- Ross Douthat and Bart Ehrman debate about the evolution of human morality; I’m not completely on board with either of them, and have a better explanation;
- Examples of the religiously besotted: who think Christ is the King of America; who thinks US troops are fighting for Jesus; who want women barefoot and off the voter rolls;
- Trump name-checks God;
- The teleport guy triples down.
Items on religion, beginning with a serious debate between two scholars.
NY Times, Ross Douthat with Bart Ehrman, 2 Apr 2026: Did Jesus Rise From the Dead? A Debate., subtitled “A ‘Christian Atheist’ joins Ross Douthat.”
Very long, with video. I noted it a couple days ago but haven’t taken the time to read it (or watch it). But then I saw this take:
Why Evolution is True, Jerry Coyne, 3 Apr 2026: Bart Ehrman schools Ross Douthat on Christianity and how to find Biblical “truth”
Coyne summarizes and quotes. Both have recent books. Douthat, a reliable defender of faith for NYT, has Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious from a year ago. Ehrman has Love Thy Stranger: How the Teachings of Jesus Transformed the Moral Conscience of the West just published in March.
I dismiss Douthat completely; he thinks the world would be a better place if everyone were a Christian, just like him; he thinks that’s what right and true about the world; he was imprinted young. I’m open to Ehrman, who went from believer to scholar (if not entirely skeptic), but I’m still skeptical of him; I had issues with his book JESUS BEFORE THE GOSPELS (review here), and the new one seems similarly credulous about matters of moral evolution (the moral conscience he refers to is the evolved human nature of hundreds of thousands of years; Jesus could not have changed human nature’s moral inclinations in a single generation, and what about the rest of the world?).
(One trouble with experts on any subject is that they don’t always know very much about anything else.)
Coyne excerpts their debate, and challenges claims from both. Ehrman seems to think he can tell what Jesus really said and thought (as opposed to what later writers claimed he said). His reasoning is valid to a point. Sample exchange from the debate:
Ehrman: Well, I think there are credible historical narratives in the Gospels. I think we can find things that Jesus really did say and really did do. But I don’t think that you can simply read the Gospels and think: Oh, that’s what Jesus really said and did.
There are a lot of reasons for that.
Douthat: Give me three reasons.
Ehrman: They are contradictory to each other, describing the same event, where they both can’t be right because they’re contradictory. They are written by people who were not there at the time, who didn’t live in the Jewish homeland, who did not speak Aramaic. They’re living decades later and are recording accounts that they’ve heard. So that’s two things: The authors living much later, and the contradiction.
The third thing is: These authors got their stories from somewhere. We don’t know where the authors lived and we don’t know who the authors were. The Gospels circulated anonymously before they had names attached to them. So we don’t know. We call them Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. But we don’t ——
Then Coyne challenges Ehrman’s thesis, consulting his “friend the philosopher Maarten Boudry”:
Is it true that there were a lot of Axial Age religions that promoted counterintuitive and challenging moral codes, like loving your enemy and turning the other cheek, apart from Christianity?
Yes, this is a well-documented observation among historians of religion and philosophy. The Axial Age (roughly 800–200 BCE, a term coined by Karl Jaspers) saw a remarkable convergence across several civilizations, where thinkers independently developed moral and ethical frameworks that challenged conventional human instincts like tribalism, revenge, and self-interest.
Then citing examples, with details, from Buddhism, Confucianism and Mohism in China, Jainism, Stoicism in Greece, and Zoroastrianism.
Here’s my take. As already said, Jesus could not have magically changed human nature — to expand it beyond selfish interests to be altruistic and generous — in a single generation. Morality has evolved, and it couldn’t have evolved that quickly. And again, what about the rest of the world?
On the contrary, I think, Jesus’s teachings simply encapsulated, just as some of the 10 commandments did, what was already going on around the world, in all cultures. No one got morality from the 10 commandments; the commandments simply captured the morality of the times (while giving that particular tribe and its particular god special priority). What actually happened was that, over hundreds of thousands of years, human morality evolved in (not for) the survival of larger and larger groups. No one given to theft or murder would last long; better for the instinct against these things to survive via natural selection that enabled such groups to survive. This happened in all cultures around the world, likely before those cultures split after the African diaspora. Eventually (once writing developed) the various religions encoded such rules. The instinctive rules came first. No one needs to consult lists in a holy book to know, at a basic level, what’s right or wrong.
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The besotted.
JMG, via Nashville ABC: GOP Rep. Andy Ogles Intros Bill To Lower Flags On Good Friday Because “Christ Is The King Of America”
No, he’s not.
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NY Times, 3 Apr 2026: Hegseth Says U.S. Troops Are Fighting for Jesus. The Pope Disagrees., subtitled “In sharp contrast to the Trump administration’s calls for Christian prayers for the war effort, Pope Leo XIV says military domination is ‘entirely foreign to the way of Jesus Christ.'”
Caption of the photo shown here: “Pope Leo, during the Holy Thursday Mass in Rome, said the Christian mission had often been ‘distorted by a desire for domination.'”
Again, modern Christianity seems more driven by the OT than by the NT.
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Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, today: These Christian men want women barefoot, pregnant… and off the voter rolls, subtitled “Influential pastors and right-wing figures are openly arguing women shouldn’t vote”
Have such people always been around, and we’re just hearing about them more and more? Or is this part of the resurgence of base tribal human nature? Note his appeal to the “natural”, and Mehta’s comment that they promote their goals “while ironically railing against the dangers of ‘Sharia Law'”
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Mediaite, today: Trump Name-Checks ‘GOD!’ in New Rant Threatening ‘Hell’ Will ‘Reign Down’
Trump:
Remember when I gave Iran ten days to MAKE A DEAL or OPEN UP THE HORMUZ STRAIT. Time is running out – 48 hours before all Hell will reign down on them. Glory be to GOD! President DONALD J. TRUMP
Has he used such language before? Or is he straining to appeal to his base?
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This guy triples down. Of *course* no one saw him ‘teleport’ in. He’s a religious lunatic.
NY Times, 3 Apr 2026: No One at Waffle House Remembers FEMA Official Who Says He Teleported In, subtitled “Gregg Phillips, who is in charge of responding to fires and floods, says the hand of God suddenly and mysteriously moved him to a 24-hour breakfast spot in Rome, Ga.”
Caption of photo: “Gregg Phillips is in charge of hundreds of people and millions of dollars.”
(Stipulation: apparently the word ‘teleported’ wasn’t his, but someone else’s description.)
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Enough for this evening.
