Yes, fervent patriots, it’s that time of the quadrennium when our beloved Land of the Freak and Home of the Depraved goes from being almost universally despised to being more nearly universally ridiculed, when every deluded moron, every scumbag egomaniac, every pompous twit, every cretinous sociopath, every incompetent, lying, contemptible scoundrel who can still manage to crawl out from under his rock or wade out of his swamp, “throws his hat in the ring” and declares himself (or herself or itself) a candidate for the coveted and deeply respected office of President of the United States. Let us bow our heads in shame.
Those of you who are old enough may remember the title above as the campaign slogan of George Papoon, the invention of Firesign Theatre who, with his running mate George Tirebiter, ran for President on the Natural Surrealist ticket against Richard Nixon in 1972. Now, even more than then, this country needs a president who is NOT INSANE! So it is encouraging to find that Papoon still has an active web page (on which he shows the Florida ballot on which he appeared in 2000), and is evidently still trying to save our beloved country from those who are insane. How many humanoid organisms can you name who have that kind of tenacity? Who will not give up in spite of years of mounting evidence that they’re insane. Okay, unfortunately we do know of one notorious example of that, so forget I asked.
A recent post from my guru concerns a recent column in the Denver Post by Dave Barry in which, in the course of a discussion of the unique charms of Miami as a host for the then upcoming Super Bowl, he skewers Tom Tancredo (R-CO), who had previously and very stupidly insulted Miami by calling it a third-world country. In a Denver Post article about Barry’s column, passing reference is made to Tancredo “recently open[ing] a presidential exploratory committee,” and Barry is quoted as saying that “thanks to Rep. Tancredo, my candidacy looks less like a joke than it used to.” In my fair and balanced opinion, the idea of anyone running for President is a joke, and the only question is one of relative ridiculousness. I suspect I’m not the only person who would far rather have Barry as president than Tancredo, and I’ve always taken Barry’s candidacy far more seriously than those of most of the lame-brained fuck-tards who think they should be taken seriously. Over the years, I have fantasized all sorts of presidential tickets I’d like to see, like Dave Barry and Garrison Keillor, or Molly Ivins and Whoopi Goldberg (tragically mooted by Molly’s recent untimely death). I’ve even thought of running for president myself. I have my own party: the American Nihilist Absurdist Loafers Party. Slogan: Better ANAL than Banal. Very simple platform: kill everybody who isn’t nice. It’d solve a lot of problems: it would get rid of almost all crime (there are, however, many alleged criminals who are actually nice people but are guilty of violating stupid laws), and would considerably alleviate most of the problems associated with overpopulation, like pollution, by eliminating about 40% of the people. Naturally it would be up to me to decide who is or is not nice, although I’d rather not be the one who has to kill them; I detest bloodshed. The idea of getting rid of all stupid people, although appealing, is, of course, out of the question, as that would eliminate about 80% of the population. One has to be reasonable.
Well, my hat is in the ring—and if you’ve ever seen my hat, you’ll want to stay far away from the ring. I think I can fairly claim that I’m not insane, although there may be some disagreement about that in some circles, ellipses, oblate spheroids, or truncated polyhedrons. Please leave campaign contributions in a brown paper bag inside my screen door. And disregard the sign in the window that says “FORGET THE DOG — BEWARE OF THE HUMAN.”
Tuesday, February 6, 2007
Thursday, February 1, 2007
A word from the opposition
If I were that sort of believer, I might suspect that “God is testing my faith” (notice that I put that in quotes) after all that quasi-religious ranting a few days ago. A path of several links (which is how I learn most things these days) started with my guru (not on his blog but through an e-mail) linking me to “Only in America: Secular Scribblings of a Grumpy Old Man”. This particular page was a quiz on how many of the targets of the Rude Pundit’s rude insults the reader could recognize, but earlier posts of the “Grumpy Old Man” (actually a grumpy old British atheist) in turn linked me to two YouTube clips.
I cannot now find the path that linked me from Grumpy to the first YouTube clip, a 2-part post done by another atheistic Brit (the Church of England is not very alive and well), Nick Gisburne. I thought (wrongly) it was linked from “Driving lessons, child abuse, etc.”, because Jesus Camp is certainly related to that subject. (Many bloggers simply give you a link with no further comment and expect you to open it and reach your own conclusions. I use links as an excuse for my own ranting commentary, hoping you will find it dull and boring.) Gisburne has evidently taken clips (interspersed with his own commentary) from a larger documentary, which seems to be what’s available, without Gisburne’s commentary, at FluNIGGS A nation down the drain. The second is a fuller depiction of one of the most vile, psychotic atrocities of lunatic evangelicalism I’ve ever seen: a camp (in rural North Dakota, of all places!) where demonic adults basically brainwash and terrorize a bunch of helpless, vulnerable kids with a crash course of their sick, vicious garbage, reducing many of them (9 or 10 years old!) to tears for their “sinfulness” during the “Spirit-filled” orgies that pass for worship. It’s really quite sickening for anyone who loves and respects children to watch.
The second one (which was linked from “Driving lessons, child abuse, etc.”) was Part 3 of The virus of faith, a 5-part documentary (actually a 50-minute program chopped up into five 10-minute segments) which was probably run on BBC, done by Richard Dawkins. The name should be recognizable to most atheists, as Dawkins, a British evolutionary biologist (called “Darwin’s Rottweiler” by someone), is probably the most well-known, articulate, and (I hate to admit) convincing of all contemporary apologists for atheism—or, viewed from the other side, critics of Christianity. Since Grumpy linked me directly to Part 3, I didn’t see the first two parts, but this one was devoted to more examples of moronic, insane, vicious heresy among the evangelicals—and of course it wasn’t at all difficult for Dawkins to find lots of them, like sadistic maniacs further scaring the shit out of kids with “Hell Houses” during Halloween, and an interview with an apologist for a guy who murdered an abortion doctor (actually, that’s in Part 4). Well, I’d heard and seen it all before, though never done as skillfully as Dawkins did it—tarring all Christians with a brush dipped in the most hideously evil perversions the critics can find—which strikes me as less than entirely fair to what is considered the mainstream faith. It’s like vilifying all Americans on the basis of the criminal thugs and psychotic halfwits in the government. Later in the same part, Dawkins discusses what a nasty asshole Yahweh is (“the most unpleasant character in all fiction—jealous, petty, vindictive, racist”) and the appallingly barbaric, “poisonous” tribal morality of the ancient Hebrews who called themselves “his people.” Okay, again I’ve heard all that dozens of times and agree with most of it, as I suggested in my last post. But things get better in the New Testament, don’t they?
In Part 4, Dawkins says, No, not much. He calls Paul’s “tortuously nasty, sadomasochistic doctrine” of Atonement, which is a fundamental Christian belief, “barking mad” (nice Briticism there); and indeed, quite a few people have claimed that the message of the gospels, for whatever worth you want to grant it, was totally fucked up by St Paul, who was, by the massive evidence of his writings and his own admission in his letters, a thoroughly loathsome creature. (In fact, he bragged about what a nasty shit he used to be because it showed how loving Jesus was in forgiving him, but it didn’t stop him from still being a nasty shit after being forgiven.) In an attempt to give the moderates a voice, Dawkins interviews the liberal Anglican Bishop of Oxford, who, typically for a liberal, says that modern believers are quite entitled to reinterpret Scripture to meet our “evolved” understanding of the nature of, specifically, homosexuality, according to which is not sinful, and to emphasize biblical passages which reinforce this interpretation. But, says Dawkins, if you can just “cherry-pick” which parts of the Bible to believe and decide on the basis of secular input how to interpret them (which he calls “fence-sitting”), then why bother with the Bible or Christianity at all? As a sanction for a code of morality? But, he says (and, as I think I alluded in an earlier post, John Stuart Mill says), a good moral code doesn’t need religion to sanction it; it finds sufficient support in common sense and human decency.
And, Dawkins goes on to say in Part 5, in evolution. Morality is based on “altruistic genes” which we share with (we DO NOT “inherit from”!!!) chimpanzees. Well, that’s as may be, Richard, after all the evidence you present to show how sweetly altruistic chimps are, but Bonzo has a darker side, which we also share with him. The altruistic genes only work in their own small kinship group; outside that, in relations with other groups, the chimps show an eerily human propensity for conflict and murder, and I can remember when Jane Goodall was traumatized by witnessing cannibalism among them; there are, in fact, what could be called sociopathic chimpanzees. Even their motives for such behavior are uncannily similar to those of humans, when the veneer of “civilization” is stripped away: sex and territory. Even religious wars are fundamentally about ideological territory, and about power over others, which is a form of lust related to sex. So the argument that “altruistic genes” are a sufficient basis for a moral code is, in my opinion, his weakest point.
But aside from that I found Dawkins, as I said earlier, convincing, and I must admit that, after the dual attack of his persuasive arguments for atheism on the one hand, and on the other hand the humiliating spectacle of all the evil insanity perpetrated by some of the sick assholes who call themselves Christians, my faith has been slightly shaken. But only slightly. Faith is beyond reason, although not necessarily against it. Whether reason is used to support faith in philosophical theology or to attack it in atheistic controversy, neither one has any effect on faith when the chips are in. To quote Pascal’s famous line, the heart has its reasons which reason cannot know. I know that sounds pitifully lame, and it’s probably a piss-poor answer to Dawkins, but it’s the best I can do—and the best I feel I need to do. Remember, I’m a lousy apologist.
I cannot now find the path that linked me from Grumpy to the first YouTube clip, a 2-part post done by another atheistic Brit (the Church of England is not very alive and well), Nick Gisburne. I thought (wrongly) it was linked from “Driving lessons, child abuse, etc.”, because Jesus Camp is certainly related to that subject. (Many bloggers simply give you a link with no further comment and expect you to open it and reach your own conclusions. I use links as an excuse for my own ranting commentary, hoping you will find it dull and boring.) Gisburne has evidently taken clips (interspersed with his own commentary) from a larger documentary, which seems to be what’s available, without Gisburne’s commentary, at FluNIGGS A nation down the drain. The second is a fuller depiction of one of the most vile, psychotic atrocities of lunatic evangelicalism I’ve ever seen: a camp (in rural North Dakota, of all places!) where demonic adults basically brainwash and terrorize a bunch of helpless, vulnerable kids with a crash course of their sick, vicious garbage, reducing many of them (9 or 10 years old!) to tears for their “sinfulness” during the “Spirit-filled” orgies that pass for worship. It’s really quite sickening for anyone who loves and respects children to watch.
The second one (which was linked from “Driving lessons, child abuse, etc.”) was Part 3 of The virus of faith, a 5-part documentary (actually a 50-minute program chopped up into five 10-minute segments) which was probably run on BBC, done by Richard Dawkins. The name should be recognizable to most atheists, as Dawkins, a British evolutionary biologist (called “Darwin’s Rottweiler” by someone), is probably the most well-known, articulate, and (I hate to admit) convincing of all contemporary apologists for atheism—or, viewed from the other side, critics of Christianity. Since Grumpy linked me directly to Part 3, I didn’t see the first two parts, but this one was devoted to more examples of moronic, insane, vicious heresy among the evangelicals—and of course it wasn’t at all difficult for Dawkins to find lots of them, like sadistic maniacs further scaring the shit out of kids with “Hell Houses” during Halloween, and an interview with an apologist for a guy who murdered an abortion doctor (actually, that’s in Part 4). Well, I’d heard and seen it all before, though never done as skillfully as Dawkins did it—tarring all Christians with a brush dipped in the most hideously evil perversions the critics can find—which strikes me as less than entirely fair to what is considered the mainstream faith. It’s like vilifying all Americans on the basis of the criminal thugs and psychotic halfwits in the government. Later in the same part, Dawkins discusses what a nasty asshole Yahweh is (“the most unpleasant character in all fiction—jealous, petty, vindictive, racist”) and the appallingly barbaric, “poisonous” tribal morality of the ancient Hebrews who called themselves “his people.” Okay, again I’ve heard all that dozens of times and agree with most of it, as I suggested in my last post. But things get better in the New Testament, don’t they?
In Part 4, Dawkins says, No, not much. He calls Paul’s “tortuously nasty, sadomasochistic doctrine” of Atonement, which is a fundamental Christian belief, “barking mad” (nice Briticism there); and indeed, quite a few people have claimed that the message of the gospels, for whatever worth you want to grant it, was totally fucked up by St Paul, who was, by the massive evidence of his writings and his own admission in his letters, a thoroughly loathsome creature. (In fact, he bragged about what a nasty shit he used to be because it showed how loving Jesus was in forgiving him, but it didn’t stop him from still being a nasty shit after being forgiven.) In an attempt to give the moderates a voice, Dawkins interviews the liberal Anglican Bishop of Oxford, who, typically for a liberal, says that modern believers are quite entitled to reinterpret Scripture to meet our “evolved” understanding of the nature of, specifically, homosexuality, according to which is not sinful, and to emphasize biblical passages which reinforce this interpretation. But, says Dawkins, if you can just “cherry-pick” which parts of the Bible to believe and decide on the basis of secular input how to interpret them (which he calls “fence-sitting”), then why bother with the Bible or Christianity at all? As a sanction for a code of morality? But, he says (and, as I think I alluded in an earlier post, John Stuart Mill says), a good moral code doesn’t need religion to sanction it; it finds sufficient support in common sense and human decency.
And, Dawkins goes on to say in Part 5, in evolution. Morality is based on “altruistic genes” which we share with (we DO NOT “inherit from”!!!) chimpanzees. Well, that’s as may be, Richard, after all the evidence you present to show how sweetly altruistic chimps are, but Bonzo has a darker side, which we also share with him. The altruistic genes only work in their own small kinship group; outside that, in relations with other groups, the chimps show an eerily human propensity for conflict and murder, and I can remember when Jane Goodall was traumatized by witnessing cannibalism among them; there are, in fact, what could be called sociopathic chimpanzees. Even their motives for such behavior are uncannily similar to those of humans, when the veneer of “civilization” is stripped away: sex and territory. Even religious wars are fundamentally about ideological territory, and about power over others, which is a form of lust related to sex. So the argument that “altruistic genes” are a sufficient basis for a moral code is, in my opinion, his weakest point.
But aside from that I found Dawkins, as I said earlier, convincing, and I must admit that, after the dual attack of his persuasive arguments for atheism on the one hand, and on the other hand the humiliating spectacle of all the evil insanity perpetrated by some of the sick assholes who call themselves Christians, my faith has been slightly shaken. But only slightly. Faith is beyond reason, although not necessarily against it. Whether reason is used to support faith in philosophical theology or to attack it in atheistic controversy, neither one has any effect on faith when the chips are in. To quote Pascal’s famous line, the heart has its reasons which reason cannot know. I know that sounds pitifully lame, and it’s probably a piss-poor answer to Dawkins, but it’s the best I can do—and the best I feel I need to do. Remember, I’m a lousy apologist.
Monday, January 29, 2007
You shall have no other gods.
In “Yes, Virginia, there ARE liberal Christians” (29 Dec 06), I made an admittedly lame-ass and rather incoherent attempt to defend liberal Christianity against the great majority of bloggers I was reading who were not only “secular progressives” but often militantly atheistic progressives, sometimes rather harshly critical of Christianity in particular and religion in general. I admitted at that time that I was a rather poor apologist, but not because my faith is, again admittedly, rather tepid. It is mixed (although not, I think, weakened) by a healthy dose of skepticism (my birthday saint is Thomas the Apostle, the “yeah, sure, show me” saint) and a strong and irreverent sense of humor and irony concerning religion. No, I’m a weak apologist simply because I don’t like to argue. I really don’t much give a shit whether people agree with me or not; it’s their prerogative to disagree and I see no need to try to change their minds.
Besides, there are some fairly articulate atheists out there—who are not, however, any more likely to change my mind, since most of them aren’t trying any harder than I am to do so. One of the most articulate, to whom my guru recently called my attention, is Stuart Savory (“Stu Savory’s Blog”), who describes himself as “an overeducated, grumpy, blatantly opinionated, multilingual ex-pat Scot” living in Germany. (One of his recent posts is actually in Scots—an interesting read for the linguistically curious.) In “A Sunday sermon” (7 Jan 07), he says, “A handful of my readers (4 Christians, 1 Jew) objected to my demand for Equal Rites for all the gods on Xmas day. Vituperativeness aside, they all basically wrote ‘there is only one god,’ whereas correctly stated, it should have read that they believe there is only one god. . . . There are, in fact (?), somewhere between 2 and 3,000 gods.” He then gives a link to Godchecker.com, “Your guide to the gods,” which combines a whimsical irreverence with some impressive scholarship in their listing of “currently … over 2,850 deities” in the pantheons of the world, broken down into categories: African, Australian, Aztec, Caribbean, Celtic, Chinese, etc. The vast majority are from antiquity and are now no more than historical curiosities, and it’s not exactly complete even at 2,850. A search on Hindu gods gives the message, “The Indian mythology section is currently being updated. … 20 August 05.” A year and a half ago is “current”? Also noticeably absent are the gods of the three great monotheistic religions, and in answer to an FAQ about this, they reply:
“Unfortunately there's some confusion over who the One True God actually is. Christians believe one thing, Muslims another, and the Jewish faith is different yet again. It seems to us humble Godcheckers that Christians, Jews, Muslims, Protestants, Catholics, and Seventh-Day Jehovah's Mormons all devoutly worship the same Supreme Being. But the devil is in the details and, apart from confessing their devotion to the One True God, they can't agree on anything else. Which is very sad, as this has caused a lot of unnecessary pain and suffering. . . . Monotheism seems to bring out the worst in some people.”
Couldn’t have said it better myself; that’s why I quoted it. I find it interesting and significant that the three monotheistic religions are also called Abrahamic because they all trace their roots back to the quasi-mythical patriarch Abraham, whom some chronologists date to the twenty-first century BC. And the Abrahamic history, as told in Genesis and as roughly confirmed by biblical archaeology, took place in that godforsaken corner of the Middle East now called, with a massive irony which nobody seems to appreciate, the “Holy Land.” The irony, of course, is that the so-called Holy Land (or the Middle East generally) is and always has been the site of some of the most wickedly unholy and bloody atrocities in the history of mankind, waged by the adherents of the monotheistic religions against each other in the name of and for the sake of Guess Who. (Not to mention the internecine battles within these religions—Protestants against Catholics, Shi’a against Sunni, etc.) Current attention is focused on the Islamic terrorists who ostensibly justify their wanton slaughter with something in the Koran about killing infidels, but some of their animosity toward Christians probably dates back to the Crusades of the Middle Ages, when the sword was in the other hand and the Christians felt justified in wasting Muslims in their attempt to “reclaim” Jerusalem and the “Holy Land.” The present-day evangelical Christians, for their part, are content to get their jollies off on that disgustingly perverted Left behind trash promulgated by LaHaye and Jenkins, in which it is left up to “Jesus” and his angels, at the Second Coming, to make a worldwide bloodbath of all unbelievers so the Christians won’t have to get their own hands dirty.
It all boils down to the fundamental tenet of all monotheism, that if my god is the One True God, then anyone who worships any other god is worshiping a false god (even if they call theirs the One True God as well), and I’m entitled, nay obligated, to convert them to my One True God or kill them if they refuse to convert. (No wonder the atheists think we’re fucking insane; so do I, when it comes to that.) Well, that’s not entirely accurate. Christians and Muslins are guilty of that; at least some Christians would like to be able to do it rather than waiting for the Second Coming, although some of the more deranged members of the “American Taliban” advocate doing it right now. The Israelis, on the other hand, are guilty not of murdering others because they’re heathens but of stealing their land and murdering them because they want it back. Lest I be accused of being anti-Semitic, note that I accuse the Israelis, not the Jews. The distinction is of paramount importance to me because I consider the Israelis as members of a state to be the absolutely worst representatives of the Jews as members of a religion, and I think a lot of what is being criticized by Jews here lately as anti-Semitism is actually anti-Israelism, which is an entirely different matter. But in fact, the Jews even as a religion were just as guilty in the past. Clear back in Abrahamic history, Yahweh told the ancestors of the Hebrews to invade Canaan and slaughter all the native inhabitants, and when they did what Yahweh told them to do, they then displayed the most touchingly naïve surprise when the people they’d driven out of their land weren’t warmly fond of them. (“Oh, they just hate us because they’re jealous of our One True God who enables us to kick their asses.”) And when Old Testament history repeated itself in 1948 with the formation of the State of Israel, which again required the displacement of the Palestinians who had been living there for centuries, the Israelis once more justified their piracy by claiming that they were just fulfilling their mandate from Yahweh, and they still can’t quite seem to understand why the Palestinians hate them so much. Welcome to the “Holy Land.”
Well, I didn’t want to digress into an anti-Israeli tirade; that’s not quite the point, although it is related. The point, to re-quote Godchecker, is that monotheism seems to bring out the worst in some people—not in all people, but in enough to give religion generally a very bad reputation. Another irony is the fact that religion is supposed to bring out the best in people; and it does, in most people. All the monotheistic religions have a central message of peace and justice and brotherhood as well as admonitions to deal with heathens and infidels in various unpleasant ways, but for some reason deeply seated in fundamentally corrupt human nature, there are always those who choose to ignore the former message and obsess on the latter. It is also worth noting that, so far as I know, this pathology is unique to the monotheistic faiths; I am not aware of it in any of the polytheistic faiths. Hindu-Muslim relations are less than warm, but guess whose fault that is. (Hindu-Sikh relations are also a bit chilly because the Sikhs are a splinter sect that rejected Hinduism, but let’s not get too involved here.) In fact, it stands to reason that if a polytheistic believer has ten or twenty gods of his own, he would have no problem accepting the fact that someone else has another ten or twenty gods. More irony: the Roman empire in the first few centuries after the birth of the church was perfectly willing to accept the Christians as just another cult among many; it was the Christians who refused to compromise with Roman polytheism. The Romans ended up persecuting them because they were frankly obnoxious, trouble-making pests. (See Gibbon’s History of the decline and fall.)
Ending (“none too soon,” I hear you mumble) on a lighter note: I find a perverse delight in the number of parody and joke religions, and even some of the bizarre cults, which have arisen from the general disenchantment with institutional Christianity. Among the first group, perhaps the most familiar are the Church of the SubGenius, which has as its avatar J. R. “Bob” Dobbs; the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which “worships” just that and is actually a spoof of Intelligent Design; and the Landover Baptist Church, a parody of the worst aspects of evangelical Christianity. (A friend of mine years ago, a student of philosophy and mathematics, invented the Church of the Holy Nullity, based on the single doctrine that God was the mathematical Null Set. The idea did not catch on.) The bizarre cults that take themselves seriously—many of them based on some form of reverence for some charismatic but often more or less batty leader or avatar or god-incarnation or what have you—are too numerous to list, and the task would be rather depressing anyway. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so delighted by them because they give credence to the idea that all religion is the refuge of crackpots, but I kind of like the idea of people being able to dream up any hare-brained excuse they want to start a religion and expecting to be taken seriously.
LATE NEWS FLASH from Chuck Shepherd’s “News of the Weird”! (Well, not really very late; 24 December, actually. My brother gives these to me secondhand and I sometimes take weeks to look at them.) How to start your own church. (I’ve always wanted to. Hasn’t everybody? Well, maybe not those who have no use for churches.) A group of nine college guys who wanted to live together in one house got around the zoning regulations against this by filing papers declaring themselves a church, which gets past the zoning restriction. I get the impression they don’t have to do anything “churchy” to justify this, they just say “look, these papers say we’re a church, that’s all we need.” Reminds me of the Universal Life Church, the group who ordain as clergy anyone who asks for it, free of charge, no credentials needed. See, you atheists, we’re not all bad. All crazy, maybe, but not all bad.
Besides, there are some fairly articulate atheists out there—who are not, however, any more likely to change my mind, since most of them aren’t trying any harder than I am to do so. One of the most articulate, to whom my guru recently called my attention, is Stuart Savory (“Stu Savory’s Blog”), who describes himself as “an overeducated, grumpy, blatantly opinionated, multilingual ex-pat Scot” living in Germany. (One of his recent posts is actually in Scots—an interesting read for the linguistically curious.) In “A Sunday sermon” (7 Jan 07), he says, “A handful of my readers (4 Christians, 1 Jew) objected to my demand for Equal Rites for all the gods on Xmas day. Vituperativeness aside, they all basically wrote ‘there is only one god,’ whereas correctly stated, it should have read that they believe there is only one god. . . . There are, in fact (?), somewhere between 2 and 3,000 gods.” He then gives a link to Godchecker.com, “Your guide to the gods,” which combines a whimsical irreverence with some impressive scholarship in their listing of “currently … over 2,850 deities” in the pantheons of the world, broken down into categories: African, Australian, Aztec, Caribbean, Celtic, Chinese, etc. The vast majority are from antiquity and are now no more than historical curiosities, and it’s not exactly complete even at 2,850. A search on Hindu gods gives the message, “The Indian mythology section is currently being updated. … 20 August 05.” A year and a half ago is “current”? Also noticeably absent are the gods of the three great monotheistic religions, and in answer to an FAQ about this, they reply:
“Unfortunately there's some confusion over who the One True God actually is. Christians believe one thing, Muslims another, and the Jewish faith is different yet again. It seems to us humble Godcheckers that Christians, Jews, Muslims, Protestants, Catholics, and Seventh-Day Jehovah's Mormons all devoutly worship the same Supreme Being. But the devil is in the details and, apart from confessing their devotion to the One True God, they can't agree on anything else. Which is very sad, as this has caused a lot of unnecessary pain and suffering. . . . Monotheism seems to bring out the worst in some people.”
Couldn’t have said it better myself; that’s why I quoted it. I find it interesting and significant that the three monotheistic religions are also called Abrahamic because they all trace their roots back to the quasi-mythical patriarch Abraham, whom some chronologists date to the twenty-first century BC. And the Abrahamic history, as told in Genesis and as roughly confirmed by biblical archaeology, took place in that godforsaken corner of the Middle East now called, with a massive irony which nobody seems to appreciate, the “Holy Land.” The irony, of course, is that the so-called Holy Land (or the Middle East generally) is and always has been the site of some of the most wickedly unholy and bloody atrocities in the history of mankind, waged by the adherents of the monotheistic religions against each other in the name of and for the sake of Guess Who. (Not to mention the internecine battles within these religions—Protestants against Catholics, Shi’a against Sunni, etc.) Current attention is focused on the Islamic terrorists who ostensibly justify their wanton slaughter with something in the Koran about killing infidels, but some of their animosity toward Christians probably dates back to the Crusades of the Middle Ages, when the sword was in the other hand and the Christians felt justified in wasting Muslims in their attempt to “reclaim” Jerusalem and the “Holy Land.” The present-day evangelical Christians, for their part, are content to get their jollies off on that disgustingly perverted Left behind trash promulgated by LaHaye and Jenkins, in which it is left up to “Jesus” and his angels, at the Second Coming, to make a worldwide bloodbath of all unbelievers so the Christians won’t have to get their own hands dirty.
It all boils down to the fundamental tenet of all monotheism, that if my god is the One True God, then anyone who worships any other god is worshiping a false god (even if they call theirs the One True God as well), and I’m entitled, nay obligated, to convert them to my One True God or kill them if they refuse to convert. (No wonder the atheists think we’re fucking insane; so do I, when it comes to that.) Well, that’s not entirely accurate. Christians and Muslins are guilty of that; at least some Christians would like to be able to do it rather than waiting for the Second Coming, although some of the more deranged members of the “American Taliban” advocate doing it right now. The Israelis, on the other hand, are guilty not of murdering others because they’re heathens but of stealing their land and murdering them because they want it back. Lest I be accused of being anti-Semitic, note that I accuse the Israelis, not the Jews. The distinction is of paramount importance to me because I consider the Israelis as members of a state to be the absolutely worst representatives of the Jews as members of a religion, and I think a lot of what is being criticized by Jews here lately as anti-Semitism is actually anti-Israelism, which is an entirely different matter. But in fact, the Jews even as a religion were just as guilty in the past. Clear back in Abrahamic history, Yahweh told the ancestors of the Hebrews to invade Canaan and slaughter all the native inhabitants, and when they did what Yahweh told them to do, they then displayed the most touchingly naïve surprise when the people they’d driven out of their land weren’t warmly fond of them. (“Oh, they just hate us because they’re jealous of our One True God who enables us to kick their asses.”) And when Old Testament history repeated itself in 1948 with the formation of the State of Israel, which again required the displacement of the Palestinians who had been living there for centuries, the Israelis once more justified their piracy by claiming that they were just fulfilling their mandate from Yahweh, and they still can’t quite seem to understand why the Palestinians hate them so much. Welcome to the “Holy Land.”
Well, I didn’t want to digress into an anti-Israeli tirade; that’s not quite the point, although it is related. The point, to re-quote Godchecker, is that monotheism seems to bring out the worst in some people—not in all people, but in enough to give religion generally a very bad reputation. Another irony is the fact that religion is supposed to bring out the best in people; and it does, in most people. All the monotheistic religions have a central message of peace and justice and brotherhood as well as admonitions to deal with heathens and infidels in various unpleasant ways, but for some reason deeply seated in fundamentally corrupt human nature, there are always those who choose to ignore the former message and obsess on the latter. It is also worth noting that, so far as I know, this pathology is unique to the monotheistic faiths; I am not aware of it in any of the polytheistic faiths. Hindu-Muslim relations are less than warm, but guess whose fault that is. (Hindu-Sikh relations are also a bit chilly because the Sikhs are a splinter sect that rejected Hinduism, but let’s not get too involved here.) In fact, it stands to reason that if a polytheistic believer has ten or twenty gods of his own, he would have no problem accepting the fact that someone else has another ten or twenty gods. More irony: the Roman empire in the first few centuries after the birth of the church was perfectly willing to accept the Christians as just another cult among many; it was the Christians who refused to compromise with Roman polytheism. The Romans ended up persecuting them because they were frankly obnoxious, trouble-making pests. (See Gibbon’s History of the decline and fall.)
Ending (“none too soon,” I hear you mumble) on a lighter note: I find a perverse delight in the number of parody and joke religions, and even some of the bizarre cults, which have arisen from the general disenchantment with institutional Christianity. Among the first group, perhaps the most familiar are the Church of the SubGenius, which has as its avatar J. R. “Bob” Dobbs; the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which “worships” just that and is actually a spoof of Intelligent Design; and the Landover Baptist Church, a parody of the worst aspects of evangelical Christianity. (A friend of mine years ago, a student of philosophy and mathematics, invented the Church of the Holy Nullity, based on the single doctrine that God was the mathematical Null Set. The idea did not catch on.) The bizarre cults that take themselves seriously—many of them based on some form of reverence for some charismatic but often more or less batty leader or avatar or god-incarnation or what have you—are too numerous to list, and the task would be rather depressing anyway. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so delighted by them because they give credence to the idea that all religion is the refuge of crackpots, but I kind of like the idea of people being able to dream up any hare-brained excuse they want to start a religion and expecting to be taken seriously.
LATE NEWS FLASH from Chuck Shepherd’s “News of the Weird”! (Well, not really very late; 24 December, actually. My brother gives these to me secondhand and I sometimes take weeks to look at them.) How to start your own church. (I’ve always wanted to. Hasn’t everybody? Well, maybe not those who have no use for churches.) A group of nine college guys who wanted to live together in one house got around the zoning regulations against this by filing papers declaring themselves a church, which gets past the zoning restriction. I get the impression they don’t have to do anything “churchy” to justify this, they just say “look, these papers say we’re a church, that’s all we need.” Reminds me of the Universal Life Church, the group who ordain as clergy anyone who asks for it, free of charge, no credentials needed. See, you atheists, we’re not all bad. All crazy, maybe, but not all bad.
Thursday, January 18, 2007
Two wrongs might make a right
Hey, guys, the latest cheerful news I’ve found tells us that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in Chicago “have added climate change to the prospect of nuclear annihilation as the greatest threats to humankind,” which they have expressed graphically and dramatically by setting their “Doomsday Clock” two minutes closer to midnight. However, a related article suggests that one of the effects of widespread nuclear bombing—besides killing millions of people and generally fucking everything up—might be a global cooling, or “nuclear winter.” So I just had a great idea—the sort of thing our glorious and brilliant national leaders might dream up. Why not deliberately start a nuclear war that will involve exploding lots of bombs that will then reverse global warming by bringing about global cooling? Isn’t that a neat solution? I’m surprised the Mad Emperor’s advisors haven’t thought of it themselves. It’s just the sort of thing that would appeal to them.
Or maybe they have, and they’re not telling us. . . .
Or maybe they have, and they’re not telling us. . . .
Sunday, January 14, 2007
What rough beast
I might mention, as an addendum to my tirade about the weather in Colorado here lately (“The blizzard of Ought-six,” 8 Jan 07), that with the Denver-Boulder area slogging and slipping around in so much snow and ice (and, later, pools of slush and melt-water that couldn’t drain anywhere because they were blocked by ice dams) that it will be at least a month before any significant dent is made in it, cherry trees are blooming three months early in Washington DC, and the New England ski industry is going down the tubes because of lack of snow. But be ye comforted: the venal, pseudo-scientific lackeys of the Mad Emperor continue to assure us that global warming has still not yet been sufficiently proven to their satisfaction, and if they refuse to admit it exists, it doesn’t. The news that there may be no snow at the North Pole in 35 years, that glaciers around the world are rapidly disappearing, and that chunks of ice the size of small U.S. states are breaking off from the Ross Ice Shelf, are just scare stories dreamed up by liberal scientists and nothing to worry about. If your friend tells you your splitting headaches are stress-related and you should pay no attention to your neurologist’s diagnosis of brain tumor, you can rest perfectly happy and secure in this belief until your head explodes.
Of course this is simply a symptom of the same mentality which enables our glorious leaders to tell us that our efforts to bring freedom and democracy to Iraq are going just marvelously and military victory is just within our reach, when the death toll keeps rising exponentially and everybody with half the brain of a sea slug keeps yelling at the administration that military victory is totally impossible and the longer we stay there, the worse we make the situation. The problem is, guys, we are trying to communicate with manifest psychopaths. In spite of my earlier cynical rant that we could expect nothing from the new Democratic leadership, they must be given credit for trying their damnedest to really turn things around in the gang of thugs and boneheads who are still in the driver’s seat. But these cretins aren’t listening to critical debate because they are incapable of listening. In fact, the Mad Emperor is not only incapable of listening, he’d be incapable of understanding what he heard if he did listen. He’s not only half-witted, he’s psychotic. His actions are determined by what he is told by voices he hears in his head, which he thinks are from God; that’s psychotic. He is incapable of distinguishing between the fantasy world he has built for himself and consensus reality and is, by his own veiled admission, not even very aware of consensus reality; that’s psychotic. He is enabled in his psychosis by the vicious circle of shit-nosed sycophants who protectively surround him like muskoxen encircling their vulnerable, helpless young to protect them from predators. They are very careful to insulate him from any intrusions of reality that might upset the delicate balance of this deer-in-the-headlights between the happy dream-world of his psychosis and the danger that he might go completely berserk if too much reality seeped through his defenses. So, as much as I admire the hopeful Democrats who are trying to change things by rational discourse, they’re talking to a brick wall. They aren’t getting through, and never will, and never can. The Mad Emperor, now not just a lame duck but a cooked goose, couldn’t give a shit less if his poll numbers are the lowest of any president since polling started and most of the world either pities him or despises him. The voices in his head tell him history will vindicate him even if the present world loathes him, and Pelosi, leading the House, seems to have refused to consider impeachment, which is the only thing that might possibly make an impression on the Mad Emperor. So, barring that, the Dems continue talking, gamely but futilely, to a psychotic halfwit, and the world continues to plunge into more blood and chaos and anarchy.
“Surely the Second Coming is at hand” wrote William Butler Yeats (in 1921!), with savage irony, in that great gem, “The Second Coming.” Remember the lust of the lunatic fundamentalists to bring about Armageddon so their sick, vicious idea of Jesus will come again? The one Yeats seems to imagine is terrifyingly similar to what the loony fundies seem to want, even though he predicted it as a vision of horror and the Jesus-is-gonna-kick-everybody’s-ass-but-ours crowd look forward to it with glee. You should read the whole poem if you can find it (and it shouldn’t be hard to find), but I will close with Yeats’s widely quoted last two lines, which you can recite every time you see or hear things getting worse. (A lot of other lines are widely quoted, like “The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.”)
“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?”
What rough beast indeed! The loony fundies might be surprised to find out what the event they’re trying so hard to bring about might turn out to be. No, you secular-atheist progressives, I’m not saying I believe that particular brand of pseudo-religious poppycock any more than you do (or any more than I think Yeats did). But the fact remains, history is being inexorably driven, by those who do believe it, in the direction of trying to deliberately precipitate it, and you might be as surprised as they to see some rough beast slouching toward Washington.
Of course this is simply a symptom of the same mentality which enables our glorious leaders to tell us that our efforts to bring freedom and democracy to Iraq are going just marvelously and military victory is just within our reach, when the death toll keeps rising exponentially and everybody with half the brain of a sea slug keeps yelling at the administration that military victory is totally impossible and the longer we stay there, the worse we make the situation. The problem is, guys, we are trying to communicate with manifest psychopaths. In spite of my earlier cynical rant that we could expect nothing from the new Democratic leadership, they must be given credit for trying their damnedest to really turn things around in the gang of thugs and boneheads who are still in the driver’s seat. But these cretins aren’t listening to critical debate because they are incapable of listening. In fact, the Mad Emperor is not only incapable of listening, he’d be incapable of understanding what he heard if he did listen. He’s not only half-witted, he’s psychotic. His actions are determined by what he is told by voices he hears in his head, which he thinks are from God; that’s psychotic. He is incapable of distinguishing between the fantasy world he has built for himself and consensus reality and is, by his own veiled admission, not even very aware of consensus reality; that’s psychotic. He is enabled in his psychosis by the vicious circle of shit-nosed sycophants who protectively surround him like muskoxen encircling their vulnerable, helpless young to protect them from predators. They are very careful to insulate him from any intrusions of reality that might upset the delicate balance of this deer-in-the-headlights between the happy dream-world of his psychosis and the danger that he might go completely berserk if too much reality seeped through his defenses. So, as much as I admire the hopeful Democrats who are trying to change things by rational discourse, they’re talking to a brick wall. They aren’t getting through, and never will, and never can. The Mad Emperor, now not just a lame duck but a cooked goose, couldn’t give a shit less if his poll numbers are the lowest of any president since polling started and most of the world either pities him or despises him. The voices in his head tell him history will vindicate him even if the present world loathes him, and Pelosi, leading the House, seems to have refused to consider impeachment, which is the only thing that might possibly make an impression on the Mad Emperor. So, barring that, the Dems continue talking, gamely but futilely, to a psychotic halfwit, and the world continues to plunge into more blood and chaos and anarchy.
“Surely the Second Coming is at hand” wrote William Butler Yeats (in 1921!), with savage irony, in that great gem, “The Second Coming.” Remember the lust of the lunatic fundamentalists to bring about Armageddon so their sick, vicious idea of Jesus will come again? The one Yeats seems to imagine is terrifyingly similar to what the loony fundies seem to want, even though he predicted it as a vision of horror and the Jesus-is-gonna-kick-everybody’s-ass-but-ours crowd look forward to it with glee. You should read the whole poem if you can find it (and it shouldn’t be hard to find), but I will close with Yeats’s widely quoted last two lines, which you can recite every time you see or hear things getting worse. (A lot of other lines are widely quoted, like “The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.”)
“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?”
What rough beast indeed! The loony fundies might be surprised to find out what the event they’re trying so hard to bring about might turn out to be. No, you secular-atheist progressives, I’m not saying I believe that particular brand of pseudo-religious poppycock any more than you do (or any more than I think Yeats did). But the fact remains, history is being inexorably driven, by those who do believe it, in the direction of trying to deliberately precipitate it, and you might be as surprised as they to see some rough beast slouching toward Washington.
Thursday, January 11, 2007
On J. S. Mill’s literary style
I’ve been reading John Stuart Mill’s “On the utility of religion” here lately, and it is frankly something of a chore. Although his ideas are good, he states them in the most godawful convoluted Victorian tangle of verbiage I’ve ever seen outside Dickens or Melville. His sentences remind me of the nuclei of trans-uranium elements, which are so gargantuan that they spontaneously fall apart and decay. (Okay, so do a lot of sub-uranium isotopes, not because they’re gargantuan but for other reasons of instability. No matter.) And as I suggested in an earlier post, I tend to fall into the same snare, evidently being influenced by him more than I should be. But if you can wade through Mill’s stylistic sludge, there are some real nuggets in the mess. Here’s one from that essay—one of the less tortuous sentences, believe it or not, and one which I editorially cleaned up a little:
“ … there is a very real evil consequent on ascribing a supernatural origin to the received maxims of morality. That origin consecrates the whole of them, and protects them from being discussed or criticized; so that if, among the moral doctrines received as a part of religion, there be any which are imperfect—which were either erroneous from the first or not properly limited and guarded in their expression, or which, unexceptionable once, are no longer suited to the changes that have taken place in human relations (and it is my firm belief that instances of all these kinds are to be found in so-called Christian morality)—these doctrines are considered equally binding on the conscience with the noblest, most permanent, and most universal precepts of Christ."
Sounds like me at my worst, doesn’t it? To condense that into slightly more accessible and vernacular terms: the gay-bashing fundamentalists are full of shit. At least that’s my take on it. Doubtless many other applications could be found for it, but that’s the first one that struck me. Let me know if you think of any others yourselves.
“ … there is a very real evil consequent on ascribing a supernatural origin to the received maxims of morality. That origin consecrates the whole of them, and protects them from being discussed or criticized; so that if, among the moral doctrines received as a part of religion, there be any which are imperfect—which were either erroneous from the first or not properly limited and guarded in their expression, or which, unexceptionable once, are no longer suited to the changes that have taken place in human relations (and it is my firm belief that instances of all these kinds are to be found in so-called Christian morality)—these doctrines are considered equally binding on the conscience with the noblest, most permanent, and most universal precepts of Christ."
Sounds like me at my worst, doesn’t it? To condense that into slightly more accessible and vernacular terms: the gay-bashing fundamentalists are full of shit. At least that’s my take on it. Doubtless many other applications could be found for it, but that’s the first one that struck me. Let me know if you think of any others yourselves.
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
We are all victims.
One of the services, I guess you could call it, of my blog supporter (called, oddly enough, “Blogger”) is a “Next Blog” button up in the whaddayacallit bar, which, when clicked, gives you a random selection of other blogs. The great majority of these are, if I may say so, dull dull boring dull—a remarkable number of women writing sensitive New Age poetry or just witless blathering about life or relationships or nature-worship, or talking about their kids (a few blogs consisting of nothing but pictures of their kids), lots of travelogues with lots of pictures, one woman going into great detail about her weight-loss diet—plus blogs in Spanish, Danish, Dutch, Bulgarian, Turkish, Chinese, God knows what. It’s a remarkable, even if very tiny, window into what the Blogosphere has become. But every once in a while, maybe once every 20 or so, I hit pay dirt. The latest such is a guy in Virginia who calls himself Crankster and his site “Cranky Old Bastard”—the sort of names that would appeal to me, of course. He is mildly cranky, in a very articulate way which is refreshingly free from foul language (I obviously have nothing against colorful language, but it’s nice once in a while to read someone who can express himself without it), although not, at 35, what I would consider old. And one of his recent posts (3 Jan 07) pushed one of my buttons: “Gotta love the kiddies”.
He starts by citing a column in The Telegraph by British Conservative MP Boris Johnson in which he tells of being seated on a British Airlines plane next to two “bratty” kids (Crankster’s term, not Johnson’s), and just as he was resigning himself to a miserable flight in their proximity, a stewardess asked him to move. Imagining that he was being moved to a better seat out of respect for his office, he was told that it was instead because BA has “very strict rules” against men sitting next to unrelated children. The reason, of course, is that all men are assumed to be, at least potentially, child molesters and pedophiles. In the Telegraph article, Johnson goes on at some length about the totally ridiculous nature of such an assumption, bewailing the terrible effect it has on British society in general and British schools in particular; and of the dozens of comments on his article, the vast majority agree with him and warmly thank him for telling it like it is. A fair number of the commentators tell of knowing men whose lives and careers have been ruined by the fanatically zealous application of laws based on this assumption, often against men who haven’t the slightest inclination to pedophilia but have been falsely accused; and of incidents where someone has, out of human compassion, tried to help a child who has fallen and hurt him/herself, only to have the mother descend on him like a harpy, screaming that he’s molesting her kid.
Well, all that is about the implications of a British incident for British society, but it doesn’t take much stretching for Crankster to apply it to American society as well, in which very similar attitudes lead to very similar incidents. As he puts it: “The fact that society increasingly seems to view men as presumptive sexual predators, without any corroborating evidence, is terrifying.” He goes on to apply the same principle to women falsely accusing men of rape, illustrating it with a story from his own experience of a woman who accused a guy (a friend of his) of raping her simply because she didn’t want to admit it was consensual sex. In the same vein, one of the comments to Johnson’s article suggests that kids can use the same weapon vindictively against teachers who give them bad grades; all they have to do is accuse the teacher of looking at them funny or patting them on the shoulder and the teacher is gone, no questions asked. A situation in my own experience involved the rector of the church I was working at being accused of “sexual harassment” by two fruitloop-paranoid bitches because he told them an off-color joke—didn’t even touch them, just told them a naughty joke. The resulting witch hunt was so stressful that he had a heart attack that ruined his health, and his career along with it, since even if he was exonerated, he was too damaged to continue working.
Yes, all this is terrifying, as is also the widespread occurrence of it. What is perhaps most terrifying is that it points to a mentality of near-psychotic paranoia that has gripped the entire nation, so that no one can do the most innocent and innocuous thing without having to consider what raving crackpot will accuse him of some crime that never entered his mind. The accusation will always lead to a conviction because of the closely related and equally widespread social pathology that assumes, without trial or evidence, that if someone is accused of something, he is automatically guilty of it; I have even heard it said, in all seriousness, that such people must be guilty or they wouldn’t have been accused. And the strychnine-flavored icing on this shit-filled cake is that everybody is looking for the flimsiest half-assed excuse to accuse somebody of offending or hurting them because everybody is a victim: it’s the culture of victimization. In the course of the witch hunt against the rector mentioned above, some woman who claimed to be a counselor to victims came to speak to the congregation to help us “work through” the terrible damage done to us by the rector’s misbehavior—not a word about the damage done to the rector, since he was obviously guilty and deserved no consideration. In a presentation notable for its appalling asininity, she actually said, “Everyone here is or has at one time been a victim”; and when I and a few others had the temerity to challenge this bizarre assertion, she calmly replied that anyone who denied being a victim was “repressing” whatever experience had victimized them.
Connected to all this on several levels is the episode in my own life when I was bullied into attending a therapy group for alcoholics because I was accused of being one and was, according to the above logic, undeniably guilty. In the course of these sessions, one of the “therapists,” perhaps in an attempt to make us feel better about being alcoholics, made the insane claim (similar to the one above about victims) that everyone is an addictive personality. I was not kindly received when I pointed out that this essentially removed any rationalization for treating alcoholics as special if they were simply displaying the same behavioral trait that everyone else had, but I was polite enough not to mention further that this banal statement served the useful purpose of extending his client base to the entire population.
So we have here the following principles for relationships in today’s society:
1. Everyone is a victim of someone else; all one has to do is find someone they think is victimizing them and accuse them of it.
2. Anyone accused of any sort of misbehavior by anyone else, no matter how manifestly batty or lying, is automatically assumed to be guilty.
3. People who aren’t even accused of anything may be assumed to be potential, if not probable, offenders and therefore guilty of being a member of a suspect class.
Under rules like these, is it any surprise that our society is a hopeless shambles of emotionally crippled, scarred basket-cases trying to compete in accusing each other of thoroughly phony and specious pseudo-offenses, totally incapable of trusting anyone enough to enjoy any kind of sensible relationship, always on the lookout for some excuse to blame someone else for their own failures, always trying to screw the other guy before he screws them. . . A common idea among us social misfits (a quote for which I can’t find now) is that the people locked up in nut-houses are far more sane than the people outside who decided they were crazy. The entire society is an unwalled loony-bin, with no sane attendants.
One last observation: Note that the guy who started all this is a British Conservative MP. Maybe conservatives over there simply have more sense than ours here, but I think another factor is that what we are dealing with here is closely related to Political Correctness, which has been the demon curse of the Left for decades and the source of almost all the witlessly silly ideas and policies they’ve endorsed. Almost everything that is called Politically Correct is rationally moronic, and the sooner the Left disowns this blithering nonsense, the healthier and stronger they’ll be.
He starts by citing a column in The Telegraph by British Conservative MP Boris Johnson in which he tells of being seated on a British Airlines plane next to two “bratty” kids (Crankster’s term, not Johnson’s), and just as he was resigning himself to a miserable flight in their proximity, a stewardess asked him to move. Imagining that he was being moved to a better seat out of respect for his office, he was told that it was instead because BA has “very strict rules” against men sitting next to unrelated children. The reason, of course, is that all men are assumed to be, at least potentially, child molesters and pedophiles. In the Telegraph article, Johnson goes on at some length about the totally ridiculous nature of such an assumption, bewailing the terrible effect it has on British society in general and British schools in particular; and of the dozens of comments on his article, the vast majority agree with him and warmly thank him for telling it like it is. A fair number of the commentators tell of knowing men whose lives and careers have been ruined by the fanatically zealous application of laws based on this assumption, often against men who haven’t the slightest inclination to pedophilia but have been falsely accused; and of incidents where someone has, out of human compassion, tried to help a child who has fallen and hurt him/herself, only to have the mother descend on him like a harpy, screaming that he’s molesting her kid.
Well, all that is about the implications of a British incident for British society, but it doesn’t take much stretching for Crankster to apply it to American society as well, in which very similar attitudes lead to very similar incidents. As he puts it: “The fact that society increasingly seems to view men as presumptive sexual predators, without any corroborating evidence, is terrifying.” He goes on to apply the same principle to women falsely accusing men of rape, illustrating it with a story from his own experience of a woman who accused a guy (a friend of his) of raping her simply because she didn’t want to admit it was consensual sex. In the same vein, one of the comments to Johnson’s article suggests that kids can use the same weapon vindictively against teachers who give them bad grades; all they have to do is accuse the teacher of looking at them funny or patting them on the shoulder and the teacher is gone, no questions asked. A situation in my own experience involved the rector of the church I was working at being accused of “sexual harassment” by two fruitloop-paranoid bitches because he told them an off-color joke—didn’t even touch them, just told them a naughty joke. The resulting witch hunt was so stressful that he had a heart attack that ruined his health, and his career along with it, since even if he was exonerated, he was too damaged to continue working.
Yes, all this is terrifying, as is also the widespread occurrence of it. What is perhaps most terrifying is that it points to a mentality of near-psychotic paranoia that has gripped the entire nation, so that no one can do the most innocent and innocuous thing without having to consider what raving crackpot will accuse him of some crime that never entered his mind. The accusation will always lead to a conviction because of the closely related and equally widespread social pathology that assumes, without trial or evidence, that if someone is accused of something, he is automatically guilty of it; I have even heard it said, in all seriousness, that such people must be guilty or they wouldn’t have been accused. And the strychnine-flavored icing on this shit-filled cake is that everybody is looking for the flimsiest half-assed excuse to accuse somebody of offending or hurting them because everybody is a victim: it’s the culture of victimization. In the course of the witch hunt against the rector mentioned above, some woman who claimed to be a counselor to victims came to speak to the congregation to help us “work through” the terrible damage done to us by the rector’s misbehavior—not a word about the damage done to the rector, since he was obviously guilty and deserved no consideration. In a presentation notable for its appalling asininity, she actually said, “Everyone here is or has at one time been a victim”; and when I and a few others had the temerity to challenge this bizarre assertion, she calmly replied that anyone who denied being a victim was “repressing” whatever experience had victimized them.
Connected to all this on several levels is the episode in my own life when I was bullied into attending a therapy group for alcoholics because I was accused of being one and was, according to the above logic, undeniably guilty. In the course of these sessions, one of the “therapists,” perhaps in an attempt to make us feel better about being alcoholics, made the insane claim (similar to the one above about victims) that everyone is an addictive personality. I was not kindly received when I pointed out that this essentially removed any rationalization for treating alcoholics as special if they were simply displaying the same behavioral trait that everyone else had, but I was polite enough not to mention further that this banal statement served the useful purpose of extending his client base to the entire population.
So we have here the following principles for relationships in today’s society:
1. Everyone is a victim of someone else; all one has to do is find someone they think is victimizing them and accuse them of it.
2. Anyone accused of any sort of misbehavior by anyone else, no matter how manifestly batty or lying, is automatically assumed to be guilty.
3. People who aren’t even accused of anything may be assumed to be potential, if not probable, offenders and therefore guilty of being a member of a suspect class.
Under rules like these, is it any surprise that our society is a hopeless shambles of emotionally crippled, scarred basket-cases trying to compete in accusing each other of thoroughly phony and specious pseudo-offenses, totally incapable of trusting anyone enough to enjoy any kind of sensible relationship, always on the lookout for some excuse to blame someone else for their own failures, always trying to screw the other guy before he screws them. . . A common idea among us social misfits (a quote for which I can’t find now) is that the people locked up in nut-houses are far more sane than the people outside who decided they were crazy. The entire society is an unwalled loony-bin, with no sane attendants.
One last observation: Note that the guy who started all this is a British Conservative MP. Maybe conservatives over there simply have more sense than ours here, but I think another factor is that what we are dealing with here is closely related to Political Correctness, which has been the demon curse of the Left for decades and the source of almost all the witlessly silly ideas and policies they’ve endorsed. Almost everything that is called Politically Correct is rationally moronic, and the sooner the Left disowns this blithering nonsense, the healthier and stronger they’ll be.
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