Ethics – Page 2 – Auxiliary Memory

To The Bearers of False Witness Against Our Democracy

by James Wallace Harris, 2/23/21

When I was in school back in the 1950s and 1960s we were taught that America was the best example of democracy, and it was our most valuable export. The history I was taught, also claimed we inspired a slow worldwide conversion to democracy since the founding of America. Those lessons were something we took very seriously, and for most Americans it was politically sacred. We looked down on those corrupt government and leaders in other countries that undermined democracy as barbarians. And most of all, we believed America was impervious to any such corruption.

Well, we were wrong. Conservatives have taken up the weapon of denialism, first wielding it against science, then journalism, and now democracy. Denialism is a weapon of mass destruction. Donald Trump spent months carpet bombing America with denialism against democracy, claiming our system of voting is corrupt and full of fraud. It was Trump’s backup plan in case he lost the election, and his followers embraced that plan wholeheartedly. Even now the Republican party is doing everything it can to undermine democracy so they can win back power in 2022.

There was no significant voter fraud in 2020, even the conservative judges Donald Trump appointed affirmed that. Anyone who knows anything about our voting systems knows it’s well monitored. But even more important armies of Americans volunteer to support our voting system each election, and to claim it is corrupt and fraudulent is to insult their dedication. That’s goes beyond anything I can imagine to undermine our national unity.

Donald Trump shat all over American democracy and his followers have embraced his acts as the way to get what they want. The only systemic fraud in American democracy are the efforts by Republicans to disenfranchise people of color and immigrants, and to undermine our voting systems. This is down to Earth evil. If you follow the news, it is quite obvious that the Republicans have decided their #1 tool for winning elections in the future is by controlling them.

I just read this quote in 21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari:

Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda maestro and perhaps the most accomplished media-wizard of the modern age, allegedly explained his method succinctly: “A lie told once remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.”

Donald Trump told his lie about election fraud so many times that it has become true to millions of people. Those lies are bearing false witness against democracy. By Republicans playing this one trump card over and over is causing their party members to believe it too. Harari went on to say:

In Mein Kampf Hitler wrote, “The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly — it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.” Can any present-day fake-news peddler improve on that?

I definitely do not mean to imply any connection between Trump and the Nazis. It’s just that the Nazis wrote the manual on public manipulation. Anybody who manipulates other people use a fraction of the techniques the Nazis perfected. We all need to study those techniques to become aware of how we’re being manipulated, either by politicians, corporations, or even by our coworkers, family, and friends.

Harari in an earlier chapter worked to understand why people believe what they do. He said as a species we’re not rational, but depend on myths and group thinking to understand reality. Most Americans don’t understand our democracy and voting systems so it’s easier to sway their opinion with disinformation. Trump treats his followers not as individuals but as a group mind. This comes from from the same book:

Not only rationality, but individuality too is a myth. Humans rarely think for themselves. Rather, we think in groups. Just as it takes a tribe to raise a child, it also takes a tribe to invent a tool, solve a conflict, or cure a disease. No individual knows everything it takes to build a cathedral, an atom bomb, or an aircraft. What gave Homo sapiens an edge over all other animals and turned us into the masters of the planet was not our individual rationality but our unparalleled ability to think together in large groups.

The Republican Party has learned the power of group thinking. That’s why they are so passionate about party loyalty. Unity consistently achieves success and they know it. The trouble is people who do think for themselves can break up groups, and the group is all important to Republicans. What’s amusing is individual Republicans who do think for themselves are always jockeying for control of the party, but it seems that it was Trump who rolled out the attack on democracy and the others had to fall in line. It’s another reason why so many Republicans want to retain Trump as a leader, his successes worked, so why rock the boat.

Harari went on to say:

Yet like many other human traits that made sense in past ages but cause trouble in the modern age, the knowledge illusion has its downside. The world is becoming ever more complex, and people fail to realize just how ignorant they are of what’s going on. Consequently, some people who know next to nothing about meteorology or biology nevertheless propose policies regarding climate change and genetically modified crops, while others hold extremely strong views about what should be done in Iraq or Ukraine without being able to locate these countries on a map. People rarely appreciate their ignorance, because they lock themselves inside an echo chamber of like-minded friends and self-confirming news feeds, where their beliefs are constantly reinforced and seldom challenged.

Conservatives, like any group seeking power, have used techniques and insights into how people form opinions to shape party member’s opinions. It’s how they get their coalition to do their bidding. Harari also noted that once people form opinions they seldom change them. Once the denialism of democracy bomb was dropped there was no going back. The rank and file had to follow. This is destroying our democracy with lies and even false witnessing in courts of law and the courts of public opinion.

Even some Republicans realized this is going too far. It’s like dismantling a passenger jet in flight. We all depend on our democracy for security and happiness, even the people who no longer believe in it. I plead with all rational Republicans to stop denying democracy. Stop undermining our way of life.

I have never believed in hell because I could never imagine any compassionate God would condemn any human soul to it for eternity. Christianity teaches forgiveness, and I can forgive the people who can’t think for themselves and spread lies about democracy. They don’t know any better. But I don’t have enough forgiveness to forgive those who are capable of thinking, who know what they are doing, and who bear false witness against democracy. They can go to hell – forever.

JWH

Will Americans Ever Be United?

by James Wallace Harris, Wednesday, July 30, 2020

We might be the United States, but we’re hardly a united people. Hasn’t the melting pot of the world produced a particularly unhomogenized population?

If you pick any year in our history and study it, divisiveness is the norm. This has got me to wondering, are there topics of agreement that we mostly share?

For example, if we pass a law that means we want 100% of the people to abide by the law. Yet, a law can be passed by only a fraction of the population. Does it really make sense for 50% of the people to say how 100% of the people should act? But we’ll probably never get 100% agreement on anything. So, shouldn’t we think harder about what percentage of the vote equals a proper majority?

Would it be fair to require an 80% majority? That would still mean 20% of the population would oppose the law and would probably be unhappy. But it would also mean 80% of the population would be happy.

What we have is a happiness v. unhappiness ratio. Right now, we have a 50/50 ratio, which explains why our society is so polarized. Wouldn’t America be somewhat happier with a 60/40 ratio? And even happier with a 75/25 ratio?

We’re never going to have a 100% happy society. But shouldn’t we try to reduce the unhappy portion of the equation? My guess if we agreed to make 60% the required majority to win any vote, we’d see a shift in the contentment of the nation.

Ideally though, we’d eventually need to increase that to 75%, but right now that would be an impossibility. Just developing a 60% consensus would take a tremendous effort, mainly in learning how to make compromises.

Our Cognitive Toolbox for Working with Reality

by James Wallace Harris,

All too often we think we know but we don’t. Why do so many people argue with 100% certainty against others who feel equally convinced? Often wisdom tells us the more we know the more we don’t know. Does that mean the person who claims to know nothing knows the most? Why is this reality so hard to understand? Even eyewitnesses are often fooled. And why is it so important to know thyself?

Reality is complex, but is it unknowable? Humans believe they are the crown of creation because all animals are ignorant of their own existence. Is our sentience really a quantum leap over all other life forms on this planet? If we compared ourselves to an amoeba, ant, or cat, we can see that awareness of reality has slowly gotten more complex and each of those animals perceives a larger portion of reality. Does that mean we see everything in reality, or are we just as blind to a much larger reality?

I believe we’ve evolved a number of cognitive tools to analyze reality, but it’s important to know the effectiveness of each.

First-Hand Experience. Common thought claims we have five senses for perceiving reality, but we actually have many more. People often believe seeing and hearing things for themselves is a primary source of knowledge. However, our senses can deceive us. For example, the lady cop who shot a man in Texas because she thought he was a burglar in her apartment when she was in his apartment. Just pay attention to how often eye witness accounts fail. Or better yet, recall all the times your senses have fooled you.

Instinct and Intuition. Our genes and unconscious mind direct us to act without thinking. Many people prefer to go by gut reaction than thinking it through. But how often does gut reaction tell us to kill or take what we want?

Language. By breaking reality down into pieces and giving each part a name goes a long way into gaining useful insight. But language is imprecise and the parts of reality are many. People who know the different names for trees have a greater understanding than the person who only knows the word tree. Language has evolved tremendously giving us one of our best tools. Pay attention to how words help you to perceive how reality works, and observe how people with lesser or better language skills fare compared to you.

Word of Mouth. We learn from other people’s observations. When we were hunters and gatherers hearing from scouts describe where animals could be hunted was vital. On the other hand, if a seafarer told you about mermaids you ended up believing in an unreal being. Word of mouth is very unreliable. Remember the Kindergarten game of Telephone? Word of Mouth evolved into journalism, and we know how reliable that can be. Word of Mouth has always had a fake news problem. Gossip, innuendo, slander are also descendants of word of mouth.

Counting and Measuring. Simple arithmetic became a tool that lets us invent, build, grow crops, trade, and develop an economy. Counting and measuring evolved into mathematics.

Mysticism. Mystics are people who claim to acquire knowledge from a higher source. They became shamans and seers who influenced other people. They also speculated about how reality worked, inventing higher beings. Even today many people still give credence to mystical insight. However, mystical insight has produced an infinite variety of conflicting information. We have to assume its all suspect. Mysticism tries to be the first-person experience of the divine.

Religion. Religion is codified mystical insight that is retaught as the truth. Religion allowed us to create very complex social structures. However, its truth is suspect. If there are a thousand gods, most followers are atheists to 999 of them. Religion succeeds in creating artificial realities that may or may not interface well with actual reality. Religion spreads best through word of mouth.

Laws. Laws are an external tool to encourage consistent thinking. Religious laws attempt to force mystical insights onto a population. Secular laws attempt to get people to work together.

History. If you study the Old Testament you’ll see it’s more about a history of a people than spiritual instruction. We have always tried to remember the past to explain how we got here. Early histories were no better than word of mouth stories that could be highly inaccurate. And each succeeding generation of historians alters the histories. A good example is the New Testament. Whoever Jesus was, and whatever he taught, has been constantly changed by each new writer of the New Testament. It appears the historical Jesus advocated communal living and sharing that today would be called communistic. The historical Jesus was concerned about creating heaven on Earth. It was later writers that gave him superpowers and turned him into God. Studying the history of Christianity is an excellent way to understand how history constantly mutates. History is a worthy way of understanding reality but it has to be tempered by comparing multiple histories.

Philosophy. Where religion taught that knowledge came from God or other spiritual authorities, philosophy teaches us we can figure things out for ourselves. Using rhetoric, logic, and mathematics men and women observe reality and deduce what’s going on. This was a great paradigm shift away from religion. However, like the game Mastermind, it leads to a lot of false assumptions. Elaborate castles of logic can build imposing concepts but that often turns out to be illusions of great knowledge. Philosophy is a major tool for understanding reality but it also has major faults.

Ethics. Ethics, like laws, attempt to come to a consensus on what’s right and wrong. Ethics is based on philosophy. Although in recent years, some ethicists have tried to look for a scientific foundation.

Science. Science combines mathematics, statistics, observation, testing, and philosophy into a systematic way to evaluate reality. Science assumes if tested observations and measurements prove consistent by scientists from any nation or culture then they might be true. Science never assumes it finds the absolute truth, but just the current best guess based on all the existing data. Science is statistical. Some science is so refined that it works incredibly well with reality. Space probes visiting distant worlds validate hundreds of years of scientific endeavors.

Scholarship. We have made education into a major portion of our life. We spend our entire lives trying to figure things out. We study, we think, we make assumptions. Like philosophy, scholarship often builds vast models of speculation. Scholarship tends to endorse results from competing trends. However, scholarly theories can be deceptive and even dangerous.

The problem is we use all these tools to explain our version of reality. Unfortunately, most are unreliable or clash with other people’s version of reality. Science has proven to be the most consistent at explaining reality, but science doesn’t cover everything. For example, right and wrong. These two concepts are ancient, probably coming out of mysticism or an instinctive desire for justice. Both religion and philosophy have tried to perfect them, but our reality is completely indifferent to morality or ethics. We have invented many concepts that just don’t exist in reality.

This causes problems. Several million people might believe with absolute certainty in a particular concept and then try to impose that view on millions of others who are just as certain such a concept is invalid.

We live in a polarize society because we all embrace different ancient beliefs, most of which we can’t explain how they came about. We just accept them as true. Most people believe in God because it was something they learned as a little kid. They won’t let the idea of God go no matter how much other cognitive tools disprove God’s existence.

Donald Trump seems to base most of his knowledge from first-hand experience and word of mouth information. Twitter is the perfect tool for word of mouth. Trump is neither religious, philosophical, or scientific. But this isn’t an uncommon way of dealing with reality. Few people are philosophical or scientific. Too many people only want to trust first-hand experience and instinct, but we know how unreliable those cognitive tools are. People who rely heavily on first-person experience and word of mouth tend to disbelieve science.

There have been various disciplines that try to teach self-programming that jettisons cognitive bullshit. Zen Buddhism is one. Meditation can be used to seek mystical insight or to observe the working of our own being.

The reason I wrote this essay was to help me think clearer. I’ve been reading books on Greek philosophy, and early Christian history. They are teaching me what people 2,000-2,500 years ago thought. I can see those ancient people struggled to make sense of reality without science. I can also see the same struggles today in people. We just don’t think clearly. We’re too influenced by low-level cognitive tools that deceive us. We base our existence on illusions created by those most primal cognitive tools.

I keep hoping the human race will get its act together and create a sane society that coexists with reality, and not on insane illusions and delusions. I realize until everyone becomes a master of their various cognitive tools, and learn the limits and limitations of each, we can’t start working on that sane society. We can’t start learning what’s real until we learn how to perceive what’s not real.

JWH

Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell

by James Wallace Harris, Sunday, November 3, 2019

Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About The People We Don’t Know is Malcolm Gladwell’s sixth book. I’m a big fan ever since his first book, The Tipping Point. Gladwell is an explainer, but he’s not straight forward in how he explains things. He enlightens by having the reader go step-by-step through the data he’s gathered to reach the same conclusion he has carefully discovered himself. He doesn’t just try to tell us the answer. Gladwell sees the world multidimensionally, so simple explanations won’t do.

In Talking to Strangers Gladwell wants us to understand what happened to Sandra Bland. Bland was pulled over for not using her turn signal when changing lanes, ended up being arrested, and committing suicide while in jail. The story was in all the news in the summer of 2015, and there was even an HBO documentary about the incidence. Gladwell became quite angry by the event and feels the media has failed to explain what happened and why.

It’s such a complicated story that Gladwell doesn’t even get to Bland’s story until page 313, but when he does, it all comes together perfectly.

Many people feel society is coming apart. That politics is disintegrating our culture. That everyone is on a short fuse, overly sensitive, and too easy to take offense. That there is little honesty in the world, and too many people want to carry guns. Our society is being overrun by mistrust and resentment. I am reminded of an experiment I heard about in school back in the 1960s. It involved cramming rats into a cage to simulate overpopulation. The stress of being forced to interact made them go mad and attack each other. Gladwell doesn’t mention this, but I was reminded of it constantly as I read his book.

Gladwell says we don’t know how to talk to strangers. He then goes on using various famous historical and news events to explain how miscommunication created extreme problems, often resulting in lethal consequences. His examples are quite fascinating. The first goes all the way back to Hernán Cortés meeting the Aztec ruler Montezuma, an extreme case of strangers meeting. Then he deals with Cuban spies and the CIA. This chapter is a mind-blower because Gladwell presents several historical cases where the CIA were completely fooled by double-agents. This is impressive because we assume CIA agents are highly trained at observing and understanding people.

After covering the CIA’s failure to detect traitors, Gladwell goes into detail about how Neville Chamberlain totally misread Adolph Hitler. These are fascinating cases of how we misread strangers, but they are so varied that you have to wonder what they mean to Sandra Bland’s case. Gladwell reminds us occasionally that Bland is his real goal, but he also tells us we’re not ready yet. He was right. You really want to stick close to Gladwell’s examples and explanations, because they do pay off big.

The problem is most people default to the truth, which is Gladwell’s way of saying we tend to believe other people are telling the truth. After reading his studies you feel like you should distrust everyone. Gladwell then gives cases of people who are always wary, and this is actually a worse way to live. To complicate matters, he gives several cases, such as Amanda Knox’s and Bernie Madoff’s where people act contrary to how they should act, which makes them even harder to read. I’ve seen a lot of news stories and documentaries about both of these cases and they don’t get to the details and insights that Gladwell does. I get the feeling that Gladwell wrote Talking to Strangers to show us how we’re all thinking too simplistically.

I’m not going to reiterate all of Gladwell’s arguments and cases. Besides not being able to tell when people are lying, and for many reasons, Gladwell gets to two other important insights. Coupling and location. He uses Sylvia Plath’s suicide and various studies on crime reduction methods to explain them. This is where Gladwell’s insights get more subtle. We want problems explained with one answer. Gladwell teaches us that sometimes a problem requires multiple datasets to understand what’s really going on. All too often we jump to what we think is the obvious conclusion when were missing whole areas of evidence. Evidence that sometimes appears to have no connection to the case.

Talking to Strangers is not a book you want to read casually, although it is very easy and entertaining to read. In essence, Gladwell is being a Zen master trying to explain the sound of one hand clapping. His examples bring us to the point where we have to have our own “I see!” moment. He can’t tell us. When Gladwell finally gets down to explaining what happened with Sandra Bland you should come to the conclusion that our present-day problems can’t be explained with the kind of logic we ordinary use with our friends or the kind of thinking we hear from pundits on TV. We’re too quick to lap up easy answers.

The trouble is most people will never understand what Gladwell is teaching. Most of us will continue to act on instinct using very limited instinctive thinking. Humans can’t handle the truth. This is my conclusion, not Gladwell’s. We think we know when we don’t. In fact, too many people are absolutely certain of their conclusions because their own explanations feel so right. We all live in the film Rashomon, each thinking we see the truth, but can’t understand the multiplex view we’d get from watching our lives from an outside vantage point.

Talking to Strangers, like other Gladwell books, are ones we should reread periodically. It’s so easy to fall back into simplex thinking. One of my favorite novels is Empire Star by Samuel R. Delany. It’s a science fiction novel about a farm boy from a backward planet traveling to other worlds and cultures. Before he leaves a wise person tells him that there are three kinds of thinking: simplex, complex, and multiplex. What this kid learns is most people are stuck in simplex and maybe complex thinking, and very few achieve multiplex thought. The story is about the kid evolving through the three stages of thinking.

Talking to Strangers is Gladwell’s attempt to get us to think in multiplexity.

JWH

Jesus and Christ

by James Wallace Harris

For decades I’ve wondered how Christianity could be so closely associated with Republicans. It seems that Democrats are more concerned with feeding the poor, healing the sick, and welcoming the stranger, all issues generally linked with the teachings of Jesus. But recently, I had a revelation – not from God, because I’m an atheist, but just an ordinary light bulb going off in the head kind.

Republicans worship Christ and not Jesus. Of course, most people are going to claim that Jesus and Christ are the same, but I don’t. And maybe at an unconscious level neither do Democrats and Republicans. I consider Jesus a man, a human being, a member of the Homo sapiens, whereas believers in Christ believe Jesus was and is a God. Because I’m an atheist, I don’t see Christ, but I do see Jesus. Jesus was a man who had philosophical ideas about a compassionate society. I see Jesus like Socrates, and Paul was his Plato. Unfortunately, Paul was tainted by a lot of magical thinking – to put it kindly – so it’s hard to know how much magical thinking Jesus the man also believed.

I’m going to make a lot of generalizations in this essay that have no scientific basis, but I do think they have some rough validity. It’s like going outside at night and seeing a mercury-vapor streetlamp and a yellow incandescent houselight and noticing that each attracts different kinds of bugs. Developing a theory that bugs are attracted to different wavelengths of light isn’t farfetched, but it isn’t scientific proof either. I’m saying that Christians, who should have a consistent moral philosophy, are attracted to both the Democratic and Republican parties, which seems to me to have opposing moral philosophies. Is it so strange to ask why? Here are my guesses.

Republicans see Christ. They like father figures. They like authority and power. They also like patriarchy. Jesus was meek, kind of wimpy, a hippie preaching peace, love, and happiness with socialistic leanings, who hung out with the poor, the losers, the powerless. After he died, his image was made over, giving him superpowers, eventually elevating him to equality with God. I never understood the Trinity business but that’s what it appears to rationalize. But the PR experts of the early church needed their guy to compete with other so-called gods of their day, and they gave Jesus more and more superpowers. That whole died for your sins and immortal life in heaven was just brilliant marketing. No wonder it became the dominant religion.

It makes sense to me that Republicans consider their party the party of Christians. Then what are the Democrats? I guess I’ll call them Jesuits. I know that the label has been trademarked by the Society of Jesus, but it works well for my purpose. If you look at history, I feel I can trace liberal philosophy and humanism back to Jesus, but not to Christ. Christ the God is just a repackaged Jehovah. Conservative philosophy goes way back, well before Jesus. See, that’s another insight I had. The Old Testament is all about nation-building. It’s us vs. them. The Old Testament is dominated by following the rules, about might makes right, the end justifies the means. It’s a very Republican kind of book. The New Testament is all about love and forgiveness, the Golden Rule, power-to-the-people, all about embracing diversity. Paul worked to bring globalization to the teachings of Jesus.

Christ is really a transformation of Jesus the man into the Old Testament God. The early Christians, the ones that became the orthodox Christians competed with the traditional Hebrew religion, and they owned the copyright on God because they had invented the monotheistic God. At first, the Christians just claimed their guy was the son of God, but eventually, they had to make him equal to God, otherwise. how could their movement succeed?

I believe Jesus was a man, a philosopher, and died. Because I’m a liberal I’m somewhat of a Jesuit, even though I’m also an atheist. I believe his philosophy continued on, but not him. Christ is an idea created by the early followers of Jesus. I believe Jesus would have been shocked by all these miracles and superpowers given to him. But it’s hard to know. Paul really created Jesus for us, and like I said, Paul had a lot of magical thinking ideas.

All we have of Jesus is the red letter text in the New Testament. Many Biblical scholars have expressed doubt that all the sayings of Jesus were really spoken by him. We have to assume Jesus was illiterate. He didn’t write his philosophy down like Plato, he was like Socrates and went around speaking to people. His friends and followers appeared to have remembered his sayings and passed them down by word of mouth in the early years after he died. Eventually, they were collected by followers who could write. And those collections of sayings were used by the writers of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, written decades later in another language to compose the gospels. Time filters and alters all memory. Each gospel was written years apart and show a changing, evolving, Christ. Jesus is most human in Matthew and most God-like in John.

Paul’s writing is the oldest we have about Jesus, and he wrote his epistles a couple decades after Jesus’ death. You can see the earliest ideas about Christ forming in Paul’s writings, but far from all. They were added with each gospel. By the time we get to the Gospel of John, Christ has amazing god-like powers. But it wasn’t until a couple centuries later, by several generations of church theologians did Christ become completely God. During those hundreds of years, the early church, the church we now call the Catholic Church, had theological wars with other sects or branches of Christianity and Jesuits.

To me, Christianity became Judaism 2.0 because it carefully incorporated the Old Testament into its philosophy. But that was common back then when one religion supplanted another. Christianity became orthodox. It became a conservative philosophy. It decided the hierarchy. It decided the role of men and women. It was patriarchal. God was the father, the church was next in power, and ordinary people were the children. The family was very important because it was designed to mirror the structure of the church, with the husband being the God/father of the family. Christ is a God who is easy to understand because he looked like us, but he also had all the powers of the supreme creator in the Book of Genesis. Any man wanting ruling power on Earth had to align their quest with the orthodox Christian church.

If you think about this, it all makes sense why Republicans hang on so tightly to Christianity. But it also explains Democrats. Their political platform follows the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, the commandment to love each other. It also explains why there has always been a polarized split between liberals and conservatives. Some people naturally are Jesuits, while others are Christians. If you look at the Apocrypha and Gnostic Gospels you can see that other followers of Jesus tried to form opposing religions to orthodox Christianity. At one level that same conflict is still going on between Democrats and Republicans.

Democrats are still trying to divide the fishes and loaves. Democrats believe everyone should have a healer. Democrats believe everyone should have shelter, and strangers should be welcomed. Democrats believe we should help each other. Republicans believe its God’s duty to decide what to do with the poor, the sick, and the homeless. If God sends a hurricane to Puerto Rico then why should we pay to rebuild it?

The followers of the human Jesus, the philosopher, see building the Kingdom of Heaven is our job, not God’s, and we’re to build it here on Earth. Jesuits feel we are responsible for Earth, not God. That’s why Republicans hate the idea that climate change is caused by human activity. By their way of thinking, the power of weather belongs to God. If they admit that climate change is our fault, it means it’s within our power. It destroys their sense of hierarchy. It undermines the conservative philosophy. It lets the Jesuits win a battle, and they can’t let that happen.

Christianity has a subservient role for women, one that’s part of the hierarchical structure. Making women equal to men devalues the hierarchy. Many of the apocryphal gospels had Jesus giving power to women followers. The power structure is very important to Republicans. If Jesus was just another philosopher, he has no power. If he has no power, he has no authority. Democracy came later, and I think Jesus would have been a big believer in true democracy. Republicans don’t want a true democracy. They want a power structure, and they want to be part of the power structure. They don’t want equality because if everyone was equal no one would have power. If God is on your side you have the power. If a philosopher is on your side, all you got is a wordy guy.

Before democracy, the practical thing for the average citizen to do was to align themselves with the most powerful person around. Conservatives still have that urge. With democracy people are the power and leaders should only be the administrators of our power. That goes against the natural Darwinian reality of the strong taking control. In our world, the rich are the strongest. Now that’s quite amusing because Republicans are generally against Darwin. They want to believe power is top-down from God, whereas Darwin claims it’s a bottom-up thing from nothing.

That might explain another reason why the orthodox made Jesus the man into God. They don’t like bottom-up power paths. That would mean any mere mortal human could start a revolution and disrupt the harmony of the hierarchy.

I know all of this is a bunch of weird ideas, but I do think it’s an interesting way to explain our political polarization. I don’t think it changes anything. I’m not sure we can change. I think some people are naturally drawn towards conservative philosophy and others towards liberal ideas. Genetics might explain it, but it would involve too many different genes and other variables. It’s sort of like gender identity. Some folks identify as male and others as female and some people with all kinds of combinations in between. It’s a spectrum. I assume some people are liberal, others are conservative, and lots of people with different variations. There is a certain percentage of the population that are Yellow Dog Democrats, and another percentage that always votes the straight Republican ticket. While there a bunch of people who swing back and forth. I doubt logical persuasion changes the way they think politically. I’m not sure we have free will when it comes to our political and religious choices any more than people have with their gender identity.

All I’m suggesting is the word Christian isn’t exact enough. Of course, Christians split into a zillion different sects. For my purposes, I’m going to label them Jesuits and Christians, for followers of Jesus and followers of Christ. I know most of my readers will think I’m pursuing painful hairsplitting. But for me, it’s helped me understand Republicans who embrace Trump and claim he’s the best President ever for helping Christians. Using the above perspectives let me understand how they could think that, and I now believe them. But maybe they will understand why I believe Trump is the worst president ever for Jesuits.

JWH