The Anti-Religious Left Fails By Its Own Scientific Metric And On Its Other Chosen Tests

IN THE HEADY DAYS when I as so many others were being introduced to the brave new world of online self-publishing, in those early days of 20 years ago, blogs, a lot of us saw the potential for correctives of the corporate media and, maybe, the salvation of democracy.  Alas, it quickly turned out that self-publishing was also available to the fascists and they had financial backing and were the ones that the media would pick up.   C-Span, through Brian Lamb's Washington Journal gave a big leg up to a lot of them, some of them among the worst, Matt Drudge, for example, and, since I still listened to it, NPR was always ready to do the same.   And as well, there where the online magazines which had backing, Politico and  The Hill were favorites for citation at "public radio" (for an example of how naive the left can be in its aspirations) and on "the left" there was always Salon being cited, if my memory of the recent, distant past holds up.

It took me about four years after 2002 to figure out that my early optimism was foolishly optimistic, one of the earliest and most promising of the "new media" venues,  Media Whores Online ceased posting and left it to a host of spin-off blogs, Eschaton and SullyWatch, what one always had to designate as "the good Roger Ailes" blog, . . . some of which kept it up longer than others, some of which quickly decayed into silliness and jr. high for seniors.   I'll give this to Sully Watch and "the good" Roger Ailes, they got out of it with a lot more dignity than others did.

But there were others who kept up a higher level of writing though too few of them got to do what Digby of Hullaballoo did, make the jump to magazine level and not all of them who did make that jump were the best.  My former colleague at Echidne of the Snakes, though a extremely good writer, especially for someone for whom English is a second language and a very fine researcher has not been picked up by anyone - the paid writing profession with the demise of print or, rather, paid advertising for journalism, isn't what it recently once was.  

One of the things I quickly learned from the "new media" and, especially, unmoderated, unedited comment threads is that a lot of "the left" is actually rather conservative, a lot of it frivolous and rather uncommitted to serious change, interested in upholding what is merely a different set of tribal myths and lies and pushing an ideological preference instead of making actual, real change in things. 

And a lot of it was an expression of conceit based on nothing much.  In the process of reading tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of comments on such comment threads, I've come to the conclusion that honesty required that I stop using the phrase "college educated" and admit that a lot of those in my cohort were merely credentialed by their universities and colleges.  If it was always so, I can't say because previous generations never left the evidence of that in an easily accessible form.  My joke which is only about a quarter joke that it's what happened when, during my generation, so many colleges and universities dropped requirements such as Frosh Rhetoric is not entirely unserious.  Though I think the demise of such requirements even earlier in education, as soon as the rage and fever of puberty wanes into what used to be an expectation that achieving actual adulthood was to be tried, is even more true.  Thinking and reasoning are too good to limit the attempt to achieve it to those who go to college.   I've known people who had to drop out of school when they were 16 or even younger who achieved it to a far higher degree than those with a graduate degree have.  I would trade you Abraham Lincoln or even Harry Truman for most of today's elite-Ivy-Ivy-Equivalent graduates in government.  It's possible to promote reasoning and thought in grade school and high school and in the real replacement of those as education, the media,  and it should be required, "free press" without the requirement to serve the interests of egalitarian democracy doesn't work.  

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That was a prelude to going over two articles from the last few days, one at one of the online magazines of more variable quality, from very good to very bad, Raw Story, the other from The Daily Beast which is generally somewhat better.  I got to that through RMJ posting the Raw Story twitter hook for its alleged summary of David Rothkopf's piece at The Daily Beast and read the two articles, seeing immediately that, typical of its anti-religion ideological preference, ignored most of what Rothkopf said in which lies told by religion was only one and hardly the most damning of the sources of lies.   Though I think both of them are seriously wrong headed,  Matthew Chapman's is the worse of the two.  That Chapman has written for the equally anti-religious Alternet is certainly relevant to seeing where he's coming from.  I'll leave it to you to read the pieces and see what I'm talking about for yourselves.  I've got another couple of points to make.

Along with what I wrote yesterday about how the "skeptical" community, the materialist-scientistic-atheist old farts of CSICOP and CSI and Michael Shermer's branch of that industry despise and disdain UFO and extra-terrestrial talk they don't like but are entirely comfortable with the as outrageous claims of their own, Carl Sagan, Francis Crick, etc. the political secular "left" is also seriously hypocritical about religion in politics. 

Right now, one of the major means of voter suppression being passed into now Supreme Court sanctioned law is the suppression of voting on Sunday, especially in the hours right after church services typically let out to thwart the very important "Souls To The Polls" practice of Black Churches, in which they bring large numbers of their congregants to vote directly from church services on Sunday.   The struggle to prevent Republican-fascists from suppressing the votes of Black Voters hinges on the votes of those who have just heard things that David Rothkopf would probably call "lies" that he blames for the rise of Trumpist fascism in the Republican-fascist party.   That is perhaps as true for other religious groups who are important to other Democratic hopes for defeating Republican-fascism, though I don't think many of them are as well organized or which could bring such large numbers to the polls.  A lot of those Black Churches would probably self-identify or be identified as "evangelical."  

I've pointed out many times that the Civil Rights Movement was successful when it was identified primarily with The Reverened Martin Luther King jr, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and that when secularists grabbed the mic and took over, that success halted.  The things that are under attack by the Republican-fascists on the Supreme Court and, as they have reinstated Jim Crow, in Republican controlled states, were achieved when the movement was identified with and largely brought to effectiveness through the Black Churches, other churches playing an important but lesser role in it. And that is true of the even earlier Civil Rights struggle AND DESPITE WHAT THE SECULARISTS WILL CLAIM THE ABOLITION MOVEMENT.   It was one of the early things I did in response to something written by one of the best of the secular lefty blogs, researching the actual history of the abolitionist movement and finding out that it was, in fact, almost exclusively done by those who cited religion as their primary motive, most of all the Black opponents of their own enslavement, those who "stole" themselves to freedom, those who became free through legal means and those who joined them from the white population from the Germantown Quakers and John Woolman right through till the end of legalized slavery which was reimposed in much of the country through the secular "non-establishment" separation of church and state Constitution.   

Today, as I noted in response to the claim that religion is a major motivation of the Republican-fascists that when I've observed and experienced neo-facist violence adherence to the teachings of Jesus, Paul, James, The Prophets and The Law is not in evidence in their words and actions.  I would bet that in the fascist insurrection of January 6th, the fascists broke the commandment on taking The Lord's name in vain, the ban on bearing false witness (which was the catalyst that set it off) and many other assorted violations of the religion that only some of those fascists profess outnumbered citations of scripture.  If there was any "religion" in evidence it was that of the Qanon "Shaman" and whatever that was, it wasn't something mainstream Christianity, Judaism or Islam would necessarily endorse.  It was closer to the Nazi paganism of Himmler than the Christianity of The Reverend William Barber or the Islam of Keith Ellison.  

What's wrong with "white evangelicals" isn't that they're too religious, it's that they're not really religious.   If they have a religion it's a christianity falsified by the neo-slave power with a large does of Hollywood "bible" epics and other fascist produced garbage.   As RMJ also pointed out, through another Raw Story link, the degenerate Republican-fascist Lauren Boebert is invoking just such an abiblical, Hollywood John Wayne - Charlton Heston kind of "Jesus" in her recent ranting.  

If "religion" is to be faulted for this it is the refusal of those who may be more open to doing the far harder work of following Jesus than the easy as lying "praise the lord" fakery that is the sum and substance of the religion of most "white evangelicals" being too nice and polite to take them on in a religious brawl, a defense of the Gospel, the Law and the Prophets.   I point out MOST WHITE EVANGELICALS because the fact is that there were likely more White Evangelicals who supported Hillary Clinton and opposed Trump than there are atheists and agnostics combined, if the Pew research numbers that everyone cites are to be the basis of discussion.  If you add in all of the Christians and Jews and Muslims who voted for Clinton and the most observant Catholic president in our history, Joe Biden, as to compare that total to the one that Raw Story, Alternet, perhaps David Rothkopf see as the salvation of American democracy, you'll quickly see that they are all mathematically absurd in their contentions, the numbers don't only not support their contentions, they refute them rather definitely.   If Joe Biden and Hilllary Clinton had not had the "white religious vote" behind them, Trump would be in office because there simply are not enough non-religious voters (NOT ALL OF WHOM VOTED AGAINST TRUMP, BY THE WAY) to make up an electoral majority.  On the basis of something like the science that is worshiped by all of them, what David Rothkopf says is a search for "the truth".   Ironically, Rothkopf cites exactly the kind of social science I am skeptical of for its scientific insufficiency but which I cite in refutation of his contention in regard to religion because their own choice of metric refutes them.  

I am afraid—and those people thrive on lies, follow liars, reject the search for truth, fear science and history and math, don’t want to do the work required to figure out what is really happening around them—then we will have an irreparably fucked-up government.

Yes, we will, and I can report that if other people thrive on the lies they like, we'll have an irreparably fucked-up "left" such as the one we have had ever since The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. was martyred, though the Christian left has kept on a lot longer than the Yippies and the various Marxists, secularists and assorted anti-religious lefties of that era have.   

And, though this is already too long, I will point out that all of these "new media" venues have entirely let off the real motivation of the Republican-fascists, the mass media which all take up a lot more of the lives and times of the fascists and the college-credentialed play-lefties than any church ever has excepting, perhaps within a few cloistered religious communities.  The screen, computer, TV, movie, is the school of fascism, the First Amendment has never allowed those who run those a freer hand than it has had in the period in which Trumpian fascism rose TRUMP AS A FASCIST FORCE AS NEWT GINGRICH BEFORE HIM WAS A CREATION OF THE MEDIA.   The media is the church of fascism, Hollywood and Madison Ave (what used to be shorthand for the ad industry, for you younger people who might have gotten this far).   Yet these professional and semi-professional writers, their "new media" venues won't admit that is where all of this has really come from because it's a violation of their secular religious sensibilities, their tribal code and their financial self-interest.