The Quiverfull Delusion

Many American Christians are adherents of the Quiverfullmovement, which is one of the most oppressive and evil ideas to have ever used Christianity as a means of spreading. Its adherents consider themselves Christians, while in reality they are showing God just how much they despise his creation and the other people with whom they, whether they like it or not, share it.

The Quiverfull Delusion is not a Christian idea. It is based on Old Testament concepts that might actually have made sense thousands of years ago but which are not, in fact, incorporated into New Testament law. There are two main ideas on which the delusion is based. First, Genesis 1 has God telling humans to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the Earth.” Second, there is a psalm that says that having lots of sons makes a man happy “when his quiver is full of them,” as if they were arrows.

Let us suppose, for the moment, that the Genesis and Psalm references are valid for modern life. Maybe God really did want humans to be fruitful and multiply and fill the Earth. Well, there are over seven billion people in the world, so we have already filled the Earth. Time to do something else already. The way I demonstrate this idea to my students is to fill a glass with water. Once all of the students agree that the glass is full, I proceed to pour more water into the glass so that the water spills all over the floor. It makes a mess. God did not command humans to overfill the Earth and to create a far worse mess than the one that I created. And what about the Psalm reference to a quiver full of sons? A quiver is something light that you can carry on your back. The psalmist did not say, happy is the man who tries to pull along a quiver that is as big as an elephant.

The Quiverfull Delusion uses religion as an excuse to afflict the Earth (which religious people supposedly believe is God’s creation) with resource depletion and pollution. High population densities also make conflict nearly inevitable.

The Quiverfull Delusion also uses religion as an excuse to afflict women. The man is happy if his quiver is full and that itching sensation in his dick gets relieved. The woman? Shut yo mouth and spread yo legs. I know that is not a Bible verse, but it is, in fact, the fundamental scripture upon which the Quiverfull Delusion is based. The ultimate power of the delusion is that men have convinced many women that they want this. It is psychological tyranny, carried out by men who pretend to be shocked at sexual immorality but whose prime directive in life is unlimited sperm production.

As you might expect, the best insight into this question, as into most questions, comes from Marx. Groucho Marx, that is. When he interviewed a woman for his TV show You Bet Your Life, she said she had seven kids. “I love my husband,” she said. Groucho said, “I love my cigar but I take it out of my mouth once in a while.”

Bold Comments about Organized Religion

I do not often post strong comments on Facebook, since my friends are from all over the gamut on religion and politics. But I decided I had to say these things:

Many large religious organizations use their power and influence for political ends, and to guilt-trip money out of their followers. These organizations are not satisfied if a person says, “I will love God and love humans collectively and individually and love the earth that I share with them.” Instead they say, “No! That’s not enough! God also wants you to give us your money and believe every doctrine we proclaim!” The result is organized religion, which throughout history has been a scourge upon humankind.

When Isaiah wrote words that he attributed to God (chapter 1 verse 14), “Your…feasts and your appointed festivals I hate with all my being; they have become a burden to me, I am weary of bearing them,” Isaiah was referring to organized religion, not to individual religious people who loved their neighbors.

When Jon Stewart and associates wrote (in the 2010 book “Earth: The Book”) that it is difficult to kill a person, but easy to kill an infidel; and that “religion helped overcome man’s catastrophic tendency toward neighborliness,” he was talking about organized religion, not individual religious people who loved their neighbors.

I am repulsed by the big religious organizations that want to make Jesus merely an appendage of the Republican Party (or the Democratic Party; but you don’t hear much from them) and want nothing to do with organized religion. Pat Robertson’s gospel was, when I heard his show a few years ago, “Send money send money send money bomb Iran send money.” My religion is a private relationship with God. It is, as I said above, I will love God and love humans collectively and individually and love the earth that I share with them.

American Exceptionalism

If there is one single idea that is central to the various conservative Republican views of the world, it is American exceptionalism. Let me attempt a definition and description of this concept.

The first component of American exceptionalism is that conservatives in America are, and always has been, God’s chosen people, whom he will exempt from any judgment or consequence. If there is any judgment upon America, it will be because of those whom they call liberals. But anything, no matter how perverse, that a conservative wants to do is, in advance, already approved by God. Modern American conservatives, alone among all people who have ever lived, are inerrant and automatically exempted from God’s judgment. They can say whatever they want, without evidence, and it’s just fine. They can believe that God created the whole world just for them to destroy for their own pleasure right now, and it’s just fine. They can use Jesus as their finger-puppet to wiggle in the air whenever they want the appearance of God’s approval on whatever they say or do, and it’s just fine. They do not worship God; God is their tool, and they sneer at him even as they exploit him. It is themselves whom they worship.

Today is not the first time that some people, calling themselves Christians, have assumed that God has already forgiven them in advance for whatever they might do. When Crusaders sacked Constantinople (which was the capital of a Christian, not a Muslim, land), the pope had forgiven them in advance for whatever brutalities they might perform. And those brutalities, which I cannot bear to list, were far beyond anything the Bosnian Serbs or the Islamic State have been able to invent. One can only hope that modern conservatives are not going to do anything like this, but they apparently believe that there is no higher authority preventing them from doing so.

So that is the first component of American exceptionalism: American conservatives, alone among all the people of the world, are exempted from judgment by God, humankind, or history, for whatever they might do.

The second component of American exceptionalism is that conservatives think that God has exempted them from any consequences of the laws of nature. They think they can release all the carbon dioxide they want to into the air, and this carbon dioxide will not, in fact, do what carbon dioxide always does. Carbon dioxide always does cause and always has caused global warming, but apparently the carbon dioxide released by American conservatives and the corporations whom they worship will not have this effect on the Earth. And if it does? Well, they don’t care. Conservatives can just stay indoors with the air conditioning on, and the heat waves will kill Europeans (as in 2003) and Pakistanis (as earlier this summer), whose lives do not matter to them anyway. The comfort, indeed every sensual whim, of American conservatives is more important than the survival of other people. If American conservatives want to release carbon dioxide, then God had better miraculously exempt the world from the consequences of it, if God knows what’s good for him.

American exceptionalism, then, is the belief that there are no laws of God or man to which American conservatives are obliged; they are excepted from all of them. American exceptionalism is a species of blasphemy. So if a conservative begins his or her line of reasoning with a defense of American exceptionalism, you know that no discourse is possible with them. As for me, I will never have any conversation with a conservative unless he or she is willing to renounce American exceptionalism at the start. And if they do—if a particular conservative individual is willing to admit that the same God (if any) judges all of us and we all live on the same Earth with the same rules—then it might be possible to have an exchange of ideas.

The Same Damned Thing Over and Over: A Look at American History

The eternal question for historians is whether history is one damned thing after another or the same damned thing over and over. It appears to be the latter, except for occasional technological or intellectual innovations. The reason is because human nature has remained unaltered since the beginning of the human species. Or even before: a May, 2015 news report said that there is evidence that one pre-Neanderthal Homo heidelbergensis (or H. antecessor) murdered another and dropped the corpse into a pit now known as Sima de los Huesos in Spain over 200,000 years ago.

I have been reading the John Dos Passos novel 1919, which is primarily about the lives of some Americans before, during, and after World War One. Dos Passos used what was at the time a really innovative technique: between the main passages he has fragmented bits of insight in the form of Newsreels and “The Camera Eye.”

In one of these segments, Dos Passos described what was happening during World War One. Sound familiar? He said the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, small farmers are squeezed out, workingmen labor twelve hours a day for a bare living, profits are for the rich, cops and law are for the rich. “Was it for this that the Pilgrims had bent their heads into the storm, filled the fleeing Indians with slugs out of their blunderbusses…”

Today, the income ratio of the richest Americans compared to the poorest is greater than it was in 1919. Even World War One did not end this system of oppression. It took the Great Depression to bring about changes that allowed ordinary people to live decent lives without being crushed by the rich. It is, I believe, reasonable to ask if our current situation can only be remedied when we experience another Great Depression? Perhaps even this would not do it, because in the 2008 Recession, the richest Americans and their corporations claimed that they were Too Big To Fail and demanded (and received) taxpayer money.

Think about this on July 4.