While Praying For The Kingdom of God There Is Not Getting Suckered Our Of Working Toward It

 Or, A Short Account Of My Life Online

FINDING OUT ABOUT the real lives of those who might have been heroes to us is frequently a disillusioning thing. Composers, musicians, writers, actors, their real lives are frequently entirely different from the public relations line.  What we know of the show biz folk are often little more than the stuff lies are made from. Over and over again when I looked deeper than the PR and the ideological hagiographical presentation of heroes of the left,  I wish I'd known what they were really like before I went to the bother of believing they were more admirable than they were. The influence on my thinking and maybe action from my idiotically misplaced admiration for them has certainly not generally been good.

I can take four of those as a unit, the four singers who made up the legendary black-listed pop-folk group of the late 1940s and 50s, The Weavers, especially the guy who I grew up seeing presented as St. Pete Seeger.  Learning about his and his associates in the previous legendary Almanac Singers carrying the American-Stalinist line of appeasement with Nazism during the months of the idiotic Hitler-Stalin pact pretty well put a permanent dent in the halos of ol' Pete and Lee Hayes and the even the more legendary Woody Guthrie, who, whatever else can be said of him, was a great songwriter.  

I have come, more and more, the more I look into the history of American Communism which such folk were associated with, if not card carrying members of, to see it as a combination of active and totally ineffective agents for Leninism, then Stalinism - with the disappointed fans of Trotsky in the mix. I think the most notable impact of communism and its associated figures impact on reality was in its bumbling tripping up and hampering of any real left, here and in many other countries. In all, they were a blight on the real struggle against the Constitution and for egalitarian democracy, economic justice, a decent, sustainable life, the real agenda of the real left.  There is something of a lesson in that,  the former Trots, the neo-conservatives were such masters in that discrediting effort of the egalitarian-democratic, the real left.

I think the habits if not active links between Soviet, now Russian dictators and the American secular left are, in fact, still on display in things like that Green Party line of Putin appeasement I posted the other day, a line taken up by someone I once respected in a similar way, dear old Noam Chomsky.  That they, in the end, turn out to have a similar line on that as Republican-fascism of the Trumpian variety doesn't surprise me nearly as much as it once would have.  There were so many of the old commies of the 1920s onward who did what the neo-con ex-Trots did, once their hero was murdered by Stalin's agents in Mexico and there was no prospect of him gaining power, turning full on Republican-fascist. Knee-jerk accusation of the United States to shift blame from, first Soviet, now Putonian crimes and violence, is one of the hall marks of the idiotically counter-productive secular lefties.  If there is one thing that egalitarian democratic Americans, and those who would like to be that, will not accept it is blaming even the extremely imperfect union that is the United States for the crimes of foreign dictators.  

One of those early figures to take what was mapped as a sharp turn right into corporate fascism but was really only a baby step away from Marxism was Max Eastman, the brother of Crystal Eastman, one of the founders of the ACLU, who went from what was considered the far left to Nazional Review style hackery.  He was, more than anything, an ideological atheist who broke with his good buddy the trust-fund Stalinist Corliss Lamont over the Stalin show-trials of their fellow commies.  

In his letter breaking with  Corliss Lamont Eastman didn't much mention the millions already murdered under Communist rule (he uses that putrid objectifying of the human population, "the masses") something well and accurately reported in the West, he lamented their fellow commies who, if they had had power, would likely have run up a staggering body count of their own, many of them had helped Lenin and Stalin amass theirs. Over and over again, I've found that to be the case with disaffected communists and, to some extent anarchists who often seem to have no more of a reverence for the lives of the underclass and minorities than the most brutal of capitalists.  Eastman's lament was based in their common cause which was not justice but promoting materialism and atheism, probably with atheism placed first.  He proclaimed himself still a great admirer of Lamont's magnum opus, his    Columbia Doctoral Dissertation arguing against the possibility of life after death.  Someday I might go into my radically updated opinion of his advisor, John Dewey.   He was also Max Eastman's advisor at Columbia.  

I recall hearing one of those dear old, well-spoken, well-off, college-credentialed commies who left the American Communist Party after Khrushchev  admitted the crimes of Stalin - crimes which had been well known and documented for more than two decades before as she remained a Communist - what had attracted her to it to start with.  After thinking for a while the best she came up with is that she wanted "a more rational politics."   Facing the mountains of corpses amassed by Lenin and her former hero Stalin, that's the best she could come up with as an explanation.  Hearing that was one of the landmarks in seeing through the secular left.

In the years when much of the unselected literature, magazines, essays, etc. of the secular left have come to be readily available online, I have come to find pretty much everything about the old American secular left obviously wrong-headed at best, quite repugnant quite typically.  When viewed without some ideologically motivated filtering, in their century and counting history of politics they proved themselves to be idiots who never had a lick of political success - American voters are smarter than to think that Soviet Dictatorship, later Chinese dictatorship, which achieved numbers of murders, oppression and enslavement on the Hitler level, was preferable to our own handicapped struggle for democracy.

The Greens, mentioned here the other day, elevated the Putin-Mike Flynn dinner companion, Jill Stein, to help give us the neo-Stalinist asset Trump.  I'd like to know if there was any foreign money involved in that Green campaign.  We are lucky that they didn't help Republican-fascists reimpose him on us or deliver the recently conducted election to them. I will guarantee you that they will try to play the spoiler again, probably in the next presidential cycle. If not, I will retract.  

If, as it appears now, the Republicans take the House of Representatives, that is due to the Roberts Court allowing Republican-fascist gerrymandering to thwart the will of the majority of voters, the majority of American voters are not as stupid as the secular left or the corrupted American political system. I haven't closely followed the activities of any Green candidates for the House, if there were any, but a number of never could win "independent" candidates on the ballot may have played a similar role. If there was ever a time when we didn't need that kind of idiotic ballot access such as 1970s style "liberals" in Maine imposed on us, it is now.  Splitting the opposition to fascism is one of the fascists greatest assets, one which the secular left has specialized in.

The secular left in America has never been much of anything but counterproductive, the longer I look into the actual  (generally all too temporary) successes of American democracy, the less it can be attributed to secularist ideologues, least of all ideological materialists, atheists and those who assert a line of scientism.  Most of the time any genuine egalitarian-democraic leftists have associated themselves with those often university and small-media centered ideologues it has not been good for the progress of the real left. The real left has had to deal with the burden of that association at the same time they have had to struggle for the progress which is their only real purpose to exist against political-economic gangsters. The long diversion into sympathy for those dear old commies because the gangster-fascists were mean to them was sympathy for Stalinists and, as such, sympathy badly spent.  Though it is a stupid habit that might be related to what I suspect keeps many an ACLU style liberal awake at night, the fear that somewhere, somehow, a liberal is saying mean things about Nazis, fascists and the American indigenous version of that, white supremacists.   I really have come to despise the ACLU.

The way you get notice and esteem on the secular left is generally through promoting yourself as an extreme devotee and "fighter" for some abstract, theoretical line of bilge.  Declaring yourself the most lefty in the room, such as the Leninist agents of Communism did in destroying the most successful leftist party in American history, the old Socialist Party in Chicago in 1919* and as the Maoists did, even as the mass murder of the Cultural Revolution was at its deadliest, about forty-five years later when the SDS was similarly wrecked. That is how you make a name for yourself in secular lefty politics.  Achievement of actual good for the lives of actual people and other living creatures is notably sparse for the secular left and, as they have never much reformed themselves in order to put that first, something they don't much care about.  That would be because they REALLY don't care about that.

The values of the secular left aren't especially admirable.  For example the promotion of addictive substances has about as weird a place in the culture of the left as could be imagined. Alcohol, tobacco and drugs are weirdly associated with the secular left, perhaps because more than being like the real left, they are more a weird combination of libertarianism attached to some of the worst of oppressive governments.  Maybe that's not so surprising considering things like the Soviet promotion of alcoholism, the better to control the inebriated masses, something that I understand Putin has brought back in a big way.  Getting back to the Weavers, that movie they made of their last appearance, which was sort of a benefit for Lee Hayes who was in bad health, an amputee in a wheel-chair, as I recall, started with Darlin' Cory - I believe they had collectively said that was their favorite folksong, if my memory serves - a song presenting moon-shining and the violence associated with it in a positive light, in a kind of low-brow glamor.  And that is typical of that, often college based, folky crap, associating the secular left with drinkin' and hell raisin', mostly from a perpetually adolescent male point of view and of the perpetually adolescent gals who like that kind of thing.  And that would be because that has always been such a reliable venue in the pursuit of economic justice and equality.  

Before you pick up on that, it was said sarcastically. Perhaps it is related to their elevation of the material to be a replacement for God (thus the "atom" symbol so many atheists have adopted as their mascot) in so far as alcoholics have put the alcohol molecule as their higher power that controls their lives and determines their actions, the thing they sacrifice themselves to.  Other denominations of addicts put other molecules in the same place.  It makes a perverted kind of sense.

Some longtime readers may have been puzzled by my frequent mention of the Eugene O'Neill play The Iceman Cometh but I really do believe it is probably the best meditation on the futility and defective nature of the secular left ever made, either as an artistic expression or, in fact, of any expository treatment of it.  That it takes place among a bunch of alcoholics in a flea bag bar is appropriate.  That the lefties are all either in a state of alcoholic dementia or bitterly cynical apostates who mix in with those who have had no ideals higher than those of a pimp or the hell raisin' good-time guy, the much anticipated drummer Hickey who, unlike them, has successfully held down a job as a traveling salesman.  

The amount of the play taken up with issues of the left, whether through the disillusioned anarchist, Larry,  Don, the son of his once lover and, perhaps his son, and the alcoholic anarchist periodical editor Hugo, that is certainly the primary focus of the work.  It is, I think, O'Neill's honest evaluation of the old-line secular left.  He was, for a time, part of that left and personally knew many of whose pre-WWII heroes held to be legends by the idiot secular lefties even today.  I first noticed the aptness of the play as a microcosm of the American secular left during the hey-day of the lefty blogs during the new atheism fad of the 00's.  Some of them were, fifteen years ago, turning into that kind of virtual tavern, a louche salon with all the comforts of home.  The cynicism was the same and dominated.  There might not have been ready liquor provided by the proprietor to keep your thinking down but you could BYOB.  There was the collective repetition of the litanies of the faith, the effortless citation of common received "wisdom," obeisance to the totems of club membership, the foolishness of which was obvious from its futility in reality and there was  the excitement of the in-group ganging up on someone who tried to insert a different idea into the discussion.

That secular left achieved nothing except attaching themselves to the real left, trying to gain the upper hand and discrediting the real thing.  That has been, actually, the strategy of those lefts from the 1900s onward, it is what killed the most successful party of the left, as mentioned above, it thwarted the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, etc.  Look at the idiotic exercise, the Left Forum, that continues year after year doing the same things and promising the suckers that it's, somehow, going to work this time for more than half a century (if you count the Socialist Scholars Conference it grew out of).  How many wasted decades and centuries does it take to face the fact that it is not only discreditable, it is permanently discredited.

The real left cannot grow out of materialism and atheism because those will always destroy what a real left has to start from, definite moral positions that are not only non-negotiable, they have to be held as a durable and certain structure of truths. Neither science nor mathematics nor logic can touch that reality, you have to choose it as a firm and unshakable belief.  That we are all of us, despite appearances, equal and the possessors of equal rights given to us by God, that those rights include a right to not only the minimum of sustenance to keep us in constant desperation and insecurity but enough to sustain us in a decent life.  That the environment that all life depends on must be protected so as to have it sustain us.  That there are real and bad consequences for any of us as individuals and as a society for not doing those things, if not personally, for us on Earth, then eventually in a way that we will experience. That what we do for the least among us will determine our futures.  And a lot of others that could be listed here.  No real left of any good will comes from any other basis.  

The misplacement of Marxism on the left of the idiotic old-style graph of political identity on the basis of what they claimed they were going to do with the money is the kind of thing that happens when you are a materialist reductionist who believes the modernist superstition that simple mathematical equations are an oracle of how reality is really structured. The idea was that Nazism on one end and Marxism on the other end, pivoting on the "center" made it all balance, so it must be real.  Marx may have mouthed some good slogans in The Communist Manifesto that made it seem like he was really and truly a champion of the rights of workers, and he may have been sincere in that, but he really had no belief that egalitarian democracy would be possible.  He believed in the clearly wrong belief that reality was mechanical, that we were simply cogs and springs in a machine that would work itself out to whatever it was going to end up being. The habit of believing you are working for the benefit of "the masses" ignores the reality that there is no "mass" that is separable from the individuals you imagine it out of.

I think a far more realistic graph of political identity might have materialist determinism on one end and the belief that we are all endowed with equal and inalienable rights on a place far from materialism on a line that might extend past that point on in that direction to infinity.  There is a reason that the modern mass-murdering regimes have had a pretense of being scientific, "National socialism is nothing but applied biology,"  the scientific pretensions of Marxism, etc.  Their shared materialism, even as they are held to be opposites on that absurd graph of political identity is too noticeable to not be implicated in what they produce.  The people who made those ideologies up weren't stupid, though those who powered themselves to the top in a way that might have pleased a Nietzsche and did, in fact, please the Fabian George Bernard Shaw, like Hitler and Stalin might have been mighty vulgar and not the greatest of readers.  The observed history and most notable characteristics of Marxism and its ideological allies, mass murder, oppression, terror, etc. puts those squarely next to Nazism and not that distant from capitalism at its worst.  There is a reason it was so easy for the KGB man, Putin to take that little step into something more akin to Nazism than social democracy.  The academic, intellectual Marxists who never noticed the destruction of intellectualism that comes with materialism are dolts.

Speaking of which, since "socialism" is a word so twisted and distorted that it was adopted both by the Stalinists and the Nazis, creepy entities such as Fabianism, as well as some genuine egalitarian democrats, it's probably a word that should be scrapped and a better definition of economic justice found for true egalitarian democrats.  I think the word got saddled with so much crap that it broke its back. Even where that association has not discredited it, the use of it to mean entirely different things makes it dangerously problematic and, in referring to the real effort for egalitarian democracy based on good will, some other word should be used.

The same is true for "democracy" which needs to be replaced with something that hasn't been used by the likes of the Soviet satellite dictatorships, the Kim regime in North Korea, slavery-supported, misogynistic, oligarchic systems (such as the original democracy of ancient Athens) and myriad other anti-egalitarian despotic regimes.  

And "republic" has similar problems with it.  We need a more accurate and specific vocabulary for the thinking of the egalitarian democratic left, we need it as badly as we do the definitive rejection of the secular, materialist-atheist-scientistic old left. Words designed to not only jettison old associations with the old terms but much of the actual ideological baggage of those, as well.  The ideological baggage is what earned those terms everything from disrepute to dangerous inspecificity in what they mean.

* I think the charge that those who were in control of the Socialist Party at the time were underhanded (Louis Boudin complained they were "crooks" before he very quickly decided the others were lunatics) in how they tried to deal with the John Reed camp putsch to take it over for Leninism is unfair because they were hardly dealing with people who were honest about what they were doing.

Those who do politics frequently find that the rules and regulations get gamed and hijacked in that way, the American Constitution certainly as been by corporate fascists, billionaires, millionaires here and those foreign billionaire gangsters and dictators which the Roberts Court empowered in Citizens United. It was easy for them to do it because the thing was rigged against equality and democracy from the start.  The Supreme Court is largely comprised of those who game the system for generally bad ends.  As can be seen in their use of even something as good as the 14th Amendment is susceptible to their studied, blatant dishonesty about its history. The brief period after World War Two, when the world saw, on full display, the horrors of military distatorship, fascism and Nazism, when the Warren court tried to game the Constitution for better ends, sometimes disastriously foolish in what they did, was a brief and long over abberation.  

I don't blame people who break the rules to protect things from really bad people who have no good intentions. I blame the really bad people for making that a necessity.  How do you judge when it is all right to do that?  By the intentions and their actions in trying to achieve them AND BY THE RESULTS. Given that the rules are so bent and broken as done by the worst of those in the judiciary, I don't think the real left can usefully volunteer to be hampered by the rules in ways our opponents, either on the gangster right or the gangster "left" don't feel restrained by.  And don't for a second believe that they are anything but the adversaries of equality, economic justice and real democracy.   I think being governed by solid, absolute moral stands is a far bigger problem for secular politics of a materialist sort because, in the end, materialism has no immutable goal and so nothing higher than the rules as written or temporarily imagined.  Anyone who "just wants an even playing field" is too little invested in equality and justice to trust.  That is one of the reasons I have come to distrust things like the "civil liberties" lawyers.  

You have to want more than that kind of technical, evil enabling "equality". The Republican-fascist right wants more than that, it wants power and the power to steal everything and to prevent egalitarian democracy. We know for a fact that they will do anything to get it, from the Brooks Bros. Supreme Court putsch that put George W. Bush in power to the actions of the sanctimonious James Comey and lies published by the New York Times and the free press got us Trump and the violent fascists who tried to keep him in power.  Compared to that the desire to want equality, economic justice, democracy is well worth breaking the rules for. Those goals are higher than man made rules, if you don't believe that, to hold that as determining your course of conduct, you have surrendered to the gangsters.

The materiality of the biblical tradition has to do with the quotidian dimension of the vulnerable, the widow, the orphan, the immigrant, the poor and the wherewithal for their dignity and well-being.

THE MATERIALIST IDEOLOGY is based on unprovable assumptions that are intertwined, though not necessarily,  with our notions about science.  Among those are that

a. What human beings can discover about material reality can comprise an exhaustive description of what the physical universe is like. Given the fact that it is one of the major discoveries of modern physics that we cannot do that, the holding of that assumption, stated as a fact or, more honestly put,  merely felt as a preferred notion is justifiably considered to be a quaint remnant of 19th century scientism.  I say that knowing that sciency materialists just hate it when people call their faith quaint. And because it's true.

b. What science does not know about the physical universe is continuous in every aspect with what science is considered to know about it now.  Which, since science is limited by the humanly chosen methods and framing which comprises the method of science, is a pretty huge assumption. Honestly done science can tell you about nothing which cannot be accurately and honestly viewed through its chosen methods, even if those things are there. Actually, "science" is an imaginary thing that exists only in human minds, "it" doesn't tell you anything, those deputed to be scientists do. And lots of them are little more than carny hucksters, psychology profs at prestigious universities such as Jordan Peterson, Stephen Pinker, those who are allowed into the margins of  actual science such as Richard Dawkins, . . .  When you start to think about those things which are only "things" in human imagination, the list of those which modern folk consider as something else is rather astonishingly extensive, given the pretenses of the modernist ideology and allegedly hard realism.

It is entirely possible, as Eddington put it so well, that there may be entire realms of physical "law" that are undiscoverable by even the best of human investigation.  There may be aspects of physical reality which do not fit with the framing of the physical universe which comprises what we consider science and which we will never be able to make fit with it. If the famous discontinuity between physics as done by those in the tradition of Einstein and as done by those who investigated quantum mechanics will ever be reconciled or if that discontinuity is an already noticed hint of what we will never know and which, indeed may be unknowable is an open question.  At best this assumption of materialism is, to put it mildly, premature.  Yet entire fields of deputed science are based on that faith, the entirety of the "behavioral sciences" among the worst, cosmology and the speculative branches of evolutionary biology not that far behind in many cases.

c. That there is nothing other than what human science and the human conception of the physical universe which is real.  Which, considering that science intentionally throws out anything which will not work within the chosen framework of scientific method, may be the biggest leap of naive faith of these assumptions, none of which is a logical necessity to start with, science would probably be better if all were thrown out completely.

Science, as it is ideally conceived, can only make claims about that which is carefully and correctly observed and carefully and correctly measured, including those things which can be observed and measured through humanly invented, humanly made instruments. And those have to be correctly conceived of and working as intended and, quite often, their reported results correctly interpreted.  In the actual practice of professional scientists, that is not necessarily a strictly observed requirement.  

Anything which cannot fit into that framing or pass through that filter would be something science can't deal with at all. That is a lot of the science that is published and held to be science and it always has been.  The public presentation of science concentrates on the successes and not on the things which were once held to be as reliably known as today's science but is now discontinued, holdings which have certainly not to have retained its reputed reliability. Science is what living scientists say is science and if there is one suspicion about that which is reliable, it is that much of what scientists say is science at any given time will not stand a test of time.  I could go into Max Planck's famous remark that scientific progress is measured in funerals as the old guard gives way, the old guard holding to those ephemeral items of science.

Human beings with the credentials to call themselves scientists and get away with it can pretend that scientific methods can do what they can't do and colleges and universities, the media, law courts, etc. will pretend they are legitimate.  

The sociological divinatory practice of polling cannot even come up with the first logical requirement of doing what they claim to, having a large enough, actually randomly chosen sample of the large populations they claim to be able to describe, so their claims cannot even fit within the logical extension of scientific method which chooses to ignore that the entire basis of that assumption in this materialistic faith claims is true about reality.  Yet it is commonly held and treated to be applied science.  It's most openly corrupt form, in the kind of opinion polling that "journalism" focuses on is about as reliable as a newspaper horoscope, yet they continue on even as they whine that the vast majority of the population they poll can be known to actually do one thing, they hang up on telephone pollsters, yet that majority never figures in the reported results.  And journalism and politicians and even the pseudo-scientists who should certainly notice that glaring problem with it, buy it like the latest quack promoted on talk-TV.  

I strongly suspect that the fluidity and mutability and unpredictability of a single individual consciousness makes the claimed scientific basis of polling a pseudo-science from the start.  Yet it is a pseudo-science that is firmly believed in by, especially, the most ardent of materialists under the influence of the entirely unscientific corporate mass media which has largely given up the rather harder and more expensive reporting of fact, polling being one of the many replacements for that, opinion, personal preference being another of the major replacements of it. Modern journalism is more crap than it ever has been.

Forget the entirety of reality being comprised in the product of science, science knowably cannot deal with many aspects of our not only observed but all too well known, daily experienced reality.  

And that's only one of the aspects of the decadent dishonesty that comes in when you make materialism the required ideology of the allegedly educated class, a naive faith which is the actual basis of modernism, something which has gone from an ideology to being little more than a team brand or something more akin to the world of fashion than of philosophical conviction.  Or, more typically, a license to base your life and view of reality, the minimal extent to which you care about that, on selfishness. I think that's its major attraction among the affluent and those who would like to be, or academics who would like to have sex with more of their students.

There is a different view of materiality which the snobs and self-focused fan boys of materialism hate, that is something noted by Walter Brueggeman in that lecture I keep promoting, Slow Wisdom As A Subversion of Reality:

The triad of fidelity first focuses on the body whereas the triad of control focuses characteristically on abstractions of power and possession. The couplet of justice and righteousness are concerned with the ways in which the resources of the community are mobilized for the bodily reality of persons and the healthy reality of the body politic. The materiality of the biblical tradition has to do with the quotidian dimension of the vulnerable, the widow, the orphan, the immigrant, the poor and the wherewithal for their dignity and well-being. Thus the indictment in the ancient city, they have grown fat and sleek, they know no limit in deeds of wickedness, they do not judge with justice the cause of the poor, they do not defend the right of the needy.

Which is a far different thing from the pretenses of would-be scientific materialism.  I have to point out that this view of "justice and righteousness' is a far cry from how those are commonly thought of in not only modernism but throughout human history.  "Justice" in modern non-egalitarian democracy is focused on the punishment and control of and, not infrequently, the destruction of those in the very underclass who Mosaic justice intends to lift up and relieve of their need and to gain their dignity.  "Righteousness" seems to often be regarded as a synonym of judgemental snobbery either of those in the upper class or in those in lower classes who can be counted on never to give them any trouble, kicking down instead of up.  Respectable scrupulosity is something it traffics in more than the morality that the Prophetic tradition talks about.  I think a lot of the worst of the 1960s would be social revolution foundered on the failure to define such terms adequately.  I'll post on that later today.

Last Bit Of Catching Up On Hatemail Before Going Back To Politics

THE NEW ATHEISM fad of the 00's and its blather on the blogs, in pop-lit aka "journalism", in academic lit, etc. taught me a lot about the eutrophic decadence of modernism and scientism and atheism.  But, then, so did the unedited, unselected, raw thought product of huge numbers of college credentialed people who wrote in something like the English language. 

The Darwin wars were something which before about 1995 I had the most conventional modernist views on, unknowingly and uncritically believing the post-WWII lies constructed to "protect science" from the truth of what he really said, what those he cited as reliable science said. In my subsequent researches, I never found a single case from before WWII in which those who supported the theory of natural selection denied that led to such things as eugenics, it was common knowledge then.  That is I stupidly accepted the conventional post-war "scientific" lie until I did what such atheists almost never do, honestly read his own words, those of his Darwinist colleagues he cited as reliable knowledge, those of his children about him and his theory and admit what they said and the consequences of what they said being believed by others such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charles Davenport, Paul Popenoe, Wilhelm Schallmeyer, Alfred Ploetz, Fischer, Baur and Lenz, and through them, Rodolph Hess, Adolph Hitler and later the likes of William L. Pierce and the Darwinist economists who had Trump's and the Swedish government's ear on Covid policy.  

I can say that almost every time I looked at the primary and cited secondary documentary evidence of such conflicts, the conventional modernist required POV turned out to be a rather obvious lie. That was true in researching Darwinism, many issues of history, such as those around the prosecutions of Galileo, Bruni, John Scopes, the Huxley Wilberforce "debate", the character of the U.S. Constitution, the personal integrity of many clayfootted heroes such as the fetishized "founding fathers," the real history of the American left,   around the controlled, published science done in such issues as telepathy and precognition, the actual character of the so-called sciences such as psychology, sociology, anthropology and, God help us, again, economics.   

I have never done anything but insist that an honest evaluation of such issues has to be heavily based in a critical reading of the primary documentation and such secondary literature as the creator of the primary documentation claimed as supporting their arguments, especially those whose point of view became conventionally viewed as authoritative on the matter.  That is with the little understood understanding that a critical reading can be confirmatory as well as disconfirming.  

I have never wandered into the actual primary and related secondary materials without being prepared to find my hypothesis about it was what turned out to be wrong.  I think I have always admitted when that was entirely possible, though I tend not to find that was the case, I'm kind of careful about making hypotheses. I had the history of psychology as as a cautionary lesson about doing that, if you're not careful you might just create an illusion of confirmation for of your hypothesis that is illusory.

Sometimes I had no really firm or definite commitment before I went into it.  When I first looked into some of them I was genuinely interested in finding out who was right, if that was possible to discern from the record.  Sometimes I have come out of it with the firm belief that neither side had enough evidence, often they had none at all that made believing their contentions logical or credible.

My arguments with academic, even scientific, EVEN MATHEMATICAL(!) ideologues of modernism, of material-atheist-scientism have proven to me over and over again they are usually far, far more interested in pushing their ideologies and even their rather easily refuted lies than they are in the integrity of their beliefs. More typically online, they're only interested in getting attention from their fellow ideologues and kicking the dirt around with them. That is especially true of the boys club of "Skepticism," atheism, scientism, whiny always-online geeks who love to whine about why females don't fall for them, etc.

Good theologians argue at a far, far higher level of adherence to the pretended standards of intellectual practice than any modernist, materialist, atheist devotee of scientism, even those who are supposed to be professional scientists and even mathematicians(!) regularly do.  The amount of time those who claim their disinterest in religion spend on trying to discredit or "disprove" the existence of God, having that as a rather obvious focus of their allegedly scientific work is rather self-discrediting as to both their disinterest and their interest in the integrity of their scientific endeavors.  It also, far more often than not, proves they don't really have any grounding in the philosophical character of science or even what you need to do to make credible arguments.  The appeal to prejudice is probably the major MO of a huge number of such scientific academics.  Certainly when they wade into popular conversations.  

Among other things over the period since I first went online and discovered along with the the enormous wealth of primary documentation, secondary documentation - especially that cited by the creator of the primary documentation, the first-hand evidence of observation and testimony by those who did what virtually no one else then or now could claim to have done KNOWN PERSONALLY AND OBSERVED AT FIRST HAND AND LISTENED TO, SINCE THAT'S ONE OF YOUR MAJOR BONES OF CONTENTION, CHARLES DARWIN, for another "the founding fathers" . . . among the other things that have happened is that my life long, childish belief in the integrity of many scientists, academics and intellectuals would not rather obviously lie about things they thought was important was just that, a childish belief which I held well into late middle-age.  

While there are scientists, academics, etc. who are very honest and, as a result, tend to be more modest in their claims, they are not typical of modern would-be intellectual life, especially among people hired in the professional world of alleged thinking. Especially those who are deputed to be "public intellectuals" now that the generation of those who were actual intellectuals seems to be largely past. I've had some of the most obviously dishonest arguments made to me by such as those and, more typically, they present nothing like argument at all but would be bullying and appeals to the prejudices of their fellow ideologues.

I used to get trolled regularly by "Skeptics" who complained bitterly when I was skeptical of the leaders in organized "skepticism," especially those around the rinky-dink circle of CSISOP and "Humanism" (funded by the trust-fund last Stalinist, Corliss Lamont, by the way), Paul Kurtz, the total fraud and blatant liar James Randi, Martin Gardner (who is one of the few who wasn't a proclaimed atheist), Carl Sagan, . . . whose torch is now carried by the likes of Stephen Pinker and Richard Dawkins and other professional atheists.  

I always found it amusing and telling how many of them, such as Ray Hyman were professionally involved in some of the most blatant of pseudo-science such as psychology and sociology as they misrepresented experimental research far, far more rigorously and honestly and carefully conducted than what their academic ideology accepted as science.  I have never, once, found a self proclaimed champion of science from that crowd who was prepared to be honest about the basic dishonesty of much of what is conventionally accepted as science when, like Pinker's and Dawkin's professoinal production, it is nothing of the sort. y

The lack of scientific integrity of that crowd was best exposed in the one flop of an experiment done by the Committee For The Investigation Of Claims Of The Paranormal, the infamous sTARBABY debacle, demonstrating how the champions of science were either entirely prepared to publish fraudulent science which it had been pointed out to them was botched.  Or, as in the case of the "Fellows" and allegedly governing group of CSICOP MANY OF WHICH HAD THE PROFESSIONAL COMPETENCE TO UNDERSTAND HOW THEIR COLLEAGUES WERE MISREPRESENTING WHAT WAS DONE, including such alleged luminaries as Carl Sagan and two of those who conducted the "research" who certainly knew they had published lies.  It was so bad that one of those who warned from the start, a pretty extreme member of that club, Dennis Rawlins, blew the whistle on them after trying to get the likes of Sagan and Martin Gardner (who certainly had the mathematical chops to understand the fraud) and others he took to be honest proved they were in on the con-job. Rawlins is one of the few of that type who I can reluctantly say has proven he has a significant measure of scientific integrity, reluctantly because he's a pretty nasty materialist-atheist-true believer in scientism, himself who will never honestly consider scientific research that challenges his rigidly held ideology.  His subsequent ejection from the CSI circle led to at least a couple of others in it to leave, one of them, Richard Kammann wrote one of the best analyses of it.  

I now think that such junk pervades much of modern academic writing, even that which appears in so-called peer-reviewed academic and even scientific journals.i Certainly it pervades the "public understanding" not only of science but, also much of history and other important, supposedly fact-based facets of human culture.  I think a lot of those are full to the top of it, especially in those denominated sciences that don't really practice scientific methods and things such as American's alleged knowledge of their history, politics and the law.

And yet they wonder why, in so many cases, the public doesn't believe what they say.  Tragically, that earned skepticism among a dangerous percentage of the public is true in some of the most obviously correct and important science such as that done around human-created climate change, around rigorous immunology and epidemiology, around environmental science.  A lot of that good-will based belief was sacrificed on some of the most contentious science of lesser importance and of little to no importance of all (just what is most of the alleged science of the very real phenomenon of evolution any good for other than its use by ideological atheism? the same question could be asked about cosmology) and as well as "science" made to order and done for profit, such as "nutrition science" sponsored by corporations for the purpose of promoting their products, science such as touted the health benefits of alcohol, chocolate, etc.   Nutrition science at many universities and labs is little more than prostituting and pimping sci-credentials for money.

I don't find that to be nearly as true in the theology I read, perhaps that's because a lot of theologians believe something that it's impossible for an atheist to believe and for science to demonstrate, that it's a sin to tell a lie, bear false witness, to misrepresent the truth. Any theologian worth reading certainly has that as a starting point.  

I am far more impressed with how the handling of primary, secondary, etc. documentation is handled in the theology I read than I am in how many scientists handle it in their alleged scientific professional writing. I found a lot of them on their own and their colleagues blogs had a lot in common with the crudest and most dishonest of creationists and fundamentalists and denominationally apologetic of fanatics.  In fact, most of them are fanatics of materialist-atheist-scientism who would never let disconfirming evidence, exposure of logical incoherence or honesty get in the way of their promotion of their simple childish faith in their own chosen ideology.  They're about as interested in the integrity of science as Marjorie Taylor Greene is in what Jesus actually said in the Bible.