Tag Archives: Donald Trump

What Is Truth?

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I’m sceptical (or skeptical if you’re in the US). It’s a legacy of my years of believing the promises of Christianity. Preachers, pastors, Bible study leaders told me for 25 years that the promises of the bible, of Jesus himself, were all true. And like a fool I believed them. Jesus had made a new creature out of me; he loved me; he was guiding my life; he was returning soon; I’d be resurrected; I’d live in heaven forever… and on and on.

What a preposterous set of propositions! It took my Great Realisation, my own personal revelation that there was no God, to make me see how ridiculous they were.

It is this that left me with a legacy of scepticism. If I’d been misled all this time by people I respected and admired, what else was I accepting as true that very well might not be? I wasn’t going to be fooled again and so began to question practically everything I was told by authorities, experts and the media. If it seemed ‘off’, as we say these days, not quite right or too good (or bad) to be true I asked, ‘Who says so?’, ‘How do they know this?’, ‘What is the evidence?’, ‘Do they jump to conclusions or is their reasoning sound?’, ‘Why should I believe what they say?’ It’s exhausting, I assure you, having to search out the evidence – the primary sources of information – and to sift through it, recognising any bias that has been imposed on it. It’s either this or I must accept without question that everything I’m told is true. I can’t do that any more.

Here are a few examples of claims that I’ve been sceptical of on the recent past:

We are being guided by the science, said politicians during Covid to ensure compliance with whatever lockdown measures were being imposed. Did this really just mean was ‘we are being guided by our interpretation of some rather suspect data’? It became clear after we emerged from the hysteria surrounding the pandemic that this was the case.

Tens of thousands will die of Covid unless you comply: this based on computer predictions which turned out to be very far from accurate: the suspect data that ‘guided’ politicians.

A woman can have a penis. A man can have cervix. Yes, our politicians told us this during our recent fixation with transgenderism. Whatever you think of people changing sex, these two statements, designed to change hearts and minds, if not penises and cervixes, are patently false. Whatever was guiding those who said such things, it certainly wasn’t ‘the science’.

No more irresponsible, undeliverable promises. So said the Prime Minister exactly a year ago. I’m not going to be sceptical or cynical about this. I feel sure it’ll turn out to be true. Is he implying though that promises made earlier than this were indeed ‘irresponsible and undeliverable’. Surely not.

We will not raise taxes on working people (and energy prices will fall by £300 in the long term), Labour politicians, now the government, said only last year in an attempt to gain our votes. I was sceptical about this, as with much they said, and for the first time in many years Labour did not get my vote. Taxes have increased considerably for working people and everyone else in the last year and are set to rise again this week. The price of energy has risen too, by 18%, and will do so again in January. A £300 reduction by 2030, if it happens at all, is not really going to offset this by much. This was all very predictable; since when do politicians tell us the truth in order to get us to vote for them?

Anything Donald Trump says. Insert your selection here.

The NHS is the envy of the world. Pundits and politicians are very fond of this one. They like to add too that the NHS is underfunded. But the NHS is expensive, management heavy and wasteful. Is it really the envy of the world, and if it is, so what, when it’s constantly in crisis at home?

The BBC is the envy of the world. It is impartial and balanced. Is it? A number of independent reviews have determined that it has its own agendas and biases. During lockdowns it fuelled hysteria and now contributes to climate change panic. Rather than reporting facts, it tells us too often what we’re meant to think about issues. It has also been rocked over the past dozen years by sleaze and scandals.

Islam is a religion of peace. So many questions about this one. Many Western politicians have claimed something like it. President George W. Bush did, shortly after 9/11. Perhaps ordinary Muslims are committed to peace but there are many Islamists (the term now used for Muslim extremists) are evidently not: as well as 9/11 there have been acts of Islamist terrorism in London (7th July 2005), at Charlie Hebdo in Paris, in Manchester, the slaughter in the street of an off duty soldier, the massacre of Israeli young people in October 2023, the killing of Christians and others in Nigeria.. Is ‘Allahu Akbar’ really a cry of peace?

We can halt or reverse the climate changes we ourselves have caused. Can we? Who says? (Greta Thunberg, yes, but no actual scientists that I can find.) We can perhaps mitigate and slow down the change, and we should. But the climate will continue to change. Are these changes solely the fault of us humans – we’re contributing to the pace of change, certainly – when the climate has been in constant change from time immemorial?

I was accused of trying to be a maverick in a recent comment on an old post. Honestly, I’m not. It’s more a case of ‘once bitten, twice shy’; I’m not going to be told ever again what to think, especially not by those who don’t present good reasons why I should (I’ve Jesus to thank for this). Everything needs to be questioned, otherwise our minds are not our own. Be sceptical.

Back by unpopular demand – it’s the New Year Pop Quiz!

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All set? Here we go!

1. Which one of these fantasy figures actually exists?

2. For which one of these ideas is there refutable/verifiable, corroborative scientific evidence?

3. Which one of these events is demonstrably historical?

4. Which one of these phenomena is verified and corroborated by psychology?

5. Applying logic and reasoning, which of the following scenarios is most likely to be true:

6. Which of these statements is verifiably true?

Answers:

Question 1. The answer is none of them, though C, Donald Trump, comes closest. 10 points if you put C, none if you plumped for any of the others: despite the volumes written about them there isn’t an iota of  evidence that they exist.

Question 2. Award yourself 10 points for B, though if you’re a True Believer this is the only one you think isn’t true. There is an abundance of refutable/verifiable, corroborative scientific evidence that it is. You can only wish there were for the other three.

Question 3. A is correct – 10 points. There is a considerable amount of evidence that the moon landing occurred on 20th July 1969. There is absolutely none at all that the other three are historical. For the sake of argument, let’s say they’re mythical. Nul points if you think otherwise.

Question 4. The answer is all of them. Oh no, wait… that’s my cognitive dissonance speaking. D is the only one of those listed recognised by psychologists. My bad and 10 points to you.

Question 5. The answer is of course E. Award yourself another 10 points if you thought outside the box on this one. (You can also have 10 points if you said they’re all equally likely, as in ‘not at all’.)

Question 6. 10 points for D. 

Scores: 

If you scored 50 or more, congratulations! If you scored nothing at all, you are confirmation that question 6’s answer – D. Human beings are capable of believing just about anything – is true. Well done.

A happy new year to you all.

 

 

Extinction Rebellion

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I get tired of people telling me how I should live my life. I’ve survived to the ripe old age of 64 with some reasonable success and have, I think, contributed positively to others’ lives during the course of my own. That doesn’t stop others telling me how I should live differently, in the way they think I should live. Christians do it, of course (more on that next time) and now there’s Extinction Rebellion dictating to us. It would be folly to deny, as Trump and his evangelical sycophants do, that the planet is in trouble. We do need to act now to protect it, but irresponsible pranks (and they are pranks) like mass nurse-ins, occupying and disrupting city centres and airports and spraying red paint over buildings is not how to do it. Campaigners wouldn’t be able to have nurse-ins if they weren’t producing offspring to use the resources of this already overcrowded planet; they wouldn’t be driving or using polluting public transport to get to protests; they wouldn’t be creating a mess with red paint.

The prime minster’s father, Stanley Johnson, was interviewed on the radio this morning. He’s a supporter of Extinction Rebellion and has spoken at some of their rallies. The reporter, Nick Robinson, asked him if, to help protect the environment, he would be giving up flying. Johnson responded by saying something along the lines of, ‘Of course not. Although I’m a frequent flyer, I need to fly to give speeches in different parts of the world about how to save the planet.’ How self-defeating is that? You want to save the planet? Don’t fly, don’t use fossil-fuelled transport (and it’s all largely fossil-fuelled), don’t add to the levels of pollution by wasting gallons of red paint other people have to clean up in their fossil-fuelled vehicles, don’t make more humans.

‘Change begins with me’, as we used to say, not by telling others how to live while hypocritically making an exception of yourself.

 

 

The Chosen One

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Donald Trump is chosen by God. His powerful friends in The Family have decided. Other influential Christians, like the odious Franklin Graham, have endorsed it. Trump himself made reference to it in a speech recently. He claims this was a joke, but we know what’s said about words spoken in jest; the Donald believes what his Christian chums have told him.

Evidently Trump cannot have been chosen by God when there is no God to do the choosing. Nor does Trump’s behaviour indicate that he’s God’s man. He is ignorant, self-obsessed, spiteful, vindictive, boorish, narcissistic and cruel. Not only is he ignorant generally, he is ignorant about the bible, has no idea about what being a Christian entails and is unable to answer any questions about his supposed faith.

Why then do Christians of all stripes claim he is specifically chosen by God to be president? How do they know? Allowing for a moment that there is a God, the notion that he chooses his agents here on Earth is fraught with insurmountable problems. That he predetermines who will serve him or even who is saved is an insoluble paradox that I’ve written about before, here and here.

No, Christians who say Trump is God’s Chosen are convinced of this only because he supports and implements their agenda; he is anti-abortion, anti-gay and anti-immigrant. He favours guns, white people, Israel, the wealthy and evangelicals. This is why Christians like him, why The Family says he is chosen by God, because these are their priorities and therefore, they conclude, they must be God’s priorities too.

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For any Christians reading, particularly in the U.S., the process goes something like this:

1. You decide what is important to you.

2. You find support for your priorities in the bible (because support for just about anything can be found somewhere in the bible. Alternatively, you can just say what you believe is in the bible. Nobody’s checking.);

3. You disregard any apparent contradiction in the words attributed to Jesus;

4. You tell yourself that because God supports your agenda somewhere in the bible, this must therefore be his agenda also;

5. You exercise cognitive dissonance, a.k.a. dishonesty, to enable you to conclude that any influential agent who is prepared to support your priorities must therefore be chosen by God.

Naturally your agent need not demonstrate any other traits that might reasonably be expected of a God-follower (humility, love, hospitality, treating others like they themselves like to be treated and so on.) These things are unimportant so long as the agent is carrying out your agenda.

6. You tell others only of point 5, thus furnishing the entire process with a high-sheen spiritual gloss;

7. You accuse anyone who doesn’t support your agenda and your Chosen One of betraying God.

A good deal of self-deception and deceiving of others is required to pull this off, but Christians are more than up to the job. That’s why Trump is in the White House and why his Christian fixers are never far from his side.

Jesus, plus nothing

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‘Jesus, plus nothing’ is the motto – the slogan – of ‘The Family’, a secretive, clandestine Christian group that for 60+ years has influenced, and been part of, the government of the USA. Yes, poor persecuted Christians, who find their rights eroded on a daily basis (or so they like to tell us) actually exercise a disproportionate amount of control over those in power. Controlled for many years by ‘the most influential Christian you’ve never heard of’, Doug Coe, this group disregards any notion of separation of church and state. The new Netflix series, The Family, based on Jeff Sharlet’s books The Family and C Street, documents their activities, which include affecting policy both at home and abroad, and taking the gospel of ‘Jesus, plus nothing’ to the mighty and powerful across the globe, often on the taxpayer’s dime.

But what does ‘Jesus, plus nothing’ really mean? There’s no doubt it’s intended to convey a stark honesty: this version of Christianity, it says, is without all the clutter that has accrued since Jesus walked the Earth, including all of Paul’s complicated theology. The Family’s holy book is not the bible in its entirety but a slim volume simply entitled Jesus that contains only the four gospels and Acts. The Jesus story, pure and simple.

Except there really isn’t anything simple about the Jesus story. It isn’t even a single story. Nor is there one, single Jesus. (As you’ll see at the links, I’ve written about both of these problems before.) The Jesus that The Family promotes is one of its own making. Of course, every version of Jesus is a construct, loosely based, at best, on bits and pieces from the bible, but manufactured entirely by what different groups and individuals would like him to be. It’s probable that the gospels themselves are constructs built on Old Testament ‘prophecies’ and references, and that the Jesuses they portray are no more than literary creations. Even so, the Jesuses held dear by modern believers, and The Family in particular, bear little resemblance to the constructs of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John on which he is supposedly based.

He is, as one of The Family’s Christian critics points out, a talisman, a magic word that opens doors for speaking ‘truth’ to dictators and tyrants. A Jesus synonymous with power; the power to control nations’ policies, direction and morality. A Jesus who chooses his men (always men) to wield this power; a Jesus who chooses ‘weak vessels’ to do his bidding; a Jesus who, The Family is convinced, chose Donald Trump to be president. And when Jesus chooses you – or when his agents on Earth do – then you are chosen indeed. They make sure of it.

To be continued.

Experts in make-believe

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As it is in the secular world, so in the Kingdom of Heaven. Entirely self-appointed experts abound in the religious sphere: priests, pastors, preachers, imams, rabbis. Some have degrees in theology; some have a degree of enlightenment (or so they claim) from personal encounters with the supernatural; some have learnt at the feet of the experts who have gone before them.

But what are religious experts expert in? Unlike our politicians who have at least a degree in a legitimate subject (even if not the one they now profess to know all about) the only thing religious experts are knowledgeable about is a collection of fantasy stories. That’s the Bible, of course, for Christian ‘experts’, with its supernatural beings, monsters, giants, magical incantations, transformations and resurrections.

If these experts were to encounter the same sort of fantastic notions in any other book, they would readily acknowledge that what they were dealing with was myth and legend. Not so their own ‘holy’ text! Oh no. This, of all the books of magic that exist, is, they say, the real deal because in amongst the far-fetched stories is some moralising about being extra-nice to fellow Jews and loving your enemies.

All that Christian experts are expert in is myth. That is their specialist subject. They’re not really interested in the injunctions about serving others; the mythical stuff they refuse to acknowledge as myth is much more to their liking: the eternal God-man, living forever, fantasy heaven, fantasy hell. The expertise of priests, pastors and preachers is in this smorgasbord of twaddle – and even then they frequently get it wrong. Those who offer their ‘spiritual’ experiences as demonstration of its veracity (‘I know it’s true because I commune with the eternal God-man’) add nothing of substance to their claims; all they’ve done is internalise myth, nothing more. Myth it remains. And just how useful is expertise in made-up stories in this day and age?

Like politicians who are skilled in one area but assume expertise in another, Christian experts also think that their knowledge of myth makes them experts about all sorts of other things: psychology, morality, the state of the world, politics, science, history and pre-history – even the future. They know all about these, they like to tell us, because by extrapolating from their book of myths and legends, they have an understanding that surpasses that of the real experts in these areas (we can exclude the future here; no-one in the real world claims to know with any certainty what the future holds. Naturally, Christians like to pretend they do).

You think this isn’t the case?

Because of what they think the Bible says:

Mike Pence, ‘evangelical Catholic’ and vice-President, thinks God will heal America only if ‘his people, who are called by his name, humble themselves and pray’ (quoting 2 Chronicles 7.14). He wants to end state-funded abortion rights into the bargain and disputes climate change;

Franklin Graham, who said prayers at the recent inauguration, insists that God himself engineered Donald Trump’s election;

Pastor Robert Jeffress, who provided a private church service for Trump prior to the inauguration, thinks so too, so that America can have ‘one more chance’.

Jim Bakker, ex-felon, televangelist and guest at the inauguration, claims he was responsible for Trump’s election because he ‘bound’ hell-spawned demons who opposed Trump.

Pastor Rick Wiles, meanwhile, is too busy enjoying being sprayed with the golden showers of God’s Grace that even now are ‘oozing’ from Heaven because of Trump;

Steve Bannon, Trump’s Chief Strategist & Senior Counselor and one of the architects of the immigration ban, is pushing hard for a return to ‘Judeo-Christian traditionalism’ (which hasn’t stopped him from being married and divorced three times);

Betsy DeVos, Trump’s anti-gay Education Secretary, thinks schools should be used to build God’s Kingdom on Earth and wants Creationism taught alongside Evolution;

Ken Ham continues to influence people like Betsy, by teaching that the earth was created 6,000 years ago, Adam and Eve really existed and humans co-existed with dinosaurs;

Jerry Falwell jr, appointed by Trump to reform higher education, sees no contradiction between being a pro-life creationist and an arms advocate;

Religious Rights leaders are urging Trump to reverse the rights granted to LGBT people under President Obama, both in America and worldwide. At the time of writing it looks like he might;

Anne Graham Lotz, Billy Graham’s alabaster daughter, asks what the Bible has to say about the Women’s March in Washington last week and concludes that women who protest are ‘loud, undisciplined and without knowledge’;

Sandy Rios of the religious ‘American Family Association’, agrees, saying feminists are ‘people who live in filth’;

Steven Anderson thinks people in need are ‘lazy bums’, just like the Bible says (2 Thessalonians 3:10) and continues to call for LGBT people to be executed;

A million and one other preachers and pastors think they have your psychology all worked out – you’re nothing but a sinner in need of Jesus’ saving grace.

By any rational standard this is all lunatic stuff. These people know no more than you or I about any of the subjects they spout about. They think they do – and worse still others believe they do – because of what (they think) is in their collection of myths; ‘I know what I’m talking about because it’s in my magic book!’ And who are we to doubt such credentials?

It is all fallacy. Christian experts are experts only in the ephemeral, the unproven, the mythical. Yet they claim to know so much about everything else as a result. They claim they know how you should live your life and what, for you own good, you should be allowed to do and what you should not.

People such as these have now come to power in America.