I Still Do Not Like Your Christ

... and I'm not wild about your "moderate" Christians either. This was posted in a lively comment thread today (doesn't matter where, doesn't matter who -- it's the thought that counts):

Holy Moley! What great conversations!!!! Enjoyed every one of them...thank you...the point is, folks, there are many different religions practiced all over the world. We should be respecting each one of them and understand that in each of them there are extremists. Just don't be one! I personally choose to follow the teachings of Christ...but it could be Buddha as well...they are all similar. Just be a good person and you have it down pat!

I commented:

I disagree. We should respect other people's freedom to choose their religion, or none at all, but we are under no obligation to respect anyone's beliefs, religious or otherwise. Evidently you don't respect the beliefs of the people you call "extremists," so you're in a bit of a bind. (Martin Luther King Jr. proudly avowed himself an extremist, by the way. So do I. Probably the one thing I agree with Jesus about is that being lukewarm is not a virtue.)

You say you "personally choose to follow the teachings of Christ." Which ones? Do you pluck out your eye if it leads you to sin? Do you agree that anyone who divorces and remarries is an adulterer? Do you refuse to attend a parent's funeral? Do you bring not peace but a sword? And so on. Or do you pick and choose?

"Just be a good person and you have it down pat!" That's certainly not a teaching of Jesus. Nor is it a teaching of the Buddha.

To which the other commenter replied:

@Duncan...live your life anyway you want and believe whatever you want...don't judge me and don't judge anyone else unless you are perfect...and I'm thinking you are not.

And added:

and also, Duncan...kindness is in every religion...maybe you should look into it a little more...I choose to follow the teaching of Christ regarding love and kindness and helping others....How would you know what the teaching of Christ or Buddha would be? You sound extremely negative with all of these conversations...You certainly can believe whatever you choose...and I will do the same.

I replied:

I don't know, you sound mighty judgmental to me. You think you can divide the extremists from the good believers, for example, and I'm still trying to figure out where I "judged" you. Disagreement is not necessarily judgment, and how interesting that when faced with disagreement the "kindness" melts away and you become rather ... harsh.

Sure, there's "kindness" in all religions, as well as outside them. Kindness is a human trait. But that doesn't mean it's at their core. Jesus says some nice things in the gospels, and a lot of nasty things. I mentioned some of them. I think the burden of proof lies on the person who claims, without evidence, that "just be a good person and you've got it down pat!" is all you need. How do you know what the teaching of Christ or Buddha would be?

I haven't gone back to the comment thread, so I don't know if the other commenter replied. It doesn't seem she is interested in addressing the question anyway. Sure, Jesus taught "kindness" ... sometimes. So do most religious "extremists." The other commenter wrote that she follows "the teachings of Christ", but apparently she meant "the teaching [singular] of Christ that I like" -- Cafeteria Christianity, as it's known by Cafeteria Christians. It's significant, and quite typical in my experience, that she completely dodged the question of what she does about the rest of the teachings. (Ignores them, I suppose, with crossed fingers.) She has the right to believe whatever she wants, of course, and I never denied that. What I was asking was which "teachings of Christ" she follows.

The Buddha taught compassion, but like Jesus he was primarily concerned with salvation, though he meant something different by that than Jesus did. For Jesus, salvation meant being saved from the judgment of Yahweh, coming very soon to a theater near you. According to the gospel of Mark (1:15) Jesus' first preaching after his baptism and testing in the desert was: "The time is fulfilled and the Kingdom of God is at hand! Repent, and believe in the glad tidings!" The alternative was eternal torture by Satan and his demons. Many Christians claim that Jesus put "love" first, as in "Love your neighbor as yourself" (Mark 12:30-31), but actually he put that one second, after "Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God the Lord is one" and "You shall love the Lord with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength." Yahweh, not too surprisingly, comes before mere human beings. And even here, Jesus didn't say that nothing else mattered or that loving was all one needed to do to be saved. He'd been asked what the greatest commandment was, a question of legalistic Torah interpretation. Jesus was a bit unclear about just what one needed to do to escape damnation, giving different answers at different times. Maybe he wasn't sure himself.

The Buddha was concerned with salvation as escape from the cycle of birth and rebirth, but also as escape from suffering. Suffering was due to craving or desire, which was due to being alive. He set out a program for tamping down desire. Like Jesus, he wasn't very interested in the nuclear family, for what is dear to one makes one suffer. Like Jesus, the Buddha said some things I like and others I dislike. As an atheist I feel free to take the ones I like and ignore the ones I don't, but I don't pretend to "follow the teachings" of either one, or of anyone. I certainly would not claim that the bits I like are all you need to get it down pat.

If you claim to be a follower, you're stuck with all of it. Once you take responsibility for your own values and actions, you're no longer a follower. I think that's a better approach to living -- indeed a necessary one for an adult human being -- but what do I know?

Believing In Them Just Encourages Them

From Monsieur l'IOZ, one of the few other atheists on the Intertoobz I can read anymore without (most of the time) nausea:

As for the argument from popularity, an odd conceit of a man plainly much-steeped in democracy, that Truth proceeds from the number of voters pulling the Yes lever, it would certainly dismay the early Christians scratching their little fishies in the sand. It did remind me of a good story the rabbi at my parents' synagogue told when I recently joined them at services for my brother's Yahrtzeit. Two orthodox rebbeim are debating the coming of the Moshiach. The first says, "I believe we must study Torah and observe the laws and traditions of our ancestors and not think too much of worldly things, for after all, when the Moshiach comes, many worldly things will pass away."

The second rebbe says, "I agree, we must read Torah and observe the laws and traditions, but should we not also work and pray for a better world for ourselves and our children and grandchildren? For after all, we do not know when the Moshiach will come. We do not even know if the Moshiach will come!"

"My friend!" cries the first rebbe. "How can you say such a thing? Does not Hashem promise that our Moshiach will come? Do you doubt the word of the Lord?"

"Hmmm," muses the first Rebbe. "Perhaps, perhaps."

"Aha!" the first rebbe calls out. "Then you do not believe in God!"

"Oh," the second replies. "Nonsense. I am a Jew. I believe in God. I just don't trust him."

Only You Can Prevent John Boehner

I hadn't particularly noticed Glenn Greenwald attacking "moderate" Democrats, only right-wing ones. It's Robert Gibbs who attacked moderate Democrats, but that doesn't seem to bother Alter, a booster of Bush's war on terror and an advocate of torture even before it was clear that the Bush regime was using it. (He's since tried to cover up his support of torture, but he lies.) No wonder he likes Obama.

So, given Alter's liberal willingness to throw principle to the winds and embrace Republican bloodthirst, what is his objection to John Boehner? What does Alter mean by "prevent"? How exactly could Greenwald or the rest of us on the professional left "prevent" a member of Congress?

Speaking of the Whiner in the White House and his Press Secretary, David Michael Green does a nice job on both of them at Counterpunch today. Now, Green really is in "frothing at the mouth attack mode," bless him, but he's also rational and well-informed.

And so I confess that I’m not all that psyched when I see the press secretary of a failed president lecturing the people who put him into office, following two years of betraying them while cutting deals with the scariest predatory monsters in the country.

And I especially don’t want to hear it from folks who don’t have the good sense to have good sense about themselves and their record. Obama recently gave himself a grade of “incomplete” for his presidency, but said he has a “pretty good track record”. Last year it was a B+, with an A- after health care passed. He’s certainly entitled to his opinion, which his fawning press secretary and other White House staff no doubt share in spades. It’s just that no one else does.

Maybe if Obama was up twenty points instead of down that many, maybe if he was adored by a grateful public, maybe if he was poised to increase his party’s majorities in Congress rather than turn over control of both houses to people like Sharon Angle and Rand Paul, maybe if he was genuinely changing the country for the better – maybe then he’d have a soapbox to stand on and lecture the left.

Until then, it’s not working.

Green's term "professional failures" should become the standard label for Obama and his Team of Rivals.

The Evil Boyar Leads the Little Father Astray Yet Again

On the other hand, Representative Alan Grayson appeared on CNN and, more in sorrow than in anger, declared that Robert Gibbs knows Fox Talking Points and little else.



One commenter at Joe.My.God lent support to an earlier suspicion of mine when he complained that Grayson is "always, always in frothing at the mouth attack mode, and that kind of constant over the top response wears thin after awhile." Even if I grant that this was meant literally, it's an odd way to characterize Grayson's mild, smiling demeanor in this clip. (Another, Obamabot commenter called Grayson "too radical" -- this middle-of-the-road Democrat from a Southern state! -- and predicted that he won't be re-elected.) If you say something that someone else doesn't want to hear, you'll be characterized as "angry," "frothing," "extreme," no matter how mild your demeanor or how moderate your opinion.

I disagree with Grayson, though, when he blames it all on Gibbs for not doing a better job of representing Obama, of selling the President to the nation's voters. As though Obama couldn't direct his Press Secretary to take a different line, or failing that, to replace him! Given Obama's own expressed contempt for his left critics and his inability to understand why many of his erstwhile supporters have come not to trust him, I see no reason to believe that Gibbs wasn't speaking for his boss on that fateful day. Yes, it was a stupid move, but I think Obama refuses to believe that his actions could be alienating his base.

Heaven for Me, But Not for Thee

I don't get it:

If there is one thing many fundamentalist Christians are known for, it is their blatant hypocrisy. I have heard liberal Christians and even some moderates say that they believe virtually everyone will go to some sort of heaven as long as they are not terrible people who commit serious crimes.

Not so for the fundamentalists. For them, the only path to heaven is through Jesus. Like the woman in the cartoon, they are quick to condemn all other religions as false while generally refusing to critically examine their own.

This makes no sense at all, because it mixes two different complaints together incoherently. First there's the claim that fundamentalists, but not liberals, condemn the beliefs of others "while generally refusing to critically examine their own." I don't agree -- in my experience and observation, liberal and moderate Christians just draw the line in a different place than fundamentalists do. David Fergusson, for example, dislikes fundamentalists as much as Atheist Revolution does, but he sees "faith" as a phenomenon beyond question, and chides militant atheists for being so harsh and negative and disrespectful. Even among fundamentalists there are degrees of strictness; at my job I used to overhear ladies from the Church of the Nazarene saying complacently that they weren't as strict as the "Pentycosts." And it was true: Nazarenes' hemlines were an inch or two shorter than Pentecostals', they were allowed to cut their hair, they could have a TV in the house to watch Christian broadcasting. Anything more would be going too far.

The second complaint is that fundamentalists are so extreme: liberals and moderates will let almost anybody into heaven, but fundamentalists require proper credentials. There's nothing hypocritical about this. The real trouble is that nobody knows what the criteria for heaven are. Maybe the liberals are right, maybe the fundamentalists are, maybe they're all wrong, but it's not up to them to decide. If heaven and hell existed, then it would be important to know just what the entrance requirements are, not to brush the question aside with platitudes. It won't be settled by halving the difference between the extremes and sitting down in the middle.

It would also, according to the principle of critical examination, be appropriate to ask whether it can be right or just to condemn anybody, no matter how terrible his or her crimes, to eternal punishment. How many people are you allowed to kill before you deserve Hell? How much pork can you eat, how many illicit sexual partners are you allowed, how short a skirt can you wear, how many lies can you tell? Can you be a 'terrible person' in your heart even if you don't commit any serious crimes, so that being terrible is by itself enough to consign you to the flames that are not quenched? What end is served by eternal torture anyway? This is not a trivial question in a country where literal torture is used by my government to "defend" me. It works in both directions: if some people deserve to be tortured forever in the afterlife for being "terrible," then a little waterboarding and electroshock in this life is not a big deal by comparison; if there are people who deserve to be tortured (and some prominent atheists are not willing to condemn the practice absolutely), then belief in eternal damnation is not an evil belief even if, in fact, Hell doesn't exist.

Maybe the idea is that I'm supposed to feel grateful when a liberal Christian allows that I'm a good person in her eyes, so I won't go to hell? No doubt their tolerance speaks well for them, but I'm an atheist, so hell is rather low on my list of worries. I don't see them as a different breed than fundamentalists; they remind me of the Cossacks who, because they respected Leon Trotsky, denied that he was a Jew: "He's one of us!" Being assured that I am so fit to eat with the hogs does not win me over. I've noticed that a lot of people enjoy working themselves into a snit because some Bad Christian believes that they will go to hell. Not, it seems, because they think that nobody should go to hell, but because they think that they shouldn't. (Not me! Julia!) And those who say they like Christ but not Christians need to explain why Jesus, who according the gospels was pretty free with threats of damnation, is preferable to a fundamentalist in this respect.

One important question is being begged here too: the Atheist Revolutionist seems to assume that atheists, or maybe most atheists, are people who stopped believing in gods because they subjected their beliefs to critical examination, and they continue to do so. Not from what I see. We atheists have our own traditions, our exalted if not sacred writers and scriptures, which, especially on first encounter, we tend to take on trust (which is one of the meanings of "faith"). That's why so many bad arguments and misinformation circulate in atheist writings and oral lore. The advent of soundbyte atheism is not, in this light, a positive development as far as I'm concerned.

In his 1958 Critique of Religion and Philosophy (Harper & Brothers), Walter Kaufmann wrote a dialogue between Satan and a Christian, which concluded (chapter 59):

Christian: You always harp on hell.

Satan: There is no place like home. And you might as well get used to the idea: haven't you been told that I enjoy the company of those who cannot answer me any better than you?

Christian: But I don't understand at all. Only hysterics think of going to hell themselves.

Satan: I know: good Christians consider hell a place for others. But don't you realize that if you are right about everything, you, and those like you, are undoubtedly headed for hell? Don't you see how immeasurably you stand to gain if Christianity is untenable? It is I that bring you glad tidings. Believe me and you are saved. That God exists, that is a ritual phrase, charged with emotion and a thousand connotations: some sheer superstition, some myths, some true, some false, and most of them vague. But here is the truth that shall make you free: I do not exist.

Christian: If Satan does not exist, I must have dreamed. So I can go on believing what I have always believed. But what exactly do I believe? That is the question.

See you in Hell, folks!

The Check Is In The Mail

Watching this cozy exchange between Moore and Olberman, I began wondering just what audience Robert Gibbs thought he was addressing when he threw his tantrum for The Hill. Was it the Beltway, the Democratic insiders known as the Village? If so, they approved: the Washington Post's Dana Milbank, for example, wrote that "Gibbs has, in the space of just a few weeks, twice committed the unforgivable sin for a White House press secretary: He has carelessly spoken the truth." (Oh, not "carelessly," Dana -- Gibbs surely knew what he was doing.) When asked whether he had any response to Olbermann, "'I was watching my BlackBerry for primary returns and watching the Braves game on the Internet,' the press secretary replied.

"Ouch. This is not going to play well at Professional Left global headquarters in New York." Ah yes, all them New York Jews, hating on the only President we've got. There's something touching about the pretense that New York is the metropole and Washington DC is a hayseed backwater, the real America. But then, as FAIR's Peter Hart pointed out, Milbank's a longtime Obama booster. But contrary to Milbank, I'm not waiting for an apology from the White House; I never expected one.

On the other hand, I think Moore is fundamentally wrong here. Is the White House "frightened" about the November elections? Maybe so, but I don't think they believe that their slipping numbers are their fault. Of course they blame the cable news networks, those strongholds of the Left. (Like Rachel Maddow, who helped the President toot his own horn at Netroots nation last month.) And if the Republicans make any gains in November, they'll be protesting to the corporate media that they did so resist the Left and move diligently to the center! They did their best! Don't blame them! And for the people who matter, their best was good enough -- remember, profits are up 41 percent since Obama took office.

Take that bit about 2 minutes in where Moore says, "We're frightened about it too, because the last thing any of us want to have happen is for the Republicans to come back in any form of power." I'm not a professional leftist, alas -- as Alexander Cockburn's father used to say ruefully, "Where is that Moscow money? We could use it" -- but as far as I can tell, the Republicans never left power. Obama catered to them from the get-go, and has mostly continued their policies, even allowing some of their people to keep on doing damage in their old jobs. He protected even those who were out of office from any accountability for their crimes, and has gone further than even they did in the abuse of power. Even his actual attempts at change, like the stimulus bill, were half-hearted, full of compromises with the Republicans. Though they no longer controlled Congress or the White House, Obama gave them the veto over his actions.

"I just didn't understand why that was the first thing out of his mouth, was that Canadian health care was the big thing they're worried about." I guess the single-payer advocates managed to irk Obama after all, even if they couldn't budge him from his determination to sell out to the insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry. That Gibbs was so enraged by it shows how hysterically right-wing the Obama administration really is. Whatever else you can say about it, Canadian health care is not a radical-left system.

"The hard-core base is gonna show up in November, and they're gonna vote for the Democrats, regardless of all this hoo-ha that's going on. The problem, and they know this from their own polling, is that next large group of people, that go to the soft middle, that voted for Obama but are no longer enthused and excited ... and those people aren't going to vote for Republicans either -- they're just gonna stay home. And that's the biggest fear, that people will just stay home in November, and Republicans may take power again in the House or the Senate." Again, "take power"? The Republicans never lost power. Moore may well be right about the "soft middle" -- only time will tell -- and it's true that many liberals are still bravely supporting him; that's what liberals do, they talk a hard line and then cave in. (Milbank says that, when asked if "progressives" would stay home in November, Gibbs replied, "I don't think they will.") But Obama's hard-core base is his big corporate donors -- Wall Street, the insurance companies, Big Pharma, and so on. (Some call them the elites...) As I've said before, Obama and the Democrats don't want my vote, and won't miss it.

"So the ball's in their court ... Nobody wants to go back to the old days, so Gibbs is right: we're all on the same team here, and we'd better start with a better game plan than the one they've been using for the last eighteen months or so." Are "we" all on the same team? You couldn't prove it by me. Gibbs and his master are indeed on the same team as the corporatists, and would like to be on the same team as the Republicans, but they're not on the same team as most voters. While the people at the top are enjoying an economic recovery, "half of American workers have suffered a job loss or a cut in hours or wages over the past 30 months." If American workers were on the same team as the White House, Obama would have worked a little harder for their interests.

It's not unusual for Presidents to lose touch with the country, if by "the country" you understand, as I do, the mass of the population rather than the political and media elites. Obama would have had to work very hard to do otherwise, and judging from his days as a "community organizer" as he reported them in his first book, he never had the common touch, never really identified with the people he was supposedly organizing. I'm not sure how a President would go about schmoozing with ordinary people after he takes office -- the Secret Service would go nuts. He could have appointed some people from the actual Left, such as it is, as advisors even if he couldn't give them real positions of power; they could have told him things he urgently needed to know. But he preferred to play golf with big-donor CEOs. So be it; Obama has made his choices, let him live with the consequences. They're not likely to be severe, for him.

The Word "Duh" Comes to Mind

By Daniel Gross at Slate:

Employers shouldn't be surprised that Americans won't take their crummy, low-wage jobs.

At "Mechanical Devices, which supplies parts for earthmovers and other heavy equipment to manufacturers such as Caterpillar Inc., part owner Mark Sperry says he has been looking for $13-an-hour machinists since early last year," the Journal reports. Thirteen dollars an hour, 40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year—that comes to an annual salary of $26,000. (In the adjacent Peoria, Ill., metropolitan area, per capita income was $39,965 in 2008.) Or take Emirates Airlines. When it held jobs fairs in cities like Miami and Houston, only about 50 people showed up, "compared to a global average of about 150 and as many as 1,000 at some events in Europe and Asia." The jobs don't require much in the way of education, and they come with benefits, free accommodations, and a starting salary of $30,000. But you'd have to move halfway around the world, to Dubai—an alien and expensive place. Would you uproot yourself and your family for $30,000 a year? Don't you think both of these employers would find many more interested applicants if they offered higher wages?

Despite this shortage of applicants, however (via):

Profits are up 41 percent since Obama’s election; yet half of American workers have suffered a job loss or a cut in hours or wages over the past 30 months. They’re saying around 28 million people either have no job or one that doesn’t yield them enough money to get through the week. On Friday, August 13, the Bureau of Labor Statistic noted on its home page that “Employers initiated 1,851 mass layoff events in the second quarter of 2010 that resulted in the separation of 338,064 workers from their jobs for at least 31 days.”

Perhaps the employers got rid of the workers they already had because they intended to replace them with new workers at lower wages, without benefits (assuming the old workers had them, which I admit is a stretch). Given the comfortable rise in profits, the corporate sector's poor-mouthing (we have to get rid of workers and cut wages in order to stay competitive in this age of globalization) can be dismissed as propaganda.

Meanwhile, the war on Social Security continues on its 75th anniversary, led by its Commander-in-Chief. Obama just delivered a ringing defense of Social Security against the Republican running dogs, but don't believe him: for one thing, his ringing defenses usually presage an ignominious retreat soon after. He's also fond of the diversionary lie: he declares his opposition to privatizing the system (not that he should be taken seriously even on that, given his record), but that doesn't rule out cutting benefits (via) and raising the retirement age, which appears to be his current goal. For another, he's packed his National Committee on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform with right-wing corporatists, working with Pete Peterson, a right-wing billionaire who's been crusading against Social Security since at least the Nixon Administration. (Peterson's Potemkin "Town Hall" meetings, rigged in an attempt to show public support for his agenda, backfired.) Doug Henwood of Left Business Observer promises a new major article on the subject, but links to this 2005 defense of the system.