The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> thoughts while shaving in bed.....

thoughts while shaving in bed.....

Posted by pancho (Moderator) - Monday, November 9 2020, 23:50:09 (UTC)
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You can't apportion all the blame for anything on just one thing, but you can certainly pin most of it on one thing. In the case of America today you can blame evangelical religion for a lot. All religions, ever, have downplayed human reason because a thinking mind is hard to control. The more irrational a position is the more the one holding it feels believing irrational things underscores the strength of Faith. Having Faith, they say, means believing when there IS no reason to believe...and they feel empowered and vindicated by that...as if it's a plus...when all they really mean is “I can believe anything I like and I don't need to show evidence”!

A person may believe, have faith, that by hard work and a bit of luck, they can someday sing at Carnegie Hall. That's a rational faith because it HAS been done. There is evidence for it. It's not just a wish, or even a longing. But, it requires work and effort and time and patience and also talent. All the while you practice singing you can legitimately have faith that you will succeed. But, if instead of making the effort you sit in a field all day eating bananas, you can't say you have “faith” that someday you'll be on the stage at Carnegie Hall. That's stupid faith...I don't care how good it makes you feel or how you couldn't imagine your life without that faith, it's still stupid faith. That's what evangelical christianity offers as “faith”...stupid faith. And, not surprisingly, that kind of faith is going great guns among the people who live in a trailer park of the mind and who love Trump.

Biden said many times “this is not who we are”.....yes it is, that is XACTLY who we are...we are half of us rabid trumpsters. People aren't joking when they say, “he says out loud exactly what I'm thinking”. Because these people believe in Trump, on faith, they have to ignore all the evidence of what he, and they, really are. His “policies” are all dreck and nonsense, but that's not the reason they love him. He's a racist, misogynist, liar, rude and cruel...THAT'S what they love about him and that he's giving it to all those liberal Hollywood type elites they've despised so long...and are envious of.

In fifty years his faith-based followers have watched in horror as abortion was legalized and pot has been legalized and Gay marriage has been legalized and atheism is the largest growing “other”...people can blaspheme in comfort and laugh at Jesus, especially evangelical Jesus and get away with ALL of it.

Half of America just WANTS to believe Trump....they have faith in him as their savior, like they had faith in his University when all evidence should have scared them off...like they have faith in what he tells them about a stolen election. Like having faith in Jesus, there is no reason for it...in fact, there is every reason NOT to believe in Jesus, or Zeus etc. People just WANT to because it pleases them...and accepting the evidence of a lost election does not...it goes against their faith and they'd feel pretty shabby if you could damage that faith with evidence.....it would mean that they never really HAD any faith.....because “true” faith, remember, is believing when there is no reason TO believe....so why would they ever accept election results based on evidence? They're waiting for the faith-based results....which will please them. And if those don't come, they'll cling to their Faith in them all the harder.

To try to win these people over with logic or facts or kindness is a mistake. The more religion is debunked the more ardently the faithful have to believe, or else they were never really true believers after all. That's why evangelicalism has grown and gotten even more nuts. We don't have to go to war with them but to coddle them and tiptoe around them is a mistake, a huge one. It didn't work in avoiding a Civil War or WW II and it won't work now. Liberals will make that mistake because it's also a flaw of theirs to have “hope”. But hope, just like faith, has to have REASON and evidence behind it. Are there any examples in history that hope for change in these kinds of things has worked? Hope didn't end slavery and it didn't defeat Nazism. No amount of “liberalism” in dealing with these people worked then, and it won't work now....it never works.

Finland had the best response to the crisis of fake news on the internet. They didn't hold hearings or scold tech leaders...instead they instituted “critical reasoning” classes in their schools. In America they keep hauling tech leaders before Congress to scold them and nothing changes or will change...as sacred as not interfering with religion is in this country, not interfering in money-making is more sacred. This country would never institute critical thinking classes...are you joking? Starting with Bush and now with Betsy Devoss our government has been laying the groundwork to produce future armies of blank-eyed children taught in Christian and private schools, using tax dollars which is unconstitutional. They know what they're doing. They know that the battle for tomorrow needs soldiers for tomorrow and they need training schools for them. If we were wise we would cut their federal funding to the bone but America created a stick for its own back when it separated church from State.

I suppose during the 16th and 17th Centuries with the religious persecution and murder raging in Europe it made sense to the drafters of the Constitution to separate the two because the two had been working hand in glove to kill and torture “dissenters” in Europe. The religious wars cost Europe millions dead and countless treasure lost. The irony is that the Puritans, at least, didn't come to America to establish freedom to worship, but to freely be able to persecute and murder those who dissented from them. Little could the founding fathers have imagined that the bloody church, within a couple of hundred years, would fall by the wayside across Europe till today when Jesus is just a marketing mascot for the holidays. But by enshrining the separation in our laws they made it impossible to prosecute the multiplying number of charlatans and crooks who use Jesus for political ends...even though they KNOW these guys are scam artists, they don't dare touch the “church”. The Right makes good use of this. If anyone suggests cutting back on the tax breaks, or funding for their schools, they scream “religious persecution” and no one wants to challenge them on that...and we'll be sorrier than we are one day soon.

If the better half of us were wise we'd cut the funding, as per the Constitution, and bolster the mealy-mouthed “education” on offer in public schools with classes to teach Civics, the meaning of Democracy and how it works, the dangers to Democracy and, most important of all, how to THINK and value evidence over “belief in faith”.....but we won't.

Things will still have to get worse before they get better.

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