What Was Scattered Was Not Destroyed

Mega churches have replaced the Good News with a mission statement.

Here in Rockford, Illinois, a Rust Belt city well-acquainted with extraction and abandonment, that line isn’t satire. It’s an observation. You can’t drive across the east side without passing half a dozen colossal church buildings, their parking lots repaved more often than their theology. Inside, you’ll find stage lighting, fog machines, and sermons that sound suspiciously like quarterly business updates. If you drive west, over the Rock River, you’ll pass a dozen smaller sanctuaries. These are the old brick churches with crooked signage and overgrown hedges. The lights are off. The pews gather dust.

In my work as a therapist, I’ve sat with the shepherds of these flocks, who confess, quietly and often tearfully, that the Church is dying. Not changing. Dying. Some say it with a kind of weary relief, as if finally naming aloud what they’ve known for years, but didn’t have permission to speak. Others say it with resignation, their voices thin from holding up too much for too long. They speak of empty pews and aging congregations, of buildings they can no longer afford to heat, and the pressure to stay upbeat and innovate. Many of them have baptized, married, and buried three generations of the same families. What they grieve is not the loss of status or size, but the slow unraveling of something sacred, something that once held people together, and now struggles to hold at all. None of them say it flippantly because they’ve stayed, and love the flock, even as the pasture thins.

It reminds me of what’s happened to the land itself. This region was once a checkerboard of crop rotations and small farms that provided local goods and sustained families. Rockford made things that lasted. Spoken of now almost like mythology, this was the land of the monkey sock, the screw capital of the world, a manufacturing goliath built with many hands. It was a place of quarried limestone, used to build roads and homes with local stone and labor. Then the quarries closed. The factories shuttered. The fields gave way to monocrops, and the people were left to wander inside the skeleton of something that once provided. And now I see it happening again—this time in the sanctuary. Congregations are being mined for tithe, for clout, for spectacle. Rock bands and prosperity gospels work the crowd while the till stands open, not to offer, but to receive.

The Church has begun to mimic the economic logic of the industry that abandoned it. Build bigger. Consolidate. Extract. Move on. What follows isn’t meant to be a eulogy, exactly. It’s a reflection, maybe even a small lament. A slow walk around the ruins of Babel, with some help from Richard Rohr, Maslow, and a few thoughts from the therapy chair. There are still pockets of quiet faith out there. Faith with dirt under its fingernails, content to grow things instead of counting them. But it’s getting harder to hear that voice through the static. If the Tower of Babel was a warning label, we’ve peeled it off the pack and lit the match anyway.

As a therapist, I spend my days listening to people sift through the wreckage of their own lives. They are lives marked not just by trauma or loss, but by confusion. A kind of existential disorientation. They come in asking some of the same questions the builders must have asked when the mortar started to crumble: How did we get here? Why doesn’t anything feel solid anymore? Why doesn’t anyone understand me?

I used to think the Church could still be the place to hold those questions. Once upon a time, it was a vessel that held the complexity, the grief, the beauty, the doubt, and yes, the dogma too, but not as branding, and not as the product of a board meeting. But lately, it seems more interested in managing the brand. These days, the tower doesn’t just reach toward the heavens. It comes with WiFi and a gift shop. There’s a campus map in the foyer, a latte in your hand, and a QR code for online giving projected where the crucifix used to hang.

I’ve sat with pastors and priests in that same confusion, some who’ve grown sick from what they’re serving. “The church is dying,” they whisper. Sometimes they cry. Sometimes they laugh in a way that doesn’t feel right. They’re caught in the middle of an institution that once held the sacred, and now can’t hold much of anything. Certainly not silence. Certainly not a mystery. And in therapy, I see what happens when people have nowhere to put their anguish. It metastasizes into panic, into addiction, into rage. The Church, when it was at its best, offered not just answers, but a place to ask. Now, it too speaks in bullet points and marketing copy.

The builders of Babel wanted to make a name for themselves. I see the same instinct in my consulting inbox: churches asking how to grow their footprint, expand their “reach,” capture a younger demographic. They aren’t offering peace. They’re optimizing for engagement. And what gets built in the end is impressive. But like all “Babels,” it can’t bear the weight of the human soul.

It’s here that the voice of Richard Rohr begins to matter. A Franciscan priest and spiritual writer, Rohr has become a quietly subversive figure in modern Christianity. His work challenges the institutional Church, not with rebellion, but with depth. He critiques its obsession with purity over transformation, certainty over mystery, and control over grace. Though Catholic by vocation, Rohr’s appeal crosses denominations. He has found a massive following among mainline Protestants, evangelicals, and Catholics in spiritual transition, those no longer satisfied with black-and-white answers, but still drawn to the sacred. He writes of descent, paradox, and the long arc of inner change, offering something few religious institutions still know how to hold: permission to fall apart without being lost.

Rohr says we grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right, not as license, but as invitation. The descent doesn’t excuse sin, but neither does it condemn the sinner. It opens the door to the kind of grace that breaks us open and remakes us from the inside. That’s a hard sell in a church culture obsessed with excellence, relevance, and strategic growth initiatives. Failure doesn’t trend. Paradox doesn’t preach. And yet, every mystic worth reading tells us the same thing: the way up is down. Rohr calls it “falling upward.” The idea that transformation doesn’t come from climbing higher but from being stripped of the ladders entirely. We come to wisdom not through conquest, but through surrender. Through the wilderness. Through the kind of quiet that makes you question every illusion you once knew with certainty.

This doesn’t play well on stage. It’s not sexy. You can’t build a satellite campus around it.

But it’s real.

The spiritual desert has always been the crucible where illusions die. In therapy, I see that too. People come in looking for solutions, but what they really need is space. A place to fall apart without being judged or fixed. A place to let go of the performance and admit they’re scared, angry, tired, or lost. Rohr’s genius is that he gives theological permission for that unraveling. He speaks of a God found in the tension between opposites, in the unresolved spaces, in the compost heap of your failed certainties. Rohr doesn’t offer escape. He offers depth, like good soil, not poured concrete. Somewhere beneath that depth runs living water, though not always visible from the surface. And depth, like good soil, takes time and rot. (...)

In the therapy room, I hear the echoes. No one asks how to self-actualize. They ask why they feel numb, why the anxiety will not go away, why success does not satisfy, or why their relationships feel like transactions. They are not chasing the top of a pyramid. They are trying to understand what broke, and whether anything real can grow in its place. (...)

In Rockford, that difference shows up in the space between pride and grief. This is a city that once made things, machine parts, fasteners, hard goods with weight and permanence. When that vanished, we didn’t evolve. We mourned, slowly and without permission. The prosperity gospel doesn’t play well here, except in places that pretend the grief never happened. The landscape remembers. It’s a patchwork of rusted factories, cracked sidewalks, and churches that were built to last but now echo with silence. Faith here has to grow low to the ground. It doesn’t rise like glass towers. It creeps through the broken concrete and clings to whatever light is left. It is not triumphant. It is tenacious.

In therapy, I often feel caught between the two ladders. Clients want to “fix” their lives. They’re not asking how to self-actualize. They’re trying to understand why the scaffolding they built their life on no longer holds. They come in chasing Maslow, but often find Rohr: the painful gift of being broken open. Of discovering that transformation isn’t about climbing higher, but surrendering to what they can no longer control. The Church used to know something about that. Before it became obsessed with branding and metrics and appearing successful, it offered something harder and holier. It didn’t hand out blueprints. It offered bread, wine, and silence. Now it offers sermon series with titles like “Level Up.” (...)

And now, beloved, let us speak plainly of what’s become of Babel.

The Babel story was never just about language. It was about the illusion of unity: everyone speaking the same tongue, chasing the same goal, convinced that ambition itself was holy. It is easy to hear that same cadence today. In politics, in the media, even in ministry, everyone is talking. No one is listening. Each angle is convinced it is speaking sense while the other just refuses to understand. We have built towers of ideology, platforms of performance, and digital sanctuaries where clarity is promised but rarely delivered. The noise is constant, and underneath it all is something quieter, something heavier. Loneliness. (...)

The Church once served as a counterweight to all this. It was an embodied community, stubbornly local, where you sat beside people you did not entirely like and still called them brother or sister. It held tension instead of amplifying it. Now, many churches have become political performance halls, leaning into culture wars, doubling down on certainty, and selecting congregants more for their alignment than their presence. The container that once held our contradictions has become another venue for tribal identity. (...)

Babel didn’t end with a curse. It ended with dispersion. With people being sent back to their places, their languages, their particular lives. The tower fell, but the story didn’t. It just stopped trying to reach heaven by force. I walk through my community, meditating on this as I pass shuttered buildings, familiar faces, and the quiet persistence of people who keep showing up. So many of them carry disappointment like an old coat they cannot quite throw away. The plant closed. The school consolidated. The church split. And still, they show up.

by Colin Gillette, Front Porch Republic |  Read more:

Image: GetArchive

Horizontal and Vertical Christian Faith

Selfishness is not a virtue

When Christianity goes wrong, it goes wrong in a familiar way.

Last Friday, at a town hall meeting in Butler County, Iowa, Senator Joni Ernst delivered a grim message to her constituents. In the midst of an exchange over Medicaid cuts in President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” someone in the crowd shouted at Ernst, “People are going to die!”

Ernst’s immediate response was bizarre. “Well, we all are going to die,” she said.

True enough, but that’s irrelevant to the question at hand. Yes, we’re all going to die, but it matters a great deal when, how and why. There’s a tremendous difference between dying after living a long and full life that’s enabled at least in part by access to decent health care, and dying a premature and perhaps needlessly painful death because you can’t afford the care you need.

All of this should be too obvious to explain, and it would cost Ernst — who occupies a relatively safe seat in an increasingly red state — virtually nothing to apologize and move on. In fact, just after her flippant comment, she did emphasize that she wanted to protect vulnerable people. The full answer was more complicated than the headline-generating quip.

By the standards of 2025, Ernst’s comment would have been little more than a micro-scandal, gone by the end of the day. And if we lived even in the relatively recent past, demonstrating humility could have worked to her benefit. It can be inspiring to watch a person genuinely apologize.

But we’re in a new normal now.

That means no apologies. That means doubling down. And that can also mean tying your cruelty to the Christian cross.

And so, the next day Ernst posted an apology video — filmed, incredibly enough, in what appears to be a cemetery. It began well. “I would like to take this opportunity,” she said, “to sincerely apologize for a statement I made yesterday at my town hall.” But her statement devolved from there.

“I made an incorrect assumption,” she continued, “that everyone in the auditorium understood that, yes, we are all going to perish from this earth.”

She didn’t stop there. “I’m really, really glad that I did not have to bring up the subject of the tooth fairy as well. But for those that would like to see eternal and everlasting life, I’d encourage you to embrace my lord and savior, Jesus Christ.”

Remember, this was not a snarky, impulsive rejoinder. It was a considered response. She decided to film the statement and release it. There is no ambiguity — the video delivered exactly the message she wanted to send.

The fact that a sitting United States senator was that callous — and then tried to twist her cruelty into a bizarro version of the Christian gospel — is worth highlighting on its own as another instance of the pervasive “own the libs” ethos of the Republican Party. But Ernst’s fake apology was something different — and worse — than simple trolling. It exemplified the contortions of American Christianity in the Trump era.

Americans are now quite familiar with the “no apologies” ethos of the Trumpist right. They’re familiar with Trumpist trolling and with MAGA politicians and MAGA influencers doubling and tripling down on their mistakes. My former Times colleague Jane Coaston has even popularized a term — “vice signaling” — to describe MAGA’s performative transgressiveness. Trumpists think it’s good to be bad.

But why bring Jesus into it?

America has always been a country with lots of Christian citizens, but it has not always behaved like a Christian country, and for reasons that resonate again today. An old error is new. Too many Christians are transforming Christianity into a vertical faith, one that focuses on your personal relationship with God at the expense of the horizontal relationship you have with your neighbors.

To understand what I mean, let’s turn to a much darker time in American history, when Christianity and slavery existed side-by-side in the American South. In 1970, Wendell Berry published “The Hidden Wound,” a book-length essay about the profound damage that racism had inflicted on us all.

Reflecting on the Christianity of the slave-owning South, Berry wrote this passage, which is worth quoting at some length:

First, consider the moral predicament of the master who sat in church with his slaves, thus attesting his belief in the immortality of the souls of people whose bodies he owned and used. He thus placed his body, if not his mind, at the very crux of the deepest contradiction of his life. How could he presume to own the body of a man whose soul he considered as worthy of salvation as his own? To keep this question from articulating itself in his thoughts and demanding an answer, he had to perfect an empty space in his mind, a silence, between heavenly concerns and earthly concerns, between body and spirit. If there had ever opened a conscious connection between the two claims, if the two sides of his mind had ever touched, it would have been like building a fire in a house full of gunpowder.

The master hardened his heart to the plight of the slave by fundamentally rejecting the idea that his vertical faith in God carried with it a series of horizontal earthly obligations to love your neighbor as yourself, to do justice to the oppressed and to care for the vulnerable.

So long as the vertical relationship between God and man was secure, the horizontal relationship between men was of secondary importance, to the extent that it mattered at all. Why would this fleeting life matter when eternity was at stake?

Thankfully, we don’t live in such extreme times. We’re far from the dreadful days of slavery, and we’ve left Jim Crow behind, but I’m noticing a morphing of American evangelicalism back to the vertical, away from the horizontal, and that change is turning our gaze inward, to our own well-being above all, sometimes even to the exclusion of caring about the fate of others.

Let’s look at a different, more contemporary, example.

In April, I wrote about Paula White, one of Trump’s principal faith advisers, and her Easter offer of “seven supernatural blessings” in exchange for a suggested offering of $1,000. My piece was focused on the cohort of pastors and their Christian followers who behave more like Trump than like Jesus.

But I could have just as easily focused on the sheer selfishness of her message as well. Look again at the gifts White offered to her flock: “God will assign an angel to you, he’ll be an enemy to your enemies, he’ll give you prosperity, he’ll take sickness away from you, he will give you long life, he’ll bring increase in inheritance, and he’ll bring a special year of blessing.”

The emphasis is clear — look at what God will do for you. It’s all vertical. Honor God (by giving White a pile of cash), and he’ll make you healthy, wealthy and strong.

Consider also the evangelical turn against empathy. There are now Christian writers and theologians who are mounting a frontal attack against the very value that allows us to understand our neighbors, that places us in their shoes and asks what we would want and need if we were in their place.

But Christianity is a cross-shaped faith. The vertical relationship creates horizontal obligations. While Christians can certainly differ, for example, on the best way to provide health care to our nation’s most vulnerable citizens, it’s hard to see how we can disagree on the need to care for the poor.

Put another way, when the sick and lame approached Jesus, he did not say, “Depart from me, for thou shalt die anyway.” He healed the sick and fed the hungry and told his followers to do the same. (...)

People often ask me if I think the evangelical church has changed during the age of Trump or if its true nature is being revealed. There is not a neat yes or no answer. Certainly Trump’s rise has revealed the extent to which the will to power has always lurked in Christian hearts. When faced with a conflict between their stated principles and their access to power, millions of Republican Christians chose power over principle — and they are continuing to do so every day.

At the same time, some things have changed. An evangelical community that once celebrated, for example, George W. Bush’s PEPFAR program — the AIDS initiative that has saved an estimated 26 million lives — has now either applauded or stood by passively as Trump has decimated American foreign aid and damaged the a program that was one of America’s greatest humanitarian accomplishments.

Ernst isn’t the chief offender here by any means. Nor do I think that she’s consciously trying to narrow Christian doctrine to the kind of purely vertical relationship that enables so much injustice. Senators aren’t theologians, and neither are columnists.

But politicians are weather vanes (as we’re all tempted to be), and there’s a foul wind blowing out of parts of American Christianity. Ernst’s first quip was a gaffe. Her apology video was no such thing. It was a premeditated effort to say exactly what she thinks Republicans want to hear.

by David French, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Illustration by George Douglas; source photographs by Heritage Images, Glowimages and imagenavi/Getty Images

[ed. See also: You Are Not Religious (HTW)]

How Impermanence Became Central to Japanese Thought

Nothing Lasts. How Do We Face It? (NYT)

Images:Moe Suzuki
[ed. On Japanese impermanence. Other topics: Fashion, Cuteness, Monsters, Seasonality, Walking, Iterations, Fandom, Milky, Boxes, Citrus, Koreans, Pop Music, Matcha, Ozu, America, Fermentation, Purin.]

Eve's Diary

SATURDAY.—I am almost a whole day old, now. I arrived yesterday. That is as it seems to me. And it must be so, for if there was a day-before-yesterday I was not there when it happened, or I should remember it. It could be, of course, that it did happen, and that I was not noticing. Very well; I will be very watchful now, and if any day-before-yesterdays happen I will make a note of it. It will be best to start right and not let the record get confused, for some instinct tells me that these details are going to be important to the historian some day. For I feel like an experiment, I feel exactly like an experiment; it would be impossible for a person to feel more like an experiment than I do, and so I am coming to feel convinced that that is what I AM—an experiment; just an experiment, and nothing more.

Then if I am an experiment, am I the whole of it? No, I think not; I think the rest of it is part of it. I am the main part of it, but I think the rest of it has its share in the matter. Is my position assured, or do I have to watch it and take care of it? The latter, perhaps. Some instinct tells me that eternal vigilance is the price of supremacy. [That is a good phrase, I think, for one so young.]

Everything looks better today than it did yesterday. In the rush of finishing up yesterday, the mountains were left in a ragged condition, and some of the plains were so cluttered with rubbish and remnants that the aspects were quite distressing. Noble and beautiful works of art should not be subjected to haste; and this majestic new world is indeed a most noble and beautiful work. And certainly marvelously near to being perfect, notwithstanding the shortness of the time. There are too many stars in some places and not enough in others, but that can be remedied presently, no doubt. The moon got loose last night, and slid down and fell out of the scheme—a very great loss; it breaks my heart to think of it. There isn't another thing among the ornaments and decorations that is comparable to it for beauty and finish. It should have been fastened better. If we can only get it back again—

But of course there is no telling where it went to. And besides, whoever gets it will hide it; I know it because I would do it myself. I believe I can be honest in all other matters, but I already begin to realize that the core and center of my nature is love of the beautiful, a passion for the beautiful, and that it would not be safe to trust me with a moon that belonged to another person and that person didn't know I had it. I could give up a moon that I found in the daytime, because I should be afraid some one was looking; but if I found it in the dark, I am sure I should find some kind of an excuse for not saying anything about it. For I do love moons, they are so pretty and so romantic. I wish we had five or six; I would never go to bed; I should never get tired lying on the moss-bank and looking up at them.

Stars are good, too. I wish I could get some to put in my hair. But I suppose I never can. You would be surprised to find how far off they are, for they do not look it. When they first showed, last night, I tried to knock some down with a pole, but it didn't reach, which astonished me; then I tried clods till I was all tired out, but I never got one. It was because I am left-handed and cannot throw good. Even when I aimed at the one I wasn't after I couldn't hit the other one, though I did make some close shots, for I saw the black blot of the clod sail right into the midst of the golden clusters forty or fifty times, just barely missing them, and if I could have held out a little longer maybe I could have got one.

So I cried a little, which was natural, I suppose, for one of my age, and after I was rested I got a basket and started for a place on the extreme rim of the circle, where the stars were close to the ground and I could get them with my hands, which would be better, anyway, because I could gather them tenderly then, and not break them. But it was farther than I thought, and at last I had to give it up; I was so tired I couldn't drag my feet another step; and besides, they were sore and hurt me very much. (...)

I followed the other Experiment around, yesterday afternoon, at a distance, to see what it might be for, if I could. But I was not able to make [it] out. I think it is a man. I had never seen a man, but it looked like one, and I feel sure that that is what it is. I realize that I feel more curiosity about it than about any of the other reptiles. If it is a reptile, and I suppose it is; for it has frowzy hair and blue eyes, and looks like a reptile. It has no hips; it tapers like a carrot; when it stands, it spreads itself apart like a derrick; so I think it is a reptile, though it may be architecture.

I was afraid of it at first, and started to run every time it turned around, for I thought it was going to chase me; but by and by I found it was only trying to get away, so after that I was not timid any more, but tracked it along, several hours, about twenty yards behind, which made it nervous and unhappy. At last it was a good deal worried, and climbed a tree. I waited a good while, then gave it up and went home.

Today the same thing over. I've got it up the tree again.

SUNDAY.—It is up there yet. Resting, apparently. But that is a subterfuge: Sunday isn't the day of rest; Saturday is appointed for that. It looks to me like a creature that is more interested in resting than in anything else. It would tire me to rest so much. It tires me just to sit around and watch the tree. I do wonder what it is for; I never see it do anything.

They returned the moon last night, and I was SO happy! I think it is very honest of them. It slid down and fell off again, but I was not distressed; there is no need to worry when one has that kind of neighbors; they will fetch it back. I wish I could do something to show my appreciation. I would like to send them some stars, for we have more than we can use. I mean I, not we, for I can see that the reptile cares nothing for such things.

It has low tastes, and is not kind. When I went there yesterday evening in the gloaming it had crept down and was trying to catch the little speckled fishes that play in the pool, and I had to clod it to make it go up the tree again and let them alone. I wonder if THAT is what it is for? Hasn't it any heart? Hasn't it any compassion for those little creature? Can it be that it was designed and manufactured for such ungentle work? It has the look of it. One of the clods took it back of the ear, and it used language. It gave me a thrill, for it was the first time I had ever heard speech, except my own. I did not understand the words, but they seemed expressive.

When I found it could talk I felt a new interest in it, for I love to talk; I talk, all day, and in my sleep, too, and I am very interesting, but if I had another to talk to I could be twice as interesting, and would never stop, if desired.

If this reptile is a man, it isn't an IT, is it? That wouldn't be grammatical, would it? I think it would be HE. I think so. In that case one would parse it thus: nominative, HE; dative, HIM; possessive, HIS'N. Well, I will consider it a man and call it he until it turns out to be something else. This will be handier than having so many uncertainties.

NEXT WEEK SUNDAY.—All the week I tagged around after him and tried to get acquainted. I had to do the talking, because he was shy, but I didn't mind it. He seemed pleased to have me around, and I used the sociable “we” a good deal, because it seemed to flatter him to be included.

WEDNESDAY.—We are getting along very well indeed, now, and getting better and better acquainted. He does not try to avoid me any more, which is a good sign, and shows that he likes to have me with him. That pleases me, and I study to be useful to him in every way I can, so as to increase his regard.

Extract from Adam's Diary

Perhaps I ought to remember that she is very young, a mere girl and make allowances. She is all interest, eagerness, vivacity, the world is to her a charm, a wonder, a mystery, a joy; she can't speak for delight when she finds a new flower, she must pet it and caress it and smell it and talk to it, and pour out endearing names upon it. And she is color-mad: brown rocks, yellow sand, gray moss, green foliage, blue sky; the pearl of the dawn, the purple shadows on the mountains, the golden islands floating in crimson seas at sunset, the pallid moon sailing through the shredded cloud-rack, the star-jewels glittering in the wastes of space—none of them is of any practical value, so far as I can see, but because they have color and majesty, that is enough for her, and she loses her mind over them. If she could quiet down and keep still a couple minutes at a time, it would be a reposeful spectacle. In that case I think I could enjoy looking at her; indeed I am sure I could, for I am coming to realize that she is a quite remarkably comely creature—lithe, slender, trim, rounded, shapely, nimble, graceful; and once when she was standing marble-white and sun-drenched on a boulder, with her young head tilted back and her hand shading her eyes, watching the flight of a bird in the sky, I recognized that she was beautiful.

by Mark Twain, Project Guttenberg | Read more:
Images: Lester Ralph

Making America Germany Again

Mahmoud Khalil, Viewed From the Right

The arrest and possible deportation of Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian activist, has galvanized the left and drawn criticism from liberals and civil libertarians. Even some neoconservatives have condemned the White House’s aggressive action earlier this month. MAGA conservatives should also oppose it.

At least one prominent MAGA-friendly voice, the author Ann Coulter, has already spoken out against deporting Khalil, who was born in Syria. “There’s almost no one I don’t want to deport, but, unless they’ve committed a crime, isn’t this a violation of the first amendment?” Coulter wrote last week on X.

Khalil, a green card holder whose wife is a U.S. citizen (and eight months pregnant), does indeed enjoy rights under the First Amendment. The Supreme Court ruled in 1945 that alien residents cannot be deported for political speech, including speech in support of groups seeking to overthrow the U.S. government. Notably, the Court rejected the government’s argument that the targeted alien held an “affiliation” with a subversive organization, judging that the claim relied on too loose a definition of that term. The case, Bridges v. Wixon, is highly relevant to the controversy surrounding Khalil.

The Trump administration, in rescinding Khalil’s green card, invoked a 1952 immigration law to justify the move. That statute, the Immigration and Nationality Act, empowers the government to deport any lawful permanent resident whom the secretary of state deems a danger to U.S. foreign policy interests. The White House has said that Khalil, through his protest activities at Columbia University, promoted antisemitism. Additionally, the Department of Homeland Security said that Khalil “led activities aligned to Hamas,” a designated terror organization.

These justifications are spurious. The First Amendment does not carve out an exception for speech that Marco Rubio labels “antisemitic,” and in any case Jewish students at Columbia have vouched for Khalil’s character. As for the vague assertion that Khalil is “aligned” with Hamas, the administration has not produced evidence that he was affiliated with the group in any meaningful sense. If the arrest of Khalil is legal under the Immigration and Nationality Act, then the relevant provisions of that law are null and void under the Constitution, the supreme law of the land.

MAGA conservatives have a principled reason to defend Khalil’s right to free speech, even if they don’t agree with his anti-Israel views. Free speech is a cornerstone of our republican system of government, as the Founders knew well. One early-modern aphorism, which Benjamin Franklin quoted approvingly in 1722, captures the relation between free speech and a free people: “Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech." Conservatives tend to emphasize ordered, political liberty rather than individual rights, but in matters of free speech, the latter bolster the former. (...)

MAGA conservatives have yet another reason, in addition to those relating to the protection of free speech, to oppose the Trump administration’s persecution of Khalil. John Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, got near the mark in a recent podcast conversation. “The single greatest threat to freedom of speech in the United States at this point in time is Israel and its supporters here in the United States,” he said. Mearsheimer’s argument was about free speech, but he alluded to a principle that is even more fundamental.

Right-wingers tend to conceive of politics not in terms of rights, but of power. One political ideal that relates to power and that MAGA conservatives should cherish is sovereignty. What Mearsheimer’s comment suggests, even if he wouldn’t put the point in this way, is that Israel and the Israel lobby presently undermine the sovereignty of the United States.

Sovereignty refers to the exclusive authority of a state over the country it rules and the nation it defends. It is the glue that holds a political grouping together and safeguards its survival and liberty. A state, to truly possess sovereignty, must have the power to make decisions free from foreign influence. One reason the actions against Khalil should give MAGA pause is that the administration seems to be acting on behalf of Israel, not the American people.

Here’s the plain truth: Khalil was arrested not because he posed a threat to the United States, but because he protested against Israel. Drop Site News reported that Khalil’s arrest “followed a two-day targeted online campaign against Khalil by pro-Israel groups and individuals” (emphasis added). President Donald Trump has alleged that Khalil supports Hamas, an enemy of Israel. Khalil led protests against the Israeli war in Gaza. Miriam Adelson, a top donor to Trump’s presidential campaigns, has pushed the president to take pro-Israel actions and is leading the charge against critics of Israel on college campuses.

As if to make clear which nation’s interests are actually implicated in the Khalil episode, the White House’s X account has written “Shalom Mahmoud,” using the Hebrew word for “goodbye.”

I had thought English was America’s official language now. (...)

The undue influence that pro-Israel groups exert over the U.S. government deserves close scrutiny and blunt criticism. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long tried to drag the U.S. into war with Iran, which poses little threat to the American homeland. The president seems on the verge of giving Bibi what he wants, though in Trump’s first term he griped that the Israeli leader was “willing to fight Iran to the last American soldier.” In recent months, Israel’s supporters have sought to thwart foreign policy appointments perceived as inimical to Israel, and they may have succeeded last week. [ed. Here's a sickening video of Israel blowing up and destroying the Turkish Friendship Hospital, the only hospital in Gaza dedicated to cancer patients. Not a mistake.]

The Trump administration simply cannot pursue an America-First policy agenda if its military and staffing decisions and the nation’s foundational rights are subject to Israeli veto. 

by Andrew Day, The American Conservative |  Read more:

Image: Getty Images

[ed. Sometimes (not often) it's good to check in on what the other side's thinking. In this case they get it exactly right. It's good to be reminded that there are some saner versions of Conservatism out there, even if most are quite happy to ride MAGA's coattails whenever it's convenient (like saying the unpopular parts out loud). Will it matter with this administration? Want to guess? See also: The Israeli-American Trump mega-donor behind speech crackdowns (Responsible Statecraft); MAGA Must Resolve Tech vs. Populist Tensions; and, Trump's No Good, Very Bad Week (TAC).]

The Dragon in My Garage

"The Dragon in My Garage" is a chapter in Carl Sagan's 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World, which presents an analogy where the existence of God is equated with a hypothetical insistence that there is a dragon living in someone's garage. This is similar to Russell's Teapot in the way it forms an apt analogy for the concepts of the burden of proof and falsifiability. The main thrust of how Sagan develops the garage-dwelling dragon example is that the proponent employs increasingly ad hoc reasoning to describe their belief in the face of further questions. Eventually, the goalposts are moved in such a way as to render the initial assertion practically unfalsifiable. In a more general sense, this part may be done during the initial definition of the belief, or as when replying to critical examination of the belief in question.

Dragon-style arguments originate in what Daniel Dennett terms "belief in belief": rather than actually holding a belief, you think you should hold the belief — or "fake it till you make it". The post hoc justifications come from cognitive dissonance between what the believers think they should believe and how these beliefs would actually manifest in practical terms. While such justifications need to be made quickly on an ad hoc basis, someone declining all these tests must, somewhere in their head, have a model that makes them not expect to see this sort of evidence at all. This is tantamount to not really holding the belief (since you'd expect to see something if you really did believe), but just thinking that they do, hence "belief in belief". This is often rationalised away in much the same manner that the metaphorical dragon is, by changing the rules to say that the dragon doesn't really need to have a real effect on our lives to have a real effect on our lives. What? Exactly.

In the case of the dragon, we expect footprints and flames, in the case of miracles and prayer we expect the ability to test them — and proponents subsequently attempt to hide these things from experimental scrutiny.

Sagan described the discussion as follows:

"A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage"

Suppose I seriously make such an assertion to you. Surely you'd want to check it out, see for yourself. There have been innumerable stories of dragons over the centuries, but no real evidence. What an opportunity!

"Show me," you say. I lead you to my garage. You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle — but no dragon.

"Where's the dragon?" you ask.

"Oh, she's right here," I reply, waving vaguely. "I neglected to mention that she's an invisible dragon."

You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon's footprints.

"Good idea," I say, "but this dragon floats in the air."

Then you'll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire.

"Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless."

You'll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible.

"Good idea, but she's an incorporeal dragon and the paint won't stick."

And so on. I counter every physical test you propose with a special explanation of why it won't work.

Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there's no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. What I'm asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so.

How do I do this?

It's easy to create your own unfalsifiable belief. Just follow these steps:

1. Express a belief
2. Someone proposes a way in which the belief can be tested
3. Add or change an attribute of the belief to render the proposed test invalid, and simply reiterate step 1

by RationalWiki |  Read more:

Image: YouTube via

[ed. Applicable to a variety of situations and professions (lawyers and politicians in particular) but especially prevalent among MAGA supporters (lawyers and politicians know they're purposely being evasive). Facts are useless. They've already drunk deeply from the religion of Trump, and like any religion, their support and commitment is grounded in faith. Facts don't and won't matter until they're the ones getting shafted (which'll happen soon enough), and even then they'll dragonize them away. For fun, just ask them to define "Make", "Great" and "Again" and watch the froth fly. See also: Elon Musk and the Useless Spending-Cut Theater of DOGE (NYT):]

***

Riedl: I think Donald Trump is a big government populist who reflects where the Republican Party is today. Today’s Republican Party is older, lower income, more dependent on not just Social Security and Medicare, but programs like Medicaid and SNAP. It also includes a lot of veterans who want veteran spending and a lot of people concerned about defense.

So, overall, you have a big government populist party. But what’s interesting in this populism is, while they’re definitely more comfortable with government spending than past Republicans, they’re also accelerating the tax cut rhetoric. And as an economist, I look at that and say something’s got to give. (...)

French: So, what is your best estimate about the DOGE savings right now?

Riedl: Perhaps $2 billion, which they claim is $55 billion. Even that $2 billion may not ultimately happen because technically speaking, DOGE cannot impound and unilaterally reduce federal spending. Any spending cuts legally have to be reprogrammed elsewhere unless Congress goes in and reduces the spending levels. So right now I would say DOGE has saved $2 billion, which, to put it in context, is one-thirty-fifth of 1 percent of the federal budget, otherwise known as budget dust. [ed. emphasis added]

Riedl: The budget resolution mostly consists of $4.5 trillion in tax cuts over 10 years.

They’re also indicating they’ll offset this with cuts to Medicaid, SNAP and other nutrition spending, and likely student loans. I’m skeptical that Congress can actually pass this. If they don’t, it will be a $4.5 trillion cost over 10 years.

The budget also promises discretionary savings far into the future, but there’s nothing enforcing that and there’s no reason to take it seriously. The budget also assumes a huge growth in tax revenues from economic growth. That is more of a gimmick. It’s not going to happen.

French: It’s been a while since I’ve had a math class, but it sounds like what you’re saying is they’re cutting $2 billion for savings but they’re adding $4,500 billion in deficit. It’s $2 billion versus $4,500 billion. Those are very, very different numbers.

Trump and DOGE have been focused on reducing the number of federal employees. What would the impact be on the federal deficit of, say, cutting 300,000 or 400,000 federal employees?

Riedl: Here’s one way to look at it: There are 2.3 million civilian employees. If we eliminated one quarter of them — which would be remarkable, that would be laying off nearly 600,000 workers and not replacing them — you would save 1 percent of federal spending. (...)

French: Suppose you wanted to be serious about cutting the deficit. Where does federal money go? And as a corollary to that, what has to be cut or what kind of revenue has to be raised to meet these obligations?

Riedl: When I explain where the money goes, it’ll be clear why we’re not cutting it.

Seventy-five percent of all federal spending goes to six items: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense, veterans and interest. That is 75 cents of every dollar. Everything the government does besides that — education, health research, housing, justice, homeland security — that’s all the other 25 percent. But Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are the big drivers. That’s really the ballgame.

What Did the War in Gaza Reveal About American Judaism?

Peter Beinart on the story of Israel and the moral blind spot of the Jewish diaspora.

In a new book, “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning,” Peter Beinart argues that many American Jews who defend Israel have lost their moral bearings. He makes the case, in a series of linked essays, that Jews in America and around the world should push for a single state comprising Israel and the Palestinian territories which grants everyone equal rights. “This book is about the story Jews tell ourselves to block out the screams,” Beinart writes. “It’s about the story that enables our leaders, our families, and our friends to watch the destruction of the Gaza Strip—­the flattening of universities, the people forced to make bread from hay, the children freezing to death under buildings turned to rubble by a state that speaks in our name—­and shrug, if not applaud.”

I recently spoke by phone with Beinart, whom I met almost twenty years ago when I went to work for The New Republic. (...) During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed what he misjudged about the U.S.’s unwillingness to change its relationship to Israel, whether a one-state solution is really a more likely alternative than two states living side by side, and how debates over Israel have warped conversations about antisemitism in America.

There was hope about a decade ago among people like yourself that American Jews—especially younger ones—were moving away from ironclad support for Israel. Do you feel surprised or disappointed by the degree to which the United States, and even the Democratic Party, seems to have not moved in that direction after October 7th?

I think I probably underestimated the degree to which, even inside the Democratic Party, politicians could remain unresponsive to shifts in public opinion, because they don’t really face much of a cost. There are other forces that just matter more than public opinion.

Which are?

Well, the role of money in politics is a really, really big one. And I think that was especially true for Joe Biden, because he didn’t have the capacity to raise money from the public at large. He wasn’t a Bernie Sanders or a Barack Obama who could raise large amounts of money from small donations. It’s also a problem for members of Congress. Except for a small handful of celebrity members, they are not national figures who can raise enough money that they can compete with an organization like AIPAC if AIPAC decides to target them.

But I think there is a danger in focussing too exclusively on money. Money plays a role in this, but there’s also a deep way in which the Israeli story is one that’s very resonant to many Americans, because it’s so similar to the American story. It’s a promised land forged on a hostile frontier. And the more invested you are in America’s own founding myth, the more you’re going to find Israel’s founding myth appealing. I think a lot of people in the Republican Party, even if there was no campaign financing at stake, find this narrative very, very powerful. And Israel, in some ways, is a vision of what they would like America to be, which is a country that’s more nationalistic, more militaristic, has stronger border protection, and has clear hierarchies based on ethnicity and religion.

As Edward Said famously said, Palestinians still lack permission to narrate. Their story is in some ways a threatening story to America’s founding myth. When you start using phrases like “settler colonialism,” it doesn’t take much for Americans, especially white Americans, to get uncomfortable. And beyond that, October 7th was a horror. It was a horrifying event. And so there was a natural desire to express sympathy and solidarity with Israeli Jews in this moment of incredible trauma. And then the Israeli government says, “O.K., you want to show you care about Israeli Jews? Then support us in destroying the Gaza Strip.” It was a little bit like a post-9/11 moment, when it was very difficult in the public discourse to distinguish between the act of horror—what had happened, and empathy for the victims—and a policy response, which was just disastrous.

Why was the Biden Administration so unwilling to really do anything to sanction Israel or to try to stop its behavior?

If you come up in Washington politics and policy circles, you become accustomed to a template for how you deal with Israel. And that template is generally to avoid public fights, because those are not going to go well for you. And I think the people in the Biden Administration remember the Obama Administration. I will never forget the moment when, after Obama basically gave a speech about how there should be a Palestinian state near 1967 lines, Harry Reid, the Democratic leader of the Senate, went before AIPAC and threw Obama under the bus.

If you’re in Washington for a long time, you almost turn off a part of your brain when it comes to the question of Israel and Palestine. You just take the safest political route and you block out some of your human responses to what actually happens to Palestinians. You just become so accustomed to basically just looking away and rationalizing and not doing anything. I think folks in the Biden Administration underestimated the degree to which ordinary progressive Americans who had not undergone that kind of acculturation would simply look at what was happening in the age of social media and say, What the fuck? Why are we supporting this? And they underestimated the degree to which Gaza mattered for American progressives.

One of the things you say in your book is that many American Jews responded differently to this war than they would have if any other country had done what Israel did to Gaza. How do you understand that now?

Well, for most American Jews, it’s not just another country, right? It’s a country that we have been raised to see as deeply, intimately, connected to us, as a central part of our story—our story of genocide and survival and rebirth. And it’s a story of pride and safety. The Jewish tradition has this kind of metaphor of family running through it, this kind of imagined family. Imagine if you start getting pieces of evidence that members of your family are doing terrible, terrible things, right? That’s very painful to acknowledge. Plus, you recognize that generally people in a family don’t take kindly to those members of the family who start saying, “Hey, we’re doing horrible things.”

And this leads to the way the organized American Jewish community really functions. Whatever Israel does, they come up with some post-hoc justification. “It’s Hamas’s fault because it’s using human shields. It’s the people in Gaza’s fault because they voted for Hamas. The numbers are a lie—you can’t trust them.” (...)

What changed your thinking about the need for a one-state solution versus a two-state solution?

I spent my whole adult life as a supporter of the two-state solution, of partition. I think two things changed. The first was just the recognition that I was arguing the same position year after year after year. And facts on the ground were changing, right? Every year, Israel was more deeply entrenching itself in the West Bank, which would be the heartland of a Palestinian state. And the chances of a Palestinian state that could ever really be sovereign and contiguous were becoming harder and harder to imagine. I found an article from someone saying the two-state solution was almost dead. It was Anthony Lewis writing a column headlined “Five Minutes to Midnight”in the New York Times, in 1982, when there were maybe not even a hundred thousand settlers in the West Bank. Now there are seven hundred thousand if you include East Jerusalem.

It was actually a Palestinian interlocutor, I remember, who said, “Peter, something can’t be perpetually dying. At a certain point, it’s dead. And you have to be willing to think about alternatives.” And, when I started to think about alternatives, I came to the conclusion that this principle that Jews and Palestinians should live under the same law in one political territory—this idea is considered so radical and outlandish, if not downright antisemitic, in American political discourse. But it’s actually the principle that, as a general rule, we tend to think is the right principle for most countries, including our own. And I was struck by political-science literature that suggests that in divided societies, things tend to be a lot more peaceful when everyone has a voice in government.

If you support a two-state solution because you want to maintain Israel as a Jewish state, that means that Jews will rule, that Jews are going to be the vast majority of the population or at least the vast majority of the population that can vote. You are in an ethno-nationalist framework. I think I probably became more aware of how uncomfortable that was when I started listening to Tucker Carlson speaking that way about the United States. Because it is the discourse of the ethno-nationalist right in the United States and in Europe, that basically countries should be ruled by members of one tribe and everybody else is a guest in the country. I began to be more uncomfortable with making an exception to this principle for a Jewish state. Especially because I noticed that that exception didn’t stay in Israel, because Israel had been a bright shining example for every ethno-nationalist who wanted to make their own country attack the principle of equality under the law. I’m thinking of people like Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Marine Le Pen in France, the AfD in Germany, Narendra Modi in India.

At one level, the question could be framed as whether Israel should give equal rights to everyone it rules over. And that seems hard, for me at least, to argue with. But that’s a little different from saying, “My long-term solution to the problem is that these people live in one democratic state together rather than in two partitioned, hopefully democratic states.” I agree that a two-state solution seems almost dead. But especially after October 7th and Gaza, isn’t a one-state solution even less likely?

Both of them at this point are completely unrealistic. What is realistic is that Israel maintains permanent control over millions of Palestinians who lack basic rights and, indeed, moves toward the destruction of the Palestinian people through active expulsion and death. If you had to put a gun to my head and ask me what I think is the most realistic likelihood that we will see over the coming decades and generations, it would be what I would call an American-style solution to the Palestinian question. By which I mean the nineteenth-century American solution to Native Americans. You just continue this process and it grinds away without restraint until basically the population is destroyed as a functioning political entity.

I think we’re in the process of seeing that play out. The question to me is what force in the world could be powerful enough to stop that and to create a different reality? To me, it seems like there would need to be a mass movement of people all around the world in the tradition of the anti-apartheid movement and the civil-rights movement. It’s the power and strength of that movement that really matters. And I think that movement almost inevitably has to be a movement about human equality and freedom. It can’t have the moral power it needs if it’s about partitioning into competing ethno-nationalist states. I think a movement is going to be more powerful if it is built around the principle of equality rather than the principle of partition.

But what about the people within Israel and Palestine? Do you think they want to live together?

There was a vote last year in the Knesset on two states and not a single member of a Jewish political party in Israel voted yes. So that’s Israeli discourse. It’s basically the center is pro-status quo, and the right is pro-expulsion. Among Palestinians, I think that there was historically a desire for one equal state, what was sometimes called the secular democratic Palestine. That was the P.L.O. position.

Then there was this shift in 1988 where the P.L.O. accepted the idea of a partition. And the truth is now we don’t really know, because there’s no democratic process that exists among Palestinians for them to express their political views. Most popular Palestinian leaders are in jail. There are no elections in the West Bank or Gaza. And so I guess one of the things that I should acknowledge about this conversation is that my own view about this has to be deeply informed by what Palestinians want. They’re the group of people who lack rights. The way in which they want their rights to be vindicated is crucially important.

And so as a process matter, it’s really, really important that we support mechanisms by which Palestinians can actually create a legitimate political process to reflect on these questions of one versus two states. If we see some kind of legitimate process in which Palestinians say, No, no, we still really want to commit to the idea of two states, it’s kind of silly at that point for me to be more Catholic than the Pope. But I don’t think we have that process. And when I listen to what we have in the absence, which is the Palestinian public discussion that one hears in the United States, or around the world, I think the current has clearly moved toward the idea of equality and historical justice in one space. And so, I think I’m partly responding to that.

In the book, you talk about the degree to which American Jews are blamed for things that Israel does and how that is of course antisemitism. And also how many American Jews view any criticism of Israel as antisemitic. You and I can sit here and say, Well, that’s absurd. But when you hear Jews say that the phrase “from the river to the sea,” for example, is antisemitic, does any part of you want to defer to people who might feel that way, even if you might disagree on the substance? How do you wrestle with the idea, which we have heard more of in the last decade, that minority groups should broadly get to decide what they consider offensive?

Yeah, so the first thing is when people claim that only Black people get to determine what constitutes anti-Black racism or only trans people get to determine what constitutes transphobia, I sometimes think, What country do they think we’re living in? Donald Trump just outlawed D.E.I. The idea that those minority groups, or historically disadvantaged groups, have complete power to determine the discourse is nonsense.

I know it’s not how America functions in 2025, but it’s definitely how a lot of people attuned to bigotry wish it functioned. To me the question is whether, generically speaking, one should be using terms that many people use in a bigoted way even if you don’t mean it that way.

First of all, I don’t like the idea that basically only members of one ethnic, racial, religious group should have a monopoly on defining what discrimination means, whether they’re Black or whether they’re L.G.B.T., whatever. First of all, because it quashes the diversity that exists within every community, right? There is political diversity in every community. Just because people have the same identity status doesn’t mean they all see the world in the same way. And that’s especially true for Jews. As you know, there’s a very profound division among American Jews now on some pretty basic questions related to Israel. And you see it most strongly among younger American Jews, where you find polling which shows that maybe not a majority, but very large minorities of American Jews think Israel is an apartheid state and that, depending on how you ask it, many of them have very serious concerns about Zionism.

So the irony becomes that when you paint Jews as monolithic and say, basically, that anti-Zionism constitutes antisemitism, the way that plays out on college campuses is that a bunch of the students who then get suspended and disciplined are Jews. You get this absurd situation where Jewish Voice for Peace is suspended at Columbia. And the Anti-Defamation League congratulates the president for keeping Jews safe. Well, not those Jews, right?

Let’s say that you think Black people should get to define what constitutes anti-Black racism, so Jews should get to define what constitutes antisemitism as it relates to Palestinians. The problem with this is that the relationship between Jews and Palestinians is not the same as the relationship between white and Black people. Palestinians are not the historically superior group that have ruled over Jews for generations. They’re the group that, in Israel-Palestine, is legally subordinate and that the United States has basically marginalized from public discussion. So when you say that Palestinian discourse, which tends to be anti-Zionist, should be deemed antisemitic because a lot of Jews find it antisemitic, you’re completely erasing the Palestinian experience. And what you end up doing is basically silencing Palestinians and not allowing them to speak about their experience.

by Isaac Chotiner, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Michael M. Santiago

Outrage of the Day - Feb. 9, 2025

MAGA’s Sickening Hypocrisy: From ‘Save The Children’ To ‘Defund The Org That Actually Saves Children’ (TechDirt); and, With Aid Cutoff, Trump Halts Agency’s Legacy of ‘Acting With Humanity’ (NYT):

Funds from the world’s richest nation once flowed from the largest global aid agency to an intricate network of small, medium and large organizations that delivered aid: H.I.V. medications for more than 20 million people; nutrition supplements for starving children; support for refugees, orphaned children and women battered by violence.

Now, that network is unraveling. (NYT)

-----------

After years of screaming “save the children” while baselessly accusing others of exploiting kids, the Trump administration is now trying to destroy the actual infrastructure that saves children. This one crosses from standard MAGA hypocrisy into genuinely evil territory.

I’m one of those people who doesn’t think you can (or should) call most people inherently “bad,” but if you support what the Trump administration is doing here, you are a bad person. (TD)

------------

From Comments:

As one of the most important philosophers of the modern era once put it: “They’re all in favor of the unborn. They will do anything for the unborn. But once you’re born, you’re on your own. Pro-life conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to nine months. After that, they don’t want to know about you. They don’t want to hear from you. No nothing. No neonatal care, no day care, no head start, no school lunch, no food stamps, no welfare, no nothing! If you’re preborn, you’re fine; if you’re preschool, you’re fucked!”

***

“The unborn” are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don’t resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don’t ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don’t need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don’t bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. It’s almost as if, by being born, they have died to you.

You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus but actually dislike people who breathe.

Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.

— Dr. Dave Barnhart, Christian Minister

***

When the central pillar of your ideology is hating The Other and blaming them for all the wrongs (whether real or imagined) that you suffer there must always be an Other to vilify, and if the current one is no longer doing the trick then a new one will be found in short order.

And the best part is that a hate-focused ideology like this isn’t even safe for it’s members, because if ever there’s no-one outside the group that’ll make for an effective scapegoat and target for hate and blame? Why then it’s time for a little in-group ideological Othering…

***

[ed. I've always thought MAGA was largely a cult of personality thing, specific to Trump (with no obvious heir apparent). Now that Musk seems intent on out-Trumping Trump we have someone who's a hell of a lot smarter and more dangerous in a lot of ways (Trump being 78, and with obvious cognitive/personality issues). So that hope/theory may no longer be operable. It could and undoubtedly will get much worse.]

God in the Machine

Silicon Valley’s Obsession With AI Looks a Lot Like Religion (MIT Press Reader)

Image: Tech Agnostic, MIT Press

"The point here may be obvious, even painfully so: Our computing culture has become so ubiquitous and insular, so devoted and devotional, that it repeatedly recycles the tropes of traditional religions, because these are the patterns human beings evolved to deal with our anxieties about life, death, and the future. Our lives are painfully finite and contingent on countless factors far beyond our understanding, let alone our control, and we wish this were not so, because it is comforting to feel in charge of one’s own destiny. So we imagine that forces far beyond us are both subject to our logic and interested in our thoughts. (...)

“But,” you might very reasonably ask me, “you’re not talking about actual, noncrazy people who literally worship religion in a traditional way and worship tech at the same time, and think that the two things they’re doing are one and the same?”

To such a question, sadly, I would simply stare back at you, stone-faced.

To which perhaps you’d reply, “Are you?”

via:

Losing My Son

Losing my son (Lars Doucet - Fortress of Doors)

Enough.

Look, the news media inundates us every day with endless tales of genuine horror and suffering, because in a world with billions of people that will always be happening somewhere. Life is and will always be fundamentally unfair, and the vale of tears filled with a never-ending parade of horrors. And yet, it's also true that for the median person on Earth, life is much better today than ever before in human history.

My own story is exactly one such example – the fact that I'm devastated to lose my son to a crippling injury highlights another fact–that this very thing has become so rare in my country as to be "unimaginable." We should rejoice at this! Losing a child used to be so unremarkably commonplace that everyone, even emperors and kings, routinely suffered it until approximately yesterday.

The correct adjective for the tragedy I'm experiencing is not "unimaginable" but unfathomable. I can imagine it just fine because it's happening to me, and you can imagine it too now because I'm describing it to you. And because we can imagine it, we can turn and face it, and, with God's grace, we can lift up our cross and bear it, somehow.

But what none of us can do is to measure–to fathom–the depth of it.

Stand at the brink of the abyss of despair, and when you see that you cannot bear it anymore, draw back a little and have a cup of tea.

— Elder Sophrony of Essex

***

Memory Eternal, Nikolas Doucet - Eulogy

I’ve heard a lot of bad eulogies in my time. There’s at least three different ways to give a bad eulogy.

First, I could pour all of my efforts into denying every ounce of grief, insisting instead on “celebrating the life” of Nikolas, pursuing the absurd goal of making sure nobody gets sad at the funeral of an eight year old boy.

Second, I could robotically recite a list of dates and anecdotes, leaving you with little more than a disjointed Wikipedia summary of Nikolas’ life.

Last and worst, I could make this all about me, making myself the main character at my own son’s funeral.

I regret to inform you that I will surely fail in each and every one of these ways, so settle in for a bad eulogy. Forgive me. (...)

Many of you know me as a man of deep faith, but I confess to have long been plagued by moments of doubt, moments that are the darkest when thoughts turn to the inevitability of my own death. It is of some relevance that I am also possessed of a pathological phobia of falling from great heights. It is therefore no surprise that when I imagine the experience of death, I picture myself falling into a great yawning abyss. I see myself falling, falling, falling, headlong into that great nothing, and God is not there to catch me.

Book Review: The Rise Of Christianity

The rise of Christianity is a great puzzle. In 40 AD, there were maybe a thousand Christians. Their Messiah had just been executed, and they were on the wrong side of an intercontinental empire that had crushed all previous foes. By 400, there were forty million, and they were set to dominate the next millennium of Western history.

Imagine taking a time machine to the year 2300 AD, and everyone is Scientologist. The United States is >99% Scientologist. So is Latin America and most of Europe. The Middle East follows some heretical pseudo-Scientology that thinks L Ron Hubbard was a great prophet, but maybe not the greatest prophet.

This can only begin to capture how surprised the early Imperial Romans would be to learn of the triumph of Christianity. At least Scientology has a lot of money and a cut-throat recruitment arm! At least they fight back when you persecute them! At least they seem to be in the game!

Rodney Stark was a sociologist of religion. He started off studying cults, and got his big break when the first missionaries of the Unification Church (“Moonies”) in the US let him tag along and observe their activities. After a long and successful career in academia, he turned his attention to the greatest cult of all and wrote The Rise Of Christianity. He spends much of it apologizing for not being a classical historian, but it’s fine - he’s obviously done his homework, and he hopes to bring a new, modern-religion-informed perspective to the ancient question.

So: how did early Christianity win?

Slowly But Steadily

Previous authorities assumed Christianity spread through giant mass conversions, maybe fueled by miracles. Partly they thought this because the Biblical Book of Acts describes some of these. But partly they thought it because - how else do you go from a thousand people to forty million people in less than 400 years?

Stark answers: steady exponential growth.

Suppose you start with 1,000 Christians in 40 AD. It’s hard to number the first few centuries’ worth of early Christians - they’re too small to leave much evidence - but by 300 AD (before Constantine!) they’re a sizeable enough fraction of the empire that some historians have tentatively suggested a 10% population share. That would be about 6 million people.

From 1,000 to 6,000,000 in 260 years implies a 40% growth rate per decade. Stark finds this plausible, because it’s the same growth rate as the Mormons, 1880 - 1980 (if you look at the Mormons’ entire history since 1830, they actually grew a little faster than the early Christians!)

Instead of being forced to attribute the Christians’ growth to miracles, we can pin down a specific growth rate and find that it falls within the range of the most successful modern cults. Indeed, if we think of this as each existing Christian having to convert 0.4 new people, on average, per decade, it starts to sound downright do-able.

Still, how did the early Christians maintain this conversion rate over so many generations?

Through The Social Graph

This is another of Stark’s findings from his work with the Moonies.

The first Moonie in America was a Korean missionary named Young Oon Kim, who arrived in 1959. Her first convert was her landlady. The next two were the landlady’s friends. Then came the landlady’s friends’ husbands and the landlady’s friends’ husbands’ co-workers. That was when Stark showed up. “At the time . . . I arrived to study them, the group had never succeeded in attracting a stranger.”

Stark theorized that “the only [people] who joined were those whose interpersonal attachments to members overbalanced their attachments to nonmembers.” I don’t think this can be literally correct - taken seriously, it implies that the second convert could have no other friends except the first, which would prevent her from spreading the religion further. But something like “your odds of converting are your number of Moonie friends, divided by your number of non-Moonie friends” seems to fit his evidence.

History confirms this story. Mohammed’s first convert was his wife, followed by his cousin, servant, and friend. Joseph Smith’s first converts were his brothers, friends, and lodgers. Indeed, in spite of the Mormons’ celebrated door-knocking campaign, their internal data shows that only one in a thousand door-knocks results in a conversion, but “when missionaries make their first contact with a person in the home of a Mormon friend or relative of that person, this results in conversion 50% of the time”. 1

This theory of social-graph-based-conversation was controversial when Stark proposed it, because if you ask cultists retrospectively, they’ll usually say they were awed by the beauty of the sacred teachings. But Stark says:

I knew better, because we had met them well before they had learned to appreciate the doctrines, before they had learned how to testify to their faith, back when they were not seeking faith at all. Indeed, we could remember when most of them regarded the religious beliefs of their new set of friends as quite odd. I recall one who told me that he was puzzled that such nice people could get so worked up about “some guy in Korea” . . . Then, one day, he got worked up about this guy too.

by Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Image: uncredited
[ed. There's much more, but I'd also suggest that Christianity benefited from an abundance of scribblers, editors and transcriptionists who, over successive generations, defined and redefined God in the Bible (and Christianity in general) to fit an evolving religion and events of the time. Jack Miles' God: A Biography covers this ground quite thoroughly. See also: this review of the book (Commentary); God: A Biography: Q&A (Jack Miles); and, Christian theology (Wikipedia).]

Human Nature

And God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”
Image: markk
Genisis 126-31 via 

On Weaponizing Antisemitism Against Pro-Palestine Protests

The press and especially the news channels are constantly warning us that antisemitism is everywhere on the rise. They don’t point to specific episodes, content instead to denounce an ancient prejudice that in the context of a Middle East crisis is staging a resurgence. No, they describe a gigantic wave of antisemitism that has been sweeping across the globe since October 7. Its epicenter is on American college campuses, just as the epicenter of the anti–Vietnam War movement was on college campuses sixty years ago.

The New York Times has published a number of articles making the analogy between the current antiwar demonstrations and the earlier ones. The comparison is fair enough, since the United States has not seen protests on this scale since the Vietnam War. Students are well aware of this. In the 1960s, an American army was engaged in war in Southeast Asia; today, Israel is destroying Gaza with weapons supplied by the United States.

Like their predecessors, today’s students understand that their involvement is crucial to stopping the massacre, that their demonstrations are not mere gestures of solidarity but an uprising organically linked to the Palestinian resistance. In both cases, these movements have been violently denounced, and even repressed. During the Vietnam War, students who occupied college campuses and burned the American flag were painted as being enemies of the free world, communists, and totalitarians. Today they would be branded as antisemites.

The accusation is as serious as it is false. When I join pro-Palestinian demonstrations on the Cornell University campus, I see many Jewish students, often waving signs of endorsement from their organizations. At the rallies, Jewish students and professors—sometimes also Israeli students—express their anger at the massacre in Gaza. United in their demand for justice and equality, Jews and Palestinians display brotherly feelings toward each other.

When I go home and turn on the TV, I am immediately confronted, flipping through the main U.S. and European channels, with a talk show on the antisemitism of the antiwar movement. Mike Johnson, speaker of the United States House of Representatives, appears on every channel. Surrounded by policemen and people holding Israeli flags—not one of them young enough to be a student— Johnson positions himself next to the pro-Palestinian encampment at New York’s Columbia University and denounces antisemitism.

Shortly afterward, I see him again at a press conference, and still later at a ceremony at the Holocaust Memorial Museum. This same man, a member of the Republican Party and an ardent supporter of Donald Trump, has been repeating for three and a half years that Joe Biden stole the election.

Should we believe that the students demonstrating for Palestine are deplorable antisemites and the attackers of the Capitol building on January 6, 2021, true defenders of democracy? It strikes me that the journalists, special correspondents, and newscasters who tour American campuses, some with entire crews of photographers and cameramen, and who then tell us about the antisemitism of American students are lying and dishonoring their profession.

The reality is that antisemitism has been weaponized, to use the current expression. Not the antisemitism of yesteryear, which was directed against the Jews, but a new, imaginary antisemitism aimed at criminalizing any criticism of Israel. The antiwar movement is very broad and diverse, in the United States as in Europe. 

Within this large constellation, three main clusters stand out quite clearly. The first consists of young people of postcolonial origin, born in Europe or the Americas into families originally from Africa or Asia. For them, the Palestinian cause is a new stage in the struggle against colonialism.

Next come African Americans, who identify the liberation of Palestine with a global fight against racism and inequality. Palestinian lives matter. Israel has relegated Palestinians to an apartheid system comparable to what once existed in South Africa.

And finally, there are those who are reactivating a specifically Jewish universalist and internationalist tradition, though one that has always stood apart from Zionism—when not opposing it outright. Many of these youths are “non-Jewish Jews,” in the sense that Isaac Deutscher gave that term: “heretics” who take part in the Jewish tradition by transcending Judaism. Others are what we might call “Dreyfusards,” Jews who will not stand for discrimination, oppression, or killing to be carried out in their name, just as there were French citizens who, believing in a republican ideal of equality and justice, supported the Algerian cause.

In the twentieth century, this tradition placed Jews in the vanguard of liberation movements. Clearly, the tradition is still very much alive, and we should be thankful. The media campaign denouncing the alleged antisemitism of students who rally in support of Palestine is a direct attack on these three groups. Equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism kills three birds with one stone, striking at anti-colonialism, anti-racism, and Jewish nonconformism.

The link between anti-Zionism and antisemitism has always been ambiguous. On the one hand, a Jewish nationalist movement was always going to be viewed with hostility by European nationalists who found in antisemitism one of their baseline elements. On the other hand, Zionism sought from the outset to use antisemitism to achieve its own ends. Antisemites wanted to drive out Jews, and Zionists wanted to persuade Jews to emigrate to Palestine—there was ample room for a meeting of minds. (...)

There is no question that, especially on the right, many anti-Zionists were antisemitic. Moreover, after the birth of Israel, the Arab world imported many antisemitic stereotypes from Europe, which became widespread just as they were waning in their countries of origin.

But it’s also true that Zionism has always been criticized, and often vehemently rejected, by a large part of the Jewish world. A list of anti-Zionist Jewish intellectuals would fill several volumes. Zionism was one of the many offshoots of the secularization and modernization that transformed the Jewish world starting in the nineteenth century, but for a long time it had relatively few adherents. Today the situation has changed, because Israel is a state, and in a secular world the memory of the Holocaust and the existence of Israel mark out the landscape in which the identity of diasporic Jews is defined.

by Enzo Traverso, LitHub | Read more:
Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: Inside the State Department’s Weapons Pipeline to Israel (ProPublica).]