Posted inPolitics

With the election tomorrow, I’m trying to empathize with Trump supporters

Empathy. It's a fine-sounding word. I aspire to it. But it can be damn hard to do when people act like selfish jerks and I'm supposed to look upon their twisted view of reality with empathy.  That's how I feel about Trump supporters. They cheer on their chosen candidate, a twice-impeached former president, convicted felon, habitual liar, and instigator of a violent attempt to subvert the result of the 2020 presidential election that was conducted freely and fairly, which Trump lost. Of course, that only scratches the surface of Trump's negative qualities and wrongdoing. Yet polls show that almost half…
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Posted inPolitics Radha Soami Satsang Beas

Gurus are like Trump: promising protection in return for absolute fealty

My wife found a Slate article by Steven Reisner on Apple News that she thought I'd be interested in, "The Deep Psychological Reason We're Stuck in This Feedback Loop With Donald Trump." Reisner starts off by saying: This is the third time Donald Trump has run for president as a major-party candidate, and yet, this cycle, the American electorate and the American press seem unable to fully comprehend the choice we are facing. It is not, as we’ve been trained to think, a contest between an extreme Republican and a middle-of-the-road Democrat. There is still no language that conveys what…
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Posted inGod Politics

A model isn’t reality, whether we’re talking politics or God

Since my mind is so focused on the presidential race here in the United States -- we're a week away from November 5, election day -- I figured I might as well go with the mental flow and write a post about a subject that is germane to both politics and God: modeling.  Not the sort of modeling where women or men put on designer clothes and strut down a walkway in front of an audience. The sort where a human understanding of some complex aspect of reality is fashioned into a model that attempts to reflect its nature. This…
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Posted inPolitics Radha Soami Satsang Beas

Trump is a proven authoritarian fascist. Reminds me of some religious leaders.

Yesterday I wrote a post for my Salem Political Snark blog, "Trump is a fascist, says his chief of staff, John Kelly." Here's part of a quotation from a New York Times story that I included in the post. In response to a question about whether he thought Mr. Trump was a fascist, Mr. Kelly first read aloud a definition of fascism that he had found online. “Well, looking at the definition of fascism: It’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social…
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Posted inPolitics Reality Religions

In both politics and religion, reports aren’t the same as verified evidence

Building on my post of four days ago, "Harris-Trump debate shows how political lies are like religious lies," now I want to talk about how in both politics and religion reports aren't the same as verified evidence. I got to thinking about this after watching a clip on X, formerly known as Twitter, from an interview Meet the Press host Kristen Welker did today with Republican Vice-President candidate J.D. Vance. Leaving aside the fact that I can't stand Vance and his running mate, Donald Trump, I found the arguments Vance brought forward in favor of his belief that migrants from…
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Posted inPolitics Religions

Harris-Trump debate shows how political lies are like religious lies

In both politics and religion, lies are commonplace. I'm defining "lie" as a person saying something that isn't true, because there isn't any persuasive evidence supporting the statement. God loves you is a lie, since there's no persuasive evidence that God exists, so there's no entity to love or do anything else. You'll go to heaven after you die is another lie given the lack of evidence for life after death. People believe in religious lies for a variety of reasons. For example, it feels good to embrace warm supernatural fantasies that are more appealing than the cold truth of…
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Posted inHappiness Neuroscience Politics

Negative emotions are just fine. I’ll be angry if you don’t agree.

Proving (sort of) that the cosmos agrees with the theme of this blog post, about an hour ago I finished episode 8 of the fourth season of The Handmaid's Tale on Hulu, which I belatedly started watching after seeing Elisabeth Moss in another streaming series and wanting to see more of her acting. The Handmaid's Tale, of course, is an adaptation of the dystopian book by the same name written by Margaret Atwood. Women are treated extremely badly in the nation of Gilead, which used to be the United States until religious zealots managed to take over the country, motivated…
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Posted inGod Politics

God didn’t save Trump from being killed. But Trump’s devotees think so.

On Saturday a 20 year old man, Thomas Matthew Crooks, a registered Republican, tried to assassinate Donald Trump with an AR-15 rifle for a reason that likely never will be known, since Crooks was killed by Secret Service counter-snipers and left no indication why he fired numerous shots from a rooftop near the rally where Trump was speaking. As I said in a post on my Salem Political Snark blog yesterday, "It's good Trump wasn't killed. Now let's defeat the S.O.B."  There's no one in recent American politics who has been more toxic than Trump. Trump never tires of attacking…
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Posted inPolitics Religions

Jewish religious nationalism is behind Israel’s horrible treatment of Palestinians

Anyone who wrongly believes that religiosity is a private affair of personal faith needs to educate themselves about the danger religious nationalism poses in many places around the world, including Israel. I wrote a post about this yesterday for my Salem Political Snark blog, "Two well-researched stories show how badly Israel is treating Palestinians."  One of those stories was a lengthy piece in the New York Times Magazine, with the title shown above. Since I'm a subscriber to the online New York Times and gifted that link, you should be able to click on it and read this disturbing investigative…
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Posted inPolitics Science

No, you religious fool, a total eclipse isn’t a sign to repent

Yesterday there was a total eclipse in part of the United States. This follows on a total eclipse in 2017 whose path went right through where I live, Salem, Oregon. It was a cool experience. But certainly not a religious one. After all, eclipses are 100% predictable by modern astronomers. Even not-so-modern astronomers had learned how to predict them. I'm no expert on how this is done, but obviously it entails calculating the positions of the sun, moon, and earth -- since a total eclipse is when the moon, which amazingly is just the right size in the sky to…
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Posted inFundamentalism Mindfulness Politics

Beware of ideologies, even though most of us embrace them

I enjoyed this recent comment on a churchless blog post from "sant64." There's valuable wisdom here. The first paragraph comes from what I said in the post. "This makes sense in many situations. However, when it comes to solid facts, such as the reality of human-caused global warming, 'trying out different perspectives' isn't the right thing to do. In these sorts of cases, reality almost certainly is a certain way." The proper perspective that jibes with "reality" is what? Believing that we're in the end-times because there's little hope we can reverse GW, or believing that GW is manageable and…
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Posted inPolitics

Israel-Hamas war is bringing out worst on both sides

I was planning to share more in today's blog post from Robert Sapolsky's book, Determined, which argues persuasively that free will is an illusion. But with disturbing news of the Israel-Hamas war ricocheting around in my mind, I find myself unable to focus on my original intent. Which is how minds work. I'm going to talk about no-free-will anyway, just not in the way that I had intended. Every experience changes us. We are nothing but our experiences, understanding that "experience" includes much more than that word implies. It encompasses the genetic experience of our bodies; the historical experience of…
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Posted inPolitics

I wish “evil” could be banished from political discourse

Here in the United States, our politicians love to spout venomous talk about evildoers, the necessity to combat evil, and how some conflict is a battle between good and evil. Prime Minister Netanyahu and his allies have been doing the same thing in Israel after Hamas terrorists attacked that country on October 7. A Daily Mail story says: Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to 'completely eliminate' Hamas on Saturday night as he revealed IDF forces have been fighting within the Gaza Strip to get rid of 'evil' and 'bring back' hostages. He told Israeli citizens that the ongoing ground operation…
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Posted inFundamentalism Politics

Israel on verge of becoming a Jewish authoritarian nation

Fairly frequently religious people say that atheists like me overstate the danger of fundamentalism. The argument goes, "What's the harm in religion? Everybody should be free to believe in whatever they want to, whether it be God or whatever." Well, what's happening in Israel right now is a great example of why fundamentalism is so dangerous. Since Israel was founded after the horror of the Holocaust, there's no problem with the country being largely Jewish. But right-wing Jewish fundamentalists are determined to go much farther than that. They want to put the judicial system in Israel under the control of…
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Posted inPolitics Religions Science

Trump’s arraignment reminded me of connection between law and science

Today Donald Trump was arraigned in New York City on 34 felony counts involving the falsification of business records.  Trump at his arraignment  I was thrilled. Trump is a horrible human being. He has lied and cheated his way through a life that, amazingly, until now hadn't included being charged with a crime. That changed today, and almost certainly Trump will be charged with additional crimes since there are other ongoing investigations into his wrongdoing. Following the news about the indictment against Trump that was unsealed today, I heard lots of legal analysis on MSNBC and CNN. I also read…
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Posted inPolitics

Religious bigotry behind hatred of transgender people

There are lots of reasons why I reject religion. One big one is that religious people, especially fundamentalists, often are extremely narrow-minded and judgmental when it comes to sexual matters. Here in the United States, opposition to transgender individuals is a disgusting hallmark of the Republican Party -- which includes evangelicals and other religious zealots who love to hate those who don't conform to their theological beliefs about gender. It's a plain fact that some people with a male or female body don't view themselves as being the sex they were assigned at birth. A CNN story, "GOP lawmakers escalate…
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Posted inIndia Politics

India’s Modi doesn’t want people to see BBC documentary critical of him

Politicians are much the same the world over. They hate criticism. But in countries with robust freedom of speech and a free press, like the United States, politicians find it difficult to shut down criticism of them. Not so in India, where Prime Minister Modi and his allies are working hard to keep people from seeing a BBC documentary, "India: the Modi Question." TWITTER AND YOUTUBE censored a report critical of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in coordination with the government of India, according to a top Indian official. Officials called for the Big Tech companies to take action against…
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Posted inChristianity/Jesus Politics

Christian Nationalism defeated in Pennsylvania, but still scary

Politics is divisive and arouses strong emotions. Religions are divisive and arouse strong emotions. Mix politics with religion, and not surprisingly the worst qualities of each can combine in a toxic combination. Such is evident in countries around the world where dogmatic religion fuses with narrow-minded nationalism. Iran. India. Saudi Arabia. Israel. There are others, including the United States. This was personified in the recent midterm election here in the United States by Doug Mastriano, the Republican candidate for Governor of Pennsylvania.  Fortunately, Mastriano lost to Democrat Josh Shapiro by a large margin: 56% to 42%. But in the runup…
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Posted inPolitics

How the media and Republicans got the election so wrong

Being a political junkie -- someone who has loved to follow politics since my childhood -- I feel like my immersion in the United States midterm election that happened last Tuesday, and whose votes are still being counted, should enable me to draw some philosophical conclusions from what happened. Well, at least I'll give that a try.  The gist of what happened, for those who don't live in the United States and/or don't follow American politics closely, is that the widely predicted Republican "Red Wave" turned out to be a Red Ripple, if even that. Both the mainstream media and…
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