5 Most Extremist GOPers Who Might Be Headed to Congress


Congressional hopeful Glenn Grothman worries that “gals” are running — and ruining — America by leading a “war on men
October 21, 2014

The conventional wisdom is that so-called establishment Republican candidates by and large triumphed over Tea Party radicals this election cycle. But the truth is that those victories were the result of a party establishment that itself has moved far to the right. Even where Tea Party candidates have failed, the Tea Party movement has increasingly remade the “establishment” GOP in its own image.

It is now core doctrine in the GOP to deny the science behind climate change, endorse sweeping abortion bans and engage in anti-government rhetoric reminiscent of the John Birch Society.

As Tea Party icon Michele Bachmann put it last week, while she may be retiring from Congress, she leaves with the knowledge that “even the establishment moved toward embracing the Tea Party’s messaging.”

Here, we look at five Republican congressional candidates who could be heading to the Capitol next year. Some have been labeled “establishment,” some “Tea Party,” but all are emblematic of the party’s strong turn to the right.

1. Joni Ernst

One Iowa conservative pundit has described state Sen. Joni Ernst, now the GOP nominee for U.S. Senate, as “the choice of the Republican establishment” who has “been backed by national Republican establishment figures like Mitt Romney, Sen. John McCain, and Sen. Marco Rubio.”

But in today’s Republican Party, even an “establishment” candidate like Ernst can be just as extreme as a Tea Party insurgent.

Ernst subscribes to the radical, neo-Confederate idea that states can “nullify” federal laws that they deem to be unconstitutional — and even went so far as to suggest that local law enforcement officers can arrest government officials for simply administering federal laws.

In response to a 2012 candidate survey for a group affiliated with former congressman Ron Paul, Ernst pledged to “support legislation to nullify ObamaCare and authorize state and local law enforcement to arrest federal officials attempting to implement the unconstitutional health care scheme known as ObamaCare.” In a speech to a Religious Right group the next year, she criticized Congress for passing “laws that the states are considering nullifying.”

As a state senator, Ernst backed resolutions calling on Iowa to defy federal environmental regulations and gun laws. Ernst’s campaign denies that she has ever supported nullification, despite her own statements and positions in favor of the radical ideology.

Not only does Ernst think states should simply be able to void laws they don’t like, but she also wants to abolish the federal minimum wage and eliminate federal agencies such as the Department of Education, the EPA and the IRS. She also came out in favor of a plan, known as the “Fair Tax,” that would scrap the income tax and replace it with a federal sales tax of 23 percent on nearly all goods.

Ernst has also repeatedly floated the idea of impeaching President Obama for becoming a “dictator.”

Her anti-government paranoia even extends to taking on a non-binding United Nations sustainable development agreement, Agenda 21, which she warned will pave the way for the UN to remove Americans from rural lands and force them into cities. She has even disagreedwith the official investigations finding that Iraq did not have WMDs at the time of the 2003 U.S. invasion.

But Ernst does support government intervention when it comes to women’s reproductive rights, sponsoring the Iowa personhood amendment, which would ban abortion in all cases along with common forms of birth control. “I think the provider should be punished, if there were a personhood amendment,” Ernst said, but has since insisted that she thinks the amendment would be purely symbolic.

Ernst has repeatedly denied the science of climate change, arguing that she has “not seen proven proof” of human influence on the climate and dismissed the role of “man-made activities.”

As Ernst’s candidacy shows, the line dividing “establishment Republicans” from fringe right-wing zealots has become so blurred that it has effectively vanished.

2. Thom Tillis

Like Ernst, North Carolina House Speaker Thom Tillis is widely considered the choice of the “establishment” and “mainstream” wing of the GOP, while his extremist record shows just how far to the right even the party’s “mainstream” has moved.

In 2007, Tillis blasted government policies that “have redistributed trillions of dollars of wealth,” calling them “reparations” for slavery. The same year, he opposed a resolution apologizing for an 1898 massacre of African Americans in a North Carolina city, explaining that the amendment didn’t sufficiently honor white Republicans.

Tillis supported the repeal of North Carolina’s Racial Justice Act — which allowed death-row inmates to appeal their sentences based on evidence of racial bias — and backed heavily restrictive voting laws designed to weaken the black vote. In a 2012 interview, he lamented that Democrats were gaining ground in North Carolina thanks to growing Latino and African American populations while the “traditional population of North Carolina and the United States is more or less stable.”

Tillis has said he would support a Personhood Amendment banning abortion in all cases and prohibiting common forms of birth control, and believesthat states have the right to ban contraceptives. In his role as state House speaker, Tillis led attempts to defund Planned Parenthood and to add abortion rights restrictions to a motorcycle safety bill. A Tillis-backed “targeted regulations of abortion providers” (TRAP) bill last year threatened to close all but one of the state’s 16 abortion clinics.

Following a federal court ruling striking down North Carolina’s ban on same-sex marriage, Tillis attempted to preserve the ban by teaming up with the founder of one of the country’s leading anti-gay groups. At a 2011 town hall meeting, he suggested that marriage equalitywould lead to “Big Government.” Tillis is also a climate change denialist and suggested that liberals plotted to use climate science “as a Trojan horse for their energy policy.”

Tillis wants to abolish the federal minimum wage, supported the GOP-led federal government shutdown (before reversing himself) and cut jobless benefits so severely that it made North Carolina ineligible to receive federal compensation.

While cutting hundreds of millions of dollars from education spending and blocking the expansion of Medicaid under the guise of fiscal stewardship, Tillis shepherded through a massive tax break to benefit top earners and corporations while effectively raising taxes on the lower 80 percent of taxpayers.

At an event in 2011, he suggested that the government cut public spending by finding “a way to divide and conquer the people who are on assistance” — specifically by setting disabled people against “these people who choose to get into a condition that makes them dependent on the government.”



He has now pivoted his campaign to focus on addressing the menacing specter of people infected with Ebola coming to Mexico to illegally cross the southern border into the U.S.

3. Jody Hice

Jody Hice entered politics as a Religious Right activist and a conservative talk radio show host, making him part of two worlds that are at the core of the conservative movement. Now, as the frontrunner in an open Georgia House seat, currently held by outgoing far-right Rep. Paul Broun, Hice is set to bring his right-wing agenda to Congress.

Hice made his first foray into politics by trying to convince local governments to erect monuments of the Ten Commandments in public places, which were deemed unconstitutional by, in Hice’s words, “judicial terrorists .” A Christian Nationalist, Hice thinks the founding fathers would support his congressional campaign and has posted on his Facebook page numerous fake quotes from our nation’s founders about the dangers of “Big Government” and the need to mix religion and government.

Hice outlines his political beliefs and fears in his book, “It’s Now or Never: A Call to Reclaim America,” in which he claims that abortion rights make the U.S. worse than Nazi Germany; endorses the fringe “nullification” theory; argues that Islam “does not deserve First Amendment protection”; and spells out his worries about gay people trying to “sodomize” children and persecute Christians, fearing that children will be “preyed upon” by gay “recruitment” efforts until they embrace “destructive,” “militant homosexuality.”

In one episode of his radio program, Hice suggested that gay people seek therapy, lamenting that “we are enslaving and entrapping potentially hundreds of thousands of individuals in a lifestyle that frankly they are not.” During another radio commentary, Hice denied that legal discrimination towards gays and lesbains exists, before comparing homosexuality to incest. If anything, according to Hice, it is the Christian community that faces government discrimination as a result of a Satanic plot to “chip away” at “our Christian rights.”

When armed militia groups gathered at the Bundy ranch in Nevada to back a rancher and race-theorist who refused to pay grazing fees for using federal property, Hice praised the groups that were threatening violence against law enforcement officers. He has argued that individuals have the right to have “any, any, any, any weapon that our government and law enforcement possesses,” including “bazookas and missiles,” in order to give citizens a fighting chance in a potential war against the government.

This summer, as thousands of Central American children fleeing violence in their home countries reached the U.S., causing a humanitarian crisis, Hice suggested armed militia groups organize at the southern border.

The GOP nominee blamed mass shootings such as those that occurred at Virginia Tech and in Aurora, Colorado, on abortion rights, the separation of church and state, and the teaching of evolution, and said that the Sandy Hook school shooting was the result of “kicking God out of the public square” with the end of school-organized prayer.

Hice also believes that we are now living in the End Times, worrying that “we have little time” left on earth and citing the appearance of blood moons as proof of imminent cataclysmic, “world-changing events.”



While Hice is worried about the destructive consequences of blood moons, he dismissed climate changeas a “propaganda” tool of the “Radical Environmental Movement” to make people of believe in an “impending environmental disaster due to ‘Global Warming.’”

His theological views also make him skeptical of women running for public office, saying a woman should only do so if she remains “within the authority of her husband.”

4. Glenn Grothman

Wisconsin state senator and anti-Kwanzaa crusader Glenn Grothman is running for an open House seat, from which he hopes to legislate in the same manner as his “soul mate” Rick Santorum.

Not one to hold back, Grothman has lambasted union activists protesting a law targeting labor rights as “slobs” and proposed doing away with the weekend and paid sick leave. So fearful of “Big Government” is Grothman that he also tried to put an end to municipal water disinfection programs.

Grothman opposes abortion rights without exceptions in cases of rape, incest and a woman’s health, even working to make it a felony offense for a doctor to perform an abortion that could save a woman’s life. Grothman successfully passed laws requiring doctors to read scripts meant to discourage women from terminating their pregnancies, which he said was necessary because oftentimes “women are looking for someone to talk them out of it.” He also sponsored a 24-hour waiting period for abortions that only exempts survivors of “forcible rape” who file a police report.

The Republican lawmaker worries that “gals” are running — and ruining — America by leading a “war on men.” He has said the U.S. “is in the process of committing suicide today” as a result of single mothers collecting public benefits and pushed a bill to declare single parenthood “a contributing factor to child abuse and neglect,” calling single parenthood a “choice” and the result of a culture that “encourages a single motherhood lifestyle.”

“I think a lot of women are adopting the single motherhood lifestyle because the government creates a situation in which it is almost preferred,” he said in a 2012 interview with Alan Colmes, adding that he believes women aren’t telling the truth about having unintended pregnancies: “I think people are trained to say that ‘this is a surprise to me,’ because there’s still enough of a stigma that they’re supposed to say this.”

In a similar vein, he defended Gov. Scott Walker’s decision to rescind a pay equity law because, according to Grothman, pay disparities are due to the fact that “money is more important for men.”

Grothman is a sponsor of the Wisconsin Personhood resolution [PDF], which would ban abortion in all cases and many forms of birth control, and his campaign has touted the support of personhood activists.

He once described Planned Parenthood as “probably the most racist organization” in the country, adding that he believes the group targets Asian Americans for abortion. In 2007, he voted against a bill that made sure hospitals provide information about emergency contraception to sexual assault survivors.

He opposes laws protecting employees from discrimination based on sexual orientation, and once tried to strip a sex education bill of a nondiscrimination provision that he suspected was part of a plot to make kids gay. Grothman also demanded that his state refuse to follow a court order to recognize same-sex marriages, which he feared would “legitimiz[e] illegal and immoral marriages.”

Not content with just opposing gay rights in the U.S., Grothman also defended a Ugandan law that makes homosexuality a crime punishable by sentences including life in prison. He even suggested that “unbelievable” American criticism of Uganda’s law would prompt God to punish the United States.



Although Grothman fears that America might incur God’s wrath for standing up to state-sanctioned violence against gays and lesbians, he is less concerned about climate change, which he says “doesn’t exist.” Grothman told one interviewer: “This environmental stuff, this is the idea that is driven by this global warming thing. Global warming is not man-made and there is barely any global warming at all, there’s been no global warming for the last twelve or thirteen years. I see a shortage of Republicans stepping up to the plate and saying, ‘look, this global warming stuff is not going on.”

5. Zach Dasher

Taking advantage of his family’s new-found reality TV fame, “Duck Dynasty” cousin Zach Dasher is running for U.S. Congress in Louisiana in an election where the top two candidates advance to a runoff vote if no candidate takes over 50 percent of the vote.

Dasher cited the success of “Duck Dynasty” as one of the reasons he entered the race: “Five years ago, I didn’t see an opportunity or window of opportunity to get into this type of venture. But here recently, obviously with the family name and being able to get my message out there, I saw an opportunity that I couldn’t pass up.”

Of his uncle Phil Robertson, who came under fire for making statements in a magazine interview defending Jim Crow and demonizing gays and lesbians, Dasher gushed: “The support of the family means a lot to me. We share a very similar background and philosophy, and our spiritual beliefs are the same as well. They’re going to be a big part of the campaign. I’m going to have Phil as my PR director, since he’s so good with the media.”

Robertson also appears in commercials promoting Dasher’s candidacy, and Dasher has said he agreed with Robertson’s remarks about the gay community. Dasher’s wife wrote in a blog post that just as people should break out of addictions to alcohol and heroin, gay people can “overcome” and “come out of” homosexuality and find “healing.”

One of Dasher’s opponents, Rep. Vince McAllister, is a freshman Republican congressman who said he would retire after he was caught on video kissing a staffer who was not his wife, then changed his mind. Dasher says he is running as an even more conservative candidate than the GOP incumbent, and has received backing from Tea Party and pro-corporate groups such as the Club for Growth and Citizens United.

“My platform begins with God. That’s really what this whole thing is about. In Washington, when we look at what’s going on, we see an erosion away from that platform,” he told Fox News host Sean Hannity. “We see the ruling classes kick God out and in His place they place themselves. That scares me because we didn't send these folks to Washington, D.C. to determine our rights, we sent them there to defend our rights.”

Dasher fears that the federal government “believes that they’re God” and is intent on “gain[ing] control over every aspect of our lives” as part of a plan to create a “culture of dependency.” In a personal podcast, Dasher said the “swift drift away from God will usher in tyranny and death,” warning: “Tyranny will get its foothold — if it already doesn't have it — and in the end, there will be mass carnage and mass death. It's inevitable.”

Dasher blamed the Sandy Hook shooting on atheists, whom he also accused of “brainwashing a generation ” through rap music and ushering in “moral decay” and the erosion of liberty. He said that schools should “arm the teachers,” arguing that laws targeting gun violence actually leave people as “unarmed sitting ducks, waiting for someone to come in and shoot their schools up.” Dasher recently claimed that the Second Amendment was established to allow people to defend themselves against “a tyrannical government,” warning that government officials intend to repeal the amendment in order to eliminate all other freedoms.

You mean those "cheese eating surrender monkeys!"- can I quote Groundskeeper Willie?

Historical background[edit]

See also: Biblical law in Christianity § History and background and Circumcision controversy in early Christianity § Jewish background

The Council of Jerusalem is generally dated to around the year 50 AD, roughly twenty years after the crucifixion of Jesus, which is dated between 26 and 36 AD. Acts 15 and Galatians 2 both suggest that the meeting was called to debate whether or not male Gentiles who were converting to become followers of Jesus were required to become circumcised (presumably in accord with Genesis 17:14, a law from God which, according to Genesis 17:13-19, God said would be everlasting). However, circumcision was considered repulsive during the period of Hellenization of the Eastern Mediterranean.[2]

At the time, most followers of Jesus (which historians refer to as Jewish Christians) were Jewish by birth and even converts would have considered the early Christians as a part of Judaism. According to Alister McGrath, the Jewish Christians affirmed every aspect of then contemporary Second Temple Judaism with the addition of the belief that Jesus was the Messiah.[3] Unless males were circumcised, they could not be God's People. The meeting was called to decide whether circumcision for gentile converts was requisite for community membership since certain individuals were teaching that "nless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved".[4]

Circumcision as a mandate was associated with Abraham (see also Abrahamic covenant), but it is cited as 'the custom of Moses' because Moses is considered the traditional giver of the Law as a whole. The circumcision mandate was made more official and binding in the Mosaic Law Covenant. In John 7:22 the words of Jesus are reported to be that Moses gave the people circumcision.

Issues and outcome[edit]

The purpose of the meeting, according to Acts, was to resolve a disagreement in Antioch, which had wider implications than just circumcision, since circumcision is the "everlasting" sign of the Abrahamic Covenant (Genesis 17:9-14). Some of the Pharisees who had become believers insisted that it was "needful to circumcise them, and to command [them] to keep the law of Moses", according to the popular KJV translation[5] while the Unvarnished New Testament[6] translates: "They have to be circumcised; we have to proclaim and keep the law of Moses".

The primary issue which was addressed related to the requirement of circumcision, as the author of Acts relates, but other important matters arose as well, as the Apostolic Decree indicates. The dispute was between those, such as the followers of the "Pillars of the Church," led by James, who believed, following his interpretation of the Great Commission, that the church must observe the Torah, i.e. the rules of traditional Judaism,[1] and Paul the Apostle, who believed there was no such necessity. (See also Supersessionism, New Covenant, Antinomianism, Hellenistic Judaism, Paul the Apostle and Judaism)

At the Council, following advice offered by Simon Peter (Acts 15:7–11), the apostle James submitted a proposal, which was accepted by the Church and known as the Apostolic Decree:


It is my judgment, therefore, that we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God. Instead we should write to them, telling them to abstain from food polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, from the meat of strangled animals and from blood.[2] For the law of Moses has been preached in every city from the earliest times and is read in the synagogues on every Sabbath. (Acts 15:19–21)

The Western version of Acts (see Acts of the Apostles: Manuscripts) adds the negative form of the Golden Rule ("and whatever things ye would not have done to yourselves, do not do to another").[3]

This determined questions wider than that of circumcision, particularly dietary questions, but also fornication and idolatry and blood, and also the application of Biblical law to non-Jews. It was stated by the Apostles and Elders in the Council: "the Holy Spirit and we ourselves have favored adding no further burden to you, except these necessary things, to abstain from things sacrificed to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, and from fornication. If you carefully keep yourselves from these things, you will prosper." (Acts 15:27-28) And this Apostolic Decree was considered binding on all the other local Christian congregations in other regions.[7] See also Biblical law directed at non-Jews, Seven Laws of Noah, Biblical law in Christianity, and the Ten Commandments in Christianity.

The writer of Acts gives an account of a restatement by James and the elders in Jerusalem of the contents of the letter on the occasion of Paul's final Jerusalem visit, immediately prior to Paul's arrest at the temple, recounting: "When we had come to Jerusalem, the brothers received us gladly. On the following day Paul went in with us to James, and all the elders were present." (Acts 21:17-18, ESV) The elders then proceed to notify Paul of what seems to have been a common concern among Jewish believers, that he was teaching Diaspora Jewish converts to Christianity "to forsake Moses, telling them not to circumcise their children or walk according to our customs." They remind the assembly that, "...as for the Gentiles who have believed, we have sent a letter with our judgment that they should abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols, and from blood, and from what has been strangled, and from sexual immorality." In the view of some scholars, the reminder of James and the elders here is an expression of concern that Paul was not fully teaching the decision of the Jerusalem Council's letter to Gentiles,[8] particularly in regard to non-strangled kosher meat,[9] which contrasts with Paul's advice to Gentiles in Corinth,[10] to "eat whatever is sold in the meat markets."(I Corinthians 10:25)[11]

Historicity[edit]

See also: Historical reliability of the Acts of the Apostles

The description of the 'Apostolic Council' in Acts 15, generally considered the same event described in Galatians 2,[12] is considered by some scholars to be contradictory to the Galatians account.[13] The historicity of Luke's account has been challenged,[14][15][16] and was rejected completely by some scholars in the mid to late 20th century.[17] However, more recent scholarship inclines towards treating the Jerusalem Council and its rulings as a historical event,[18] though this is sometimes expressed with caution.[19] Bruce Metzger's Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament includes a summary of current research on the topic as of about 1994:


In conclusion, therefore, it appears that the least unsatisfactory solution of the complicated textual and exegetical problems of the Apostolic Decree is to regard the fourfold decree[20] as original (foods offered to idols, strangled meat, eating blood, and unchastity—whether ritual or moral), and to explain the two forms of the threefold decree[20] in some such way as those suggested above.[21] An extensive literature exists on the text and exegesis of the Apostolic Decree. ... According to Jacques Dupont, "Present day scholarship is practically unanimous in considering the 'Eastern' text of the decree as the only authentic text (in four items) and in interpreting its prescriptions in a sense not ethical but ritual" [Les problèmes du Livre des Actes d'après les travaux récents (Louvain, 1950), p.70].[22]

As the last line reads- not ethical but ritual; Is this not a major subject in the teachings of Jesus- that the law should NOT be ritual but ethical?

Maybe he is frustrated- I know that certain people will ask me to help them with something, which means do the whole thing for them, to which I will get frustrated and say: do you want me to wipe your *** too? I try to tone that down with: I am sorry about the accident. What accident? The one that broken your legs so that you can't get up and do it for yourself.

2 Timothy 2:23New International Version (NIV)

23 Don’t have anything to do with foolish and stupid arguments, because you know they produce quarrels.

Elsa Lancaster, who was married to Charles Laughton, who was gay. So not only was she cute but pretty cool.

How come I always miss the good stuff!

Chew a bunch of Wintergreen Lifesavers before performing oral on her; occasionally I will **** the **** into my mouth and then **** the tongue on it.

Did not Jesus say this is the whole of the law:1. Love the Lord thy g-d; 2. Love one another. This is first found in the Noahide code, which James instructs Paul (in Acts) that his gentile converts should follow, not laws specifically relating to Jewish people.

In Isaiah 1:11 you read "To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me? saith the LORD: I am full of the burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts; and I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he goats."

Here one can begin to see that it is not rote ritual that is wanted, but a heart full of love and life. You are to remember the Sabbath day in your heart and keep it holy, not rotely mark off a day on the calendar. BTW, JMHO

Isaiah 1:13 The new moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity.
Matthew 12:2 Behold, thy disciples do that which is not lawful to do upon the sabbath day.
John 5:16 And therefore did the Jews persecute Jesus, and sought to slay him, because he had done these things on the sabbath day.
Romans 14:5 One man esteemeth one day above another; another esteemeth every day alike. Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind.
Colossians 2:16 Let no man therefore judge you in meat and drink, or in respect of a holy day, or of the new moon; or of the sabbath days.

This is an example of the type of conversations I have 8 hours a day at work, while helping someone with skin lotion (teaching self care and nurturing): Me- see you have a callus here, did you know you have a callus? Them- Yeah, I wear that on the weekends.

Then a co-worker asked me for Halloween costume ideas; I said the Bride of Frankenstein; after 20 seconds of further conversation, I realized she had no idea who the Bride of Frankenstein is.

I can't recall the last time I spoke with anyone normal, what would I say? Is conversation a perishable skill?

Was Man made for the Sabbath, or the Sabbath made for Man?

If you know what a threesome is then you know why they call me handsome

Technically, this is a very old debate, which you can research for yourself- see the works of (forgot how to spell his name), but it runs like this: Much of what Jesus talks about was talked about much early by the Pagan philosophers (and not to belittle or attack anyone, but more elegantly); many early Xians, in fact mimicked the Pagan teachers in dress, attitude, etc. However, it was felt that Xians made such approaches as for example vows of poverty not a virtue but a rote adherence which offered no spiritual benefit to anyone.

Belittling and attacking people doesn't get anyone anywhere; to debate, discussion and even challenge each other is what helps each one to grow and affirm their own value structure and the ability to keep an open mind

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

23 hrs � Edited �
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RELIGION vs ATHEISM: Religious people are largely atheists, depending on the domain & why the discussion is largely flawed.
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Some philosophy now. One brilliant contribution by economists is the concept of "cheap talk", or the difference between "stated preferences" (what you say) and "revealed preferences" (from actions). Actions are louder than words: what people say (in opinion polls or elsewhere) isn't as relevant, as individuals reveal their preferences with hard cash or, more generally costly action, or even more generally risky action (which, invariably, brings us to *skin in the game*). This is why opinion polls are considered largely BS. I also believe that the notion of "belief" is largely misunderstood.
Likewise I consider the difference between "believer" and "atheist" as mere verbiage unless someone shows difference in action.
--
In Chapter 1 of SILENT RISK, the notion of "probability" is shown to be verbalistic and empty (probability maps to "degrees of belief" mathematically, is ~ belief), largely INCOMPLETE, while revealed preferences via decisions is what matters (more technically probability is something deeply mathematical, useless on its own, an integral transform into something larger, and cannot be "summarized" in words). And decisions and decisions ONLY can be a metric for RATIONALITY. [Footnote 1]
--
In our paper Rupert Read and I wrote that the "belief" content of religion is epiphenomenal ("pisteic" not epistemic), it is merely like believing in Santa Claus makes Christmas a more colorful event.
Belief is cheap talk (to oneself). Western society, particularly the U.S., has managed to marry deep religiosity (in talk) with total atheism (in words). What matters in the West, is the action by the state never impacted by religion. In rational decision-making it has a small cost.
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If you want to know if someone is a believer in words not in action, just observe whether he relies on some supernatural force to get him out of trouble or if he'd rather rely on the laws of physics and the logic of biology. An individual who goes first to the doctor and as a mere luxury to the priest (without paying for immediacy) is technically atheist though nominally a religious believer. So it looks like religion is something left to the spiritual, socio-ritualistic.
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The idea hit me when I saw a joke of a cleric who said "I throw charity money in the air, letting The Lord take what share He wants and I keep the rest". People have adapted to the idea for millennia.
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Finally "Christianity" has evolved since the Middle Ages to become "atheistic in decisions and Christian in beliefs".
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Some unrigorous journalists who make a living attacking religion typically discuss "rationality" without getting what rationality means in its the decision-theoretic sense (the only definition that can be consistent). I can show that it is rational to "believe" in the supernatural if it leads to an increase in payoff. Rationality is NOT belief, it only correlates to belief, sometimes very weakly (in the tails).
******
[Footnote 1] See in Silent Risk the paradox of the trader who makes a bet against the "probable" though he believes it will eventually happen.
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SILENT RISK(S) is at:
www.fooledbyrandomness.com/FatTails.html












Silent Risks: Lectures on Fat Tails and Fragility - Nassim Nicholas Taleb



fooledbyrandomness.com

8 Biggest Myths About Ebola, Debunked




It's not the species-ending disaster some fear it could be.







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October 16, 2014 |





















The Ebola outbreak has been claiming lives in Africa for many months now, but following the first Ebola death from a case diagnosed outside the continent, coverage – and concern – in the west has stepped up yet another notch.

The outbreak is certainly a grave issue for west Africa, a public health priority, and has been exacerbated by a slow response from international bodies and rich nations. It has already claimed more than 3,800 lives, and could claim far more without an appropriate international response.

But it is also not the species-ending disaster some fear it could be. Below are eightEbola myths, and an attempt to set out the real position.
1. Ebola is highly contagious
Compared with most common diseases, Ebola is not particularly infectious. The primary risk of catching Ebola comes from the bodily fluids of people who are visibly infected – primarily their blood, saliva, vomit and (possibly) sweat. These can transmit the disease if they make contact with the mucus membranes (lining of your nose, mouth, and similar areas).

Each patient in the current Ebola outbreak is infecting on average two healthy people (this figure, known as the R0 value, can be reduced with appropriate precautions). The Sars outbreak of 2002-03 had an R0 of five, mumps 10 and measles a huge 18. Ebola could be much more infectious than it is.
2. You can catch Ebola from someone who looks perfectly healthy
You almost certainly can’t. Ebola has an incubation period of up to 21 days between infection and showing symptoms (though it’s generally shorter). This is part of the fuel behind fears people could travel from west Africa then spread the disease.

However, in general, people who display no Ebola symptoms are not yet infectious – and in any case, casual social contact (being nearby, or even shaking hands) generally doesn’t spread the virus.

The exception actually lies with those who have had Ebola and recovered: studies suggest the virus can linger in semen for up to three months after recovery – so you may wish to think twice before having sex. Or at the very least, use a condom.
3. If you catch Ebola, you’ll almost certainly die
The most widely cited figure about Ebola is that its death rate is “up to 90%”. The history of Ebola, prior to this year, is a series of short-lived and very isolated outbreaks of different strains of the disease, and it is true that one of these outbreaks had a fatality rate of 90%.

Thankfully, this outbreak has a lower death rate. At present, about 8,000 people have been confirmed as diagnosed with Ebola, and of those 3,865 have, sadly, died. This is a fatality rate of 48% (though it could increase as some of those still ill die) – tragically high, but not nearly as bad as it could be.

Given the rudimentary and overloaded conditions in many of the hospitals in affected areas, it is likely this rate could be lower still for patients with access to top-tier medical care.
4. We should quarantine anyone with ‘Ebola-like symptoms’
This would lead to a lot of people being quarantined: if you want an accurate list of symptoms for early-stage Ebola, simply imagine the last time you (or someone you know) had flu – the two are almost indistinguishable at first.

This set of symptoms, shared among many common ailments, is behind the flurry of incidents at airports of “possible Ebola cases” causing so much coverage and disruption. It’s likely to keep happening, though there should be many more false alarms than real cases.
5. We should screen everyone for Ebola at our airports
Airports take in a lot of people, the overwhelming majority of whom have travelled nowhere near west Africa. Using measures like temperature sensors or similar en masse in western airports would trigger a vast number of false alarms.

The most effective measure, public health officials have repeatedly stated, is to make sure there is effective and comprehensive screening in place for people exiting countries with Ebola outbreaks – though some nations (notably the US) have implemented screening for airports with particularly high numbers of travellers from west Africa.
6. We are not ready for Ebola in the west
We’re about as ready as we can be. The Sars outbreak and pandemic flu scares mean hospitals and public health officials in most countries are required to have contingency plans for both local, small-scale outbreaks and major events.

Rich countries have much more ability to track and isolate those who have been in contact with anyone diagnosed with Ebola, and much better abilities to treat those who have been affected in hospital.

That’s not to say the risk is zero, but generally speaking public health officials areconfident of their ability to limit the direct harm Ebola could do to countries like the US or UK.
7. Ebola has brought Africa to its knees
It is important to stress the three nations currently most affected by Ebola – Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone – face a public health emergency, social unrest, and economic issues caused by the protracted outbreak. Dealing with this is a humanitarian priority, and more help is needed.

But it is an oversimplification to suggest Ebola is a disaster for “Africa”, a continent of more than 50 countries and a land mass more than twice the size of Europe. The countries currently battling Ebola make up less than 1% of the continent’s economy – for much of Africa, like the rest of the world, it is largely business as usual.

It’s also worth noting that Ebola is far from Africa’s number one infectious killer: malaria, tuberculosis and HIV have each claimed hundreds of thousands of lives – many, many times more than Ebola – already this year, with none of the horrified coverage of the latter.
8. Ebola is the biggest public health disaster imaginable
Ebola is a real issue for the world’s governments, and one they’ve been slow to respond to. But there are many things epidemiologists (and others) think we should worry about far more.

Top of the list is a repeat of a deadly pandemic flu. Despite a few near misses, we’ve yet to see a repeat of the Spanish flu outbreak of 1918, which devastated nations already barely recovered from war, killing the youngest and healthiest.

There are extensive measures in place for such a situation, but officials agree they all leave much to be desired. If you must fear a pandemic, it’s a much better candidate than Ebola.

Ebola is a serious problem, which anyone with a degree of compassion should be concerned about. But if you’re in the west, it is astonishingly unlikely it will affect you, or anyone you know, personally.

Perhaps, though, it’s only that fear that’s making us pay the virus any attention at all.

More importantly:


Chomsky: There's an Overt Corporate Effort to Indoctrinate American Children




The academic talks about education and indoctrination, ISIS, and the media in a new interview.







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October 13, 2014 |





















This article first appeared on Truthout.

History teacher Dan Falcone and English teacher Saul Isaacson spoke with Noam Chomsky in his Cambridge office on September 16, 2014, about education and indoctrination, the 1960s, the Powell memorandum, democracy, the creation of ISIS, the media and the way "capitalism" actually works in the United States.

Dan Falcone: We're in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with Professor Noam Chomsky. I am Dan Falcone with Saul Isaacson, and this is actually the third time I've visited you. So I wanted to thank you for that. And since I am a teacher, I wanted to start off by continuing on the themes of democracy and education.

I have noticed students making very insightful and uplifting observations in the midst of chaos. For example, they noticed that support for Israel fell out of favor in certain mainstream circles, and that the recent police treatment of unarmed black teenagers in intensifying areas of violence is a crucial matter of concern. This, to me, is an example of reasons to be hopeful. Can this type of thinking be traced to the work done in the 1960s or is that an oversimplification in your view?

Noam Chomsky: I think the activism of the 1960s had a very definite civilizing effect on the whole society in all kinds of ways. So lots of things that by now are almost taken for granted were heretical in the 1960s. We had anti-sodomy laws until not many years ago.

When people denounced [former Iranian president Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad for rejecting and criminalizing homosexuality, it should be remembered that was true of the United States until very recently. Women's rights were unheard of. Civil rights proponents were horribly treated, not just in the South. It was awful there, but pretty bad here. Environmental issues did not exist. Opposition to aggression was virtually zero. In fact, so little, that to this day, even scholarship mentions the Vietnam War as beginning in 1965.

By 1965, South Vietnam had already been practically destroyed. At least a couple of hundred thousand US troops were ravaging and began the attack on the north. You literally could not have mentioned this in Boston, which is a liberal city. The first time we tried to have a public antiwar demonstration on the Boston Common, which is where everything takes place, it was broken up; [we] couldn't have it. It was October 1965. I was supposed to be a speaker. Nobody could hear the speakers. The Boston Globe - the most liberal newspaper in the country - the next day, you can look it up on the internet, was full of denunciations of these people who were daring to question the validity of the bombing of North Vietnam. I mean, this is five years into the war. There's nothing like that anymore.

The Iraq War, for example, is the first war in history, in which there were huge demonstrations before the war was launched, not beginning five years later and then being broken up. All of these are changes, and the people who are writing in journals today lived through these changes. They were all affected, and so I think you and your students' perceptions are correct. It's kind of interesting and sick that the intellectual culture called the 1960s, "time of troubles," a dangerous period in which a lot of harm was done to the society. And the reason is because we were civilized and that's dangerous. That increased the commitment to democracy, to rights and so on, and this left people much less obedient.

There's actually a classic presentation of this which maybe we discussed, so stop me, but the study of The Crisis of Democracy, a very important book which was published. It's the first publication of the Trilateral Commission, which was a group of liberal internationalists. For example, the Carter administration was entirely drawn from their ranks. It's basically where they come from; so kind of the liberal end of the mainstream spectrum.

The Crisis of Democracy was published in 1975, and it was a discussion of the destructive effect of the 1960s. The destructive effect was that it called for too much democracy. You have to read it to believe it. The picture was that before, people were mostly passive and obedient and they did what they were told and democracy functioned fine.

But in the 1960s, various parts of the population became energized and began to enter the public arena to call for the rights of women, students, young people, old people, farmers and workers. What are called "special interests" - meaning the whole population - they began to press to enter the public arena. And they said that puts too much pressure on the state and therefore we have to have more moderation in democracy and they should go back and be quiet and obedient.

There's interestingly one group that they never discussed as a special interest, corporate power, which makes sense. That's the national interest, so we don't talk about that. But, of course, they have overwhelming control over policy and they particularly singled out the universities. Schools, churches, universities - they describe them as institutions responsible for "the indoctrination of the young" - their phrase, indoctrination of the young. And they said they're failing. You can see it because all these young kids are out in the street, opposing the war, calling for women's rights and so on.

So the young are not being indoctrinated properly and they therefore called for more efforts to - the state, they said, should intervene to ensure that indoctrination takes place properly. They also criticized the media. Anyone who looked at the media could see that it's overwhelmingly conformist. But there was some criticism. I mean, there were people in the media who were saying, "The war's too costly. Maybe we shouldn't continue with it" and so on. And they said even that's too much. You can't have the media being this oppositional and critical of power. So maybe the state should step in with some form of censorship and control over the media.

This is the liberal extreme of the spectrum. If you want to see the other extreme, one important thing to look at, which came out around the same time, is the Powell Memorandum. You can pick it up on the internet. This is Justice Powell. He was picked by Nixon to be on the Supreme Court. He was an advisor to the Nixon administration, very right-wing, and he essentially expresses the same views except in a less polite form. And you have to read it to believe it. It was very influential. It was a letter written to the Chamber of Commerce, a business group, but it surfaced pretty quickly. It was supposed to be secret.

But what he essentially says - and the rhetoric is revealing, almost quoting, he says, "Marxists have taken over practically everything. They run the universities. They run the media. There're overwhelming attacks on business. Business is being persecuted. Nobody's standing up for business. We're the persecuted minority and the world is lost," which is a very interesting illustration of the attitude of people who own everything. If you owned everything and a tiny little piece gets out of control, then your world's gone. Like some unusual child who has a million toys and one of them is stolen, he's going to perish.

That's the standard attitude of people who fundamentally own the world. And then he goes on to talk about how we can deal with this. He says, look, take the universities. The universities are funded by business. The trustees are from the business world. Instead of just allowing the universities to be taken over by Marxists led by Herbert Marcuse and so on, which is such an illusion you can't even talk about it. Instead of that, he says, "We could discipline them by using the power of the purse, which we have, and we can oppose it and we can defend this." It's all defensive. We can defend ourselves from this tremendous attack by using our economic power to sort of allow business a tiny little sector in which it can function.

You really have to read it to get the sense. Well, those are the two ends of the spectrum and out of that comes the whole liberal assault, the population on the colleges, on the schools and so on. So the students are right. There was a big impact and it's partly illustrated by the reaction, but it's there. You can see it in all kinds of ways. It's just a much more civilized world than it was.

Falcone: Just recently in the Myth of the Spoiled Child, a book by Alfie Kohn, he systematically discredits this belief that children are spoiled. He seems to challenge the standard bipartisan effort that undermines democratic education and drives it toward a business model or corporate setting for education. In other words, the standard complaint by those parents or educators whether liberal or conservative, is that no matter what the tactic, old school or new, education is still compliance-based, while focusing little on development. What are your thoughts on his sentiments, which are probably the same as a Jonathan Kozol?

Chomsky: I think they're basically right. Both Kozol and Kohn, and others too, are focusing on what traces back to the kinds of attitudes that are expressed in the books I mentioned across the spectrum. Maybe people didn't follow those particular prescriptions, but these are reflected as very widely held views, which is why the '60s are called "the times of troubles" by "real" intellectuals. And out of that comes the sense that, yes, you have to improve the institutions responsible for indoctrination of the young. You have to control children. You have to make sure that they're not too free and creative and independent, and it shows up in all sorts of ways.

So, for example, take say the neighborhood where I live. We moved there 50 years ago. It's a quiet neighborhood out in the suburbs. No traffic on the streets, practically none; woods in the back where the kids can play. When we moved, we moved there mainly because we had young children. It looked like a great place for children to grow up and kids were all over the streets. We had a couple of little girls playing out in the woods by themselves and so on. You go in that neighborhood now you'd never see a child.

If I take a walk, occasionally I'll see an adult with a dog and sometimes they'll have to drag a child along with them that didn't want to be there. But in general, there are no kids playing. Back in the woods behind our house, for example, there's a tree, which for children automatically is a climbing tree. It's just perfect. As soon as a kid sees it, they want to climb.

Back in the '60s and '70s, that tree over the summer became a cooperative, a spontaneous activity for the kids in the neighborhood. Each kid would bring a piece of wood and they'd put it up and somebody would bring something else, and by fall you had this elaborate construction up in the tree of tree houses and kids playing and running around and so on.

You take a walk now, the tree's bare. Children are not allowed out. They don't play. They're either inside looking at video games or something or they're in organized activities. I've seen it in the most amazing ways. Look, I have a grandson who's in his 20s, but when he was a kid, he loved sports. So he wanted to play soccer and basketball and everything.

But the only way to do it was to be in a league. It happened to be Salem, so he was in the Salem baseball league or something. I remember once my wife and I went out to watch him one Saturday afternoon. He wanted us to come out. He was 7 years old. There were two teams of 7-year-old kids playing soccer. Now, the referee was 11 years old. The parents were standing on the sideline screaming at the referee and ready to kill him because somebody had pushed their kid and he didn't do something about it.

I remember once we went over to his house on another Saturday afternoon. He was to play a baseball game. He came back about half an hour later very unhappy. We asked him what happened. They said they had to call off the game. The kids were about 10. They had to call off the game because the other team only had eight players. So therefore the kids couldn't play baseball. Everybody's sitting around. But they couldn't allow their teammate to be the ninth player for the other team so that the kids could have some fun because it has to be run by adults so that the league works the way it does.

And this just goes on and on. I mean, childhood is just being lost and in the schools you see the same thing. Well, you know better than I do that the indoctrination is incredible. The Bush-Obama programs are programs for training kids for the Marine Corps. And I think they're purposely done that way. It undermines the independence of teachers. If kids are studying for a test, they're not going to learn anything. We all know that from our own experience. You study for a test and pass it and you forget what the topic was, you know. And I presume that this is all pretty conscious. How conscious are they? I don't know, but they're reflections of the attitude that you have to have discipline, passivity, obedience, the kind of independence and creativity that we were shown in the '60s and since then - it's just dangerous.

Falcone: Faith Agostinone-Wilson has conducted some educational research that's similar to Henry Giroux's in that she examines school-based implementations, as you mentioned the "neoliberal worldview via correct worker attitude." This would be for a teacher - I'm assuming a student also - in order to "promote classroom management as a way to build teamwork or steering students towards self-regulation. These efforts worked together to ultimately shape attitudes and dispositions towards a capitalist ethos." Almost as if the schools are becoming embodiments of modern corporations. Is that overstated?

Chomsky: Well, you may know better than I do. I see the schools only from a distance, but my feeling is, it's basically correct. I don't think Duncan and those guys are saying, "Let's instill capitalist values." I think what they want to do is instill discipline, obedience and passivity. We're going to say this is what you have to know to repeat at age 7, at age 10, at age 12. And if you can repeat those things, you go on ahead. If a kid decides "I don't want to do that. I want to study something else," you have to stop them.

Actually, I've talked to teachers' groups occasionally and the reactions are interesting. I remember not long ago I talked to a group of teachers. At the end, a sixth-grade teacher came up just to talk to me and she told me of her own experience in class. It was a little girl that came up after class and said she was interested in something that came up. Could she have some ideas as to how to pursue it? And the teacher had to tell her, "You can't do it because you have to study for the MCAS. You have to pass that exam that's coming." The teacher even said, "My salary depends on it." So you're not going to get ahead if you do that. If you pursue your own interest, you're not going to pass. And I happened to go to a school when I was a kid and that's all we did, pursue our own interests. It was kind of structured so you ended up knowing everything you were supposed to know, arithmetic, Latin, whatever it was. But almost always it was under your own initiative.

Falcone: A lot of this is accompanied by a very strong emphasis on technology, and not necessarily for liberating or creative impulses. It's technology that's driving software managers or selling products and driving obedience training. It makes education difficult.

Chomsky: Technologies can be liberating, but it can also be a tool of coercion and control.

Falcone: Can I ask you about "The Responsibility of Intellectuals"? Your famous essay is nearing its 50th anniversary. In your opinion, have the challenges associated with that essay shifted or remained relatively the same?

Chomsky: I think they're virtually identical. It's almost comical. I could give so many examples. To pick one out, it doesn't make any sense. But this morning I happened to read a Washington Post editorial which was about the conference on building this great coalition to fight ISIS. Everybody thought it was wonderful. They said there was one spoiler. The spoiler was Iran and then it quoted a tweet by the Ayatollah Khomeini condemning the conference. It also pointed out that Iran hadn't been invited to the conference, but that couldn't be the reason why Iran was criticizing it. It was because Iran was the spoiler.

That's typical of the way intellectuals look at the world. You take the party line and you internalize it and then you interpret everything in those terms with few exceptions. In fact, there are probably more exceptions now than there were in the '50s and '60s, but they're still pretty restrictive. A lot of people who try to break out of the mold are just kicked out.

Saul Isaacson: I have a media question. When I heard about the fall of Mosul, to be honest, that was the first I've heard of ISIS and I follow the mainstream media fairly closely.

Chomsky: Same here. It was a real surprise.

Isaacson: Why is that? Were there people who knew and were keeping it from us?

Chomsky: First of all, when Iraq stopped being a US story, the press corps left. If we're not involved, what's the difference? So, for example, the worst crimes in the world right now in the last couple of years are going on in Eastern Congo. There's almost nothing about them.

Isaacson: I've read nothing of it.

Chomsky: Nothing, but maybe 5 million people have been killed in the last couple of years. One reason we don't hear anything about it is because there's very limited official US involvement of the press corps. The other reason is that the story is not going to be palatable. Part of the reason for the atrocities is so that you can have a device like a cell phone. The multinationals are all over the place. They're ripping off essential minerals. And the militias that are slaughtering everyone are basically providing the mineral resources for multinationals that are profiting off this kind of cheap access to resources and selling it to you. That's not the kind of story you want to tell people.

So there are several reasons why it's not covered. In the case of Mosul, there was an official story. General [David] Petraeus, who is a military genius, went to Mosul and pacified everything - was wonderful and he left and became a big hero. Five minutes after he left, it all fell apart because there was nothing going on. And as soon as he left, the place fell apart with warring militias and so on. But that's not a good story. It didn't fit with the party line at the moment. And since then, that's been continuing. It's kind of ironic a US and Iranian-backed government happens to be very brutal. It's been attacking the Sunni minority quite viciously and nobody's paying attention. Then all of a sudden, it turns out that you got this group ISIS, which had literally a couple of thousand lightly-armed jihadis facing an Iraqi army of 350,000 people heavily armed, trained by the United States for 10 years. The army, as soon as it looked at them, ran away and left their weapons behind. What does that tell you about the attitude of Iraqis toward the United States? It's not the kind of thing you report back. There are people doing it, like Patrick Cockburn of the London Independent, but he's almost alone.

Isaacson: Did it remind you of the army of South Vietnam? (ARVN)

Chomsky: Yeah, it's kind of like that. You go back to the Vietnam War; it's kind of interesting. The American military intelligence couldn't understand what was happening. They said that our Vietnamese don't want to fight, but their Vietnamese are 10 feet tall. They seemed to be supermen. They're the same people. How can that be? But the obvious answer, of course, doesn't occur. In fact, you can generalize this. Let's take Southeast Asia. The last 20, 30 years has been what's called the "Asian Miracle" - fast economic growth, industrial society. It's happening all over, with one exception, which one? The Philippines is the one that can't grow, which the US has been running for 100 years. Is there a correlation? Have you read about it? It comes to mind, at least.

Falcone: I remember you making the point about the iPads and the materials used from the Congo and you made a comment that said something like, maybe American taxpayers, if they had their choice between the brutal behavior with transnational support or services, they might pick governmental goods and services but they didn't have a choice.

Chomsky: Go back to the '50s when I got here. I was in a research lab. In fact, right down below this, there's a research lab for electronics. It was 100 percent funded by the Pentagon. What it was doing was creating the modern IT technology culture in a high-tech economy on public funds: the internet, computers, microelectronics. It was all coming out of public funds. Thirty years later, it began to be profitable. Then it was handed over to private enterprise.

The first marketable small computer was Apple in 1977. That's after about 30 years of research and development mainly in the state sector, places like this, of public expense. In a capitalist system, there's a principle that if you invest, especially in a long-term risky investment, if something comes out of it, you're supposed to get the profit. It doesn't happen in our system. The taxpayer paid for it and gets nothing - assumes all of the risk, gets zero. The money goes into the pockets of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, who are ripping off decades of work in the public sector.

Now, go back to your question and comment. Had the people in the 1950s had been asked, "Do you want your taxes to go to development of the kind of technology that will allow your grandchildren to have iPads or do you want your taxes to go into a livable society? Health care, education, places where people can have decent lives? And so on. What would people have decided? Well, whatever the answer was, they didn't have an answer because they never had a choice. They were told, "You have to pay taxes for the Pentagon because the Russians are coming and the Chinese are coming."

And it turns out that they were paying their taxes so that their grandchildren could have an iPod and Steve Jobs could get rich. Well, that's the way the whole society works, but you don't read about that. Go back to "The Responsibility of Intellectuals." How often do you read this? It's a glaring, obvious fact. You can find it. There are a couple of people around the fringes who read about it. But it's not the kind of thing that's presented to the public. The economics department here - a good department - they don't even write about it. They produce abstract models of free markets, which have very limited relation to the reality right under their nose.

Falcone: Thank you very much for your time.

Isaacson: Thank you. It was fascinating as always

Former Fundamentalist Exposes the Christian Right's Bizarre PR Sham




Just watching their films shows their vile, heavy-handed tactics.







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October 16, 2014 |




































“Millions of believers will suddenly vanish into thin air,” Willie Robertson, best known for his work on Duck Dynasty, exclaimed recently. He was promoting the new Christian movie ”Left Behind,” where he has an executive producer credit. “It’s a warning to those, if it happened today, would be left behind. And I believe that people are going to make the life-changing decision to follow Christ on the way home from the theater … opening the door to unbelievers has never been this fun.”

I’m sorry to inform Mr. Robertson, but I watched “Left Behind” and spent my entire ride home only contemplating the two hours of my life back that I will never get back. The film proves that conservative American Christians have not learned an important childhood lesson: You can’t threaten, vilify or bully someone into liking you. In simpler times, stories of persecution and Christian supremacy were delivered in sermons and badly written books, but a recent batch of films has hit theaters with the net effect of corralling American fundamentalists into an ever-shrinking intellectual ghetto. I watched not only “Left Behind,” but also a sampling of some other recent Christian films in an attempt to understand what messages they convey to this ever-more-insular community.

By way of background, I have lived both irrational religion and right-wing politics. To “find myself” and salvage a crumbling marriage, I converted to fundamentalist Christianity in my early twenties. Both my religion and marriage ended up failing, but I remained supportive of right-wing social politics for several years after, because “religious values” were part of my political identity. I opposed gay marriage long after I left the church (I am very, very sorry), even though without religious motives there is no logic behind such discrimination. As years passed, I grew uncomfortable with the theocratic right and became a libertarian, but even that wasn’t far enough from the religious right for me. Today it is impossible to separate religion from right-wing politics, creating a community rooted in dueling fantasies of persecution and righteousness with a pasty, white Jesus at the helm. Christianity expressed in culture and in religious movies has nothing to do with faith, decency or alleviating suffering. It’s a bizarre American offshoot best expressed by second-amendment Jesus and cutting food stamps for hungry children.
You can’t judge Christian films like other movies. Any casual examination shows them to be conventionally terrible without exception. But they are not meant to be good, but rather they are designed to deliver pointed messages, spurring audiences to promote and support established political and religious powers. They are vehicles that carry naked threats for people who believe differently and are threatening reminders to keep believers in line. For those opposed to reactionary religion and coercion, it’s important to examine these films to understand the stories this slice of America is telling itself and foisting on the rest of us.
“Left Behind” is the most ambitious and mainstream of recent Christian film offerings. The plot is simple: All “good Christians” and young children (but not teens) are whisked up to Heaven, leaving the vast majority of the planet to riot, panic and self destruct. The movie focuses on a small group of people on an airplane, led by a pilot played by “A-list actor Nicolas Cage” (feel free to substitute your own characterization here). Cage must pilot and land the plane through a series of unrealistic complications, while simultaneously grappling with religious skepticism. There is a subplot with his daughter but the implausible plane ride is the scaffolding of the film.

Like so much of white America, the film comically fumbles with American diversity. There is an African American woman, a journalist, a junkie, a little person and a devout Muslim. It’s a juvenile and clumsy attempt to reflect real America that only serves to highlight the insular, monochromatic and artificial makeup of conservative America.

The mechanics of the movie work as an apocalyptic suspense film, a well worn Hollywood trope. Stories about disasters, plagues or environmental calamity will always be popular, but the difference between “Left Behind” and other disaster films is that no one (of right mind) craves the end of the world through asteroid or zombie attack, while many Christian film goers honestly crave the end of the world. They are waiting, predicting and reading signs, because they think themselves immune to the suffering that they fervently believe awaits their fellow humans. Christians make up 2.5 billion out of a total of just over 7 billion of the earth’s population at this moment (estimates vary). This emphasis on mass punishment of non-Christians makes “Left Behind” nothing more than a planetary-sized snuff film.

The most offensive part of the show by far is the Muslim who is “left behind” despite his faith and love for god. The character is the kind of moderate Muslim that even American Christians could accept. He has all the right traits to join the rapture, but he must pay for the unforgivable crime of being born into the wrong culture. I can give “Left Behind” a pass for condemning heathens like me, but the treatment of this otherwise religious and devout character exposes the fundamental, uncompromising and fatal flaw of extreme sectarian religion.

The golden age of Christian film began (arguably) with the global success of “The Passion of the Christ” made by notable anti-semite and widely acknowledged lunatic, Mel Gibson. The message of this granddaddy of religious films is of course that “Jews killed Christ.” The message behind the film is offensive enough, but it spawned imitators that are still racing to find their lowest point.

In “God’s Not Dead” released in March, the core message is that education is both evil and dangerous and that all answers are contained in the Bible. This is a common theme for fundamentalists, one that does a great deal to keep people uninformed and afraid. I found God’s Not Dead to be the most unbelievable, two-dimensional and downright offensive of all the films I reviewed, descending to the level of self-parody by the second act.

Many of the films I reviewed shared troubling traits. Liberals are comically stereotyped as vegetarians or “god-hating” college professors. Serious journalism is suspect, and secular people are all outlandish cardboard cutouts, less human than disembodied twirling mustaches of absolute evil. When religionists reduce critics to banal caricature in order to defeat them on film, it betrays a lack of confidence in their own arguments.

Every single film I reviewed features some variation of the Christian persecution complex. No serious person can argue Christians are really persecuted in America. It is anti-factual. Every president has been a Christian as is 95% of congress. Religious denominations pay no taxes and are over-exalted (I argue) in our society. There are religious wars waged across the globe, no question, but Christians sit atop of the pig pile in America. The “war on Christianity narrative” is a wholesale fabrication that injects religious strife into a country founded on actual religious freedom.

The danger with this recurring and false persecution narrative is that it takes away from the real suffering of actual people. An excellent (but depressing) essay by Alex Morris in Rolling Stone details the suffering of homeless gay youths who, because of their sexuality, are shunned and cast out of religious families. Morris quotes:


“People ask me all the time if I hate my parents for everything they’ve put me through, but I really don’t. If anything, I just feel sad for them because I’m sure it hurts so bad to have chosen their religious values over their child.” – Jackie

Discarding your children over sexuality is what persecution really looks like. I have never heard a case of a liberal family throwing a born-again Christian teenager into the street.

It is important to note that not all Christians believe the warped ideology or hostility expressed in Christian moviemaking. My father-in-law, David Ashton, is a retired professor of religion and a current Christian pastor. He often calls me out when I try to lump all Christians together.

“We don’t believe that billions of people are going to be tortured in hell,” David told me recently. His is a mature faith, based on reason, self examination and even doubt. He seems as exasperated with the religious right as I am. For me they are a never-ending source of essay fodder but for my father in law, they have hijacked and twisted his deepest beliefs. Religion and non-religion can only live together if we acknowledge each other’s fundamental humanity and right to exist. Even though I’m an atheist, I can see a place in society for faith communities built on kindness and mutual understanding. This kind of community is not the face of American Christianity nor do you ever see this message in any Christian film.

The people who create and consume Christian film are neither mature nor reflective. They are at their core superstitious, afraid and tribal. They self-identify overwhelmingly Republican and shout about “moochers” while vilifying the poor. They violate the teachings and very essence of their own “savior” while deriving almost sexual pleasure from the fictional suffering of atheists, Muslims, Buddhists, Wiccans, Hindus, and even liberal Christians. To top it all off, the stories they tell themselves are borderline psychotic.

The fundamentalist community will continue to shrink until they start telling themselves—and those they hope to win over—more honest and humane stories. The Pew Forum on Religious Identification shows fundamentalism profoundly losing ground with the next generation. Christian film with its cardboard characters and heavy-handed messages will only drive an increasingly diverse and media-savvy populace away. Failing a profound change of heart, the best this community can hope for are films so bad no one will bother to watch them.




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Ebola Is Scary, But These 6 Things Are a Lot Scarier
Most Americans are just not at that much risk. Here are the real killers.

Ebola is scary. No doubt about it. Now that a second Dallas health worker has been diagnosed with Ebola, many people are justifiably frightened of the terrible disease—particularly healthcare workers who might find themselves taking care of Ebola patients. In Western Africa, the virus is spreading and nowhere near under control.

However, most Americans are just not at that much risk of catching Ebola, though you wouldn’t know it from the media. America has not seen fearmongering on this scale since the early days of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. Then, as now, a little-understood disease made people afraid of even being in the same vicinity as an unfortunate victim. As with AIDS, rumors and paranoia have begun to circulate.

In Georgia, home of the Centers for Disease Control, Gov. Nathan Deal announced that people should just wash their hands, because water kills the Ebola virus. (Wrong: chlorine bleach kills the virus.) Singer Chris Brown tweeted to his over 13 million followers that Ebola was unleashed as a means to population control. (Wrong, needless to say.) Right-wing radio commentator Michael Savage spewed that Obama was sending soldiers to Africa not to help in the crisis but to infect soldiers who could bring the virus back to the United States and wipe out Americans. Seriously, people, get a grip.

Of course, America does not have a corner on dangerous rumors and crazy theories. In Nigeria, rumors abound that Ebola doesn’t even exist. Obviously wrong. In Liberia, a country that is getting crushed under the spreading disease, there’s a rumor that kissing a dead victim of Ebola will immunize you. (Very wrong: It’ll probably infect you.) Meanwhile Fox News, CNN, the major broadcast networks, and local news stations are all buying into and promoting the hysteria, breathlessly spreading panic while ignoring actual doctors, researchers and health professionals even as they interview them. Jon Stewart on Comedy Central’s "Daily Show" rather brilliantly skewered this irresponsible “journalism” last week.

Ebola is a very deadly disease. There is no doubt it deserves the fearful respect it is given. But it is time, at least for Americans (and most of the world, actually, outside of Western Africa) to take a step back, breath deeply, and gain some perspective. Three cases of Ebola in Texas makes for a pretty crappy zombie apocalypse. One of the cases was directly exposed to Ebola in Liberia. The other two were in contact with the patient as caregivers. Healthcare professional after healthcare professional has assured us over and over again: Ebola is very hard to get. Period. Unless a victim’s blood, vomit, or other bodily fluid gets into your body via your eye, mouth, nose, or open cut, you cannot get Ebola. It is not transmitted via the air.

New York Times columnist Frank Bruni recently interviewed Jeffrey Duchin, chairman of the public health committee of the Infectious Diseases Society of America. “People get very fearful and stressed out and have a lot of anxiety about things like Ebola that aren’t a general health risk. Just look at causes of death in the United States. Everything is higher than Ebola, and there are things that we can do about many of them,” said Duchin, sensibly putting things into perspective.

Americans tend to worry a great deal about illnesses they shouldn’t worry about, while at the same time not worrying about very real threats to their health.
1.According to the CDC, nearly 48% of deaths in the U.S. are caused by cancer and heart disease. The leading cause of cancer is, by a country mile, smoking, yet 25% of American still smoke. Over 3.5 million cases of skin cancer are diagnosed every year and 10,000 people die yet we still pursue the tan and skimp on the sunblock.
2.The best way to prevent heart disease is exercise and sensible eating, yet America is besieged by an obesity epidemic, with over 78 million people considered obese, including 1 in 5 children under 19 years of age. Instead of fruits and vegetables, we still chow down on burgers and fries.
3.The fifth leading cause of death in the U.S. is by car accident. Many if not most of those deaths are preventable simply by wearing your seatbelt, yet countless Americans complain about seatbelt comfort and forego wearing them.
4.Influenza is the seventh leading cause of death in the U.S. and almost completely preventable by simply getting a yearly flu vaccine. Instead we are facing a growing anti-vaccine movement that propagates the complete falsehood that vaccines cause autism.
5.Over 88,000 deaths each year are related to drinking alcohol, and half of those are due to binge drinking. According to the CDC 38 million adults binge drink at least four times a month (averaging eight drinks at a time), and most are not alcoholics. By choice these people over-imbibe and proceed to kill thousands of innocent bystanders.
6.Gun violence is a national plague in which thousands of people lose their lives in order for the NRA to “defend” our second amendment right to own guns and kill thousands of people.

The point of all this is that we can be understandably concerned about Ebola without losing perspective. Ebola is not the thing to worry about. Right-wing politicians, who ignorantly talk about quarantining all of Africa (which health professionals have warned would make it harder to track the disease, not easier), and about children bringing Ebola across the border from Central America (where Ebola is unknown), and about washing your hands with water to kill Ebola, would serve us better if they turned their influence to things that really kill Americans. So far, at least, Ebola is not one of them.



Larry Schwartz is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer with a focus on health, science and nutrition. He works at Scholastic Inc. in the classroom magazine division on Superscience and Science Wo



Of course #6 is why we currently have no Surgeon General as the NRA is pressuring the Senate to reject the nominee because he stated that gun violence is a national health issue.

As per #5, I always say drink up Shriners, whenever I see a bunch of them.

My definition of rudeness is somewhat flexible. I got kicked out of a fraternity at University for the following charges:
1. Minor Misbehaviour
2. Gross Minor Misbehaviour
3. Minor Misbehaviour that was Gross