- Concerning Hegseth, Trump, and Rubio;
- Also, how do religious sects decide to reinterpret their scripture?
- 100% approval, teleportation, church/state separation, and uncounted COVID deaths;
- FBers compare reactions to Charlie Kirk’s death to Trump’s reaction to Robert Mueller’s death;
- And David Brin notes a similar comparison between Cesar Chavez and the people the right defends.
Everyone thinks God is on their side. Don’t they realize this?
NY Times, 20 Mar 2026: Hegseth Invokes Divine Purpose to Justify Military Might, subtitled “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has imbued U.S. military actions with a Christian moral underpinning that suggests they are divinely sanctioned.”
He spoke of “overwhelming force” and the U.S. military’s unmatched ability to rain “death and destruction from above” on its “apocalyptic” Iranian foes.
Then, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, standing in the Pentagon, issued a call to the American people for a specific kind of wartime prayer. He asked them to pray for victory in battle and the safety of their troops.
“Every day, on bended knee, with your family, in your schools, in your churches,” he said, “in the name of Jesus Christ.”
At a time when the U.S. and Israeli militaries are dropping thousands of bombs on a majority-Shiite Muslim nation, the explicitly Christian nature of Mr. Hegseth’s call stood out.
And so on. Later:
“I was saved by God to make America great again,” Mr. Trump said at his 2025 inauguration, referencing a sense of divine mission after surviving an assassination attempt. And last month in Munich, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said America and Europe were bonded together as civilizations by “Christian faith.”
I’m not sure which is worse: that Hegseth and Rubio and Trump really believe these things, or that they just say so to appeal to their base. It simply can’t true that God is on everyone’s side. To think so is to fail reality-literacy 101. And to think that God is on your side, and the other side is evil, is simple arrogance…. Not just personal arrogance, now that I think about it. There’s a civilizational arrogance too, and racism, reflecting the notion that America thinks its culture is superior to all others, that those brown-skinned people in the Middle East or Asia of Africa can’t be quite as smart as American whites and so their beliefs aren’t quite as legitimate, and so can be discounted. We’ve heard Rubio lately about the superiority of “Western Culture,” ignoring the aspects of that culture that overcame religion (the Enlightenment, the scientific revolution) and built our modern technological society. Despite religion.
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Similarly, how does this work exactly? It’s not about evidence. (Science is about evidence, which is why its conclusions do change from time to time.) The Catholic Church has famously done this many times. And the Mormons…
Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, today: Jehovah’s Witnesses issue “clarification” on blood transfusion ban after decades of suffering, subtitled “A long-standing life-or-death doctrine has been softened… without apology or accountability”
Of course their first mistake was in picking and choosing which passages of the Bible to think apply to the modern world. Mehta quotes Associated Press:
Jehovah’s Witnesses’ historic teachings on blood transfusions stem from biblical passages requiring believers to “abstain … from blood,” which they interpret as applying not just to food but to transfusions. While they teach that many detailed dietary laws in the Old Testament portion of the Bible no longer apply, they say this prohibition on partaking of blood is upheld as a universal principle for believers in other Bible passages.
While other religions interpret differently, of course. If only there were a way to draw conclusions about the world from the objective evidence of that world!
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Briefly, from JMG.
- From Yahoo News. Trump Lies That CNN Poll Gives Him “100% Approval”. Moron.
- From CNN. CNN: QAnon FEMA Chief Claims That He Can Teleport And Once Declared That “Bitch Biden Deserves To Die”. Looney. Click through to admire his beard.
- From Christian Post. Johnson: Atheists Lie About Church/State Separation. This is called motivated reasoning, in favor of his *own* religion, of course. (Never ever the Muslims, whom they would expel from the country if they could.)
- Much more seriously, from Associated Press: Study Finds 155,000 Uncounted COVID Deaths In US. There are legitimate disputes about how to assign cause of death of patients with multiple conditions. But note: “The undiagnosed dead were more likely to be Hispanic people and other people of color, who had died in the first few months of the pandemic, and who had been in certain states in the South and Southwest — including Alabama, Oklahoma and South Carolina.” Republican states who tended to downplay the severity of the disease.
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And an example of what everyone is saying today, from FB:
There wasn’t a single Democratic elected official who celebrated Charlie Kirk’s death. Not one. Donald Trump is openly celebrating Robert Mueller’s death and no Republicans are condemning him. Both sides are not the same.
Similarly, this comment from David Brin today on FB.
The differences are as stark as they were at Gettysburg, between flawed-good and absolute evil. Dig it: when Americans* learn that one of their icons or leaders had been a criminal pervert, we purge or disown him, as now with Chavez. When confederate/Kremlinist/Foxites learn about perv leaders they double down! They protect the rat. The many, innumerable rats, going back from Epstein’s pal all the way to Dennis Hastert …
*And yes, by now it’s clear. Blue = American and red/gray = Confederate. What? Can I prove that? While that’s not explicitly wager-able, one word makes it clear. Look a MAGA in the eye and say “Appomattox is coming.” He will flinch and flush, knowing exactly what you mean.
