It Looks as if I Can't Stop Writing About Trump Just Yet

Believe me, I'd really like to. Believe me, I completely understand those of you who never want to read another word about him. But he hasn't gone away yet. From strong hints that he would run for President again in 2024, Trump has shifted, according to accounts so numerous and similar that it has become impossible to dismiss them, to the belief that he will be reinstated as President in August 2021.

Charles CW Cooke's National Review article ends by describing him, on the issue of his reinstatement, as "so unmoored from the real world that it is hard to know where to begin in attempting to explain him."

I agree. My only issue here is, this describes him in general, not just on this issue, and for a long time -- since long before 2015 -- not just recently, as Cooke seems to believe. The GOP has been following "a world-historical buffoon," as James Carville so beautifully put it.

The problem is not that Trump is a moron. There have always been lots of morons, and the world deals with them, keeps them safe and away from sharp objects and so forth. The problem with this moron is that he's got millions of dedicated followers. You'd think that more Republicans would know better. You'd think that more of the ones who know better would have the guts to stand up to him. 

 

I've got to stop over-estimating Republicans.

 

Stupidity and Global Warming

There's a meme going around: a picture of some Country & Western-looking German woman playing a guitar, with the claim that she said (in German),

"I don't think that global warming is nearly as dangerous as human stupidity."

There are several things wrong with this statement, whoever said it.

For one thing, the cause of global warming is human stupidity. It makes no sense to say to people who are battling global warming to say, "Don't worry about global warming -- human stupidity is much more dangerous!" when they're battling a direct product of human stupidity. If you say to researchers who are looking for a cure for AIDS, "Don't worry about AIDS -- viruses are much more dangerous!" all you've accomplished is to demonstrate that you don't know nearly as much about AIDS or viruses as the people whose very important work you're interrupting in order to say stupid things to them.

A statement which in itself is very stupid is not necessarily the best course against stupidity. Not every single time. Not in my opinion.

Also, asserting that global warming is less dangerous than human stupidity goes directly against the record of human life, which shows us thriving for many thousands of years despite many thousands of years' worth of very widespread and uninterrupted stupidity. Stupidity has certainly made our lives less pleasant in many ways, but it hasn't killed us yet. On the other hand, if it were not dealt with at all, global warming would kill us all in much less than a thousand years.

Global warming is now being dealt with, on an ever-larger scale, at a rate which just might possibly save our lives. But this is happening, not because people suddenly got smarter, but because energy generation which doesn't generate deadly levels of carbon and other toxic emissions suddenly got much cheaper, and continues to get less and less expensive.

If alternative energy saves us from killing ourselves off -- and it looks as if it just might -- then it will not have been our wisdom which saved us, but our greed. We will have remained just about as stupid as we were, just about as stupid as if, for whatever combination of economic reasons, alternative energy had never become cheaper, and, therefore, it never made the headlines nearly as much, and so it wasn't able to prevent us from killing off our own species with fossil fuels. Once again, our stupidity will not have been enough to kill us.

Yes, I think it's very important -- and almost hopeless -- to struggle against human stupidity. But if, for example, I and another person were stranded somewhere in a vehicle, and a grizzly bear was attacking the vehicle, trying to open it up so that it could eat me and the other human inside, and the bear was making progress, gradually making bigger and bigger cracks in the glass in the windshield and windows -- Ah say Ah say if I were in a situation like that, and the person next to me inside the vehicle said to me,

"I don't think that that grizzly bear is nearly as dangerous as human stupidity."

then that person would be showing a profound lack of a sense for what is urgent and what is not. Yes, it may very well have been human stupidity which got us into that predicament. But solving the problem of human stupidity -- assuming we were somehow able to solve it, there inside that stranded vehicle -- would not save us from that predicament. The problem we would have to solve, in such a situation, is the bear. If we didn't solve that problem, we would never be able to solve another problem.

Stephen Greenblatt and New Atheism

It took me a while, but I finally noticed the link between a recent source of aggravation, Stephen Greenblatt

and his profoundly misinformative and hugely popular book The Swerve,



and that earlier source of annoyance, those avid consumers and champions of misinformation, the New Atheists.

I had separated myself from the New Atheists. It was amazingly easy to do: I simply stopped seeking them out, and, to my amazement and immense relief, I rarely came across any of them any more. There was a whole big wonderful world out there which was almost entirely free of them. Almost.

New Atheists are atheists who believe that religion is the source of most or actually all of the world's problems, and who constantly talk and write about religion in this vein while being very careful never to learn anything about it. The classic example is Richard Dawkins, who is constantly going on and on about how Islam is the greatest threat to the world, and has never read the Koran and never will and is freakin' proud of it. New Atheists are constantly discussing a fictitious story about early Christianity and the creation of the Bible, while being very careful never to read more than a dozen or so verses of the Bible specially selected for their awfulness, or to learn anything about the ancient Mediterranean world in which Christianity and the Bible first arose. They live in an echo chamber, only "learning" about the ancient Mediterranean world from each other, distrusting any and all actual experts.

I don't know whether Stephen Greenblatt is a New Atheist or has even heard of New Atheism, but how could New Atheists not love Stephen Greenblatt and his book The Swerve, which is so full of inaccurately hostile denunciations of Christianity?

I don't mind denunciations of Christianity -- I've written a few myself -- but I greatly prefer those which are factually accurate. Like this one, a positively furious book-length denunciation of Christianty which cuts much deeper than any New Atheists have dreamed of doing, although it is much less clumsily broad than their attacks: Der Antichrist,



written by Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche had been appointed a full professor of Classics at the University of Basel at the astonishingly young age of 24. He was very well-versed in the literature of the ancient world in which Christianity and the Bible arose. At age 44, writing Der Antichrist, Nietzsche referred often to the New Testament in the original ancient Greek, although he found the Greek New Testament to be very badly-written, and reading it to be a very unpleasant experience. Nietzsche never was interested in taking the easy path, or so his writings make it seem. He was a scrupulous author, concerned, to a very unusual degree, that the things he wrote made sense. He wanted to make sure that his book about Christianity contained no inaccurately hostile denunciations, only accurate ones.

Nietzsche wrote Der Antichrist in 1888, an extraordinarily productive year for him as a writer. (Was he hurrying because he felt the end of his sanity approaching?) This one book was written between the 3rd and the 30th of September, and then he went right on to other things, until the 3rd day of January, 1889, when he went suddenly, thoroughly and permanently insane, perhaps from the effects of a decades-old case of syphilis overpowering his brain at last. Or perhaps he went mad from exasperation at so many people who spoke and wrote on the topics he cared about, without bothering to be well-informed. Like the many people who've been glad to discuss Nietzsche with me, who've never read anything Nietzsche wrote. (What on Earth did they suppose they were discussing?) Like Greenblatt and the New Atheists, so eager to discuss things like Medieval monasteries and atheist philosophy, and so determined not to learn about them. What do they actually imagine they're talking about?

And what should I do about it? Simply avoiding New Atheism certainly has been comfortable. But maybe, ultimately, as thoroughly atheist as I am, I can't be completely comfortable just sitting back and watching religious forms of stupidity be replaced by equally stupid atheist ones. Maybe, as sweetly tempting as it is, I'm just not as Epicurean as that.

Gee, I hope this doesn't drive me completely and permanently mad.

Fiji Water and Vinyl Records

Those Fiji Water commercials are in heavy rotation on the TV stations I watch, the ones with the choirs of children singing in the background, symbolizing purity, while the child narrator, symbolizing even more purity, talks about purity even more, and how Fiji Water is "untouched by Man." I don't think it says anything good about my IQ that this crap is in heavy rotation on the channels I frequent. (Then again, it could just mean that advertisers don't know what they're doing.) Seriously, how dumb do you have to be to believe that water which is transported 10,000 miles to be put into plastic bottles and sold to rich hipster doofi* for several dollars a pop is "untouched by Man"?

*"Doofi" is plural for "doofus."

About as dumb, I think, as you need to be to believe that "vinyl sounds better." In fact, I think that in very many cases, the people who drink Fiji Water and play music on vinyl are the same individual people: people with too much disposable income and too little clue about reality.

I want these people to be tested: give them tap water which they see flowing from Fiji Water bottles, and Fiji Water which they see coming from a tap, and ask them to describe each sort of water -- assuming that we were able to get them to take a taste of the Fuji Water they saw come out of a tap. Blindfold them, and play them the same recordings of their favorite music: once on vinyl played on a $25,000 turntable, and then on a $10 mp3 player, both fed through the same equalizers and speakers. Ask them to describe their experiences.

The really infuriating part is that it won't work: do such tests, confront the stupid people with the results, and they will find ways to reject what you say and to disbelieve you, so as to remain stupid, drinking their bottled water transported from 10,000 miles away in the name of the environment and of opposition to Evil, and using 19th-century technology to achieve what they continue to believe is the very best possible home-listening experience. And just as with Fuji Water drinkers and vinyl listeners, so too with Republicans and people who pay psychics to read their palms and their tarots.

I want to help these people. There are those of us who want to help them, and those other people who want to rip them off, and they keep going with those others. How do we reach them?

Journalists Exposing The Plunder Of Politicians

Journalists are hard at work, exposing politicians who claim to be working for the little guy, while they themselves live in unimaginable wealth: the headline at foxbusiness.com:

Barack and Michelle Obama Are About to Get Even Richer

That's right: while You Know Who is busy running the country into the ditch, appointing billionaires to his Cabinet and selling as much of the US as he can to Putin at bargain-basement rates, and please let's not forget about how our new Treasury Secretary foreclosed on a 90-year-old woman because of a discrepancy of 27 cents on her mortgage check (I don't think I'll ever be able to forget that last one); while all of that is really happening, Fox Business is keeping a sharp eye on the wealth of those nefarious plutocrats -- the Obamas.

I wonder how wealthy the Obamas are in the right-wing parallel universe where he's a secret Kenyan Muslim. In the real world, it probably would be pretty easy to estimate their real wealth pretty accurately, given that they've publicly disclosed all the details of their finances going back decades. Unlike You Know You.

Nice to know that Fox Business is on the case, isn't it?

"I'm Not On Obamacare"

Now, if the GOP succeeds in doing away with the ACA, and can convince their supporters who were on ACA plans and are outraged that the ACA is gone, and who still think Obamacare and the ACA are two completely different things, that the ACA disappearing is completely Obama's fault -- well, I guess that would be just more of the same. And speaking of Holy Shit: the Republicans, not just Trump but Republican legislators, are talking about building that fucking wall. "Mexico will pay us for it after it's done." You'd figure at some point their BS would become too stupid to fly anymore. However...

Afraid Of AI? You Got It Backwards

I'm not afraid of artificial intelligence. I don't see it coming anytime soon, for one thing. You disagree? Take the most advanced computer translation program you can find, use it to translate a simple 5-word English sentence of your choice into Japanese, take that Japanese sentence and use the same program to translate it back into English, and then we'll talk. As Stephen Root said in the 4th-season episode of "News Radio" entitled "Super Karate Monkey Death Car":

"I had a small house of brokerage on Wall Street. Many days no business come to my hut, but Jimmy has fear? A thousand times no! I never doubted myself for a minute for I knew that my monkey-strong bowels were girded with strength like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo dung. Glorious sunset of my heart was fading. Soon the super karate monkey death car would park in my space. But Jimmy has fancy plans, and pants to match! The monkey clown horrible karate round and yummy like cute small baby chick would beat the donkey."

You can call that hilarious, you can call it great TV. One thing you can't call it, in my humble opinion, is evidence of the imminent arrival of artificial intelligence.

But even if I'm wrong, and AI is even now on the verge of happening -- it doesn't worry me. More intelligence? That would be great. That would be most helpful. The main threat to humanity is the very opposite, the same thing it's been for thousands of years: a lack of intelligence. Any threat posed by artificial intelligence is laughable compared to the constant threat posed to us by natural stupidity.

The most obvious current example? The moron who was just elected POTUS and all the millions of morons who voted for him. We were on the verge of cutting US dependency on petrochemicals in half, on the verge of getting a smart grid, on the verge of shoring up the social safety net, on the verge of making minimum wage a living wage -- but all of that and a whole lot of other very good stuff is just going to have to wait now, because of stupidity. Because of nothing other than stupidity. Artificial intelligence would be great right now. It could be a tremendous help with that question so many of us are asking: "What the Hell are we going to do now?!" It's not as if there's an overabundance of intelligence currently working on that one.

Another example of stupidity being the greatest danger to humanity? Hitler. Some say he was an evil genius -- to that I say, "Feel my skills, donkey donkey donkey donkey!" Hitler believed that the Soviet Union and international banking were united in a Jewish conspiracy to impurify the "German race." He actually believed that. He was a moron.

Artificial intelligence? Bring it on! Artificial intelligence, natural intelligence, hybrid intelligence, any kind of intelligence: we need it, we need more of it, we need much, much more of it, just as we have for thousands if not millions or billions of years.

Mein Beileid, Deutschland: Auch Ihr Habt Jetzt New Atheists

Ich sehe einen Link nach der Jungen Welt: Leute wollen Lutherstrassen umbennen, weil Luther war ein Juden- und Frauenhasser.

Jein: war er. Ich bin gar kein Fan von Luther.

Aber wieviele Strassennamen muesste man aendern wenn Judenhass und Frauenhass als Grund dazu ausreichte? Wieviele beruehmten europaeischen Maenner der letzten 2000 Jahren waren NICHT sexistisch und antisemitisch?

Ja, es ist gut, wenn man sich an die haesslichen Seiten Luthers erinnert. Und Juden- und Frauenhass war nur zwei von gar vielen haesslichen Seiten von diesem duenkelhaften, kruden spaetmittelaelterlichen Monch, dem das Christentum seiner Zeit gar nicht christlich genug war. Waere noch besser, wenn man, zb, sich auch erinnern wuerde, wie weitverbreitet solches wie Judenhass und Frauenhass zu Luthers Zeit waren. (Obwohl der damalige Vatikan, gegen den Luther wetterte und wuetete, mE sehr viel weniger haesslich als Luther war. Dieser Vatikan unter Leo X und anderen Paepsten war einer der Hauptmotoren der Renaissance.)

Aha: ich habe auf dem Link geklickt: Atheisten ­fordern[...] Auch ich bin ein Atheist. Gar viele von uns sind Atheisten. Aber Gott sei dank (regt Euch ab, es ist bloss eine Redensart) sind nicht alle von uns solche Atheisten von Beruf, die sich so sehr ueber Geschichtliches aufregen und dabei so herzlich wenig Geschichte kennen. Pfui Teufel! (Redensart!) Hier in den US wollen sie die Zehn Gebote aus oeffentlichen Raeumen bannen, und sie verlangen, dass Islam "seine Reformation endlich haben." Dort in D, wo es unmoeglich ist, so wenig ueber die Reformation zu wissen als dass mein einen islamischen Luther herbeiwuenschen koennte, wollen sie Lutherstrassen wegschaffen. Nutzlose Narren hier wie dort.

Schopenhauer, Twain, Nietzsche, Russell und Sartre, um einige zu nennen, waren Atheisten, aber sie waren auch vieles mehr.

Schopenhauer war leider sexistisch und antisemitisch, aber er war auch vieles mehr. Nietzsche uebernahm Schopenhauers Sexismus, ueberwand aber seinen Antisemitismus, und tat noch vieles mehr. Aber diese Grauzonen in Menschen erkennen und diskutieren, das viele Trotzdem und Sovielalsauch in auch den Besten unter uns, solche Subtilitaet war nicht nach Luthers Geschmack, und sie ist gar nicht eine Eigenschaft der Atheisten, die jetzt verlangen, dass Lutherstrassen umbenannt werden, weil keinen sinnvolleren Gebrauch ihrer Zeit ihnen einfaellt.

Straight Democratic Ticket, Is What I Recommend

At 4:02 today, Ex-US Representative Joe Walsh @WalshFreedom of Illinois tweeted:

On November 8th, I'm voting for Trump.

On November 9th, if Trump loses, I'm grabbing my musket.

You in?

About an hour later, having apparently suffered in a meantime a backlash over that tweet severe enough to alarm even him, Walsh explained in an interview that he was "talking metaphorically."

Walsh is an unbearable jackass.

Metaphorically speaking, of course. He's not actually a donkey. That part was metaphorical.

The part about him being unbearable was not. And I'm not the only one who feels that way. Walsh was one of the Tea Party freshmen Congesspeople voted in in 2010 and voted out again in 2012. He has repeatedly gotten into trouble for speaking in a racially insensitive manner and repeatedly had to explain that he was speaking metaphorically and so forth and that what he really meant was, and so forth.

Earlier this year, Walsh Twitter account was suspended -- not for the musket tweet, but for something much worse which Twitter deleted, which I won't repeat here. Walsh had to explain that he hadn't really meant what he said and promise to cut it out to get his account back. In an interview the next day, Walsh said of what was in the deleted tweet which he hadn't really meant that way:

That's crazy and stupid and wrong. It would end my career and it's wrong."

It would end his career -- AND it's wrong. Nice to see a man of integrity who has his priorities right.

My point is just to remind my readers, once again, that Trump didn't come out of a vacuum, that Trump really isn't even much of an anomaly in the GOP. As much as the Republican primaries seemed to be a complete cluster****, they in fact did not nominate him completely by accident.

Of course, for those of you who live in the many parts of the US represented by Republicans who aren't distancing themselves from Donald Trump, it's probably not even necessary for me to point out that Trump is not an anomaly. This is more for those of you watching all the Republicans running full speed away from Trump on the nationwide news and in places where he's messing up the campaigns of the local Republicans.

You know of any Republicans running for office or for re-election in areas where Trump leads Clinton in the polls, who are distancing themselves from him? Me neither. Isn't it a remarkable coincidence how closely bad poll numbers for Republicans and Republican moral outrage at Trump coincide?

No Republican politicians running for office anywhere should be considered completely free of association with Trump. The main difference between "moderate" Republicans and jackasses like Trump and Walsh is that the "moderates" have a better sense of when it's expedient to keep their mouths shut -- or, for example, to distance themselves from a colleague who's going down like the Hindenburg, or to pretend that they think Hillary is just swell and always have thought so. And, of course, the "moderates" are running for office in places where people like Trump and Walsh are very unpopular.

Idiots And Democracy

An idiot holds up a sign reading, "Not Hillary, Not Trump," illustrating one of the most exasperating aspects of politics, one for which I thus far have shown no talent: dealing with idiots. It's not just that some people are too dumb to see a difference between Trump and Hillary big enough to justify voting for one or the other, which is already pretty damn dumb. Beyond that, a significant number of people actually believe that Jill Stein or Gary Johnson or Bernie Sanders actually has a chance to win. (Who knows how many idiots didn't believe that, until they read the last sentence and completely misunderstood it, and have now switched from campaigning for Hillary or Trump to campaigning for Stein or Johnson or Sanders.)

Pollsters are saying that up to 20% of registered voters now plan to vote for Stein or Johnson, with about 40% each left over for Hillary and Trump. That means that, although in reality perhaps every election is completely about winning the idiot vote, there's no doubt that this Presidential election is.

Of course, beyond the 20% Stein-or-Johnson-no-doubt-they're-idiots-bloc, some of the Trump and Hillary supporters are idiots too. It's harder to tell how big this voting bloc is, and it may also be much harder to campaign to this bloc, because who knows many idiots are voting for either Trump or Hillary only because they completely misunderstand where the candidate stands on the issues about which they care most? For example, people supporting Trump because they think he's pro-union, or supporting Hillary because they think she's against a woman's right to choose. I think it's pretty safe to say that the percentage of voters who are that confused or worse about every Presidential campaign is bigger than that of those who voted for Nader in 2004, and possibly comparable to those who voted for him in 2000.

In any case, the number is too high to be safely ignored.

So how do we deal with those voters, how do we lure as many as possible over to the Democratic side?

Like I said at the beginning of this post: I have no flippin' idea. I have no practical suggestions to offer, other than to urge those of you who are skilled at persuading idiots to keep in mind that there are a huge number of them out there, and to do whatever you can. Thank you.

Anyhow: although it's very, very early, the first post-Democratic-Convention polls are encouraging. One poll says that Missouri has gone from safely in Trump's column to a tossup. Wouldn't it be sweet if that poll turns out to be accurate, not an outlier, and if it stays that way, and we win Missouri? Don't laugh: it was awfully close in 2008. McCain only won by 3903 votes, 1,445,814 to 1,441,911

And I'd really like to win Texas too. I know everybody considers Texas to be deep-red Presidentially, but I look at the same data that's out there for everybody else to see, and it looks kinda purple to me. (And I'm way above average at math.)

I repeat: it's early. Almost every Presidential candidate gets a post-convention bump, we shouldn't overvalue Trump's bump, too many people have been panicking about that. And we shouldn't get carried away if Hillary gets a big bump too.

But it would be so nice if we just mopped the floor with those suckers this time...

13th-Century Translations Of The Bible

On the first day of July, 2011, I published a post quoting a dispute I had with a couple of other people over some 13th-century translation of the Bible about which they claimed to know. I googled 13th-century bible translations and found some interesting things, but nothing having to do with 13th-century translations of the Bible. I googled "13th-century bible translations" and got 0 hits. 0 also for "13th-century translations of the bible."

Without quotation marks around the search terms, search results occur with references to the Cathars, and to their demands, in opposition to the Catholic Church, for vernacular translations of the Bible -- the opposite of what the idiots in the 2011 Wrong Monkey post claimed to know about, translations made by the Catholic Church. Maybe that's what the idiots had in mind. As I said, I've found references to demands made by the Cathars for translations of the Bible. I'm still looking for actual translations of Biblical texts made during the 13th century.

Someone claimed on Wikipedia that King Dinis of Portugal (1261-1325) translated a part of Genesis into Portugese, a translation which since has been lost.

On Wikipedia. I haven't so far been able to find any mention of this anywhere else.

Here we go: 13th-century Spanish translations: La Fazienda de Ultra Mar, a Spanish account of travels in the Holy Land, appeared early in the 13th century and contained Biblical passages in the vernacular. And was suppressed by the Council of Tarragona in 1234. And then a complete Castilian Bible appeared under the reign of the renowned scholar and patron of scholars, Alfonso X, King of Castile, León and Galicia from 1252 to 1284.

I could be wrong, but I don't think this is what the idiots were thinking of back in 2011. I think it was more like this: some New Atheists overheard something somewhere about King James having some Bible verses altered in the King James Bible to suit his political ends. Without first bothering to learn which verses these were or how or why they were altered, they took this assertion of politic-religious mendacity and ran with it, put it through their New Atheist echo chambers and games of Elephant, and by the time these particular idiots met me, they thought they had learned about Bible translations (into what language or languages?) made by the Catholic Church (by whom in the Catholic Church?) to suit the Church's agenda (in what way?), and without even posing any of the question in parentheses there, let alone answering them, they thought that they had blown the lid off of an historical scandal.

Something like that. This is what many New Atheists do, which they think is studying history. The way they tend to react to people who actually know something about the historical topic they think they're discussing, is illustrated by they the way they behave toward me in the Wrong Monkey post from 2011 linked above. I for one am not getting paid nearly enough to put up with that sort of treatment. Why would actual historians want to hang around for it, when some of us actually appreciate what they do? I wonder how Bill Nye or Neil deGrasse Tyson get treated when they try to talk to Bill Maher about vaccines.

It's stupidity. Stupidity isn't merely ignorance, it's the dogged determination to remain ignorant.

Bernie Said Global Warming Is The Greatest Threat To National Security...

...and Hillary lost West Virginia because she didn't pander to coal miners by telling them their mining jobs would last forever. That, ladies and germs, is whatcha call irony.

Bernie called his win in West Virginia a "tremendous victory." He gained 2 delegates on Hillary. 2 down, 769 to go. Tremendous. He said, "We can do arithmetic," and the crowd (in Washington state) went wild. But they can't. And they don't listen to people who can.

Who says, over and over, that they can do arithmetic? People who can't. It wasn't Michael who said over and over that he was smart, it was Fredo.

Yes, Hillary broke the rules by having a private email server. Colin Powell and Condaleeza Rice broke the same rules. And while Hillary was using the private server she wasn't supposed to be using, the Chinese hacked the State Department email server. You can't make up good stuff like this. What a shame nobody notices it.

What's the greatest threat to the security of the world? Stupidity. What did nobody see coming in the 2016 Presidential campaign? How stupid Bernie is. Those reporters Bernie smugly tells more and more often not to moan or roll their eyes at him, they're moaning and rolling their eyes because they can do the math. Those superdelegates even Bernie admits he would need to get the nomination? They are the very same politicians Bernie keeps trashing, the ones he claims have been thwarting him and "the will of the people" at every turn.

Christopher Columbus lived until 1506, believing until the end that he had sailed to Asia. Will Bernie go to his grave believing that the race between himself and Hillary was close and that the nomination process was conducted unfairly and that he would've won in a fair fight?

Will he ever actually concede? Will he be dragged off of the convention stage, raving, literally unable to let go of the rush to which he's become addicted, the rush of pleasing those crowds? Will he refuse to concede and set off a riot of morons?

New Atheism: Because Thinking Is Hard

75 years ago, the most prominent exponents of atheism were Sigmund Freud, Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre. Today it's Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens. Then, English-speaking atheists watched No Exit and read The Stranger, or at least pretended to have read it; today, New Atheists repeat Hitchens' would-be bonmot "religion poisons everything" and think of ways to insult religious believers with Facebook memes, and pay for billboards which are basically identical to those memes.

I suppose it's risky to actually try to understand people with whom one disagrees. What if one eventually understands so well that one no longer disagrees and becomes one of them? Why look at good things which some religious people do in the name of religion, when it could make things look more complicated than the memes showing clergy who are thieves and child molesters, and congregations who are blind, fearful, obedient, fleeced sheep? Yes, there are some clergy and some congregations who are like that. But others are somewhat different. Some New Atheists definitely do not want to talk about religious believers who do not fit their favorite stereotype, whether it's Christian congregations who actually use most of the collection-plate money for charity work instead of Super Fly lifestyles for the clergy; or Muslims who actually are peaceful and opposed to terrorism; or Muslims who do not advocate subservient roles for women, and actually don't torture, misfigure or kill women who are assertive; or whatever doesn't fit their pet stereotypes.

I agree with the New Atheists that belief in God or multiple gods is mistaken. I agree that this belief can have many negative effects. But I also think that New Atheism is having many negative effects. I don't think we're going to overcome religion by sneering at it. I don't think "We're all atheists -- I just believe in one less God than you do." is brilliant; on the contrary, everytime I see it on a sign someone's holding at a rally or on a billboard or a meme I just go: Uhhhhhhh, (That was a sound of disgust) that again? I really cannot imagine a Christian or a Muslim finding it clever, much less convincing. And of course Hindus and other polytheists are liable to feel both disgusted and slighted, treated as if they don't exist or don't matter.

How many minds are actually being changed by simpleminded garbage like that, or like holding up a sign next to someone holding up a sign with a religious message saying "FUCK THIS GUY", or a meme showing a collection plate and a caption comparing Christianity to a family of children paying their abusive father not to punish them, or the popular message "YOU KNOW IT'S NOT TRUE", etc? It all seems to me like a lot of people agreeing with each other and slapping each other on the back.

Eh. Maybe that's what they need, if they come from abusive fundamentalist backgrounds and have never before felt safe expressing disbelief, and never before met others who don't believe. Maybe they have a lot of hurt to get out of their systems, and need a place where they're allowed to vent.

See what I did there? I made an attempt to understand people whom I loathe for the constant stream of nonsense they produce. Because if we never understand them, how are we ever going to have any clue about how to interact with them in any way which is at all productive?

And, on the off-chance that someone is reading this who was one of those atheists who badly needed to know that there were others, who needed to escape from an abusive religious home; but now agrees with some of my critique of the New Atheist scene, which is beginning to annoy him or her, and wants to get a bit deeper -- welcome. There are a few others like us: atheists disenchanted with the New Atheists. I don't know whether we yet have a name, which we can use to distinguish ourselves from the New Atheists, to make it clear that we're not with them, that we realize "religion poisons everything" is a bit of an oversimplification, etc. I have suggested the name Steven Bollinger Can Haz Nobel Atheists.

The New Atheist Approach To Anthropology

This (an actual quote from a real-life person) is what passes for a theory of the origin of religion in the New Atheist echo chamber this month:

"that fine line, or moment (period maybe) in history where we went from hunter-gatherers to settled civilized people, seems to me that certain people took advantage by creating stories etc to put themselves in positions of power. that's the answer, these people cut themselves off from what went before, they invented something and now they won't let go"

Oh. Okay. So now we know. (Good thing YOU didn't invent anything.)

Bernie Supporters: No Offense, But You're A Bunch Of Schmucks

1) so Bernie's a Socialist, huh? What's the name of the Socialist party Bernie belongs to, again? Who are some of his colleagues from that party? Uhhh, uhhhh, uhhhhhh...

You're darn right, uhhhh. Bernie's a Social Democrat, but the part of the history lesson he leaves out is that the rest of Democratic Party are Social Democrats too. The US has this irrational phobia about the word "socialism," but what it is is things like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the Postal Service, publicy-owned utilities, unions, increasing the minimum wage, health care for everybody, etc. Democratic stuff. Look at Bernie's voting record. He's just another liberal Democrat, and he's scammed you all into thinking he's something completely new and special.

2) Hillary's a liberal Democrat. Boy, the far Right has got to be loving the way you schmucks hate her, because they hate her too. They hate and fear her more than anyone else in the world. And the people they hate the most are not the Democrats who are so centrist that they're practically Republicans, it's the liberal Democrats who kick ass. (Known in other countries as Socialists or Social Democrats.) Like Hillary. Above all, Hillary.

You're such schmucks! Educate yourselves!

I know you won't. I tried.

We Don't Know Nearly Enough To Make Any Rational Assertion Beginning: "Religion Has always Been [...]"

It seems to be a currently popular New Atheist talking point that religion is and has always been a means for the elite to control and manipulate the masses. But it's nonsense. We don't even know how old religion is -- it appears to be more than 30,000 years old, judging from artifacts which have been found. How much older than that? Nobody knows. (Some say that recently-found 70,000-year-old artifacts show the presence of religion, but that's controversial.) And you know that for that entire time it's been systematic manipulation? I don't think so. Writing which has been discovered so far goes back less than 6000 years. When we think about human behavior before that, to a very great extent we are poking around in the dark and guessing -- much the same way that we are only guessing when we try to understand what may be going on the minds of other species.

How old is religion? We don't know. When it began, was human society organized into anything which could be called elites and masses? Sing it with me, children: we don't know.

"Religion is and has always been a means for the elite to control and manipulate the masses." That sounds as if religion has always been controlled by elites who themselves don't believe in it. As if it has always been a con, a lie. That fits in very well with the New Atheist black-and-white, atheism-good, religion-bad dichotomy. But is it justified in any way by the actual history and prehistory of religion? No doubt, there has been a very cozy relationship between religious authority and political power for a very long time. No doubt today much of this relationship is maintained in a cynical way by powerful elites. Some neoconservatives, not all of them, are atheists who think that religion, while not for them, is good for the masses, or at least good for keeping the masses in line. But the thing is, we're very far from being able to prove that all of the elites who say that they have religious beliefs are insincere. The fact that a religion is very beneficial for someone does not prevent that person from believing in it. Robert Musil thought that the very opposite was true, and it's not an entirely daffy thought.

As far back as ancient Rome we have records of people having said cynically that religions in which they themselves clearly did not believe were good for controlling the masses. But not any longer ago than that. As far back as back as ancient Greece there is evidence that a few people were atheists, but not any longer ago than that, and it was not more than a handful of ancient Greeks.

We can't make the mistake of assuming that there were always people like us. We have to reckon with the possibility than religion may be much, much older than atheism. We can reasonably conjecture that religion is more than 30,000 years old, and ask how much older it might be. We can reasonably conjecture that atheism is more than 2500 years old, and guess about how much older it might be. But there's a real possibility that for tens of thousands of years, maybe for hundreds of thousands of years or even millions of years, ALL of our ancestors believed in gods.

Cities began to develop thousands of years ago -- how many thousands? And all the people said: We don't know. And all the people said: We don't know. But in the remains of the oldest cities we've found, 10 or 12 thousand years old, a big honkin' temple always seems to have been in the middle of town, suggesting that priests and kings were one and the same category. But it doesn't follow from that that the priest/kings were manipulating people, or that they didn't believe in the religions which they preached. That's a premature conclusion, the evidence for it is entirely lacking. And as I mentioned above, religion seems to be much, much older than city life. We don't know very much at all about how human -- or humanoid -- or primate societies may have been organized when religion first arose, inasmuch as we entirely lack such crucial pieces of the puzzle as when religion arose, to name just one.

"Religion Is A Sand-Castle, And A Tidal Wave Of Reason Is About To Wash It Away!"

Another parallel to the fundies: the fundies say that Jesus is coming back really soon, any minute now, and the New Atheists say that Reason will wash religion away really soon, any minute now.

If the New Atheists read more than scientific journals, comic books, the occasional sci-fi or fantasy novel and each other, they might have come across some of the atheist philosophers and historians from one or two centuries ago who sounded exactly like the 21st-century New Atheist over-optimism quoted in the title of this blog post. The Age of Reason could also have been called The Age of the Premature Belief in the Coming Final Victory of Reason.

I believe that if humanity survives long enough, religion will eventually fade away. If we're not killed off in the meantime by an asteroid or by our own nuclear weapons, or by ironically actual tidal waves, strengthened by the climate change we're causing, or by some disease, or one of the many other things which could quite suddenly render this discussion moot. But not only has religion proven much more tenacious than those historians and philosophers from the late 18th to the early 20th century thought: in addition, atheism in its current form has some problems.

Probably the most serious of those problems right now is that the most prominent leaders of the atheist movement are ignorant obnoxious pricks. Arguably, they are slowing the progress of atheism down more than they are aiding it, because they're so repulsive. They're inducing some atheists to deny that they're atheists and call themselves something like skeptics instead, lest someone should assume that they're with THEM. That's not a hallmark of the best possible leadership. Sam Harris, in addition to many, many other glaring shortcomings, believes in spirituality, which in my opinion raises serious doubts about whether he is really an atheist at all. He and Dawkins and Hitch and Myers and other leading New Atheists are atrociously ignorant Islamophobes. Dawkins, who simply cannot shut up about Islam and how horrible and dangerous it is, has never read the Koran and announces proudly that he never intends to, reminiscent of the Ayatollah Khomenei putting a price on Salman Rushdie's head for writing a book which the Ayatollah did not read. Dawkins has recently referred to Christianity as a valuable bulwark against the menace of radical Islam, which for me raises questions about his credibility as an atheist just as Harris' nonsense about spirituality does.

Harris claims that Islam is currently going through its "Medieval" phase, which shows you that he can count to 14: the beginnings of Islam are 1400 years ago, and 1400 years AD Christendom was in its Middle Ages (or at least some of it still was). It also makes one wonder, not only how the tremendous flowering of Islamic science, philosophy and art during the actual Christian Middle Ages fits into Harris' chronology, in which Islamic culture's progress is to mirror Christendom's, but 600 years later, but also whether Harris gave any thought at all to the fact that most of the oldest cities on Earth, Eridu, Ur, Babylon, Memphis, Thebes, are in the most central regions of Islam.

But you can't give much serious consideration to that which you never learned to begin with, can you?

A really remarkable, truly striking example of New Atheism's negligence of the study of history is the widespread New Atheist ignorance of both the history of religion and the history of atheism. Remarkable and striking because, if you're going to have an atheist movement which isn't absurd, the leaders of that movement should be among the leading experts on that history. Otherwise, what is the movement actually about? Batman and Spidey may be pretty cool, I wouldn't know, but they're no substitute for Thucydides and Livy and Gibbon and Voltaire and Marx and Burckhardt and Nietzsche.

By no means should the leaders of an atheist movement be as ignorant of science as Dawkins, Harris, Hitch, Myers and New Atheists generally are of history and philosophy. Looking at the New Atheists, the gulf between the sciences and the humanities seems as huge and strong as ever on the part of the scientists, but fortunately, the people who used to be known as humanists have been much better at filling it. Perhaps Bronowski should've been scolding both scientists and the people who used to be known as humanists about it, and not just the people who used to be known as humanists. (You see, before the New Atheists appropriated the word, a humanist was a specialist in the humanities. Made sense, didn't it? Ah, all the amazing things you can learn by studying history!)

"Since [group I dislike] [do this, which makes me dislike them], I guess I should reciprocate."

1) Not all of that group do that thing.

----- 1a) In fact, most of that group dislike it when that aggravating minority does that thing, making them all look bad in some people's eye. (Such as yours.)

----------1aI) You said that in a FB group specifically designed to overcome animosity between us and that group.

--------------- 1aIA) There are plenty of other FB groups, lots and lots of them, tons of them, where you can rag all day on that group and get high-fived and get plenty of likes, because verbal aggression against that group is what all those other FB groups are for, it's what they're about.

2) If it's bad when they do it and makes people dislike them, what's going to make it great and make you popular when you do it (outside of the groups, mentioned in 1aIA), specifically set up for that kind of thing)?

----- 2a) All they're doing is talking. (Ya big pussy.)

---------- 2aI) Do you find it necessary to respond to every stupid thing anybody ever says about you, or just with these guys?

----- 2b) You and people like you keep claiming we're better than they are. Is this how you prove it -- by stooping to the worst behavior of the worst of them?

---------- 2bI) Are you actually envious because you feel like they can get away with some bad behavior you can't get away with? (Wow, you really have some ambitious dreams for your life, don't you?)

3) I hate you, you idiot!

----- 3a) I don't expect you ever to understand why I hate you (being an idiot, and all). But if you're actually curious, there are dozens of other posts on this blog besides this post labelled "stupid atheists."

----- 3b) I like lots of people in the other group a lot more than I'll ever like you. There a lot of other criteria which a re much more important to me than which one of these two groups someone belongs to.

---------- 3bI) Which one of the two groups someone was in seemed a lot more important before I actually met a lot of the people in our group. Frankly, most of you have been a horrible disappointment.

--------------- 3bIA) But I'm sure that a lot of people in our group simply never mention that they're in our group, because they're embarrassed by you and those like you.

4) I hope you have a nice day. (See? See what I did there, Chuckles? It didn't kill me. It didn't cost me a thing but a moment and a kind thought, you moron!)

Should I Just Stop Responding To People Who Assume I'm A Theist?

It would save me a lot of time and energy. I mean a lot. A LOT. And it would reward those who pay more attention and who wait to decide whether a person is a theist or not until that person gives some sign about whether he or she is a theist or not -- or it would punish those more attentive people, depending on whether you consider my attention to be a reward or a punishment.

A Facebook group I'm currently in has far more actual communication on religious topics between atheists and believers than any other group I've seen. I don't think it's a coincidence that the leader of this group is a Christian who spends far more time criticizing Christians than non-Christians. It's clear that he cares about Christianity and recognizes the benefits for a group of self-criticism. Recognizing such benefits isn't rocket science, and they weren't discovered yesterday, but that recognition does seem to be entirely lacking from many religious and atheist groups.

The recognition of the downside of monotonous repetition seems to be lacking too. Have you noticed how atheists who say things like "atheists do not have a common belief system, sacred scripture or atheist Pope. This means atheists often disagree on many issues and ideas" tend to repeat a lot of the same talking points word for word -- for example: "atheists do not have a common belief system, sacred scripture or atheist Pope. This means atheists often disagree on many issues and ideas" ?

These people I'm talking about, who assume I'm a theist, they do so whenever I criticize any atheists or have positive things to say about any believers or any aspects of any religion. They do so in ostensible reaction to posts or comments in which I've gone to the trouble to say

"I'm an atheist."

Today it happened when someone responded to a blog post in which I had said

in the title of the post

that I was an atheist.

So maybe the reasonable thing to do is ignore them. Attempting to communicate with them seems to be pointless. I do put a certain amount of care and attention into my writing, perhaps it's not too much to ask for a certain amount of care and attention from my readers.

Perhaps you consider repeating talking points word for word to be communication. It sort of reminds me of some of the duller things that happen in churches, synagogues, mosques and other temples.

Postscript To 'Of Course The US Is A Christian Nation'

Over and over, New Atheists with whom I disagree about anything assume that I am a Christian. It's a standard reflex with them: NEW ATHEIST: When the Council of Nicea convened in AD 346 -- ME: Actually, they met in 325. NA: Look, pal, your precious God isn't going to come to your rescue here! Not in this discussion!

Don't I know it! It happened again today: someone supposedly responding to my blog post Of Course The US Is A Christian Nation referred to "your mythical deity."

He also mentioned the one line in the Treaty of Tripoli which another reader quoted 2 days ago in a comment here on the blog:

"The government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion."

Talk about cherry-picking. Going on 240 years of history of hundreds of millions of people, and one line in a treaty addressed to the Ottoman Empire is the best they can do when challenged by the suggestion that the famous American separation of church and state is lip-service occasionally paid to a principle, as opposed to an honest reflection of the way things are actually done here in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. It's not so surprising that two New Atheists separately mentioned a line from a treaty about which presumably neither of them knows anything else, a treaty very rarely discussed by anyone in the US outside of academic journals and graduate courses in US history. When you've got so very few straws to cling to defend a talking point, you've got to make sure that those straws are widely known.

What would the alternative be? Why, they'd have to abandon some preconceived ideas, and re-think some things! And we know they're not going to do that! No more than they're actually going to read the entire Declaration of Independence or Gettysburg Address from beginning to end.

The New Atheists' favorite American statesman when they insist that church and state really are separated in the US is Thomas Jefferson. Yes, Thomas Jefferson spoke out quite boldly against religion -- in some of his private letters to John Adams. What a firebrand! Jefferson is the most popular choice among New Atheists to replace Jesus. Jefferson himself sort of did this when he -- secretly, again -- cut out the parts of the Bible which offended him, creating the "Jefferson Bible," highly revered among New Atheists. Makes sense that they would love a book with many passages cut out. Makes sense that they would lionize this staunch opponent of slavery -- publicly. Occasionally. Depending upon his audience -- who never freed one of his hundreds of slaves during his lifetime, and in his will freed 5 of them, 2 of his children by Sally Hemings and 3 further members of the Hemings family, leaving the Jefferson family free to sell the other 130 to help defray the enormous debts he also bequeathed to them. I agree with the New Atheists: Jefferson is a fitting symbol for them.

(Besides the 2 of his children with Hemings freed in Jefferson's will, 2 others escaped during his lifetime. Unlike all the other slaves who escaped from Jefferson, no effort was made to re-capture these 2. What a great Dad, huh? What a statesman!)