Good advice to religious leaders: Don’t promote the mutual exclusivity of faith and reason.
Go back to the good old days where religion and science were compatible. Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz were collectively known as the “rationalists.” Good times!
Do you really want to say that God sometimes says irrational things? Bad idea!
Here’s where we are, folks.
Almost half our nation eats up Trump’s rhetoric with a spoon.
Earlier today, I had the opportunity to ask some old prep-school chums about something I consider to be absurd: the U.S. Supreme Court’s considering the idea that the president of the United States should enjoy immunity from criminal prosecution.
One such friend, the only conservative in the group, pointed out that presidents have done things in the past, e.g. dropping the first atomic bomb and sending troops into Vietnam, for which he could have been criminally charged. Such immunity would enable the president to do what he thinks is right, and not be worried about going to prison for it.
An interesting response, to be sure, though both of these examples are potential war crimes, which are prosecuted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague. In any case, this seems to be a red herring. What we’re concerned about here is something quite “over the top,” something that would definitely be, and, in all likelihood will be, prosecuted within state and federal jurisdictions.
In particular, there is ample evidence that Donald Trump tried to overthrow the U.S. government, which, if he had been successful, would have made him a king, rather than a public servant. Are we saying that this is a valid direction for our nation to take? Insofar as I don’t recall any mention of the subject in the Constitution, it’s hard to imagine what these SCOTUS people are talking about.
I know absolutely nothing about the strategizing that must be going on inside the Republican party, but one has to think that some smart people realize that the GOP’s current course, MAGA/Trumpism, is not sustainable, and that an alternative must be developed and put into place.
America has shown that it has a certain appetite for the lies, the criminality, the rejection of science, the hatred, and all the rest. But that appetite is limited.
How hard would it be to organize around some garden-variety conservative who happens not to be criminally insane?
What Glinda is saying here is true, of course.
Trump may be convicted of all the charges in the other three indictments (and maybe more to come), and most of his followers will forever maintain that their hero was innocent, the victim of weaponizing the justice system by the Biden crime family, the Deep State, the Hollywood elitists, or whomever.
Admitting the truth would be a horrible embarrassment, and it’s simply never going to happen.
There are people in the former Confederacy who teach their children that the Union invaded them, a 165-year-old assertion that, similarly, will never die.
If you think that reason and truth are the guiding points of our lives, think again.
In 2023, the United States received an 83 on a scale from 0 to 100 on the Freedom Awards, from an organization called “FreedomHouse.” That placed us #17 of the 200+ sovereign nations on Earth.
Not bad, but what would it have taken to win first place, i.e. at or above the levels of Switzerland, New Zealand, Denmark, Ireland, Estonia and Iceland? Well, let’s look at the 12 criteria the judges use:
Rule of law
Security and safety
Movement
Religion
Association, assembly, and civil society
Expression and information
Identity and Relationships
Size of Government
Legal System and Property Rights
Access to Sound Money
Freedom to Trade Internationally
Regulation
I see two main gaping holes in American’s position here.
1) Rule of law. The judges don’t like multi-tiered justice systems. And just wait until they see what is happening here in 2024, where our Supreme Court is weighing the idea of granting immunity from criminal prosecution to the president, essentially making him a king. It would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic.
2) Religion. The judges are also turned off to countries in which the proponents of one religion have authority over others. Our push to have the Christian bible inserted in our public school system will not sit well.
By the time the prosecutors in the RICO case in Georgia get finished with Guiliani, a license to practice law will be of no more value to him than a diploma in devil worship. He either flips on Trump and takes a plea deal in exchange for a lighter sentence (as others have done), or he stands behind the wanna-be dictator and goes down hard.
In either case, he’s finished.
My mom and I have been talking about presidential immunity lately, as I can’t think of an idea that more directly confounds what the Founding Fathers intended in terms of rule of law and the concept of a monarchy as a replacement for American democracy.
Mom believes if that U.S. presidents don’t have immunity, that they can be charged with crimes by their political opponents as in this case with Biden. What I try to get her to realize is that our justice system doesn’t work that way. In Trump’s case, four different grand juries in four different jurisdictions found there was solid evidence that Trump had committed 91 felonies and needed to be indicted accordingly.
If Biden had any power in this regard, do you think his own son would be going on trial for gun-law violations?
What about Nixon? He didn’t have immunity, which is why he resigned in disgrace.
Funny meme here.
Seriously, however, many Trump supporters disbelieve that their hero lost to Biden by seven million votes, purely on the basis that the president didn’t do rallies with hats and flags.
In my limited experience, even the most unintelligent and backwards people say they believe in science but contend (because this is what their online “research” has taught them), that disciplines like epidemiology and climate change are driven by money and politics, rather than science itself.
Frankly, I have some level of sympathy for these folks, and I count myself lucky at some level that I happen to know a significant number of high-level scientists in these fields personally, and that I can vouch for their integrity on an individual basis.
Also, my brain is wired along the lines of what philosopher David Hume wrote: “We always disbelieve the greater miracle.”
What’s more likely? That millions of people, all around the globe, with “MD” and “PhD” after their names, working in research institutions and hospitals, conspired to develop and disseminate a story that COVID-19 was a serious disease when they knew it was no more dangerous than the flu? Or, alternatively, that these people followed legitimate science to reach their conclusions, and took measures to prevent even worse outcomes than those we actually experienced?
When I come across a conspiracy theorist whose ideas are completely baseless, it reminds me that, in so many ways, we’ve lost our ability to think. Then we see phenomena like Trump rising in the polls, and we have to admit that this is all completely predictable.
