Via Jerry Coyne, a long piece at Quillette by Matt Johnson: Liberalism and the West’s ‘Crisis of Meaning’, subtitled “Many liberals are strangely eager to concede that liberal societies are morally and spiritually bankrupt without religion to give life meaning.”
This is an enduring topic, triggered here by a recent David Brooks column in NYT (which I discussed here).
No time to read it just now. But a couple quick comments: some who address this topic think that Christianity is the only thing that can fill this “god-shaped hole” as Coyne puts it; but that’s probably because we here in the West don’t see similar arguments that only Buddhism, to take a random example, can provide the meaning of life (by people who are just as sincere as the Christians are). Second, this worry strikes me as a simple failure of imagination, and a lack of knowledge about the world outside their own tribe. Third, which is to say, this isn’t about religion, or theology, or which of the many of those is correct; it’s basically an issue of psychology and human nature.
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Quick items:
JMG: Florida Sees Surge Of COVID Emergency Room Visits. Completely predictable.
JMG: STUDY: Melting Of Major Alaskan Glacier Accelerating. Remember, climate change is just a Chinese hoax.
AlterNet: MAGA fumes over report 4th of July gas prices lowest in 3 years: ‘Why is CBS campaigning for Biden?’. It can’t be true if it can be construed as giving any credit to Biden. (Not that presidents have much if any control over gas prices, so their alarm is absurd to begin with.)
AlterNet: ‘Some folks need killing’: Far-right MAGA candidate praises violence in unhinged church rant. This guy again. Who would those “some folks” be? Why, people from outside his tribe: “socialists and communists,” homosexuals and trans women, the Obamas, the Pelosis — he rants about a lot of these; hard telling where the killing would end.
Also covered at The New Republic: MAGA Gov Candidate’s Ugly, Hateful Rant: “Some Folks Need Killing!”, subtitled “Mark Robinson, the GOP nominee for governor in North Carolina, has a long history of incendiary comments. But he may have topped himself this time.”
And more about Candace Owens’ recent remarks: Boing Boing: Candace Owens: “I’m not a Round Earther… science is a pagan faith”. I’ll quote from this, beginning exactly with a point I keep making:
What she doesn’t say is that this pagan faith is what gives her the ability to broadcast her message to her throngs of followers. It also allows her to eat safe food, live in an air-conditioned home, fly around the world to spread her brilliance, and basically do everything that doesn’t involve living in a pre-industrial, technologically primitive society.
Let’s take a look at some of Candace’s other fields of expertise. In 2018, she showed off her historian credentials when she said, “If Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, OK, fine.”
In 2020, she put on her epidemiologist lab coat and revealed that COVID-19 was a hoax, declaring it to be the “most ridiculous scam in the entire world.”
In 2022, she hung her certificate in forensic pathology on her office wall when she said that George Floyd died from an overdose, debunking the official medical examiner’s report, as well as video evidence that showed the contrary.
She also has time to moonlight as a foreign policy analyst, proposing that the United States should invade Australia because it is a police state.
And just a month ago, she overturned decades of scientific research and fossil evidence to reveal that the belief that dinosaurs roamed the Earth until a great big meteor hit it is an “absurd” concept.
What’s next, BB writer Mark Frauenfelder concludes by wondering.
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Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, 2 Jul 2024: “God’s Not Dead 5,” a film no one asked for, already has a trailer, subtitled “This time, the main character runs for Congress while being accused of being a Christian Nationalist”. These films seem to me like preaching to the choir, and it’s been noted before that, in cinematic terms, they’re really bad. From my post nearly a decade ago, quoting a Salon review:
When religionists reduce critics to banal caricature in order to defeat them on film, it betrays a lack of confidence in their own arguments.
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The people who create and consume Christian film are neither mature nor reflective. They are at their core superstitious, afraid and tribal.
