- Conservative morality: Pete Hegseth’s racism; Vance’s immigrant fraud hoax; Blanche and loyalty; Narrow definitions of masculinity; downsizing recognized religions; more about demons; and Adam Lee on how conservatism may be hazardous to your health;
- Enlightened Progress: Jim Palmer on 10 religious ideas we no longer need to believe;
- Activity today.
— Conservative morality —
- Salon, Fred Kaplan, today: Pete Hegseth Keeps Turning the Racism Dial Higher and Higher
- Subtitled: Trump’s secretary of defense has a clear pattern of tearing down top officers who aren’t white men. The military will be weaker for it.
- Flat-out, in the open, racism and white supremacy.
- Salon, commentary by Amanda Marcotte, today: JD Vance goes all in on immigrant fraud hoax
- Subtitled: The vice president and Stephen Miller hope Nick Shirley’s dubious “exposés” will distract from Trump’s failures
- I don’t have a clean take on this. Is it that conservatives are racist, as in the above item, and consider immigrants to be subhuman? Is it strategic, as the subtitle suggests? But there’s the conspiracy theory part. Again, strategic? Or is it that conservatives, driven more by religious ideology than informed understanding of the real world, are especially credulous?
- Vox, Ian Millhiser, yesterday: Trump’s attorney general pick has exactly one qualification
- Subtitled: Todd Blanche passed his loyalty test to Trump.
- Loyalty. Which means he will lie and cheat for Trump, as needed.
- And their narrow definition of masculinity.
- The Atlantic, Helen Lewis, today: The Republicans Who Impugn Talarico’s Manhood
- Subtitled: Attacks on the Democratic Senate candidate in Texas show the GOP’s narrow, anxious definition of masculinity.
- And, the same writer is interviewed by Ezra Klein in NY Times, today: The New Right’s Very Old Vision of Men (with video)
- Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, today: Pete Hegseth shrinks military’s recognized religions list, erasing atheists and Humanists
- Subtitled: The Defense Secretary slashed the military’s religious categories from 200+ to 31, making countless service members effectively invisible
- Is it that 200+ categories are too many to keep track of? You can see the list of 31 on this military.com page. All but 10 are Christian denominations.
- Also noted by JMG
- These people are obsessed with demons.
- Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, yesterday: Hank Kunneman Says ‘The Devil And His Demons’ Do Not Want You To Know America Is Christian Nation
- In a way, another kind of conspiracy theory thinking.
- A substantial think piece.
- OnlySky, Adam Lee, today: Conservatism may be hazardous to your health
- Subtitled: The inevitable result of putting political ideology over science and expertise.
- Perhaps political ideologies should carry warning labels, like packs of cigarettes. The states with longest life expectancies are blue; those with shortest life expectancies, red.
-
A new scientific study in the journal Nature Human Behavior by Elizabeth Elder and Neil A. O’Brien … bears the title “The political polarization of health outcomes in the USA“, and it provides a glimpse of what the future holds for people on both sides of the great divide in America’s bitterly divided, harshly polarized political landscape.
- A recurring theme. Conservative ideologies eventually bump up against reality. The essay ends:
-
If conservatives cling harder to their anti-science ideology as a badge of identity, they’re only going to die in greater numbers over time. If that happens, it will be a fate they brought entirely on themselves. Liberals and progressives, who tend to trust science and follow medical advice, will inherit the earth.
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– Enlightened Progress –
Let’s try this subheading. The world progresses, despite conservatives. Progress is partly about growing up, and understanding how the things you thought as a child didn’t mean exactly what you were told.
Here’s a guy, Jim Palmer, with a Substack and frequent posts on Facebook.
Deconstructionology, with Jim Palmer, yesterday: 10 Religious Ideas We No Longer Need to Believe, subtitled “And the human problems they were trying to solve”
(This recalls the Stephen Prothero book, reviewed here, about how the different religions identify various “problems” that they then offer solutions to.)
Palmer:
Religion is often evaluated as though its primary purpose were to provide accurate information about reality.
That is rarely why religious ideas survive.
Religious ideas survive for centuries not because they are scientifically accurate, historically precise, or philosophically coherent. They survive because they help human beings manage something difficult about being human. They help us cope with uncertainty, mortality, suffering, belonging, identity, morality, chaos, and meaning.
The problem is that solutions developed under one set of historical conditions do not necessarily remain viable under another. As human knowledge expands, certain religious explanations become increasingly difficult to believe. Yet the existential needs they were addressing do not disappear.
I think this is precisely right. He goes on, at length. (As with some other online pundits, I wish he’d just write a book.)
I will list his ten items.
- The God in the Sky
- The Book That Contains All Truth
- Adam and Even
- Original Sin
- Hell
- The Virgin Birth
- Satan
- Divine Violence
- Blood Sacrifice
- Going to Heaven
And then his conclusion:
The crisis of our time is not that people are losing religious beliefs.
The crisis is that millions are losing the structures that once helped them orient themselves within reality while possessing no alternative framework for meaning, belonging, morality, mortality, or purpose.
This is why the future of spirituality will not be decided by arguments about doctrine. It will be decided by whether we can develop forms of existential maturity capable of carrying the human needs religion once contained.
The collapse of inherited belief systems is not the end of the spiritual journey. It is forcing us to develop capacities those systems once supplied for us.
The question is no longer what we believe.
The question is whether we can become the kind of people who no longer require certainty in order to remain in relationship with reality.
The future belongs neither to fundamentalism nor nihilism. It belongs to those capable of remaining in contact with reality without requiring guarantees. The task before us is not simply constructing new beliefs. It is developing the capacity to live honestly within uncertainty, mortality, complexity, and freedom. In other words, the challenge is not theological. It is existential.
The third to the last sentence is the key.
I’ll keep checking this guy out.
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Activity today. Began compiling the Shirley Jackson Awards. Will finish tomorrow. Anticipating both Nebula and Stoker winners this weekend. Read/skimmed 120 pages of Penn Jillette’s GOD, NO!. Began setting up blog post for the new Neil DeGrasse Tyson book. Thoughts about an “Inspectional Reading” Fb post about the two Haffner volumes. Did standard 30-minute walk. Listening to the Morricone score for Marco Polo. Going to dinner at A16, in just a few minutes.
