As one of those paying subscribers, I realize that someday you will write something with which I strongly disagree and I hope that I won't have a snit and cancel. This is not that day. Wow, is this not that day. Today's post speaks to me on a lot of levels.
I'm not sure where the current tiptoeing around religion began; probably Reagan/Falwell-era. I'm old enough to remember that it wasn't always like that, that challenging religion was more accepted, even when more people identified as religious. I don't know if people in media got cowed by religious groups (likely) or if it seemed like questioning somehow seemed like religious discrimination.
I've been an atheist most of my life, but not a militant one. (Not a "Dawkins in a fedora" here, and I love that line.) I'm not as anti-religion as I once was, mostly because I know that there are some people - not enough, not nearly enough - who are better people and more community-oriented because of their religion. But I've always thought that if someone was of a mind to accept such a grand concept as God without evidence, they'd accept other things as well, particularly if those other things buttressed their worldview.
One question that I'd like the Christian nationalists to answer is: "Which Christianity?", because there are only, what, 100 denominations and conflicting interpretations of the Bible? I mean, are we going to ban dancing? Divorce?Drinking? Caffeine? Christmas trees? Are we going full Amish?
I've already gone on too long and I could go on longer. Thank you, Hamilton, for writing this.
Jun 26, 2023·edited Jun 26, 2023Liked by Hamilton Nolan
There isn't tiptoeing around religion, let alone confronting of it, because the rich and powerful ownership class intentionally embraced it for utilitarian purposes many decades ago. I recommend reading "One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America" by Kevin Kruse (who also happens to be newly writing here on Substack, check him out!). I also recommend watching the Noam Chomsky documentary from the early 90s called "Manufacturing Consent." It's available on YouTube now.
coexistance is futile, indeed! The nuns may have taught me cursive, but not expository high rails as you and mr nolan have erected here. i m marv'd and blesst this evening
Jun 26, 2023·edited Jun 26, 2023Liked by Hamilton Nolan
I feel your frustration. It's maddening. However, I thought I'd share a perspective that I myself am fairly new to embracing because I think it will be helpful for others to come to understand, too.
I've been atheist for far more of my life than I was ever Christian (raised Evangelical and started abandoning my faith by around age 13 and embraced the label "atheist" by my early 20s), but disentangling myself from capitalist and colonial/imperialist propaganda occurred much later in my life (unfortunately). I used to think religion was the root of all evil, as Richard Dawkins proclaimed in his documentary by that name. I spent roughly 20 years of my life dedicated to combating that evil.
But I've come to understand that it's actually capitalism (and other oppressive socioeconomic systems both past and present) that is the root of all evil. So long as people are shackled to the misery capitalism causes, there will continue to be a need to attempt to escape or sooth the pain, an escape that religious belief (and other balms such as drug use) offers.
Many are familiar with Karl Marx proclaiming religion "is the opium of the people," but fewer know that phrase was preceded by "religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation." Marx was sympathetic to oppressed people turning to religion because he knew it offered an escape from the pain of their reality.
I have concluded that that to take religion away from people without alleviating the conditions which cause them to turn to it in the first place is as cruel as it is ineffective. Religious belief and practice is an addiction. Addiction that springs from one's attempt to self-medicate just as much as drug addiction and alcoholism is self-medicating to cope with inner pain.
If we want a more rational world, the rational thing to do is to eliminate capitalism and all other systems of human oppression. Religion will fade away when people no longer have the need for it.
That explains why people are religious..the belief that if no one else listens or cares <insert name of higher power here> does. I get that and it drives why I pray and why prayer provides me calmness/hope.
Yet it still begs the question being posed here...why we allow people to use their "faith" as an answer to questions like: why they openly are against bodily autonomy for anyone who wasnt assigned a male organ at birth for example or why those who may chose to be with someone who as the same parts under there clothes are evil? At this point any atrocity, any discrimation is okay or excused by saying "it's my faith" or "my belief" or "my God said in Chapter X verse 1-5", while completely ignoring what that same God said in Chapter X verse 20-25!. It is fully acceptable to say you believe the Bible is the word of God and it "drives your life choices" even while saying "Two Corthinans",not knowing the old testament is tied to Judaism..or even why some words are in Red!
Yet when the church of Satan talks about their beliefs they are dismissed as trouble makers, making fun of others, and forced articulate their rationale. (Not that I mess with Satan but if religious liberty is gonna be a thing....this falls under that umbrella)
True. Privileging religious behaviors that impose on another's rights and autonomy should never be acceptable and we absolutely should push back against that. It's fine for someone to believe something and let their belief inform behavior that only affects themselves, but when that behavior crosses the line into affecting someone else, that's where the line must be drawn. And I would argue that also applies to indirect harmful behaviors lthat spring from belief, like continuing to cause harm to the environment because "Jesus will come, so it doesn't matter."
We used to draw that line pretty sharply in the U.S., but that wall of separation has been systematically and intentionally eroded for decades by the combined forces of business and religion, the leaders of these having recognized the usefulness of their working together to subdue the population for their own purposes.
I was treated as a total loon by my (very liberal!) family because I was like, this is fuckin' awesome. I mean, yeah...they're doing it for the wrong reasons. But there ARE thousands of legitimate reasons to burn down Congress and start over again.
"Whenever a politician nods to the Bible as their inspiration, they should be interrogated."
I've struggled with the question of faith from the jump. As a non Christian kid growing up in an area that was 95% Catholic, there was a matter of fitting in. Religion wasn't culturally defining for me as it was my parents. Religious ritual not only was nonconforming but I found nothing speaking to 12 year old, American me.
When I moved south introductions quickly got to "what church do you go to." Using the word "Jesus" is the go to justification for anything inappropriate someone might say. Political pandering to the flag and faith crowd is totally performative. Interrogate most Jesus blatherers about Christian principles and they'll throw out a few "Biblical" references they've tailored to deflect from their daily violations of the same.
Certainly faith can inform politics. It'd be nice if it manifested itself as a foundation of civil engagement rather than as an absolutist hammer. I detest being sold to. I'm predisposed to dismiss anyone who hypes their piety. A true believer of any faith should walk the walk before talking about it. It's all made more preposterous when a Donald Trump has a faith adviser or waves a Bible when every sane person knows he doesn't care fuck all about religion. We need to head off the right wing's push towards white theocracy because they don't fucking mean it. We've been previously disappointed that the loudest are not the truly pious. The media tiptoes around challenging religion in order not to discriminate when in fact it's probably more dangerous than opioids.
Yeah. I was very religious when young. Still am, in a way. I fell for this shit not because I was religious but because I wanted to understand people and respect them, etc. Now I see that many will not return the favor and are actively opposed to coexistence, and the freedom of others to live their lives.
Challenge away I say. I have an argument why it's much better for believers to live in an extremely free, totally secular society as long as the atheists are mellow (not the libertarian bro rational dudes or whatever they're called) but I need to vacuum my house or I fear I will burn in hell. (Kidding. Though I really gotta go vacuum the house while my kids aren't here to bug me.)
PLEASE challenge religious beliefs and the power of religious institutions on grounds of freedom and morality and the value if each human being and many apologies to all for all the tiptoeing around many of us did before. Though the situation seemed complicated at times that was probably an illusion and it certainly isn't a complicated situation now.
I believe Jamelle Bouie and Chris Hayes talked about this on a podcast right after Jan 6th. If you truly believed the election was stolen, that a vast left wing conspiracy had robbed Donald Trump of another term in office, then Jan 6th made perfect sense. It should have been MORE violent, not less, if that's what it took to overthrow the pretenders to the throne.
Right? People were taking pictures with Capitol Police and that one dude smoked a cigar with his feet up on Pelosi's desk. There were some serious revolutionaries in that crowd, but it's amazing how much of that, I don't know, putsch? was deeply, deeply unserious.
I think one could easily argue that there are just competing moral codes, some much more well-organized than others. The problem though is as you say—when something is totally made up it opens the door to anything, even if it’s cruel or derived from hierarchies that the powerful have used to maintain their positions using diversion and exploitation of base fears. E.g. being gay is wrong and people from other religions and the non-religious should be converted/prayed for/often warred against and are “other.” The most pernicious of all may turn out to be the sanctioning of the avoidance of ecological preservation: “we don’t need to worry about climate stabilization because of the apocalypse or general absolution from concern about things that are too systemic (God’s realm/Jesus take the wheel).”
Wow Hanilton- all your fitness articles are amazing that you linked to! I wanna go to your gym and do yoga in front of the weights you need. That was so funny!
I enjoyed your Gawker series on, for lack of a better term, "Just Exercise God Damn It," and very happy to see you continuing the crusade of " Run And/Or Pick Things Up It's Not That Hard You Lazy Sheep." Would be interested to see a follow-up on Spellman College's transition to campus-wide fitness from like 2015.
This take makes a fundamental error which I find depressingly common on our side.
*We* - not even our recent ancestors - haven’t “given” religion anything.
Religion has been around since the dawn of human civilization. Sure, at some point, some primitive band of hunter-gatherers was the first to “give” religion respect. And their neighbors and trading partners and whoever else across the world eventually also gave this new invention of religion respect.
The start condition here is that religion has always played a major role in human affairs. Secularism may be a welcome reprieve from the absurdities and outrages that ensued, but secularism is something that has, at every step of the way, either been *imposed* upon the unwilling or *persuaded* of them.
It’s an important distinction, because if we imagine religion to be a recent imposition - imposTER - then we do not understand the nature of how to beat it back. We might mistake it for a struggle that can be won over a few short decades of our lifetimes, and we might be disappointed to see the struggle never be won, to never see meaningful progress towards the end goal of universal secularism.
But if we understand religion’s deep roots in the very psyche and existence of civilization, then we can contextualize secularism as the project of centuries, not years and decades. We won’t delude ourselves that any given front of the struggle - Roe/Dobbs, evolution, political evangelicalism, LGBT rights, etc. - is the final frontier, the final push to Berlin, rather than just another skirmish.
"We" (the press) "give" religion a lower standard of evidence in public discourse than we ask of other political rationales or philosophies. That is not a magic bullet that will erase religion from the earth but it is a real thing that impacts politics downstream.
*You* don’t. You apply a pretty high standard of evidence!
And so do many of your colleagues, I would bet. Probably even a majority! Well, depending on how you define the population.
The segment who do *not* apply the standard you want, fail to do so because religion is so fundamentally entrenched in society that they don’t even notice they’re advantaging it. They also mostly aren’t reading this Substack! It would certainly be wonderful if they did, but they don’t.
Seems to me like your real challenge is that the journalists whose behavior you want to change are normie working stiffs who can’t be bothered to read Substacks about the level of evidential scrutiny that religion rightly deserves. Which is a different problem from them simply not being persuaded that your evidential standard is the right one.
I just would appreciate freedom FROM religion. That’s the part that has experienced the biggest uptick. The religious right aren’t happy with just practicing their beliefs. They want to force their beliefs onto others through legislation. That never ends well.
Almost nobody in the USA who is not religious wants 1) to severely restrict abortion 2) to restrict equality for LGBT people. There are a few misogynistic or homophobic or transphobic right wingers who are also atheistic Nazi types online-but VERY few. All of these efforts in society come from the religious. All the legislators and judges behind these efforts are religious believers who belong to religions that have deemed these things a sin. They also want to eliminate birth control and no fault divorce as soon as they are able. The beliefs they have come from their religious background, although I don’t think the deepest explanation necessarily is from religious texts or anything but more from a certain kind of culture they have created that uses those texts. However, that’s irrelevant and insider baseball. Basically, they are using the government to impose their religious beliefs on the public. I think this is undeniable although--because they give arguments that aren’t DIRECTLY religious--people stringently deny it. But this seems really silly to me given that it is only right wing Christians with this political project which is being achieved through legislation and the courts. Nobody else has this political project!
Were it not so ironic, I would shout 1,000 resounding 'Amens' to this. Someone finally effing said it. This needs to run in every American news outlet.
Those of you who were NOT THERE on Jan 6 but pop off about how 'cool' it was need a reality check. Some (very few of us) have been attending as many of the militant right's invasions of our city as we can, to bear witness. Best way to see the whole scene is by bicycle – mobile and quick. I was there for hours on Jan 6, watching the crowd at the speech on the Ellipse (and spotting people carrying weapons), watching and listening to the sideshow artists along the Mall, Capitol Hill and out by Il Corte di Tuti Corti (and recognizing quite a few from previous Lost Cause shoutfests), casually riding around the little knots of plotters on the east side of the Capitol (this was long before the mob made it move toward the west side), swinging back toward the event area to see the mob start moving, and then seeing the events unroll as they got to the Capitol. I took a couple photos but my phone battery died. I could not even call 911 to report what was clearly about to happen – that the officers fronting the building were about to be swept up and probly killed (I'm still astonished so few people died). I watched the exact sort of behavior football hoodlums display as they wait for that moment of crowd density and agitation – when things are about to 'go off'. I even saw 'scouts' climb some of the statues to turn and look not to the Capitol but back the opposite direction, toward the crowd, as if gaging precisely when there would be enough bodies in place to justify beginning an attack.
To be sure, far more people stayed outside than trespassed in the building, and only half at most of the original speech crowd came all the way to Capitol Hill. But that's still thousands of people, many enraged and ready for violence.
IT WAS NOT COOL. It was sedition. Some folks clearly conspired before the violence began. I watched some of them.
Seeing there was nothing I could do except witness, I stayed long enough to confirm it was going off, then rode home and flipped on the internet. That ride takes ~20 minutes. When I got online, I saw reporters talking blandly about this and that going on in the chambers. They STILL did not know what was happening outside. People were breaking into the building, some of them determined to capture and kill legislators and the vice president.
Much of the sideshow was godful nazis holding forth about one thing or another. I've seen them there many a time and they have/bring their own audiences. The underlying story is as Hamilton describes – god says, and y'all must obey. The hierarchy is all. Everything is top down. Authoritarianism is exactly the same, and that's one reason authoritarians embrace rightwing religions – true believers will believe anything if the message is couched and delivered the right way. The goddies were there in large numbers on Jan 6 but did not participate in violence that I saw, except that they lent weight of numbers to the whole mob.
I was never a believer (my parents gave up trying when I was a little kid) so all that does not touch me. But I know enough about that scene because I've actively studied lots of religions not from the theoretical angle but from the lived experience of being with religious people in their homes, temples, retreats, outposts, paraphernalia stores reading rooms and road shows. There is occasionally an irrefutable logic presented that goes something like this: god is the supreme (if not the ONLY) authority (so say the authoritarian leaders), and god's will is to convert all humans to his (always HIS) will. Thus, every believer MUST go forth and convert heathens because not to do so would be to earn damnation themselves. It's not their fault you are to be subsumed to the flock against your will (the effect is spiritual and psychological, if not physical, kidnapping); god told them to do it and they are just obeying. Same as the 'just following orders' nazis.
Im an ex Christian. I left Christianity because of experience. It ticks me off when Christians practice witchcraft or take up Buddhism( the meditation and other practices pertaining to Buddhism) thinking that is fine. I left Christianity because it is toxic. I wish Christians had enough sense to question their faith and pick a lane, rather than ruin other beliefs because they can. Christianity is toxic, the history alone should turn people off, the holocaust, witchtrials and crusades arent something to brag about. Neither is the child abuse, school shootings and the mistreatment of women, children and LGB+. Learn from history or suffer the consequences
First, let's correct the identification of "faith" as "whatever you decide to believe in." You no more "decide" what you believe than gay people "decide" to be gay. 90% of the political conversations in which I participate, in person and online, have nothing to do with facts, and everything to do with declaring tribal loyalties.
As Boss Tweed used to say "I don't care who people vote for as long as I can pick the candidates." Team red vs. team blue is the current sporting event, but both sides are equally clueless. Trump is anathema because he at least tries to sabotage team red's agenda (make rich people richer). But the idea that D's don't want to make rich people richer is equally as ridiculous as any "faith" from the Trumpiest faithful.
I'd suggest the move toward the religious was at least suggested by the civil rights movement's inspiration of using churches as the nexus of organization. Of course as soon as (Reverend) Martin Luther King started talking about sharing the wealth, he was assassinated.
In any case, the political right often mimics and follows the political "left" (there really is no left left, hence the quotes). For example, Jimmy Carter deregulated trucking and airlines, both showing Reagan how to deregulate, and throwing the workers in those heavily unionized industries under the bus. Teamsters endorsed Reagan in the next election.
Finally, a word about the religious right. They're more interested in stirring up dissatisfaction and dissent than in any principles. Jerry Falwell supported abortion until his political masters told him to stop doing that. To kill the New Deal, dissent, any dissent, must be honored, and sabotaging government is just an extra bit of dissent. It goes on all the time. To give you an idea of how well funded it is, the NY Times reports the Kochs spent $889 million in the 2016 elections. The pseudo-lefty (actually capitalist's capitalist) George Soros spent $27 million. The amount of money beats any other predictor of outcomes. Perhaps the most radical recent departure from conventional wisdom was Bernie Sanders' appeal to the internet to fund his campaign. That's a hopeful sign, but certainly no guarantee of victory.
Oh, one other thing: I would not mind if you did a little mini-post to let us know of your writing/publication elsewhere when it's available. And I'm a Slate Plus member, too, so hey.
As one of those paying subscribers, I realize that someday you will write something with which I strongly disagree and I hope that I won't have a snit and cancel. This is not that day. Wow, is this not that day. Today's post speaks to me on a lot of levels.
I'm not sure where the current tiptoeing around religion began; probably Reagan/Falwell-era. I'm old enough to remember that it wasn't always like that, that challenging religion was more accepted, even when more people identified as religious. I don't know if people in media got cowed by religious groups (likely) or if it seemed like questioning somehow seemed like religious discrimination.
I've been an atheist most of my life, but not a militant one. (Not a "Dawkins in a fedora" here, and I love that line.) I'm not as anti-religion as I once was, mostly because I know that there are some people - not enough, not nearly enough - who are better people and more community-oriented because of their religion. But I've always thought that if someone was of a mind to accept such a grand concept as God without evidence, they'd accept other things as well, particularly if those other things buttressed their worldview.
One question that I'd like the Christian nationalists to answer is: "Which Christianity?", because there are only, what, 100 denominations and conflicting interpretations of the Bible? I mean, are we going to ban dancing? Divorce?Drinking? Caffeine? Christmas trees? Are we going full Amish?
I've already gone on too long and I could go on longer. Thank you, Hamilton, for writing this.
There isn't tiptoeing around religion, let alone confronting of it, because the rich and powerful ownership class intentionally embraced it for utilitarian purposes many decades ago. I recommend reading "One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America" by Kevin Kruse (who also happens to be newly writing here on Substack, check him out!). I also recommend watching the Noam Chomsky documentary from the early 90s called "Manufacturing Consent." It's available on YouTube now.
coexistance is futile, indeed! The nuns may have taught me cursive, but not expository high rails as you and mr nolan have erected here. i m marv'd and blesst this evening
I feel your frustration. It's maddening. However, I thought I'd share a perspective that I myself am fairly new to embracing because I think it will be helpful for others to come to understand, too.
I've been atheist for far more of my life than I was ever Christian (raised Evangelical and started abandoning my faith by around age 13 and embraced the label "atheist" by my early 20s), but disentangling myself from capitalist and colonial/imperialist propaganda occurred much later in my life (unfortunately). I used to think religion was the root of all evil, as Richard Dawkins proclaimed in his documentary by that name. I spent roughly 20 years of my life dedicated to combating that evil.
But I've come to understand that it's actually capitalism (and other oppressive socioeconomic systems both past and present) that is the root of all evil. So long as people are shackled to the misery capitalism causes, there will continue to be a need to attempt to escape or sooth the pain, an escape that religious belief (and other balms such as drug use) offers.
Many are familiar with Karl Marx proclaiming religion "is the opium of the people," but fewer know that phrase was preceded by "religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation." Marx was sympathetic to oppressed people turning to religion because he knew it offered an escape from the pain of their reality.
I have concluded that that to take religion away from people without alleviating the conditions which cause them to turn to it in the first place is as cruel as it is ineffective. Religious belief and practice is an addiction. Addiction that springs from one's attempt to self-medicate just as much as drug addiction and alcoholism is self-medicating to cope with inner pain.
If we want a more rational world, the rational thing to do is to eliminate capitalism and all other systems of human oppression. Religion will fade away when people no longer have the need for it.
That explains why people are religious..the belief that if no one else listens or cares <insert name of higher power here> does. I get that and it drives why I pray and why prayer provides me calmness/hope.
Yet it still begs the question being posed here...why we allow people to use their "faith" as an answer to questions like: why they openly are against bodily autonomy for anyone who wasnt assigned a male organ at birth for example or why those who may chose to be with someone who as the same parts under there clothes are evil? At this point any atrocity, any discrimation is okay or excused by saying "it's my faith" or "my belief" or "my God said in Chapter X verse 1-5", while completely ignoring what that same God said in Chapter X verse 20-25!. It is fully acceptable to say you believe the Bible is the word of God and it "drives your life choices" even while saying "Two Corthinans",not knowing the old testament is tied to Judaism..or even why some words are in Red!
Yet when the church of Satan talks about their beliefs they are dismissed as trouble makers, making fun of others, and forced articulate their rationale. (Not that I mess with Satan but if religious liberty is gonna be a thing....this falls under that umbrella)
True. Privileging religious behaviors that impose on another's rights and autonomy should never be acceptable and we absolutely should push back against that. It's fine for someone to believe something and let their belief inform behavior that only affects themselves, but when that behavior crosses the line into affecting someone else, that's where the line must be drawn. And I would argue that also applies to indirect harmful behaviors lthat spring from belief, like continuing to cause harm to the environment because "Jesus will come, so it doesn't matter."
We used to draw that line pretty sharply in the U.S., but that wall of separation has been systematically and intentionally eroded for decades by the combined forces of business and religion, the leaders of these having recognized the usefulness of their working together to subdue the population for their own purposes.
I ended up writing a whole post based on this. Thanks for the prompt! https://open.substack.com/pub/jdgoulet/p/dawkins-was-wrong-religion-isnt-the?r=10bxpq&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
As I watched Jan 6 unfold I thought (and still think) that everything about it was really fucking cool except for the reason it was happening
I was treated as a total loon by my (very liberal!) family because I was like, this is fuckin' awesome. I mean, yeah...they're doing it for the wrong reasons. But there ARE thousands of legitimate reasons to burn down Congress and start over again.
"Whenever a politician nods to the Bible as their inspiration, they should be interrogated."
I've struggled with the question of faith from the jump. As a non Christian kid growing up in an area that was 95% Catholic, there was a matter of fitting in. Religion wasn't culturally defining for me as it was my parents. Religious ritual not only was nonconforming but I found nothing speaking to 12 year old, American me.
When I moved south introductions quickly got to "what church do you go to." Using the word "Jesus" is the go to justification for anything inappropriate someone might say. Political pandering to the flag and faith crowd is totally performative. Interrogate most Jesus blatherers about Christian principles and they'll throw out a few "Biblical" references they've tailored to deflect from their daily violations of the same.
Certainly faith can inform politics. It'd be nice if it manifested itself as a foundation of civil engagement rather than as an absolutist hammer. I detest being sold to. I'm predisposed to dismiss anyone who hypes their piety. A true believer of any faith should walk the walk before talking about it. It's all made more preposterous when a Donald Trump has a faith adviser or waves a Bible when every sane person knows he doesn't care fuck all about religion. We need to head off the right wing's push towards white theocracy because they don't fucking mean it. We've been previously disappointed that the loudest are not the truly pious. The media tiptoes around challenging religion in order not to discriminate when in fact it's probably more dangerous than opioids.
Yeah. I was very religious when young. Still am, in a way. I fell for this shit not because I was religious but because I wanted to understand people and respect them, etc. Now I see that many will not return the favor and are actively opposed to coexistence, and the freedom of others to live their lives.
Challenge away I say. I have an argument why it's much better for believers to live in an extremely free, totally secular society as long as the atheists are mellow (not the libertarian bro rational dudes or whatever they're called) but I need to vacuum my house or I fear I will burn in hell. (Kidding. Though I really gotta go vacuum the house while my kids aren't here to bug me.)
PLEASE challenge religious beliefs and the power of religious institutions on grounds of freedom and morality and the value if each human being and many apologies to all for all the tiptoeing around many of us did before. Though the situation seemed complicated at times that was probably an illusion and it certainly isn't a complicated situation now.
I believe Jamelle Bouie and Chris Hayes talked about this on a podcast right after Jan 6th. If you truly believed the election was stolen, that a vast left wing conspiracy had robbed Donald Trump of another term in office, then Jan 6th made perfect sense. It should have been MORE violent, not less, if that's what it took to overthrow the pretenders to the throne.
Right? People were taking pictures with Capitol Police and that one dude smoked a cigar with his feet up on Pelosi's desk. There were some serious revolutionaries in that crowd, but it's amazing how much of that, I don't know, putsch? was deeply, deeply unserious.
I think one could easily argue that there are just competing moral codes, some much more well-organized than others. The problem though is as you say—when something is totally made up it opens the door to anything, even if it’s cruel or derived from hierarchies that the powerful have used to maintain their positions using diversion and exploitation of base fears. E.g. being gay is wrong and people from other religions and the non-religious should be converted/prayed for/often warred against and are “other.” The most pernicious of all may turn out to be the sanctioning of the avoidance of ecological preservation: “we don’t need to worry about climate stabilization because of the apocalypse or general absolution from concern about things that are too systemic (God’s realm/Jesus take the wheel).”
Wow Hanilton- all your fitness articles are amazing that you linked to! I wanna go to your gym and do yoga in front of the weights you need. That was so funny!
I enjoyed your Gawker series on, for lack of a better term, "Just Exercise God Damn It," and very happy to see you continuing the crusade of " Run And/Or Pick Things Up It's Not That Hard You Lazy Sheep." Would be interested to see a follow-up on Spellman College's transition to campus-wide fitness from like 2015.
This take makes a fundamental error which I find depressingly common on our side.
*We* - not even our recent ancestors - haven’t “given” religion anything.
Religion has been around since the dawn of human civilization. Sure, at some point, some primitive band of hunter-gatherers was the first to “give” religion respect. And their neighbors and trading partners and whoever else across the world eventually also gave this new invention of religion respect.
The start condition here is that religion has always played a major role in human affairs. Secularism may be a welcome reprieve from the absurdities and outrages that ensued, but secularism is something that has, at every step of the way, either been *imposed* upon the unwilling or *persuaded* of them.
It’s an important distinction, because if we imagine religion to be a recent imposition - imposTER - then we do not understand the nature of how to beat it back. We might mistake it for a struggle that can be won over a few short decades of our lifetimes, and we might be disappointed to see the struggle never be won, to never see meaningful progress towards the end goal of universal secularism.
But if we understand religion’s deep roots in the very psyche and existence of civilization, then we can contextualize secularism as the project of centuries, not years and decades. We won’t delude ourselves that any given front of the struggle - Roe/Dobbs, evolution, political evangelicalism, LGBT rights, etc. - is the final frontier, the final push to Berlin, rather than just another skirmish.
"We" (the press) "give" religion a lower standard of evidence in public discourse than we ask of other political rationales or philosophies. That is not a magic bullet that will erase religion from the earth but it is a real thing that impacts politics downstream.
*You* don’t. You apply a pretty high standard of evidence!
And so do many of your colleagues, I would bet. Probably even a majority! Well, depending on how you define the population.
The segment who do *not* apply the standard you want, fail to do so because religion is so fundamentally entrenched in society that they don’t even notice they’re advantaging it. They also mostly aren’t reading this Substack! It would certainly be wonderful if they did, but they don’t.
Seems to me like your real challenge is that the journalists whose behavior you want to change are normie working stiffs who can’t be bothered to read Substacks about the level of evidential scrutiny that religion rightly deserves. Which is a different problem from them simply not being persuaded that your evidential standard is the right one.
I just would appreciate freedom FROM religion. That’s the part that has experienced the biggest uptick. The religious right aren’t happy with just practicing their beliefs. They want to force their beliefs onto others through legislation. That never ends well.
Almost nobody in the USA who is not religious wants 1) to severely restrict abortion 2) to restrict equality for LGBT people. There are a few misogynistic or homophobic or transphobic right wingers who are also atheistic Nazi types online-but VERY few. All of these efforts in society come from the religious. All the legislators and judges behind these efforts are religious believers who belong to religions that have deemed these things a sin. They also want to eliminate birth control and no fault divorce as soon as they are able. The beliefs they have come from their religious background, although I don’t think the deepest explanation necessarily is from religious texts or anything but more from a certain kind of culture they have created that uses those texts. However, that’s irrelevant and insider baseball. Basically, they are using the government to impose their religious beliefs on the public. I think this is undeniable although--because they give arguments that aren’t DIRECTLY religious--people stringently deny it. But this seems really silly to me given that it is only right wing Christians with this political project which is being achieved through legislation and the courts. Nobody else has this political project!
Were it not so ironic, I would shout 1,000 resounding 'Amens' to this. Someone finally effing said it. This needs to run in every American news outlet.
Those of you who were NOT THERE on Jan 6 but pop off about how 'cool' it was need a reality check. Some (very few of us) have been attending as many of the militant right's invasions of our city as we can, to bear witness. Best way to see the whole scene is by bicycle – mobile and quick. I was there for hours on Jan 6, watching the crowd at the speech on the Ellipse (and spotting people carrying weapons), watching and listening to the sideshow artists along the Mall, Capitol Hill and out by Il Corte di Tuti Corti (and recognizing quite a few from previous Lost Cause shoutfests), casually riding around the little knots of plotters on the east side of the Capitol (this was long before the mob made it move toward the west side), swinging back toward the event area to see the mob start moving, and then seeing the events unroll as they got to the Capitol. I took a couple photos but my phone battery died. I could not even call 911 to report what was clearly about to happen – that the officers fronting the building were about to be swept up and probly killed (I'm still astonished so few people died). I watched the exact sort of behavior football hoodlums display as they wait for that moment of crowd density and agitation – when things are about to 'go off'. I even saw 'scouts' climb some of the statues to turn and look not to the Capitol but back the opposite direction, toward the crowd, as if gaging precisely when there would be enough bodies in place to justify beginning an attack.
To be sure, far more people stayed outside than trespassed in the building, and only half at most of the original speech crowd came all the way to Capitol Hill. But that's still thousands of people, many enraged and ready for violence.
IT WAS NOT COOL. It was sedition. Some folks clearly conspired before the violence began. I watched some of them.
Seeing there was nothing I could do except witness, I stayed long enough to confirm it was going off, then rode home and flipped on the internet. That ride takes ~20 minutes. When I got online, I saw reporters talking blandly about this and that going on in the chambers. They STILL did not know what was happening outside. People were breaking into the building, some of them determined to capture and kill legislators and the vice president.
Much of the sideshow was godful nazis holding forth about one thing or another. I've seen them there many a time and they have/bring their own audiences. The underlying story is as Hamilton describes – god says, and y'all must obey. The hierarchy is all. Everything is top down. Authoritarianism is exactly the same, and that's one reason authoritarians embrace rightwing religions – true believers will believe anything if the message is couched and delivered the right way. The goddies were there in large numbers on Jan 6 but did not participate in violence that I saw, except that they lent weight of numbers to the whole mob.
I was never a believer (my parents gave up trying when I was a little kid) so all that does not touch me. But I know enough about that scene because I've actively studied lots of religions not from the theoretical angle but from the lived experience of being with religious people in their homes, temples, retreats, outposts, paraphernalia stores reading rooms and road shows. There is occasionally an irrefutable logic presented that goes something like this: god is the supreme (if not the ONLY) authority (so say the authoritarian leaders), and god's will is to convert all humans to his (always HIS) will. Thus, every believer MUST go forth and convert heathens because not to do so would be to earn damnation themselves. It's not their fault you are to be subsumed to the flock against your will (the effect is spiritual and psychological, if not physical, kidnapping); god told them to do it and they are just obeying. Same as the 'just following orders' nazis.
None of that is cool. Think harder.
Im an ex Christian. I left Christianity because of experience. It ticks me off when Christians practice witchcraft or take up Buddhism( the meditation and other practices pertaining to Buddhism) thinking that is fine. I left Christianity because it is toxic. I wish Christians had enough sense to question their faith and pick a lane, rather than ruin other beliefs because they can. Christianity is toxic, the history alone should turn people off, the holocaust, witchtrials and crusades arent something to brag about. Neither is the child abuse, school shootings and the mistreatment of women, children and LGB+. Learn from history or suffer the consequences
First, let's correct the identification of "faith" as "whatever you decide to believe in." You no more "decide" what you believe than gay people "decide" to be gay. 90% of the political conversations in which I participate, in person and online, have nothing to do with facts, and everything to do with declaring tribal loyalties.
As Boss Tweed used to say "I don't care who people vote for as long as I can pick the candidates." Team red vs. team blue is the current sporting event, but both sides are equally clueless. Trump is anathema because he at least tries to sabotage team red's agenda (make rich people richer). But the idea that D's don't want to make rich people richer is equally as ridiculous as any "faith" from the Trumpiest faithful.
I'd suggest the move toward the religious was at least suggested by the civil rights movement's inspiration of using churches as the nexus of organization. Of course as soon as (Reverend) Martin Luther King started talking about sharing the wealth, he was assassinated.
In any case, the political right often mimics and follows the political "left" (there really is no left left, hence the quotes). For example, Jimmy Carter deregulated trucking and airlines, both showing Reagan how to deregulate, and throwing the workers in those heavily unionized industries under the bus. Teamsters endorsed Reagan in the next election.
Finally, a word about the religious right. They're more interested in stirring up dissatisfaction and dissent than in any principles. Jerry Falwell supported abortion until his political masters told him to stop doing that. To kill the New Deal, dissent, any dissent, must be honored, and sabotaging government is just an extra bit of dissent. It goes on all the time. To give you an idea of how well funded it is, the NY Times reports the Kochs spent $889 million in the 2016 elections. The pseudo-lefty (actually capitalist's capitalist) George Soros spent $27 million. The amount of money beats any other predictor of outcomes. Perhaps the most radical recent departure from conventional wisdom was Bernie Sanders' appeal to the internet to fund his campaign. That's a hopeful sign, but certainly no guarantee of victory.
Oh, one other thing: I would not mind if you did a little mini-post to let us know of your writing/publication elsewhere when it's available. And I'm a Slate Plus member, too, so hey.
I usually include links at the bottom of these posts to whatever other stuff I write that's been published since my last post here.
Oh, yes, I meant that if you wanted to send something out between the regular posts, I'd welcome it. Thanks!