Why There is No God, Reasons 42 & 43

The One True Religion™, the Catholic Church (self-named it was), instituted what it called the Inquisition (1184 to the present day) to root our false learnings and false teachings, oh and witches and sorcerers, too. Their primary instruments were fear and torture. Whole villages of people were “put to the question,” and then executed.

When the Pope got involved (the first Papal Bull on the topic was in 1199), he ignored the Bible’s teachings (Yahweh’s actually) “The one who sins is the one who will die.” —GOD, Ezekiel 18 and declared that executions, previously forbidden were now the order of the day, and the punishments would be imposed on the descendants of the condemned, also.

Now the god they claimed to worship was also claimed to be all-knowing and you’d think that such a god would let the Inquisitors know what we know now, that torture doesn’t work. Tortured people will tell you exactly what you want to hear, not what they believe.

This is especially egregious based upon what the Inquisitors learned. In France Inquisitor after Inquisitor commented on how freely peasants spouted heresies, proud of their learning. This shouldn’t surprise anyone, especially not an all-knowing god, because the vast majority of those peasants could neither read nor write. Consequently, what they knew was taught to them . . . by the damned Church! They were proud to share their learning because they learned what the priest taught them! Then they burned at the stake.

Now, based upon the easily observable facts such as these, an “all-loving god,” such as the Christian god was declared to be would take pity on the poor duped peasants and set up re-education camps or classes to get them sorted out. Even the communists did this instead of just executing all the “wrong thinkers” willy-nilly.

Two more strikes against the Crummy Christian God™ leaving us to wonder how it got its god card in the first place.

Postscript With the exception of the Papal States, the institution of the Inquisition was abolished in the early 19th century, after the Napoleonic Wars in Europe and the Spanish American wars of independence in the Americas. The institution survived as part of the Roman Curia, but in 1908 it was renamed the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office. In 1965, it became the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. In 2022, this office was renamed the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. (Source: Wikipedia)

Why Isn’t Populism Popular?

In my youth and political naïveté I often wondered why populism wasn’t what all Americans wanted. Didn’t we want “government of the people, by the people, and for the people?” Fast forward to today and we are being warned daily about the dangers of populism, and the words populism and populist seem to be used as slurs.

So, off to my go-to dictionary, Merriam-Webster I go:

populist 2 : a believer in the rights, wisdom, or virtues of the common people and
1 : a member of a political party claiming to represent the common people

Definition 1 is spot on with my original thinking, and definition 2 is also, but that’s not all there is.

Another definition is:

Populism is a range of political stances that emphasize the idea of “the people” and often juxtapose this group with “the elite.” It is frequently associated with anti-establishment and anti-political sentiment. (Wikipedia)

this too is spot-on, and

populism : political ideas and activities that are intended to get the support of ordinary people by giving them what they want: e.g. “Their ideas are simple populism – tax cuts and higher wages.” (Cambridge Dictionary)

Finally, here is why the powers that be, on the left and right (actually “above” as left and right don’t really exist anymore, having been co-opted by the oligarchs) are opposed to populism. Although one could claim that the oligarchs are in favor of tax cuts and higher wages, for the rich, but the assumption here is “for ordinary people” so since such things reduce profits and thus the salaries and stock earnings of rich people, they’re agin’ it. We are supposed to be creating government structures “of the people, by the people, and for the people” but the rich are opposed to this quaint idea. They consider “the non-rich” to be “the filthy poor” who just can’t wait to get their hands on the money the rich people have piled up by hook or crook, so it is unthinkable that “those people” would be in charge. (This is why Franklin Roosevelt was declared to be a traitor to his class. He did way too much for ordinary people (even supported labor unions, eww!), at least according to the oligarchs.) Their idea is government of the non-rich by the elites (the rich and those chosen to represent them, e.g. paid for politicians).

One of their tried and true tactics is to demean the things that they want their followers to hate. They turned the term “liberal” into a slur. Social Security and even the Post Office became socialism. Church-state separation became a war on Christianity and now populism is a dirty word. The message underlying all of this is “you don’t want this, move along.” Apparently they think it is a Jedi mind trick.

What started me off on this post was a single sentence (I don’t have triggers so much as short fuses): “Populists always say popular things, so judge the man for what he’s done not for what he says.” WTF? Only populists tell us what we want to hear? Apparently they were thinking of politicians, not just populists.

Why I am Coming to the Point of Hating All Religions

I don’t want to hate anything . . . but . . .  I was recently watching a rather nice three-part BBC documentary on Persia and Iran. In college I took a course in ancient near eastern history but I only learned a smidgeon about Persia, so this was an opportunity to fill in the gaps in my understanding of history. Persia, one the first major empires, became over time a doormat for invaders, many, many invaders.

About 500 years ago an Islamic general decided to conquer Persia and made war and accomplished that goal. He was not conquering Persia to convert that country to Islam. Persia had been conquered by Arab invaders centuries before who had converted the entire country to Islam, essentially relegating Persia’s native religion, Zoroastrianism, to the dustbins of history. (As religions go, Zoroastrianism, to my tastes, was a superior religion, but . . . it still conferred the “divine rights of kings” onto their rulers, etc. There are an estimated 110,000–120,000 Zoroastrians left in the world from the millions previously.)

Back to the invasion of 500 years ago. The general, who made himself King of Persia, wasn’t converting the country to Islam, he was converting it from Sunni Islam to Shia Islam. For this many, many people died, economies were disrupted, buildings destroyed, etc. Then the people were forcefully converted from Sunni Islam to Shia Islam. Yes, that Islam, the religion of peace, whose holy book clearly states that no one is to come to Islam by force.

Never judge a religion based upon what they say, always look to what they do. Religions represent a terrible cost to human beings. Instead of focusing on things that make people’s lives better, wars are fought over imaginary differences. Religions make people stupid.

Obviously this is not the only case I base my conclusion upon. Currently Palestinians and Israelis are fighting a religious war. And the “Troubles” in Ireland are not that far in the past, the Nazi efforts to exterminate Jews and Gypsies, and then, the Croats and Serbs went at it . . . and then . . . there are myriad examples of religion being at the heart of wars and human misery.

The current actions of Christian nationalists here in the USA are part of the same picture.

Yes, I am an a-theist, and now I am an anti-religionist. If you are requesting special privileges because of your religion, I am against it. If you do not want your churches to pay taxes, I am against you.

A pox on all religions and their imaginary solaces and real damage they offer. If you are one who wants to convert the USA into a “Christian Nation,” fuck you and the horse you rode in on. You are just paving the way for turning us into an Islamic nation.

MAGA Logic

Republicans are now calling for a ban on faux meat, aka plant-based, lab -grown meat, the production of which is an entrepreneurial opportunity which has been grasped by small and large corporations. (I thought regulations were bad, especially those restricting businesses.) And the Republicans offering this new regulation are described as being “pro-business.”

Democrats propose a ban on companies adding poison to our natural ecosystems, especially our drinking water, and they are called “anti-business.”

What am I missing?

It seems that Republicans are “pro-profits” of corporations that donate to their coffers and Democrats are pro-people in a few cases, not all. On occasion the Dems get the Republican disease and support corporations that donate to their coffers but I am unaware of cases in which the GOP actually are pro-people in their actions.

Recently they have been referring to themselves as “pro-democracy” but they do not want people like you people of color, women, etc. to be able to vote. As I said, MAGA logic.

Is This Just a Manifestation of the Green Car Effect?

I have mentioned I am re-reading Daniel Quinn. I have finished Ishmael and am deep into The Story of B. So far the message is clear: for two million years Homo sapiens lived in compliance with the Law of Nature referred to as The Law of Limited Competition (amongst other things), which states that you can take what you want to sustain yourself and your family, but you cannot make war on other species (by wiping them out, hunting them to extinction, obliterating their food supplies, etc.). Then 12,000 years ago or so we opted out of obeying that Law of Nature, and in just that many years we have brought the planet to the point that it may not be able to sustain us or any other species in the next 100 years. We made chickens the most populous domestic species on the planet, and wiped out many, many species of animals and plants to do so.

Okay. I subscribe to many lists, several from Amazon.com, and one of those lists had on it “Agrarian Justice” by Thomas Paine. “Oh, there’s a book by Thomas Paine I haven’t read, so I went on to Amazon.com to buy it only to find out I had already bought it. So, I searched my “Library” of Kindle books and voilà! This book was written in the winter of 1795-96 and I was floored when I started reading it. Here is the part that floored me:

“Whether that state that is proudly, perhaps erroneously, called civilization, has most promoted or most injured the general happiness of man is a question that may be strongly contested. On one side, the spectator is dazzled by splendid appearances; on the other, he is shocked by extremes of wretchedness; both of which it has erected. The most affluent and the most miserable of the human race are to be found in the countries that are called civilized.

“To understand what the state of society ought to be, it is necessary to have some idea of the natural and primitive state of man; such as it is at this day among the Indians of North America. There is not, in that state, any of those spectacles of human misery which poverty and want present to our eyes in all the towns and streets in Europe.

“Poverty, therefore, is a thing created by that which is called civilized life. It exists not in the natural state. On the other hand, the natural state is without those advantages which flow from agriculture, arts, science and manufactures.

“The life of an Indian is a continual holiday, compared with the poor of Europe; and, on the other hand it appears to be abject when compared to the rich. Civilization, therefore, or that which is so-called, has operated two ways: to make one part of society more affluent, and the other more wretched, than would have been the lot of either in a natural state.

“It is always possible to go from the natural to the civilized state, but it is never possible to go from the civilized to the natural state. The reason is that man in a natural state, subsisting by hunting, requires ten times the quantity of land to range over to procure himself sustenance, than would support him in a civilized state, where the earth is cultivated.

“When, therefore, a country becomes populous by the additional aids of cultivation, art and science, there is a necessity of preserving things in that state; because without it there cannot be sustenance for more, perhaps, than a tenth part of its inhabitants. The thing, therefore, now to be done is to remedy the evils and preserve the benefits that have arisen to society by passing from the natural to that which is called the civilized state.

“In taking the matter upon this ground, the first principle of civilization ought to have been, and ought still to be, that the condition of every person born into the world, after a state of civilization commences, ought not to be worse than if he had been born before that period.

But the fact is that the condition of millions, in every country in Europe, is far worse than if they had been born before civilization began, had been born among the Indians of North America at the present. I will show how this fact has happened.

“It is a position not to be controverted that the earth, in its natural, cultivated state was, and ever would have continued to be, the common property of the human race. In that state every man would have been born to property. He would have been a joint life proprietor with rest in the property of the soil, and in all its natural productions, vegetable and animal.

“But the earth in its natural state, as before said, is capable of supporting but a small number of inhabitants compared with what it is capable of doing in a cultivated state. And as it is impossible to separate the improvement made by cultivation from the earth itself, upon which that improvement is made, the idea of landed property arose from that parable connection; but it is nevertheless true, that it is the value of the improvement, only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property.” (Source: Paine, Thomas. Agrarian Justice, (p. 25). Kindle Edition. )

Here, in short order, Paine presaged Daniel Quinn’s main point in Ishmael and also echoed (pre-echoed?) David Graeber’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity especially about Graeber’s claim that Native Americans influenced European intellectual and political thought in Paine’s time period. (Paine was writing in France at the time.)

I think his most salient point was “In taking the matter upon this ground, the first principle of civilization ought to have been, and ought still to be, that the condition of every person born into the world, after a state of civilization commences, ought not to be worse than if he had been born before that period.

But the fact is that the condition of millions, in every country in Europe, is far worse than if they had been born before civilization began, had been born among the Indians of North America at the present. I will show how this fact has happened.”

“Civilization” seems, in an historical perspective, to be a mechanism whereby the “haves” can extract wealth from the “have nots.”

The big question, of course, is “Now, what do we do?”

Postscript For those of you who have never heard of the green car effect the name comes from the effect when someone buys a green car, that they see green cars “everywhere.” Actually the number of green cars hadn’t changed, just your attention to them had. This is known as “priming” in the consciousness discussing crowd.

Does He Want to Win?

It seems The Donald doesn’t just want to win, he wants to win in the most embarrassing fashion possible to his opponents. Or maybe he wants to lose to see if he can pull of a successful insurrection. It is hard to tell.

Recently Trump promised to cut off federal funding for any school which required vaccinations of its students. Basically Trump is saying “I want your kids to die.”

Then Trump said he would cut Social Security and Medicare if reelected. His campaign immediately realized how damaging his comment was and got Trump to try to walk it back, but cuts to Social Security and Medicare are ensconced in the plans Trump and his MAGA allies have for Trump’s second term, in order to give another giant tax cut to the morbidly rich.

Cutting Social Security is opposed by 85% of voters over 50. And when you look at the list of the states with the most voters over 50, it’s like a carbon copy of the list of key 2024 election battleground states: Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, etc.

Oh, if you are Jewish and vote for Democrats then you “hate Israel.” Didn’t know that, did you. It is  Gospel According to The Donald.

As to the January 6^th convicts, “The whole thing is crazy what’s happening in our country. Let’s call these brave Americans what they really are: persecuted Christians. They’re being persecuted, and let’s call their imprisoned and imprisonment. They are being imprisoned by Joe Biden and his people, evil people. He’s surrounded by very evil people. They are, I believe, just doing whatever they want to do. I don’t believe they have any leadership at all. Joe Biden, because of his gross incompetence, is a threat to democracy, big threat to democracy. To reverse these monstrous abuses of power, the moment I win the election, I will appoint a special task force to rapidly review the cases of every political prisoner who has been unjustly victimized by the Biden regime.”

“Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war, With the cross of Jesus going on before!” as sung by what The Donald calls “the J6 prison choir,” comprised of 20 men who have been arrested, convicted, and incarcerated because of their role in the violent January 6^th insurrection, now available for just $49.99 on the website! (This paragraph is 100% pure parody, so don’t go looking for that album . . . but I wouldn’t put it past them.)

This was in a speech made to the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) in February, including “We’re going to save this country. It’ll be thanks to the men and women like you, like the people in this audience. And we are represented by the best. The people who make God’s work your work…. Today, we are in another struggle for survival of our nation….

The greatest threat is not from the outside of our country. I really believe this. It’s from within. It’s the people from within our country that are more dangerous than the people outside. We can handle China. We can handle Russia. We can handle all of ’em if you have a smart leader. But the inside people are very dangerous. They’re very sick people, in my opinion. In many cases, they’re sick. I’m here today because I know that to achieve victory in this fight, just like in the battles of the past, we still need the hand of our Lord and the grace of Almighty God. We have to have that.”

I am waiting for the Trump website to offer “Gott Mitt Trump” belt buckles.

Does he want to win, just win? It doesn’t look like it. It looks like he wants to win in Bizzarro World fashion, or lose so he can stage a successful insurrection.

Postscript Trump pays no attention to what he is saying, after referring the Biden and “his people” he says “I don’t believe they have any leadership at all.” And then he goes on as to how they are doing this and doing that and persecuting him, and Christians, and, and. . . .  Pretty good for people who have no leadership at all.

Remembering Wrong Manae

I lived in a very small community in Northern California before moving to Chicago. The whole county had just breached 100,000 residents. Our little community had a radio station however, and that station hired a weatherman, who did double duty as a weatherman and morning show host. His name was Ron Manae(sp?) although he quickly acquired a nickname of “Wrong Manae.”

One morning our weatherman, who I believe wasn’t a real meteorologist (most TV people just join a meteorologists society which gives them the title) and just read the weather services predictions keeping up a litany of things like “X% chance of rain today.“ One day, it went like this: “40% chance of rain today,” then “60% chance of rain today, finally up to “80% chance of rain today,” all the time I looked out the window of our home and saw that it was pouring. And we lived just a bit over a mile from the radio station.

Finally a caller had had enough and called the station and his call was put on air, possibly because the producer had had enough, too. The caller, exasperated, pointed out that it had been raining, hard, for over two hours. He capped his call with “For the love of God, man, look out your window!” (The booth was fronted by a large window so passersby could see the radio station in action.) The next weather report? It was “80% chance of rain today.”

So, why do I bring this up?

It is a mirror to our politics.

For example, Trump and his goons, keep screaming that there is a wave of violent crime in this country entirely due to illegal immigrants. You can always tell when Trump is lying, his lips move. New data, however, demonstrates that there was not a spike in violent crime in 2023. Instead, across America, rates of violent crime are dropping precipitously — and the decline is especially pronounced in border states.

If you look, you can always find a spot in which something has increased. Just pick a spot with a low number and when it jumps up a point or too, shout “Look!” It is much harder for an area that has a high number of whatever and have it increase a substantial percentage. But in this case, the lies aren’t even data-based at all; they are just fear-based.

Notably, the two border states that have completed their FBI Uniform Crime Reports saw particularly sharp declines in murder in 2023, with 15% drop in Texas and 8.8% drop in Arizona. Both states also saw significant declines in violent crime overall. If undocumented immigrants were driving a violent crime surge, as Republicans and some media outlets suggest, you would expect to see it show up substantially in the data from border states, like Texas and Arizona.

Of course, Fox News is still reporting on the rampant “Biden immigrant crime.”

Why is there no penalty for lying, especially political lying? The defense that they believe what they are saying is true, is not a foundation of good journalism, but then Fox News and the Republican National Committee have no journalists on staff. Maybe that explains their lies. More probably it is an absolute belief in the end justifying the means, indicating both a lack in objective morals as well as subjective morals.

Ishmael: A Book Review

I am re-reading Daniel Quinn’s books and I am beginning at the beginning as it were with Ishmael. The book is labeled a “novel” which I guess it is. It begins with a young man answering a personal ad in the newspaper: “Teacher Seeks Pupil, must have an earnest desire to save the world. Apply in person.” And so, yes it is a bit dated—remember personal ads? Remember newspapers? Well, it was written in or rather published in 1992. As I understand it, it took many years to write.

In any case, the protagonist, a young man, bites, finds a guru and explores the question “How did things get this way?” Spoiler Alert: His guru is a telepathic gorilla, name—Ishmael.

No quick summary can do this book justice but basically the main point is that Homo sapiens lived for two million years in harmony with nature and then mankind got this crazy idea that mankind was not living at the whim of nature, mankind was destined to control nature and determine its own destiny. Quite obviously that destiny has turned out to be making the planet uninhabitable by mankind and many other species.

So, how did we get to this point?

It might be a knee jerk thought to point right to the Hebrew Bible “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” Genesis 1:26-31

Actually it began before that point but religion sure didn’t help.

Basically we lived for two million years in harmony with nature but then not. We voided nature’s law of competition which allows predators to take prey but not to take all of them or wipe out their food supply. Modern man does this on a daily basis. We exterminate animals and feedstocks willy-nilly. This results in many, many species being wiped off of the face of the Earth.

I will leave further details to you should you choose to read this book, which I recommend highly.

Some consequences of the path mankind has taken have come apparent to me, however. Clearly nature and evolution created Homo sapiens. But we now have extracted ourselves from nature and evolution is not working the way it did before.

For example, mutations to species germ plasms occur naturally. Then nature culls the unsuccessful changes. But now we do things like put trout genes in tomatoes, skipping over any rulings by nature of unviability. By skipping over the editing process we end up with unnatural species. And we also have created far more sources of mutation through chemical pollution, nuclear radiation, etc. than ever before.

We also extol our ability to make the unviable viable. I recall an article where scientists were rejoicing in “defective” human beings that used to die young now living long enough to reproduce. That ought to improve the gene pool.

By taking control of evolution (editing human genes before birth, etc.) guess who becomes responsible for our successes and failures? It isn’t the gods and it isn’t nature.

The mere fact is that we lived sustainably for two million years but in the last 12,000 years we have brought the planet to the brink of unsustainability. But back in the 1960’s there was the “Back to Nature” crowd that wanted to opt out of modern society and go back to living off the land. This was an obvious reaction to modernity but also obviously futile. Nature dictates that a species will always expand its population to the size of its food supply. But we took control of our food supply and our population is now far too great to do anything like moving back to nature. (The book points out that ever major advance in food production was spurred by the thoughts that “we need to feed the hungry, babies are starving” but how many times have we gone through that cycle (remember the Green Revolution) and there are still hungry people and starving babies. The increased food supply went where? To increases in population, of course, which creates more hunger and more starvation.)

So, what do we do?

I think a first step is to put our ego/attitude in a bushel basket and drop the whole dominion idea. We need to focus on what will actually help and what will not.

Ishmael by Daniel Quinn . . . a must read.

Why Would Any Woman Ever Vote for Donald Trump?

The Donald says outwardly that he wants what the Christian Nationalists want, that they are “good people.” But what exactly do they want? They want this country to be declared a “Christian Country” (no such concept exists in the Bible, however) and to enforce a “Biblical lifestyle/Biblical worldview” upon all of us.

So, what does that mean?

House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson, who evidently hid his christofascism from those of us not in his caucus, says the Bible defines his worldview, but he is antiabortion while the Bible isn’t, so how does he reconcile this conflict? He and the rest of his ilk do it in a Lewis Carrollian fashion: it means exactly what they say it means, nothing more, nothing less.

But, for women it is horrific. If I may quote “Biblical Nonsense: A Review of The Bible for Doubting Christians” by Jason Long:

“If a man rapes an engaged virgin who doesn’t cry loud enough to draw attention, the community should consider the attack consensual if it took place within the city. Thus, the whore must be stoned to death per God’s instructions. It obviously doesn’t matter if the woman is too scared to scream because the law makes no such exception. The man will be stoned to death as well, not because he committed a brutal atrocity against the woman, but only because he “violated another man’s wife” (Deuteronomy 22:24). Note the shamefully sharp contrast in disciplinary action between raping a woman with a husband and raping a woman without a husband: death versus a (fine of a) pound of silver. Since it’s all the same to the woman, it now becomes clear that God feels the husband is the one who is the victim of the attack.”

“Another unfortunate circumstance pushing half the population into considerable danger of becoming a slave is to have been born female. From the time a girl is born, she is the property of her father. The ownership is transferred once the father sells her to another man to become his wife or concubine. From the previous chapter, we know that the wife is to be totally subordinate and fully submissive to the husband in every way, regardless of extraneous circumstances.

“She is not to question her husband, and the New Testament authors disallow her to participate during worship. In essence, she has no real freedom. If you don’t feel this is an example of slavery, I’m afraid you’ve missed the point somewhere along the line.”

And, I assure you, there is worse.

Donald Trump wants Christian nationalist people to have more power. Me, I would like them to take their Biblical worldview (not the Bible’s worldview) and shove it up their asses.

Omigosh, He Lied!

During his presidential announcement in June of 2015, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump told a hypothetical story about taxing goods manufactured outside the United States, saying he is “really rich” and wouldn’t kowtow to donors. He would not be accepting donations was in another statement.

Of course he had already been accepting donations at that point but, fast forward to now and Mafia Don has established his daughter-in-law as co-chair of the Republican National Committee apparently to make sure the RNC “contributes” to his legal defense fund.

If Trump does this it will make it harder for down ballot Repubs to get elected, being starved of support funds, but he doesn’t care about them, only himself.

And if his legal “fees” are paid with funds from the RNC, that constitutes income Trump needs to pay taxes on, and I hold out the hope that he will get prosecuted for tax evasion.

Job #1, though, is to defeat Trump in November so that we can watch him twisting slowly in the wind for months thereafter. Consider it must watch Court TV.