- Hemant Mehta’s summary of the “Project 2025” plan by conservatives to turn the nation into a Christian theocracy;
- The trend in the US of the nonreligious;
- How drug use doesn’t cause homeless; it’s usually the other way around; and conservative cynicism;
- Revisiting U2 and Peter Gabriel. Today: “San Jacinto”
I’ve mentioned “Project 2025,” the Heritage Foundation’s plans for dismantling the US government as soon as a Republican gets into the White House again, several times. Here’s a one-stop-shopping summary by Hemant Mehta. (Including a link to the 920-page plan!)
Hemant Mehta, Friendly Atheist, 3 Oct 2023: Project 2025: A Christian Nationalist fever dream that would destroy American democracy, subtitled “The 920-page document details how a future Republican president could turn the nation into a Christian theocracy”
Mehta cites various examples of actions in the plan.
A lot of this reads like a Tucker Carlson fever dream. But make no mistake: It would elevate a conservative brand of Christianity above other faiths, no faith, and other kinds of Christian faith.
We see this in the first few pages, when Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts writes, “Today the Left is threatening the tax-exempt status of churches and charities that reject woke progressivism. They will soon turn to Christian schools and clubs with the same totalitarian intent.”
All of that is a lie. Church/state separation groups are not calling for churches to lose their tax-exempt statuses on the basis of their preaching; the only time that has come up is when pastors endorse political candidates from the pulpit, violating their own agreement with the IRS.
Elsewhere, the document claims “the Biden Administration has been hostile to people of faith, especially those with traditional beliefs about marriage, gender, and sexuality.”
The Biden administration opposes discrimination and bigotry; they have no problem with people of faith. (Biden is, in fact, a person of faith.) The fact that Project 2025 conflates the two says more about the type of Christianity they espouse than anything negative about the current administration.
It goes on. The essay ends:
The people behind Project 2025 have a $22 million budget to work with and an “advisory board” full of right-wing organizations with a long history of harming marginalized groups, spreading lies about American history, filing lawsuits to destroy civil rights protections, and banning books.
This is the future that awaits us if the Republican Party wins next year. It’s not fear-mongering. They’re literally telling us their plans.
The Republicans are the ones so concerned about “indoctrination.”
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A long piece by the Associated Press about a decades-long trend in the US.
AP, Peter Smith, 5 Oct 2023: The Nones: America’s nonreligious are a growing, diverse phenomenon. They really don’t like organized religion
This excerpt summarizes the piece:
The decades-long rise of the nones — a diverse, hard-to-summarize group — is one of the most talked about phenomena in U.S. religion. They are reshaping America’s religious landscape as we know it.
In U.S. religion today, “the most important story without a shadow of a doubt is the unbelievable rise in the share of Americans who are nonreligious,” said Ryan Burge, a political science professor at Eastern Illinois University and author of “The Nones,” a book on the phenomenon.
The nones account for a large portion of Americans, as shown by the 30% of U.S. adults who claim no religious affiliation in a survey by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Other major surveys say the nones have been steadily increasing for as long as three decades.
So who are they?
They’re the atheists, the agnostics, the “nothing in particular.” They’re the “spiritual but not religious,” and those who are neither or both. They span class, gender, age, race and ethnicity.
While the nones’ vast diversity splinters them into myriad subgroups, most of them have this in common:
They. Really. Don’t. Like. Organized. Religion.
That is, they’re not turning away from religion per se (that entails a sense for meaning, any meaning, that seems to be built into human nature); they’re turning away from the churches. All you have to do is pay attention to the scandals within the churches, and their attempts to subvert the democracy established by the American founders, to understand why. (Still, there’s that sunk-cost fallacy, and the difficulty of independent thinking in small towns.)
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Conservatives, cynical by nature, notoriously think the worst of people, while actual evidence shows they are usually wrong.
LA Times, Ryan D. Assaf, 4 Oct 2023: Opinion: People think drug use causes homelessness. It’s usually the other way around
A common perception among many Californians is that substance abuse is a chief cause of people losing their housing and living on the streets. But research debunks this myth.
Findings from the recent California Statewide Study of People Experiencing Homelessness encompassing more than 3,200 adults — the largest and most representative sample of homeless individuals since the 1990s — found that 50% have not used any drugs (methamphetamine, cocaine, crack cocaine or nonprescription opioids) in the last six months.
While drug use is much lower in California’s housed population, by no means does every person who is homeless actively use drugs.
For those who did use drugs in the last six months, 40% of people started using — more than 3 times a week —after becoming homeless.
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I’ve been revisiting my favorite musicians from the past… 40, even 50 years. I heard a song by U2 on a TV episode the other day, so I’ve re-listened to The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree, the latter being one of the great rock albums of all time. And that led me to thinking about Peter Gabriel, whose album So, released in 1986, the same year as The Joshua Tree, is also one of the great rock albums of all time. So I went to the garage, where my backlog of CDs sits, and brought upstairs everything by U2 and Peter Gabriel, to listen to them again.
There were four albums by Gabriel before So, just as there were four albums by U2 before The Unforgettable Fire. The earlier Gabriel albums have gems, like “Solsbury Hill”, but I had sorta not remember that, while So was likely his greatest album, the previous one, his fourth, had at least two very powerful, great songs. Here’s one of them. San Jacinto is a mountain overlooking Palm Springs.
Peter Gabriel, from his fourth album: “San Jacinto.”
And here are the lyrics. Yes, it’s about Mount San Jacinto, a peak lying just west of Palm Springs, looming over the town when you visit, with a famous tram you can take to the top. The song contrasts the rituals of the Native Americans who lived there before the white men came and took everything over. “I hold the line” the narrator sings. Apparently he’s been bitten by a snake. He sees the white men’s steakhouse. He climbs to the top of the mountain. And he’s getting weaker.
It’s unfortunate, perhaps, that Gabriel didn’t use the Native American name for the mountain. Wikipedia:
The peak is known to the Cahuilla Native Americans as I a kitch (or Aya Kaich), meaning “smooth cliffs.” It is regarded as the home of Dakush, the meteor and legendary founder of the Cahuilla.
Maybe Aya Kaich wasn’t sufficiently euphonious.
