I Prefer To Limit My Worship To The Real God Not The Myriad Of Those Set Up By Secularism

As you know, I loathe American football and absolutely endorse Walter Brueggemann's statement that with its glorification of violence, sex and money and, so tellingly, with its slogan "We own Sunday" it is the liturgy of corporate-consumer culture.  I don't know if Brueggemann would go as far as I would in saying it is the gladiatorial sacrament of American fascism but, there, I said it.

As bad as it is in reality, the industry of American football and sports journalism have cloaked the violence, sex and money of it ESPECIALLY THE MONEY OF IT, in the most revolting of sentimentalized, pseudo-moralistic, goopily romantic, soft veiled, artificial autumnal lighting effect sentimentality.   Football is sold with all of the revolting, manipulative cinematic insincerity of a made for Lifetime movie.   And don't forget the flag waving, quasi-militaristic nationalism involved.

The claim that it builds moral fiber and character in the typically and notably conceited, notably sexist, notably violent, bullying, drunken, debauched, serially adulterous often raping players and coaching staff that spills over into crime reporting with alarming regularity is the biggest load of bull shit that is regularly fed to TV-addled Americans.   In that it takes the same kind of crap invented about "sport" in Britland in the 19th century, its usefulness in teaching the values necessary for training the class that would carry out their imperial colonial oppression and brings it into the electronic media age in the dying American imperial period.

I bring that up as an other example of Duncan Black's accusation against Christianity that it is guilty of giving "people a magical cloak to hide how horrible they are".   It being American football, they have corrupted Christianity into the mix and the results are far worse, discrediting the idea of following the Gospel of Jesus than it is for the industry of football which hijacks the images and idea of that to its own ends.  That, like the hijacking of Christianity for political purposes other than egalitarian democracy, everything that Jesus said has to be scrapped to claim it for that use.

It was mightily objected to when I noted that science also "gives people a magical cloak to hide how horrible they are" which, for anyone who has followed my many posts shooting holes into the giant plaster St. Charles Darwin image of science will understand.  Eugenics, in all of its forms from genocide through sterilization to genocide by murder, was sold as right through the sanctification of science and the ideal of scientifically producing a master race, which was hardly exclusive to the Nazis.  You can read how the eugenicists said so in virtually everything they wrote from Charles Darwin, Francis Galton .... to today's eugenicists.    Today's eugenicists sell even proposals for infanticide up to an unspecified age that way.   I find thinking about how Peter Singer and his fellow, university based "ethicists" turn the very idea of morality upside down that way and it's not respectable for the academic-liberalish type to say it.

And, lest you forget, it was the equally sanctified high-priesthood of theoretical and applied physics and chemistry who gave us the nuclear nightmare that has hung over humanity and which, with Trump in power, is of renewed anxiety.   That one might end up killing us all.

You can take virtually every institution of secular, modern culture and see that it also functions in the way that Duncan Black accused Christianity of .   Listen to virtually any of the reporters who cover the Supreme Court as their beat, listen to the lawyers on the Senate Judiciary Committee, look at the popular literature and theatrical productions dealing with the Supreme Court and famous Supreme Court Justices of the past.  If you're honestly familiar with the actual character of that Court and its members over its existence the lying, hypocritical sanctimony concerning it is entirely in keeping with a false and romanticized view of Christianity as peopled by mere mortals.  Only, you're allowed in polite, secularized, academic and journalistic life to say it about Christianity, you're not allowed to say it about the Court, or science and scientists or about American football.


Update:  You can hear what I said in the putrid NPR selling of the far-right ideologue and almost entirely safe Republican-fascist vote on the Court, Neil Gorsuch this morning.   I've gradually grown to loathe Nina Totenberg's reporting.  She's a long, long way from when she reported Clarence Thomas's sexual harassment.

Update 2:  When I read comments like that my first thought is somewhere there's a horse without an ass.