Emails from Hell, part twelve.

Hell just gets curioser and curiouser, according to our informant from Hell. Read his twelfth dispatch here.

{beginning of email}

            “Let me show you something,” Andrew said to me. “It is a Bible.”

            I took the book from his hand. It was a little thinner than I remember Bibles being back when I was on Earth. Matter of fact, back on Earth I studied the Bible pretty closely, hoping to maybe get some better insight into the world. Some parts of the Bible were more useful in this regard than others. I found the book of Ecclesiastes very enlightening—in fact, one of the best pieces of literature I had ever read. I opened the Bible Andrew handed to me, and was surprised not only that Ecclesiastes was missing, but the books that remained there were quite different from what I remembered. I glanced over passages I thought I knew well—especially the parts of Amos and Isaiah in which the prophets cried out against the way the rich people oppressed the poor, and how rich people always made the decisions in government. Getting a little alarmed, I turned to the book of Exodus and found that the commandments for the Year of Jubilee and the Sabbath of the Fields were missing. (I wrote about these in an earlier dispatch.) I looked up at Moses. He nodded at me, fully aware of what I had just discovered. My alarm reached its fullness when I turned to the book of Matthew and discovered that some of Jesus’ most beautiful words were missing: “Consider the lilies of the field…Even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these.”

            “What,” I said, even more dudgeonly than I had spoken previously, “is this?”

            “It is the official Heavenly version of the Bible,” said Andrew.

            “You mean, the fundamentalists rewrote the Bible?” I exclaimed.

            “They wouldn’t dare do it on Earth. Even the brainwashed Sheeple in their churches would not have put up with that. But up here, they finally had their chance,” quoth Andrew.

            “What did they change?” I asked.

            “First,” said Andrew, “turn to the Book of Abrasions.”

            “I don’t remember that one…Oh, here it is.” I glanced through it. “The whole book seems to be about how evil Muslims are.”

            “That is one of the foundational beliefs in Christian fundamentalism,” explained Andrew. “Of course, the original Bible (original, that is, after it reached its final form about 367 CE) did not mention Islam, since it did not even exist until the eighth century. But without scripture telling them to hate Muslims, the fundamentalists felt sort of lost. Now, turn to the Book of Contusions.”

            I did. It was a long prophecy, written by a man named Johnny who was in the spirit, or perhaps high on THC, on the Isle of Patmos. In his vision, Johnny predicted the discovery of a large continent on the other side of the vasty ocean to the west, a continent inhabited by dusky people, and which the Chosen People of God would conquer and create a Light Unto the World.”

            “This sounds like Johnny was predicting the United States of America,” I said. “This is ridiculous. The original Bible did not have any prophecies that could remotely refer to the United States.”

            “Well,” said Andrew, “even here it is not referred to by name. That would be too much even for them. America was named after Amerigo Vespucci.”

            “Which means,” said Karl, “that there was a fifty-fifty chance that your country might have ended up being named the United States of Vespucci.”

            “And you will notice,” said John, “that everything I wrote about love has been left out. On Earth, they gave lip service to love, but when the fundamentalists got to Heaven, they could quit pretending. Turn now to the book of Concussions.”

            I did. It was all about how glorious it is to shed one’s blood for the fatherland, and how true Believers were not to show any mercy to the enemies of The Nation.

            “I was not a great admirer of the Bible while I was alive,” said Karl. “But compared to this swill, the original Bible was a real gem.”

            Everybody said Amen.

            “And furthermore,” continued Karl, “at least it is a book. I like to sit and read books. You know, outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.”

            “Wrong Marx!” we all yelled.

{end of email}

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.

Do Americans Have the Same Human Nature as Everyone Else?

America bristles with firearms. You can safely assume that everybody you see has one hidden on their person or within easy reach. This is not true, but it is close enough to being true that you certainly would not want to make the opposite assumption.

Firearms advocates, who want to see as many people carrying guns as possible, claim that this makes us safer. They have all kinds of rationalizations and anecdotes to support this.

But the numbers tell a different story. Here are some numbers from Wikipedia regarding the number of firearm-related deaths per 100,000 people per year in recent years. The article appears well-referenced and I consider it more reliable than either conservative or liberal things I see floating around the web.

Australia: 1.06

Austria: 2.95

Brazil: 19.03

Canada: 2.38

Colombia: 28.14

Costa Rica: 6.28

Denmark: 1.45

France: 3.01

Germany: 1.24

Honduras: 64.8

Israel: 1.87

Italy: 1.28

Japan: 0.06

Mexico: 11.17

Netherlands: 0.46

Nicaragua: 7.29

Norway: 1.78

South Korea: 0.06

Sweden 1.47

UK: 0.25

USA: 10.3

Clearly, the United States has one of the highest rates of firearm-related homicides in the world—not as high as countries with lots of organized crime, like Mexico, Colombia, and Honduras, but higher than virtually anyone else. Our rate is even higher than Nicaragua, a Central American nation whose socialistic government we considered so evil in the 1980s that President Reagan used illegal means to get firearms to the right-wing “contras.” But if you compare us to countries that have similar living conditions to ours, or so we think, we have ten to a hundred times as many firearm deaths per capita. Just compare the UK and the USA. We cannot claim that there is no social strife in the UK; they have ethnic and economic tensions just as we do. Perhaps ethnic uniformity explains the exceptionally low firearm death rates in Japan and South Korea, but not the UK, France, Germany, or Italy.

Americans have more guns and more gun deaths. Most other countries have fewer guns and fewer gun deaths. Clearly guns are not keeping us safe from gun deaths.

There appear to me to be two possible explanations. One is that we have too many guns at least in the hands of people who are not capable of handling the responsibility. The other is that there is something exceptional about America that makes us different from everybody else. “American exceptionalism” is usually meant as a belief that America and Americans have special privileges in the world; to religious conservatives it means that we are specially blessed of God, God’s people. A lot of conservative megachurches have American flag backdrops for their services. But if this is so, then it means that one way that we are exceptional is that we are exceptionally bloodthirsty.

There’s something different about an American that will make him (sometimes her) ten to a hundred times more likely to shoot your brains out (or your children’s brains out) than someone from any other country except those with drug cartels or civil wars. What might this be? If it is not simply the fact that so many Americans have guns, then it must be something about us.

I refuse to believe the latter without further proof. I believe that all humans have the same human nature, based on the recent evolutionary diversification of all races only about 100,000 years ago. I do not believe that Americans are biologically or intrinsically more bloodthirsty than Englishmen. I believe that the problem is too many unregulated guns. We need gun regulations—not by themselves but in conjunction with education and a deliberate cultural effort to shift the way we think. If you say that this is impossible, then think about what you are saying: that Americans are intrinsically bloodthirsty.

Either our gun problem is a problem that can be solved, or it isn’t. And if it isn’t then we should hang our heads in shame and not meet the eyes of the rest of the world, recognizing ourselves as incorrigibly bloodthirsty. If there is a third alternative, I am not aware of it and my readers are welcome to post a third alternative.

Oh, by the way, how many weapons did Jesus own? And if He owned none, what the bloody hell was wrong with Him? The God that Americans worship should have beat some sense into that Boy.

Happy July 4 everybody.