The Pew Research center reports that Evangelicals have come out strong for Donald Trump. Seventy-eight percent would vote for him for president today.  Here's a link to the story and poll data.

I'm unsurprised. Why wouldn't Evangelicals support a man who has been divorced twice; lusts after his own daughter's "figure";  is a fake Christian who misquotes biblical verse, and panders to the religiously stupid; makes fun of the disabled, is an inveterate liar, and has a wife who poses nude?
After all, Christians in general, and Evangelicals in particular are utter hypocrites. Hypocrisy is a veritable sacrament to them. Let them be damned.

Violence, Hate and Sickness in America: The Religious Answer

From time to time I go to the religion section of the Huffington Post to see what the religiously impaired are up to. Given the horror of the assassination of police in Dallas, and the brutal killings of African American civilians by police in the past few days, the religious leader take on the issue and what needs to be done about it took center stage. You can read the article here, albeit, it's hardly enlightening. 

This one comment from a pastor caught my eye: 
"Dear Lord today please protect black men who are driving, selling, walking, riding bikes, working or just breathing,” "

Naturally it really tweaked my hump to read that. Appeal to the Lord to protect black men, because if you don't beg god it doesn't know what to do? Because it has the power to do that, but was too busy over the past few days, months, years, helping some balls players win some games to intervene and stop an innocent passenger from being blown away in cold blood at 18 inches? Why not just do the old "our thoughts and prayers are with the victims" nonsense that they all spew as easily as saying "God bless you" after a sneeze and leave it at that as though that platitudinous religio-gibberish means anything.

The fact is we are a sick society. Racism, white privilege, political extremism, xenophobia, a culture that sees guns and violence as the answer, the means to an end, for everything - this is our nation's prevailing mentality. We have become the example of what civilization should never become; the obscenity that every other industrialized nation points to in horror.

So naturally I'll be asked "That's all well and good...but what do we do about it?" I haven't the foggiest idea. I'm not sure it's even fixable anymore, our ills having been either ignored or embraced for so long they may now be terminal. But what I do know is two things:
1) that spewing religious platitudes, praying to a make believe sky daddy , or imploring people to "hold on a little longer", as though there is a fix afoot is patently inane and less than useless. And...
2) Pogo was right: "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

The Bible: Either Love it or Leave it...you can't have it both ways

In a recent interview Jimmy Carter decried the use of the Bible as justification for immoral and unethical behavior. Here’s an extract:

“You can pick out individual verses throughout the Bible that show that the verse favours your particular preference, and the fact that the Catholic church, for instance, prohibits women from serving as priests or even deacons gives a kind of a permission to male people all over the world, that well, if God thinks that women are inferior, I’ll treat them as inferiors. If she’s my wife, I can abuse her with impunity, or if I’m an employer, I can pay my female employees less salary,...”

Whole interview here: http://churchandstate.org.uk/2014/03/jimmy-carter-warns-bible-is-being-used-to-promote-the-abuse-of-women-and-girls/

So the question becomes:  “Yeah…and? Problem?”
The fact is that the Bible, the “Good Book”, is, according to believers, the last word in how their God wants people to behave. He sets the tune, and the sheep dance to it.  How then can Jimmy decry Christians who take God and His Bible at His/It’s word and accuse them of less than Christian behavior?  How does one have the nerve to say on one hand as a Christian he embraces the bible, while on the other hand it shouldn’t actually be taken seriously, lest we behave badly?  Why doesn't he just renounce the bible, since its been justifiably used to do just that for some 1700 years?

Seems to me if he wants to continue to believe a mythical dead Jewish guy is God he can do it without holding the bible up as some bastion of morality and ethics.  Thomas Jefferson respected Jesus' [alleged] specific words, but rejected everything else in that book of supernatural foolishness and immoral horrors. Jimmy could do it too ... all Christians could do it.

My point is: those who use that book as a guideline / as a model for and justification of their behavior, as obscene and evil as it may appear in the 21^st century, are...by definition...more Christian than the one who rejects its guidelines but embraces its existence as holy.

Want people to stop using the Bible as support for their misogynist, homophobic, xenophobic, and violent behavior?  Then declare it an obsolete and false doctrine. Disown it as a product of ancient ignorance and prejudice.  To condemn the actors but not their script, and its authors, is patently absurd and hypocritical.   

Fear and Loathing in the US: If you’re not having a déjà vu moment, you may be part of the problem

I don’t typically scare easily. Oh sure, the occasional furry spider may startle me, but I don’t go into flash backs over it.  But coming from a Jewish back ground, and what with my parents having lost relatives in the Holocaust…I’m starting to get a funny feeling that I’ve seen this all before, and I’m scared. 

Before I go any further, I must apologize to my readers, especially those who bought my books. In them, more than once, I declared that the greatest threat to this nation is not radical Islam from without, but Christianity from within.  I may have been wrong and I’m sorry.

Perhaps I can be forgiven, because I was foolish enough to be lulled into accepting that what happened in Europe in the 1920s and through the 1930s could never happen here; that we learn from history; that we would never repeat its most heinous events; that we are better than that.  Well, it can, we didn’t, we may, and we aren’t.

Once this nation looked toward a bright future. Once our politicians, on both sides of the aisle, had high ideals and great hopes for our future.  We didn’t always accomplish those goals, those promises, but the promises were invariably predicated on hope, on growth, on advancement.  Usually only the method toward achievement divided us.  Not so anymore. 

As I hear the rhetoric of the GOP front runner, slathered with hate speech, with fear mongering, with innuendo, with encouragement to violence against those who may protest that speech a knot forms in my gut.  When I hear him espouse truncating the 1st amendment to be more to his liking and benefit I cringe. When I see the racism, scapegoating and demonizing of minorities as people coming to take American jobs while they perpetrate "rape and murder" throughout the land; or the lumping together every member of a given religion as “they all  hate us! I don’t know why...” , I know I’ve heard this somewhere before. 

When the throngs of followers, largely white, and largely less educated - are driven by that rhetoric to the point where they feel compelled even encouraged toward meting out violence and doing so with a sense of entitlement and impunity… I am seeing something I remember from old photographs and newsreels.  Only the brown shirts and the guttural speech and accents are missing. 


As I hear that would be leader, that con man, that hater and purveyor of hate- babble his circular and self aggrandizing say nothing babble, and as he directs his fanatical and mesmerized followers to pledge their allegiance to this cult of personality … a feeling of familiar dread comes over me. 


Some will say I’m exaggerating, that I’m being melodramatic, that I’m distorting this into more than it is.  They’re wrong. I’m seeing this for exactly what it is:  Fascism. To ignore it, to down play it, to say “it can never happen here” is to be in denial.  Worse, that denial makes us complicit in what could well be our future.  It’s not too horrible to contemplate… it is our duty to contemplate it now, before it’s too late.

Obituary for a Theocratic Tyrant.

Antonin Scalia represented to me the worst kind of  tyrant. His decision on the Gore V Bush election issue was obscene.  His failed attempts to overthrow Roe V Wade would have set women's reproductive rights back fifty years. His racism was verbalized more than once while on the bench.  His prejudice toward gays was blatant.

He interpreted the Constitution strictly, as "a dead document", meaning not to be interpreted in / or adapted to today's societal realities, but only by its original words in its original time period.  But his point of view, his decisions were, by my observations, equally if not even more driven by his devout Catholic beliefs.  He was just as dedicated to the dead document perspective /  literal interpretation of the law as he was to the literal interpretation of the Bible . He was theocratic. He lived in the past on virtually every social issue that came before him.  His objective was to maintain the status quo, and suppress societal growth and advancement.  If he ever decided in favor of human rights and progressive thought, it was tantamount to a blind squirrel finding a nut now and then...rare.  My guess is he bemoaned the fact that he was born too late to serve as a church appointed prosecutor during the Spanish Inquisition.   

There's my obituary for him.

    "How disrespectful! How dare you speak ill of the dead. What about his family?" 
The above is typical of the comments I received in response to comments I posted to facebook. Yes, it's disrespectful. And is intended to be. 

Why should I be respectful? Because he's dead?  Because his brain ceased to function and his heart has stopped? Because his body is in decomposition?  Why should the state of nonexistence garner respect for a person who commanded none from me in life?  I've said this before:  I'm not John Donne - every man's death does NOT diminish me, and certainly not the demise of a tyrant.

This mentality hearkens back to nonsensical religious superstition. "Do not speak ill of the dead, lest they haunt you from the grave."  Thanks. I'll take my chances.

As for his family:  I doubt any of them are on my facebook friend list, or are readers of my blog.  If they are surfing the net at the hour of their beloved's death, they have bigger issues than worrying about my words of contempt.  

No, this phony piousness for the dead that we must supposedly feign even though we despised them in life is hypocrisy... religiously inspired archaic hypocrisy.  I don't do hypocrisy. If you didn't honor him in life, but think the end of his bodily functions requires some sanctimonious false respect... take your hypocrisy elsewhere.
I'll have none of it.

A Night in Nam with Jesus

I don’t typically talk or write about Vietnam, I’d just as soon forget it. I was going to include this account as a chapter in one of my books and talked myself out of it both times. But I’m comfortable enough now, in my waning years, to recount an episode that if nothing else reaffirms my atheism. This isn’t a war story.  I don’t do war stories.  This is a Jesus story.

From my first days in country, and after being assigned to my unit, I heard the phrase: “Charlie owns the night.”  Our ground forces…Army, Marines, South Vietnamese Army, Aussies, and assorted other allied troops ...we ruled the day light hours. But Charlie, the Viet Cong irregulars, Charlie flourished in the darkness. 

This idiom was in the back of my mind when a week or so into my tour my squad was sent out on ambush.  Ten or twelve of us, lead by our sergeant, were going out beyond our forward firebase’s concertina wire and set up before darkness in a likely spot, perhaps a path through the jungle, or a natural opening.  There we’d settle into position, an L-shaped configuration usually, in the hopes of surprising Charlie, the Viet Cong, as they moved through the darkness…catching him off guard, blowing claymores, and raining down shit on him.

Leaving our rucksacks and steel helmets behind, we wore only our soft boonie hats, ammo bandoleers, combat suspenders and pistol belt with a canteen, extra loaded magazines and fragmentation grenades; rifles, an M-79 grenade launcher, extra belts of ammo for our machine gunner, some claymore mines, and a PRC-10 radio (phonetically referred to as the “Prick”).  For my first ambush I was picked as the radio man.  

We should have already pushed off. It was getting close to dusk, and you don’t want to be humping the boonies in the dark.  But we were waiting for “Doc”, our medic.  He showed up 20 minutes late, reeking of weed. We pushed off.

We were about a klick, a 1000 meters, outside the wire when darkness started to close in.  The sergeant took point and following his nose he lead us through tall elephant grass looking for a place that was close by and advantageous for the ambush.

As he came around a curve in a trail, which we wouldn’t have been on had we left earlier and it had been lighter, he shouted “HALT!” (an involuntary ejaculation I suspect since shouting halt in the jungle is not SOP and rather absurd), and immediately opened up with his M-16.We would later find out we had walked head on into a unit of  North Vietnamese regulars, exact strength unknown.

 In what seemed to be an instant hundreds of green hornets were streaming over our heads (they shoot green tracer rounds to track and adjust their rifle fire, we use red). The stream of  bullets were cutting the tops of the elephant grass over our heads as we all struggled to get on line and make ourselves as low to the ground as we could, then lay down return fire in the direction of the enemy.

The guy next to me wasn’t firing.  He was mumbling something I couldn’t understand between all the shooting and my sergeant yelling orders at the top of his lungs.  “Gimme the fucking Prick!” That was my queue to crawl over to the sergeant with the PRC radio.

It was about fifteen yards but felt like a mile.  When I had almost reached him I realized I couldn’t find the handset to the radio. I started to panic until Doc, mildly bemused in spite of the shit storm all around us, gestured to me that the handset was attached to the radio and was trailing behind me on the handset cord. Oh…yeah!  The sergeant snatched the radio and started calling in artillery support from our firebase.  I crawled back to my position next to the mumbling kid.

He was still mumbling, and hadn’t seemed to have fired a shot as evidenced by there being no empty magazines around his position. Then I heard it. In between my changing magazines and over the din of the shooting I could hear “…who art in heaven hallowed be…”.  He was praying to Jesus….and crying. 

In short order our artillery was dropping high explosive shells about 75 to 100 meters to our front, and lighting the sky with flares…better for us to see any enemy movement. Eventually the enemy fire stopped. We set ourselves up in a tight perimeter in the event we were being flanked and to fend off any attack.  None came.  It got quiet.  No one slept. The kid next to me was still praying in between sobs. I must have heard “Jesus” mumbled in his southern drawl about a thousand times that night.  I came to hate that kid as much as the word “Jesus.”  The next morning the NVA were gone. We counted three NVA bodies; took their weapons and their assorted effects, and made it back to the fire base.

The praying kid was transferred to another platoon. Three or four months later he was killed in action.

I always wondered about that night.  About what would have happened if every guy on the squad was praying and not focused on returning fire. About if that kid thought the reason he survived, that we all survived that encounter, was owing to his prayers and Jesus, and not because of ten or eleven other guys doing their duty, the sergeant’s cool head and experience, and the artillery support. I also wondered if, when he was killed, he was he still praying and not returning fire; if he may have contributed to his own demise…and the deaths of two other guys in that later action because of his dependence on his nonexistent God.

I’ll never know the answers to those questions.  I still wonder about it, almost a half a century later. But I know one thing for sure - that Jesus and any other imaginary friend - is worse than useless in battle.

Inventing the Ideal Religion

The Huffington Post has an article that asks:
             "If you could invent a religion what would it look like?"

I gave the concept a minute's thought and posted the following to the article's comment section.  I think I have it reasonably  well developed, albeit, any such religion that would have me as a member I'd want no part of.

What would my religion look like?

One that sucks the money out of the poor and ignorant; that sells them a promise of eternal torture after they die if they don't believe; one that promises prayers will be answered, as long as it isn't to end starvation, or war, or disease, or re-grow an amputated limb.

A religion that hides its abuses of children; that amasses great amounts of money and real estate and sets itself up in a palace, or ten bedroom mansion with a swimming pool and 100 acre compound in the country, with private jets, expensive cars - and that promotes itself as a follower of an impoverished wandering carpenter ...or plumber.

One that dismisses women as lesser beings, who need to have their reproductive system controlled by men. A religion that condemns people to second class citizenship because they love someone the religion doesn't approve of. One that says masturbating is a sin...and God is watching you while you do it.

A religion that promotes the idea that the End of the World is a good thing, something to be looked forward to...to be worked toward. One that demonizes the other religions, and establishes the people of a specific religion as scapegoats based on a 2000 year old mythical execution.

One that says every child is a sinner, because a mud man and a rib woman ate a fruit, and thus need to be cleansed...even though it claims to have paid for that sin in sacrificial blood. A religion that claims to have the one TRUTH, and yet has over 30,000 sects and denominations because it can't decide exactly what that precise "truth" is.

A religion that says only God can end the world, thus encourages people to ignore the science that says the world is being slowly poisoned to death. One that tells children a boogie man created the universe as per scientifically ignorant nomadic goat herders and to pay no attention to the realities of science. One that has no ability to understand why there are both monkeys and humans, even when you explain it's for a similar reality as to why there are still Europeans AND Americans from whom they descended.

Yes...this is the religion I'd invent, and ..... Oh...Wait...