a right to be part of the family, he immediately added "That does not mean approving of homosexual acts, not in the least."

As I wrote on this topic before, "many people scour Francis's statements for what they 'hint' or may  'imply' or 'suggest,' as if he were the Delphic Oracle and no one has any business pressing him to make himself clear.  Part of the problem of course is that even when he is reasonably clear, they still overinterpret him to suit their own fantasies.  Maybe that's it: if they got him to clarify, they wouldn't like what he'd tell them."

I think it's perfectly reasonable to say that a Pope, like any other head of state, should have to face hard questions. While Hannity is technically correct that Donald Trump "takes questions all the time," Trump doesn't usually answer them: he lies, distracts, wanders off the subject, blusters; and if a reporter presses him, he turns nasty.  But then, the media don't know how to ask intelligent hard questions, and I don't believe Hannity would be any different.  Even secular US reporters would be too busy bowing and scraping and calling him "Your Holiness" to do their job properly. (I just thought of the time some US gay male activists were permitted to ask the Dalai Lama to clarify his position on homosexuality.  They were all Buddhists, if memory serves, and too thrilled at being in the Presence to push very hard; the DL was also less than forthcoming, and of course there was also the language barrier.  Yet the DL is much less pompous than most high-level holy men.  I should do a post on that encounter soon.)

I don't know, maybe Garry Trudeau, the creator of Doonesbury, is a Catholic too. But the reaction to Hannity's suggestion was just another example of the weird authoritarianism that's common among American liberals, the idea that commoners shouldn't get above ourselves when we're allowed to be in the same space as royalty.

The title of this post comes from Matthew 5:37, which I think is good advice, even though Jesus himself liked to dodge hard questions like "What is your authority to say these things?" or "Should we pay tribute to Caesar?" Pope Leo likes to quote the Bible at times, but he also gets rather woolly at others. But it would be rude to quote Matthew 5:37 to him - who do I think I am, anyway?

Yahweh Sabaoth Would Like a Word

While I was reading right-wing Christians fuming that the Pope should stay out of politics, it occurred to me that such people usually insist that separation of church and state is not in the Constitution, and that we need more voices of faith in the public square.  It wouldn't be fair to say that they've changed their minds, exactly, because the inconsistency would never occur to them.  They want what they want, and that's all that matters.

Still, it's clear that Trump's antics have made them uneasy, especially the Catholics among them. I happened on a Facebook comment thread this afternoon where the contradictions were heightened: I've been a Catholic all my life, but Pope Leo isn't my Pope!  He's a Communist and should be minding his own business! ... and so on.  I don't know how representative these people are. It does seem that there are some deep divisions among Roman Catholics at all levels, from the laity up to reactionary clergy.  Some of the latter have been disciplined.  They forget that the Church is not a democracy, it's a hierarchy.

On the other hand, liberals and even leftists -- Catholic and non-Catholic, theist and non-theist -- are reveling in that hierarchy, though they're confused about it too. Celebrity right-wing Catholics like J.D. Vance are being mocked for daring to criticize the Pope, especially when they're recent converts like Vance.  And it is funny that Vance would be so unself-conscious about it.  Luckily for him, he's not likely to have a date with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and even if he does he's not going to be tortured or executed. As the 19th-centurhy composer Hector Berlioz wrote, "Now that She [i.e., the Church] has ceased to inculcate the burning of heretics, Her creeds are charming."  I suppose Vance is aware of this somewhere in what's left of his mind.  I suppose his liberal mockers are too, but it feels to me like they actually believe that a mere layman has no business disagreeing with the head of 1.2 billion Catholics.  It's nicely summed up in this meme:

(If you'd like to see a buttload of baboon screeching and feces-throwing, here's the thread where I found the meme.)  If you think that religion is just a matter of book-learning, this makes sense.  But it isn't, and believers will be the first to insist that it isn't when it suits them. Of course the Roman Catholic Church has a lot of intellectual capital built up over two thousand years, and as a subject of that church, who joined it as an adult, Vance know that and should at least pretend to respect it.  It's his problem, not mine.

Derek Guy, whose timeline inspired that meme and that screeching, had a much more measured take.

Truly remarkable how many people have told the Pope, in some way or another, to "shut up and dribble." Or corrected him on the Bible, despite their thin education on theology. Or told him to stay out of US affairs, despite him being a US citizen. The hubris is amazing.

It's not just the Pope. I would never dream of correcting an Imam or a Harvard law professor about their fields of study using some bullshit I read using ChatGPT. Some people lack an appreciation for the depth of their own ignorance because they don't have expertise in anything.

I agree to an extent; after all, the same people who are telling Leo to shut up are telling him to defer to the political wisdom of Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and Marco Rubio - a bunch of clowns who have no wisdom at all, whose incompetence is plain to see every day. Or they tell him to focus on morality instead of politics, as if they were mutually irrelevant spheres, as if an illegal war and terror against civilians had nothing to do with morality.  And, as Derek mentions, Leo is an American citizen, though he doesn't need to be one to criticize the US or any other country. He's also a head of state, of the Vatican City, and as such is a politician as well as a cleric.

I'm an atheist, though, and while I'll acknowledge Leo's learning, I'm not bound to defer to it.  His claims about his god and war are simply absurd.  The Bible contains many instances where Yahweh orders war, orders the massacre of entire populations and the enslavement of others.  But Leo doesn't care about that any more than Trump cares about his own falsehood.  He's laying down doctrine on his authority. (He's not declaring it ex cathedra, so he's not even claiming to be infallible - not that he would be.)  But only Catholics are bound by his authority.  Derek's reference to Harvard law professors is unfortunate too, since prominent Harvard law professors have made wildly false claims about the law.  I'm thinking, for example, of Obama's "Ultimately, I am confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress."

Nor do I feel any obligation, or even temptation, to defer to Leo's positions on homosexuality, abortion, contraception, women in the clergy, or other matters. I know that the Pope, or any other learned Catholic, can churn up a flurry of learned arguments to support those positions; I don't care.  These are not matters to be settled by scholastic discourse, and the justifications for them change as the church's positions change. Think of slavery, which the church not only used to justify but practiced.

Another response to Vance's insubordination has been some version of this:

QuoProQuid is a queer Catholic game designer whose posts I read regularly.  Mason Mennenga is a nice liberal Christian whose posts I see only intermittently.  His picture of lifelong Latin American Catholics is as much of a caricature as his picture of adult American converts. Most of not all of the worst right-wing Latin American dictators were lifelong Catholics; it didn't keep them from killing and raping and torturing - nor did it keep previous Popes (and American presidents) from being good buddies with them.  

I'm glad that Leo is opposing Trump and the war, but that means he's on my side (and the side of many other non-Catholics), not that I'm on his.  It's certainly a PR problem for Trump, and will further erode his already slipping support.  His base will stand fanatically firm, but not everyone who voted for him is in his base. I'm not indignant, as many atheists are, that Trump is attacking "an American Pope," as NPR's anchor people keep putting it - his nationality makes no more difference than his religion.  These details make it harder for Trump's insults to land. I don't mind Vance's insubordination against his religious superior, only that his criticisms are so inept; but who would expect any better from him?  Leo's low-key delivery of his criticism is pleasant too, but I don't make the liberal mistake of confusing moderation of tone with moderation of content.

The flip-flopping works both ways, as usual.  The same liberals who cheer Leo's denunciation of war were mostly silent when Obama bombed wedding parties and turned Libya into a slave market.  Many of them supported George W. Bush's wars too, and many embraced Israeli atrocities until they began to hurt their own chances of election or re-election.  The quality of mainstream discussion on these matters is, as usual, abysmal; and getting worse.

Theater of the Absurd

CECILY.
I have never met any really wicked person before. I feel rather frightened. I am so afraid he will look just like every one else.

[Enter Algernon, very gay and debonair.] He does!

[The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde] 

We live in interesting times, don't we?  It has been entertaining to watch the fuss over Pope Leo's opposition to war and the MAGA Right's fury over it, with JD Vance (a Roman Catholic convert) and other Trump toadies joining Trump in his outrage at Leo.  It's been less entertaining to see various non-MAGA non-Catholics cheering Leo on, expressing their outrage that anyone should dare to oppose the Holy Father.

Then, during the night, Trump posted another incoherent rant against Leo on his social media platform, adding an AI-generated image of himself in conventional Jesus robes, laying hands on a sick bedridden man who could be Uncle Sam or possibly Jeffrey Epstein.  Someone deleted the image soon afterward, but by then it had been copied and gone viral.  Trump later told reporters that he thought the image showed him as a doctor, and he was paying tribute to the Red Cross.

Naturally, many in Trump's base rallied to defend him, saying that obviously the image didn't depict him as Jesus, but it seems that he'd finally managed to upset a good number of his fans. The word "blasphemy" was flung around.  Trump's advisor Laura Loomer pointed out correctly that the US doesn't have blasphemy laws, advising Trump's critics to move to an Islamic country where the charge would have legal consequences. Nice try, but numerous Christian countries also have laws against blasphemy.

Still, it's been weird watching religious liberals and even atheists, like Friendly Atheist Hemant Mehta, in a snit over Trump's "blasphemy."  It doesn't seem that they're just pointing out Trump's hypocrisy.  Many of them seem to be sincerely outraged by his cloaking himself in religious imagery, as they are by his daring to speak harshly to the leader of a billion Catholics.

I approve of Leo's stance in this case, but since he's still the head of an antigay hate group, it's not because I recognize his moral authority.  This declaration of his, for example, is as laughable as anything Trump has spewed online: 

Brothers and sisters, this is our God: Jesus, King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war. He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying: "Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood" (Is 1:15). 

(Offer not good during the Crusades, the Spanish Armada sailing to England, or the Spanish invasion of the New World.)

I also support Leo's refusal to be cowed by Trump's ranting against him.  He's one of the few European heads of state who hasn't tried to make nice with Trump, hasn't offered him a shiny gold trinket to appease him.

Anybody has the right to disagree with, criticize, or protest a Pope or a President.  It's depressing, indeed infuriating, to see so many people who aren't Catholic or even theists demanding that Trump respect the Pontiff's autoritah. I must say, though, I wonder what is going through Melania Trump's mind today. She's a Catholic, though she married Trump in an Episcopal ceremony. Coming so soon after her tirade against Jeffrey Epstein, today's circus must be putting some strain on her determination to stand by her man.

All Animal Farm Adaptations Are Equal, But Some Are More Equal Than Others

I've been hearing about Andy Serkis's animated version of George Orwell's satirical fable Animal Farm for some time now.  Apparently it's been in development for a long time, but the time is now fulfilled, and the release is at hand.  I barely remember the two previous versions (from 1954 and 1999), except that they were pretty bad, toning down the book's anti-capitalist assumption.  I say "assumption" rather than "message," because the story takes for granted that capitalism (represented by the human farmers) is evil.  The remarkable thing about its mainstream reception is that its anti-communist fans completely missed that assumption.

So I didn't expect much from this new adaptation.  The occasional reports I saw didn't say much about its fidelity to the original.  But this weekend the Algorithm recommended a story about it from Deseret News, a Latter-Day-Saints newspaper.  It was even more clueless about Animal Farm than the book's Cold War boosters:

In the final scene of George Orwell’s 1945 satirical novella “Animal Farm,” animal workers watch through a window as their ruling pigs and the human farmers drunkenly play cards, and they can no longer tell them apart. The moment is grim and impactful.

The image exposes the cracks beneath Marxism’s utopian promise. 

... The upcoming animated adaptation of “Animal Farm,” directed by “Lord of the Rings” actor Andy Serkis, transforms Orwell’s sharp critique of communism into a lighthearted, family-friendly story — and casts capitalism as the villain.

Wait, what?  Capitalism is the villain in the original tale, but I can't remember encountering such blatant denial about that before.  It's not the only villain, of course: Napoleon and the other pigs, who happily embrace greed and ultimately become indistinguishable from their human neighbors, are also villains, but is it really so hard to grasp that there's more than one group of bad guys involved?  If Orwell thought capitalism benign, that final scene would be the happy ending this article's writer claims Serkis imposed on his version.  Nobody makes that mistake - everybody knows the outcome is bad - but it seems to be almost impossible to recognize why it's bad.  Similarly, the writer of an introduction to a print edition of Animal Farm (I think it was Malcolm Muggeridge) wrote that already in 1946, when the book was first published, "it was becoming brutally clear that wartime hopes of peacetime cooperation between the West and Russia had been dangerously naive."  Orwell coined a word for this sort of ideological self-discipline in his later novel Nineteen Eighty-Four: "doublethink."

I learned from the Deseret article that Serkis invented a new human character who seduced Napoleon into embracing sinful luxury; also that [SPOILER ALERT] when Napoleon first stands on his hind legs, "flatulence erupts, amusing the kids and reminding adults how low Serkis will go to get a laugh" according to Variety. Well, kids and not a few adults love fart jokes, so I suppose this is what Serkis meant when he said he'd tried to make the film more "family-friendly."

Deseret quoted "One commenter [who] criticized Hollywood, writing, “Hollywood is incapable of critiquing anything other than capitalism.”  Have any of these people ever read Animal Farm?  Do they know anything about Orwell and his politics?  As I said earlier, he didn't explicitly "critique" capitalism in the story, he took for granted that it was exploitative and generally immoral. I think I can safely skip watching this film.

Swing Battuh Battuh Battuh, Swing

 

This sort of slop isn't the product of partisan thinking. It's a product of not being able to think at all.  When news outlets assign sports reporters who see everything through the lens of elite corporate sports to cover serious news, this is what you get.

I'd already heard NPR's Scott Simon and Franco Ordoñez do a more restrained version of the same thing on Weekend Edition today:

ORDOÑEZ: ... And again, as you noted, it comes as American and Iranian teams are meeting in Pakistan for peace talks led by the vice president, Vance. You know, they kicked off this morning between the U.S., Iran and Pakistan, which of course is serving as host and intermediary for the talks.

SIMON: To state the obvious, I suppose, this seems like a huge test for Vice President Vance.

ORDOÑEZ: Yeah, very much so. I mean, perhaps the most significant of his political career. I mean, it'll be a defining factor as he looks ahead to a, you know, possible run for the White House himself. 

But there is no joy in Mudville, mighty JD has struck out.  Does this mean he'll be sent back to the minors, or will he just be benched for awhile?

 

An Elephant's Faithful, One Hundred Percent

Some people are still trying to defend liberal / centrist Democrats for being angry that Trump didn't annihilate Iran. You know, they didn't really want the war, they were just angry because he didn't have a plan.  Trump never has a plan; he's always just winging it, he can't remember what he said from one end of a sentence to the other, and he just expects everyone else to have the same convenient amnesia.

But not having a plan is not these Democrats' main complaint.  The core is that Iran hasn't been crushed yet.  As Senator Shaheen complained, "Iran still has 50% of their missile capacity. They still have enriched uranium. And they still control the Strait of Hormuz. The President had no credible strategy going into this war, and it's clear he still doesn't have one to accomplish the goals he set out." What does one have to do with the other?  Under international law, Iran has the right of self-defense (hence the missiles), and also the right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes (despite all the bipartisan alarmism, there is no evidence that Iran has enriched uranium for weapons).

Senator Chuck Schumer used the same talking points: "Iran still has its nuclear stockpile. Its nuclear ambitions are still unchecked, if not accelerated". Because Trump pulled the US out of the JCPOA, and Biden didn't rejoin it, Iran is no longer bound or "checked" by the limitations it imposed. Its leaders may well have decided that getting nuclear weapons for self-defense, like so many other countries, is a good idea (though to repeat, there still is no evidence that they were doing so). Nor does the US have any right under international law to bomb Iran to make it  comply with our imperial demands.

As one online weirdo put it, "if i was a prominent democrat politician i would be saying stuff like 'Israel is fucking up your amazing peace & ceasefire deal on purpose mr. president! they think you're a sucker, show them who's boss!' instead of like 'He didn't even nuke iran lol. Is he gay??' but whatever [i guess]" It's true, as Senator Chris Murphy complained, that Trump is incompetent - but so is the Democratic leadership.  This is an old complaint of mine, going back at least to the Obama years, that these cute, supposedly media-savvy solons -- at least they have hired media-savvy staff -- are so tin-eared, so clueless, so unprepared.  Obama was consistently surprised that the Republicans wouldn't play nice, and instead of thinking creatively about how to stymie them, he would just let them have their way.

But like, you know, "by backing down, Trump also, you know, risked damaging his own credibility."  I mean, the President promised to wipe out Iran, and it looks really bad if he doesn't keep his promise.  It's not that these people want war, though they do, it's that a promise is a promise and America's word is its bond.

I suddenly remembered the biblical book of Jonah, because we atheist leftists can quote scripture to our purpose.  Everybody knows about Jonah being swallowed by a big fish and then being vomited up onto dry land, but how many remember the context?  Briefly, Jonah was a prophet, which was a thing in those days, and Yahweh told him to go to the non-Israelite city of Nineveh and threaten it with destruction if it didn't repent.  Jonah ran away, because if the Ninevites repented the prophecy would be falsified, and in the course of his flight he ended up in the belly of the great fish, which brought him to Nineveh and spewed him out.  So Jonah went in and proclaimed, "Yet thirty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!"

The King of Nineveh heard, and commanded general repentance, so Yahweh changed his mind and didn't destroy Nineveh.  Jonah was very upset by this.  He left the city and built himself a booth in whose shadow he sulked.  Yahweh caused a gourd plant to grow up overnight and give him some shade, then made it wither and made Jonah uncomfortable.  Drama queen that he was, he said he wanted to die.

And God said to Jonah, Doest thou well to be angry for the gourd? And he said, I do well to be angry, even unto death. Then said the LORD, Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it grow; which came up in a night, and perished in a night: And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle? 

This is obviously out of character for Yahweh, who would ordinarily be perfectly happy to kill 120,000 heathen children plus adults and "also much cattle," so you know this story is a fable.  But it's a good one, and its point is relevant today.  Don't worry, I'm not getting religion.  But I'll use any material that is pertinent.  

Peace In Our Time?

When I went to bed last night, the stories of the announced ceasefire with Iran were already starting to fray. By this morning, it was clear that Israel had not been consulted on the deal and was continuing to bomb Lebanon. US and Iranian media acknowledged conflicting understandings of the terms, with Trump claiming that the Strait of Hormuz had been opened and Iran saying that it wasn't, yet.  Trump thought that Iran would give up its missiles, Iran didn't agree.  And so on.  It was reported that JD Vance was going to participate in negotiations, but at one point the White House said he wasn't, for security reasons.  As with the war, disentangling the confusion and lies was an uphill struggle.

Today on NPR's Morning Edition, their White House Correspondent Franco Ordoñez told their resident Hoosier Steve Inskeep:

It's, of course, never a bad thing to kind of avoid the dire scenario that Trump was describing. But by backing down, Trump also, you know, risked damaging his own credibility. I mean, he's likely to face some criticism, even more so now that, you know, he has a reputation of backing down from some of his most flattening rhetoric.

Donald Trump has no credibility to begin with. Anyone who believes what he says (and NPR still gives him credence most of the time) discredits himself immediately.

Unfortunately, though, Ordoñez was correct that Trump is facing criticism.  Jon Schwarz wrote on Twitter that "There's a very real chance the 2028 Democratic presidential nominee will attack Trump for the Iran war — from the right, because he didn't 'finish the job'". He linked to a Democratic Senator from New Hampshire, Jeanne Shaheen, who'd complained "Iran still has 50% of their missile capacity. They still have enriched uranium. And they still control the Strait of Hormuz. The President had no credible strategy going into this war, and it's clear he still doesn't have one to accomplish the goals he set out."

Senator Chris Murphy, D-CT, also was upset: 

It appears Trump just agreed to give Iran control of the Strait of Hormuz, a history-changing win for Iran. The level of incompetence is both stunning and heartbreaking. What on earth is happening?

Iran already had control of the Strait of Hormuz. The US has no claim on it. But Murphy, like some other Democrats, supports Trump's illegal war; he only wants it to be run "competently."  The most pressing need is not to prolong the war, but to end it. The US and Israel are the aggressors, and they have already done enormous harm to human lives, not to mention the world economy.

I have a special contempt for Murphy, since he posted in 2020 that Trump had interfered with his plan to overthrow the government of Venezuela and install a crooked US collaborator:

Then, it got real embarrassing. In April 2019, we tried to organize a kind of coup, but it became a debacle. Everyone who told us they’d rally to Guaido got cold feet and the plan failed publicly and spectacularly, making America look foolish and weak.

Notice the words I put in boldface: "a kind of coup."  Murphy bragged in public that he'd conspired to stage a coup in another nation, which has to be some kind of violation of international and other law.  He suffered no consequences for this, of course.  Now he wants to prolong a war that should, in a halfway sane world, put its perpetrators in the Hague for crimes against humanity.  The US isn't entitled to demand concessions from its victims. Yes, Trump is incompetent and stupid, but refraining from destroying another country, however clumsily he's doing it, should be supported rather than undermined.  Yes, the Iranian regime is evil, but so is Chris Murphy, and so are the other pols and pundits who like Trump's war but think they should be in charge of it.

P.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has weighed in, using talking points like Shaheen's:

"Iran still has its nuclear stockpile. Its nuclear ambitions are still unchecked, if not accelerated…The nations at the world are furious at Trump: the Asians, the Europeans, even the Middle Eastern allies."

These people want Trump's war, and they want it to be more murderous and more destructive.

But We Think the Price Is Worth It

 

As I write this, it appears that the world may have dodged a bullet: Trump has put off his threat to wipe out Iran.  But no one should suppose that he won't change his mind in a week or two, and the reports I've seen so far don't say that Israel has agreed to pause its aggression against Iran. (Or Lebanon.  Or Gaza. Or the Occupied Territories.) Any ceasefire will just give the US and Israel time to arm themselves for further atrocities.

I haven't written about this war before, largely because it's just too depressing.  I'm not alone in this: many commentators I respect have been reduced to sputtering outrage at Trump's conduct.  Doug Henwood, for example, mostly posts one- or two-word grunts on Twitter/X, like "Gross," "Disgusting," "Shameful," "Ugh," etc. over reposts of other people's material. Some do better, but after awhile it comes down to detailing how Trump's a deranged criminal.

It's better than the corporate media's fondness for pussyfooting around.  The political scientist Corey Robin quoted the New York Times on Facebook this evening: "One big question: Experts say Trump’s threatened attacks could be unlawful. It comes down to: What defines a civilian target?"  Later he added, "The New York Times has been hemming and hawing for days about whether killing civilians is a war crime or not. What if civilians are surrounded by 'military-age males?' What if a power grid upon which civilians and hospitals depend has a 'dual use' for military purposes? So complicated, so nuanced, so grey an area. But now comes the prospect of imposing a toll on the Strait of Hormuz. And what is the NYT headline? "How Tolls in the Strait of Hormuz Would Undercut International Law'".

NPR has been about the same.  The other day one of their talking heads fretted about the effectiveness of a ceasefire: would Iran respect it?  He didn't wonder whether the US or Israel would "respect" it; maybe because the answer is so obviously No.

I don't know what it would take to stop Trump and Netanyahu. With one or two honorable exceptions, the mainstream Congressional Democrats have been busy complaining that Trump didn't ask their permission before he went to war. Of course they would have given him that permission, so what difference would it make?  Many of them have wanted to destroy Iran for years.  They might pretend to distinguish between Iranian citizens and "the Regime," but they're willing to sacrifice Iranian lives in a good cause.

In another Facebook post, Corey Robin spelled out parallels between Trump's war and George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq.

1. A hard-right Republican president comes to power denouncing the more "internationalist" and "establishment" Republicans and Democrats who see the United States as policeman to the world. (Don't forget, this was one of Bush's promises when he ran in 2000: he wouldn't do nation-building, he wouldn't be the world's cop, he would be "humble," he would have a narrow view of US national interest.)

 

2. A small group of influencers—neocons in Bush's case; the Israelis, in Trump's case—make the case for war to the president on two logically incompatible grounds: a) the enemy regime is poised to be so militarily powerful, that if the US waits any longer, the enemy will be able to land a devastating blow against it; b) destroying the enemy regime militarily will be staggeringly easy.

 

3. Top-level US intelligence and military officials say that this advice is nonsense, totally lacking in evidence. Additionally, they repeatedly ask, what if you are able to destroy the regime, what comes next? How are you going to run the country?

 

4. Eager to destroy an enemy that has been a thorn in the side of the US for decades, the president ignores the intelligence and military establishment, displays scant concern about what comes next, and takes the country to war. 

 

5. Republicans and conservatives scratch their heads. How did a president who came into office promising not to be the world's policeman wind up taking the country to war.

 

Structurally, the two important features to focus on are these: 1) the distinction between a radical right and moderate establishment right in the Republican Party is nonsense; 2) Congress and both parties have long abandoned their role in limiting the power of the president when it comes to war.

One of the most depressing things about this is that, twenty years later, there are still pundits and politicians who defend Dubya's war.  Even if Trump's war were to end now, the long-term consequences, especially for the Iranian people and other civilians killed or hurt or displaced, will continue indefinitely, because neither Trump nor his successor will have any interest in cleaning up after it, and since there have so far been very few US casualties, most Americans will happily sink into lethargy and amnesia.

Religious Illiteracy

I've been reading Dear Abby's advice columns for at least sixty years, and I can't remember any as weirdly off as one she published last week, on March 24.

The question she answered came from a Christian woman who'd raised her children to be Christians, and they in turn had raised their children to be Christians.  One of her grandchildren, however, had joined a very strict church and cut off his family.  "He and his wife have decided that no one outside of his church can see his child."  The grandmother is heartbroken: will she ever see her great-grandchild?  What advice could Abby give?  Signed, PRINCIPLED IN FLORIDA.  Abby replied:

I always thought Christianity was a welcoming religion. This is the first time I have heard of a denomination that decides other Christians are not Christian enough. The church your grandson has joined sounds more like a cult than a religion. Before making any decisions about how, what or whether to gift anything to the new baby, ask your grandson whether accepting a gift from an "outsider" is even allowed. 

I could hardly believe my eyes as I read it. Abby has never "heard of a denomination that decides other Christians are not Christian enough"?  That decision is the historical Christian norm. It begins in the New Testament with the apostle Paul denouncing competing Christian teachers for proclaiming what he considers a false gospel: "As we have said before, so now I say again, if anyone preaches any other gospel to you than what you have received, let him be accursed" (Galatians 1:9, NKJV).  In the gospels Jesus repeatedly warned against "false" teachers, threatening them and their followers with condemnation.  And -- my favorite - in the second letter of John, the Elder warns "the Elect Lady": "If anyone comes to you but does not bring this teaching, do not receive him into your home or even greet him. / Whoever greets such a person shares in his evil deeds" (2 John vv. 10-11). In the third letter of John, the Elder complains to Gaius that

I wrote to the church, but Diotrephes, who loves to have the preeminence among them, does not receive us. Therefore, if I come, I will call to mind his deeds which he does, prating against us with malicious words. And not content with that, he himself does not receive the brethren, and forbids those who wish to, putting them out of the church [vv. 9-10, NKJV]. 

Since those glorious days, Christians have fought not only with outsiders but with each other, often over tiny matters of doctrine that were nonetheless held to be vital for salvation.  After a millennium and centuries of religious wars, some Christians decided that toleration was the better part of valor; as the composer Hector Berlioz said of the Roman Catholic Church in the 1800s, "Since she has ceased to inculcate the burning of heretics, her creeds are charming."

As for "cult," all religions are cults, dedicated to the care and feeding of their gods. Of course Abby was using the word in the twentieth-century sense of "any sect, usually fairly new, whose teachings I disapprove of."  But by every criterion I've ever seen, New Testament Christianity was a cult in this sense: a new, militant, embattled sect that maintained its boundaries by building walls to keep outsiders out and new converts in, teaching them to regard their former religion as demonic and their families as enemies. As Jesus put it in Luke 14:26, "If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple" (NKJV). It's a recurring theme in the gospels. 

Christian intolerance is so notorious that it's hard to believe that Abby was serious.  Maybe she was being snarky or sarcastic; I don't know.  But serious or not, her reply was unhelpful.

But He's So Articulate!

 

I don't get excited over politicians as orators; they're usually overrated anyway. (Remember when Ronald Reagan was promoted as "the Great Communicator"?) I usually prefer to read transcripts so I can concentrate on the content instead of the packaging. It's how I got through the Obama years. When I did listen to him, I was put off by his scolding tone, his fake folksiness, etc.; his dishonesty was just the icing on the cake. I never agreed that he was a good speaker. (Yeah, Dubya was worse - that's supposed to be a recommendation?) 

But I was impressed by this short video from Zohran Mamdani. I watched it all the way through without wanting to bang my head on the table. For one thing, he doesn't talk down, doesn't hide that he's bright, but without being professorial. The content is good too, which is why it infuriated so many of the usual suspects. Which doesn't mean I'm uncritical of him; I reserve the right to be as harsh about him as I am about Obama, Trump, Dubya, Clinton, Harris, and the rest. This clip is just refreshing, that's all. 

You don't have to agree with me, either: whether a pol is a good speaker is a subjective aesthetic judgment, which takes me back to my original point: that it's unimportant compared to the pol's words and actions, which loyalists prefer to downplay if not ignore. In Mamdani's case, it's often difficult to sort out reality from the flood of hydrophobic propaganda directed against him, but as far as I can tell, he's doing pretty well. Compared to his centrist-Dem attackers, he's wonderful.

You Keep Using This Word; or, How Can I Leave This Behind?

I happened on a book called Queering Gay and Lesbian Studies, by Richard Piontek, published in 2006 by University of Illinois Press.  The publisher's blurb proclaimed it 

a broadly interdisciplinary study that considers a key dilemma in gay and lesbian studies through the prism of identity and its discontents: the field studies has modeled itself on ethnic studies programs [sic], perhaps to be intelligible to the university community, but certainly because the ethnic studies route to programs is well established.  Since this model requires a stable and identifiable community, gay and lesbian studies have emphasized stable and knowable identities.  The problem, of course is that sexuality is neither stable, tidy, nor developmental.  With the advent of queer theory, there are now other perspectives available that frequently find themselves at odds with traditional gay and lesbian studies.

Hm.  Okay, that's the blurb, I won't hold the author responsible for it.  I looked in the text, where essentially the same claim is made.

The notion of a coherent and unified gay and lesbian identity also made gays and lesbians candidates for the project of minority history by constituting them as a minority akin to ethnic and racial ones. Minority history lets gays and lesbians be inserted into the historical canon alongside other previously excluded groups. At the same time, however, defining “bad history” as the only problem, and thus merely multiplying the number of historical subjects as a remedy, evades important epistemological questions. Here I take up postmodern challenges to traditional historiography, seeking, among other things, to determine how historical knowledge is produced and how particular viewpoints established dominance and allowed for the exclusion of minority points of view.

I hope to read the entire book soon, so I may be able to account for Piontek's statements.  Some of this makes sense to me. I've thought along the same lines, and I've encountered slighting references to the "ethnic model" of gay people, along with sloganizing claims by some activists that "we are a people."  Those claims resonated for me at times, but they also made me uneasy.

What is "a people"?  The blurb writer seemed to assume that the ethnic model "requires a stable and identifiable community, gay and lesbian studies have emphasized stable and knowable identities.  The problem, of course is that sexuality is neither stable, tidy, nor developmental."  Ethnic communities aren't stable, knowable, tidy, or developmental (where did that come from?) either.  Nor are other identitarian conceptions like gender, disciplines, religion, the arts. "Challenges" to those conceptions aren't postmodern either: they are part of modernism itself, and go back to the beginning of the twentieth century if not earlier.  Jason Josephson Storm has an excellent discussion of this issue in his Metamodernism: The Future of Theory (Chicago, 2021).

Maybe Piontek went into this later in the book, but the divide he starts with has been present since the late 19th century, continued through the response to Alfred Kinsey's work, and has persisted to the present.  It's not a matter of one model succeeding an older, inferior one, which incidentally is a model of linear progress that self-identified postmodernists supposedly reject but have difficulty leaving behind. The field that Queer Theory superseded was never particularly stable either: it originally was simply "gay studies," became "gay and lesbian studies" as gay men struggled with their sexism, then "gay, lesbian and bisexual studies" and so on - just as the formerly gay movement added subgroups, "queer" among them.  

I hope I'll have more to say on this in due time.  It may be unfair to pick on a book that is now twenty years old, but I haven't noticed that the field has improved much since 2006.  It might be worth adding that a cursory online search found many references to "LGBTQ culture" and even to "queer culture." Queer culture is postulated as something that has persisted visibly over centuries, even millennia, despite attempts to stamp it out. That would seem to imply a stable and identifiable community with knowable identities, inserted into the historical canon alongside other previously excluded groups. As I've said before, queer and trans scholars have objected to imposing "gay" and "lesbian" on societies and eras that supposedly didn't have those concepts, but have then imposed "queer" and "trans" on them even though the same objection applies. At best Piontek was over-optimistic about the postmodern challenge to traditional historiography, as queer theory was simply assimilated to existing approaches and categories.

Let Me Go, Lover

This post on the Platform Formerly Known As Twitter was passed along by a "technical" philosopher still working on his Ph.D., with the remark "People are making fun of this, but it worked."

My first thought was to wonder if the man was able to extract himself because of the hour-long prayer session, or because the woman's muscles simply relaxed after awhile, as I think one would expect. It probably didn't save them money, because holy men expect compensation for their services.  You could argue that distracting them for an hour "worked," but it wouldn't mean that the prayer and preaching were direct causes. Or, going on the reasonable assumption that the goal was to get many views for the video, you could say that it worked: two days ago the video had 230 thousand views.  A philosopher should be able to do better than this.

My second thought was that the video was very likely staged.  My third was that from the description, it appears that the man and woman were not married to each other, and that the Lord was imposing the due penalty for their sin on the fornicators (or adulterers?), showing his infinite mercy by letting them go after a little time, while putting a little cash in the pocket of his servant.  My fourth is that there are people who need divine intervention a lot more than these two.

I also thought of a quip ascribed to the glorious snarkmeister Bernard Shaw, about the healing site at Lourdes: "All those canes, braces and crutches, and not a single glass eye, wooden leg or toupee."  I haven't been able to confirm the source, but what matters is the point.  Jesus, according to the gospels, healed a man with a withered hand, and restored life to a man who'd been dead four days. (According to Matthew, many people who'd been dead for much longer than that came to life when Jesus was crucified.)  One of the most famous Christian healing sites doesn't even come close to such feats.

While trying to find a source for the supposed Shaw quip, I found an odd article which quoted it, and tried to answer it.

Point taken, but somewhere in that logic a greater miracle is missed. Consider the cripple. Assuming he was not faking it, the fact still remains that he was able to discard his walking support. Hardnosed rationalists would not call that a miracle. They'd say that if such an event occurred at all, it was probably due to some psychosomatic effect - if they didn't say it was a placebo thing outright.

And that's the common everyday miracle they would be missing; how does the mind effect the body? Consider amputees next. Over 50% of people who have an arm or leg surgically removed report what is called "phantom pain" in parts of the limb which is no longer there. Medical science doesn't have a coherent theory why this happens though, amazingly, medications, including placebos, can reduce the pain.

So phantom pain is a miracle?  I've noticed that Christian apologists often try to confuse the meaning of "miracle."  They point to the glory of sunrise, the wonder of biological reproduction, and other everyday events and call them miracles. 

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
 “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
 “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that's all.”

If everything is a miracle, then nothing is.  Nobody marveled when Jesus walked on land, though it was just as miraculous on this logic, and a literal act of God; they marveled when he walked on water.  Nobody marveled when Mary gave birth; they marveled that she had conceived without sexual intercourse.  There's dispute among philosophers and theologians as to what a miracle is, whether it involves violations of the laws of nature for example.  It's true that earthquakes, plagues, and other events have been called acts of God, though many modern Christians are uneasy about doing so.  So it's conceivable that the eventual separation of the Kenyan fornicators might have been Jesus' doing.  But any other god could have been responsible, or none at all.  

Just because something is unexplained, and never may be explained, that doesn't make it a miracle.  Invoking placebos is an attempt to dodge the question, to distract. The point of the quip about Lourdes is that an all-powerful god's ability to work wonders of healing has some intriguing blind spots. Get back to me when a placebo makes a missing eye or limb grow back. 

Later the same day that I saw the Kenyan video, YouTube pointed me to this video.  (A miracle!  It couldn't be mere coincidence!)  The man who makes them, Andrew Henry, is a biblical scholar.  Unlike some other YouTube biblical scholars I could name, his videos are well-planned and organized.  This one is about reported appearances by the Virgin Mary to ordinary people, which have been happening for centuries.  I learned quite a lot from it, and it occurred to me that when Protestant apologists deride scholars for disbelief in the supernatural, they don't seem to have in mind Fatima or Guadalupe or the many other sightings Andrew Henry discusses.  Why not?  Don't they believe in the supernatural?  I'll have to ask about this the next time I encounter this accusation.

You Think I'm Joking?

A whole lot of people were outraged at Donald Trump's latest offense against civility, his posting of a video which included an image of Barack and Michelle Obama's faces superimposed on apes. The outrage seems to have died down a little, as Fox News has gratefully seized on the kidnapping of Nancy Guthrie to occupy program time, and CNN on the Winter Olympics, but it's still active outside corporate media.  I started this post right away, but got sidetracked by personal commitments and general laziness.  It was easy, though, because I wasn't outraged.  Of course Donald Trump is a pig, but this sort of activity is typical of him; it's dog bites man.

First, the video didn't do the Obamas any harm. They're rich, they have Secret Service protection, they're safely insulated from any features of American life they don't want to know about.  Barry is rubbing elbows with billionaires and superannuated rock stars, posting his playlists and favorite books, they have their various mansions.  Michelle has her podcast and other projects. Every so often they stick their heads out to attend presidential funerals or make annoying statements about, like, stuff.  

I agree that public displays of gutter racism will bother and upset young people of color who don't have the Obamas' advantages, but there are far more immediate displays of gutter racism that also bother them: raids of their schools by masked goons, racist campaigns about immigrants supposedly eating pets, and the familiar grinding effects of poverty. I'm reminded of right-wing concern trolling in the 90s about how Bill Clinton's sex scandal would upset innocent children who were probably more worried about the effects of war and other political violence.

Second, when it comes to repugnant Presidential attempts at humor, Obama yields nothing to Trump.  Obama joked - in public, on camera - about killing the Jonas Brothers with predator drones if they looked askance at his daughters.  "You won't even see it coming. You think I'm joking?" It wouldn't have been funny even if Obama hadn't killed plenty of people with predator drones: American teenagers, wedding parties, hospital patients.  No big deal, all American presidents and their flunkies are blood-soaked butchers; nobody but the Professional Left cared, then or now.  ("Professional Left" was the Obama administration's version of Trump's "paid protesters," come to think of it.)

Obama also found it amusing that people in Latin America should care about US violence there, whether directly or merely funding, training, and protecting its perpetrators.  Early in his tenure he flailed inelegantly when asked about Israel-Palestine: "The Middle East is obviously an issue that has plagued the region for centuries, and it's an issue that elicits a lot of passions as you have heard."  I mean, he couldn't possibly have foreseen that a college student would ask him such a question; obviously the student was a Professional Leftist.  A few years later, he was better prepared.  Asked a hostile but not unreasonable question (which he didn't understand, since it was in Hebrew), Obama mocked the questioner, an Arab-Israeli student from Haifa University, joking, "I have to say we actually arranged for that because it made me feel at home ... I wouldn't feel comfortable if I didn't have at least one heckler."  Remarks like these are, if not anticipations of Trump, at least retreads of Ronald Reagan, the Master from whom Obama learned how to make pithy quips.

Confronted with such performances, Obama's fans may ask me where I was when Obama was president, they bet I liked him then.  No, I didn't.  This blog has too many of my attacks on him from the period to link here.  The best they have to offer is that he was a disappointment sometimes.  Yeah, I know that one too.  I did find it really depressing when the radical writer Marge Piercy, whose work I love and respect, posted the D-word about Obama ("a bit of a disappointment" was how she put it) while expressing her outrage on Facebook over Trump's video post.

So yeah, I take due notice of Trump's latest crime against propriety, good manners, presidential norms. But I won't join in outrage with people who'd be watching football, having brunch, or just having a nice nap if only Trump would disappear.  

A Few Words in Defense of Our Country

"Loser" is a nothingburger as an insult, though I admit it's better than "ret*rd," which is popular not only among MAGA but everywhere on the political spectrum. But then so is "loser." Don't be stupid, people. If that's the best you've got, it's better to keep silent than to remove all doubt about your vacuity.

 

Oh, it's okay because Trump uses it and you're just turning it back on him? Keep digging yourselves in deeper.

He Strictly Charged Them to Tell No One About Him

The discourse on race / ethnicity stinks to high heaven. 

A new movie version of Wuthering Heights will be released next month, and not for the first time there's controversy over the casting of Heathcliff.  It has been more than a decade since I last read the book, and I'm in no hurry to do it again, but as I remember, Heathcliff was a man of mystery, of ambiguous and unknown ancestry.  The discussion I saw on Twitter/X today agreed, but people were still trying to pin him down, while others tried to impose "modern" Foucauldianism on the story.  For example, dismissals of "people who interpret everything through contemporary American racial dynamics," or "But Heathcliff is supposed to be possibly-not-fully-white by the standards of late 18th C Yorkshire, which is not the same thing as being clearly nonwhite by modern standards... He isn't clearly described as nonwhite, but as someone who raises suspicions because of an ambiguous appearance and background."

Whose modern standards?  Which modern standards?  The new movie is a US-UK production.  British racial dynamics are different than US racial dynamics, and both sets are complex and incoherent, even leaving "mixed-race" people out of it.  Jacob Elordi, who plays Heathcliffe in this version, is Australian with a Basque father. Judging by this publicity photo, I think he looks suitably ambiguous by modern standards.

 

"White" and "non-white" aren't clear categories, and never have been. As I've pointed out before, in English usage "black" is applied to human beings along a continuum from black hair to being sub-Saharan African.  Here's how Heathcliff made his first appearance to the Earnshaw family:

We crowded round, and over Miss Cathy’s head I had a peep at a dirty, ragged, black-haired child; big enough both to walk and talk: indeed, its face looked older than Catherine’s; yet when it was set on its feet, it only stared round, and repeated over and over again some gibberish that nobody could understand. I was frightened, and Mrs. Earnshaw was ready to fling it out of doors: she did fly up, asking how he could fashion to bring that gipsy brat into the house, when they had their own bairns to feed and fend for? What he meant to do with it, and whether he were mad? The master tried to explain the matter; but he was really half dead with fatigue, and all that I could make out, amongst her scolding, was a tale of his seeing it starving, and houseless, and as good as dumb, in the streets of Liverpool, where he picked it up and inquired for its owner. Not a soul knew to whom it belonged, he said; and his money and time being both limited, he thought it better to take it home with him at once, than run into vain expenses there: because he was determined he would not leave it as he found it. Well, the conclusion was, that my mistress grumbled herself calm; and Mr. Earnshaw told me to wash it, and give it clean things, and let it sleep with the children.  

Children, even little blue-eyed blond-haired rosy-cheeked English children, were commonly called "it" in English well into the twentieth century, so this passage shouldn't be assumed to be racist.  Heathcliff is referred to as a "gipsy," a "a little Lascar [i.e. South Asian], or an American or Spanish castaway" by other characters in the novel.  Whatever the racial dynamics of late 18th-century Yorkshire were, they weren't clear.  Numerous people have pointed out that Liverpool was a terminus of the Atlantic slave trade, and speculated that Heathcliff might have been a slave or the child of a slave. It's less often noted that the reader has at best only Mr. Earnshaw's word for it that he found the boy in Liverpool; what was he going to say, though, "This is my son by a slave wench"?  I don't assume that Emily Bronte had a clear picture of Heathcliff's ancestry in mind, nor that she could have explained herself clearly if pressed. Intentionally or not, she gave an accurate picture of the racial dynamic in her day by showing that Yorkshire folk just threw around a salad of labels for the boy. They didn't care much what he was, only that he was Other.  (I couldn't resist thinking of the various answers the Twelve gave when Jesus asked "Who do men say that I am?" "Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.")

On "gipsy," Roma are not a single "racial" group: see the 1993 musical / documentary Latcho Drom, which ranges from India across Europe to Spain.  If Heathcliff could have been "a Spanish castaway," he could have been Basque; he still wouldn't have been white. Complaints about the casting of Elordi that call him white are as inadvertently entertaining as the complaints that Neo in The Matrix was played by a white actor.  (Keanu Reeves is multiethnic, to put it gently.)  The gatekeepers are as ignorant as their opponents, and contribute little or nothing to improving the discourse.

Are Hispanics white?  Hey, remember the right-wing think-tanker who thought that Spanish speakers are a "race"? But he wants you to know that he's not a racist. Remember the liberal queer diversity educators who insisted that Sunni and Shi'a are ethnicities?  Jon Schwarz likes to remind us that Benjamin Franklin said that Germans are "swarthy," that is, dark-skinned:

Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red? But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind. 

You see, it's okay for a Basque to play Heathcliff: they aren't white! And I remember that light-skinned African-Americans sometimes passed, or were mistaken for Mexicans or or Latins.

A similar casting dilemma affects Shakespeare's Othello. What is a Moor, in Elizabethan racial dynamics?  Othello is called "black" by some characters, and he might have been African, but probably not. Numerous commenters in those threads mentioned that in more recent adaptations, Othello has been played by black African actors.  Laurence Olivier (who also played Heathcliff in a film version of Wuthering Heights) played Othello in blackface in a 1965 movie performance. (My goodness, the whole thing is on YouTube.)  Like this:

 

Then there was Andrea Arnold's 2011 version of Wuthering Heights, in which Heathcliff was played by an Afro-British actor.  I found it uneven but interesting, partly because the dialogue included some F-bombs. Was that "authentic"? "Correct"?  Bronte couldn't have published the novel with such language, and I have no idea whether she knew the word, but probably she did, and the expletives were in character for Heathcliff.  The English were notorious for their foul language: Joan of Arc called them "goddens," or "goddamns."

I don't intend to see the new version; I'll see how the reviews are.  But I don't love the book, so why bother? The anxiety and confusion over the casting - there's also an actor in it with an Arabic name, and a Chinese as well - drew my attention to it, that's all.  Is there even any point in trying to sort out the tangled web of race / ethnic discourse?  I don't think it can be done.

You Keep Using This Word, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means

 

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.” 

The New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman - or more likely, his subliterate social media team - posted this on Facebook a few days ago.  ("'Deconstructed' out of" is new to me, though I've seen some other people talking about "deconstructing Christianity" online.)  It got plenty of comments along the lines of "The earth is not 6000 years old and Moses didn’t write the Pentateuch", which are fine. I began thinking over my own journey, as they say, on this subject.  It's a bit more complicated, and I bet so are other people's stories.

As I've written before, I've been an atheist since I was about ten years old. This distinguishes me from most of Ehrman's fans, I think, who appear to have had religious upbringings and had to make more dramatic breaks with belief. I was never a fundamentalist, though I grew up in rural northern Indiana in a Christian milieu and I had to start thinking about my relation to religion early on. I didn't begin reading serious biblical scholarship until I was 30, and it was a complicated process as I learned to think historically. But one thing that broke the logjam was Morton Smith's "A Comparison of Early Christian and Early Rabbinic Tradition," Journal of Biblical Literature 1963. It's an article that (like much of Smith's work) has been misrepresented shamefully. It sent me back to compare the resurrection stories in the gospels and 1 Cor 15, and I saw how incompatible they were. I also owe a lot to scholars like Dennis Nineham and James Barr, whom I encountered long before I heard of Ehrman. Almost everything I've read by them was helpful, but Nineham's The Use and Abuse of the Bible and Barr's Fundamentalism stand out, along with Barr's Holy Scripture: Canon Authority Criticism, which I reread a few days ago. These and other scholars seem to me much more thoughtful than Ehrman, but it may be that you need a basic awareness of Bible scholarship to be able to follow them.

In most online discussions about religion, numerous commenters will pipe up sarcastically: "Why would you want to study fairy tales?" There are scholars who study fairy tales, from all cultures, and the problems they deal with are the same that biblical scholars study: oral tradition, turning oral tradition into written forms, where they came from and what they mean. It's questions like these that drive my interest in religious studies. Scholars also study modern religious texts such as Star Wars, Star Trek, and The Matrix.  Many nominally secular people quote those texts as if they were scripture, and many avowed atheists have faith-based theories of morality. (Such as "people should get their morals from their hearts and feelings, not books.")  Thinking is hard: let's go shopping.

I've mentioned before one of the most useful insights I picked up from the philosopher Mary Midgley: that thinking critically or philosophically is not like taking apart a machine, but like disentangling a mass of yarn. You pick at your problem here, then there, and once in a while a big section comes loose; but then you have to return to the detail work.  It described my own engagement with big issues - not just religion, but US foreign policy, literature, and more, but certainly religion and specifically Christianity.  I'd read one book, move to articles and books it cited in the footnotes, and soon one of those would send me off in another direction.  Then I'd write about it.  Sometimes this process was more interesting than at other times, but over time I covered a lot of ground.  This wasn't a sign of my great patience, but of the persistence of the problem. I'd leave the subject for awhile, then pick it up when I found a book that drew me back in.

Come to think of it, the biggest hurdle I had to get over, even as a lifelong atheist, was to recognize that Jesus was not a good person, not a great and wise teacher, not an authority on anything. Apart from being wrong factually, as in his end-times teaching, he was often wrong morally, in his fondness for extreme punishments especially. And there was no reason he should have been other than he was. This, I think, is the hurdle that stops even many atheists and other nonbelievers: they want to reject religion and churches, but they still want a Jesus they can admire, a Jesus who'd be their best friend, someone they could have a beer with and laugh at all the stupid Bible-thumpers. This drives a lot of the hatred for Paul, for example the claim that Paul plumb ruint Jesus' beautiful simple teaching of love. Jesus was distorted and misunderstood by the stupid apostles, but they understand him.

It requires determined selective reading of the gospels, which depict Jesus as an end-times prophet, a hellfire and damnation preacher, a faith healer and exorcist who cadged money from his (often wealthy) followers, who taught his followers to break with their families and was hostile to normal human sexuality.  These traits, which non-fundamentalists are aware of in the sects they've left, aren't visible only through the eye of fancy-pants biblical scholarship.  They're right there on the surface of the text, and critical scholarship hasn't really dislodged them. I don't mean to be smug about this: I found them easy to ignore for quite some time, partly because the critical scholars I read didn't dwell on them either.  But since they are emblematic of the Christianities that liberal Christians and secularists alike despise, shouldn't they get more attention?  They don't, though, even when they're pointed out. 

Part of the explanation for this, I think, is the normal human tendency (which I share) to view others in either-or terms, as totally good or totally bad.  Either Jesus was, at the very least, a supremely good man and a moral visionary, or he was a totally evil person, as in C. S. Lewis' "Lord, Liar, or Lunatic" trilemma from his Mere Christianity. I'm not going to discuss it here, maybe another time, but for now it's relevant for the problem of how to evaluate our heroes. If people have trouble dealing with the clay feet of people who are unquestionably merely human, then it will be even harder to assess someone who stands at the apex of Western civilization.  Even those who reject the churches want to use his prestige, and they'll work very hard to preserve it in their own minds, by their own standards.

So, for example, this post by gay African-American former Clinton staffer Keith Boykin, which the Facebook Memories feature sent my way recently:

I think they both are equally God-fearing Christians. Or neither, as you like. Obama has as much innocent blood on his hands as Trump, but for Boykin and others that fact has to be ignored.  It's fair and reasonable to try to evaluate both of them based on the evidence, but for the true believer, Obama fan or MAGA, it's unacceptable and indeed unthinkable.

At this point I insist that we don't have enough reliable information about the "historical Jesus" to evaluate him at all.  We probably never will. People who want to be Jesus' BFFs usually seem to have a good grasp of the problem; at best they believe that since the Bible is not a reliable historical source, they can pick the parts they like and dismiss the rest as inauthentic.  That's not how it works, but of course they have the First Amendment right to believe what they like, if not to demand that others accept their version of Jesus. It's why I stress the less appealing traits Jesus is assigned in the gospels, and which they ignore -- except quite often to accept the hell-and-damnation part for people they hate. Recognizing that the world wasn't created in 4004 BCE or that Moses didn't write the Pentateuch isn't enough; it's barely a beginning.