The Communist Origin of the Modern Conservative Movement VI

It is often said that religion inspired such great music and secular music can’t compare but when major beliefs of major composer are examined what we find is that many of the great composers were atheist. Mozart may have not been an atheist but he condemned the orthodoxy of his catholic upbringing and he refused to ask for a priest when he died. Beethoven was also born into the Catholic Church but studied philosophy. A friend said Beethoven was inclined toward deism and reportedly said after last rights had been administered, “Applaud friends: the comedy is over.”

George Bizet was a French composer who wrote the opera Carmen. He was an atheist who wrote:

“Religion is a means of exploitation employed by the strong against the weak; religion is a cloak of ambition, injustice and vice… Truth breaks free, science is popularized, and religion totters; soon it will fall, in the course of centuries—that is tomorrow…in good time we will only have to deal with reason.”
_____________________________________________________
Bizet was born in 1838 and died 1875 it looks like his talents did not extend to predicting the future as religion still has a death grip on many even today. Superstition has many lives and is almost impossible to kill it is like a parasitic infection that is born by the air.

Will Donald Trump put an end to the Christian right? One of the founders of the Christian right movement, formed in 1979 to help elect Ronald Reagan, believes Trumps nomination will bring an end to Christian right’s political power. Michael Farris was of the early leaders of the Moral Majority and even though it fell apart a decade later it evolved into the Christian right. Ferris is declaring the Christian right political dead on arrival. Faced with Republican nominee who declares that he has never ever had to ask for God’s forgiveness or anyone else’s for that matter what is a good Christian suppose to do? Can the Christian right hold their nose and vote for Trump? Trump’s mistress was pregnant while he was married and one hell of a fight happened when his wife discovered him talking to his mistress on Christmas day. After his divorce he married his mistress two months after she had his baby. In Saudi Arabia Trump would have been stoned to death.

Ferris stated that the only qualification Trump has is that he is a republican (and even that is doubtful). The Christian right is torn between voting for a republican or voting for their values. The republican party has long courted the Christian right and given them some political power in exchange for their support. The division in the movement, over the support of Trump, has grown so deep that it threatens the movement survival.

“How Norman Vincent Peale Taught Donald Trump to Worship Himself” is the name of an article about Trump. I think Trump could teach Norman Vincent Peale a few things about self- confidence and narcissism. Trump says he still remembers Peale’s sermons he didn’t ever want them to end. Trump also says Peale was one of the greatest speakers. Peale merged worldliness and godliness to produce his theology. Peale was called a conman by his critics who described his church as a cult. Trump’s armor is made up out of hardened self-confidence that nothing can penetrate.

The Republican Party was for all practical purposes dead after they presided over the Great Depression. It would be over twenty years before the Republicans could elect another president and he was a war hero courted by both political parties. As the Soviet Union emerged as a threat after WWII the Republicans used the fear of Communism to regain some of their former political power but the 60s bought a far more extreme republican party, the party of Barry Goldwater and Ayn Rand. The politics of Rand and Goldwater were too far to the right for most Americans. The Republican Party languished for the next twenty years until they forged an alliance with the Christian right. The Christian right help deliver the next three presidential elections to the Republican party followed by two terms for baby Bush between 2001-2009. Without the participation of the Christian right Baby Bush would never have been elected and his father likely would not have been elected either.

This post started by citing how former communists helped shape the modern Republican Party but a good deal of time has been spent looking at how the Christian Right has influenced the Republican Party and why we should be concerned when there is a clear effort to eliminate the separation between church and state. I really don’t care if people want to worship a flying spaghetti monster but what worries me is when they decide that the flying spaghetti monsters’ book should be used to govern America. This is no different than ISIS insisting that all countries should be governed by Sharia Law. In America legalized abortion awoke a slumbering Christian Right which decided that the legal definition of life was wrong and that their interpretation of bible was right from there it was a short step to believing that other laws should not conflict with the bible.

Many people have speculated that a third political party might be formed but there has been a third major political party for many years in America it has jut been controlled by the Republican Party while they learned the game. Many have speculated this election will be the end of the Christian Right and I would like to believe it but I know where belief will get you. Trump’s damage will be confined to the Republican Party and the Christian Right will step out from under the Republican Party’s wing and go it alone next election. A government run by those who are ignorant of even the basic facts is problem and it is not so much they are ignorant of the facts they just refuse to use their rational mind. There has been a dangerous resurgence of ignorance over the last 50 years and I am afraid we are about to reap the whirlwind.

I was 12 years old when Marilyn died and even after all these years it not necessary to tell you her last name was Monroe. I had seen a few of her movies but I figured she would vanish from public memory like other actors and actresses who died before her but is now 54 years later and she is still more alive in a sense than most people. It was 1977 and we had a new Civic Center and Elvis was scheduled to come to town. This is a small town and Elvis was a big time act one of the biggest ever slated for the arena but Elvis never made it he died in August of that year. The tickets were refunded and then returned to those who bought them as souvenirs. Elvis much like Marilyn became immortal in a sense. This phenomenon always puzzled me, certainly many famous actors and singers have died before and after the pair and none have ever reached anything like this same level.

We all programmed by ours ancestors if something had survival value it was handed down. Men are not solitary creatures our earliest ancestors learned to depend on others for survival. Of course a tribe had to have a leader and the selection of that leader would determine whether the tribe survived. Those that selected leaders with good qualities were more likely to survive. We no longer live in tribal societies but the instinct to select leaders has been redirected toward celebrities. Sure we still elect government officials but it is removed from having an observable direct effect.

What we see with Marilyn and Elvis is that we have an inborn need to worship or pay homage and this no doubt is a piece of the puzzle that explains religion. Religions cannot be based on any man because men are mortal. If a religion was based on a man it would die with him but legends survives death. Gods were created to be the vehicles in which to encase legends. When Joseph Smith created the Mormon religion he did not make himself a God though I believe he could have but he knew if he did his religion would vanish with his death he needed a God for it to continue beyond his lifetime.

As human societies left the tribal stage and became increasingly more complex and exponentially larger loyalty to a leader was the glue that held entire countries together. People had to fight and die often for someone they never met. These leaders had to be larger than life, better looking and braver than their fellow men. They had spin-doctors even then who were not confined to the truth in fact the truth would indeed hinder a legend. Many early rulers were considered men made into a Gods. Of course the problem here is that Gods multiplied like men. In all societies there is innovation and the Holy Roman Empire’s key innovation was realizing the political advantages monotheism. They decided to make the God of a small religious cult known as Christianity the one and only true God.

The trouble with kings is they die and there are always political factions and a fight to see who would be the next King which caused divided loyalties throughout the kingdom. There will always be different political factions but in the golden age of monotheism there was only one God in the Roman Empire and the Roman Empire controlled religion until it fell. Once the Roman Empire fell the church continued on with no master to keep it in line. Religious icons got the same treatment as kings of old. King Arthur legend had nothing on the saints who could according to legend perform miracles. Hollywood was a quick study and studios learned to manufacture the legends of celebrities like the church churned out saints. And we can clearly see today that most people are far more familiar with their favorite celebrities lives than the lives of the saints. Ask someone to name five celebrities and they will have no trouble but ask them to name five saints and most couldn’t. Celebrities seem to fill an inner craving in many people. I was never one to hero worship. I never saw a legend just a man like everyone else. When I raced I was always uncomfortable when asked for an autograph but those autographs are not worth anymore today than they were 30 years ago. The inclination to look for leaders is basic to human nature and religion exploits it. A God is a supreme leader who has the power to create the world if anyone is disserving of hero worship surely it is a God.

Marilyn Monroe’s celebrity was a product of a Hollywood studio and her sexuality just as Elvis celebrity was the result of the hard work of Colonel Tom Parker, a conman par excellent. Elvis also had a certain amount of sex appeal. Politics is the art of illusion and creating celebrities is as useful in politics as it is Hollywood. The art in politics is how to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. The media and the ever-increasing time spent on line make it extremely to color over character deficiencies. Remark’s made ten years or more are preserved forever on film, tape or the internet as Donald Trump found out today when remarks made over a hot mike 10 years ago came back to haunt him. Trump was remarking to Billy Bush now of the Today Show that because he was a star he could simply go up to women and grab them by their p….y and they would not say anything, he also made other statements that were worse. Paul Ryan has said that Trump will not attend a campaign event in Wisconsin and even the Chairman of the Republican Party said he was sickened by Trumps 2005 remarks. Trump said, “when you are a star they let you do it.” Bill Cosby had that exact same attitude. Trump was describing sexual assault, a crime and this was just after he married his third wife.

You can see now why it is much easier to make a legend out of a God. An imaginary God has no ugly past to come to light later. With a God you are starting with a clean sheet paper and you create the past accomplishments of your God. I’ll bet Trumps handlers are wishing they had a clean sheet of paper now. Maybe in the next presidential election the Republicans will nominate Jesus for president they will still have to convince the public he is real in spite of the fact he is invisible at least he will never be found on tape saying, “I did try and f**k her. She was married,” Trump said. I moved on her like a b**h, but I couldn’t get there.

After Trump’s crude remarks came to light many Republican’s are abandoning him but many are sticking with him. We are likely to learn far more from those who are sticking with him then those that aren’t. One woman at the political event in Wisconsin, where it was made clear to Trump after the publication of his crude remarks by the Washington Post that he would no longer be welcome, was disappointed and said she was still supporting Trump because “He was a real human being.” Trump remarks sounded much like those of teenager bragging, more likely about something he hadn’t done in attempt to generate admiration from his peers. I would have to doubt it actually happened or if it happened it likely wasn’t very many times because he was never charged with sexual assault or beaten up by angry husband or boyfriend. This is to be expected of a teenage boy but not a man of 59 now at 70 he might be excused for being senile. But the woman claimed that this made Trump “a real human being.”

Would we really want to make Chester the molester the role model for the next generation? The pattern in politics and religion is the same you lean to deny even the obvious truth. The woman in question probably would not like to have her p***y grabbed by a strange man or at least one she did not find attractive. She most likely would not like to see that happen to her daughters unless of course it was Trump because she is obviously celebrity struck. Provide a born again Christian with absolute proof that the earth is over 4 billion years old and he will deny it and tell you no the earth was created by a creature resembling an old man only 6,000 years ago.

There is no question that human beings have an inborn ability to deny the obvious truth. A husband can deny all the signs that his wife is running around. A man caught in bed by his wife with two women can simply tell her, “Who are going to believe me or your lying eyes?” The ability to deny the obvious reality had to have some survival benefit for ancestors to hand it down to us. It is counterintuitive that denying the truth has some survival benefit but it no doubts does. We knew in the 90s that President Clinton was a womanizer but we overlooked that because the economy was so good. There are no perfect men or perfect leaders. Throughout time mankind has learned to deny the obvious truth about their leaders to facilitate a cohesive society. Consensus truth and personal truth can and do overlook the real truth when there is an agenda.

It is said we cannot change the past but that is not true it is done all the time. In last night presidential debate Trump referred to his grabbing p***y remarks as just “locker room talk” but he wasn’t in a locker room and his comments were intended to describe his actions in fact to brag about those actions. Locker room talk might go as far as discussing women’s sexual attributes and a wish list of what one might like to do but Trump’s remarks were a report of what he did and got away with. This was more like a rapist bragging about the women he raped and got away with. We do not live in past and all we have are memories of the past but while the past cannot be changed the memories of the past can be changed and for all practical purposes it is the memories that are the past. It is all about changing perception. The Republican base will accept Trump’s explanation and remember his remarks as nothing more than “locker room talk.” The past will have changed for them.

Scientists that study memories find that they change a great deal over time even if no one is trying to deliberately trying to influence those changes. We tend to believe our memories are very accurate when they are far from it. Scientist would take an event like the Kennedy assassination and collect detailed information bout what people were doing at the time it happened. They were then questioned in a few months, and the memories were already changing, question after a few years the memories of many had completely changed. All would remember Kennedy being killed but the other details as to what they were doing had changed. It is not the past that we have to deal with it as much as it is our perception of the past that matters.

Politics and religion both take advantage of being able to alter the past or at least alter our perception of the past. The Christian church was a monstrous corrupt organization drunk with power in the Dark Ages where they tortured and burnt harmless old women at the stake. The memory of how absolutely corrupt the Christian Church was has almost been completely expunged. Popular culture even today still tries to change the past by portraying the harmless old ladies as evil witches with dangerous supernatural powers. In the parlance of most modern movies the victims deserved to be burnt at the stake the Church was right all along according to popular culture.

It is not the past that matters as much as our perception of the past.

On the Today Show this morning they showed a Trump supporter, the woman said “Nothing said eleven years ago has no effect on me or any other Trump supporter. We don’t care.” But this was just not something Trump said, this is him self-reporting his criminal actions and saying he can get away with it because he is a “star.” No one would question that grabbing a woman’s p***y is a crime in all 50 states and the District of Columbia and it should be for good reason but to the Trump supporter it is not a crime when Trump does it, it is just something he said. If she had her way she would elect the first Commander and Molester instead of a Commander and Chief. Even if Trump had raped a woman on film in the middle of Time Square this woman would still vote for him, it would be just something he did eleven years ago. Remember Trump’s remarks that he could kill someone on main-street and not lose any votes? He was talking about people voters like this woman.

This is the exact same attitude we run into with religion. When the Christian Church was confronted with Darwin’s Theory of Evolution the attitude was, “Nothing discovered by scientists has no effect on me on me or any other bible supporter.” To be sure I think all of us live in our own world to one degree or another but for some they go out of their way to make sure the real world does not encroach. Our world- views are constructed out of both reality and personal reality and of the two personal reality is the more important because it can block out any portion of reality. When I built a political coalition in town made up of Police, Fire, District Labor Council, and city union workers even though we shared the same goals it was evident our personal realities were quite different. It worked great for one local election 83% of our candidates were elected.

Could anyone change that Trump voter’s personal reality? Not likely in her reality no matter what Trump did would change her mind. The “wisdom of crowds” will take care of her but it is those who live in the closed world of religion that we need to reach. In a world where planes are flown into building and mass killing done with modern technology penetrating their personal reality is of utmost importance. We have journeyed into out space but the most important journey is into inner space.

When we look at religion we have to realize it is part of personal reality and not reality. You need to think of actual reality as the lines in a coloring book. Personal reality is far richer and more complicated because it is not just the bare facts of reality it includes things such as intention and motive and all the colors of emotion. In theory people should just fill in the spaces between the lines but we know that many people like to color beyond the lines. What lies within the lines is the natural world what lies outside of the lines is the supernatural. Some people are reluctant to color beyond the lines to explain the natural world while others have a supernatural explanation for everything that happens in the natural world.

The question everyman has to ask himself is did the natural world spring from the supernatural world or did the supernatural world have its origin in the natural world? How one answers that question determines whether one is religious or not. If the natural world sprang from the supernatural world we would expect that religion would have been the “perfect conception.” If a supernatural being created the known world what would we expect to find? Surely a being capable of creating a world and everything in it in 6 days would be able to transmit their religious ideas flawlessly from the supernatural world to the natural world. We would expect to find only one religion and God would have written the book himself without ghostwriters but that is not what we find.

If the supernatural world was created by the natural world what would we expect to find? It would be like you gave a bunch of children Lego blocks and told them to create a God. You would find all sorts of different creations because they were being created out of the children’s imagination. After the first generations of Gods were created by the children the second generation of Gods would be more complex as the children drew inspiration from the other children. After several generations the traits of the Gods could be traced back to earlier Gods and this is exactly what we find. For religion to be true it would have had to be perfect from the very outset.

If a supreme being actual existed would he let the bible, Koran or other religious text represent him? Both the bible and the Koran are a hodgepodge conglomeration of tales. Would the communication of a supreme being even remotely resemble these works? We would expect communications from a far superior intelligence to be well organized, clear and to the point neither the bible or the Koran have any of these traits. Why would anyone choose to believe in them? Tradition, they have been handed down from generation to generation as sacred texts that cannot be questioned. We inherit them something bequeathed to us by our great ancestors but they are bequeathed as sacred texts that can never be questioned.

Much of what was believed to be true 2,000 years ago has proved to false. For instance we no longer believe that evil spirits cause disease. Mankind continues unabated to look for truth and question what was believed to be the truth in the distant past in all areas except one, religion. Religion can never be question and is locked into the distant past. The conventional way of looking at religion is blocked by it being considered sacred and unquestionable but if we look at what religion proposes to be and to what it actually is you can see that religion is no more than a poorly orchestrated fraud. By looking at what religion would be if there were a supreme being and what it is it easy to see it as the fraud it is. The bible not only endorses slavery but sets out the rules of who you can own for a slave. Very few people would endorse slavery as moral today but the bible does. We would not consider someone that was pro slavery today as a morally superior to us and if the bible endorses slavery, as it does, it impeaches itself as a source of superior knowledge. Since supreme beings don’t make mistakes the bible is nothing more than a fraud.

This election is showing us how religious reasoning really works. The religious right labeled themselves previously as “value voters” in other words they voted to uphold Christian values in America by voting for those who also upheld those values. Faced with the recent release of tape where Trump proudly bragged about sexually assaulting women a conference of Christian leaders was held Sunday via phone. They delved deep into a the bible looking for away to support a man who has a court date coming up in December for the rape of a 13 year old girl and of course they found it. Those holding the meeting were the twenty-three men and three women members of the Donald Trump’s evangelical council. They scoured the bible looking for Christian scoundrels to justify Christian support of a self-professed sexual deviant and one pointed out that Jesus befriended tax collectors and sinners. “Another invoked the Old Testament figure Nehemiah who served as a pagan king of Persia, but leveraged the relationship to accomplish the holy mission of rebuilding the ancient walls of Jerusalem.”

So much for value voting by the Christian right in America. The bible can be used to justify any and all positions. One Dallas megachurch pastor, Robert Jeffress, said, “This election is not about the Donald Trump’s past, it is about the future of America.”
How easily it is to corrupt your thinking and lose complete sight of your values when you let your bible be your guide.

The major news networks are accused of being biased against Trump but they have deliberately not covered Trump’s upcoming trial for the rape of the 13 year old girl. A Google search for Trump rape trial returned 26,700,000 results and something tells me there are going to be many more rape trials in Donald’s future. The smaller news outlets and the Huffington Post are covering the Trumps rape trial. Trump’s rape trial is a civil proceeding for damages and is set for Trial Dec 16 after the election. The major news media refused to report the rape allegations against Bill Cosby till the evidence was overwhelming. One thing Trump said that is true is “when you’re a star you can get away with anything.” (if you have an army of high paid lawyers and lots of money to pay people off) The allegations revolve around under age sex parties held by billionaire perv Jeffery Epstein. Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting minors in 2008.

Donald is no stranger to rape trials his first wife, Ivana, accused him of violently attacking her because she had referred him to a cosmetic surgeon who had botched a scalp reduction job (to cover a bald spot) and caused pain in his scalp- hence the vindictive yanking of her hair.” In 1989 under oath in a 1989 deposition Ivana stated, that he violently attacked her, ripped out her hair and forcibly penetrated her without her consent.

Another suit was filed by a business associate of Trump’ named, Jill Harth. In her lawsuit she lists multiple acts of attempted rape. She said, Trump forced her into his daughter’s Ivanka bedroom “wherein he forcibly kissed, fondled and restrained her from leaving. And then Trump bragged, “that he would be the best lover you ever had.”

Though Trump did not pay that lawsuit he paid a parallel lawsuit by her husband. Best lover sounds like Trumps claims that he knows all the tax laws when he doesn’t know enough to even ask an intelligent question of his accountant.

The public count of women molested by Trump in the mainstream news media is officially up to nine. The count on the Internet is far higher and the mainstream news media has yet to report that Trump is going on trial Dec 16th in Federal in New York for the rape of a 13 year old girl at a billionaires home. The billionaire, Jeffrey Epstein, has been convicted of soliciting underage girls for the sex parties held at his mansion and stands accused of soliciting scores more. It kind of reminds of the Tom Cruise movie “Eyes Wide Shut” where sex parties were held at a mansion and the men wore masks. Fiction often is based on disguised reality. One would have to wonder if the movie was based on a similar case. In the movie a girl is murdered to keep her quiet.

But that is not the worst part of this election the worst part is that the many of the leaders of Christian right are still supporting Trump’s bid for president. I don’t know but if Trump is elected maybe the preachers will use their churches to hold sex parties for those of us who will never be invited to the billionaires home. Like one prominent preacher from the Christian right said, “The Christian Right has sold its soul for 21 pieces of gold.” Politics is a dirty business at best and “when you look into the abyss the abyss looks into you.” Deep involvements in politics not only changes you it changes your values. All of a sudden the Christian right has found itself committed to one of the worst examples of a human being ever to run for presidency. They find themselves making excuses for his behavior that they would never condone in anyone else. As the abyss looks back into them it changes them and the endorsement of monster is also an endorsement of his behavior. Many accused Clinton for changing the definition of sex for young people. After Clinton” sex scandal many young people no longer defined oral sex as sex. Trump continues to try and benefit from the Clinton scandal but Vice President Biden pointed out Clinton was impeached. Will sex parties make a come back? I can remember a friend recounting the sex parties he went in high school. He was black and most of the girls were white. It was the 60s and the while boys got very angry with him because he was doing the white girls of course the white girls were not objecting. The power hungry Christian Right has no clue as to what their support of a known sexual predator is going to do for the next generation. The mainstream news media can only keep the Trump sex party trial off the front page for so long the Internet 270,000 results about the Trump rape trial will wash over them like a tidal wave. If Christian Right is successful in electing Trump the Trump’s rape trial will surpass and political sex scandal in the world. Sex parties will be all that young people discuss for the next year and I suspect they will be come popular once more.

Hitler and the Nazis killed six million Jews and the world swore that they would not let that happen agin but the now the same propaganda Hitler used to drive the extermination of those Jews is being used in the popular Christian book series “Left Behind.” Why would the authors of the “Left Behind” series want to do this? The series of books is trying to prove by creative imagination that Christianity is the one and only true religion. If Christianity is the one and only true religion then the Jews that don’t covert will be killed by the Christian messiah or the antichrist either way Jesus will make Hitler’s dream a reality. The authors Tim Lahaye and Jerry B Jenkins sold sixty-five million books and spawned four movies.

The book series panders the worst possible religious bigotry, that there is only one true religion and anyone that follows any other religion deserves to be punished with death and this appeals to their fondest fantasies and greatest fears. A believer greatest fear is that he has picked the wrong religious and an avenging God killing all those who don’t belong to that particular religious cult is a very comforting idea. When you believe in your heart that anyone who doesn’t belong to your religious cult deserves to die you are beginning to understand how Hitler thought. It is a short step between believing and taking action once you accept the base premise of the “Left Behind” series that not only all Jews should die but also anyone who does not believe as you do should die. The idea is that they are getting their just reward. The “Left Behind” series turned back the clock 75 years and made it idea acceptable that people should and will die for having different religious beliefs.

The Jews are considered the “deniers” of Christ in “Left Behind” series and there is nothing quite so bad as a denier to believer. The Jews in the “Left Behind” series are internationalists with no loyalty to any country. Lahaye was quoted as saying to Jeffery Goldberg, a journalist on Slate.com, “Some of the greatest evil in the history of the world was concocted in the Jewish mind.”

After Trumps now famous quote about being able to grab women by their p***y Pat Robertson (the very Pat Robertson who said the 9/11 was retaliation from God for America granting rights to homosexuals) and Jerry Falwell Jr. have announced they are staying the course and sticking with Trump. This shows that they never had any values in the first place they just want political power no matter what they have to do to get it. They are in a word whores, political whores. I don’t know whether bigotry is hereditary or whether Falwell Jr. came by it on his own. The students at Falwell’s Liberty University are staging a revolt over Falwell’s continued support of one of the biggest low life that ever ran for president. Many of the Republican groups on Liberty’s campus have refused to endorse Trump stating, “Not only is Trump a bad candidate for President, he is actively promoting the very things we as Christian’s oppose.” The University of Virginia Republicans rescinded their support from Trump.
_______________________________________________________
But of all the terrible things Trump has said I believe this to me is the most offensive:

“Donald Trump, who had five deferments, never had to fight in the Jungles of Vietnam.”

“But he had a different sort of war record, as he told Howard Stern years ago. He slept with many different women without getting STDs. It is my personal Vietnam, he said. ”I feel like a great and very brave soldier. What’s more, Trump added: This is better than Vietnam. It’s more fun.”

Stern said: Every vagina is a landmine. Haven’t we both said that in private?”

Trump concurred: “I think it is a potential landmine. There is some real danger there.”

From the “Washington Post”
___________________________________________________
This statement shows the real Trump values. There was a draft during Vietnam War to ensure that the rich and poor both served their country. Some poor man whose dad could not afford to send him to college no doubt took Trump’s place in Vietnam and probably came back in a box or without arms or legs. And for Trump who used five deferments to dodge the draft to say that, “He feels like a great and very brave soldier.” Is beyond contempt

This has been probably the nastiest election in history but when all is said and done there may be more good come out this election than any other. The political whores have stood on the sidelines for the last 36 years claiming to further “family values” through political action. Of course this would mean in theory that they would get the vote out for the candidate that most closely held the same values as they did. But in practice the political whores always endorsed the republican candidate. The Republican candidate in this election only value is grabbing your wife’s p***y when you back is turned so now the political whores can no longer hide behind the camouflage of family values. They have been outed not only to the public at large but to the millions of young people that they once led.

Now the tens of thousands of young men and women in Christian Universities are now viewing not only their leaders like Jerry Falwell Jr. and Pat Robertson in a new light but they are questioning their motives. Once they realize that the Emperor has no clothes they will begin to question everything else the Emperors have told them. If the Emperor is lying to them now about Trump they will wonder what else he is lying to them about. They are the first generation of Christian right in many generations to assert their right to not only decide who they will vote for but the right to think for themselves. The Christian Right has been like an army taking orders from their leaders as to who to vote for and who to work for.

The Christian right leaders were not pursuing family values they were pursuing political power and by continuing to support Trump they have done far major damage to their cause. They have spawned a revolution in their own ranks. This revolution may finally allow the young men and women to see through the self-serving fog of religion.

At tonight’s debate the traditional family handshake between the presidential candidates families were cancelled after the Clinton family heard that the Trump family was going to use the new Donald Trump up the skirt handshake. Who knows maybe the new Trump handshake will catch on at the office and at school. I am sure the teenage boys have been closely following the reports of Trump’s predatory sexual behavior and what will strike them is not just the fact of Trump’s predatory sexual behavior but the fact that he was able to molest so many women and get away with it.

Trump is now being described as being “lecherous and worthless” by his own supporters. James MacDonald the pastor of megachurch Rolling Meadows, Ill. He is on Trump’s evangelical council one of the 23 men and 3 women charged with bringing the evangelical vote in for Trump. MacDonald stated, when ask about Trump’s remarks on Access Hollywood, “misogynistic trash that reveals a man to be lecherous and worthless.” MacDonald said, “he is no longer willing to offer any more of his time without a change of heart and direction.” The democrats don’t need to say a whole lot about Trump they can just wait for his supporters to crucify him on their own alter.

Why did our ancient ancestors create and all seeing all knowing God? Why not a God who could just catches us doing something in public? There was a need to control not only people’s public life but their private life as well. Typically authority figures depend on controlling the public actions but they also wanted control over the private lives of their followers. How better to control their followers by convincing them that their were eyes watching them even in the privacy of their houses. You might remember the experiments in a coffee room. The coffee was sold on the honor system but once a picture of a pair of eyes was placed in the coffee room wall far more coffee money was collected in the months the picture of the eyes were on the wall. In the months the picture of the eyes was replaced with another picture the money collected for coffee dropped again. Even though they knew it was only a picture of eyes and they knew they were alone in the coffee room it affected their behavior. By placing the idea of an all knowing all seeing God in their followers home it affected their behavior.
____________________________________________________
“Taken as whole the knowledge of hygiene contained in the Mosaic Law is nothing more than stunning. It correctly identifies the main sources of infection as vermin, insects, corpses, bodily fluids, food, (especially meat), sexual behavior, sick people, and other contaminated people or things. It implies the underlying source of infection is usually invisible and can spread by the slightest physical contact… And if prescribes effective methods of disinfection such as hand washing, bathing, sterilization by fire, boiling, soap, quarantine, hair removal and even nail care.

From the book “This is Your Brain on Parasites”
____________________________________________________
Many of the procedures needed to be carried out in the privacy of the home and the religion served as the pictures of the eyes on the wall. If you used the bathroom without washing your hands you knew that God was watching. God in this case had some survival value to enforce good hygiene on people who would have ignored it. A picture of a set of eyes might be needed in modern day public bathroom these days judging from the number of people who do not bother to follow this simple rule today.

The question that evolutionary scientist are asking themselves is, “Are parasites responsible for belief in God? At first glance the question seems a little far-fetched but natural selections selects those traits that provide a survival advantage. Knowing how to avoid parasites would definitely provide a survival advantage. The excerpts from Mosaic Law in yesterday’s post applied to hygiene and served as a way to keep people safe from parasites and germs even though they had no idea what a parasite was. Those that didn’t practice good hygiene were more likely to be exposed and far more likely to die. Natural selection would be far more likely to select those that had a propensity to believe in God.

Now good hygiene is no longer the responsibility of religion it is now the responsibility of the health department but natural selection has selected a majority of those who have a propensity to believe. There may be an actual structural difference in the brains of those who find it easy to accept magical thinking and at one time this provided enhanced chances of survival. Just as the laid back ancestor who herd sticks breaking in the jungle and thought nothing of it and didn’t survive long enough to have children. One must survive long enough to have descendents in order for your genes to be passed on and some times only slight modification may make a big difference in survival.

The problem is what at one time provided a survival advantage may become a survival disadvantage in another. Religion may have helped millions survive parasites and germs but on 9/11 3,000 Americans died because of religious differences. We are now looking at more major religious confrontations with much more deadly weapons than any time in history. Evolution moves slowly but atomic bombs move at the speed of sound. Most of the religious followers might eventually kill each other off over the course of thousands of years and magically thinking would no longer be selected but in the meantime they are likely to kill the rest of us.

This evening HBO ran a movie called “Gods of Egypt” which was no doubt wildly inaccurate. My wife asked if Egyptian religion was a myth. I replied that it is now considered a myth but at one time people actually believed in those Gods. Those Gods were ever bit as real to the people of that time as Jesus is today and one day the bible will take its rightful place as just a myth and be replaced by some other religious myth. The Egyptian Gods were in style at one time and like all other things that come in to style they go out of style. Religions are a subset of philosophy and different philosophies come into style and many go out of style. Religions reach a tipping point at which time they become mainstream but the most interest question is what causes a religion to fail and be considered a myth.

If we could isolate the forces at work when a religion transitions to myth we might have a way to solve our religious problems. Do Gods die one funeral at a time as the believers die off? If a new generation steps back and turns a more critical eye toward religion they may be more apt to look for a different religion. Of course you would have to reach a tipping point where more people looked for a new religion than stayed with the old. One way to change religion of a country is of course war where a conquering country imposes their religion on the country they took over. Another way to change religion is to have the state to mandate a religion, as was the case of Christianity when the Roman Empire mandated Christianity as the official state religion. It seems unlikely given our constitution that America will ever mandate a different state religion. Christianity, especially Protestants, have been dividing and sub dividing as over differing interpretations of the bible. Also the number of different practicing religions might discredit each other. However at this time there are no new messiahs on the horizon. The best we can hope for is to disqualify magical thinking in favor of reason.