I started this blog in 2003, back when blogging was hip and trendy.  I like to write, so why not?  At the time, I was an evangelical Christian, an associate pastor and a church worship musician.  I had been a Christian for nearly 20 years and had grown dissatisfied with church and with the shallowness of the Christian lifestyle.  I wondered, "Is this it?  Is this as good as it gets?"  I had undertaken a very intentional project of in-depth Bible study (which began with learning how to legitimately study) and of trying to answer the question "What is church?"--by which I meant, "How did church function for the earliest Christians, and what was church intended to be, and why does what I've experienced over the last twenty years seem to not be it?"

My wife and I were so hungry for authentic, meaningful, genuine community.  I was reading and researching copiously in the hopes of finding answers, or at least clues.  One thing we had figured out was that sitting in rows in a congregation on Sunday morning, listening to some marginally educated guy give a sermon was not it.

My very first post on this blog was an account of my visit to a "postmodern" (remember when that was a buzzword?) church in Seattle called Quest, which had a coffeeshop (very cutting edge at the time).  Other such field trips are documented in this blog: to Vintage Faith Church in Santa Cruz, to the ill-fated Mars Hill Church in Seattle (before pastor Mark Driscoll had his precipitous fall from grace), to House for All Sinners and Saints in Denver, led by iconoclastic pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber..  

Before long, we embarked on launching a house church.  The goal was for it to be utterly egalitarian and participatory.  We were seeking to emulate the ekklesia of the 1st century, where as Paul wrote, "When you come together, each of you has a hymn, or a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation. Everything must be done so that the church may be built up." (1 Cor. 14:26).  It was a wonderful and profound experience, those times when each person present shared something in no particular order and with no one controlling it.  But ultimately the house church crumbled--in large part because I refused to take on the role of pastor and "lead" (aka "control") our gatherings and community life, and that's what people were conditioned to want: someone to "do the stuff" for them so they could be passive participants.  We also experienced a heated division brought about by differing interpretations of the "end-times" and the role of Israel.  Go figure.

My studies of how to be church, in the sense of authentic community, ultimately led us, after the house church imploded, to the Quakers.  My wife and I spent twelve years as Quakers.  I have so many fond memories from that time and those wonderful people, but there were also tribulations.  The branch of Quakers we had joined wrestled with issues such as acceptance and inclusion of folks who are LGBTQ+ (something which my wife and I fully and actively supported) and trying to break free from the shackles of fundamentalist evangelical Christian theology.  Those struggles eventually shattered the Quaker organization we belonged to.  In the process we also learned that Quakers are as susceptible to internal power politics as any other organization.

During those "Quaker years" I enrolled in seminary with the goal of earning a Master's degree in Religion/Theology.  This was a wonderful experience for me, and I did earn my Master's from the Earlham School of Religion, a Quaker-founded seminary in Richmond, Indiana (part of Earlham College).  My emphases were on Quaker Studies, Contemplative Spirituality and Process Theology.  My master's thesis was ultimately converted into a book and published, and received endorsements from Brian McLaren, Fr. Richard Rohr, Philip Gulley, etc.  The book is still in print and each year I receive a little royalty check from the publisher, which lets me know how many copies have sold.  It's gratifying to know that people still find the work I did to be useful.

Much of this personal history has been documented in this blog, but in recent years it has fallen to the wayside as blogs were replaced by social media.  So here's a quick catch-up:

I sometimes joke that I went into seminary as an evangelical Christian and came out as a Buddhist.  This is an oversimplification, but essentially true.  As I studied the history of Christendom, and dug deep into Christian theology, and opened myself to understanding the other religions in the world, I discovered two things:

1. I was becoming an atheist.

2. I was drawn to Buddhism.

This was a long, slow process--an evolution, if you will--that continued over the course of many years (and is ongoing).  To my great relief, my wife tracked right along with me.  A watershed moment was when I discovered Stephen Batchelor and his books 'Buddhism Without Beliefs' and 'Confession of a Buddhist Atheist'.  Batchelor's eloquent, cogent and intellectual writing helped me to see a path forward.  Involvement in the Seattle Insight Meditation Society sealed the deal for my wife and I.

And that's pretty much where I am today, spiritually speaking.  I suppose that technically I'm an agnostic, meaning "I don't really know" about the existence of God--which I think is the most honest viewpoint anyone can have, because nobody does know, if they're honest about it.  But my inkling is that God, at least as depicted by human-made religions, does not exist.  If there is a "God" or gods, he/she/they/it is far beyond our comprehension, and nothing like the primitive depictions in the Rig Veda, the Hebrew scriptures, the New Testament, the Quran, the Book of Mormon, or any other sacred texts.  

As far as Buddhism goes, I practice Buddhism in the sense of walking the eightfold path, but I don't subscribe to the various traditional Buddhist metaphysical/speculative beliefs such as reincarnation or the divinity of the Buddha or heavens and hells.  Buddhism is not something I believe, it is something I do.  The title Buddha means "awakened one" and so, to be a Buddhist means to be an awakeist; to engage in practices (such as meditation) with the goal of being awake and aware in each moment, with each breath.  The point of the Buddhism that I practice is to skillfully live a meaningful life.

Based on that, the most apt description for myself these days is that I'm a Buddhist Atheist (or an Atheistic Buddhist), with a long background in Christianity (and minimal tolerance for any kind of fundamentalism or authoritarianism) and an abiding love and respect for Quakerism.  I tend to concur with the viewpoints expressed by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Stephen Fry, Sam Harris, et al that religion is becoming increasingly un-useful (and often harmful) as humankind's knowledge of ourselves and of the world and of the universe continues to expand via the application of science.  The gaps in our knowledge, where religion used to find its home and its power, are shrinking and will continue to do so.

I haven't yet decided where this leaves me in relation to this blog that has now been around for 23 years.  Do I try to continue it going forward or do I delete it at this point or do I leave it as a memorial to my long quest?  I'm not sure, but I lean towards the latter, if for no other reason than that, judging by comments I continue to receive, it still really pisses off the followers of Jack Hibbs.  😁

 “Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.” -- Epictetus, Greek Stoic philosopher, 50-135 AD

In some Asian cultures there is a mythical creature called a Hungry Ghost.  The Hungry Ghost has a massive stomach and a ravenous appetite, but a mouth the size of a pinhole and a pencil-thin throat.  As a result, it can never satisfy its intense hunger, and so exists in unending torment and rage.  As with most myths, there is a moral involved.  Hungry Ghosts were once humans who were excessively and cruelly greedy.  Karma has handed them a hideous fate.  It's a cautionary tale.

Whenever I see Donald Trump, this is the first thought that comes to my mind.  Donald Trump is a Hungry Ghost.  He is unable to be satisfied, always needing more: more money, more attention, more adulation, more power, more vindication, more control--and so he is a profoundly miserable person.  His misery and rage sloshes out of him like water from a saturated sponge as he spreads a miasma of cruelty, greed and grift across the world.  

What a horrible way to exist.  I find him despicable for many reasons, but more than anything, I pity him.

“Iran is run by lunatics, religious fanatic lunatics.” -- Marco Rubio, Donald Trump's Secretary of State

 Blood Moon (by Danny Coleman)

There's a blood moon in the sky tonight

And no one knows why we have to fight, tonight

Who puts a school for girls next to an army barracks?

Who drops a bomb on it anyway?

Why do they all seem to care less

About the children, than about their power plays?

There's rich and powerful men

Coercing sex from teenage girls

While their rich and powerful friends

Try to hide it from the world

There's crypto scams and corporate plans

That make them even richer

The details we don't understand

But we get the general picture

There's a blood moon in the sky tonight

And I don't know if we can make this right

The reasons given don't make sense

The justifications are insincere

For all this needless violence

All this pain, all this sorrow, all this fear

Is it a distraction?

Is it quid pro quo?

Is there a profit motive?

Or is it just for show?

The price is paid by the sons and daughters

And the parents who hoped their kids would have more

They all get screwed or become cannon fodder

By rich and powerful men who are rotten to the core

There's a blood moon in the sky tonight

And we're at war, once more, tonight

And we don't know what for.

 

 And so the United States is at war (again). This time it appears to be at the whim of one man, the "stable genius" Donald Trump.  There was little, if any, attempt to get congressional approval, or form an international coalition (other than with Israel), or coordinate with neighboring nations in the region, or make a case to the American people, or allow negotiations to run their course.  The goal is unclear.  The reputational damage will be extensive and lasting.  The economic costs will be great.  Who can say at this point how extensive the human toll will be?  The U.S., under Trump and the sycophantic Republicans, has now become a rogue nation.  

 

The blessing of the rapist.

Having spent 12 years as a Quaker (including earning a Master's degree from a Quaker seminary and studying Quaker history in depth) this is something that warms the cockles of my heart, because it's very much like something that the early Quakers used to do: confront hypocrisy in the Church (and in the justice system, and in the government), in a non-violent but disruptive manner... - DC

"Protesters disrupted church service at [fundamentalist evangelical] Cities Church in Saint Paul this morning where one of the pastors, David Easterwood, is the acting director of the St. Paul Field Office for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Their demands were clear, justice for Renee Good, who was shot and killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, and for the pastor to use his authority to get ICE out of Minnesota.

Protesters said the objective of disrupting service was to inform the congregation of what they described as their pastor’s double-mindedness when it comes to the word of God and not loving thy neighbor with his work as a field director for ICE. The Pastor in the pulpit is Jonathan Parnell. David Easterwood was either absent or left when the protest started."

 

The "Ordinary Men" of the department of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)

 

There have been several books that have dramatically altered my outlook on life. One of them is Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher Browning. The book is a masterpiece of historical research that focuses on a relatively small contingent of German soldiers. But in doing so it reveals some very disturbing universal truths.  Recent events with ICE agents brutally attacking U.S. citizens and non-citizens alike in Minneapolis have caused me to ponder once again the profound lessons I learn from reading "Ordinary Men." 

Reserve Police Battalion 101 was comprised of middle-aged working-class men who were drafted into service in the latter part of WWII. Their job was to go through Poland, village-by-village, round up the Jewish residents, and execute them as part of Hitler's "Final Solution." The men in Reserve Police Battalion 101 were not rabid Nazis or even particularly antisemitic. They were just "ordinary men"--one might even say "mediocre men"--following orders and doing their job. They killed tens of thousands of Jews.

There is a quote, falsely attributed to filmmaker Werner Herzog, that goes like this: "Dear America: You are waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that 1/3 of your people would kill another 1/3, while 1/3 watches." Although the origins of the statement are murky, the statement itself rings with clarity. As the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment demonstrated, a lot of people will go along with evil and injustice if it is mandated by "the authorities." And there can always we found a cadre of mediocre, ordinary men (and women) who will actively commit atrocity and utterly misuse civic power that is placed in their hands, if told to do so.  In times of authoritarian crisis, only a minority, it seems, possess a strong enough internal moral compass to enable them to refuse to participate.

U.S. history is filled with atrocity, if one chooses to not gloss over it. More often than not it has been against non-white people. The perpetrators of atrocity usually do their best to keep their actions out of the general public view. Germans who lived in the lovely village of Dachau claimed that they had no idea of the depravity that was occurring at the concentration camp on the outskirts of town. 

Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries we average Americans have generally remained ignorant or apathetic about the atrocities in Central and South America, the Middle-East, Africa, Asia and elsewhere, committed with our government's backing, but now we are witnessing a new expression of atrocity within our own borders, and it is in plain sight. The Trump administration is intent on terrorizing immigrants and silencing citizens throughout the U.S. The level of atrocity does not compare with what was perpetrated by Reserve Police Battalion 101 in Poland, but the underlying psychology is very much the same.  The men and women of ICE and the Border Patrol would, and will, commit greater atrocities if ordered to do so.

Hannah Arendt, who reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, coined the term "the banality of evil." Eichmann, and others like him, she observed, tended to not be sadistic arch-villains but rather "terrifyingly normal" bland bureaucrats who managed to disassociate themselves from the reality of the evil they were responsible for. Eichmann, Arendt observed, was actually a rather shallow person, a joiner, a follower rather than a leader, an unimaginative and somewhat ignorant person more concerned with job security than with ideology. This description also applies to the men of Police Battalion 101 and, I suspect, to many of the men and women in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol and their parent bureaucracy, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

When this present dark time has passed, and Trump is gone, and the United States is once more in sane hands, there will need to be a reckoning of Nuremburg-style trials.  J.D. Vance, Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, Gregory Bovino, Karoline Leavitt, and the rest of Trump's minions will need to be investigated and held accountable.  ICE and BPS agents (and any other law enforcement agents) accused of committing illegal acts will need to be investigated, tried and, if found guilty, punished to the full extent of the law.  And these agencies, such as ICE, Border Patrol and Homeland Security, that have been so utterly corrupted by the Trump administration, will need to be torn down and replaced with something that serves the American people (and those aspiring to become American) rather than terrorizes them. 

Renee Good Is Dead

My heart has been broken
At what the news just said
ICE in Minneapolis
And Renee Good is dead

Jonathan Ross, a Christian man
(at least that's what's been said)
Chose a uniform and a mask and a gun
And now Renee Good is dead

"Thou shall not murder"
"Show mercy instead"
But Jonathan Ross chose violence
And now Renee Good is dead

Three shots from his handgun
Three shots aimed at her head
As she sat in her Honda
And now Renee Good is dead

"I'm not mad at you"
Are the last words that she said
"Fucking bitch" he muttered
After Renee Good was dead

Renee, she followed Jesus
"Care for the least" He said
So that's just what she did
And now Renee Good is dead

The President and his lackeys
Called her a terrorist instead
And told all kinds of hateful lies
About why Renee Good is dead

But we watched it with our own eyes
And we won't be misled
It was murder in Minneapolis
And Renee Good is dead

And tonight there are three children
Laying in their beds
Who will never see their Mom again
Now that Renee Good is dead

And now I have this fury
Now I have this dread
ICE in Minneapolis
And Renee Good is dead.

 by Danny Coleman, 01/09/2026 

 

Woodie Guthrie (1912-1967), composer of "This Land Is Your Land."  Anti-fascist. 

 "With worship music, the Christian singers sought to whitewash Kirk and make his political views equivalent to what it means to follow Jesus. That’s what Christian Nationalism does. It takes Christian language, symbols, and songs to put a holy veneer on top of a profane political agenda. But notice the flow of the service, starting with worship songs and Kirk’s pastor as the warm-up acts to various politicians until the climax with Trump’s speech. This was using worship songs to point to partisan politics."

Chris Tomlin’s Worshipwashing of Charlie Kirk

https://publicwitness.wordandway.org/p/chris-tomlins-worshipwashing-of-charlie

      "The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.

    The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."

--H. L. Mencken, Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26th, 1920

 “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven."

--Jesus (Gospel of Matthew, 5:43-48)

“I forgive him [the murderer of her husband] because it was what Christ did and it is what Charlie would do. The answer to hate is not hate. The answer we know from the Gospel is love.”

--Erika Kirk, 9/21/2025, at Charlie Kirk memorial event

"This is just the way I am. I hate my opponent. I hate my opponents…. Hillary, Joe, Kamala. It doesn't matter. I just hate them."

--Donald Trump, 8/21/2024

"I hate my opponent, and I don't want the best for them. I'm sorry. I am sorry Erika. But now Erika can talk to me and the whole group and maybe they can convince me that that's not right, but I can't stand my opponent."

--Donald Trump, 9/21/2025, at Charlie Kirk memorial event

Note: Donald Trump was voted for by 80% of white evangelical Christians in 2016, 2020 and 2024.

 We have achieved Idiocracy.

One of my guilty pleasures is documentaries about musicians/bands. The new documentary about the Lilith Fair is one of the best I've seen.

 Ahem...

"We must recognize that violent instability is baked into any system where one side has power and rights and the other has none."

Noam Sheizaf, How to Burst the Israeli Bubble

 

Seeing two-dimensionally in a three-dimensional world 

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." 

- Hamlet, William Shakespeare

On September 10th, 2025, Charlie Kirk--a prominent right-wing political activist--was shot and killed by 22-year-old Tyler Robinson.  The murder of Kirk happened during a public event at Utah Valley University, and graphic video of Kirk's death spread rapidly across the Internet.

On that same day, 16-year-old Desmond Holly launched an attack on Evergreen High School in Colorado, critically wounding two students.  Holly then killed himself.  

Two weeks prior to that, 23-year-old Robin Westman fired dozens of rounds into an all-school Mass at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis.  In two minutes of shooting, Westman killed two children, and wounded eighteen children and three adults, then committed suicide.  

These are just the latest three in a long series of mass shootings and acts of extreme violence in public places, typically--but not always--perpetrated by young men.  Whenever they occur, politicians and pundits are quick to cast the blame.  The rank and file then join in via social media, pointing the finger (often before anything is actually known about the shooter or their motivations).  Robin Westman, the Annunciation School shooter, identified as transgender and had changed their name from Robert but had not received any kind of gender-affirming medical treatment or hormone therapy.  As a result of that tidbit, right-wing pundits and politicians jumped to blame transgender people and "woke" ideology for the shooting.  When the Charlie Kirk murder occurred two weeks later, those same right-wing pundits and politicians once more immediately blamed "the radical left" and transgenderism, even before a suspect had been identified.  Meanwhile, some on the left postulated that the killer was perhaps a radical right-winger who felt that Kirk was not right-wing enough.

And so it goes, the left suspects the right, the right is certain it is the left.  Both sides are operating in a binary us vs. them framework.  When Tyler Robinson, the murderer of Charlie Kirk, was apprehended and identified, and it was learned that he was a white kid from a good Republican Morman home and was not transgender, the calls from the right to visit holy war upon Democrats became less strident (though at this point in time some are still holding out hope that Robinson's roommate is transgender so that scapegoat can still be used).  And, so far, nothing has come to light to indicate that Robinson was indoctrinated into neo-Nazism or some other far-right ideology.  Time will tell the fuller picture.  

But in the meantime, there are very clear indications (for those who have eyes to see) that Robinson was radicalized by the same zeitgeist as Holly and Westman and a number of other mass shooters who preceded them (including 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, who attempted to assassinate Donald Trump, and killed firefighter Corey Comperatore, and critically injured two others, in Butler Pennsylvania on July 13th, 2024).  But this dark and poison wellspring exists outside of the two-dimensional binary worldview of right vs. left, Democrat vs. Republican, MAGA vs. Woke, progressive vs. conservative, making it difficult to comprehend.  It is an ideology of nihilism.  So, in a sense, it is an ideology of no ideology.  Robin Westman, the Annunciation Catholic School shooter, made the following journal entry: "This is not a church or religion attack, that is not the message. The message is there is no message.”  As the character Alfred says of the Joker in the Batman film The Dark Knight, "Some men just want to watch the world burn."

According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (an excellent, peer-reviewed, resource), "Nihilism is the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated. It is often associated with extreme pessimism and a radical skepticism that condemns existence. A true nihilist would believe in nothing, have no loyalties, and no purpose other than, perhaps, an impulse to destroy."

This particular nihilism that we see manifesting with alarming frequency lives and spreads in a world that is completely invisible and alien to most of us.  It is a world situated in dark corners of the Internet, on Discord and Telegram servers, in computer gaming culture, in decentralized online groups with names like Order of Nine Angles, No Lives Matter, Atomwaffen, 764, the Terrorgram Collective, Tempel ov Blood, the True Crime Community, etc.  Communication in this world is rife with symbols and memes that are inscrutable to the uninitiated (I'm reminded of an old Star Trek episode called 'Darmok' in which Captain Picard finds himself marooned on a planet with a starship captain from a previously unknown race called the Tamarians who's language is made up entirely of references to Tamarian culture, mythology and history.  In order to survive, Picard must figure out what phrases like "Shaka, when the walls fell", "Temba, his arms wide" and "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" mean.  This is what came to my mind as law enforcement and news reporters struggled to decipher the meaning of phrases and symbols etched into Tyler Robinson's bullet casings, and suggested interpretations that were eventually shown to be misguided).

The FBI has recently coined a term: Nihilistic Violent Extremism (NVE).  They define it as “individuals who engage in criminal conduct within the United States and abroad, in furtherance of political, social, or religious goals that derive primarily from a hatred of society at large and a desire to bring about its collapse by sowing indiscriminate chaos, destruction, and social instability.”  Former FBI director Christopher Wray characterized NVE as “more about the violence than the ideology."  British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has warned that “Terrorism has changed” to incorporate “loners, misfits, young men in their bedroom accessing all manner of material online, desperate for notoriety, sometimes inspired by traditional terrorist groups, but fixated on that extreme violence, seemingly for its own sake.”  As disaffected young people become immersed in this dark cyberworld they are exposed to a buffet of cynicism, nihilism, extremism, graphic gore, misanthropism, sadism, rage, abuse, and hopelessness.  Human empathy becomes dulled.  

Marc-Andre Argentino, an academic expert on NVE, states, "Practitioners articulate a visceral disdain for humanity, morality, and meaning; their writings celebrate extinction, entropy, and the erasure of narrative coherence. Violence is framed as existential art: an aesthetic of ruin whose highest achievement is the visible unravelling of norms. Their ultimate objective is a civilizational vacuum in which all normative constraints—legal, moral, religious, and even ideological—have been liquidated. Collateral suffering is not a means to an end; it is the end."

A common feature of Nihilistic Violent Extremism is "accelerationism", a term that Wikipedia defines as "attempts to worsen existing conditions for a favorable outcome. [For example] Right-wing extremists such as neo-fascists, neo-Nazis, white nationalists and white supremacists have used the term to refer to an acceleration of racial conflict through assassinations, murders and terrorist attacks as a means to violently achieve a white ethnostate."  Those indoctrinated into Nihilistic Violent Extremism, though not seeking to further a political agenda,  may choose to act out in ways that create public shock and chaos and lead to further destruction.  The perpetrator will then be remembered for his/her audacious deeds, which gives them a sense of immortality and meaningfulness.  Both Desmond Holly and Robin Westman idolized previous school shooters, studied their methods, wrote about them in their journals, and incorporated references to them into their own violent performative acts of terror.  

It remains to be seen if this is also the case with Tyler Robinson, but I suspect it will be.  It is likely that Robinson's plan to murder Charlie Kirk, a prominent national Republican figure, in such a public way, had more to do with getting himself into the lorebooks of his nihilistic online community, to join the pantheon of young people who have shocked the world with cruel violence going back to Columbine High School's Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.  Robinson not only caught the attention of the entire world with a single bullet, but his act also brought about a ripple effect of chaos and potential violence as the Right blamed the Left and the Left blamed the Right.  The next shooter may very well engage in obsessive hero worship of Tyler Robinson as they plan their own outrageous performance of meaningless violence.

I'm no expert in that world, that invisible and nearly incomprehensible dimension  (I highly recommend Marc-Andre Argentino, who is), I'm just a dilettante scratching the surface.  The FBI and U.S. Department of Justice are well aware of that culture of Nihilistic Violent Extremism, and what its access points are, and what the danger signs are that a young person is being pulled into its dark orbit.  But one wonders if highly politicized government bureaucracies, as the FBI and DOJ currently are, are going to convey this information to the public-at-large or instead mute this information so as not to interfere with the cynical (and politically useful) narratives of "us vs. them" put forth by the politicians and pundits.  And the news media, alas, tends to be too beholden to what makes quick and punchy headlines rather then providing us with in-depth and nuanced three-dimensional analysis.  The obvious lesson here is that the longer we retain our two-dimensional us vs. them worldview, the more likely we are to play into the hands of these nihilistic attempts to sow self-perpetuating violence and chaos.

"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." 

-- Isaac Asimov 

Omer Bartov is an Israeli-American historian and a leading authority on The Holocaust and genocide. He was born in Israel, raised in a Zionist home and served in the Israeli military. He says he has reluctantly come to the conclusion that Israel's actions in Gaza amount to genocide. (Source: CBC)

https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-14-day-6/clip/16167739-an-israeli-american-holocaust-scholar-says-israels-actions-gaza 

 

 

 

 

Back in the 1980's, when my wife and I were Charismatic Evangelical Christians, there was an idea circulating around about seven spheres of Christian influence.  The hope and belief at that time was that God was going to bring about a massive revival, accompanied by signs and wonders and miracles.  People would be drawn to Jesus by the love of God and the power of the Holy Spirit.  This would cause a dramatic increase in the number of Christians in seven spheres of societal influence: entertainment, media, business, government, education, religion and family.  This would occur because of a supernatural outpouring from God that would draw people in.  It would be a critical mass event of exponential proliferation of Jesus followers and of God's tangible presence.  The Kingdom of God, on earth as it is in Heaven.

Loren Cunningham, founder of Youth With a Mission (YWAM) and Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, are often credited with the inception of the "seven spheres" (or "seven mountains") vision.  They and their organizations were committed to fulfilling the "Great Commission" of taking the Gospel message into all of the world--so they saw the concept of the "seven spheres" not just as prophecy, but also as strategy for missionary work.

But gradually, a radical shift took place.  The prophetic concept of the "seven spheres" drifted from something that would occur through God's supernatural power into something that would be imposed by human power.  The "seven spheres" became no longer a vision of Holy Spirit revival or successful evangelism, but a cookbook for theocratic dominion.  It slid from being miraculous to being militaristic.  In 2013, megachurch pastors Lance Wallnau and Bill Johnson published an influential book titled "Invading Babylon: The 7 Mountain Mandate."  The publisher's synopsis of the book includes this statement: "Before church was established as a place that people 'came to,' Jesus instituted it as an army that brought transformation to society, starting with salvation and continuing with seven spheres of influence."  Army.  Invading.

So the concept of "seven spheres of influence" has now morfed into "the Seven Mountain Mandate" and has become the blueprint for Christian Nationalism.  The transformation of "spheres" within the public realm is now viewed by followers of the Mandate as something that can (and should) be accomplished through any means necessary, including by backing the most corrupt, incompetent, and authoritarian of politicians, right up to the office of President.  The ends justify the means.  As Pascal wrote, "Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."

Webster's defines theocracy as "government by immediate divine guidance or by officials who are regarded as divinely guided."  In my studies of history I've realized that theocratic governments--from the ancient empires to the Holy Roman Empire to the Islamic Caliphate to Calvin's Geneva to the Mormon Church to the Taliban--are always, ALWAYS, oppressive; to women, to children, to racial and sexual and religious minorities, and generally to anyone who is outside the imposed definition of who is right and good and empowered and favored by God.

As of 2024, theocracy has taken root in the United States, as has the accompanying predictable mistreatment of women, of people who are LGBTQ, of adherents to non-Christian religions and views, etc.  This will only get worse until and unless it is soundly rejected and rooted out.  The "seven spheres" of Christian influence are metastasizing into the seven spheres of oppression, as the United States devolves into theocracy. 

Margaret Atwood predicted much of the United State's current trajectory in her chilling "speculative fiction" book The Handmaid's Tale, in which a theocratic government (calling itself Gilead) takes over part of the United States.  The atrocities that ensue in her book were all based on actual atrocities and oppression that have occurred in real life theocracies.  It serves as a warning.

 

 A poem for my grandson on the occasion of his birth...

I hope you have a long and easy road
I hope you don't bear too heavy a load
Struggles and hurts will make you strong
But I hope the pain never lasts too long

I hope you live surrounded by care
With family and friends who are always there
I hope you find a purpose to do
And in pursuing it, you find meaning too

I hope that you give peace a chance
And reject the path of violence
I hope you never go to war
Or blindly obey without asking what for

I hope you live life with a gentle touch
And never worry or stress to much
I hope you find a partner that's true
Like your parents did, and I did too

I wish that I could see it all through:
The amazing life that's ahead of you
But I'll only get to catch a slice
Before I'm finished with my own life

So try to leave the world a better place
Try to be an agent of grace
Try to consider others as valuable as you
Because someone had loving hopes for them too

But most of all, I hope you know
That you came from love, and to love you will go
Love will always follow you
And love will always see you through.
 

 Any day now I'm expecting to hear "Christian" right-wing pundits begin making the claim that sexually exploiting teenaged girls is Biblical.  💩

 A young Palestinian girl in Gaza begs for food. (Source: Associated Press)

James Talarico is one of the bright lights of Texas state politics.

 

 

 

Only Then Will Your House Be Blessed - Harry Manx

I love this song so much...

 

 

The Fallacy of Thoughts and Prayers

For the last three years I've been living in central Texas, near Austin.  My wife and I moved here to be close to family.  There are things we really like about central Texas and things we don't.

One of the things we've learned about this area is that it has extreme weather, including a history of deadly flash floods.  We don't live on or near a river, so this has not been an immediate concern for us.  But the tragic events that occurred this past 4th of July weekend have seared the lesson into our consciousness.  As I write this, 80 people have died, many of them children, as flash floods ravaged homes, youth camps and RV campgrounds along the Guadalupe, Llano, San Gabriel and other rivers in the region.  That death toll is sure to rise as recovery efforts continue.  There is a pall of sadness over the region now, and the inevitable (and probably necessary) finger-pointing and blame-casting has begun. 

What I find interesting is the prevailing theological response to this tragedy.  Calls for prayer are ubiquitous.  Those who survived are considered to be "blessed."  The Governor of Texas, a religious conservative, declared that yesterday, Sunday, July 6,  be "A Day Of Prayer For Texans Impacted By Devastating Floods," asking that people pray for "God's peace and comfort" and for "His merciful intervention and healing in this time of crisis."  In a press conference on Saturday, he stated "All we know is that prayer does work."

Likewise, social media is filled with calls to pray for the devastated towns and people.

This is the typical Evangelical response to tragedy, be it school shootings or hurricanes/tornadoes/floods/wildfires, and seems designed to provide folks with a sense of doing something while avoiding addressing the actual underlying problems that could be fixed.  Politicians are usually the first to make these calls to prayer, while doing all they can to avoid discussion of why they failed to implement practical solutions to mitigate the tragedies from occurring in the first place.

The theological cognitive dissonance for me during times like this is in the fact that many of the people asking that we pray, and who praise God for the "miraculous" survival stories, also believe that God is omnipotent (all powerful) and omniscient (all knowing) and omnipresent (everywhere at once) and that nothing happens except that God wills it.  This is a doctrine called "predestination," that many, but not all, Christians subscribe to.  Many Christians aren't cognitively aware that they believe in predestination, because they've never really examined their theological beliefs in any systematic fashion.  As a result, they can earnestly ask each other to pray for God to do something even though they believe that God is going to do whatever God wants to do regardless of prayers because whatever happens is part of God's preordained plan.  So, for example, they can be militantly anti-abortion but fail to consider that if an abortion was performed successfully then it must have been God's will for that to happen. They fail to see the contradiction in believing that God has complete unilateral sovereignty and will always accomplish exactly what He wishes, whilst simultaneously asking God to do what they wish Him to do (I'm using the male pronoun here because those who believe this way almost universally envision God as male).  

No one doubts that many of the people who died in the Texas floods this past weekend were praying to God to spare them as the waters encroached and then swept them away.

Christian theologians going back to Irenaeus (125–202 AD) have proffered the idea of predestination as a means of trying to reconcile their belief that God is omnipotent/omniscient/omnipresent with the observed reality that horrible shit happens to people who don't deserve it.

But it is the 16th century Protestant reformer John Calvin who's teachings about predestination have had the most profound and lasting effect on Christianity (particularly on Evangelicalism).  Calvin wrote, "If one falls among robbers or ravenous beasts; if a sudden gust of wind at sea causes a shipwreck; if one is struck down by the fall of a house or a tree; if another, when wandering through desert paths, meets with deliverance; or, after being tossed by the waves, arrives in port and makes some wondrous hairbreadth escape from death—all these occurrences, prosperous as well as adverse ... are governed by the secret counsel of God."  In Calvin's view, nothing occurs except that God wills it.  We may not understand why it occurred, we may think it tragic or unjust or evil, but God willed it nonetheless and we simply have to accept the fact that we can't fathom God's inscrutable will.

I call bullshit on that.  It's an intellectual cop-out.  Things happen because of prior causes.  Humans have a considerable amount of agency to understand those contributing causes and enact counter-measures against future occurrances.  The scientific method serves as a tool for us to better understand these causes.  No, we can't (yet) control every storm and assault-weapon-owning-troubled-mind and aggressive cancer, but we can do an awful lot to mitigate bad things--an awful lot more than issuing thoughts and prayers after the fact, and leaving it in God's hands.

Already, here in Central Texas, it is coming to light that a very lax attitude had developed about placing children's camps (many of them run by Christian organizations) and RV campgrounds next to rivers that have long histories of violent flash floods.  We are learning that in Kerr county, which had by far the highest number of deaths, flood warning systems had not been implemented (as they had in some other counties and towns), despite their need being apparent and the costs negligible compared to the potential death tolls.  We are learning that the state government has been largely AWOL on the need for improving safety in the flood-prone region, being apparently more interested in combatting immigrants and women seeking abortions, banning access to Internet porn, and getting the Ten Commandments posted in public schools.  We are learning that the Trump administration's (and DOGE's) decimation of the National Weather Service was quite possibly a contributing factor for the imminent flood dangers not being adequately communicated.  More failings will come to light, and one hopes that solutions more concrete than "thoughts and prayers" will be implemented in response.

Lives could have been saved, and future lives will be saved, not by prayers or by passive acquiescence to what is perceived as "God's will," but by intentional, practical, proactive strategies and actions. 

 A poem:  (Don't Call It) Genocide

Take their land
Take their lives
Imprison them without trials
Wall them in to a few square miles
But don't call it genocide

Kill the electricity
Choke the funds
Keep them moving, on the run
Bomb them into kingdom come
But don't call it genocide

See the children with missing limbs
See the mothers, gaunt and grim
See the rubble that fell on them
But don't call it genocide

Say it's done in your defense
Say that they're all terrorists;
Enemies who shouldn't exist
But don't call it genocide

Make them fight for scraps of food
And live in tents 
Away from you
And when they perish, as they do
Don't call it genocide

We all know the calculus
Fifty of them to one of us
Buried in the desert dust
Just don't call it genocide

But the definition's pretty clear
And if this ain't it, it's pretty near
Erasing a people through violence and fear
They call it genocide.

I deleted my Twitter account back when Elon Musk took it over and rebranded it as "X".  Last week, after Mark Zuckerberg announced the loosening of fact-checking and of safeguards against hate speech (in addition to donating a large sum of money to Trump's inauguration fund), I decided to cut ties with Meta.  I've deleted my Instagram account and am in the process of backing up 20-odd years of data from my Facebook account, and will then delete it.  I have setup an account on Bluesky.  I like it a lot, but their word limit is frustrating for a wordy guy like me.

Now, if I could just figure out how to do away with Amazon...

After the disastrous 2024 election, I've also given up on U.S. commercial media (CNN, MSNBC, etc.) but will stick with my long-time favorite news sources: the UK's Guardian, Canada's CBC, the venerable BBC, etc.  And, for her clear and cogent political news summaries, Heather Cox Richardson.

I started this blog back in 2003, when blogging was a thing.  Over time, and to my great surprise, readership increased steadily.  Eventually I was getting tens of thousands of views per month and my posts were being re-posted on other much more popular sites.  But I never set out to be widely distributed or some type of "influencer."  I was just documenting my spiritual journey and random thoughts.  Then I got onto Facebook and slowly shifted my output onto that platform.  For a few years now this blog has mostly lain fallow. 

But now I'm shifting back to this musty trusty old blog.  I don't have any kind of grand strategy for content, just occasional "deep thoughts" from a nobody, the way it used to be.