- Sure, teach the Bible in school, alongside Greek mythology;
- How Anthony Fauci was an early MAGA success at tearing things down;
- Heather Cox Richardson on how the Trump administration is trying to rewrite American history;
- Jim Palmer on religious ideas that don’t fit reality;
- How and why Trump is making the government worse, on purpose;
- And a suite of Hans Zimmer music for The Thin Red Line, including music that didn’t appear in the final score.
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OK, sure.
The Atlantic, Adam Kirsch, yesterday: The Bible Belongs in the Classroom, subtitled “Everywhere you look in American history, you will find the language, stories, and concepts from the Old and New Testaments.”
I would agree. When I was in the 8th grade, we learned Greek Mythology. We read Edith Hamilton. We read — maybe that was in the 10th grade — The Odyssey.
If only to understand how the ancients interpreted reality. How their stories became our phrases. And how their understandings inform our own. And the same could be said for the Bible. None of those ancient mythologies are literal truth.
At the same time, the conservative push to teach selections from the Bible in Texas public schools is not about cultural literacy.
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One of MAGA’s earliest successes at tearing down things they don’t understand.
The Atlantic, Katherine J. Wu, today: The Unmaking of Anthony Fauci, subtitled “He built an empire. It did not last.”
His advice changed as circumstances changed, and that befuddled and outraged conservatives. Long piece that ends:
Several of Fauci’s friends and former colleagues told me that they were hopeful that, with the passage of time, the vitriol would fade, administrations would change over, and the history books would ultimately memorialize Fauci for the scientific advances he spearheaded and the lives he saved. At the same time, several of the people I talked with admitted that Fauci’s recent experiences had forced them to reflect on what it meant to be a scientist in the modern era, when the practice of research and public health is under political attack.
They may understand that the approach to scientific leadership at which Fauci most excelled—moving through the nation’s politics, instead of being caught up in them—no longer works the way it did before. Americans have been advised by top health officials to second-guess traditional scientific expertise; some of those same officials now profess neutrality as they make “gold-standard science” their euphemism for political control. For decades, Fauci stood before the nation to offer steady and nonpartisan advice. In tomorrow’s hearing, that voice of science may not be heard at all.
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This is what conservatives do. Which indicates you can’t believe *any* history. Including the Bible’s.
Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, yesterday: July 27, 2026
The Trump administration is trying to rewrite the history of the United States. Trump officials reject our traditional understanding that the country was based on the ideas the Founders wrote in the Declaration of Independence and that Americans from all walks of life have struggled ever since to make those principles come to life.
In place of that historic understanding, the administration argues that the United States was founded as a white nation whose citizens are defined by their European heritage and the land they inhabited, an echo of the “blood and soil” ideology of Germany in the 1930s.
Making that shift requires erasing not just our multicultural past but also our history. On July 4 the White House Domestic Policy Council released a report titled Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage. The report says that the National Museum of American History (NMAH) “fails in the basic task of illuminating our heritage.”
It continued: “Our central finding is not that the Museum has simply added overlooked stories, corrected perceived errors, or broadened its historical scope. Rather, it is that Museum leadership has explicitly adopted an ideological framework that no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated, but as a political instrument to divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens.”
This conservative tendency is all about tribal solidarity. Don’t discuss anything that might undermine it. Hide all the mistakes. Deny all atrocities. We are the best!
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One might forgive the ancients for projecting human motivations onto the natural world. That’s all they knew. But you can’t forgive modern people for denying the evidence of reality.
Jim Palmer, Deconstructionology, today: 13 Religious Ideas That No Longer Fit Reality
One of the strangest features of religion is that ideas can survive for centuries after they have ceased to correspond with reality. We would never expect medicine, astronomy, or biology to remain frozen in the first century. As human knowledge expands, those disciplines revise their conclusions. Religion, however, has often treated revision as a threat rather than a responsibility. Many beliefs continue to receive an exemption from the ordinary standards of evidence and moral reasoning that we apply everywhere else simply because they are considered sacred.
I’ll just list the 13 items. Palmer has a paragraph of explanation for each.
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- There is a male God in the sky who rules the world.
- The earth was created in six twenty-four-hour days a few thousand years ago.
- God miraculously impregnated a virgin to produce a perfect son.
- Jesus was fully God and fully human at the same time.
- Adam and Eve were the first Homo sapiens.
- Sin is a spiritual disease spread by human conception.
- God regularly suspends the laws of nature through miracles.
- Evil is the result of a fallen angel named Satan.
- God commands murder, violence, and war when necessary.
- God required the sacrifice of his own son before humanity could be forgiven.
- Unbelievers are sent to an afterlife of eternal conscious torment.
- The point of Jesus is punching people’s ticket to heaven.
- All absolute and ultimate truth is contained in one book.
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Notice what these ideas have in common. Nearly all of them emerged in a pre-scientific world attempting to explain reality with the knowledge available at the time. The remarkable question is not why ancient people believed them. The remarkable question is why so many people still do.
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Letting go of these ideas does not leave us with less. It leaves us with reality itself. The task is not to replace one closed system with another, but to develop the capacity to encounter reality with greater honesty, humility, and wonder.
Well, I would say, because such beliefs tie people to communities of similar believers; they serve a social function. And it’s so much easier to defer to a fixed set of ancient holy texts than to actually understand the real world.
This is not about “believing” in religion or not; it’s about rejecting a primitive view of the world derived from human nature, and not about the evidence of reality. Of course one doesn’t “believe” in the supernatural claims of religion; many religious followers don’t either, really. They just like the community bonds.
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Because…
The Bulwark, Jill Lawrence, today: Trump Is Making Government Worse on Purpose, subtitled “Instead of seeking to simplify and improve citizens’ lives, this administration keeps creating new obstacles and burdens.”
DONALD TRUMP HAS BEEN TRYING for months now to shrink the number of Americans who can vote. So far his efforts have been in vain, but this might be the week he succeeds.
The SAVE Act that Trump is pushing is not simply a voter ID bill. It’s part of his administration’s larger drive to make government interactions as frustrating, time-consuming, and clunky as possible—with the end goal of netting financial or political gain for Trump, his family, his friends, and his enablers.
As I mentioned a few posts ago: Trump is about power, and mostly money, and not about principles or the American people.
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As I write I’m listening to this YouTube:
Hans Zimmer’s score for THE THIN RED LINE is one of my favorite film scores of all time. It’s slow, deep, immersive, profound. What this video reveals is that much more music was written for the film than was actually used.
But this is common. Writers, musicians, filmmakers, all generate more text, music, and film scenes than are ever used in their final products. I’ve known that intellectually; I didn’t realize that about this score.
Here’s a suite from the actual score:
