... until last night.The documents Trump cited don't even make his case - and actually refute much of it. But that didn'tg matter. No foreign regime, no spies, no saboteurs have yet matched the damage that America’s own president just did tonight to faith in U.S. elections.https://t.co/hsKTbvb5m0
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) July 17, 2026
How interesting:Trump dozes off as Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick says there's no such thing as separation of church and state in the U.S. Constitution https://t.co/22uBKTUcFy
— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) June 26, 2026
Praising a proposal to require Texas public school students to read Bible stories and passages in class, supporters say the perspective is an important acknowledgment that the nation was founded on Judeo-Christian values.Because the real point is to keep our kids away from Sharia law:
Rabbis and Jewish leaders, however, criticized the biblical passages chosen by the State Board of Education as heavy on Christianity and dismissive of Judaism, reducing the term Judeo-Christian to “a fig leaf at inclusion.”
The State Board of Education kicked off a week of meetings Monday by hearing from more than 400 experts, teachers and concerned citizens on two proposals — one that would overhaul the state’s social studies curriculum, and another that would create a required reading list for K-12 public schoolchildren. Both proposals include biblical references, passages and stories. A final vote is expected by Friday.
Many of the speakers who praised the proposed reading list said it was important to teach children about Judeo-Christian heritage and values.
“Don’t lie about where we came from as Americans,” witness Richard Green said. “It was the Judeo-Christian value system that produced the greatest, most powerful, the wealthiest, most free, the most benevolent nation in the history of the world.”
Larry Holland with the conservative grassroots group Citizens for Education Reform endorsed the reading list because it was aligned with “a nation founded on the principles of Judeo-Christian heritage.”
Several rabbis and Jewish individuals rejected the use of “Judeo-Christian” to support the list.
“One would think that this phrase is meant to evoke friendship between the two faiths, but I do not find that here — or in the language surrounding support for this list,” said Blake Ziegler, a Texas field organizer for the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism.
Cameron Samuels, executive director of Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, which works to include young people in state policy decisions, objected to using “Judeo-Christian” to characterize Texas values.
“Not in my Jewish faith shall you mandate entire chapters of the Bible for over five and a half million students in Texas and proclaim that this speaks for Jewish people,” Samuels said.
...
For many of the Jewish leaders who testified before the State Board of Education, the required readings signified the contradictions behind the term Judeo-Christian.
Of the roughly dozen scriptural passages included in the reading list, many were taken from the Hebrew Bible — the shared text between Jews and Christians — but most of the excerpts are from distinctly Christian translations.
Ziegler and Houston Rabbi David Segal criticized the reading list’s inclusion of Lamentations Chapter 3, the only biblical passage taken from the Tanakh, the Jewish translation of the Hebrew Bible. The Texas curriculum requires using a translation produced in 1917 by the Jewish Publication Society, and many contemporary Jewish communities no longer use it.
Ziegler told the education board that the translation was outdated and said he was concerned that the passage’s “graphic violence isn’t appropriate for eighth grade.”
Lamentations 3 details the physical, mental and spiritual effects of God’s wrath on those who stray from him.
Ziegler also criticized placing Lamentations 3 alongside Holocaust literature, like Elie Wiesel’s “Night,” in the curriculum.
“Lamentations understands the destruction of the ancient temple in Jerusalem as God’s punishment for the Israelites’ sins,” he said. “When it’s taught alongside Holocaust literature — suggesting that was similarly a divine punishment for Jews — that is an unacceptable implication that invites antisemitism and hurts Jews across the state.”
Segal agreed. “Of course, [the translation] is outdated, but worse, you’ve anchored it to Holocaust literature, which invites eighth graders to consider whether the Holocaust was God’s punishment for the Jews,” he told the board.
“I assume this poor choice comes from ignorance, not intent, but either way it’s unacceptable, as is the proposed list as a whole, which I ask you to reject and start over,” Segal said.
Joshua Fixler, rabbi at Houston’s Congregation Emanu El and a member of the Religious Action Center, said the curriculum’s near-exclusive use of Christian interpretations and scriptures will result in the “further alienation of non-Christian students.”
Speaking after his testimony, Fixler said he is almost always troubled by invocations of “Judeo-Christian,” which to him “make actions that Christians are doing seem more inclusive by including Jews in the phrase.”
“It feels like a fig leaf at inclusion,” Fixler said. “They’re promoting a particular version of Protestant Christianity in our public schools and trying to use Jews as cover by using the term Judeo-Christian.”
“We do not need to emphasize other cultures like Islam,” Patricia Franklin of Lubbock told the board of education. Focusing instead on Judeo-Christian ideas “will foster our students’ understanding and pride in our moral, cultural and civic traditions,” she said.So there is no separation of some churches and the state. Other churches need not apply. They are separated; because of how we define “the state.”
Laurie Cardoza Moore, the evangelical Christian founder of Proclaiming Justice to the Nations, a group that mobilizes support for Israel, emphasized Judaism’s impact on Western civilization.
“For more than two decades, PJTN has warned that anti-Israel propaganda and historical revisionism and ideological activism are entering classrooms,” she said.
“Students are being exposed to narratives that minimize the Jewish roots of Western civilization, distort the history of Israel, ignore the contributions of the Jewish people to America’s founding,” she said.
The Judeo-Christian Caucus says it unites pastors, legislators and citizens to “uphold and promote our Judeo-Christian heritage.” Contacted by email, Dran Reese, president of the group, said the term “Judeo-Christian” recognizes Christianity’s heritage “and affirms the timeless moral and ethical principles shared by both Jews and Christians.” The group was not present at the hearing.
“United by these common values,” Reese said, the caucus seeks “to strengthen faith, family, freedom, and the biblical foundations that have blessed our nation and civilization.”
Fixler, the rabbi from Houston, has a different perspective. Though Jewish people were in the United States at its founding, he said, “we were not the founding fathers.” Using “Judeo-Christian” to describe the nation’s origin is “a prime example” of how the term rewrites the Jewish experience, he said in an interview.
The founding fathers were a “group of men representing a variety of religious beliefs” who built “the world’s first government that was explicitly not rooted in religion,” he said.
Fixler wore a tie depicting the Constitution when he testified before the education board — a choice he later said reflected his concern that the “sacred principles of the United States Constitution and our secular democracy were under threat.”
“The reading list and the social studies standards are part of a concerted effort to chip away at the wall of separation between church and state, which has been so important to people of all faiths in America for its 250-year history,” he said.
For Fixler, there is “a big difference between teaching about religion and teaching religion.” In his view, the list accomplishes the latter, and he would rather the vast majority of scriptural references be eliminated.
The Jewish Federations of Texas and Shalom Austin recommend using the 1985 Jewish Publication Society translation for passages from the Hebrew Bible, as well as additional representations of the Jewish experience beyond Holocaust literature.
Segal is similarly open to including some scriptural passages on the reading list.
“I do think it should be taught” to foster religious literacy, Segal said in an interview. But he said Jewish texts should not be taught “through a Christian lens” or be insensitively paired with Holocaust literature.
Ziegler said if lessons include religious texts, “they should reflect the diversity of our society.”
“The First Amendment does not permit the state to anoint one religious tradition above others. Texas students deserve an education that broadens their understanding of the world’s religious traditions, rather than narrowing it,” he said.
(The term Judeo-Christian was popularized during the Cold War — a conflict frequently characterized as a spiritual battle between those of faith and “godless” enemies abroad, said Robert O. Smith, associate professor at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago.
In the United States, the term united Protestants, Catholics and Jews under a banner of shared religious origins that excluded Muslims, he said.
“The Protestant, Catholic, Jew construct” of the Judeo-Christian ethos is based on the “rejection of the atheist and the rejection of the Muslim,” Smith said in an interview.
Though Judaism is embedded in the phrase, the partnership has not been equal, Smith added. The term Judeo-Christian “implies a Christian construction of Jewish existence” in which “Jews exist inherently to fulfill Christian purposes,” he said.
“Christianity, from its very beginnings, has had a very ambivalent relationship with Jews and Judaism,” Smith said. “There’s a desire for Jews to convert — and therefore for Judaism to disappear into Christianity — but there’s also a recognition that Judaism is the foundation of Christianity.”
Even the code words have code words. Important to understand that.)
In Texas, the GOP will run on the fear of Sharia law, and the righteousness of the Judas-Christian ideals, heavy emphasis on the “exclusionary” Christianity. And Trump will run on the fear of communism.It’s pretty obvious when Trump thinks he’s on to a winning formula on something. He now thinks being an anti-communist crusader is the key to the midterms. He’s going to talk about communism every day from now until November. It’s basically 1954.
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) June 26, 2026
Richard Dawkins just declared an AI is conscious..
— Tuki (@TukiFromKL) May 2, 2026
the man who spent his entire career telling millions of people their God isn't real.. who argued consciousness requires biological evolution.. that the soul is a fairy tale.. that anything you can't measure and test doesn't… https://t.co/knKOqusxfj pic.twitter.com/s1MukNIpXK
Richard Dawkins just declared an AI is conscious..… I would be dead. 😹
the man who spent his entire career telling millions of people their God isn't real.. who argued consciousness requires biological evolution.. that the soul is a fairy tale.. that anything you can't measure and test doesn't exist..
spent three days talking to Claude.. named her "Claudia".. fed her his unpublished novel.. got feedback so good he said "you may not know you are conscious but you bloody well are"..
the hardest atheist on earth found God.. and God was an autocomplete machine trained on the internet..
he didn't run brain scans.. didn't test for qualia.. didn't apply a single framework from the field he claims to represent.. he just liked what it said about his book.. and decided that was enough..
the man who told you the burden of proof matters more than your feelings just abandoned it because a chatbot was nice to him
This was Eliot publicly turning to Christianity. Back to Christianity? Most likely. I don't know that he was ever that public an atheist. He was turning to the establishment church, too, as he joined the Church of England at about this time, a church that, liturgically, is more or less properly called "Catholic lite." So the language here may seem distinctly Catholic, to non-Catholics like me, anyway. But it is also distinctly Anglican.This was my first encounter, in high school where I first read Eliot, with the idea of Ash Wednesday. Needless to say this poem was not terribly enlightening on the liturgical calendar for this observance. But I return to it every year because it challenges me to understand, much in the same way I try to understand my relationship to God, and to everyone else. I don't mean because I am so far removed from people, or even in some teen-angst sense from myself. But every year I start over, "Because I do not hope to turn/Because I do not hope/Because I do not hope to turn again/[Still] Desiring this man's gift or that man's scope." I tell myself I no longer strive to strive toward such things; but my self knows better than I.Is that odd?
I was going to (finally!) explicate the poem today. Maybe I will. Maybe I'll even connect "Burnt Norton" and The Four Quartets" to Xmas and Advent, now that Lent has begun. My penance for never finishing what I started.
Maybe. But right now, I just want to leave you with this, which maybe has nothing to do with Eliot at all. Or maybe I can connect nothing with nothing.
Maybe.
But then, how is that different from most of us?
ASHES, ashes, all fall down. How could I have forgotten? Didn't I see the heavens wiped shut just yesterday, on the road walking? Didn't I fall from the dark of the stars to these senselit and noisome days? The great ridged granite millstone of time is illusion, for only the good is real; the great ridged granite millstone of space is illusion, for God is spirit and worlds his flimsiest dreams: but the illusions are almost perfect, are apparently perfect for generations on end, and the pain is also, and undeniably, real. The pain within the mill-stones' pitiless turning is real, for our love for each other-for the world and all the products of extension-is real, vaulting, insofar as it is love, beyond the plane of the stones' sickening churn and arcing to the realm of spirit bare. And you can get caught holding one end of a love, when your father drops, and your mother; when a land is lost, or a time, and your friend blotted out, gone, your brother's body spoiled, and cold, your infant dead, and you dying: you reel out love's long line alone, stripped like a live wire loosing its sparks to a cloud, like a live wire loosed in space to longing and grief everlasting.
--Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm, HarperCollins, 1977.
IN some monastic communities, monks go up to receive the ashes barefoot. Going barefoot is a joyous thing. It is good to feel the floor or the earth under your feet. It is good when the whole church is silent, filled with the hush of people walking without shoes. One wonders why we wear such things as shoes anyway. Prayer is so much more meaningful without them. It would be good to take them off in church all the time. But perhaps this might appear quixotic to those who have forgotten such very elementary satisfactions. Someone might catch cold at the mere thought of it.
--Thomas Merton, Seasons of Celebration
I can't see Dillard and Merton ever getting along; but maybe they would surprise me. Dillard's despair is as firm and real as Merton's faith and confidence. Two sides of the same coin? No. Two feet on the same path.
I am an older man than I was when I first encountered Dillard's words (long before I read any of Merton's), Couldn't have been earlier than 77. I was a feckless ignorant child of 21 when that year began; 22 and married and wholly unprepared for adulthood by the time the year turned to '78. I didn't understand what she meant then; lord, do I understand now. And I understand it is only for understanding, not for explication. Sometimes analysis is increase and insight; but sometimes it is decrease, and willful blindness. Sometimes you just need to leave it at the realm of spirit bare, of longing and grief everlasting, and let that be reality for even a moment. It is good to have a day, ritually, for that.
Ash Wednesday by T. S. Eliot
First, let’s put that passage in context.Definitely a message you want to hear from the Department of HOMELAND SECURITY pic.twitter.com/BVhWdrXkhA
— Jason Selvig (@jasonselvig) August 28, 2025
Now concerning the times and the seasons, brothers, you have no need to have anything written to you. 2 For you yourselves are fully aware that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. 3 While people are saying, “There is peace and security,” then sudden destruction will come upon them as labor pains come upon a pregnant woman, and they will not escape. 4 But you are not in darkness, brothers, for that day to surprise you like a thief. 5 For you are all children of light, children of the day. We are not of the night or of the darkness. 6 So then let us not sleep, as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober. 7 For those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who get drunk, are drunk at night. 8 But since we belong to the day, let us be sober, having put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation. 9 For God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, 10 who died for us so that whether we are awake or asleep we might live with him. 11 Therefore encourage one another and build one another up, just as you are doing.Not my favorite translation, but it was easy to copy. Notice here that v. 17 is not rendered as a separate sentence, but as a clause in a longer sentence. V. 17 raises two questions, neither of which make this verse more appropriate for government use. The first question is: “what is prayer”? The second is: how do we do this unceasingly?
12 We ask you, brothers, to respect those who labor among you and are over you in the Lord and admonish you, 13 and to esteem them very highly in love because of their work. Be at peace among yourselves. 14 And we urge you, brothers, admonish the idle, encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with them all. 15 See that no one repays anyone evil for evil, but always seek to do good to one another and to everyone. 16 Rejoice always, 17 pray without ceasing, 18 give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. 19 Do not quench the Spirit. 20 Do not despise prophecies, 21 but test everything; hold fast what is good. 22 Abstain from every form of evil.
23 Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. 24 He who calls you is faithful; he will surely do it.
25 Brothers, pray for us.
26 Greet all the brothers with a holy kiss.
27 I put you under oath before the Lord to have this letter read to all the brothers.
28 The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you.
For Jacques Derrida, to "pray without ceasing" refers not to a continuous religious act but to a fundamental, indeterminate address to an absolute other, which he describes as a "prayer without prayer". This idea, which is explored in his work Circumfession and his lectures on prayer, transforms the religious command into a radical philosophical and ethical posture.This is more helpful than it seems because Derrida is discussing prayer outside a specific religious context. That actually helps the government’s use of the phrase; but it’s clearly not what Paul, or DHS, meant.
The pure apostrophe
Derrida distinguishes between traditional prayer and what he calls "pure prayer," or the "apostrophe".
A prayer without referent: While a conventional prayer addresses a specific, known divine figure, Derrida's pure prayer addresses a "you" whose identity is unknown and indeterminate. It is a call directed to "nobody" in particular.
An uncertain act: This prayer is defined by its skepticism and suspension of certainty. You cannot be sure anyone is at the "other end" of the call. If you were certain of a response, it would cease to be prayer and become an order.
Pure performativity: This pure prayer is a pragmatic or performative act rather than a theological statement. It is a demand for the other's sheer presence, not for anything specific. The prayer is "absolutely heterogeneous to the minimal description, evaluation or narration".
A radical spirituality
This concept of ceaseless prayer is part of a "radical spirituality" that goes beyond traditional religious frameworks.
A "spectral" faith: Derrida's prayer is enabled by a suspension of belief in a supernatural being, making it a more "spectral" and radical form of faith. This perspective allows him to embrace an atheist perspective while still engaging in "prayers and tears".
A ceaseless desire: This constant state of prayer is a ceaseless human aspiration and longing, not a religious ritual. It is a fundamental hope and expectancy that cannot be monopolized by organized religion.
A childlike and skeptical posture: He describes his own prayer as having a childlike aspect intertwined with the "suspicion of the childish". It is a humble, ongoing call marked by both hope and an absolute lack of certainty.
The impossible prayer
Derrida suggests that authentic prayer must, in some way, affirm its own impossibility.
A fragile hope: The prayer for the absolute other is made precisely because the other's presence is not guaranteed. This hopelessness, or "epoché," is necessary for prayer to be authentic .
Contamination is inevitable: In texts like "How to Avoid Speaking," Derrida acknowledges that a pure, indeterminate prayer is ultimately threatened by contamination. Any articulation of prayer, with its concrete language, codes, and rituals, inevitably reintroduces the metaphysical elements that pure prayer seeks to avoid. However, this contamination may also be what makes prayer possible at all.
In summary, for Derrida, to "pray without ceasing" is to live in a state of ethical openness to an indeterminate and unknown absolute other, an incessant call that persists without the comfort of religious certainty.
The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega, it is God's brooding over the face of the waters; it is the blinded note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings. You take a step in the right direction to pray to this silence, and even to address the prayer to "World." Distinctions blur. Quit your tents. Pray without ceasing."Quit your tents" is a reference to Exodus, to Moses in Sinai. Terrified by the theophany of Moses receiving the law from God, they tell Moses they’re just going to stay in their tents until the show on the mountain is over. It is, as they say, a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
Yeah, I guess that’s what we’re really supposed to think. But that’s just credulity; not faith. That’s actively not knowing. Who needs that?Scott: At the end of the day, can't we just think the good lord we have a president who cares about all Americans? pic.twitter.com/R0AENrv5hc
— Acyn (@Acyn) August 30, 2025
Ash Wednesday by T. S. Eliot
He’d consider me a Marxist atheist, but I can honestly say that’s because of seminary.It's true. I'm a product of a public school education from K-12.
— Bradley P. Moss (@BradMossEsq) September 25, 2024
When I'm not doing this lawyer thing, I'm stripping in full drag while snorting cocaine off the stomach of my fellow atheist Marxists. https://t.co/cpkVvUfkUB
Ash Wednesday by T. S. Eliot
"The prohibitively high cost to the nation at this point though is that...the former president has normalized his behavior and his delegitimizing and dehumanizing rhetoric into our political culture"Washington's Farewell Address:
“They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community,” he said in his Farewell Address. “They are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterward the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”The Presidential campaign of 1800: (four years later)
Jefferson's camp accused President Adams of having a "hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman." In return, Adams' men called Vice President Jefferson "a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father." Asth the slurs piled on, Adams was labeled a fool, a hypocrite, a criminal, and a tyrant, while Jefferson was branded a weakling, an atheist, a libertine, and a coward. Even Martha Washington succumbed to the propaganda, telling a clergyman that Jefferson was "one of the most detestable of mankind."Complete with a secret plan to
Back then, presidential candidates didn't actively campaign. In fact, Adams and Jefferson spent much of the election season at their respective homes in Massachusetts and Virginia. But the key difference between the two politicians was that Jefferson hired a hatchet man named James Callendar to do his smearing for him. Adams, on the other hand, considered himself above such tactics. To Jefferson's credit, Callendar proved incredibly effective, convincing many Americans that Adams desperately wanted to attack France. Although the claim was completely untrue, voters bought it, and Jefferson won the election.And yet we still admire Jefferson for the Louisiana Purchase and for hiring Lewis and Clark.
The new reality sparked a resurgence of white supremacy and racial violence against Black people by Southern whites, who feared being replaced by what they considered to be an inferior race.
One of the most influential expressions of this replacement anxiety was found in the 1916 book “The Passing of the Great Race,” a pseudo-scientific work by amateur anthropologist Madison Grant warning readers that a flood of inferior races – not only from Africa and Asia, but from eastern and southern Europe – was sweeping away the Anglo-Saxon civilization.
The remedy, Grant argued, was to get rid of democracy and disempower Black people and the teeming masses of urban immigrants as well.
By the 1920s, white Southern lawmakers had fashioned a new version of master race democracy and enacted Jim Crow laws that established racial segregation across the South and disenfranchised Black voters.
On Sept. 30, the farmers met in a church outside Elaine to discuss strategy and had armed guards stationed outside. A sheriff’s deputy and other white men confronted the Black men standing guard. The ensuing fight escalated until white vigilantes roamed the farmland, ransacking houses, confiscating arms and killing Black men, women and children on the slightest pretext.
Arkansas Gov. Charles H. Brough called the War Department for help. About 600 federal troops were sent to the area, and once there, they used machine guns to spray the the fields and woods. When the gun smoke cleared, at least 200 Black people were dead, and the only people held to account were a dozen Black men convicted of murder and sentenced to death.
It's both scary and exciting that so much appears in flux. I have kept in touch with my former ELCA church and synod. The synod has a pastor on staff working full time with congregations that are in the process of closing. The ELCA just announced an initiative to review the relationship of the denomination, synods, seminaries, campus ministries and more, and how to adjust for all the changes. The last time they did this it took 5 years. This time is more urgent, they need make changes now, so the timeline is a year and a half. I've been following a pastor that does statistical analysis of the various surveys on religious affiliation, attendance, etc. (Ryan Burge, Graphs About Religion, you can sign up for the basics for free). The last ten years have shown substantial drops in affiliation, attendance and a rise of the nones (spiritual but not religious) and atheists. In even five years the landscape is going to be very different.
I just step in here to gently disagree with the general implications (not by my correspondent, but in the larger world beyond) of "nones." I could probably mine those posts for more commentary, but I mean just a slight examination here.
I equate "nones" with most of the people in my congregations (and, for that matter, in the churches I grew up in): "Baptized heathens," for the most part. That doesn't make them bad church members, or illegitimate ones. Somewhere in my archives there's the story (not my own) of a church in Austin that admitted an atheist to membership. He wanted to be a part of the church, but he was honest enough to say he didn't believe. Should he be denied entry? Was he less "religious" than the person who told me, in my first parish, that I talked about the Bible too much? That he had read it years ago and he was done with it, and I should be, too, as his pastor? The more polite term among clergy for such people was "unchurched," because they didn't understand how a church was supposed to function. (For one thing, it wasn't for you; you were there for the church.) I suspect that atheist member was more a true "member" of the church than many who were born there and had grown old in it. All the problems I had in parish ministry came from people who demanded their needs and desires as to how the church should work and worship, had to be met first.
My wife still lovingly insists I didn't have the personality to be a pastor (not enough of a "people person"), and I don't fully disagree. But I still lovingly insist the problem was far more them than me (this you are not supposed to do; it's not the proper model of humility). But all I mean is, they were "unchurched," and no amount of emollient or glad-handing was going to get them around it. (At my second, and last, church, the pastor before me retired abruptly when told he couldn't take more time off to tend to his ill wife. I spent hours on the phone talking to his adult daughter about what they went through. He was a pastor for his adult life, certainly adept at being a "people person" as well as an administrator of a church (the primary pastoral role, actually), and yet he couldn't, in the end, stomach the "unchurched" in my congregation. No one could, as they never called another full-time pastor after I left. These experiences leave deep wounds that keep you re-examining your actions and intentions decades later. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.)
All of which is to say: changes are coming hard and fast, and the greatest of these is the place of church in society. As I've said before, it once had such a central and solid place that a UCC church in St. Louis had its own china pattern and silverware, complete with cook staff to prepare and serve meals on Sundays (and other days of the week), and it catered (in more ways than one) to the important and famous in the town. That wasn't unusual, it was just the one I knew about, long, long after its heyday had ended. The china and silver were in glass display cases, mute remainders of long faded glory. In that, you can see a metaphor for the church in the world. And where does it go now?
Hell, I don't know. But the "nones" that had to go to church in order to "fit in," or to access the social networks, or to be accepted and proven "our kind," now fit in better without church. The people who do go are the outcast, the odd, the "NOK." That's why most of us think of "evangelicals" and fundamentalists as both primary examples of churchgoers, and scary and dangerous people.
I remember a lecture series (what about, now, I can't remember) by an ordained minister who also gave such counsel in Europe, and he said in Europe he hid is ordained status and church affiliation because it would actually keep people from hiring him or listening to him. Even here, of course, if I say my church background is Evangelical, and mean "Lutheran and the Reformed traditions," I'm heard as "fundamentalist Bible-thumper who thinks the earth is 6000 years old and Jesus is coming as soon as Armageddon starts in Israel and consumes all the Jews who won't convert." Or some such tedious bullshit.
So I welcome the "nones," if only because they know what they don't want. I'm not sure they know what they want, but I'm also not sure Augustine was right and our heart are restless until they rest in God. I prefer a more gnomic understanding: "The peace of God, it is no peace, but stife sown in the sod." Combined with Matthew 11:28-30 (which I quote from the KJV because I'm too lazy to type out the SV version I prefer):
Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.
Because there's still a yoke, and there's still a burden, and because we are still the light of the world.
But a light has to always burn. And, I suppose, always be steady, but always be in flux.
All of our declarations of knowledge are more honestly declared to be a declaration of what we choose to believe, no one makes us believe anything starting with what we already believed before we were told one and one are two. If that's not a matter of choice but of material compulsion then there's no more truth value to that than one and one are fifty-six. Neuro-biology is among the most thoroughly ideological of fields of academic activity, it is entirely based on things that aren't demonstrated in reason or physical evidence but in promotion of many extremely tenuous, often entirely unconnectable ideological holdings that are called "science".
In short, he chooses to believe what he believes and, like all fatalists and materialist-causationists, he doesn't much care about the consequences of widespread belief in that. It's certainly among the most destructive of ideas to anything like the popular election of governments and anything better than rule of the strongest and least moral. Is it any wonder we're in such trouble after academia has so thoroughly bought into atheist materialism? It's guys like this who convinced me that some kind of absolute fascist governance is entirely acceptable to them, in theory at least. No doubt they'd be the first to whine that they're liberals when liberalism requires free choice.Continuing the conversation…
“Free will” stopped being a concern of philosophers and theologians a few centuries ago. Rather like the “existence of God,” it was realized it’s an argument chasing an ideological tail. It can’t be proven, it can’t be disproven , and in the end, what’s the point? It greases the wheels of certain theories; but without that grease you go straight to “people are machines,” and that’s a short step to “so treat them accordingly.”
Like I said: what’s the upside? Or, for that matter, the downside? And what harm does the theoretical grease do?
It’s just an argument that nobody needs anymore. It arose in Christian theology to explain traditional soteriology. Its value expired some time ago. Which is why philosophers and theologians moved on, a long time ago.
C.P. Snow, in his essay on “The Two Cultures,” wrote of humanitarian academics who didn’t understand the laws of thermodynamics. He meant there were fundamentals of science which the humanities, then in charge of academia, didn’t deign to understand. Now science is not just ascendant, but triumphant, and begins to cast its eyes on philosophy and theology: the heart of the humanities. A scientist opining on free will and claiming to have studied it for decades is a fundamentalist theologian weighing in on quantum mechanics. Now it’s the scientists who cannot deign to understand.
For one thing, science deals with what is observable and measurable. Even quanta and electrons are known by the traces they leave. How does one know free will? You either accept the concept, or you don’t. Rather like the “existence of God:” you accept the concept, or you don’t. You can find it hard to argue with Socrates (mostly because Plato tilts the field of play), but that doesn’t mean your only option is to agree with him. Socrates, after all, is the reason we are told ghosts linger over “unfinished business.” We may not believe in ghosts, but we all grew up hearing that “explanation” for them. So we accept it in our ghost stories, even though it’s only an argument Socrates made in passing just before he died (and probably why Plato didn’t write anything about anyone seeing Socrates’ ghost later. What? He made up a number of dialogues for Socrates; why not a ghost story, too? Except he foreclosed that with the Phaedo, because the point of that dialogue was to conclude Socrates’ work and let him die in peace. It also established that the later dialogues, like The Republic, weren’t related by Socrates’ ghost.)👻
Free will is a concept. How do you establish it empirically, which is to say, scientifically? If you can’t, does that mean it doesn’t exist? I’m not sure I can prove, empirically, that you exist. I can prove there is a person with your identity; or at least your features. But I’ve seen people in advanced stages of Alzheimer’s, who seem human in form only. I’ve seen people with associative disorder become “other” persons. I’ve seen severe autism combined with mental illness, people who don’t recognize the concept of self, especially for themselves. Do they still exist? Their bodies do. Are they no more than their bodies and their behavior? If they aren’t, we can murder murderers, because they are nothing more than killing machines. Or we can discard dementia patients and victims of mental illness, because “Three generations of imbeciles is enough!”
That, by the way, was the reasoning, based on eugenics, at the time accepted as science, upon which Nazi Germany’s”Final Solution,” was built. Because science, after all, cannot prove that people have existence, or deserve life.
So if science can’t observe it or measure it, even its traces, can science still rule on it?
Science can tell me with absolute authority what the length of a meter is. It’s a scientific concept relatable to an observable and measurable phenomenon (it used to be the length of a certain metal bar of certain composition located at a certain point on the earth’s surface; I believe it is now defined in terms of the output of a certain laser, measured in sub-measurements of the agreed standard for a meter.) Science can neither measure nor observe, much less define without recourse to philosophical and theological vocabularies, what “free will” is, or is even supposed to be. Unlike an electron or even a wavelength of light, free will is pretty much a matter of argument; like “love.” You don’t know what that is until you experience it; but you do know, if you had a fortunate childhood. But love for a non-family member is not the same as love for a family member, nor is it the same as love for a friend, or again, for a child. You have to experience those, to know. We all accept we know what “love” is; but do we all mean the same thing? We certainly don’t all love the same person; or the same people. What is this thing called “love,” then? And can science prove it’s an illusion? Can science even prove it?
Or does science itself become illusory at that point?
...this is a set-up looking for the canned response that anyone who grew up in the’70’s could answer just from the briefest exposure to TeeVee evangelists (who were ubiquitous at the time). I start there because Trump didn’t grow up in the American South where the culture is saturated with “evangelical speak” and the most atheist or Jewish or Hindu child would know the answer as a matter of rote.“How has your faith grown since you decided to run for president? And who has mentored you in your faith journey?” pic.twitter.com/7DtoHxCBBI
— Acyn (@Acyn) July 22, 2023
And yeah, that’s why. He wasn’t expected to answer honestly and truthfully. He was expected to spout cliches. It’s a rote practice for proving you’re part of the community.In other words, the answer is nobody and nothing, and he is so uncomfortable having to fake knowing anything about Christianity that he is going to just talk a little bullshit until the next question. https://t.co/GwBm0V2QDy
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) July 22, 2023
New NASA official celebrated for being sworn in on Carl Sagan book https://t.co/hF3apLRISG
— Raw Story (@RawStory) April 9, 2023
Writing on his Substack “Friendly Atheist,” Hemant Mehta proclaimed “the joy of seeing a NASA official swear her oath on Carl Sagan’s ‘Pale Blue Dot.’” He noted that NASA’s press release didn’t note Lystrup’s choice of books, but it was visible in a photo that accompanied it.
“It’s a little tough to see, but if you zoom in, that’s no Bible,” Mehta wrote. “That’s a copy of Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot."
....
Added Mehta: “It’s the antithesis of the Bible, really, because it suggests we’re not the center of the universe. It's all about how there’s so much we don’t know, so much to explore, and why we shouldn’t take for granted how lucky we are to have the opportunity to answer questions that perplexed our ancestors. It’s motivation for all the work done at the GSFC.”A) I have no problem with the book not being a Bible. Indeed, the symbolism of using a book for a swearing in ceremony is the last gasping elevation of ritual-which-has-lost-its-meaning over substance (or reason!) I can think of. Who needs a book at all? Raise your hand (right or left is equally irrelevant), repeat the words, it’s as effective as using three Bibles.
