Recommended: Elite Media Got it All So Wrong

The media today is full of pompous talking heads and slightly desperate Clinton spokespeople telling us dozens of reasons why Donald Trump can't possibly beat Hillary Clinton in the presidential election.  These are the very same people who have been telling us for almost 12 months now that a Trump candidacy would be a one-day wonder, a joke, and that he would certainly fall at the first (second, third,......) primary race. The piece Elite Media Got it All So Wrong today summarizes this situation pretty well.

It is clear that the narrow political and media elites who have been running the country have gotten so completely out of touch with the mood of the average American voter that they simply cannot conceive of how Trump could ever do what he has apparently not only managed to do, but do convincingly. In the most recent primaries he won almost every demographic group - men, women, highly educated, poorly educated, white, black, rich, poor, conservative, evangelical, old. Only the very young defected - not to Hillary but to Bernie.

Establishment Democrats (and who else would be supporting Hillary?) would be foolish indeed  to underrate Trump's appeal to American voters across the board.  It's not, I think, that American voters think Trump is so great - it's that they think the establishment alternatives, including Hillary, are so bad.

In fact, Trump's sentiments, indelicately as they may be expressed, align pretty well with what a lot of American voters, perhaps even a majority, feel. That America has been pushed around and taken advantage of. That Obama has been outfoxed repeatedly by Putin.  That the administration has been rudderless in the whole Middle East fiascos (all of them - Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and especially the ISIS phenomena). That China is eating our lunch on more ways than one.  That the federal government is a total mess and can't run anything right, from the VA health system to Obamacare to military procurement to fiscal policy.

One may agree or disagree with these positions - the elites, obviously, mostly disagree - but many voters apparently see the world differently.  Perhaps because they don't live in the East Coast intellectual and political bubble. Perhaps because they are not immune from the job losses and declining middle class incomes the elite's policies have generated.  Perhaps because they have to run or work in real-world businesses instead of cushy government or government-subsidized jobs.

I have no idea how I will vote in this election. Trump looks like a disaster, but then so does Hillary. But one thing is clear - it's time to stop taking seriously the predictions and arguments of the mainstream political consultants and media talking heads - they have been so completely wrong for so long now.

American religious freedom and the culture wars

Continuing my thoughts from the previous post, in the light of the current political culture wars I have been thinking about what American religious freedom really means. It seems to me that it means one can believe whatever one wants to believe, and live by that belief so long as it harms no one else, and that by simple logic means the next person who comes along is equally free to believe something different. It does NOT mean that one person can impose their beliefs on another person.

So people who oppose abortion based on their religious belief that a religious concept called “the soul” enters a fetus at conception are perfectly free never to abort a fetus. But they have no right to insist that people who don’t hold that religious belief be similarly restricted.

People who oppose gay unions based on their religious beliefs about how to interpret some biblical passages are perfectly free never to enter into gay or lesbian unions.  But they have no right to insist that people who do not hold those religious views be similarly restricted.

People like Christian Scientists who believe in using prayer instead of modern medicine to treat diseases are free to do so, but not to insist that the rest of us do so. (There is an interesting legal question when they subject their own children to that belief, and the children die as a result.)

People who believe pork is unclean are free never to eat pork, but not to ban the sale of pork to others.

I happen to think that teaching young children that they are inherently sinful and unworthy, as some religions try to do, is a form of malicious child abuse, and I am free to avoid doing that.  But I am not free to insist that everyone else cease doing it.

The alternative to such religious freedom is inevitably the imposition of one group’s peculiar religious beliefs on everyone else. We see that all over the world today, especially but not exclusively in the more militant Islamic countries. And we are repelled by it.

In Christianity it has led in the past to pogroms, the Inquisition, genocide, brutal and long Catholic-Protestant wars, and the slaughter of millions. This is not something we want in America, so those – largely evangelical Christians – in our country who are so determined to make everyone else live by their own religious beliefs ought to take note, and learn from history.

Christian "orthodoxy"

I have been reading early Christian history lately, especially The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture (Bart Ehrman, 2011), Jesus Wars: How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens, and Two Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe for the Next 1,500 Years (John Philip Jenkins. 2011), and Sources of the Jesus Tradition: Separating History From Myth (R. Joseph Hoffman, Ed., 2010).

I am struck by how passionate the early Christians were about “orthodoxy” – about the need for EVERYONE to believe exactly the right thing (which happened to be exactly what THEY believed) about Jesus. There were in the early days, up perhaps to the fourth century, a widely divergent range of views about Jesus among Christian communities, and even within Christian communities.  Was he all divine, or all human, or half divine and half human, or simultaneously divine and human, or human but inhabited temporarily by the divine, or human but adopted by the divine, etc, etc, etc. Given the fairly tolerant attitude of the Greek and Roman world around them to adopting new gods and believing in a multitude of gods, it is surprising to me that the early Christians felt so strongly about these issues that they were (eventually) willing to resort even to genocide against those who held even slightly different views on these issues.  This was not a Jewish fetish.  Some of the most vehement – even anal – in this regard were non-Jews, many of them Romans.

Of course eventually one group became dominate, and established their particular views as the orthodox or “right” views (and rewrote some of the scriptures to buttress their views), and then proceeded through the following centuries to persecute and exterminate anyone who believed even slightly differently.

I think of this these days when “political correctness” has taken over the nation, and even college students, who used to fight for freedom of speech, now fight for political correctness and feel “unsafe” in the presence of alternate opinions.  And perhaps the arrogant certainty of the Islamic jihadists that they and they alone have the correct belief is also on my mind.

Why is it that the monotheistic religions, especially Christianity and Islam, are so passionately concerned to make sure everyone believes exactly what they believe, or extinguish them in the attempt.  In almost every other field of human endeavor – food, literature, art, dress, music etc , etc, etc. diversity is tolerated, even valued. But Christians have fought century-long wars and slaughtered millions over this issue – and Islam is still doing it.  Why?  Why does it matter so much to these people that everyone believe EXACTLY what they believe?