The Terrorist Attack in Strasbourg

Last night, a terrorist attack in Strasbourg left two dead, one brain-dead, and twelve injured. This attack has shocked people around the world. French police responded immediately and are looking diligently for the shooter, whose identity is known and whose face has been broadcast everywhere.

Very quickly les citoyens strasbourgeoises created memorials to the slain.

This was the same response that I saw in July 2016 when the citizens of Strasbourg created memorials for the victims of the terrorist attack in Nice.

While the horror of this attack cannot be ignored, I must remind my readers that there were more people killed, thirteen in all, on October 27 at a bar in Thousand Oaks, California. That was the 307^th mass shooting in America. America has so many mass shootings that people here and around the world quickly forget them.

Mix Together Religious Zeal and Scientific Ignorance, and What Do You Get?

You all already know the answer to this question. I want to give you a particularly vivid example.

In eighteenth-century France, as in other places in Europe, Catholics massacred a lot of Protestants, and the reverse was often true as well. One of the worst massacres was in August, 1572, when French Catholic mobs murdered thousands of Protestant Huguenots in the St. Bartholomew’s Massacre. Historical summaries generally say the triggering event of the massacre was the attempted assassination of the Admiral de Coligny. But there was more to the story. I cannot find this information online, but I distinctly remember reading in a book in 1976 (written by Henri Noguères) that one of the triggering events was the flowering of a crabapple tree. Crabapple trees usually bloom in spring. When some of them bloomed in late summer in Paris, many people, already stirred up by religious zeal, took this to be a miracle; if a miracle, then a message; if a message, then from God; if from God, it meant that they were supposed to go kill Huguenots.

This event, however, was all based on ignorance—in this case, botanical ignorance. If crabapple (or Bradford pear) trees experience a summer drought, and then rain begins to fall, the rain serves as a trigger that makes the trees bloom. This is because the trees do not have heat and cold sensors; to a tree, winter is dry (because the water is frozen) and spring is wet. Therefore, many trees will respond to a dry midsummer followed by a wet late summer as being winter followed by spring. This is why the crabapple trees bloomed in Paris in August 1572.

When the trees bloomed, the religious zealots did not know why. And if they do not know why, then it must be a miracle. This was their religiously deluded line of reasoning. Who knows how many people lost their lives because some religious zealots did not know enough botany!

I also posted this on my science blog.

This is my 401st essay.

Christian Radio: What Fundamentalists Really Believe

Fundamentalists want you to think they believe the gospel of the love of Jesus. But this is not so. To find this out, all you have to do is listen to Christian radio. Whenever I am near Oklahoma City, I do so, since there are at least five Christian stations in that area.

A couple of weeks ago I was listening to one of the Christian stations. I will not identify the network, since if I get even one little comma wrong in what I report that they said (or, as in the Bible, a jot or a tittle) they would sue me. But I solemnly affirm that what I am about to report is what they really said, except maybe a comma or two.

The talk show host invited the president of the organization to have a free-wheeling discussion on a Friday afternoon. Here are some of the things they said:

• Democrats talk about impeaching Trump. But the reason they want to impeach him is because of his hairdo.
• Hispanic immigrants are “sporting a permanent suntan.” (Is racial humor really necessary here?)
• The host and guest both agreed that they were glad John McCain was dead. (He was too liberal for them.)
• The host, a woman, said that every woman should have five kids.
• The Me Too movement is spreading the idea that a man should never touch a woman, even with so much as a handshake.
• The Kavanaugh hearings showed that Democrats were vile. (How dare a woman accuse a Republican man of sexual misconduct? Only a vile woman would do so.)
• Republicans should not refer to Democrats as their friends. They are enemies.
• The Russia investigation should be terminated right now. (Trump and his associates could not possibly have had any inappropriate contact with Russia.)

All of this was said within about a half of an hour.

I am hard pressed to find any Biblical basis for any of these claims.

My interpretation of their statements, taken as a whole, is that God made Trump president and anyone who criticizes Trump for anything is a servant of Satan. They claim to believe in the forgiveness of sins by the blood of Christ, and they will mouth these words, but they quickly forget them as they proceed to overtly worship Donald Trump. Since Trump has repeatedly claimed that he has the power to negate any part of the Constitution that he does not like, it appears inevitable that fundamentalist Christian leaders will urge their gullible listeners to support the resulting dictatorship.

John Muir's Spirituality

This is a short entry to bring back to our remembrance the kind of spirituality that John Muir had. His spirituality would not be well-defined enough to satisfy modern creationists. Yet these same creationists seem to care nothing at all about what they consider to be God’s creation. It is the people that these creationists hate that truly love the Creation.

I quote from Wikipedia: In a letter to his fond friend Emily Pelton, dated 23 May 1865, he wrote, “I never tried to abandon creeds or code of civilization; they went away of their own accord... without leaving any consciousness of loss.” Elsewhere in his writings, he described the conventional image of a Creator, “as purely a manufactured article as any puppet of a half-penny theater.”

Muir remained, though, a deeply religious man, writing, “We all flow from one fountain—Soul. All are expressions of one love. God does not appear, and flow out, only from narrow chinks and round bored wells here and there in favored races and places, but He flows in grand undivided currents, shoreless and boundless over creeds and forms and all kinds of civilizations and peoples and beasts, saturating all and fountainizing all.”

Back to the Middle Ages

Many of us have become convinced that Trump and his Republican worshipers are leading us back into the Middle Ages, at least in terms of attitude, particularly the denial of science and the hostility toward non-white people.

But it appears that some Trump supporters are also going back to medieval beliefs in witches and evil spirits which, of course, they believe are living in the bodies of Democrats and attacking Republicans. The leader of Women for Trump Amy Kremer attributed the attacks on Brett Kavanaugh as being motivated by a hex placed on him by presumably Democratic witches. Here is a link to the Newsweek article about what she said October 14 on MSNBC.

Will we see a return to witch-hunts and burning at the stake for all the infidels who will not worship Trump? Presumably not; we might assume that people like Amy Kramer are speaking figuratively. But she did not say that it was a figure of speech! Given that the Republican Party has done things that even three years ago seemed unimaginable, we cannot rule out the possibility of the return of medieval mobs.

Cynicism for Fun, Health, and Profit, part six: War

In his 2012 book The End of War, John Horgan explained that it is really possible for humankind to bring all war to an end. Of course, he did not consider this to be very likely. Here is a quote that indicates that there could be an end to all war, if the United States decided to seek this goal. But it is also extremely unlikely that the United States will ever do this:

“We claim to revere peace and human rights—and yet we keep embarking on unnecessary wars, in which we treat alleged enemies and even civilians cruelly. We pay lip service to the principles of national sovereignty and international law while secretly carrying out deadly commando raids and drone attacks around the world. We sell weapons to other nations, and to their adversaries. We prop up dictators if they let us build military bases on their land, exploit their cheap labor, or sell us their oil and other resources at low prices. We are guilty of shameless hypocrisy. If we practiced what we preached—if we showed through our actions that we recognize how wrong war is—we Americans could lead the entire world to an enduring peace.”

This was back during the Obama administration. Things are even worse now under Trump who is best known for antagonizing even our allies. It is clear to everyone that we will never stop selling arms to dictators and terrorists, even when these arms come back to take aim at us. America profits—or, at least the American corporations who control the federal government profit—from keeping the world on the brink of war.

War in Yemen, 2018, from New York Times

This is yet another part of a cynical viewpoint of life, but one that can allow us to be healthy and happy. We need to simply accept the fact that the world will never embrace peace and prosperity, and then make preparations for living as well as possible despite this fact. I can’t do anything about the world, but just about my own life, work, and relationships.

Cynicism for Fun, Health, and Profit, part five. The Political Cynic.

I grew up hearing about the lofty ideals of democracy, as enshrined in the American Constitution. I grew up thinking that politicians were actually statesmen who really wanted to do the right thing for their fellow citizens, who entrusted them with leadership. As incredible as it may sound, I actually believed this when I was a kid. It was not hard to feel this way. I first became aware of the world during the administration of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. I remember where I was when the news of his assassination was broadcast. I was a first-grader, who heard it from the sixth-graders in my elementary school. I ran home for lunch and my mom confirmed the news. In upcoming years, I listened to recordings of Kennedy’s speeches, and they were very stirring. “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” That’s the most famous line. But even better is this one: “Here on Earth, God’s work must truly be our own.” His assassination made me revere political leaders even more, since the official story (which nobody really believes anymore) was that the assassination was entirely conceived by a deranged man named Lee Harvey Oswald.

And I still revere Kennedy, even though revelations have come out since his death about some bad things he did, such as cheating on his wife. Even during the Vietnam War, I trusted our politicians to be telling the truth that North Vietnamese communism really was a threat to world peace and that we had to stop it, sort of, advance and retreat, advance and retreat, in which corporations that supplied the military got very rich over a war that seemed to never end and which was supported by an endless supply of federal dollars and conscripted lives.

Then came Watergate. I had been enthusiastic about Nixon, and I felt betrayed. I felt good about Gerald Ford, who took his place (the only president to not have been elected), because he projected an image of being clean. He said, “The national nightmare is over.” In Japan, which I visited about the time Ford took office, they referred to Gerald Ford as “Mr. Clean,” because Ford did resemble a little bit the white white white janitor on the cleaning supply boxes and bottles.

The presidency of Jimmy Carter was almost boring because of its lack of scandal. To this day, Carter remains about the only clean politician of which most of us can think. Then came Ronald Reagan, who inspired everyone with his words, but then did whatever the hell he wanted to, whether it was legal or not. He sold armaments to Iran, whom he had labeled an enemy of freedom, in order to get money to supply to “Contra” terrorists in Nicaragua so that they could kill civilians. Reagan once said, “I don’t like having to consult a committee of 545 every time I want to do something.” This committee, of course, was Congress, and he was required to obey them by this little tiny document that you may have heard of, the Constitution.

The rest of the story you probably know. I have filled in the 1960s through 1980s for my younger readers. Particularly noteworthy was the administration of George W. Bush, which was so filled with conservative corruption that John W. Dean (a Republican and Watergate whistleblower) wrote a book about it, Conservatives without Conscience. (Donald Trump recently called Dean a rat.)

It is even worse today. Not just the corruption, which we have always had, except for brief shining Camelot moments. But today the powerful conservatives are leading America in a direction of totalitarianism, and even a revival of respect for Nazis. Dean quotes Professor Bob Altemeyer: “If you think [the United States] could never elect an Adolf Hitler to power, note that [Nazi sympathizer] David Duke would have become governor of Louisiana if it had just been up to the white voters in that state.” White supremacist Richard Spencer was taken seriously by Steve Bannon, who was the national security advisor for Donald Trump. Trump said that the white supremacists in Charlottesville and the diverse people who protested against them both deserved equal respect and equal blame, even though the only person killed was a young woman, by a car driven very fast into a crowd by a white supremacist. Trump said that the Congressmen who had not clapped for him at his State of the Union address were committing“treason.”  The link is to the Telegraph, a U.K. newspaper, to show that Trump’s outrageous statement was taken seriously overseas.

In the political arena, then, it appears that the facts support a cynical point of view on the national level. On the state level (I live in Oklahoma), the legislature for a long time refused to allow public school teachers to receive a living wage, and instead of trying to solve the state’s fiscal crisis, they spend their time trying to enact creationist laws. The purpose of the state of Oklahoma, they think, is to make oil companies more profitable, even if it means the poverty and disease of the state residents. Is it any different in your state? Probably not.

I think I have made my point: cynicism is the only realistic summary of the political world. There is probably nothing you can reasonably imagine that can even come close to the reality of that world, only a little bit of whose corruption is visible to outsiders.

Clearly, the momentum of politics right now is toward Trump demanding, and getting, personal adoration. And slightly fewer than half of Americans are eager to give it to Him.

But we can’t stop on such a depressing note. Otherwise you will be exactly like the miserable man I described in an earlier essay. But knowledge is power. As a cynic, you know that politics is thoroughly corrupt. The practical result is that you know it is hopeless, utterly hopeless, to try to solve any of our major problems by working through existing political channels. At least, cynicism can keep you from wasting a lot of time and resources, only to get your heart stomped into a quivering mass of protoplasm on the Rotunda floor. Find something else to do to make the world better. But, as a good cynic, you should not expect any of your efforts to make a difference in the end.

This will leave you lots of time to do things that make the world better and that you enjoy. I mean, WWGCD? What would George Carlin do? Take, for example, the fact that Trump used a ceremony that supposedly honored the Navaho Code Talkers as a chance to insult both liberals and Native Americans by calling Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas” and by holding the ceremony right underneath the portrait of Andrew Jackson, the president who broke the law in order to steal Native American land in the 1830s. What can you do in the face of such an insult from the highest office in the land? Humor, of course. A political cartoonist depicted a Native American saying to Trump, “You could learn a thing or two from us. We know how to run casinos that don’t go bankrupt.”