The politics of religion

We'll be treading into a minefield, today, taking on the role of religion in politics, asking first...

God can't pick a winner? All of the Republican candidates who claimed to have been chosen by God have now dropped out. Those 'following Heaven's plan' included Scott Walker, John Kasich, Ben Carson, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee - as well as Ted Cruz, who said he would represent the 'body of Christ' to save the nation from nonbelievers. Cruz's father asserted that Ted had been ‘called and anointed’ by the Holy Spirit to be the next president. Former Fox News host Glenn Beck predicted that America would suffer 'violent revolution' if Hillary or Rubio were elected; after Cruz dropped out, Beck opined that "you will never have another Republican President ever again."

A majority of American voters consistently poll it is important to them to have a president with firm religious beliefs... yet the pack of seventeen thoroughly pious Republican candidates steadily winnowed, leaving still-standing the least religious among them - and the most-proudly indulgent of vices - Donald Trump. So now, perhaps it is time for the Republican Party to reconsider their identity with Southern conservatives, as now Trump exposes the GOP's religion problem.

To be clear, this illustrates yet again how our divisions are not left-vs-right in any classical meaning of that silly, lobotomizing "axis." Culture (and now civil) war in the U.S. is more about personality than anything else. 

Sure, there are now record-high numbers of atheists and agnostics and secularists in Blue America (following trends in Europe.) But there are also many millions of old-fashioned Christians, Jews, Muslims and "spiritually curious." Moreover, the victory of a philandering-adulterer-divorcé gambling lord over the anointed-one Ted Cruz shows that sanctity is no more a determiner in Red America than it is in Blue.

Decrypting the Trump phenomenon in his own uniquely contemptuous way, Dilbert creator Scott Adams calls all of us deeply irrational and natural prey for a master emotion-manipulator like Trump, who shrugs off "facts" as irrelevant to his next, expert, savanarola twist. Elsewhere, I will debunk this mythology of Adams, who assumes that the Blue side of this 200 year civil war is just as emotionally-erratic, romantic, reflexive and easily fooled as confederates have always been. In other words, Trump has been successful exactly as Adams describes... on republicans.  Fortunately, that won't be enough.

But let's veer back to religion. Especially the way it has in many sectors catered to a rising volcano of spite.

== Jesus... hijacked by John of Patmos ==

Has “fundamentalism” conquered what used to be called “evangelical” Christianity with memes of hate? Much of this polarizing rant - "Evangelicals are hurting the GOP: The movement is now synonymous with bigotry and stupidity" - is apt...

... but such denouncers miss the pertinence of scripture. And they are unfair to another branch of deeply sincere Christianity.

Take the humble and yes evangelical goodness of Jimmy Carter. "Red Letter Christians” (Many modern New Testament editions convey Jesus’s words in red type) can be Carter-like in their sincere modesty, tolerance and compassionate generosity. Many take part in overseas missions that do more aid-work than preaching. As I have described elsewhere, some even look forward to building starships and spreading "the word" to aliens out there! Oh sure, you have a right to smirk. But at least it allows for an open-ended and upward-aiming human future. That's respect-worthy and if it comes true, then you'd both have fun arguing across the light years.

Such old fashioned, Carter-style evangelicals stare in confusion across a scriptural and emotional chasm at fundamentalist neighbors who focus instead on poisonous purities… e.g. Genesis literalism and vindictiveness toward science. Toward all knowledge professions. Or the hypocrisy of citing three vaguely ambiguous passages in Leviticus to justify homophobia … while stuffing down pork, which is banned explicitly in scores of places.

We discussed all of this back in 2012, the year that Robert Heinlein had forecast for the squeaker election of one Nehemiah Scudder, who would quickly clamp down, toss out tolerance and constitutional rights, then establish a theocracy as Prophet of the Lord. That political year did not feature a likely parallel with Scudder. This year though...

Look into the background of near-miss, runner-up Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz, who has smiled and nodded as his pastor father declared him to be the anointed deliverer of America and the world into a new and foretold age. Look up "dominionism," the doctrine that the faithful have a right to all the goods and property and wealth of unbelievers, who will all die horribly soon anyway, in apocalypse, followed by eternal torment. 

Of course, Ted Cruz has lost to Donald Trump. Only here's the irony. Despite the GOP establishment's fervor to stop Trump, Cruz -- so despised that former Speaker of the House John Boehner called Ted "Lucifer int he flesh" -- was the only rival able to garner enough zealous backing to even challenge the Donald. 

Moreover, when you look at Trump supporters and Cruz-backers, there appears to be very little difference!  Members of the slightly larger group are likely to claim very similar religious convictions, only a bit looser. Just loose enough to look past Donald's roles as gambling czar and twice divorced womanizer, and so on. And a bit less focus on yearning for apocalypse. For them, culture war, confederacy and (yes) racism trump religion by a margin. Maybe 60:40.

For Cruz-supporters, the ratio was reversed. That's about it. Similarities outweigh differences (which is why I expect more post convention unity than others do). Moreover, I would lay down wagers that both crowds will nod happily if a sermon by Raphael Cruz is played for them, promising them an IOU on all the wealth now held by those dastardly, den-of-iniquity Blue Americans... as a down payment to even greater rewards, further downstream.

Oh, sure, now some evangelicals have taken a  'call to resist' against Donald Trump. Where will they go? 

Indeed, there are still millions of Jimmy Carter style, red-letter evangelicals, and tens of millions of other U.S. Christians who are sincerely compassionate, reasonable, even liberal in many ways! It's a horrendously bigoted error to lump blame on all, for the frenzy of some. 

But those "some" now are in a froth. They are eager to scudderize America. And you need to understand the central sun around which their alien solar system revolves.

That central sun is a poem that's about 1900 years old, a rant of stunning hate.

== The Cuckoo's Egg in the New Testament ==

The core illness separating the now-dominant fundamentalist movement from Red Letter Christians swirls around the screed where latter-day thumpers go, to stoke their rancor -- the Book of Revelation (BoR). 

Barely added to the early Christian canon, over strenuous objection by the era's top sages, and despised by later scholars, such as Martin Luther, this froth of cackling sadism is diametrically opposite -- at every level of morality, compassion and intent -- to the homilies of Jesus. 

Those who express hand-rubbing yearnings for the world to tumble into armageddon, as soon as possible -- in the BoR's forecast bloodbath for all-but-a-very-few -- thus disqualify themselves from any say over the use of our nuclear stockpile, which was designed by scientific geniuses to end major war, not to end the world. 

Note that every generation of BoR thumpers have recognized End Times signage in the personages and events of their own era, as in 1799, when the most popular book in Europe assigned every role to Napoleonic era figures, or when both sides of the 1860s Civil War called that fight the BoR precursor, or when Hal Lindsay declared it "obvious" that Babylon just had to be the commie USSR, or today's demonization of all Islam. (When in fact, scholarly analysis shows that the BoR was entirely about Nero and the times in which Patmos lived.)

In fact, pattern Recognition does not matter. What matters is desire! It's what they want so very much to happen.

They are praying for billions - including you and your children - to suffer incredible horrors. followed by eternal torment. (See the BoR brilliantly and satirically conveyed in comic book by Patrick Farley.) To be clear, they pray specifically for an end to all democracy and science, to all human ambition of any kind... and for an end of the United States of America, amid a blood bath that slaughters nearly all of its population. At minimum, that gleeful anticipation disqualifies them from claiming the word "neighbor."  Or, morally, "citizen."

How disappointing that not a single sage or minister has - to my knowledge - refuted the BoR with a single word that tears that bloody howl of schadenfreude into confetti. 

That single word is "Jonah," referring to an earlier and more authoritative passage - one of the finest and most moving in the entire Judaeo-Christian canon - that renders all BoR "predictions" utterly moot. Because the theme and message of Jonah (reiterated in Isaiah and several other places) is the God can, and will change His mind!  He can get ticked off and make a threat... but then withdraw it!  And never, anywhere in the Bible's long litany of tales, does He wait 1900 years before carrying out a dire promise.

Hence, even if John of Patmos's raving, asylum-worthy rant did channel a genuine threat-revelation, once upon a time, the clock ran out on it, long, long ago. Duh.

Oh, sure, we are busy singeing our fingers, concocting new ways that the world might end -- ways a whole lot more interesting and realistic and potentially devastating than a bunch of sword wielding angels riding lion-horses. This new crisis ... whether we can choose to become wise apprentices while picking up the very tools of creation... is simply far, far more interesting and dramatic than the silly, pre-medieval frippery of schadenfreude in the BoR.

The Book of Revelation is a Rorschach test, exposing those who yearn for an insane deity, not the Creator of Maxwell’s Equations and a gorgeous, galaxy-rich 14 billion year ongoing-bang, and the refractive laws that give us rainbows... as well as the gifts of Beethoven and Schweitzer and liberty and tolerance and the joyful ambitions that fill a child's heart.

But no. What’s mind-boggling is the fact that millions of our neighbors seek "solace" in such a hateful screech. 

Ask them this question! 

“Do you actually want THAT to happen to me and to those I love? 

“You actively pray for that to happen to us? 

"You would love and serve the source of such horrible hate and madness?”

That's not Jimmy Carter, whose envisioned Lord simply would not do such things. No, that is barbarism and lunacy. But it is more than that. Stand up and recognize one pure and irrefutable fact.

It is war.