Hectoring Over Hubble, Wishing On Webb - Current Brawls Over The Rapidly Aging New Atheism - More Hate Mail

 

MORE THAN A FEW YEARS BACK, when the new atheism was preening in its incorrectly assumed newness and freshness and boldness, I listened to the atheists arguments against God quite a bit and was unimpressed.  I will say right now that if the new atheism hadn't happened I might never have looked hard at the religious dimension of the failure of the left, what I've since come to recognize is the secular left.  It's a half century of failure.  One of my earliest posts online shows my reluctance to take on the issue.   I got some backlash to which, you won't be surprised, I responded and so have written about why I wasn't impressed quite a bit over those years.  The arguments that rose somewhat above the ignorant barroom atheism of the vulgar past, now the kind of junk so often posted on so many blogs and comment threads, were the arguments made by actual scientists.  By which I don't mean Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, their arguments tended to be, if anything, stupider than those made by those old-timey barroom atheists.  I mean the cosmologists.  Most of those centered around the assumption that Einsteinian physics and quantum mechanics were "the end of physics," itself a rather absurd assumption, considering that neither of them was a full and all inclusive explanation of even known physical phenomena.  And they are famously not entirely compatible with each other.  Some of the most important and impressive discoveries of physics in the early decades of the 20th century indicated that human beings will never be able to achieve an absolute view of material existence, something which many of the most materialist-atheist-scientististic sci-guys don't seem to like much.

One most troublesome aspect in physics for dedicated atheists including some of the biggest names in physics and cosmology was the Big Bang, a theory derived from Einsteinian physics and inconveniently supported by some of the subsequent physical observation of the rate of movements of distant galaxies.  It was a theory resisted by some physicists from the start on the most unscientific basis that it reminded them too much of the first few verses of Genesis in which "God created the heavens and the Earth."  It implied the universe had an absolute beginning of both time, space and material existence.   Many of them didn't like that at all and denied the validity of the theory, especially hating the fact that its discoverer was a Catholic Priest, Georges Lemaître, who happened to be an eminent physicist as well as a priest.  In response they came up with many different theories that would get past it and its consequent conclusions that didn't go along with their materialist-atheist religious ideology, in other words, doing exactly what they suspected he was doing.  I suspect some of them suspected that he would have been a Biblical fundamentalist as his motive for coming up with that when it's pretty unlikely that you'd find one of that naive, anti-papist Protestant ideology within the Catholic priesthood.  Most atheists hold a pretty uninformed and bigoted conception of Christianity, especially Brit-atheists and their American white Anglo-Saxon, ex- Protestant wing when it comes to Catholics.  

I will raise something that came to me when I was thinking about the complaints that led me to write this, that for scientists to act on an ideological basis of materialism, of atheism and of scientism is especially funny because the scientism part of that is a self-defeating point in the entire debate.  SCIENCE WAS CONSTRUCTED WITH RULES THAT WERE SUPPOSED TO EXCLUDE IDEOLOGICAL CONTENT FROM SCIENCE.  From the time of Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes and Galileo, the rules of the right way to do science couldn't more explicitly make ideological content in science illicit, yet when it comes to materialism and atheism and scientism - ALL OF THOSE IDEOLOGICAL POSITIONS - they've gotten away with that from well into the early 18th century.  And it happened during the same period when it was religious thinking that was routinely and severely kept out of the formal literature and discourse of science but nothing was ever done to exclude those other ideological pollutions along with that thing I think it has been a disaster to exclude, morality, moral considerations and moral actions. I'd love to go into the meat-headed attempt to replace that with the idiocy and moral catastrophe of utilitarianism but that's for another post.

In relation to that, it's quite an irony that "Lemaître was opposed to linking particular scientific theories, including the Big Bang theory, to theological ideas, as each field must respect its own methods and competences."   As I said, materialist-atheist-sceintism has never practiced that kind of intellectual integrity.   

In the cosmologists' and physicists' ideological rejection of the big bang theory, even as it was gaining physical confirmation, all kinds of reasons to reject the indication that our universe had an absolute beginning of time and space were invented, in both tribes of physicists, the standard model physicists and the quantum physicists. Fluctuating universes, bouncing universes, some of the most far fetched of those the various "mulitiverse" conjectures in which there were jillions of universes so as to account for the calculated improbability of a universe like the one described in Genesis, that would generate and support life and, as we like to kid ourselves, "intelligent life."  You know, the one and only one we live in and know is real.  So far as we know the only one we will ever have observational confirmation of.  Perhaps the most absurd of those was the one invented by Hugh Everett, in which every action which happens in our universe generates jillions of universes in which every possible alternative mathematical equation describing alternative universes would come into existence.  Where the energy to create those universes and out of what they were supposed to be made and how whatever caused them was supposed to know the motivating action had happened and how to do all of the calculations to do all of that doesn't seem to have mattered much to them as long as it wasn't someone called "God" who did it.  I'd love to argue at who was supposed to notice the precipitating event to make that happen, who was supposed to do all of the infinitely expanding range of calculations - I assume that the existence of those new universes and the actions that happen in them is supposed to generate even more new universes - but I'll leave that point for now.  Back to the problematic Big Bang.

One of the most sensible reactions to all of this was to say it was all extra-scientific because, assuming the Big Bang model was true, physics had no way to get far enough to that absolute beginning to theorize what the physical conditions of that earliest time were like and so couldn't have anything to say about that.  That was one of the things I read from the cosmologist George Ellis who is a Quaker, perhaps that had something to do with his honesty about the inability of science to have anything to say about it.

If you think I'm making that up, you couldn't have read much of the claims of modern cosmology and, especially, read enough to understand the motives of the alleged scientists who were coming up with stuff like that.  I think their ideologies, admitted or unadmitted, are the source of that, not science.  That science doesn't do a thing to filter out such atheist ideology as it does a good job of filtering out religious thought, is obvious.  Today and well into the past, science, which is in the complete control of those fallible human beings called "scientists," has done nothing to protect the alleged purity of science to keep such ideology out of it.  A number of fields are entirely dominated by it, in the physical sciences and in the life sciences and, especially, in the so-called social sciences.  And that does have an actual effect in the world.

In the previous two decades of this century the Christian apologists such as the philosopher William Lane Craig and the mathematician John Lennox who studied the claims of such cosmologists had a good time pointing out how ridiculous their claims were and how unsupported by science.  Eventually some came to the same conclusion I was coming to, that all the atheists were doing was elevating matter and, quite often, not even something that could possibly be observed physically into full-fledged creator gods, not admitting that's what they were inventing.  That atheist pantheon got quite large, including, Probability, Random Chance, Mathematics in general and whatever branch served their temporary purposes, quantum vacuum, according to Hawking "the law of gravity" (which is a human made thing, not the phenomenon it tries to describe!), and on and past  Natural Selection . . .   About the only one that had actual physical evidence of its existence as an actual thing is "DNA."  Only it was DNA as only as conceived by someone who had failed to continue being informed by current science after the early 1970s, if not earlier.  It is quite a ridiculous cartoon of DNA as having absurd power and even will, not that much different from the conception of electricity as an anthropomorphic power-company mascot.  The evidence is that DNA does some things but it does nothing without a spectacularly extensive and intricate cellular support, it is inert.  Such a naive view of DNA is the basis of Richard Dawkins fame and fortune,  I won't go into that naive faith in those biological gods because this is about what the cosmologists and physical mathematicians are claiming or, more to the point, what the popular "understanding" of what they're claiming as I perceive it in online postings and Youtubes claiming that The Big Bang has been debunked by those pictures from the farthest past our space telescopes can observe in which large galaxies which according to current theory should not have formed yet, so soon after the presumed Big Bang created the universe and that very new discovery proves that the universe is eternal and wasn't created at any point.  

Somewhere in these posts made over those years I warned that depending on whatever the current state of cosmology and physics to make arguments about the reality of God was perilous because I had no faith that physics and cosmology were anything like "finished."  My skepticism about the possibility that physicists were on the verge of nailing down a theory of everything* was the other side of that warning.  I'd seen signs of the decadence that materialist-atheist-sceientistic ideology was driving modern science into when Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow declared because their theoretical (and transparently ideological) claims about multiverses and string or M theories could not have experimental or observational confirmation that them being able to balance their equations alone should give those the status of scientific confirmation with no physical observation.  In other words, reducing the emperor of science, physics, to something like the same status as the various cults of psychology and sociology.  

I will note that the best of those Christian apologists didn't base their religious claims on the speculations of science but merely answered the use of those speculations by atheists so as to point out their frequent absurdity.  As can be seen on many a Youtube and many a comment thread, neither the pop-atheists who pretty uniformly don't understand the arguments, nor the naive religious posters resist that temptation.  

When I read and listened to that and saw little to none of it was founded in observational confirmation, I called it science fiction written in equations the authors of which were insisting those be given the status of actual science.  Years later, I don't think that's description is wrong, nor is the idea that it's an expression of scientific decadence.  The quality of their math as math is one thing, to claim it is an actual description of something that exists in physical reality - a physical reality out side of any possible observation - is exactly that.  

It is as real as the other universe described in Clifford Simak's decidedly inferior novel All Flesh is Grass.  Why shouldn't his universe in which purple flowers which communicate with each other through their root systems having god-like powers be as valid as what others create with math instead of words?   At least he imagines them as able to break through to our Earth.  Those of the cosmologists are forever unavailable to us.  It's just a difference of a description in words and those in math.  The equations of a Hawking or some other ideologically motivated cosmologist are no more a complete description of an actual universe than the equations of physics can be a complete description of even one electron which can be known to exist through observation in our one and only knowable universe.  

I don't know if old and eminent Roger Penrose is really making the claims that I'm seeing the atheist sci-rangers Youtubing about.  I'd be surprised if he's making such rash statements about something so recently revealed.  If he is, he might be anxious to convince himself that there is no God and no afterlife he has to worry about as he continues in his tenth decade.   The writer, now somewhat faded in reputation, Somerset Maugham reportedly summoned to his deathbed the positivist philosopher A. J. Ayer, who was runner up to Bertrand Russell as Britain's biggest celebrity atheist, to convince him there was no afterlife.  I hope Penrose won't be calling on a Dawkings or Grayling to reassure him, my respect for him would suffer enormously if he did that.  

There's no reason to suspect that the new observations of those very early galaxies will result in an accurate description of a steady-state universe that will be the new "end of physics" or that even further and more impressive observations of what's out there will not overturn some of the entire majestic cathedral of contemporary physics.  Cosmology is such a wacky field of science that it's all over the place all the time, anyway.   The theoretical descriptions of physics, the mathematical theories of the 20th century as those of the 18th century, which worked quite well for their time and still do for most of human activity, but they were not complete.  I doubt human minds are capable of producing science which is a full and complete description of physical reality, much of that is very possibly forever outside of the reach of human minds because human minds are not infinite, either in abilities of perception and analysis or in the time it would take to come up with a full description of physical reality.  I'm not even convinced physical reality is fixed and not changing.  Considering some of the cosmological theories that the atheist ideologues have come up with, parts of some of the more far fetched "many worlds" multiverse conjectures (Boltzmann brains, for the love of Mike!) and ask why those aren't more ridiculous than the idea that the universe is evolving, even in what we might imagine as its "laws".  If that's true then it is a guarantee that human beings will never have a complete physics because the subject matter of physics, itself, will be evolving.  

Any description of even physical reality is bound to be incomplete and biased by the human beings that come up with them because of all that.  Whether that description is made by ancient Middle-Eastern mystics as copied, arranged and edited into the Hebrew Bible or by University professors published in the most highly regarded scientific journals.  That's just the way things are.  Some may be useful for some things including as descriptions, none are useful for all things.  Some of it is, in part or in whole, not useful for much of anything.  Some of the most deadly dangers to humanity and life on Earth are the product of science.  I hold that the human made choice to exclude moral considerations from science and academic credentialing is one of the most perilous choices made in the history of our species.  

As to a steady-state universe disposing of God, there's no reason to think that's the case.  The idea that the universe is eternal co-exists with many religious ideas.  It's not that much of a difference between believing the universe being here because God created it out of nothing and the idea that the universe exists because it is based and founded in God.  Since God as described in Christianity is eternal, God's reality is entirely compatible with an eternal universe, especially one that is always changing.  The idea that God is unchanging is certainly not based on the Scriptures of Judaism or Christianity nor, I believe I'm right, Islam.  It seems more like a speculation of Platonism pr Pythagorean philosophy than the Hebrew tradition.  God is said in Scripture to change God's mind and God's actions are not consistent nor entirely comprehensible by human reasoning (which, by the way, is consistent with the history of science).  God in the Bible is engaged in a covenantal relationship with People and, explicitly stated, animals, God declaring himself in a covenantal relationship with "all flesh."  One of the most impressive ideas to me is that God's covenant making is not exclusive to any one ethnic group but is explicitly stated to include those of other groups, even those opposed to The Children of Israel.  God's actions in relation to all of God's creatures is not uniform in its nature.  God's fidelity is promised* but what that fidelity is in terms of human perception is not guaranteed to be always what we want it to be or what we might fear it is.  We are told to expect that this earth and the heavens we know and are used to are not eternal and will change and even end, as our Earth and our seen heavens certainly came into existence and change.  The Hebrew seers who had the insights imperfectly recorded in the beginning verses of Genesis were certainly unaware of much beyond what they could see with their naked eyes and experience over time and the lore of those from previous generations.  They were certainly not talking about galaxies - being unaware that the stars they could see were part of a galaxy, other galaxies weren't know of by science until the 1920s.

Despite the extremely impressive concepts contained in it, it is a mistake to believe they were describing more than they knew of.  They had no idea of the vastness of the universe, after all even the most sophisticated of currently living scientists have had their concept of that enormously increased in the past year.  Those instruments that could show that wouldn't be invented for millennia. The "heavens and the Earth" described in Genesis are exactly that, what they could observe.  It's impressive that they intuited that those had a beginning, even the steady-state guys would assert that every star and the planets and the Earth that they could see had a beginning.  If the Big Bang model is in some sense true - perhaps those far distant galaxies that science couldn't imagine being there so recently only indicate there was a much bigger bang much longer ago - I still don't think we can relate that insight about Creation in Genesis of what they could see to that event.  Though if it annoys the atheist ideologues who want to fit science into their ideology, perhaps it's worth making that speculation.   Maybe their mystical insight was of that.  

My religious faith isn't based in cosmology and it's not based on the explanations of those ancient seers being something like proto-science.  My faith is based in my experience and my observations of what I can see of human life and life on this planet.  It is based in my experience of the good of life and the bad of it, I'm expecting the bad because it is what happens when People are free to act in ways that are bad but I know that in order for that to be diminished over an entire society or in the world it takes religious faith in realities that science has more often denied than it confirmed.   I've developed all kinds of ideas about what the bad in life means, but that's not something I feel like sharing in this response.   I think that scientists who get pissed off over People rejecting science should consider the role of malignant science and science that promotes a depraved view of life in that rejection.  Though that's more to do with the atrocities of ideological biology and its appendages in the pseudo-so-called-social sciences and the most debased of those, economics.  In the past twenty years my skepticism about any supposed science that is prefaced by "cog-" or "neuro-" has become nearly complete.  My faith doesn't depend on whether Roger Penrose or any other physicist or physical mathematician eagerly and prematurely declares that the universe is eternal or had an absolute beginning.  

First, I won't believe their word is the final one and, as I said, I don't base my faith on that kind of claim.  I would be surprised that someone like Penrose would make such a claim and show that their hand is and likely always was influenced by their preferred ideology.  As I've recently repeated, I think that the role that ideology increasingly plays in science is one of the untold scandals of modern culture.  The best thing for scientists to do about that is to admit when it happens and consciously try to keep it out of their science.    I have long expressed my admiration for the biologist (his first degree was in physics) Richard Lewontin because he was right up front in admitting that his atheism was purely ideological and based in his faith in scientific method**, that he had a preference for materialism and a dislike for "miracles,"  I think because of that his science was relatively unaffected whereas his opponents in biology, such as E. O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins, didn't much try to separate out their ideology from their scientific claims.  Dawkins is, I think, destined to be known in the future as someone whose ideology entirely guided his science as well as his retirement career in polemical atheism.  As even some of his fellow atheists have admitted, when he expresses himself against religion his ignorance is embarrassing.  As Lewontin and his colleagues pointed out in 1976, Dawkins' side in the biology wars is more or less a recapitulation of eugenics.  But that's inevitable when Natural Selection is your creator god.  I don't believe that natural selection is any more real than universes that just pop into existence when I hit the comma key instead of the period key.***   I don't mistake math as being God, either.

Second, I like every other human being has a right to take our own experience of life as being a valid basis for judging reality over what other People claim on the basis of their experience.  That's especially true when we have good reason to suspect their claims are based not on experience, such as careful observation, but are a consequence of their ideological preferences.  After all, the reason given for why we shouldn't expect our experience to lead to valid conclusions is the accusation that our ideas about that may be biased by our preferences.  I think there's every reason to believe that is especially true in the most ideologically driven sciences which are entirely out of hand these days.  Cosmology, evolutionary speculations, anything with the prefixes "cog" and "neuro" and all of the so-called social sciences are primarily governed by idology these days.  I've got to rely on my own judgement in choosing what any of them claim, anyway.  So do the materialist-atheist-scientistic true believers within each of those.  I'd rather take my chances on my thinking, the thinking I'm responsible for and have to live with, in the end.  

* Among other things, that declaration of God's fidelity leads me to believe that it must become full in the afterlife since it's not manifested here.  Though we have a responsibility to do our best to make it happen on the one and only Earth we have access to.  I think anyone who feels that way is bound to be easier to get along with than they'd be if they denied that's the case. They'd have nothing to lose by being a mean, selfish bastard.   Believing in the God of Moses, Jesus and Paul wouldn't lead to that, which is why I don't believe the "white evangelical 'christian' nationalists" are Christians.  They're vulgar materialist Mammon worshipers.  "By their fruit you will know them."  That truth is more reliable than anything that I've read coming from Darwinism.

** I wouldn't accuse Lewontin of scientism in so far as he admitted the limits of science in ways that his ideological opponents in science never did voluntarily.   Lewontin was far more philosophically sophisticated than most scientists of his generation or after have been.  His student Jerry Coyne is about as unsophisticated in philosophical thought as Marjorie Taylor Green is.  That they share similar rhetorical tactics is not any shock to me.

*** Presumably, in that absurd scenario someone like me is hitting the comma key in another universe which would, presumably, generate jillions of universes and, then, in each of those new universes as well, so the process would have to go on quite literally, eternally.  It is probably the stupidest idea I've ever read about that has been seriously entertained as real within science.  And you wonder why I say that materialist-atheist-scientism has led science into something like its ultimate decadence.

Seems Like Old, Old, Old Times - The Tired Old New Atheists As Privileged White Folks Pretending They're Oppressed - Hate Mail

RECENTLY, I'VE COME TO think that the new atheist fad of the 00s was largely about affluent white people pretending that they had suffered some terrible oppression at the hands of Christianity and Judaism and Islam.  While there may be some isolated places where Christianity has that kind of power, though I'd need to have those named and proved in the 21st century, and large parts of the world where Islam can take oppressive forms, mostly it was play-time for the college credentialed and those who wanted to be mistaken as part of that kewel-crowd.  

I've never denied that in Ireland up to living memory there were terrible oppressive institutions, a legacy of pre-Vatican II Catholicism  gut those are largely over, a product of the revelations of the sex abuse scandal revelations in the early years of this century.  I would certainly admit that the residential schools, both church administered and those which were quite secular, in the United States and Canada are within the living memory of those who were victimized by it.  And there is the already mentioned child sexual abuse scandal which is, I will point out, hardly an exclusively religious thing and which, in its secular form in the sex industry is a current and terrible thing which, oddly enough, has gotten little of the coverage of the part of it that had a religious connection.   Much of the most exigent criticism of that within religion has come FROM WITHIN RELIGION.

And in pointing those out I will not pretend that those were ever 1. any manifestation of the Gospel of Jesus or the teachings of Paul and the other writers of Christian Scripture, 2. that they were solely a product of religious institutions and hierarchies but had their secular governmental components and permission for them to occur, 3. that in many instances the secular aspects of them were and still are terrible.  The same Hollywood that will issue a Spotlight movie is constantly in the business of sexualizing even very young children, itself.  

But the people I'm talking about, those who delighted and relished their fashionable atheism starting with the readers of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, others on the fringes of science and on to the likes of Daniel Dennett and the Brit-trot turned Bush II warmonger-Neo-con, Christopher Hitchens.  Most of those I ever knew of, read, heard, etc. were affluent white guys and gals who had little to nothing to complain about in line with the crimes and sins of the kind I noted above.  Most of their whined of oppression was never something they experienced.  Certainly those four "horsemen" of neo-atheism (though they mostly were just nags) had little in the way to complain about.  In fact on one occasion the always-putting-his-tender-foot-in-it Dawkins said a little sexual abuse of boys in Public Schools was innocuous.  That would go along with the fact that within organized atheism in the late 20th century, you could advocate for pedophile rape of children on the pretense that even very young children can give adult level consent and still become a "Humanist of the Year."  I have never, once, read an internal criticism by organized atheism of that fact, nor the fact that there was quite a bit of evidence that at least one of the most renowned of such atheists, James Randi, had some pretty shady past he was never made to answer for, much.  

Most of those who hated on religion online were entirely comfortable, middle-class to affluent white guys and gals, most of them college credentialed but not really skilled at critical reading and fact checking, most of atheist polemics are riddled with shoddy scholarship, outright fabrication and misattribution, etc.  Lies, in short.  One of the early conclusions I came to in that addressing of it was that if you don't believe in sin you don't believe it's a sin to tell a lie and your only inhibitions against that were either a vestigial habit of feeling it wasn't nice to lie or that you were afraid you couldn't get away with it.  And in that milieu, truth telling was far more likely to get you into a jam than going along with the common received mythology and lies.  Just as when I researched the history of natural selection I was constantly finding confirmation of my hypotheses that it was the motivation of eugenics and the most infamous of that, the Nazi genocidal eugenics, I was constantly finding out that atheist lore and literature lied constantly, everything from the near ubiquitous falsification of what James Madison said in his Memorial and Remonstrance, to the supposed atheism of the earliest recorded laws of Hammurabi and Confucius, to the alleged atheism of Mozart, to the almost certainly forged letters of Jefferson to Tom Paine that no one ever saw except one early atheist polemicist, and onward.  I quickly came to the conclusion that everything about modern ideological atheism was constructed of lies and myths - many of those myths found in stuff taught in universities and colleges and, more seriously, in pop-historical bull-shit in shows and movies and BBC-PBS TV costume drama stuff.  The mythologies surrounding the trial and sentence of Galileo, the Scopes Trial, the Huxley-Wilberforce "debate," the burning of Bruno, the Mortara kidnapping, etc. could fill volumes of correction of the common received wisdom.  

So many other links to researched, documented, posts on these and similar topics over the past ten years here and many in the years before that elsewhere could be given.  I haven't rejected atheism and its . . . um. . . "intellectual foundations" without looking at those, seriously. 

I hold that there is little in religion that should be sacrosanct and above questioning, though I would certainly put The Golden Rule and some other such universal commandments of good to everyone in a special category.  I see a critique of  and I smell evil intent, especially when such stuff is published as "science."  I think anyone who sets themselves up or allows themselves to be set up in a hierarchy of authority and power opens themselves up to entirely justified skepticism and criticism, no mere human being or their ideas is rightly held up to be above those.  It's dangerous to do that.  But I have always noted that "religion" considered as a category has always practiced a high level of internal criticism, even within one denomination there is bound to be continual disagreement and criticism, the fracturing of denominations and parting of the ways over differences of that sort are a hall mark of every religious tradition I'm aware of.  And even when there is not a fracturing and parting, religious denominations are continually changing due to that kind of internal criticism.  Even during the much maligned scholastic period, there was a serious and lively history of some very extensive and often quite high quality internal criticism and disagreement.   As could be pointed out, even some of the worst artifacts of the late medieval period presented subject matter in a form which included extensive internal criticism of what the authors were supporting.  Modern scholarship and even science is seldom if ever so extensively honest about the weaknesses within what they are asserting.   If the claims of those scribblings of the new atheists of the 00s which I've read ever got such a treatment they would have fallen apart like the lore of PZ Myers and his "Great Desecration" fraud when I casually examined the claims which caused a sensation across the internet.  

Like all fads, sooner or later those get old and the generally stupid and superficial tots who grasp onto those move on to whatever next big thing put in front of them.  I was confident the new atheism would get old, especially as its biggest mast heads were such a bunch of flaming assholes.  I think the Covid pandemic did more damage to organized religion than the new atheism did, the moral and necessary closing of churches and People getting out of the habit of going to church.  In Catholicism, I think the consequences of the child sexual abuse scandal mixed with the all-unmarried-male priesthood not attracting enough candidates for priesthood to make ex-Catholics one of the largest religious groups - according to the polls - a real thing.  I'd add in the United States, the fact that a majority of the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops are still JPII-Benedict XVI era thugs and assholes to what caused that.  

I don't really worry much about the new atheism except in so far as they dupe People into believing lies and giving them permission to be "spiritual but not religious."  I'm not much impressed with the "spiritual but not religious," because I've seen nothing much good coming of that flaccid, meaningless self-labeling.  I haven't seen anything like the Catholic Relief Services which a Republican-fascist member of Congress recently advocated an armed attack on.  I haven't seen anything like the many Protestant charitable efforts, nor others in other branches of religion.  I haven't seen much in the way of those self-labeled "spirituals" doing much of anything that gets anything done at a personal cost and a real effort.  But, then again, I don't see much of that in much of what gets to call itself "religion" either.  A good part of that goes right back to that sacrosanct entity which no one is supposed to question or criticize, the First Amendment which is stupidly unspecific about what a "religion" is.  Which leads to all kinds of abuses, including the creation of an American neo-Nazi "religion" which was created to get tax breaks - it joins many another such "religions" and "churches" which clearly were never religious unless you call Mammon worship a religion.  I'll include the many, many atheist organizations which seem to have getting a tax exemption for donations as one of their first acts, in that.  Atheism is, honestly considered, a religious position.  Generally a naive, rather simplistic and even stupid set of faith holdings, little considered and little tested.  As I've recently pointed out, it even posits all manner of creator gods, as human beings seem to always need to find those even when they deny the reality of God the Creator.  Even the religion-reluctant Thomas Jefferson was forced into that when he had to write the "founders" excuse for breaking away from Britain.  I don't think human beings can really think hard about things like that without finding they need God or, at least, some temporarily, henotheistically raised up "god."  Most often some idolatrously considered part of materialist-atheistic-scientism.  If not that then money.
 

They Whine When You Point Out That The Ivys Are Training Grouds Of America's Most Dangerous Gangsters And Also The Judicial Dupes Of Them

LET'S START with the indicted fascist who last weekend's news reveals is still active in the scheming to impose martial law on the United States on day 1 of Trump II and Republican-fascism forever after.

Jeffrey Clark :  Harvard University (AB) - University of Delaware (MA)  - Georgetown University (JD)

He graduated from one of those putrid Catholic prep schools for the rich, the Father Judge High School in Philadelphia.   Big on sports, football, lacrosse (a dead giveaway), golf (need I go farther?), apparently low on the teachings of Jesus and Paul.   

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

I'll continue with the three Judges, two Obama appointed and one Biden appointed, who gave Trump 17 more days to call out his goons to do violence against Judges, prosecutors, jurors, etc.  instead of holding an immediate hearing and issuing a timely ruling against the most pampered felon in American history.

Patricia Millett: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Harvard Law School

Cornelia Pillard: Yale University, Harvard Law School

Bradley Garcia:  Johns Hopkins University, Harvard Law School

I am so confident in the provenance of those three appeals court judges that I made a dare to myself to post whatever I found, even if they were all products of Land Grant universities.   

The Ivy League law schools are the source of what's wrong with the law.  

I should have posted the Youtube of Keith Olbermann's podcast on this because it's far better in the listening:

The Cowardly Behavior Of the Appeals Court Panel Permitting Trump's Terrorism

 IT MAKES SOME LIBERALS nervous when I diss judges and "justices" so often.  I don't diss all of them, though almost all of them share in some of the dishonest habits that lead them to be so dissable.    I do what I can but I post this recent masterpiece in entirely justifiable anger at that kind of cowardly, willfully stupid judicial behavior that is so obviously dangerous to us all.  It is a masterpiece in the kind of thing I intend to say.  Here it is from Keith Olbermann's transcript of his podcast bulletin from this weekend.

The District of Columbia Court of Appeals Friday afternoon halted Judge Chutkan's gag order against Trump for at least the next 17 days. Rather than deal with it on an emergency basis, it scheduled the first in-person hearing for NOVEMBER 20.

The members of the three-judge panel consisting of two judges appointed by Obama and one appointed by Biden should be impeached and disbarred because they actually fell for not just a pathetically weak 1st Amendment excuse but also for a series of arguments based on the delusions-of-grandeur, megalomaniacal premise that this madman Trump believes a 100,000,000 Americans are somehow being deprived of their right to hear him because a judge had ruled no, Trump was not allowed to threaten the judge and the court officials and the prosecutors and not allowed to try to convince his cultists to try to kill them.

He had already been given – BY the Judge who issued the gag order – the right to continue to insanely claim that the prosecution of his attempt to overthrow the government and foment violent revolution in this country and install an authoritarian regime with him as its permanent dictator was actually a political vendetta personally ordered by the President of the United States. All she wanted to stop was the continued attempt by Trump to use the social media site he OWNS and the propaganda video networks that make their only money by platforming him and the fascist rallies he stages to say it in just the right way to get somebody to KILL special counsel Jack Smith and to KILL judge Tanya Chutkan and to call in bomb threats to the court room and to doxx the jurors, the way he got hundreds of his cultists to attack the Capitol on January 6 and the way he doxxed Obama and one of his cultists went to Obama’s neighborhood and hunted him, with the ultimate goal being obvious and evil: to institutionalize political violence and turn it into the determinative factor in how this country is not governed but RULED.

Donald Trump is a terrorist. A. TERRORIST. And he has been using terrorism by proxy to destroy the laws and rules of this country, without interruption by the law or the courts for fully EIGHT years now. And when the justice system FINALLY stands up on its feet and the courts FINALLY stand up on their feet and recognize that after ALL of our other institutions have utterly failed and ALL of our leaders have failed to protect the nation against domestic terrorism in the form of Trump and his family and his enablers, when SOMEBODY finally BEGINS to do SOMETHING about it, this DC Appeals court say well, no, maybe the legal system of this country has been bending over backwards to protect the rights of this man who would destroy it and KILL anybody in it he doesn’t like, but we don’t see that in bending over backwards it has yet severed its own SPINE yet, so we’re going to grant an “administrative stay” until at least November 20th to prove that we’re great legal scholars and we’re giving Trump every opportunity to get Jack Smith or Merrick Garland killed and why, yes, if there HAD been some sort of legal case against Osama Bin Laden before us in the summer of 2001 we would have delayed the injunction against him for two weeks because it’s FAR more important to give people bent on destroying the United States every last ounce of their rights, than it is to protect the LAWS of this country or the JUDGES of this country or the REPRESENTATIVE FORM OF GOVERNMENT of this country itself.

John Fugelsang on Christianity

 

When They Insist On Having It Both Ways, They're Pulling A Con Job

IN THE FIRST CHAPTER of the huge multi-volume A History Of The Book In America, the eminent librarian Hugh Amory starts:

From the beginning, printers have rejoiced in two ideologies; one vindicates the majesty of their art; the other exculpates its abuses.  In the more familiar of these pleas, echoed in may an early colophon, theirs is a divine art and mystery, Laurens Couster's "art that preserves all arts" (ARS ARTIVM OMNIVUM CONSERVATRIX), Johannes Gutenberg's "artful venture" . . .

The alternative ideology, though rarely noticed by historians of the colonial book before Stephen Botein, insists that publishing is only a trade, exercised by "mere mechanics" who must print whatever comes to their hands.  William Bradford, the first printer in Pennsylvania, claimed that his divine art deserved the special patronage of the colony, yet, only six years after his arrival in 1685, he argued that the Philadelphia magistrates could not blame him for printing George Keith's attack on the Quakers, since he had to take whatever work he could get. . . .

Due to a lack of time, I've skipped the lists provided of examples of each of these self-serving ideological formulas in practice instead of in abstract claims.

And it is self-serving and dishonest and hypocritical.  The history of printing and publishing - the proverbial "press" of First Amendment fame -  is full to the top of negative consequences of what has been done by the printing industry, a profit making venture, something which, by the very words of the first claim is an entirely artificial human creation, not carrying with it any kind of natural right.

Similar two-steps are frequently found of self glorification of those engaged in different human enterprises then followed by a total disavowal of the frequently bad consequences of those, often destroying the lives and rights of People, damage to the environment, inciting violence, in the case of lawyering and judging and "justice"ing finding for those who do all of those evils.  That's as true for the most obvious instances of intentional harm doing as that of those who are secondary in allowing that to happen and the ones who get the wrongdoers out of any penalty for doing it.

I have a whole list of rights which are often summarily disposed of by the publishing industry, by lawyers, by judges and "justices,"

The right to know the truth.

The right to have the truth about them being told.

The right to not be lied about.

The right to not be attacked by a mob, in person, in the media, online, etc.

The right for all of us to have an honestly informed voting public who will install the government.  That last one is among the most obvious of the most consequential rights which was never included in any of the Constitutional language, on which any notion of self-governance, representative governance or democracy completely depends.  

That the fabled founders never noted that shows what total amateurs they were when they set up the government.  To put the present First Amendment language in place without such stipulations was always a guarantee to produce anything but an egalitarian democracy.  The worship of The First Amendment as it is and, especially as it is read by Supreme Courts, lower judges and "civil liberties" lawyers extremely dangerous to those who will be destroyed and attacked AND TO THE POSSIBLE ACHIEVEMENT AND RETENTION OF A REAL DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT.   

That Benjamin Franklin, probably the wisest of those in what they decided was going to be the Constitutional Convention, was a professional printer is certainly relevant to what came out of that.  That so many of them were lawyers and, overriding that all, they were all affluent, aristocrats many with questionable business practices and many slavers as well.  

We need a new Bill of Rights that includes those rights I've listed above and many others as well, the right to a livable environment perhaps more pressing than any of them.  But you'll never get that until the Constitution stipulates there is no such a thing as "corporate person-hood" and there are no rights held by corporations, and that there is no "right to lie."  Anyone who says there are such rights are anti-democrats, anti-egalitarians, they are tools of the oligarchs and plutocrats. 

By Something Like Popular Demand, I Respond To Simels

 "Simps gets upset when I diss the commercial entertainment industry."

SHORTER SPARKY: Rock-and-roll and comic books caused Juvenile Delinquency.

They would seem to have contributed to your illiteracy and inability to draw a rational conclusion about what someone else said. 

As to taking the potential of comic books being a danger due to the content those hold seriously, I don't have to stand alone in that worry,  it's clear that those who produce them share that worry and it's clear that some of those who draw them intend them to have malignant effects:

For a lot of Americans and non-New Yorkers, the number “212” holds no special significance. Neither does the number “51.” But for comic book artist Ardian Syaf, who slipped the numbers into Marvel’s newest X-Men comic book, they represent an anti-Semitic, anti-Christian message.

It’s particularly inflammatory and disappointing that it was smuggled into the X-Men, a team that’s represented inclusivity, empathy, and tolerance.

Syaf is Indonesian artist, and in Indonesia, “212” denotes a mass protest against Jakarta’s Christian Gov. Basuki Tjahaja Purnama. Meanwhile, as the comics news websites Bleeding Cool and ComicBook.com explain, the number 51 refers to verse in the Quran (Chapter Surah 5, verse 51) that’s been interpreted by those protesting Gov. Purnama in Indonesia to: “Muslims should not appoint the Jews and Christians as their leader.”

In the premiere issue of X-Men: Gold which came out last week, there are a few instances where Syaf surreptitiously inserted the numbers into the comic. You can see an example in the panel below, which features Kitty Pryde, the Jewish-American leader of the X-Men, talking to civilians, and “212” appears on the awning of a building in the background of the scene . . .   

And that use of comic books goes all the way back to before Simps or I were born, it's a fact of the history of comic books.

The Nazi-controlled government in German-occupied France produced the Vica comic during World War II as a propaganda tool against the Allied forces. The comics represent Nazi influence and perspective within French society. The three issues are Vica au Paradis de l’U.R.S.S, Vica contre le service secret anglais, and Vica défie l’Oncle Sam. The author, Vincent Krassousky (also known as Vica), disappeared in the late 1940s.

The history of comics to promote antisemitism alone is a long one.  The Library of Congress, among its collections, has a trove of German antisemetic cartoons going back to the 1890s.   If you think that the future Nazis might not have imbibed such stuff in their formative years, you are as stupid as an ACLU attorney pretends to be and "justices" on the Supreme Court, as well. 

Pop kulcha carries a far higher potential for danger BECAUSE IT IS POPULAR AND MANY, MANY MORE PEOPLE CONSUME IT THAN THEY DO ACADEMIC SCRIBBLAGE AND BABBLEAGE.   

As for neo-Nazi rock music, for crying out loud, Simps, I thought you were supposed to be an expert in rock music?   I hate it and even I know about that.   You think that doesn't carry any dangers?   If all that John Lennon pretending to be a flower child peace and lovechild junk is supposed to have a positive effect, you can't pretend that without admitting the potential of its opposite to gain influence.  The ACLU line that all this stuff was innocuous was always a lie, maybe that's one of the reasons they duped so many idiots into believing there was a "right to lie" so much of their legal mumbo-jumbo were blatant lies of that kind. 

Update:  And, while I was doing the minimal amount of research necessary to respond to this, I found out that I wasn't the only one who noticed that what I started calling "fascist chic" in the early Reagan years was a real thing, especially as "Nazi chic".   

Nazi chic is the use of style, imagery, and paraphernalia in clothing and popular culture related to Nazi-era Germany, especially when used for taboo-breaking or shock value rather than out of genuine sympathies with Nazism or Nazi ideology.

Its popularity began in the 1970s with the emergence of the Heavy metal, punk and glam rock movements: the Sex Pistols' first television appearance occurred with a person of their entourage wearing a swastika. Nazi chic was later used in the fashion industry.  The trend, while having originated in the Western culture, by the late 20th and early 21st century became particularly popular in Asia. Nazi chic also partly inspired some of the fashion of the leather subculture.  

I noticed it, especially, in the themes and content of Hollywood shit.  Then in pulp publishing.  I associated it with Reagan and it has continued since then all through pop kulcha.   I would call "Celebrity Apprentice,"  a live action comic, as being a part of the wider phenomenon, it gave us Trump as a president, already.

 Update:   45 mins ago
Oh good grief, Sparky, this is just too easy. It's like shooting ducks in a barrel with an AR-15.

Here's a hint, clueless: my use of the phrase "Juvenile Delinquency" was a specific reference to a spcific time in recent American history. Specifically, the 50s, i.e. when humorless prig idiots like you decided that Batman and Robin (obvious homosexuals) and Elvis Presley (lock up your daughters!) were corrupting our youth and had to be stopped, lest the Commies take over!!!

In other words, nothing in your above rant has the slightest relevance to the point I was making, but of course since you have no idea how humor and irony work, that's not exactly a surprise.

None of that has the slightest relevance to the crap in your rant

 I'm not bound to argue on the ever-shifting bull shit that you shift to when you've got nuttin,'  the fact is you generally have nothing.  

 Second: I've been telling you for well over a decade that you should attain a 4th grade ability to use the dictionary, here's what Merriam Webster online - you don't even have to open an ink on paper book, Stupy - says as to the origin of "juvenile delinquency."

juvenile delinquency
noun
1: conduct by a juvenile characterized by antisocial behavior that is beyond parental control and therefore subject to legal action
2: a violation of the law committed by a juvenile and not punishable by death or life imprisonment

Word History
First Known Use

1816, in the meaning defined at sense 1

As with Trump, clearly someone who was, I believe, born about the time you were and whose rhetorical methods you share, as well,  you seem to believe that the world began about the time you became conscious of it and know nothing else.  There's a lot of that around Eschaton, one of the reason adults fled from there long ago.  Also, nothing outside of the limited repertoire of American, mid-brow so-called erudition exists.   

Shorter Stupy, Nazi and pre-Nazi antisemetic and other propaganda had no effect, at all.   Hey, Simps, the Supreme Court holds the same massively stupid idea, apparently. 

Update 2:

So yes -- you ARE saying that 50s comic books and rock n roll caused Juvenile Delinquency. Good, I'm glad you've cleared that up. :-)

Simps, you're the only one who mentioned "50s comic books and rock and roll. . . "  I'm nobt invested in that narrative.   I doubt most juvenile delinquents of that era were doing much looking at ink on paper.  Though they may have been listening to pop music shit.   I'd think they got most of it through Hollywood crap, it's easier to consume.  

So, let me guess, you heard something about this in the media or through some mid-brow media geared to the geezers with college credentials but no real education.   Let me guess, someone wrote a book about it, you watched the report and didn't read the book.   You're like Susan Stamberg late of NPR.  She couldn't open her mouth without a cliche coming out of it and you can't type on a keyboard without typing them.   That's the difference between having a college diploma and being educated.
 

A Frosty Footnote

IN MY RECENT READING VACATION into the Library of America volume of Robert Frosts' poems and prose, there is this 1951 half-rhyming-limerick that demonstrates even as the news about the Nazi death camps and other Axis genocidal atrocities was sinking in, eugenics was still being pushed by some of the best and brightest among us.

Pares Continuas Fututiones

Says our Harvard Neo Malthusian
"We can't keep the poor from futution;
But by up to date feeding,
We can keep them from breeding."
Which seems a licentious conclusion!
 
Of course, being a sworn enemy of eugenics and Malthusian economics and the "best and the brightest" who push those as "a benefit to humanity and the world," and a long time hater of Harvard (we get lots of them here North of Boston, as Frost would have known better than most),   I had to find out who the Harvard boy who was pushing that in 1951 was.  Luckily the book provided that answer in the many very helpful notes in the back of the book.  

Harvard Neo Malthusian]  In the letter to [Louis Henry] Cohn [dated September 21, 1951], Frost wrote that James B. Conant, a former professor of chemistry and the president of Harvard University (1933-53), as a "mouthpiece" for science had "undertaken for it to make a the planet less uncomfortably crowded with a new kind of manna . . .  a contraceptive to be taken by mouth so we can stop breeding without having to stop futution."  

No doubt tricking them into it or forcing them into eating it was the clever scheme.  The elite, especially the elite in science and the "science"  that really matters, economics, never seem to ever tire of thinking of ways of eliminating large numbers of People from the human future.  And to find ways to insult or belittle their own intelligence in their monumental arrogance.   

Conant was a great progressive who decided to push for a meritocracy as an alternative to the traditional American elite but never seemed to really understand that equality was the real cure for what was wrong with the world.  He opposed real equality, equality in results, for that guarantee of the elite always remaining elite, "equality of opportunity."  I'd love to find out if he ever tried to stop legacy admissions to the college he led, though it doesn't seem to have happened.   As I recall he did vote for the cap of 15% of Jewish students at Harvard, instituted by the previous president.   It's largely due to him that we got the college board examinations that merely reinforced the status of those with wealth whose parents sent them to better schools.  He really was kind of a pudding-head about how the reforms he instituted would actually work out. Perhaps he saw opening up admissions to a wider section of the already wealthy and, so privileged as progress.  Maybe it's just he wanted more regional diversity of the elite at Harvard.   

Unfortunately I can't find out where he made the suggestion, though I suspect it is in the Terry Lectures at Yale, he was the 1951 honoree.   Unfortunately, I don't have a copy to look at to find out.

I don't imagine he imagined feeding his contraceptives to the most dangerous families in the world, those who he, no doubt, would see as meritorious, many of them Ivy League grads and others like them.  I could take the time and research and give you a list of such dangerous people born around that time and after who I'm sure Conant wouldn't have considered the world would be better off without.  The majority on the Supreme Court and many in the Congress, for a start.
 
As I most recently mentioned around the centennial of America's most evil war criminal at large, Henry Kissinger, it was in contemplating his evil that I first realized there were many extremely intelligent People the world would be better off without but there was no such thing as a good one that you could say that about.  And a lot of them are certainly not on any list Conant would have had about who should not be allowed to have offspring.  I'd certainly put the children of George H.W. Bush on a list of those the world would probably be better off  if George and Babs had been fed contraceptives.  I could go for the idea of having prevented those lists of Ivy Leaguers and their ilk who have duped Americans into believing there was "a right to lie."  And Ron Desantis who is not as far removed from them as they'd ever want anyone to notice.

And it's such a pudding-headed idea that was bound to not happen.  For a start it would mean feeding the poor and the best and brightest aren't, on balance, big on that.  And it wouldn't have worked.  Of course, if People have economic security, if they have a decent life with prospects of being able to live out their elder years in security, most People opt for choosing a smaller family for themselves, that's pretty much what experience has shown.  

I don't know, maybe those rhymes work better in the old style of pronouncing Latin, my teacher, from the generation right after Frost, taught me the more up-to-date reconstruction of Latin pronunciation.  Or maybe Frost pronounced the English differently. In the notes on it Frost pointed out that he was referencing a particularly blue verse by Catullus, poem no 32 that includes these lines,  

. . . sed domi maneas paresque nobis
novem continuas fututiones . . .

The note translates that as,

but stay at home and prepare yourself
for nine consecutive copulations

I'd have thought "prepare ourselves" would be more accurate.

It's all a far cry from the popular imagination of Frost, that boy improbably swinging from those friggin' birches.  

I'll Say It Again, The ACLU Line Is That Trump Has The Right To Yell Fire In A Crowded Theater - Perhaps a last response on this, for now

THE COMPLAINT that I have repeatedly called America's evil tradition of white supremacy our indigenous form of fascism is, I think, a complaint of those who are largely white and, especially, privileged by wealth, whiteness, maleness, straightness, etc.  complaining that flows from never having to have thought about the consequences of the political power and legal power of white supremacy under and through the Constitution, the laws, the habits of the white majority in the United States. A power that rules far more states in 2023 than it did before 1964 when the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act were adopted.   I'll expand on that because white supremacy is not alone, though it is the most central locus of corruption, anti-equality and anti-democratic success in the United States.  It is the contemporary version of what the abolitionists called "slave power" which never really ended, only briefly eclipsed in two periods, the Reconstruction after the Civil War and the brief period in which the 1960s civil rights laws were in full effect, something which the "free press" rulings of the Warren Court started to end with the election of Nixon in 1968.  

It was one of the most important insights of my lifetime of thinking about the history, the politics, the legal apparatus, institutions, etc. that really govern us when I realized that for most of our history in most places in the United States Native Americans, Black People, other Peoples of Color, Women, especially those who were not white, various other minority groups, the poor have lived under a degree of fascism.  At times and in some places as deadly as any European fascism, in few times and in few places has that not been, the case to some extent.  In every time in our history being a person in those groups has been the equivalent of wearing a sign that person was Jewish in Nazi Germany or in medieval Europe, the parallels are so obvious that the same word, ghetto, was used for places where Black People were relegated to living in in cities under de facto as well as de jure segregation.

They directly experienced that even as the privileged population didn't much and pretended that was democracy and freedom.  The genocidal policy of the colonies and then states, the land stealing that was as much a part of that genocide as outright murder is not only identical to the policies of Nazis and other fascists, it was cited in fascist and Nazi literature as an example of the possibilities of their own intended genocides.  The enslavement, terrorism, murder, economic exploitation and oppression of Black People is another indisputable experience of life under fascism.  The terror campaign against Women is so embedded into all of those things, especially into the culture of, not only the United States but the world that Women largely don't notice the dangers and restrictions they live under constantly.  I could as easily note that male supremacy is another indigenous form of fascism.  Though the progress for white Women, especially those with money and wealthy families was far faster and more extensive than for than Women without money from poor families.  In the decades of white supremacist complaints about affirmative action, I never once recall hearing one of its opponents mention the foremost beneficiaries of affirmative action, white women, especially white women with wealth.  That fascism on a sliding scale is also true for LGBTQ+ People.  Rich white gay men, on a whole have far safer lives than Gay Men of Color. As I mentioned the other day Trans Women of Color are among those under the strongest terror campaign right now resulting in them having among the highest murder rates of any identifiable group.  The privileges available to those who are privileged, of course, goes up as wealth goes up, poor whites may have it better than even middle class or even some affluent People of Color but they are still nothing like equal to wealthy white People, especially the filthy rich.  A lot of that can depend on how bad your job is, as well.  The second part of the story of the fascist genocide against Native Americans and the domination of People of Color and other minorities is that poor whites got largely suckered by that scheme.  The Republican-fascist hearings on gas stoves and ceiling fans is the modern day version of how those who really rule us suckered them with distractions from how the system really didn't work for them.   The overwhelming majority of the "free press" was part of the peddling of that suckering job, the part that didn't was always a small fraction of the "free press".  And I'm not talking only about the tabloid and cabloid level of media, most of the most august organs of the media have been part of it too.  The entertainment division, getting the most eyes and ears, the biggest part of that.  

In those lists I've posted this week of the stars of "civil liberties,"- lists not chosen by me but either chosen by authors of articles or the self-chosen lawyers who wrote legal papers -  the whiteness, the maleness, the straightness, the Ivy Leagueness and the affluence of them could not be more obvious.  I could go through articles written by white members of the scribbling class panicked over lawyers of Color and Women in the ACLU who express deep skepticism over the traditional "free speech-press" ideology of that group and of the putrid "civil liberties" industry.  It's something that you can also find it in university and college faculties in which it is largely white male faculty, generally those with tenure and full positions (and their faculty wives) who whine the hardest when students won't put up with their casual racism, their sexism, their many habits and expressions which make the lives of students of Color, Women, and members of other minority groups more difficult, not to mention any tendencies they have to favor those they might consciously or unconsciously perceive as people like themselves, the male, the straight, the white, the affluent, the already advantaged.*

I will point out that in many academic fields, that is entirely relevant to the quality of what they put out as scholarship.  For example, the difference between an historian who writes a hagiographic and seriously covered up account of, say a Justice John Marshall and someone such as Paul Finkleman who finds out how deeply he was enriched by slavery and by the rulings he made while on the Court, the difference is  extremely important.  White supremacy by slave owners and their judicial allies has certainly had and has a direct effect on Peoples lives.  The historians who could write biographies of a Christopher Columbus while ignoring his, the first genocide against Natives of the Americas, the continuation of that by the "founding fathers" and the entire history of American government UNDER THE CONSTITUTION AND THE BILL OF RIGHTS, are the opposite of innocuous in their effect.  The mainstream of academic writing and on up in malignant influence in that short list above, to the most malignant of that in entertainment tells a serious lie about history as serious and dangerous as Holocaust denial.  Yet such academic work and the belief of it plays a vital role in constructing our indigenous fascism which has had throughout our history and has enormous power today - the House of Representatives and Supreme Court are dominated by it right now - white supremacy.  The flip side of that is the racist, sexist, hetero-sexist romance of the founding of the country, the development of it, the antebellum South, "the noble lost cause," "the west" and even such absurd variations as the "rugged independence of New England Yankees," (is there any region of the country that doesn't claim they're the home of "rugged independence"?  Those are all unrealistic, and damaging non-realities that inform our imaginations of the country and the place of those we stupidly consider unlike ourselves.  The role that regionalism and ginned up regional resentment plays in our endangerment is a related issue.  The scribbling classes have caused more harm in that than helped, if they hadn't, it would have greatly diminished instead of become more exacerbated, just like all of those other things.  And on towards the most powerful expressions of that, such as the hagiographic bull-shit "biography" of Alexander Hamilton that got turned into that rap and boogie musical that so seriously lied about him, turning one of the foremost enemies of equality and democracy into a heroic figure for the mid-brow and lower.  

And I do insist that you add to academic stuff, popular and entertainment writing and productions to that and add the damage those do to Women, People of Color, LGBTQ People and so many others. So many Americans get what they imagine they know about such things from fictitious TV and movie writing, song and dance musical comedy, garbage "historical" novels and such crap gets People elected to offices and, from there, appointed to courts.  I'd bet that fewer than one in a thousand Americans who consume such garbage on TV and in other garbage media would have ever read an academic non-fiction work of any kind.

If "free speech" absolutism, if "free press" absolutism were going to produce a more perfect union, economic justice, equal justice under law, domestic tranquility, . . . that would have happened by now.  Instead we are all seriously in danger of an overtly fascist government under Trumpian  Republican-fascism as the "civil liberties" lawyers preen in their purity and rake in the donations and the corporations and billionaires have far more "speech" and virtually all of the "press" to themselves.  Don't forget the role of the "civil liberties" industry in the Buckley v Valeo decision which declared money to be "speech" and, so, created the most incredible reallocation of "speech" and the most potent of that, in the media, to those with the most money.  I have no doubt that donations of thanks came their way from those so obscenely endowed.  The media has been constantly sandbagging the only President we have between us and that for the past two and a half years, after they witnessed the most nearly successful insurrection against the United States since the Civil War.

Given what the history of the ACLU and the "civil liberties" industry has resulted in, the ability of the media to lie about Democratic politicians and liberals and civil rights activists, minority groups, Women, etc.  The declaration that "money is speech" in Buckley v Valeo, Citizens United opening up dark money and, so the direct interference with American democracy by billionaires foreign and domestic as seen in 2016 and all subsequent election cycles, has resulted in a myriad of other such dangers, probably the most serious dangers to American democracy in our history,  I don't think the friggin' "civil libertarians" care what they bring as long as the donations keep going in and they can present themselves as ersatz heroes, just as that monumental liar and truth suppressor Lillian Hellman did with the help of one of those ersatz heroes.  

I have seen through the slogans of "civil liberties" and see that, by and large, AND IN THE TOTAL RESULTS OF THE "CIVIL LIBERTIES" INDUSTRY that they have been most effectively a force for furthering our most dangerous form of fascism, that which has been embedded in the United States since before its founding, all of those various indigenous fascisms.  

Their insistence of striving for from some daffy notion of "even handed" "objective" "fair" letting all opinions flourish and seeing which side wins, instead of the only legitimate goal for egalitarian democratic governance, equality FOR PEOPLE, of the ability of us to be governed by a government BASED ON A REALISTICALLY INFORMED VOTING POPULATION, and to the establishment and perpetuation of egalitarian democracy, economic justice, a decent, safe life for everyone couldn't possibly be more of a habit of those with privilege.  It's such a stupidly legitimate thing, "even handedness" a "level playing field" "impartiality" but only if you're dishonest enough to deny that there is no such even condition, no level field, and the nature of the legal apparatus could not be more partial to those with the wealth and privilege

Let me ask, who would have been the worse if the ideas of Nazism had successfully been suppressed in Germany in the 1920s and 30s?  Who would have been worse off if the calls for genocide had been entirely suppressed in the 1990s?   I can tell you who would have been better off if the Bill Clinton administration had ignored the doctrine of "free speech-press" absolutism and destroyed the radio tower of Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines as they were broadcasting encouragement to commit genocide and announcing the hiding places of those who were being murdered, those who were being murdered.   I have every confidence that if Bill Clinton had taken that opportunity to do the right thing, the ACLU style "civil libertarians" would have been besides themselves as they sat on their asses on North American in perfect, privileged white-collar safety.

I mentioned those prerequisites of egalitarain democracy that appear nowhere in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights and hardly matter to our "justice system,"  adequate food, drinkable water, shelter, clothing, healthcare, the right to a good education, . . . That those are left out is not only a glaring inadequacy of our Constitutional notions and, also, our law, they are symptomatic of the kind of privilege that those who wrote the Constitution and Bill of Rights, those who were permitted to vote for it - the small minority of even those who were legally eligible to vote in a ratification process that was as rigged as anything the Republican-fascists do to our elections today.  That they neglected to specify that there is a right to tell the truth but there is no right to lie, that People who are slandered and libeled and the subject of whipped up mob action and attack have a right to their reputation and safety is due, no doubt, to their own knowledge that they and those they cared about were not in serious danger of the sort that People of Color, Women, LGBTQ+ and members of other minority groups live under their entire conscious lives.  Of course it wouldn't have occurred to the rich, white, almost exclusively Protestant men who gave us the inadequate 18th century Constitution and Bill of Rights, the 19th century men who put most of the amendments to it in that those things were far more important than their abbreviated slogans of "free speech" and "free press" which has been used to destroy the lives and rights of scores of millions if not hundreds of millions of Americans throughout our history.

I really do mean it when I say that I despise the ACLU and the "civil liberties" industry.  I am entirely sincere and I've repeatedly said why I went from a dolt who donated money to them to, after the Skokie case, opposing them.  I've done a lot of reading about them and the consequences of their activities, their seedier alliances with some of the most dangerous industries and individuals and corporations in our country, their advocacy for those who, being part of that long and successful tradition of indigenous American fascism, unsurprisingly succeed where the long and hard struggle for equality and Civil Rights is continually thwarted under the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.  That struggle and temporary success, only to be struck down by the Supreme Court, other courts, often with "civil liberties" briefs on behalf of wealth, power and white supremacy,  through elections in which those for whom the loudest, most frequent lies told and peddled through the "free press," again with ACLU style advocacy on their sice, win and install Republican-fascists, Quisling Democrats.  That pattern is long enough in the United States to tell us some important things about what's wrong with our system.  The "civil liberties" advocacy of the ALCU is a glaring example of how those impediments will always produce that result, under the Constitution, under the Bill of Rights, under "the rule of law" under the mythology that the "civil liberties" industry was set up as a bulwark to American liberty while it does the bidding of corporations and fascists and Nazis to flourish and expand till now, when they tell us that a Trump has the right to yell "Fire" in a crowded theater and to escape consequences for himself when the intended and entirely predictable results happen.   

How stupid could those Ivy League lawyers be?  Or how insouciantly enabling of those results that crush equality?   How much stupider are liberals to continue to support it?   
 
* Reading this over it reminded me of the time I read about a judge who said the hardest thing he had ever had to do on the bench was to give a prison sentence to "a young man from a good family,"  by which he meant someone like him, like his family.  It makes you wonder how many kids unlike him and his social class he'd sent to prison without a second thought or even with great edification and job satisfaction. 

Update:  Simple Simps Says: 

"And on towards the most powerful expressions of that, such as the hagiographic bull-shit "biography" of Alexander Hamilton that got turned into that rap and boogie musical that so seriously lied about him, turning one of the foremost enemies of equality and democracy into a heroic figure for the mid-brow and lower. "

SHORTER SPARKY: "LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE RISE OF FASCISM IN THE UNITED STATES!!!"

I don't know what's sadder, that you actually believe this shit or that you're so predictable about peddling it at the drop of a hat.

Well, I did stipulate "and lower."   No, he's responsible for a seriously wrong piece of seriously misleading B-Way musical tripe.  Ron Chernow wrote the inadequate biography he used.   A novel about real figures in history is bound to be dishonest, a movie even more so, probably a musical is about the most probable to entirely distort history, and I am including opera.  Theatrical treatment of history is probably far more dangerous than an inadequate book treatment,  it was one of the things I learned to my horror at Eschaton that even people with PhD's were likely to stupidly assume that plays written about actual history was, you know, actual history.  Derbes and Gromit shocked me when they said that Inherit the Wind was based on history when it totally distorted the history of the Scopes trial.   And they're miles and miles ahead of a pop music, uh, . . . "scholar" such as yourself.

Update 2:   Simple Simps Says, Again. 

You're so right, Sparky. It only Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice hadn't written EVITA, Argentina would be an idyllic liberal democracy today.

 I post these just so some newcomer who hasn't seen him in inaction will believe me if I mention him.

Simps gets upset when I diss the commercial entertainment industry.   Even resorting to an idiotic defense of Donald and Vankie's favoritest musical of all times, I don't remember how many times Trump claimed they went on daddy daughter dates to see it together.   I think it gave both of them ideas, well stupid "ideas" are ideas of a sort, that they might not have had if they hadn't seen it. 

How Twisted Is It?

A Friend Of Mine suggested that I google "chastity" and see what comes up.   Mostly, none of it was chastity and none of it was chaste.  Especially on Youtube.

I haven't been so surprised since shortly after going online I innocently googled "bears" and what came up were not bears.   And I'd known about "bears" already.

Truly, there is nothing that can't be turned into a sexual fetish, even abstaining from sex can be.   People are strange. 

Wishing For A Low Overhead Halloween And Its Charms

Update:  RMJ does a much better post for the day.

I USED TO LIKE HALLOWEEN before it became seriously big business.  It was trick-o-treating, we never did that in our family.   After the ladies of the Sodality in my town stopped having their low-overhead kids Halloween party, we mostly just had the parties at school, I never dressed up in a costume for it I don't think any of my siblings did, either.  But it was a bit of harmless fun, seeing some of the cleverer though never elaborate costumes people dressed in.  One I recall was probably the least intelligent boy in my second-grade class had a paper rocket ship costume with just his face and arms outside of it.  It didn't last more than a few minutes, sort of like a rocket.  I was glad for his cleverness, maybe the height of that in his life. 

It was fun to see the strange cookys and things that kids brought in from home.  Our mother didn't do elaborate cookys, pumpkin cut outs with candy corn for eyes and nose.   I remember in an early grade one of the girls proudly brought in the quite burned ones she'd made "all by herself"  I remember eating one out of politeness and thinking it actually wasn't that bad. 

Now it's all commercialized, house decorations were probably the thing that killed it off for me.  Though adult Halloween parties took away a lot of the charm of it before then.  Horror movies, blah!   Hollywood getting involved in anything is a charm killer.   Halloween should be in person, no-frills.   Of course, now, children get stuffed with candy year-round, every day.   Hearing how much they collect today makes me wonder how non-special that is.   I remember the townies bringing in their candy the next day,  I don't remember feeling deprived.  

I think I'll go out and look at the moon late tonight, maybe walk through our local cemetery, maybe I'll leave a muffin out as a soul cake.  Something with seeds so the animals will eat it.  Then I'll celebrate All Saints and All Souls days.   Not the Day of the Dead, that's going the way of American Halloween.  

Update:  Simps rises from his crypt:

"Horror movies, blah! Hollywood getting involved in anything is a charm killer." Jeebus, Sparky, could you be any more predictable? Or be more of a joyless, emotionally crippled asshole?

Stupy, grow up.   You've gone from puberty to senility without any interval of adulthood in between.  

The ACLU is about the worst bargain American liberals have ever bought into - Another Answer

SO YOU WANT MORE EVIDENCE that the "civil liberties" racket is the game of affluent white men who went to elite training grounds of privilege and making stupid arguments on their behalf?  How about the three who wrote the ACLU brief saying that it would be terrible, just terrible, if judges didn't keep Trump from inciting violence, threatening witnesses and court staff and polluting the jury pool?

Brett Max Kaufman - Stanford University and the University of Texas School of Law

Ben Wizner - Harvard College, Harvard University, NYU School of Law

Brian Hauss - Yale University and Harvard Law School

In the NPR story on the ACLU siding with a man whose words are known to incite his cult to threaten and intimidate and commit violence it said,

The ACLU team acknowledged a "serious risk" that Trump could inspire his political supporters to violence. But their court filing said the First Amendment doesn't give the judge license to gag him.

"The mere fact that others have threatened actions against trial participants after hearing Defendant's words is not enough," the ACLU said.

Seriously, how stupid can you be to graduate from their schools?   How stupid are judges and "justices" to buy their bullshit?   If they were to argue the famous case that Holmes jr. imagined, a man shouting "Fire" in a crowded theater, they'd claim that he was blameless and wasn't responsible for all those people who trampled others to death to escape.  That he had a "First Amendment" right to say whatever he wanted to.  That IS how stupid their claim is.
 

In short, until someone gets maimed or killed, they've got no problem with a situation that risks the maiming and killing of witnesses, court staff and others and peddling lies to the jury pool.  AND THEY HOLD THE ONE WHO INCITED THEM HAS NO CULPABILITY IN INCITING THEM.   No doubt that if Trump's goons were brought up on charges, once Trump's known attempts to incite them were brought to trial, the same ACLU assholes would demand that a link to Trump be proved beyond any possible rational standard of judging that to have happened.

"Free speech" and "freedom of the press" is an ideological absolute with these assholes, the ACLU and the "civil liberties" racket have learned they can sucker liberals with those slogans and they can get big money from the media and others with a financial interest in being allowed to lie with impunity and push even the most dangerous lies.  They have no problem with the weaponization of the media, the internet, hate-talk, etc. because allowing that is in their financial and professional interest and they figure it's no skin off of them.  That's the case with all of these "civil liberties" outfits.

Their ass-covering with allegedly aiding civil rights efforts and other such things which are of vital interest to liberals is more than wiped out by their other advocacy, especially their enabling exactly what they will smarmily admit is a "serious risk" even as that risk has resulted in more than half a century of fascist ascendancy in the United States, the reinvigoration of our indigenous form of fascism, white supremacy, its allies in imported ideologies such as Nazism, and Republican-fascism WHICH HAS ALREADY STACKED THE SUPREME COURT WITH THOSE WHO ARE DESTROYING ALL OF THE PROGRESS MADE TOWARDS EQUALITY IN THOSE FIFTY YEARS OF "FREE SPEECH" "FREE PRESS" ABSOLUTISM.  And much of what has been done since the Civil War.  

The ACLU is about the worst bargain American liberals have ever bought into.  Its Ivy-League and Ivy-equivalent lawyers and staff aren't so stupid as to not realize what they enable and support with their work and they certainly haven't missed that their clients are the ones who have done so much to damage minorities, Women, LGBTQ+ People, the environment, etc.  They simply don't care because their ideology and pose of Bill of Rights purity matters more to them than the lives and rights of People, the environment, and everything else their advocacy has damaged.  It's clear in this latest filing THAT THEY DON'T CARE FOR THE INTEGRITY OF THE RULE OF LAW, EVEN IN THE FACE OF A NEARLY SUCCESSFUL FASCIST PUTSCH AGAINST THE VERY CONSTITUTION THEY CLAIM TO REVERE.

That's how truly vile the "civil liberties" racket is.  Liberals should dump it and declare the truth, they're on the side of the oligarchs and plutocrats, which is no surprise because so many of them are oligarchs, themselves.

Natural Selection And The Golden Calf of Republican Fascism In All Its Vulgar Materialism - A Response

NOTE: First the short answer.  Mike Johnson is no more of a Christian than Donald Trump is and Donald Trump is a thorough Mammonist and ego maniac, he's the golden-calf of Republican-fascism.  The topic of evolution is a mere side-show.
CERTAINLY THOSE BEING MOWED DOWN BY AUTOMATIC WEAPONS IN THE UNITED STATES MOST DAYS, AMONG THOSE MIKE JOHNSON DEEMS EXPENDABLE TO ACHIEVE HIS GOALS

THE ACCUSATION that because I reject Darwinism, the theory of natural selection, that leads me to have something in common with the fascist in sheep's clothing, Mike Johnson, the unanimous choice of the Republican-fascist caucus of the House of Representatives to be Speaker of the House is absurd.   I have never in my life not accepted that evolution is the most rational explanation of the diversity of life on Earth as indicated in the fossil and geological record.  Later the study of genetics added enormously to that conclusion.  Those show that species evolve from earlier no longer extant species at a time later species weren't there.  As far as I'm concerned, that somewhat over-rated cultural holding is well seen as being a fact and no longer a theory.  Though I think its position in the culture is absurdly elevated due to its role in the ideological struggle between a position I reject, materialistic atheism and scientism on one hand and biblical fundamentalism, which I reject just as much.  I hold that much of the clap trap of conjecture and Just-so story telling around the topic of evolution is as absurd as biblical fundamentalism and 6 day creationism and no more scientific, even though much of that is held to be orthodox science and taught in universities around the world.

Having done what you haven't, read widely in the literature of evolution, I know that not only was Darwinism the origin of eugenics - as I proved in those many posts I have written on that topic - but that it is also not a particularly good scientific theory, based as it is in an ideological economic speculation that has little to no demonstration in physical observation or accurate measurement and which included a large component of self-interest among those who originated all of it.  That lack of observation and measurement means that scientific method can't be applied to theories about it.  On top of that, no human being has ever seen speciation occur which means science cannot actually study speciation, despite the claims to that effect.  The act of speciation has left no unambiguous record of how it happened of even that it occurred in the scanty fossil record.  All of my belief in that is a conjecture based on the evidence even as the evidence doesn't show that's what happened.   No one has even the scantiest knowledge of how it happened and may be happening right now - if science and its products don't kill off all of life before new species can evolve.  No one knows if it happens in one way as conventional Darwinists insist on, or in many ways which may mix and combine in who knows how many ways, no one knows what the actual bases on which it happens are or how large that range of bases is.

Darwin's theory was based not on science but on a particularly brutal and obviously self-interested theory of late 18th and early 19th century economics, that of the rather stupid and dishonest Thomas Malthus*, taken up by the aristocratic Charles Darwin and used to make up a story of how speciation is supposed to have happened based on the extremely scanty fossil evidence available to him, the often naive and perhaps as often wrong interpretation of physical observation of living organisms, a complete lack of knowledge of genetics or epigenetics or those most recent discoveries of molecular biology that old-timey biologists get in a lather about when more up to date scientists like Dennis Nobel and James Shapiro insist on talking about them.  On top of that Darwin chose as his great demonstration of natural selection the human practice of breeding animals and plants WHICH IS IN NO WAY NATURAL BUT ARTIFICIAL SELECTION AND WHICH HAS NEVER, ONCE, RESULTED IN SPECIATION IN WHICH THE OFFSPRING COMPRISE A NEW SPECIES.   There is no demonstrable connection between human, artificial selective breeding and culling and what happens in nature.

Those biologists I've greatly admired, Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin and their close colleagues have rightly called the bases of what Gould called "Darwinian fundamentalism,"  Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, "Just-so Stories" while ignoring that the mother of all Just-so Stories is natural selection, itself.  Even as both of them were conventional Darwinists of a less fundamentalist variety.  

When you look at the theory of natural selection with open eyes and a critical mind and no professional or ideological motives, the reason it was adopted in mid to late 19th and 20th century science probably had a lot more to do with the class which professional biologists belonged to or sought to join in their professional choice, their race and gender AND THEIR IDEOLOGICAL PREFERENCES AND CLASS ECONOMIC INTERESTS than it did the integrity of the theory as science.  You can add the interest that biologists and their allies had in pretending they had a universal theory to explain one of the great mysteries of life such as it was believed physics had and chemistry was developing, I will point out with far greater success, durability and integrity than biology has proved to have.  

Its retention in the post-war period is in every way a product of all of those, especially to promote materialist-atheist-scientism, even as science has moved far past that theory being held up as supreme.  I think its retention is entirely ideological and self-interested, at this point and I think it is a serious danger, not only to scientific progress but, as the "Darwinian economists" such as advised Trumpian-Republican and Swedish policy demonstrated during the Covid-19 pandemic , they still are getting people killed in large numbers.

In terms of what Darwin, his inner circle such as Thomas Huxley, Francis Galton, Ernst Haeckel and such as W. R. Gregg claimed and were taken seriously on with often horrendous legal and political consequences, many a modern day Darwinist would have never been born if they'd had their way because their science claimed our ancestors were degenerate, either on a class basis or on a basis of their ethnicity or on their health.  I know some of mine were driven to the verge of death by Malthusian class policy and held to be degenerate, presented by Darwin as that in his books.  If one of my great-great-great grandmothers had died in the British death camps, the work house she was interned in, I wouldn't' be here to annoy you. Which would be a shame.  And mine were all Northern Europeans living in Britain and its occupied lands.  Entire races of humans were on their death lists.  We don't know if those who may have been born to those killed or forcibly sterilized in the name of Darwinian fitness as Darwin and those others advocated may have bought into the theory that marked them as fated to be biologically dysgenic and a danger to the human species as a whole, once they'd had a chance at education and entering into the profession of science.  We don't know if others who were shunted off into inferior educations on the later day applications of Darwinism may have, even though they didn't get cut off from the future in the same way, depriving Darwinism of many a true believer.  Many People of Color, Turks, Russian and Polish Jews, the Irish, the poor in general were all held by Darwin and mainstream Darwinism to have been biologically inferior and their removal from the human species desirable along with those whose only crimes were to be malnourished, ill-housed and sick.  I'm not exaggerating in that, read The Descent of Man and mainstream Darwinist science by those accepted to have constituted official science if you think I am.  

Mike Johnson is clearly a dishonest, pseudo-Christian, Republican-fascist and liar.  He is a white-collar anti-democrat who participated in the soft-handed side of the most serious putsch against American government in its history, one which attempted to put not only the former Confederate states under an anti-democratic government but the entire country.  His statements blaming mass gun murder on the teaching of evolution is entirely a product of that ideological struggle between materialist-atheism and his own brand of vulgar materialism, oddly coming out in the same place, in the end.  

That it is an irrational lie peddled in the same dishonesty as TV advertising and hate-talk radio is to absolutely be expected.  His voting record in the House is eugenic, Darwinist in its consequences just as that of the "white evangelicals" generally is.  Other than in mere words, it is in no way in opposition to the atheist materialism of Darwinism, it is just as Malthusian even if it doesn't care much about evolution -which has no practical utility that interests them - and so has no problem denying that EVOLUTION (as distinguished from natural selection) is the best explanation for the diversity of life on Earth, a diversity which he and his policy have every intention of sacrificing to the profits of the rich, the white, the male and the privileged, the very basis of Malthusianism and, so, Darwinism after it.  Johnson may not be so crude or impolitic, or scientific as to draw up explicit death lists, but he has them, CERTAINLY THOSE BEING MOWED DOWN BY AUTOMATIC WEAPONS IN THE UNITED STATES MOST DAYS, AMONG THOSE HE DEEMS EXPENDABLE TO ACHIEVE HIS GOALS.   His actions demonstrate that whereas his lying mouth doesn't say it.

While I find it somewhat interesting what archeologists and paleontologists dig up and, sometimes, their story-telling about that, am even conditionally convinced of some of it, I don't think the topic of evolution is really nearly as important as a good self-righteous, college-graduate is supposed to.  I don't think it is central to most of the biological science and much of the most important of that.  I don't think there's any particular virtue to be found in the topic and am skeptical of its practical utility.  

The claim that knowing we are a product of evolution makes People more humane to other living beings and appreciative of the diversity of nature and the environment is absurd.  That is best seen by those who are bound by that belief the most strongly.   Biologists are among the most brutal People I've ever encountered, certainly within academia. The hundreds of millions, probably billions of animals and plants sacrificed by professional "life" scientists in the most dubious of commercial testing, often pseudo-scientific scientific studies, the casual brutality of scientists who kill and often maim before killing sentient animals proves that Darwinism and even a more up-to-date and honest biological education doesn't make them more humane.  The recently demonstrated folly of believing that mammals are an effective and accurate model of human physiology and biology, sometimes leading to very misleading claims about the efficacy and safety of commercial products and industrial action may indicate that all of that killing and torturing of animals to have been as pseudo-scientific as anything in the annals of modern historical snark.  

I cannot recall, once, in their breezy talk about all of this killing, which they presented as an inevitable consequences of "the law of nature," that is the theory of natural selection, that they advocated as science NOT KILLING PEOPLE.   Darwin, once, after Frances Cobbe presented her essay pointing out the moral consequences of a belief in natural selection gave one double-speaking passage in regard to that in The Descent of Man, the rest of the book scientifically arguing against any such preservation of life and repeatedly arguing for the boon for the survivors that the deaths of those deemed inferior as solid science.  It's clear from the history of Darwinism in science and in public policy and law that no one took his disingenuous ass-covering remark seriously. 

The belief in evolution certainly didn't make Thomas Huxley more humane as he eagerly anticipated what he predited would be the genocidal extermination of American Black People by what he held were the superior white population, once emancipation supposedly eliminated their economic utility to their "superiors."  It didn't make Darwin more humane as he made similar claims about the melioristic effects of genocidal extermination of entire races around the world in The Descent of Man and their replacement by Northern White Europeans.  It didn't make perhaps Darwin's favorite supporting scientist, the German Ernst Haeckel any less inclined to call for the murder of a whole list of People he held to be both biologically inferior and dysgenic to the population as a whole. As I mentioned Stephen Jay Gould rightly called his published and widely influential science, proto-Nazi.  Nazi racial, social and military theory was entirely based on a Darwinian view of evolution. 

Darwinism has led to a situation in the humanities in which the philosophical specialty of "ethics" has become a contest in drawing up lists of who it's OK to kill or let die of neglect.  That is humanism as practiced by those among such humanists who are conventional Darwinist evolutionists.  In that they are recapitulating the work of Haeckel,  Galton, Huxley, Pearson,  and others in a continuous list of names that gets you right up into those of the Nazi scientific establishment. I've brought that list right up to today in many posts, names of living credentialed scientists who are quoted by American and British right-wing scribblers and politicians to support their brutal policy choices and as published in mainstream magazines.  As noted in many of those posts, including the one I reposted the other day, natural selection, Darwinism, identifies DEATH as a supreme engine of human progress, whether by neglect or by outright murder.   That the enormous expansion of the acceptance of evolution led to the scientific field** of eugenics WHICH IS ALWAYS PRESENTED AS A HUMAN BENEFIT FOR THE SURVIVORS OF THE HURD CULLING! is certainly due to the theory of natural selection which still dominates the science of biology and every other field that attached itself to it.  

That wasn't inevitable, it is quite possible that a theory of evolution not based in a melioristic and brutal Malthusian economic ranking of differential financial value may not have produced eugenics.  Though I doubt that such a theory would have been so quickly accepted by the class of men who ruled science, those who accepted Darwinism.  Some such theories, today, are most stridently resisted by today's Darwinists.   The overarching framing of evolution and the holding that all life is related certainly didn't produce a more humane and moral view of life, not even human life.  But, bypassing the topic of biological evolution,  the Malthusianism, the capitalism, the wealthy class basis of Republican-fascism, even when it falsely claims that it is consonant with Christianity - WHICH IT CERTAINLY IS NOT - is no better.  They having the same power now that eugenicists had before, they are far more of a danger today.  That is built on the indigenous form of American fascism, white supremacy which Thomas Huxley believed was an expression of Darwinian biological superiority.   They are merely a different branch of the same amoral and cultural evolution that materialist-atheism is, Darwinism being a major part of that in the most recent part of the modern period.  The fact that species evolve did absolutely nothing to make that better, you need far more than science to lead you to something better than that. Science is incapable of that just as economics and secular legalism are.

Mike Johnson is no more of a Christian than Donald Trump is and Donald Trump is a thorough Mammonist and ego maniac. Both believe entirely in the economic and financial ranking of lives instead of Gospel equality.  Jesus Christ said it, you cannot serve both God and Mammon.  Despite what he claims, Mike Johnson serves Mammon.  Every member of the House Republican Caucus does, their voting record proves it, their Christianity is a fraud right down to the last one.  I believe the Gospel of Jesus and take the Epistles and Acts seriously.  That results in the most radical thing there is, no materialistic ideological category can come close and the vulgar materialism of a Mike Johnson doesn't even try to.  I'm sure he would hold it is heretical and, if he could, he would violently suppress it.  

* Decades before Darwin used Malthus to invent natural selection the radical English democrat William Cobbett pointed out that Malthus  advocating that the poor be left to starve away under "the law of nature" instead of helped proved how stupid he was because if the "law of nature" instead of the artificial laws of England and Britain ruled the poor would have dispossessed the British wealthy class of their wealth in a matter of hours and the entire basis of Malthus's economics would be obliterated.  That has always been an underlying fear of those with wealth going back to when Pharaoh was having his nightmares at the end of Genesis, it is the fear of those with wealth or the fantasy they will become wealthy which leads to all of the degrees of gangster rule as opposed to egalitarian democracy in which all are truly equal.  

** Science is whatever scientists of any time accept as science.  The inventor of eugenics, Francis Galton was certainly one of the most eminent scientists of his time and the innovator of many fields still embedded into science today.  Eugenics is still promoted within science, though not generally admitted to be that.  It's as current in science as 6-day creationism is in religion, though with far more dangerous effects.   If religion is answerable for bad religion - as it certainly does answer for it, I doubt there is more exigent criticism of biblical fundamentalism than within religion - then science can't get off the hook for bad science.  Both are human activities founded in the choices that People make, science claims for itself a heightened ability to discern the truth from falsity, yet scientists and those who will claim, for themselves, a heightened "public understanding of science" insist that it be exempted from even that level of internal responsibility.  The often naive faith we outsiders have in science, the power given to it because it is sometimes efficacious and quite profitable makes it far more dangerous than any religion.  I have never seen a credentialed scientist kicked out of science for pushing climate-change denial for pay any more than its weaponeers and promoters of white supremacy have been.  Science is a mess as "religion" falsely considered as a coherent category is a mess.  Only science is pretended to be a unified whole as religion is mocked for its enormous diversity.  A lot of that is due to the dishonesty of academic credentialing, which is a different but related topic.  Education is a total mess, too.  Elite universities are really fucked up.