Re: this meme on atheism, I doubt that an examination of the bible causes any significant number of people to disbelieve in God.

I suggest that, like so many other aspects of human behavior, it’s a matter of how our brains are “wired.” Some people are incapable of accepting ideas, especially ideas with huge impact on ourselves and our civilization, without evidence.  The matter becomes ever clearer with each passing year and the accumulation of physical evidence in scientific disciplines like astrophysics and evolutionary biology.

Others, whether it’s through fear of death or the teachings of their parents, are eager to glom onto a concept that puts their fate in the hands of a loving God, who has a plan for their lives, albeit a mysterious and unknowable one.

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At left is a screen shot from this video that suggests that we will soon have robots to fill our gas tanks.

That means that somewhere, someone thinks there will be enormous investments in this infrastructure that will pay for themselves before electric transportation becomes ubiquitous.

Preposterous.

 

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Kudos to the author of the meme here.

With the possible exception of Trump, this smarmy used-car salesman is the most transparent liar that American politics has ever seen.

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Here’s another reminder of the “chicken-and-the-egg” question that we face in our attempt to understand contemporary American politics. Did American hatred and ignorance cause Trump, or was it the other way around?

In any case, we have a country in which about one-third of its people believe that woke liberals hate America and are trying to destroy it.

Note that this is much different than the way the Republican party characterized progressives just a few short years ago.   Until Trump, the GOP would say that liberals were ill-informed bleeding hearts, hoping to create a utopian society built on impractical ideas.

Now, we’re evil.  Quite a switch indeed.

Since the beginning, Trump has counted on the idea that a huge swath of the American electorate would believe anything he said.  And, for a long while, it appeared that this “swath” was large enough to keep him in power and immune from criminal prosecution.

Now it appears that this notion is simply wrong. Thank God.

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Rock legend “The Boss” has nailed it.  Trump supporters are somewhere between one-quarter and one-third of the American electorate.

And that’s now, before the entire world is exposed to the extensive evidence proving that Trump committed 91 felonies, most of which were associated with his attempt to overthrow the U.S. government.

Sadly, there are people who don’t care that Trump is a criminal conman, who would happily vote for anyone or anything rather than a Democrat.  But fortunately, they’re in the minority.

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Here is a short video made by PBS that addresses how each of us as individuals perceive the outside world in different ways, based on the “wiring” of our brains.

I bring this up to make a larger point about how we hear what we want to hear.  To me, Trump is a criminal conman in the process of getting his comeuppance.  To one of  his supporters, he’s done nothing wrong, and he is under a corrupt attack by the Biden crime family.

 

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From NPR:  “All authoritarian leaders have cults of personality,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, professor of history at New York University and author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present. “Meaning, they propose themselves as all-powerful, as the only solution possible to the nation’s ills. ‘I alone can fix it.’ “
The story linked above is well worth four minutes of your time.
We’re a full eight years past the point that Trump arrived on the American political scene, and, at least to some of us, all of this still seems surreal.  It’s just hard to imagine that this happened in the United States.
At the core is Trump’s lies.  There are still tens of millions of American voters who believe that Trump won the 2020 election, and that massive fraud pushed Biden into the White House.
And getting rid of him won’t be easy, as he’s effectively holding the country for ransom.  You either elect me as the 46th president, or watch me create several orders of magnitude more chaos and mayhem than you’ve even seen before. 
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I appreciate the offer, but I’d rather trust my retirement savings to an honest investment advisor than a professional liar.

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We’re banning books while we muzzle and starve our teachers.

We’re sending the cream of our public school student population to charter schools, leaving the most difficult kids behind.

We’re creating the perfect set of conditions for a democracy to implode.

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Let’s suppose that Trump has 50 million supporters, and let’s admit that, for most of them, there is no crime that their leader could possibly commit that would affect that loyalty. Or, put more specifically, there is nothing he could do that could cause them to vote for a Democrat.

Yet based on the look on his face, it appears that the fellow at left may be a counter-example.

He’s clearly pissed, perhaps because he knows that he’s very likely to spend a considerable chunk of the rest of his life in a filthy state penitentiary. Then, when released (disbarred and disgraced), he’ll have to find some way forward.

Of course, it’s possible that he’s angry at himself for having been stupid enough to have fallen for the con.

In any case, it’s just another example of what happens to people who have anything to do with this sociopathic criminal.

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