Saturday, January 2, 2016

Welcome to a New Year of...Craziness?

Welcome to the new year. It is a major election year in the United States, and you can expect it to be totally crazy, irrational, and disgusting.

As I have previously written, the human brain did not evolve to help us understand ourselves, or the world, or the cosmos, but to dominate one another and, sometimes, to cooperate with one another. Conquests and alliances and mates. That's what human intelligence evolved for.


Recently, the alliances part has shrunk. This year, intelligence will be used primarily in the service of antagonism. One example of this is that the Republican Party has become the party of hatred toward anyone who disagrees with it. The right wing of the Republican Party even seems to hate the moderate Republicans. I can't quite figure out what Donald Trump's message is, but it sounds like, "I hate everyone who disagrees with me in any way." Can you imagine a progressive person like myself yearning for the old days when "Republican" meant someone like Mitt Romney, or George W. Bush, or George H. W. Bush, or Ronald Reagan? At least they didn't talk like they hated everyone.

This being a religion blog, I would like to tie this in with conservative Christianity. If Donald Trump ends up being the Republican nominee, you can bet your bottom euro that conservative Christians will support him enthusiastically as the person whom God has chosen to lead us forward in these immoral modern times. And the reason they can do this is that they seem to be completely convinced that, for Republicans, there is no such thing as hypocrisy, and Republicans need never be ashamed of anything they do. They are, after all, God's chosen people.

A couple of examples. The most visible one is, of course, Trump himself. He cheated on wife number one with the woman who became wife number two, and on wife number two with the woman who became wife number three, and fathered a child out of wedlock. Obviously God's choice to make America a moral nation again.

A second, recently-visible example is the Kentucky county clerk, Kim Davis, who refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples. She believes that God gave her the right to make up the law for herself. But even more than this, she is a hypocrite. A thorough, complete hypocrite. She puts herself up as an example of morality, yet she has had four marriages. She gave birth to twins fathered by the man who was to become husband three five months (count on your fingers, folks) after divorcing husband one; they were adopted by husband two. She is on number four, and God knows how many more husbands He has planned out for her. She claims to have repented, but she still puts herself up as an example of morality. (Should we forget all about her past, because she has repented? Republicans would not allow any Democrat to be forgiven. As a matter of fact, in the case of President Obama, they invent sins to accuse him of.)

Republicans consider themselves exempted from whatever moral standards they think God expects the rest of us to follow. This means that they can and perhaps will do anything, anything at all. Combine this with the fact that they think God wants them to possess as many semiautomatic weapons and other firearms as possible, and you get a scenario of total chaos. I hope I am wrong about this, but it is best to prepare oneself mentally and not be taken totally by surprise should the worst possibility come to pass.

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