Need a Plan B. Problem is that it does not exist!

The sun is shining, and spring is in full bloom.

Yet, as Max Boot writes, "I am in despair as I have never been before about the future of our experiment in self-rule."

tRump has proved over and over again that nobody will do anything even if he shoots somebody in the middle of 5th Avenue.

And now he apparently has god also on his side!

“People say, ‘How do you get through that whole stuff? How do you get through those witch hunts and everything else?’” Trump said, turning to Vice President Pence. “And you know what we do, Mike? We just do it, right? And we think about God.”

Holy shit!

And, he continued:

“One of the things that Mike and I were discussing just a little while ago—people are so proud to be using that beautiful word, God, and they’re using the word God again, and they’re not hiding from it,” he said. “They’re not being told to take it down, and they’re not saying we can’t honor God. In God we trust. So important.”

Thus spake the pussy-grabbing sleazeball!

It does not shock me anymore that the religious right is solidly behind this horrible human being.  While politics always has made strange bedfellows, never have we witnessed such a combination.  The righteous followers of Jesus in bed with "the racist, pxxxy-grabbing, child-caging, transphobic, Muslim-hating, “sh*t hole” mocking Nazi apologist," as Charles Blow describes tRump.

We continue to dig way down and far away from the high bar that Abraham Lincoln set.  Lincoln  was asked if God was on his side, during the Civil War.  To which Lincoln replied: “Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God’s side, for God is always right.”

If god is always right, and he has selected tRump as his envoy, as the evangelicals claim in their support for him, does it mean that god approves racism; pussy-grabbing; child-caging; homo- and trans-phobia; Islamophobia; mocking the poor in shitholes; promoting white supremacy; ...?

Maybe god will reelect him in 2020 in order to teach us non-believers a lesson that we will never forget!

Yet another odd response to a blog post :)

So, a couple of days ago, I had blogged about a Gopal Krishna voicing his religious right rhetoric in Iowa. 

Turns out that the blog post was read by him; I had no idea that my blog has that kind of reach! 

In an email, Gopal Krishna writes:

Thank you for writing a blog about me.  I hope it gave you a good night sleep.

Sounds like he was not happy with my post, eh!

It is strange how my rather trivial observations from a small town end up being read by people in strange places.  No, I don't mean Iowa being strange :) 

Even the very light traffic my website generates, while catering mostly to an American audience, gets visitors from every continent--except Africa.  Rarely does the blog have African visitors.  Perhaps nothing here interests them?  But then I have blogged a lot about Africa, too ...

So, "Gopal Krishna" is a Christian name, too? :)

So, there I was wondering if C-Span might have anything interesting (yes, "I heart C-Span"!!!) and two women were getting ready to sing the national anthem.  I lingered a little longer, at the live coverage of the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition.

Good thing I stayed there because otherwise I would have never have been shocked as I was when I saw an Indian-looking and Indian-accented guy move to the mic and recognize the guests.  C-Span identified him as Gopal Krishna.

If it were a regular GOP meeting, I would not have been surprised at all; I have known quite a few people from India who are committed Republicans.

But, this was at the "Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition"--a religious right organization.

And an Indian-looking and Indian-accented guy at the mic, and his name is Gopal Krishna.

You see why I was so stunned at this spectacle?

It doesn't end there.

This Gopal Krishna lets out a crazy rhetoric that no local government, or state, or Congress, or court, or president has anything to say about life.  As the camera panned out, I saw quite a few standing and applauding that statement.

A google search tells me that this Gopal Krishna was with the Christian Alliance.  So, even more surreal that a "Gopal Krishna" is a Christian.  I mean, this is like a BJP member being named Mohammed :)

The google search also came up with the following that Gopal Krishna apparently said at an earlier event:

America is “doing a slow dance with socialism,” “abandoning friends and apologizing to enemies” abroad, and even becoming “a multicultural haven for every weird and kinky lifestyle.” The activists in attendance thrilled to each assertion.

Let me see ... an immigrant from India complaining about the US being a multicultural haven?  Can't get more bizarre, eh!  At least, the Dave Chapelle skit on the blind black guy being a white supremacist was fictional!

Only in America, eh!

Turns out that Jon Stewart had commented about it :)

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We are not "in a war of reason against faith"

So, there I was reading David Brooks' rather strange column, and all of a sudden I run into the following sentences:

The rise and now dominance of this emotional approach to morality is an epochal change. It challenges all sorts of traditions. It challenges the bookish way philosophy is conceived by most people. It challenges the Talmudic tradition, with its hyper-rational scrutiny of texts. It challenges the new atheists, who see themselves involved in a war of reason against faith and who have an unwarranted faith in the power of pure reason and in the purity of their own reasoning.

I got ticked off.
As an atheist, I have never felt that I was involved in a war of reason against faith. On the contrary, I am sick and tired of the "faith" people's attempts--on a regular basis--to push science and reason to the remotest possible corner. If at all there is a war, there is only one warring faction and that is the "believers".

Second, I do not see myself as having "unwarranted faith in the power of pure reason and in the purity of their own reasoning" .... oh, please .... I walk around with doubts all the time. I just plainly refuse to accept through "blind faith" ideas that religions and religious people want me to believe. Brooks does not seem to understand that in reason and science we always leave room for possibilities. As long as the evidence we have leads us to certain conclusions, well, we can't adopt a position that will contradict that data, can we? On the other hand, as Keynes remarked, when the facts change we correspondingly change our minds.

Heather Mac Donald has a similar point:

As for non-believers’ purported faith “in the purity of their own reasoning,” I have no idea what Brooks is talking about. The new atheists are not on an intellectual purity crusade; they see the whole of human thought as evidence of the richness of the human mind. They embrace the gorgeousness and grandeur of music, art, and literature as a source of meaning and wisdom.

She adds a lot more. I liked this:

With all respect to David Brooks, this claim strikes me as nonsensical. The new atheists are arguing not against the view that morality is innate, but that it is the product of formal religious teaching. It is the theistic and theocon worldview that is challenged by what Brooks calls the “evolutionary approach to morality,” not the skeptical one. It is the theocons who assert that unless society and individuals are immersed in purported Holy Books, anarchy and depredation will rule the world.

Skeptics respond that moral behavior is instinctual, that parents build on a child’s initial impulses of empathy and fairness and reinforce those impulses with habit and authority. Religious ethical codes are an epiphenomenon of our moral sense, not vice versa. The religionists say that morality is handed down from a deity above; secularists think that it, and indeed the very attributes of that deity himself, bubble up from below. Children raised without belief in divine revelation can be as faithful to a society’s values as those who think that the Ten Commandments (at least those not concerned with religious prostration) originated with God.

I think that Brooks should restrict himself to writing about politics and economics, and not wade into philosophy, reason, and faith.

The Secular Right

We often hear about the "religious right".  But, rarely about the "secular right".  It is simply impossible that there are conservatives who are not religious, right?  After all, it simply cannot be the case that all atheists are only lefties.

While far from a conservative myself, I found it simply fascinating a few years ago to read an essay by Heather Mac Donald in which she discussed why she is an atheist.  I had read a few essays by her in the City Journal, and almost always I disagreed with her.  Mac Donald comes to issues with a Reason-like rigid libertarian perspective and, while there is a lot of libertarian in me, well, there are issues where I lean left.

But, it was not that much a surprise because it is easy to imagine libertarians as atheists.

It is, therefore, not an eyebrow raiser by any means to read that Mac Donald is a contributing blogger at the Secular Right.  

I hadn't heard about this blog until earlier today.  Their mission sounds like it was time Conservatives were reminded of this:

We believe that conservative principles and policies need not be grounded in a specific set of supernatural claims.  Rather, conservatism serves the ends of “Human Flourishing,” what the Greeks termed Eudaimonia. Secular conservatism takes the empirical world for what it is, and accepts that the making of it the best that it can be is only possible through our faculties of reason.

I wish these people lots and lots of luck.  A reformed GOP will be far more constructive than the current one held hostage by the "religious right"

Mac Donald will certainly not get any invitations to Rick Warren's Christmas party after writing pieces like this:

Since believers give credit to God for answering their prayers when they are saved from catastrophe or illness, they have to explain why he answered their prayers and not those other people’s prayers, why he saved these children from a tsunami and not those other children.  Any believer who today thanks God for making sure that his coronary bypass operation was successful has to explain why God allowed at least 37 peasants to be buried in a Guatemalan landslide on Sunday.  

In another post, Mac Donald notes:

The teen birth rate has started climbing again. As usual, it’s highest in red states and states with high black and Hispanic populations and lowest in New England blue states. In 2006, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Texas topped the list, with 68, 64, and 63 births for every 1000 female teens, respectively, compared to 19 births per 1000 female teens in New Hampshire and 21 in Vermont and Massachusetts.

Will more religion cure this scourge? Not by itself. Mexican-American teens have the highest birth rate—93 births per 1000 girls—compared to 64 births per 1000 black girls and 26 births per 1000 white girls. Decadent secular Europe and non-Christian Asia lag far behind. In 2003, Japan’s teen birthrate was 3.9 births per 1000 girls. Italy’s rate was 6.9 per 1000, and France’s, 10 births per 1000 girls.

You go, girl!