What Should the World Be Like? Republicans and Gun Violence

Republicans talk a lot about what the world should be like, following the example of the late hatemonger Rush Limbaugh in his book The Way Things Ought to Be.

I am living, at the moment, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Nearly every day, there is a public shooting or a bomb threat. One of those threats caused an elementary school to shut down and the students to take refuge at a nearby church. Here in Oklahoma, you can do anything you want to with a gun except actually shoot somebody or point a gun directly at them.

This is the paradise that Republicans want to see. How do we know this? Because they support absolutely no further restrictions on guns, not even assault weapons. No matter how many mass shootings there are (Gun Violence Archive lists 533 mass shootings since 2013), they oppose any further action. This means the world is exactly the way they want it to be, in terms of gun violence.

 

Christianity Used to be Interesting

I was an active fellow of the American Scientific Affiliation (ASA), and went to their national meetings whenever I could, mostly in the 1990s. This organization consists of evangelical Christians who are in the sciences and who get together to exercise their brains to try to figure out possible answers to important questions about faith, science, and reason. At every meeting, you would find scholars, many from Christian colleges, struggling with questions about what God wants us to do in the world with regard to scientific topics. Just a few examples that come to mind are: What does it mean to be in the image of God, when we are biological animals? What does it mean to be created, when we clearly evolved? What should a Christian response be to the threat of nuclear war? This was a big topic at the 1988 meetings, when Richard Bube condemned nuclear war but David Siemens said, if you have nothing to die for, you have nothing to live for, as if that was relevant to the topic. What about advances in biotechnology, or to the stewardship of creation? What can we learn from the new physics about what God is doing today in sustaining the creation moment by moment? This was an important topic in the New York Metropolitan section of the ASA in 1989. I can still remember David Wilcox visibly struggling with what to believe about Adam and Eve. He was trying very hard to say that Adam was the first evolutionarily modern Homo sapiens, the primate into which God poured His spirit, but the evidence simply did not support this belief.

What the ASA focused on, very passionately, was, what would Jesus do?

And this was also the focus of many evangelical churches as well. I remember many very intellectually challenging sermons in evangelical churches in the 1980s.

That’s all gone. Instead of What would Jesus do, the only question of interest to evangelical Christians is, What would Trump do? To them, Trump is the very presence of God upon the surface of this planet. Every question has a simple answer: whatever Trump says the answer is.

This is why you never hear very much about creationism anymore, or about evangelicals attacking global warming science. Because evidence doesn’t matter any more. All that matters is Trump.

For the time being, a few evangelical Christian leaders are questioning Trump. You can read about a few of them here. One example is Mike Pence. But Pence, along with all other Republican candidates, have promised to support the eventual nominee, who will probably be Trump. Nothing else matters now. Pence will fall in line and say Yes, Lord, to Trump. In the end, the few evangelicals who oppose Trump will be silenced.

Evangelical Christianity has not only become blasphemous, but also boring. There are no more complex and challenging questions for evangelical Christian intellectuals.

CheapGrace, a New Phone App

I have just posted a new video about a new phone app, which allows you to sin all you want to and yet get forgiven a thousand times a second. Available only to Republicans.

There is no such thing as human nature, I think. We have instincts, some we consider good (such as love) and some we consider evil (such as hatred). As we live, we create our own human nature, by (one would hope) practicing the good ones and minimizing the bad ones. This is true for all humans individually, if mentally normal; all ethnicities; and at all times in history. It is the legacy of evolution, of altruism. The reality is much more complex than this, but there is no time to explore this topic now.

That is the evolutionary view. The fundamentalist Christian view, however, is that everyone is a sinner unless God specifically forgives them. But as soon as you commit another sin, you have to ask forgiveness over again. The good news is that there is no Biblical limit to number of times God will forgive you. Even fundamentalist Christians would say that you cannot ask forgiveness a hundred thousand times and expect God to keep forgiving you, but, strictly speaking, there is no Biblical basis for this assertion, however reasonable it seems.

Theoretically, then, you could just keep doing whatever you want, and every time you sin, say “Woopsie, forgive me,” and God will forgive you.

But you could sin a hundred times a day. What happens if you die right after unforgiven sin number 57? What you need to do is to keep muttering “Woopsie, forgive me” all the time. This would be mind-numbing, but it would work.

What follows next is fiction.

You would go crazy by praying “Woopsie, forgive me” a hundred times an hour. But you don’t have to! This is the age of the phone app. You can download a phone app, “CheapGrace,” that is named after a concept created, disparagingly, by the World War II era Christian martyr Dietrich Boenhoeffer. It will send text messages to God demanding forgiveness. The free version (available from Gotohell.com) texts God 10 times per second. The version that you pay for will do it a thousand times a second. You think that God cannot handle a thousand pleas for forgiveness from billions of people each second? Remember, this is an infinite God we are talking about. This app will run in the background, so you can just forget all about it, and your sins are taken care of.

There are a couple of caveats, however.

First, it is available only to Republicans. You must click on the box indicating “I am a Republican,” and another box saying, “I am not a robot.”

Second, it is not available while your phone is updating itself, but that is usually at night when you are asleep, and you cannot sin. Of course, if you have insomnia, or if it turns out you can sin while asleep, then you are taking a little bit of a risk.

Technology can be fundamentalism’s best friend, in some cases.

Oklahoma: Land of Boastful Ignorance

Are you planning a move, or is your company planning a relocation? Companies like to relocate their employees to states that have a good quality of life. For employees who have kids, this means a good educational system.

But don’t come to Oklahoma.

According to a recent report, Oklahoma ranks 40^th for overall child well-being. I think you or your company’s employees would not want to raise your kids here, unless you can afford a private school.

Oklahoma ranks 45^th in childhood education. The major reason for this is (according to the Democratic candidate, and one of two Republican candidates, for state superintendent) a teacher shortage. It is difficult to recruit new teachers or to keep old ones. Why?

One reason is that teachers are not paid very well, in comparison to other jobs or states. But many or most teachers enjoy teaching and would not quit just because of low salaries. The Oklahoma teachers’ strike in 2018 was primarily over school funding, not salaries, although the state did increase their salaries that year.

One thing that discourages teachers in Oklahoma is that they are in the crossfire of conservative anger. If parents do not want their children to have to wear masks during a pandemic, it is the teachers to whom the parents complain, sometimes abusively. If teachers dare to mention that people of color (especially Native Americans in Oklahoma, which used to be Indian Territory) have experienced oppression, parents can complain that those teachers have violated an actual state law (HB1775) that prohibits the teaching of historical oppression of people of color. Ostensibly, the law is just against “critical race theory,” but teachers often avoid all mention of racially charged historical events like the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 in order to stay out of trouble. If teachers even mention LGBTQ, they might find themselves in trespass of SB615. And if a science teacher mentions evolution…well, they just don’t.

Teachers are tired of having ignorant politicians dictate what they should teach and are tired of being the brunt of conservative hatred. There are other jobs at which they can use their talents, that pay more, and at which their opinions can remain private.

The solution, so far, has been to hire teachers on “emergency certification.” This means that the teacher needs no qualifications other than, I assume, to not be a criminal. If they have a college degree in a subject, but no education courses, they can get “alternative certification.” But for emergency certification, you don’t need the subject matter courses either. From what I could tell from state websites, the emergency teacher has to submit a portfolio of experience. But approval is up to local school boards.

So if a qualified teacher leaves, an emergency teacher can replace her or him. This person could then teach creationism, global warming denialism, and hatred (or at least mild disgust) towards LGBTQ people. While they cannot (I think) teach racism, they can teach that there are no problems with racism that require any change in societal thinking.

And more change is likely to come. One of the Republican candidates for state superintendent openly proclaimed that teachers should be required to teach that America is the best country that has ever existed in the history of the world.

Already, 3,600 out of 45,000 teachers in Oklahoma have emergency certification. This downward slide can only favor the indoctrination of children with extreme conservative views. This is already a major problem for recruiting new employees into the Oklahoma work force. For every new company moving to Oklahoma, another leaves.

Where there is the worst, there is also the best. Many high school biology teachers are members of NABT, the National Association of Biology Teachers. They have a new president each year. Three of the presidents in recent decades have been from Oklahoma. All three were high school teachers, though they are now on college faculties or in administrative positions. Three! This shows that, in Oklahoma, to be a good science teacher, you have to be motivated almost as much as a missionary.

I have little personal interest in this, as I have retired and plan to leave Oklahoma. I was just hoping that I could feel good about not only having been born in Oklahoma, having spent most of my career in Oklahoma, and about my Oklahoma family roots that go back six generations. But instead I will have to be at least a little bit ashamed.

Why I Can No Longer Participate in Organized Christianity

I have totally discontinued any involvement with organized Christianity. I can no longer affirm any Christian religious doctrines. But that is not the main reason I no longer participate.

I cannot participate in any church that has been swept along with the blasphemous Trump idolatry. These churches—and there are a lot of them—actively contribute to the downfall of America and the collapse of any hope for freedom in the world. I don’t worship Biden, either, but nobody does. There are millions—not many millions—who believe that truth consists of whatever Donald Trump says.

When I left the church of which I was most recently a member, I did not stomp out. I merely realized that my participation was a personal and social waste of time. In this church as a whole, and this congregation in particular, there were many social progressives. But there were just enough right-wing extremists that they could sabotage any efforts of the church to accomplish anything meaningful. In particular, I remember one older man (this was back in the Iraq war days when, to conservative Christians, the core of Christianity was to believe and to do whatever George W. Bush said) yelled at our assistant pastor because the assembly of leaders had voted to disapprove of the Iraq war. She had merely reported the vote and had not expressed an opinion. Her vote was secret. This was the same man who, in a church parking lot with limited space, took up eight spaces to park his truck and fishing boat. His total selfishness was not typical of the church, but he was able to sabotage the work and sentiments of the others.

Thus, it appeared to me, Christian churches were of two kinds: first, the ones that blasphemously championed the Godlikeness of Bush and then Trump; second, the ones that got sabotaged by the blasphemers.

This does not mean that I will never “darken the door” of a church again. I imagine that, if my démenagement en France goes according to schedule, my wife and I might very well participate in a local Catholic church along with many members of our extended French family. But it will be because of our membership in that family, not because I believe any Catholic, or other, doctrine. Just as spirituality has a personal function, so organized religion has a social function.

Nor does it mean that I do not revere Jesus. But my personal religious views are personal.

Guns: We Worship Them in Oklahoma

In Oklahoma, we worship guns. It is part of our worship of Donald Trump and of whatever part of the Republican Party that, at the moment, obeys his absolute command. In Oklahoma, we believe that we must all be armed to the teeth to protect ourselves from anyone who might threaten the absolute power of Donald Trump, whether it is Democrats or Republicans who are too moderate for Trump to tolerate.

 As of May 2020, the entire state of Oklahoma became an anti-red-flag-law state, the first and possibly only state to do so statewide. A red-flag law is one that allows judges to block certain dangerous individuals from possessing firearms. What this means is that the sheriff’s departments have decided to not enforce anything that might restrict the absolute right of any person (translate: white male) to do whatever he wants with his guns. This includes any laws that limit the access of any person to guns, even if a judge has determined that this person is a danger to his neighbors and should be temporarily deprived of his guns. The designation of “second amendment sanctuary” could not mean anything else, since the second amendment itself is the law of the land. In May, the governor signed a bill that permitted all counties to disregard red-flag laws and any judges’ orders related to them.

Sheriffs of these rural counties claim that this move is necessary for public safety. They claim that all citizens should have a right to defend their homes in counties with such a low population density that law enforcement officials cannot arrive in a timely fashion. But citizens already have this right, except for those that have shown themselves to be a public danger. This policy can only benefit the criminals, not the homeowners. These sheriffs have not cited any instances in which the sheriffs’ failure to enforce court orders has led to anyone being victimized.

The sole purpose of these declarations must be to allow militias to form in order to be ready, at a moment’s notice, to begin shooting any government official, or any neighbor, who refuses to follow the orders of Donald Trump.

The leaders of these rural counties worship the second amendment. It takes precedence over every other part of the constitution, every other law, and every part of the Bible. The Jesus whom they claim to worship never says that His followers have absolute rights to weapons, nor the obligation to make themselves victims to their neighbors who collect storehouses of weapons.

Suppose that there is a dangerous person in the county, and a judge orders this person to not have weapons. But the sheriff will not enforce this order. A mentally unstable man with a gun could shoot me at a convenience store, or even on the highway.

A Kind of Republican You Will No Longer Find: Example 2

Chances are you’ve never heard of James Miller, whom I described in the previous essay. But you have probably heard of Paul Harvey. Many radio stations carried his fifteen-minute program in which he gave his conservative Republican version of the news. His introduction sounded like, Stand by for news?

For him, mainstream media were intolerably liberal. He would give his right-wing reinterpretation of everything, building up to a climax that often contained the word con-damnation. But he never, ever went to the extremes that you find nearly every moment on Fox News today. And he never propagated conspiracy theories, like Tucker Carlson saying that the metric system was an instrument of world domination which America must oppose. Paul Harvey was, compared to nearly every modern Republican, a reasonable and even a nice guy.

And something Paul Harvey had that almost no conservative has anymore is empathy. Harvey cared about people. This was illustrated in a frequent segment that he had called The Rest of the Story. He would tell the stories, usually of overcoming adversity, behind many famous people past and present. It was invariably an uplifting message.

I ran across a book with 82 of his stories in it. Here were some of his stories:

• Agatha Christie faked her own murder before she became a famous writer.
• Patrick Henry kept his insane wife in his cellar.
• Mark Twain had a dream in which he foresaw his brother’s death.
• A novel entitled “Futility” described the sinking of a huge ship, called the Titan, which had proclaimed itself invulnerable. This was in 1898, fourteen years before the Titanic sank.
• Wagner played music for his dog, and waited for his dog’s approval before finalizing it.
• Adlai Stevenson shot a little girl when he was a little boy, and lived his life in remorse.
• French detective Henri Latour’s final case was one in which he discovered the guilt of his own son.
• Charles Lindbergh designed an artificial heart before he went on to become a famous pilot.
• Sarah Winchester built a huge mansion to house the ghosts of those who had been killed by the rifle marketed by her late husband.

Back in the 1970s, Paul Harvey was the voice of conservatism. Now, Rush Limbaugh gets the Medal of Freedom. Somewhere along the line, Republicans have become the voice of evil.

Evil, but increasingly of impotence. Trump’s Tulsa rally yesterday was supposed to be a bang-up start to an exciting re-election campaign. He chose Tulsa, where I live, because it is the most reliable of Trump’s support bases. He expected to ride a Red wave of support, and wanted to see violent protesters spewing hatred at him and destroying public and private property, so that he could appear to be the great Savior of America. None of this happened. There were a lot of empty seats at his rally inside the BOK convention center, and there were no crowds outside, so his campaign staff dismantled the outdoor stage. Trump blamed the poor turnout on rioters, of which there were none. The protests were peaceful, and their mood turned festive toward the end.

Perhaps worst of all for Trump was that he had nothing to say about any major issues in the nation or the world. Nothing about the economy or economic competition with China. He had an opportunity to call out for racial unity, and to proclaim himself the president of all Americans, not just white Americans. He could have so easily said these things, and he would have had an outpouring of admiration. Instead, he chose to call everyone who protested against Confederate statues as being “maniacs who want to attack our country,” and an “unhinged mob who want to erase our heritage.” In both cases it was clear that by “our” he meant Confederate. Trump’s hour-and-a-half speech was so uneventful that even the protesters decided to just chill out and watch the gradual demise of Trump’s boastful self-image.

Makes me wish for the days of Paul Harvey again. And as he always signed off, “Good day?”