Saturday Night Radio Drama - Katherine Chandler - Found

Found 

  

When Mike returns home from the shops, not with a bottle of wine as intended, but with a tiny baby, life for him and his wife Annie will never be normal again. As the couple deliberate over what to do for the best, the future life of the found child lies heavily in their hands. Katherine Chandler’s original drama about the power of parental instincts, social responsibility, sex, class, greed and good intentions. 

Annie ..... Nia Roberts

Mike ..... Oliver Ryan 

Sam ..... Rebecca Hayes 

Leah ..... Gabrielle Creevy 

Directed by Helen Perry A BBC Cymru/Wales Production in association with BBC Writersroom Wales.

Something different.  

 

The All Importance Of Good Will - Someone Asks Me About The Academic Racist Amy Wax

Just the other day I had reason to remember how shocked I was when, as a teenager in the early 60s,  in rural Maine,  I read Philip Roth's Goodbye Columbus,* shocked at only one thing.  It wasn't the mention of birth control, a diaphragm, it wasn't premarital sex or the vulgar materialism of the hero's girlfriend's assimilated family, it wasn't his allowing the pubescent Black kid to look at, if I recall, a book of Cezanne's nude paintings much to the objections of his boss at the library.  No, it wasn't even her brother's jock strap casually hung in the family bathroom (I was an Irish kid),  it was the depiction of casual racism in Yiddish coming from, if I recall correctly, Brenda Patimkin's father at his warehouse.  I'd never met a Jewish person who used racist language, I'd never met one who was not an obvious liberal, none of whom would ever say such things.  Perhaps with the exception of dear old, much missed,  Mr. Hirsh whose department store was one of the most important cultural features of the small town next to mine.  I have no idea what his politics were.  I will point out that at that time I found the news that there were not only Catholics but Irish Catholics who were Republicans to be astonishing, too.   I remember when my oldest sister got married to her college boyfriend, his family being Republicans was more troubling to me than anything else about him.   She remained a Democrat as all my family have.

Anyway, the occasion to remember those long ago times was a conversation I had with someone about that vesicle of Donald Trump's diseased brain that is Stephen Miller of whom his honorable uncle, Dr. David S. Glosser, has said:  

"I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew, an educated man who is well aware of his heritage, has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family’s life in this country."

The issue was, how someone with his family history, immigrants who had to flee the country of their origin for the United States at a time when racism, from its lowest to its highest in the guise of science was aimed at not only their exclusion but their very existence could be doing the very same thing today.  

"How could someone" who was "an educated man who is well aware of his heritage" willingly be exactly the thing that could well have destroyed his own family, the woman I was talking with wanted to know.  

The answer to that is as good an illustration of something I've been pointing out here more and more, when someone makes the choice to be immoral all an education does is make them more effective at being evil, of doing evil.  An education for an evil person just makes them better and more able at being evil, their credentials get them jobs where their evil can be amplified with power.  That is a universal truth that covers everyone of every ethnicity, of every nationality, of every religious group, of every identity.  

Education is not a cure for immorality, it, like science, like an education in the law, LIKE UNIVERSITY GRANTED CREDENTIALS,  facilitates the commission of evil, any expectation that "education is the answer" if it's a secular education or, in many cases, even if it has a component of moral theology, is a popular delusion of those with such credentials.  Their own non-predilection to do evil is no more dispositive in this area than those who consume snuff porn who don't kill, themselves is.  It's the ones who choose to be evil who matter. 

And so we come to the latest in the career of the very accomplished racist, Amy Wax and her colleague in elite racism, Lawrence A. Alexander, who deny that their work, blaming a whole host of evils on "non-whites," when the catalogue of those evils is endemic to "whites" especially those of the underclass in huge numbers is racist.  But, which, in the sociologically superstitious use of mathematics which has become ubiquitous, its presence among "whites" made to disappear into not only insignificance but effective non-existence by claiming those exist in a higher number as percentage of the population among "blacks", oh, right, "non-whites" make those percentages all-important in determining social policy and the law, who gets to come here, etc.   

I will point out that students of previous scientific racism would know that exactly everything attributed by Wax and Lawrence to "blacks" or, more conveinent to their racist spewing "non-whites" was attributed to many whites, especially to Jews form Eastern and Southern Europe.  I've written at length on one such paper written by a previous pair of scientific racists,  Karl Pearson and Margaret Moul, whose  The Problem of Alien Immigration Into Great Britain, Illustrated By An Examination of Russian and Polish Jewish Children, written in the years the Nazis were consulting such science in developing their policy, could be the grandfather of their articles.

From what I see, on the basis of reading their claims and as reported in magazine articles on their racism and the reaction to it, that is the substance of it.  

I have seen some remarks made about the Jewish identity of Wax and, it would seem, Lawrence, but, as I said, evil is a human condition that is universal.  Its presence has nothing to do with race or ethnicity, it certainly has nothing to do with intelligence or educational credentials** it is a personal choice to do evil.  I would point out that the refusal of the schools that hire such faculty to fire their lying, racist asses as if their publication didn't disqualify them from intellectual respectability is symptomatic of what I've also been talking about. 

I will certainly have more to say on this, soon.  I'm hoping to get back to Hans Kung's book I'm commenting on early next week. 

* Wish I could find my, no doubt, decaying copy.  I should read more Philip Roth to see if he stands up better than the other famous writers of his generation who haven't.  I suspect some of his would whereas lots of them, some of them with reputations bigger than his, are already has-beens.   I would bet that some of the most praised books of the 1950s, 60s are read by fewer than 100 people a year, not counting those assigned as classroom reading.   Does anyone have a reason to read John Updike?  I realized in the 1970s that he didn't write about anything I needed to read about, anymore. 

** It is amazing that anyone would harbor the irrational superstition that an education will cure someone of bigotry or evil.   In most cases, in every way under the very "modernism" that one of the less well reasoned condemnation of Wax and Lawrence name as their ultimate target,  universities, colleges, etc. have eschewed any notion of a responsibility to address morality, the morals of their curricula, the morals of their faculties, the morals of their certified product.   That is a direct effect of the hegemonic effect of adopting the methods of science as the required, universal model of what they do.   Science, from its inception, exempted itself from considerations of morality, even of honest fairness.  

It is sheer madness that, after the examples of the university graduates and intellectuals who comprised the Nazi genocidalists, the Marxist genocidalists that academia still maintains an even-handed, hands-off policy in addressing academic babblage spewing racism and other such evil from its employees.  I think in this, the "scientific" effect of modernism is closely related with the uses of orthodoxy were when such evils could be attributed to "religion".  But that's a longer conversation and I'd have to think about people like Augustine more than I have recently. 

Hate Mail - I Wish They'd Make You Guys Take Freshman Rhetoric Before They Credential You

The facts of arithmetic, addition, subtraction, multiplication and division are independent of a material substrate, they hold whatever is being counted, they hold when nothing is being counted.  That is true of every bit of mathematics, from the most humble to the most complex and esoteric. They work in conditions in which there is no possibility of a one-to-one relationship with any physical objects that could be counted, as in operations dealing with numbers so big, they exceed the number of all objects in the universe, in measurement of intervals invented by human beings which don't exist anywhere but in our minds.  That's not unknown, it's as known as anything is in mathematics.  While it would be sort of interesting to go through Eugene Wigner's famous, lauded, and often ignored essay, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics In The Natural Sciences, I've got garden work to do today.  It's harvest season, for Pete's sake.  And Pete isn't helping much.  I wonder if they still put that in the required reading of university Frosh.  Or did that, alas, go with requirements in rigorous Frosh Rhetoric.

Some mathematicians have posited that mathematical "objects" exist in an independent realm of reality outside of the realm of physical objects which science deals with* but that's a philosophical and logical problem, not a scientific statement.  You can't come to that belief except through a choice to believe.  What you can know is that 1+1=2, though as Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead found, especially after their work was rigorously criticized, you don't really know that,  you believe it.   

But it is a truth universally acknowledged. It's true no matter what physical substrate it has in what is being counted, it is true when nothing is being counted, which proves its independence of material objects in any rational meaning of the word "proves" or, really, any of the terms involved in your denial.  It's true or science, a far more tenuously asserted body of universal and reliable knowledge, is not true.


* Though, as I've pointed out recently, huge swaths of science under the hegemony of scientistic materialist monism has escaped that one-time requirement for something to be a scientific endeavor.  It is one of the most ridiculous and hilarious of all of the follies of contemporary academia, really of the ideology of modernism, that it is exactly the most ardent of materialists who have insisted on exempting science from its attachment to observable, measurable physical objects and phenomena and from the requirements that the conclusions asserted by such science be, as well, held up to properly scientific replication of their work.  I've noted before that Stephen Hawking, in his last book, made that demand very explicitly, that his cosmological speculations which have no possibility of confirmation by observation or even reasonable expectation of that in some future be considered science on the basis of mathematics, alone.  But that's true for any so-called science which purports to deal with "things" that not only cannot be observed but which, in many cases, may be made up by the would-be scientist.  

That practice is most obvious in the obvious pseudo-sciences dealing with the invisible things that go on in our minds, which cannot be known to others except by our own reporting of that invisible experience - we can't even confirm our own experience in any "objective" or even rigorous manner, never mind generate reliable data on which to perform mathematics.   

When the academic field of study, psychology, was  new, as good a philosopher  as William James made the rather incredible statement that the vulnerability of minds to the methods of science created to measure and describe the unconscious movements and transformations of observable physical objects was to be taken as a given.  He was making an incredible and totally unwarranted leap of faith, the landing of that leap has not happened and I doubt ever will.  It was a leap away from the gravity of honest, rational consideration of the limits of science imposed by the requirement of observation (not to mention the continual and habitual, and near universal sin of such "sciences" not only the requirement to replicate, they often don't even try to.  And that's not counting when the frequent other obvious sins of totally invalid methodology and, often, of the most outlandish and extravagant claims that alleged phenomena that are reported have relevance to other (often merely alleged) phenomena when there is no demonstrated link between them. 

Psychology, though, is not alone in those scientific sins, the study of things in the lost past which cannot be seen or known cannot be honestly subjected to scientific methods.  The faith of scientistic materialism that insists you can extrapolate speculations infinitely BECAUSE, DAMN, IT, IT HAD TO HAVE BEEN THAT WAY! has produced huge piles of formerly held science that has, since, gone out of fashion or been disconfirmed or merely replaced by other speculations.  There are huge areas of past speculation about evolution which go into that category.   

While it might frustrate legitimate evolutionary scientists that the vast majority of what they would need to make their science anything like complete or rigorous or accurate is and is certainly forever lost to science, they have allowed their fellow scientists to get entirely out of hand.  In no area is that more obvious than when evolutionary science must depend on the behavior of organisms which cannot be counted or even known to have existed, the nature of those behaviors or their results totally unknowable through observation or measurement, Sociobiology and Evolutionary Psychology are charcteristic of that, made more so through the mixing the worst excesses of psychology with just those areas in legitimate evolutionary science most vulnerable to the kind of ideological extension I just mentioned.  I am on record as expecting that that greatest of all such speculations, natural selection, will increasingly be seen as an illusion of that kind.  I don't think any universal explanation of the origin of species will ever be found, I'm skeptical that there is any one such mechanism.  

I think natural selection is a product of the economic class interests of its inventors and those who have, successively, over its entire history, tweaked and changed and modified and trimmed and fitted it and pasted stuff to it to make it at all plausible as THE GREATEST SCIENTIFIC THEORY IN HISTORY, DAMN, IT!  though that very history shows that, no, it really isn't.   It's nothing compared compared to the durability, the universality and the usefulness of the facts of arithmetic.  And those are about what might be entirely imaginary objects of the simplest kind.  It's an irony that only about such simple objects that reside in our imagination that you get the most durable and reliable information.

Hate Mail - It's A Disaster For Itself, Why Would Any Of What I've Concluded Not Be Reasonable?

The ratio of: [Validity of intellectual product] over [The transcendent capacity to find ideas that achieve the transcendent property of truth ]  has to, in each and every case, equal one or the value of the intellectual product is zero, it is insignificant.   

If the mind is discredited, everything the mind produces is discredited, including what is used to discredit the mind.  Talk about the ultimate humanly constructed catch-22.  It's no wonder the materialism that does that turns out to be such a total disaster when it is imposed on real life.  It's a disaster for itself.

The truth and representational significance of the product of a mind is only as valid as the independence of the mind that produced that product at the time of its production.  Especially, as in the dogma of scientistic materialism, the claimed product of those minds is an accurate representation of some reality independent of the mind and its ephemeral, peculiar chemistry and physics.

To use Eddington's example, a boy's mind which produces 7x9=65 produced an invalid product, which, no doubt, all academic materialists (or those who learned their times tables) would hold to violate the transcendent truth that 7x9=63.  That proves that even materialists want there to be a transcendent truth that is independent of the material causation they hold produced 65 as the answer.   As Eddington pointed out 90 years ago, this year, materialism is either wrong or it totally destroys the concept of the product of materialist minds having that basic level of validity so as to produce that transcendent truth.   Even the mathematics which provided the inventors of science their model of thought, their ideal example of producing reliable truth,  cannot maintain its validity under such scientism. 

If no product of the mind can achieve that transcendence denied them by materialist dogma, then the dogmatic materialism that claims that cannot be valid, itself.

I will interject that the very claim that there is some thing such as an overriding  "objective truth" which escapes the merely local physical and chemical conditions that produce phenomena,  more than implies that nature, itself, must be able to surpass the banal insignificance of mere material causation.  Where does this "objective truth" reside in nature, outside of minds?  But that's a different post.

That's not hard to figure out, though the entire realm of intellectual materialism ignores it or pretends it's not there.  Entire careers in academia which get you book contracts, invited on radio and TV and to give papers and lectures are built on that pretense.  It's among the strongest symptoms of intellectual degeneracy around today.  Materialism is the ultimate decadence current in academic and intellectual life. I'd say it's endemic to the vulgar materialism of large parts of the legal system where, "Men like to substitute words for reality and then argue about the words," Edwin Armstrong.  I'll resist the temptation to write a paragraph on the journalism of the likes of the New York Times and NPR, the cabloids and right on down to the sub-sewer levels that FOX and "social-media" feed and defecate into, what feeds Trumpian materialism.  

What does this mean for egalitarian democracy?  The production of a decent life for everyone? 

All materialism, especially the scientistic variety,  is deadly for those.  Materialism is by choice and creed divorced from and opposed to that one source that nourishes egalitarian democracy.  As the atheist Habermas said, 

Das Christendom ist für das normative Selbstverständnis der Moderne nicht nur eine Vorläufergestalt 

Christianity is, for normative understanding of modernity, not only a preformation 
 
oder ein Katalysator gewesen.    
or a catalyst.  
 
Der egalitäre Universalismus, aus dem die Ideen von Freiheit und solidarischem Zusammenleben,    
Egalitarian universalism*, from which the ideas of freedom and communal concord
 
von autonomer Lebensführung undEmanzipation, von individueller Gewissensmoral,
of autonomous life and emancipation, of individual moral conscience
 
Menschenrechten und Demokratie entsprungen sind, 
human rights and democracy have sprung from,   

ist unmittelbar ein Erbe der jüdischen Gerechtigkeits
is an unmittigated inheritance from the Jewish doctrine of justice
 
-und der christlichen Liebesethik. 
and the Christian ethic of love.
 
In der Substanz unverändert, 
In unchanged substance 

ist dieses Erbe immer wieder kritisch angeeignet und neu interpretiert worden. 
this inheritance has been critically adopted, over and over, and newly interpreted. 
 
Dazu gibt es bis heute keine Alternative.
For that [meaning for producing all those things] there is till today no alternative.

My investigations into the politics of the post-war era have led me to believe that that atheist is right and that means materialism cannot feed egalitarian democracy, economic and social justice - the scientific dictatorships of the 20th century are about as impressive an experiment in that as could be devised - and that they will produce either the dwindling of them through starvation and the rise of fascist-neo-Nazism as aided and instituted by the former KGB man, Putin using the vulgar materialism in such things as American popular entertainment which provided him with a Trump card to destroy our democracy with.  

Why Habermas remains an atheist instead of making the choice to believe after coming to that conclusion?  Perhaps, as I was, he mistakenly believes belief is an involuntary act which has to come unaided by the work of conscious choice.  If you wait for that to happen without committing yourself, consciously, it will never happen.  The entire aspiration for egalitarian democracy, for its results, including the preservation of the world environment we all depend on to live, founders on that superstition of scientistic modernism. 

*  The Golden Rule, do to others as you would have them do unto you, is a perfect expression of egalitarian universalism expressed as human action, in the choice to abide by that equality even when you might benefit from not doing so, when you can get away with it.   I would say that what Habermas calls the "Christian ethic of love" as expressed in the saying of Jesus, "love your neighbor as yourself" " I give you a new commandment, love one another as I have loved you." is a further extension and intensification of that rule.  If they were universally followed, egalitarian democracy and a decent life would inevitably follow. One in which the inevitable pains of life would be transformed from incomprehensible tragedy which wears or seduces people and societies down into isolated, solipsistic  Trumpian indifference, into the possibility of shared responsibility and betterment.  I finally realized that is a choice that you have to make, it doesn't just happen by some force of nature.

Hate Mail - "no one reads this shit"

Oh, I hardly ever look at the traffic statistics on this blog.  I can't remember seeing a day when I had fewer than in the hundreds, never more than a couple of thousand for some of the posts that got some mention elsewhere.  I don't keep track.  I figure I write stuff, I post it.  Sometimes I even fix it.  Blogging is quick and dirty writing and editing.  At Echidne's I once said, A man who acts as his own editor has a blogger for a client.  She pointed out that that didn't include women.

If people want to read it, it's there for them to read.   I figure if no one comments it means they don't have major disagreements they want to fight about.  I usually won't turn up an intelligent brawl, if they're on topic or at least interesting.  I love to argue.  I even argue with myself, it's called "thinking critically".  I'd say you should try it but it's too late for you.

Equality Is The Most Reliable Gurantee Of Freedom And Democracy

It is one of the stupidest things I was ever gulled into doing in my callow youth, not looking at the scriptures as a singularly valuable source of moral and intellectual guidance.  No, of course I'm not talking about the creation fables, which you'd know if you'd read me. 

If I hadn't it wouldn't have taken me so long to figure out what must count as about the most enduring and valid of all the commandments in the Bible, as repeated by Jesus "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," was the key to everything necessary in producing a decent life under self-government by people of good will.  

I had been remembering the ridiculously late "ah-ha" moment in thinking about my theme of what the traditional American liberal-left needed to do to regain power and to create such a decent life under such a regime of self-government when I realized that the first and final guarantee of it, even among such of us who are not of reliably good will was EQUALITY.  I think I first articulated that in a post I wrote for Echidne of the Snakes, though I can't locate that specific piece.  I believe I said, explicitly that above any assertion of "freedom" that equality was the first rule for making and judging decisions, laws, legal decisions without which freedom would become unequal and dangerous.  I think informing that conclusion was memories of the proto-fascist William F. Buckley jr. slamming equality as the enemy of "liberty".

In looking up that first time I said that at Echidne's and my original blog "olvlzl" I came across this piece that I had forgotten writing and which I like enough so I'm reposting it.  I used to take a lot more time on my posts back then.  Maybe I should go back to doing that and cutting down on the number of things I post. As I recall, it was controversial (probably at Duncan's) because people figured I was slamming two lesbians when I wasn't, I was slamming two privileged, elite Republican hypocrites, their families and the editorial writers of the Boston Globe. 

It also fits in with this mornings post about how the enhanced "liberties" "freedoms" divorced from equality and the moral framing as is found in religion turns, almost inevitably, into the enhancement of liberties taken by those who already have more power and money.  There is no more oppressive messaging and instruction for women, for children, for men without money and power than the iconic symbol of total liberty, the porn industry.  

If all men followed that teaching that Jesus repeated from the Mosaic Law, no woman or child or poor man would ever be exploited and treated the way they are because no man would ever willingly be treated that way, himself.  Slavery would be non-existent, wage slavery and poverty included.  I don't remember which Roman emperor it was who remarked with surprise that the kind of destitution (and, certainly the many consequences of destitution) that was ubiquitous in the pagan world was absent among the Jews.  The routine practice of infanticide, which fell most heavily on infant girls, was, as well, absent among the Jews and the later Jewish-Christians.

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

 

Sorry About The Cheney-Poe Baby, How Do You Feel About The Other Children?

The Boston Globe printed an editorial on Wednesday calling for the privacy of Mary Cheney and Heather Poe as they become the parents of a baby. The editorial praises Dick Cheney for not being a Republican morality policeman on the issue of gay rights while attributing this lone spec of light to his having to deal with his daughter’s sexuality.

Sorry, Boston Globe but wrong, wrong, wrong on all counts. Mary Cheney campaigned to put the Republican party in power, the party that has been using hatred of lesbians and gay men as one of the pillars of its frighteningly effective electoral strategy. The Republican Party, with the Log Cabin dupes, is the home of hatred, the epicenter of the attack on all of us who go into the category.

Mary Cheney and Heather Poe gave up any right to privacy on this issue for themselves when they supported putting people in power who were dedicated to taking the same rights away from the rest of us.

It is one of the favorite gambits of wealthy, powerful conservatives to carve out these zones of personal privilege for themselves, even islands of alleged enlightenment as they support those who turn out the lights and break down the doors for those without power and protection. That tactic of “moderate” Republicanism is over. With the defeat of Lincoln Chaffee it is so over. If they don’t like where it leaves them, well isn’t that just too bad. The rest of us are even more inconvenienced by the hate campaign that the stinking Republican Party has waged against us. You don’t like it, Lincoln, Mary, Heather, choose sides but don’t expect us to make any concessions to your other loyalties. If your families and party weren’t using the politics of hate to begin with we wouldn’t even be talking about them.

As for Dick and Lynne Cheney, two bigger hypocrites are seldom to be seen in one marriage. Going so far as publishing, one expects perhaps even profiting from, very badly written lesbian sex scenes while campaigning for the party of gay baiting, campaigning for “traditional morality” against just such sex scenes and while insisting that out of all possible targets of their parties and their own hatred that their child have a place of safety? They are the poster couple of Republican-fascist degeneracy, “The Damned - America 2000 ".

The well positioned in the media, in academia, in the law talk about a lot of different, valued rights. Freedom, privacy, free speech, etc. But they don’t seem to be very much interested in that one value that gives everyone an ironclad incentive to not violate the most cherished rights of other people. EQUALITY, the absolute and firm requirement in the law and in society that rights and liberties that one person or one group is allowed to exercise are exactly the same for every single other person. Equal rights, equal exercise of rights goes to everyone or no one gets to exercise them. Mary and Heather don’t deserve privacy when they, their parents, their party actively violate the privacy of numerous other people and not just gay people and lesbians. They don’t get to promote bigotry while enjoying a sort of social Ziebart to protect themselves.

If you ask what about their child when it is born, what about it's rights and feelings? Well lots of other lesbians and gay men have children. What about them?

On Being Exposed To "A Serbian Film"

If you live long enough, if your age brings you to wisdom instead of foolish conceit, you will find that you learn new and important things from people half, a third a quarter of your age.  I did the other day from a feminist of college age who, as I was telling her how much I despise porn and the porn industry, told me about the 2010 movie "Serbian Film" and told me that it was an attempt to make the most extreme and disgusting porn film ever made.  She is one of the young generation of feminists who seem to be getting over the "free speech feminists" promoted by the porn and publishing industry in the 1970s.  I see them as one of the few signs of hope in this area. 

I'd not yet come across the film in my investigation of how bad porn is so I can address one half of the porn-industry "free speech" catch 22* that if you haven't seen porn, you are not qualified to judge it and if you've seen it you're a hypocrite for condemning it because you've seen what you're talking about.   Oddly, enough, that rule, so often cited by the critical wing that champions absolute "free press - free speech" doesn't apply when they give bad reviews of something, it is reserved for the one and only act of condemning pornography.

I have looked into it, even to the extent of watching some clips online (watch out, luckily my malware kicked in at one point in that exercise, you pick up porn at risk of infection) and am convinced that the film is, in fact, if not the most extreme and disgusting porn film ever made, close to it.  The movie apparently has the distinction of depicting the creation of a new genre of porn, the rape of a new born baby, and that is only one of the evils it elevates on the plinth that porn is.  

The excuse for  Srđan Spasojević the filmmaker son of the kind of dodgy millionaire who rose in post-Tito Serbia was some line of "allegory" a symbolic attempt to condemn the corrupt degeneracy and evil of Serbian society, not only the very society that made the pornogrpher's father rich, but which created the milieu in which this "film" joins a flourishing industry in other porn, including some of the worst of actual, non-simulated child porn which you can see images on of just about any google search using any porn implicated terms.  But in reading what the dirtbag has said about his snuff-porn, baby-rape movie flick, his statements have about the same self-contradictory consistency as a week of Donald Trump tweets.  I think the safest conclusion to reach is that he wanted to become famous and, most likely, rich by making an extremely evil and disgusting porn film that would make him famous (as it inevitably would if it were bad enough) and which would make him money.   How this differs from the allegedly corrupt country he is alleged (sometimes by himself, just about always by the critics and academics who have praised the degenerate bit of art) to be allegorizing.  I think it's safe to say that easily 999 times out of 1000 that the word "allegory" is used to describe a violent, porn film, it is an obvious, self-serving lie.  

A movie is about what it shows on the screen, first, second by what it says, the insertion of a line or so of "social criticism" here and there, amidst the rape and torture and murder and the presentation of the male rapist, torturer and murderer as the hero AND FOR FUCK'S SAKE, THE HEROIC VICTIM of the film (easily 9999 out of 10,000 porn films are all about the rapist), means nothing.  Some of the critics have complained that the DVD release of the movie and the extensive online pirating of it have removed the filmmakers BS intro in which he declares his attempt at an ultimate slasher-porn child rape necrophiliac "film" has the "redeeming value" of social and political criticism" but that act of removing that lie might be the only honest thing that has been said by those who champion the film.  The "critics" especially those who are self-employed online, some of the academics, are just liars, they a. aren't much bothered by the content of the film, b. they want to be seen as falling within the perverted, inverted morality that always is the end of "free speech -free press" absolutism.  

In one of the many twists and dodges in attributing "meaning" to his movie Spasojević is quoted as saying it's a protest against "the fascism of political correctness," "political correctness" being, as well one of the bogeymen of America's resurgent neo-fascist-neo-Nazi-Trumpian fascist movement.  It is a clear signal what is wrong with that slogan that this "protest" against it depicts acts that could come right out of the worst indictments of fascist torturers and the catalogue of crimes of the like of Lavrentiy Beria for the thrill of sicko-degenerate men and the journalistic and academic au courant  

That is the thing about the 18th century "enligthenment" version of laissez-faire liberalism, of unregulated, unrestrained commerce, of the kind of thing that the post-Revolutionary French secularism produced**, its freedom accrues to those who already have power (wealth) and those who are more ruthless in pushing their exercise and enjoyment of power (wealth).  The liberties that are gained, generally, are at the expense of those with less power, that is the liberty which the world of pornography promotes at the expense of women, children - now including new borns) less powerful men, anyone who can be turned into a victim for the pleasure of snuff-porn heroes or torturers and rapists who haven't gotten round to delivering the coup de grace within cinematic time frames.  

It was one of the anomolies of the Paris Commune that the women successfully appealed to the leaders of it to temporarily liberate prostitutes from the prostitution they were forced into.   That atypical act of the suppression of sexual commerce in 19th century Paris was, alas, as short lived as the Commune fell and the normal civil order restored the liberty and fraternity to that area of Paris which, certainly, didn't result in equality.  

* From dear old and always new, Merriam Webster 

Definition of catch-22

1 : a problematic situation for which the only solution is denied by a circumstance inherent in the problem or by a rule the show-business catch-22—no work unless you have an agent, no agent unless you've worked— Mary Murphy also : the circumstance or rule that denies a solution

**  One of the higher falutin' critical voices of praise for Serbian Film made the typical degenerate intellectual resorts of comparing it to the degenerate French monument of such freedom, Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol 

"the dark Grand Guignol that shreds its celluloid victims with unconcealed intensity while showing in full color and detail, the collapse of the last bastions of decency, morality, and rationality."

Yes, that pretty well sums up what morality becomes in the catechism of "free speech - free press" absolutism.  Remember that list of inverted-virtues  the next time you are horrified at the latest depravities of the Trump regime by way of "collapse of the last bastions of decency, morality, and rationality".    There is a direct connection between the two, including the fact that Trump as President of the United States is 100% a product of commercial entertainment.

The creators of the Grand-Guignol considered themselves to be such champions of freedom as they used the violent exploitation of the underclass, prostitutes, homeless children, the male gangsters who raped, tortured, exploited and destroyed them for the money-making entertainment of the fashionable and decadent intellectuals seeking to stay up with the latest thing and, heavens forbid, wanted nothing to do with anything unfashionably moralistic. 

What is it about saying "French Revolution" that inevitably blinds intellectuals to these products of it, making more generally available to rich men the perverted pleasures and evil delights of the worst of the aristocratic class that it took over from?   Is it because so much of the evidence is in French and most of them don't read it that well?  Or does it being in French make it exotic and so safe for them?

Also, Two Years On, How Well Did Masha Gessen Nail It?

Just Now At RMJ's

Daniel Dale‏Verified account @ddale8

Trump says the prime minister of Denmark was “nasty” and “inappropriate” by publicly rejecting his unsolicited proposal to buy Greenland in the way she did. He says she could’ve just said no, and he’s not going to let her talk to him that way.

8:52 AM - 21 Aug 2019

 

And this:

 

 

Spam He Am

I posted enough of his spam in the past, answering it, making it the topic of posts only because he is so unoriginal that he eventually repeats every stupid, every wrong, every muttering bit of babble that comes from the lobotomized pop-"culture" industry* that it has at least that limited use, to address the typical bull shit that must be overcome to get something done. 

I can make that use of it on my own terms this way, I realized that a couple of weeks back.  Don't fight farces, use them. 

* Laziness is a chosen form of mental retardation, it is ubiquitous even, perhaps especially among the college credentialed who make more money and have more leisure than is good for their minds.   It is to be despised, not like the involuntary forms of mental limitation.  I think I'll re-read dear old Jerry Mander's great work Four Arguments For The Elimination of Television.

Secularism will never be radical enough to nourish or sustain what that kind of liberalism consists of

In my investigations of politics, my theme of what traditional American liberals can do to get out of the political wilderness it has been stuck in for a half century and counting, in the necessity of looking hard at and criticizing the habits of scientistic modernism, that far from entirely beneficial inheritance from the moribund "enlightenment" I've come to see that there are deeply ingrained habits of thought that have led many a liberal and virtually all lefties into self-defeat.  Especially those tied to what poses as "scientific" ideology.   Marxism, perhaps the worst of those still current on the play-left such as you can hear on Majority Report.

Some of the most potent of those habits are based in an over-extension and over-reliance on assumptions drawn from the pure sciences, logic, mathematics, physics, chemistry and, to the extent it can avoid the ever growing attempt at sweeping past the inevitable complexities of living beings and their environment to make unreliable generalizations, biology.  

It is, of course, in biology that the worst of that habit begins exactly because its chosen filed of study, organisms, lives, living communities, species, etc. are far too complex to generate the kind of information that you can get with physics and inorganic chemistry, as complex as chemistry tends to become, it is still not as subject to the problems generated by complexity and variation that are routinely faced in the scientific study of life. 

If you want a good example of that, the allegedly scientific study of nutrition is a good place to start because it already exhibits the difficulty if not impossibility of generating stable, reliable and generally applicable statements of the kind that science is supposed to.  And that is largely dealing with aspects of biology that have some limited number of observable, testable physical phenomena to generate data to use.  

When you add other things, both the observable and things about living organisms that can't be observed (as the retrospective science of evolution inevitably is) or of the activity of people that can't be observed, anything the study of which is totally at the mercy of self-reporting and the inevitable biases of the person reporting their experience, the researcher collecting and processing those reports, the contemporary biases of their close colleagues (the "school" of their field they belong to) and the general biases inherent in all academic fields and  academia in general, the reliability and durablity of their claims must eventually receded past the horizen where they are rationally considered to be scientific (ALL of the so-called sciences supposedly dealing with behavior).   

The alleged scientific study of the behavior, the minds of other organisms that can't report their invisible experience is of such total unreliability that it is offensive that it is considered to be a science, at all.  But, since what gets called "science" is in the often very interested hands of scientists, and since it is the faith, the creed, the firmly held conceit of so many in science that it's scope and grasp is all encompassing, lots of crap has been given the ersatz authority of science, once in a while some physicist or chemist or even biologist will either admit or snark about the pseudo-scientific character of other fields but that is very rare.  In the case of the idological materialists of science, many of them are total and true believers in some of the dodgiest of all of the over-extensions of scientific attributions, fields which don't only bend and twist but shatter any meaningful definition of "scientific method" and all standards.  

There are many which get away with stuff, routinely, that would probably get them into hot water if they were publishing in some of the more rigorous fields of the humanities, such as history or biography.   I think it's a rare, serious historian or serious biographer who doesn't hold the work of some of their colleagues up to a higher standard of criticism than many in the sciences do.  Though the humanities have their flakes, in abundance, their claims of producing totally reliable information that is proposed to govern the lives of individuals, societies, the world, to shape the law and to stand unquestioned are much more modest than those made by scientists. 

Of course, the sciences do produce things that work, they produce information that is reliable, some of the information that scientists generate about extremely complex entities is enormously important and valuable, environmental science, dealing with some of the most complex entities that science can study produces information and predictions that have proven reliable, as the warmest July on record demonstrates in a fashion undeniable except to those brainwashed by the likes of FOX experience.   As one of my dear relatives who is a field marine biologist, well respected in the field says,  "It's not rocket science, it's a hell of a lot harder than rocket science."   

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

The most persistent and stupid of my trolls has commented "The fact you don't understand that the religious morality you posit as superior to any other runs on the honor system, and thus is meaningless. You know -- kind of the way the Constitution runs on the honor system, and you know how well that's turned out lately."

How stupid can you get?  

I'll begin by noting that I've been pointing out that the Constitution is stupidly reliant on the honor of politicians, judges, "justices" for about as long as I've been writing these things which the Simp has trolled, so it's rather gratifying to see the geezer has learned one thing from me.  Though, considering his act consists of lines he stole from comedians of the past, it's no surprise he's cribbing.

But he's rather stupid to have made that argument because secularism rejects any more forceful standard than what someone figures they can get away with to inhibit their actions that are harmful to other people, groups of people, animals, the environment, etc.  It was the "enlightenment" hope of being free of consequences from God* from the Mosaic Law, the observations of the Prophets, the Gospel of Jesus and the teachings of James and Paul (all that giving away their stuff to the poor!) that led them to set up a secular system, the one which runs, not on any effective observation of God's Law, but on those things which are contrived by men.  That was the reason that, any possibly effective higher standard and inhibitions removed, the Constitution was entirely reliant on the sense of honor the very dishonorable slave holders, expansionist land-owners(stealers), men of business, sharp lawyers who are "the founders" made the stupid and self-serving resort to relying on their mutual sense of honor.  

I think the acceptance of that replaces the Jewish tradition of justice and the Christian tradition of love (which, I will remind you, in that quote from Eric Alterman, I re-posted last week, constitute the ONLY reliable source of egalitarian democracy on the authority of several experts) with a large reliance on the bad habits of imagining that egalitarian-self-government will just "happen" as a result of atavistic forces found in the natural world, that crap was generated in huge mounds during the "enlightenment."   We are as prone to that nonsense as they were in the 18th century, the pseudo-science of psychology has duped or lulled or gulled many, perhaps most of us, into believing we are at the mercy of forces we don't control, in our unconscious, based on everything from the pathlogically bizarre sexual imaginings of Freud, right down to today's idiocy that we are the lumbering robots controlled by our DNA, who don't think at all.  

Neither the product of decadent Vienna in the late 19th or early 20th century or the Evolutionary Psychology that grew out of Sociobiology are at all compatible with egalitarian democracy, that those are among the most adopted ideologies of educated people (not to mention other popular ones as incompatible with it) is a serious problem for the sustenance of government of, by and for people of good will who are equipped to make adequately informed judgments.

It is a definitive discrediting of the final reliability of the "enlightenment" that it elevated the human invention of science and, against all reason, claimed it to be the ultimate "light" that informed everything.  It has led to the quintessential characteristic and idiotic contradiction that the "enlightened" "free thinkers" are the foremost champions of the idea that consciousness is an unreliable illusion and who, by virtue of their creed,  are the most viciously hostile opponents of the possibility that people can think freely, free from material causation (such as Dawkin's selfish-genes).  The "enlightenment" wanted to claim the final reliability that it attributed to the product of science, the kind of thing that makes as Dionysian a figure as Christopher Hitchens dressing himself in the robe of a "enlightened" Apollonian, as he drunkenly dodged and swayed from Trotskyite to devoted supporter of American Republican-fascism.  The whole thing, in 2019, has well passed the state of total degeneracy, only waiting for people to undertand that it is, now, everything bad they attribute in their most opportunistically selective condemnation of religious faith.  It is more ubiquitous than the Catholic Church was at its height, it's crash will make the Reformation look like a passing shower during a picnic.  

This is an extremely complex topic because it deals with some of the most basic habits of thought that are ubiquitous among, not only those who have had educational credentials given them** but more generally in the population.  When you get down to a critique of the foundations you so often have to start with identifying your own bad habits and the parts of your thinking those are constructed on, it's not easy and thinking and writing about it is always an ongoing project.  It would help if I had more time to read and think and write but I'm not a pro.  But that means I'm free to criticize without having to worry about someone where I work attacking me for it and I can post things that are in far rougher shape than an academic would get away with. 

* The deist "god" who does nothing and who imposes no consequences, should have been a predictable product of these enlightened men on the make.  If I had the time I'd re-read Jefferson and Madison on religion because I'll bet I'd be able to understand them better in light of that idea.  Not to mention the Constitution written by such men.

**  Just try to tell an eliminationist-materialist that their intellectual credentials, their meal-ticket, their source of income, are exactly as meaningless in exact proportion to which the consciousness they dismiss is meaningless, that ratio has to equal one, press that point,  see what happens.  These people, the free-thinking denying "free thinkers", the intellectuals who want to make not only the source of thinking but the thoughts, themselves, to be crushed into oblivion by their (thought up) ideologies, are the most stupidly dishonest people in the history of world culture. 

Note:  I think one of the worst things that happened to the American left is that it is built on the basis of what happens at colleges and universities.  Not only does that mean that it is so often a "phase" that the young pass out of as they get on in life and get more of a stake in material possessions, it means that it is tied to the same cultural decadence that I described here.  The American liberal tradition of egalitarian democracy, economic justice, social justice, the preservation of the environment, needs a lot more than scientistic "enlightenment" provides.  Secularism will never be radical enough to nourish or sustain what that kind of liberalism consists of.

Why I Am Still A Christian - Chapter One continued

So the question remains:  How are we to lay down priorities and preferences on a purely rational basis?  Purely philosophical arguments to establish essential values have not come up with anything conclusive.  They have never got beyond problematical generalizations, which all tend to break down precisely in those exceptional circumstances where people do act in a way that is by no means to their own advantage or for their own personal happiness, but in a way which may involve a sacrifice; even, in an extreme case, the sacrifice of life itself. 

I will break in here and note that this is the huge problem that "altruism" is for natural selection which can't include unselfish acts.  The more numerous or significant those unselfish acts are, the less natural selection AND EVERY PHILOSOPHICAL OR SO-CALLED SCIENTIFIC FRAMING THAT TAKES NATURAL SELECTION AS A GIVEN can coherently explain things.  

That failure, though, has certainly not been admitted to or noticed by even supposedly rigorous philosophical or almost all academic scholarship. In this book, about Christianity, that failure is absolutely central to the problem it addresses and the solution to that problem it advocates.


How do we know today what we can still rely on, in the last resort?  Certainly every day we receive more and more rules of behavior, "traffic regulations,"  maxim.  But as we all know, regimentation is not the same thing as having values.  On the contrary, the more regulations, regimentation, planning, and organization we have, the more laws, requirements, forms, and the "pressure of circumstances" gain control in all spheres of life, the more people feel disorientated and lose insight and oversight, and the more people feel to be losing control over their lives, the more they demand clear signposts to help them through the confusion of rules, regulations, and outside pressures.  In this disorientated age, people long for a fundamental orientation, for some system of essential values, for a commitment  to these essential values, not to society's superficial rules and regulations, which is the theme of this book.

I should break in here to note that this is not, as I'm sure some who skim or comment on this without reading it will assume it is,  a "proof" of God or a "proof" of Christianity, that's not its purpose.  It is a book of persuasion, of explanation, a case for why someone may retain Christian belief or, as in my case, choose it.  In that the foremost arguments are based in human experience of what works to solve problems that we have, to provide a basis in which a solution may be had or even hoped for. 

I am sure some objection will be made that this appeal to what works is intellectually dishonest.  All that shows is how successfully the very basis of science, of mathematics, of logic, even of the most basic intellectual activity IN HUMAN CHOICE is not only denied but it never even occurs to such people that whether or not we admit or remember it, all of our intellectual holdings are founded in human choices to believe our own experiences and observations.  The idea that there is some kind of compulsion that demands we make choices to believe by some automatic, natural event, which, by the way, is so notably wrong in so many cases.  

I will also note that there have been many a time when I've argued natural selection or the multiverse or other questions of science, unable to come up with anything even resembling a "proof" the advocate of them will make recourse to them "working" of their utility in explaining things (even when they really don't) and, if pressed, will assert that that very standard of something "working" to produce a desired end is the equivalent of proof in a practical sense.  If it "works" when the desideratum of the, often, materialist can be gotten, then Christianity working to produce things like equality and the other things attributed to it by Kloppenberg, by Habermas, by FDR and, myself, then that is as valid a reason for its adoption as other things obtained through that standard of evidence.  I think the Jewish insight that God is evident in the workings of history and human experience is right, I certainly think it is a valid belief in general and appealing to it in an argument of persuasion is totally fair. 

As I said, I am not a pessimist.  People are no worse today than they were in the past, when values were more abundant.  Young people have always been "bad," according to their elders.  But this much must be said, if we are to understand the present younger generation in particular; social change has never come about with such speed and complexity as it does today.  Consequently, it becomes increasingly difficult to hold on to essential values, and the danger of spiritual homelessness and rootlessness is growing all the time.  Everyone - young and old - is trying to work things out for themselves, often quite naively.  Some people orientate their lives by the horoscope, others - more scientifically minded- by biological rhythms; some organize everything according to a planned diet, others according to yoga;  one person swears by group therapy, another by transcendental meditation, a third by political action.   But it is not merely a question of individual values, it is a matter of social values as well.  Ethical questions abound;  nuclear energy, gene manipulation, test-tube babies, environmental protection, East-West and North-South conflicts  and it is becoming increasingly clear that such questions are exceeding the comprehension and overtaxing the powers of individuals.  Today we can do more than ever - but what we should do we simply do not know.

I think this question of the difference of individual or social morality is an important one, especially in the contemporary Western world in which we have been encouraged and coerced into an abandonment of all generally society-wide notion of moral absolutes.  The replacement of even nominal Christianity and the loosely held and, to say the least, imperfectly implemented teachings of Jesus and Paul in the canon of the Second Testament by secular law, not only in the rightly secular realms of government administration and, with more dangerous ambiguity, the civil law but in all social interactions and actions has been far from salubrious for the equal right to a decent life under egalitarian democracy, it certainly has been a tool for courts to allow all kinds of terrible things which destroy peoples lives, devalues people into objects of commerce and trade, which kill them.  

This secularization has had the effect of hastening the syphilitic dream of Nietzsche, the day when a de-religionized society would give up the last remnants of Christian morality, even those who most strongly wave their Bibles and make pretenses of their Christianity have done that, as can be seen in the "evangelical" support for Trump.  If they held the government to the teachings of Jesus, the Law, the Prophets, Trump would never have had the possibility of getting their votes.  Theirs is a Christianity devoid of the Gospel of Jesus.

Nietzsche's prediction of that anti-millenium would be a world in which nothing but the most ruthless and ready to destroy violence would rule, not morality, certainly not the common good.  Even learning, even science would be secondary to the power of strong-men.  As Michael Polanyi noted, something similar was asserted by the supposed alternative vision of the Soviet Union in the 1930's in which science, it was asserted, would not serve a search for truth but the dictates of the Party's five year plan. 

But that last point is made out of my motives as a political blogger. 

I'll give Hans Kung the last word in this.

It is obvious that I cannot address all these complicated questions in this brief reflection.  But perhaps I can say something of fundamental importance toward their solution, something to which our educational system, geared as it is primarily toward the acquisition of knowledge and diplomas, ought to pay more attention.  Perhaps I can say something that will help provide some ground under our feet, a vantage point, from which all individual problems may be judged; the basis for a commitment to the essential values, that is to say the essential Christian values.

But it is at this very point that inhibitions arise.  So, after this first section on the crisis of values, let me in the second section make a few comments which will lead us in the right direction.  In this context I should like to introduce the important distinction between what is "nominally Christian" and what is "truly Christian."  

Sandy Brooks Was A Great Newspaperman

Taking a break, curious to see if the similar sham to that Jeffrey Epstein was reportedly considering, the "Temple of Baccus" scheme of two would-be restaurateurs of Wells, Maine was documented online, I found this link, among others.  I hadn't recalled Marguerite was involved.  I was familiar with a couple of people in the story.

I'd have linked to it if, for no other reasons, it mentions the late Sandy Brooks, the publisher during the not only golden era but the platinum one of the York County Coast Star.  He worked himself almost into the grave making that a great weekly newspaper before the goddamned New York Times bought it and turned it into a piece of George and Barbara Bush kissing shit.

No doubt, lost on those who would like to use the Epstein story in anti-religious (really anti-Christian) invective, will be that these kinds of schemes have nothing to do with Christianity but are possible on a fluke of entirely secular law and constitutions and judges who pretend that such obvious shams must be treated as if they weren't what they obviously are, shams.  That's the law's fault and dishonesty.

Stupid Mail

Between the onions and garlic I planted in the spring, I've got to deal with about 280 feet of them, by hand.  That means pulling them, letting them dry in the sun (praying they don't get rained on) brushing the dirt off of each one, laying them out so they're not touching in the barn to continue curing - oh, and removing the still wet tops that could rot in the humidity we're having the result of human caused global-warming.  I'm going to try putting fans on them, this year, last year I had a lot of rot.   I'm expecting it to take all day.  I probably shouldn't have taken the time I did writing my morning post.  

City guys with no experience of gardening don't have a friggin' clue about where food comes from and the work that goes into it. 

Oh, yeah, for the city guys information, garlic is planted in the late fall.  I should mention that because I rushed writing this. 

The Answer To The Question Is, Of Course, Only Those Who Are To Blame

I am still getting trolled about the piece I wrote the other day pointing out that the atheist-anti-Christian use of Jeffrey Epstein is absurd, considering his crimes against children are condemned by Christian scripture and tradition going back to the start of it.  I'm asked to "get back" to my most persistent and dishonest troll when "the Christianity police actually enforce those provisions". 

The idea that there are "Christianity police" who have any power or responsibility to enforce civil law, in the United States, is, of course, stupid.  But stupid is the dialect of online atheist invective.  Lying  is their mother tongue, bigotry is their accent.

The question, if you were to try to tease an actual question out of this "Friendly" atheist, blog-rat atheist attempt to blame Jeffrey Epstein on Christians or Christianity would somewhat rationally be phrased:

Who is to blame for Jeffrey Epstein?

That, of course, is not the actual motivation of the group-blaming of Sarabeth Caplin at the "Friendly" atheist or Steve Simels from his perch at Duncan Black's blog (he regularly tries to cross post his comments there, here) it is to blame people who have not only no association with Jeffrey Epstein or his crimes of raping and trafficking young girls, the very people that Caplin and the Simp want to take the fall for him are the very same people who are among the strongest opponents of the sex crimes that comprise the criminal career of Jeffrey Epstein and which the men and women included in his crimes committed.  This, of course, is something which, as those links to contemporaneous posts at Eschaton proves, is something that the secular-atheists are far more in favor of than practicing, at-least-trying Christians are.  I would like a list of Christian writers who have favored lowering the age of consent into the ages of the girls Epstein and his pimpess tricked, roped, seduced and intimidated and forced into being raped.   Rape is, of course, the word because no one of that age should be held to be able to give fully informed and mature consent to having sex with fully adult men.  

This is an example of one of the fully acceptable practices of group-blaming in which not only those to blame are held at fault but those who not only are totally innocent of any crime or wrong BUT WHO ACTIVELY OPPOSE THE CRIMES AND WRONGS IN QUESTION are held to be answerable to them. 

As much as I'd like to have just ignored this as I get on with my onion harvest today, I thought I shouldn't let this rest.   The life and crimes of Jeffrey Epstein which is disgusting to read about should have been the job of criminal prosecution while he was alive and now properly belongs to civil attorneys of those wronged by him who now have a right to sue his estate and those of his associates and fellow rapists they have a right to hold accountable.  Of course any of those who committed crimes facilitated by Epstein should still be the subject of possible criminal prosecutions. 

As much as I'd have liked to ignore the continued snark aimed at me, I was curious to see the identities of those identified as aiding the rise of Jeffrey Epstein to see which of them were practicing, observant Christians. 

But I wasn't THAT interested so I did something I seldom do, I looked at the online-atheist-blog-rat's favorite general authority,  Wikipedia, in what I have to conclude was a bio largely assembled by Epstein or his employees (practically a sure thing with so many a Wikipedia bio) and was rather surprised to see that the names of men who helped him along could be a fertile compost pile from which a bigot could, actually, mount a campaign of stereotypical group-blaming.   Here's a list of those from the article and what I was able to find about their religious profession or ethno-religious  affiliations.

Donald Barr, father of William Barr, Trump's so-called Attorney General, actually Trump's criminal accomplice -  A nominal convert to Catholicism but who was identified as originally Jewish

Alan C Greenberg - chief executive officer of Bear Stearns - identified as Jewish

Edgar Bronfman - president of Seagrams - identified as Jewish

James Cayne - former CEO of Bear Stearns - identified as Jewish

Ana Obregon - Spanish actress, socialite - no identified religious identity

Adnan Kashoggi - Saudi businessman with many shady associations - Muslim

Steven Hoffenberg - former chairman of Towers Financial -  none  listed

Douglas Leese - defense contractor - no identification listed

John Mitchell - former Attorney General-criminal under Nixon - remarkably, I couldn't find any mention of religion in the several online sources I looked at, if it makes the Christian haters feel any better, you can blame the elite Jesuit university, Fordham for having given him his educational credentials.  See the many articles slamming Catholic elite educational institutions in my archive.

Les Wexner - billionaire (I'm tempted to say criminal, for all great fortunes are based on a concealed crime, as dear old Balzac noted) Sleazy women's wear tycoon - Jewish

Robert Meister - given as an insurance executive in the Wikibio - didn't bother looking him up  

OK, the list of people associated with Jeffrey Epstein in his peak crime years is a long one and this is cutting into onion pulling hours.  You can go look at his (I assume self written or approved) Wiki bio and you can see that virtually everyone, apart from the Jewish Catholic convert, Donald Barr and, I assume, William Barr's role model in criminal Attorney General, John Mitchell and, perhaps, a Spanish actress were definitely not Christians though, if someone wanted to make the kind of hay that Caplin and the Simp are trying to make of the likely bogus story that Epstein tried to rehabilitate himself with a mail-order "ministery" credential, blaming him on Christians would not be the first such use of him that could be made.  The milieu he rose and flourished in was not a Christian one.  

Of course the point of this exercise is to show how dishonest such an attempt at blaming an entire group for the putrid criminality of Jeffrey Epstein who doesn't seem to have ever professed Christianity in anything I can find about him, is exactly that, dishonest.  Only the individuals associated with the rise and flourishing and the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein are guilty of that,  anyone who didn't do that or wasn't even aware of it has no guilt in it. 

Only, when they practice that kind of thing on Christians, it's perfectly acceptable in polite society and in college-credentialed discourse.   They do the same things the fascists do, they just have a different list of who it's OK to do it to.  And, really, do they want to encourage that horrible habit as a regular practice?   I don't.  It's certainly not in line with the teachings of Jesus. 

Update:  I didn't leave off there to avoid the possibility of finding practicing Christians who aided Epstein.  I purposely didn't include some I knew about such as the scumbag lawyer Alan Dershowitz only because he hadn't appeared in the Wiki article when I left off.  I hadn't eaten breakfast yet as I concluded the exercise and it was making me feel sick already.