Newt and the Pope: Responsibility has been Shifted

So first there was this issue with sexual abuse of children by a number of Roman Catholic priests in the Boston Archdiocese over many decades but that was just a function of the decadent, permissive society in America. And anti-Catholic propaganda. Don't forget that any negative publicity about the behavior of the Church of Rome is always just anti-Catholic propaganda regardless of how true and accurate it may be.

Then it seems that the same thing happened in Canada and it even had implications for the government of Quebec because they lack total separation of church and state. But that was simply infection from the decadent, permissive society in America which didn't have adequate border controls to prevent French or other Canadian Catholics from independently abusing children. Just more anti-Catholic propaganda inspired from south of the Canadian border even though it mostly occurred before the first story about such abuse appeared in a U. S. newspaper.

Then, horror of horrors, the same behaviors showed up in Ireland. Ireland! Saints preserve us! The Americans have infected the people whose monasteries "saved civilization"! And those horrible anti-Catholics have infiltrated the Irish press too!

And then some German choirmaster named Ratzinger seems to have physically abused choirboys. And those anti-Catholic newspaper people, clearly non-Aryan, not echt Deutsch, and probably under the influence of the Elders of Zion have constructed the falsehood that this choirmaster is the brother of Pope Hitlerjugend I, alias Josef Ratzinger, Benedict XVI.

And worst of all, those decadent, permissive Americans have reared up again, this time in Wisconsin to put forward the obviously contumacious and defamatory charge that Pope Hitlerjugend I himself, as Cardinal Ratzinger, covered up the abuse of deaf children by a priest. These anti-Catholics have gone so far as to dress up some hired shill to pose as the retired Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland to falsely confirm the pope's involvement.

Clearly there is a vast conspiracy of Jews, atheists, Protestants, apostates and (fill in the name of the group that you, as a good Catholic, hate most here) to defame Pope Hitlerjugend I.

So, let me get this right. The Roman Catholic Church covered up sexual and physical abuse of children for decades. Any insinuation that the current pope while Archbishop and then Cardinal of the Munich Archdiocese may have known about the actions of priests, choirmasters or his own biological brothers is clearly defamatory. The current pope, whose portfolio as one of the most powerful cardinals in the Vatican at the time, was the ultimate Vatican official overseeing complaints such as those of the magnitude of the Wisconsin situation against priests had no knowledge of these cover ups. The current pope who, as cardinal, engineered the exit from the Boston Archdiocese to a sinecure in Rome far from the reach of American laws and victim lawsuits of Bernard, Cardinal Law was unaware of any of these egregious abuses. And it necessarily follows, as day follows night, that any doubts about Pope Hitlerjugend I's story are biased and unwarranted attacks on his office and the Roman Catholic Church.

We can't call this "blaming the victim" exactly because the Roman Church has avoided doing so. They leave that to various radical Catholic lay organizations for the sake of plausible deniability. However, it is certainly an absolute evasion of responsibility and a craven form of misdirection.

Simultaneously with this continuing tale of a Roman Catholic Church we have a very similar tale in American politics. Former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich, perhaps the person who best typifies the cravenness, fraud, deception, vileness and lies what are the core of the Republican Party has gone the whole hog. Rather than taking the Vatican route of farming out blaming the victims of abuse, Newt has embraced that role himself.

The lunatics of the Tea Party Movement, whipped up to a frenzy by neo-fascists like of Michelle Bachmann, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Tom Tancredo, John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, started making threats against and vandalizing the offices of Congresspersons who voted for the Health Care Reform Bill. They sent envelopes of white powder (hopefully inert) to at least one Congressperson, Faxed and phoned in threats against not only the Representatives but against their families and even grandchildren, all for having the temerity to extend a basic right to health care to all Americans. At this juncture one might think that a group of cool-headed adults might step forward to discipline the out-of-control children before someone really gets hurt. Falsely presenting himself as such a grown-up, Newt came forward to insist that the Democrats who enacted the bill were responsible for the frenzy.

Of course! It should be obvious to everyone. The victims of the lunatics he and his cohorts have been whipping into a frenzy since November 4, 2008 were at fault because they weren't Newt. I expect that his excuse for his adulteries with his employees resulting in his second and third marriages had nothing to do with his ego or psychopathology but rather with the fact that wives 2 and 3 wore provocative clothing or gave signals that they wanted him to violate his marriage vows.

People listen to Newt, this neo-fascist scum bag, because of his position and the cash that ultra-rightist plutocrats keep funneling to him to keep him in the limelight. Yet ultimately he's in the same position as the current pope. Gingrich and Ratzinger are both attempting, through propaganda that might even give Josef Goebbles pause, to misdirect the focus from their own immoral, dishonest and, in some cases, criminal acts to save their own skins. Their standard enemies receive their blame because their egotistical self-absorption cannot admit of the least fallibility on their parts.

And, frankly, I am pleased, even ecstatic in both cases.

Newt and Pope Hitlerjugend I both are bent on the marginalization of their institutions. They are moving farther and farther into the ultra-fascist right both in political and religious doctrine. They reflexively excuse their worst followers while refusing to reform in ways that might gain them broader power. The scandals in the Church of Rome will continue to multiply and fester. Over 30 years of right wing popes have skewed the curia and the College of Cardinals toward fundamentalist hard liners making serious reform of the church all but impossible. The fanatics and con men that Rupert Murdock and Roger Ailes promote on Fox News along with scum like Newt Gingrich, John Bolten, Dick Cheney, Bill Kristol and the Tea Party lunatics are dragging the Republicans so far to the right that they can't even see the territory of Conservatism any longer. Even some of those who watch Fox News are inevitably going to find this extremism distasteful.

Within the Republican's corporate controlled hierarchy the purges have already begun. I have not the slightest mote of sympathy for David Frum. He's an amoral ideologue with no loyalty to anyone but the person who pays his bills. Still Frum's fate this week demonstrates that the Republican's circular firing squad has loosed its first volley. That he is, so far, the only one not to kowtow quickly enough to evade the whizzing bullets indicates the absence of anyone amongst the Republicans who isn't somewhere to the right of Benito Mussolini.

Senator John McCain, one of the very few Republicans who can fool people into thinking he's a moderate even after he opens his mouth, has claimed that Democrats will get even less cooperation from Republicans following the passage of Health Care Reform than they got before passage. How he figures that Democrats will have less than zero cooperation and even more unreasoning opposition I don't quite know but I'm sure that the neo-fascist opposition will figure it out. President Obama this week challenged the Republicans to "bring it on." I sincerely hope that they do.

If the Democrats are smart (always an iffy proposition) and emboldened (which they now are) their next legislative priority will be Senator Dodd's Banking Reform Bill. I eagerly await the spectacle of Republicans tying themselves in knots to defend their masters in the biggest banks.

The Tea Party Movement is an arranged marriage of ultra-rightists, the lunatic Libertarian fringe and some confused and worried people gullible enough to be suckered in by Republican fearmongering. Quite a substantial portion of those folks didn't like giving taxpayer money to big banks and investment houses that had just fleeced them of their retirement funds. Some will be dumb enough to stick with the right wingers but a substantial number are going to walk, run or just drift away as the Republicans insist that this isn't the right time or way to reform the banking system. The status quo in financial markets is a disaster for the small investors, homeowners, parents trying to save for a child's college education and middle-aged folks looking hard toward retirement. I fervently hope that the Republicans will defend that status quo. Such blocking of financial reform will dissolve the Tea Partiers leaving only the hardcore fully brainwashed by Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck. I only hope that the Democrats can time exposure of the Republican's suicide pact so that it falls after their lunatic fringe has picked slate after slate of unelectable ultra-rightists giving the Democrats say, 67 Senate seats and about 300 House members.

I wish I could say that I thought that the Roman Catholic Church could save itself. As an institution and as currently organized I wish it the same quick, dramatic, self-inflicted and painful demise I wish upon the Republican Party. Still it saddens me to say so because of the many, many decent, caring priests, nuns and brothers I have known to work and sacrifice for those in need of comfort and of the most basic needs for food, shelter, clothing and respect. I know that those people of sincere and deep religious calling are pained by and ashamed of the actions of their church hierarchy. Most are attached to their church in ways I respect even as I fail to understand them. Still I can feel that pain and shame and wish they did not have to go through it. I'm sure that they know far better than I that they are the source of any vitality in their church and sole hope for its survival if, it manages to survive rotting from both head and core. Pope Hitlerjugend I and his curia and College of Cardinals are the cancer that is killing their church just as Newt and his neo-fascists are the cancer killing the Republican Party.

Oiling The Cogs Of Cognitive Dissonance II

BBC listening provides me with a lot of material lately.

First, let me say that there are two uses for the term "holistic". The first definition simply means considering the whole. If we are discussing medicine - which we will be momentarily - the most benign version has the doctor considering interactions of medications, how diuretics might aggravate a patient's tendency to form kidney stones and the like. In that sense, holistic anything is wise practice and a clear boon. But the second definition is a popular one that involves a raft of New Age nonsense about auras, spiritual healing, crystals, copper bracelets, herbalism and the like. It is largely hype, sympathetic magic and con-artistry giving a bad name to those who would practice the first type of holism.

Let me also note that I have some qualms about lumping herbalism in with the other scams. As the existence of Taxol, to cite just one famous instance, proves chemicals naturally synthesized by plants can have beneficial effects on human diseases. Plants from lowly molds (e.g. penicillin) to trees (e.g. Taxol) have provided us with some effective treatments for human disease. That said, however, it give no pass to all the extremist herbalist nonsense put forward by con men looking to separate the gullible and the desperate from their cash. I saw this foolishness first hand some years ago. A very dear friend suddenly collapsed one day. She had a particularly aggressive and nasty cancer. Her doctors told her that this cancer was inevitably fatal. She might live 6 to 12 months longer, sometimes people survived a bit longer. Someone in her circle convinced her that a macrobiotic diet was the answer to surviving longer so she rejected conventional treatments with chemotherapy and radiation. The disease ran its course and she was dead in 11 months. The macrobiotic nonsense did nothing for her. It was a placebo. It neither hastened not slowed her cancer's progress. It was simply worthless though a macrobiotic counselor and "holistic health practitioner" made some substantial cash by peddling their worthless trash and nonsense.

What brings this subject up is a recent report by the BBC that the British National Health Service is considering discontinuing payment to holistic medicine con men in a money saving move. A double blind study found no effect of any kind on any medical condition studied by holistic practitioners' efforts.

The radio report brought together a person involved in the study for Britain's National Health Service  and a holistic practitioner from Germany. What struck me immediately was the German holistic practitioner's insistence that his form of medicine must be valid because it has a more than 200 year history. He also insisted that "school" medicine has a bad track record because 200 years ago it promoted treatments that have since been discredited. Both statements are independently verifiable and true. What he did not say is that the quackery of times past in large part involved exactly the quackery he practices today.

A dear friend of mine has an adult daughter who has a "practice" in Southern California, an area that's almost a cliche for its eager adoption of all manner of quackery and lunatic nonsense. His daughter is a very sweet woman. She styles herself, however, as a spiritual healer and is currently making a nice living by charging clients $150 per hour for "healing" them over the phone. It is flat out quackery that persists because the one positive thing that anyone can say about this con is that no one is poisoned as frequently happened in centuries past. The hurt is simply the extraction of cash from someone stupid enough to pay for foolishness that he or she believe has more than a placebo effect.

But back to our German con man/holistic healer. I would suggest that he cannot argue that his form of medicine is effective and valid because it has been practiced continuously since the 18th or 19th Centuries and in the next breath argue that "school" medicine is less effective and valid because medical practices of the 18th or 19th Centuries were unenlightened and have been shown to be quackery. The fact is that the very practices which modern medicine from Harvey and Pasteur onward have relegated to the dustbin are the practices that our German practitioner, my friend's daughter and others like them who are either dishonest or delusional perpetuate today.

I can't applaud the British National Health Service loudly enough for their decision to call a con a con and stop wasting scarce health care cash and resources on garbage. But don't look for that to happen in the United States. Two decades ago some very well connected con men bought Robert Dole, senator from Archer, Daniels Midland, as their front man in removing many of the restrictions the Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had on these snake oil remedies. In the guise of speeding drugs to the market we limited the review functions of the Food and Drug Administration. Much as Phil Gramm shilled for rapacious bankers to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 giving us the multiple banking frauds whose destructive consequences continue to ripple through the world economy, so Dole shilled for Big Pharma (you didn't think he became a viagra spokesman because he was so sexy, did you?) in pulling the teeth from FDA regulations and attacking then FDA Administrator, David Kessler.

Thanks to Dole, the FDA can report that scams like "energy" drinks, cosmetics that can cause permanent damage while effecting unnecessary and minimal changes and snake oil "breathing" remedies are ineffective but can't remove them from the market until and unless they kill people. Thanks to Dole and his corporate sponsors we now have "pro-biotics", the current manifestation of the American fixation on laxatives, that correct the problems that the processed foods with which those corporations stuff us by stuffing us with the bacteria removed from the processed foods. In short, we have less protection from scams, more crap on the market and waste more money on it both in tax dollars and out-of-pocket.

With a reform of the American health care system now enacted into law, we need to take a long, hard look at the British National Health report and start shutting down some of these scams if for no other reason than to control our health care costs. The first step in the process of putting an end to the "holistic" nonsense is to stop assuming that simply because a practice has been going on for hundreds of years it has any validity whatever.

The Republicans of North Korea

Yes. I admit it. I an Un-American. I listen to the BBC. The BBC offers a look at the world beyond the United Kingdom. That view is not entirely free of prejudice but it is almost entirely free of limitations. Partly I presume that that larger view is a legacy of the British Empire on which the sun never set as opposed to America on which, to look at our Teapartiers and other neo-fascist lunatics, one would think that the sun never rose.

I have just finished listening to a report of a BBC correspondent who visited Pyongyang, North Korea's capital for my geographically challenged fellow countrymen. He attended an open meeting with college students in the North Korean capital. One young woman confronted the correspondent and asked in fluent, nearly unaccented English if she seemed uninformed about the world, malnourished, oppressed or ignorant? Clearly she was none of those things. What she was is part of North Korea's supremely entitled and privileged ruling class. Of course she was not ignorant. Of course she was not malnourished. Of course she was not uninformed about the larger world. And of course she was not oppressed because she is part of the elite that oppresses the rest of the nation.

Hearing that report I was struck by the correspondences between that North Korean student's view of her nation and its place in the world and that of our own Republican Party.

In the Republican view, they still have jobs and are very comfortably off thanks to their unconscionably enormous bonuses paid by companies they've driven into the ground at the expense of the less privileged classes. They need no "stimulus package" and, therefore, in their blinkered reasoning, no one else does either.

In the Republican view, they have health care or can afford it if they don't. They need no public option and in fact want to stifle the competition for the insurance companies which they run or on whose boards of directors they have lucrative sinecures. So what if some people they don't know die sooner of preventable diseases or have their families impoverished so their doctor friends can buy that new titanium putter and drive up the the golf course in the newest BMW?

In the Republican view, taxes, any taxes at any level, are too high because they want all of their money. Let the rest of the population make soup out of bark or grass or dirt. After all, the Republicans great-great-grandfathers pulled themselves up by the bootstraps of slaves or non-union workers or exploited immigrants to create the trusts, family foundations and dummy corporations from which the current generation draws a comfortable living.  Therefore, the rest of the nation, every single one of them, should be able to do the same even after the Republicans have repossessed those boots, straps and all.

The Republicans pooh-pooh the disintegration of society...except when they need to do so for fear mongering purposes to distract the attention of the hoi poloi. After all, things are quite civilized in their country clubs and gated communities and they can always hire additional armed security if things amongst the lower classes get more unruly. After all, why should they put their (great-great-grandfather's) hard-earned cash into things like education, health care, jobs programs and social services that only make the great unwashed...uppity and less suitable for service.

The terrible thing about these attitudes shared by the privileged ruling classes in North Korea and America is that the attitudes arise from a lack of empathy and willful ignorance. It matters not in which country these oligarchs live they share and retain power through a pattern of lies designed to maintain their own privileges regardless of the viciousness visited on their fellow citizens.

The Teaparty movement here in the United States is only the latest manifestation of the fact that lying loudly and long enough will always convince one third of the population of your rightness and confuse another third sufficiently to provide an opening for the oligarchs to regain or maintain control.

And oh, if you are worrying about your health, unemployment or mortgage payment those of us who profit from your predicament think it's really all your own fault, but never mind...look over here...there's the Super Bowl...er...Olympics...Final Four...er...some starlet not wearing panties is scooting across a limousine seat.

Miscellany, January, 2010

To paraphrase Benjamin Disraeli, "There are four kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, statistics and Fox News."

The people who are most violently opposed to abortion are those whose parents could have gotten the greatest benefit from the procedure.

Similarly, I completely agree with Barney Frank who observed a couple of decades ago, "Republicans believe that life begins at conception and ends at birth."

Religious fundamentalists and rabid sports fans are living proof that evolution doesn't hold true...in all cases.

Orly Taitz was not born in the United States. Her hair color and grasp of the law are equally honest.

The louder, more often and more emphatically you say you're a "CHRISTIAN" the less likely you are to be one.

If the people who believe in "The Rapture" are the people who will be populating Heaven, being left behind is going to be a picnic. Besides, I'll have my choice of cars.

If the neo-fascist ultra-right thinks Sarah Palin is a leader why haven't we just won by default?

I just adore protesters opposed to single-payer, universal health care who chant, "Hands off my Medicare!"

Shouldn't we ask the police officers murdered from October, 2009 in Washington State whether they think that the Second Amendment conveys an individual right to own firearms? Oops! My bad. They were shot so we can't ask them.

I have ancestors who served in the American Revolutionary Army including at Lexington and Concord. The current groups calling themselves "Minutemen" are an affront to all those who fought for American independence though they fit right into the traditions of Italian Black and German Brown Shirts.

Ditto for the Teaparty Movement.

The essence of Libertarianism is, "Do unto others, grab as much as you can for yourself and get out of there before you're caught."

Nobody needs to undermine the authority the Roman Catholic Church while so many of its priests, bishops and cardinals are doing such yeoman service in undermining it themselves.

Nobody does enough work or works hard enough to justify salaries, let alone bonuses of more than $1,000,000.00 per year.

Stupid us! We give sports, movie and rock stars multiple millions of dollars while they are still in their teens and twenties and then we are shocked (SHOCKED!!!!) when we find they're using drugs, alcohol and screwing everything that passes within reach. Exceptional talent doesn't mean that the person is any brighter than the guy mumbling to himself while dumpster diving.

Not everyone can be President of the United States nor should be. We just spent eight years under the administration of criminals and fools, hopefully putting that idea to rest.

The Bush family is living proof that the British Royal Family isn't the only one suffering from in-breeding.

That Newt Gingrich still speaks about "traditional family values" is irrefutable proof that the right-wing hasn't a single shred of integrity or honesty.

As a cynic and lover of irony, I am delighted that the party of Mark Foley, Larry Craig, Mark Sanford and David Vitter is the party of "family values".

Facing Satan

If we atheists didn't already have Pat Robertson we would have to invent him.

Actually, fundamentalism is the best thing that ever happened to atheism. It's far harder to rip apart a Prince of Peace or a god whose embodiment is love than it is to piss all over blinkered idiots whose god spouts war on unbelievers and hate generally. As I've written before here, fundamentalism is not religion; it's religiosity. That doesn't keep some of the people who are foolish or stupid enough to adhere to it from being pleasant generally and even decent under narrow circumstances. But narrow is the active word here.

I don't believe in either a Big-Imaginary-Friend-In-The-Sky or Satan. I believe that what good there is in the world comes primarily from people being kind and decent to one another in living this life as if it were the only one they will ever have (because I think it is). I also believe that the bulk of evil in this world - and there certainly is evil even without a satan - comes from people being hateful and selfish and narrow minded toward others while living this life as if it were a rehearsal gone wrong as they wait for some reward in another life that will never come.

But let's, for a moment, postulate  universe in which both that Big-Imaginary-Friend-In-The-Sky and Satan exist. If I were satan and wanted to drag as many fools to hell as possible, I can think of no better Pied Piper for the task than a neo-fascist hatemonger disguised as an avuncular fellow who professes himself to be a CHRISTIAN. You want proof? The 700 Club's name derives from the number of the Beast, 666, and Pat Robertson's official age in 1964, the year Barry Goldwater was defeated for the presidency and the year that Lyndon Johnson decided to make sure that Pat's father was defeated in his next senatorial campaign. That's right, folks, Robertson's own program identifies him as an agent of satan.

Want more proof? It's a "club", right? And what color are clubs in a pack of cards? Right! Clubs are black! And satan is the prince of darkness and darkness is black. It's right there in the name.

Ridiculous?

According to Pat Robertson today, January 13, 2009, "Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French ... and they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, 'We will serve you if you'll get us free from the French.' True story. And the devil said, 'OK, it's a deal,' . Ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after another."

How would Pat know it's a "true story"? He couldn't...unless he was there! He has admitted it. In 1804 Pat Robertson himself was in the meeting between the rebellious black slaves of Haiti and satan. Now, we know that Pat certainly is not black...of African descent, I mean. So if he's not a former Haitian slave that only leaves one other presence in the meeting...satan. There you are, boys and girls, proof positive or certainly good enough for Pat Robertson and Glenn Beck, that Robertson is, himself, satan and no other.

You want more proof?

Haiti is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere and not because its people lack industriousness or invention. It is poor for a variety of reasons that range across the natural, personal and political spectrum over two centuries. Someone who controls such things must hate Haiti, right? But Jesus loved the poor. Jesus comforted the poor and afflicted so whoever is harming Haiti must be working counter to Jesus. And who is the adversary of everything CHRISTIAN and religiose?

Whoever said, "Richard Dawkins" should just close this blog now. You don't get it.

No, silly, it's satan again. Satan has visited on Haiti this massive earthquake. It killed the Archbishop of Port au Prince, didn't it? Or would Robertson say that's simply because he was a Catholic? I'm not sure on that one. Still, obviously this is satan's handiwork and satan himself, Pat Robertson, is trying to throw everyone off the track.

Or, perhaps we could look at things a little differently.

Isn't it possible that the Haitian slaves of the 18th and 19th Centuries felt that slavery was an injustice counter to every decent Christian religious principle? Isn't it possible that they were inspired by the revolutions in America and France to seek their freedom and independence? But then again, isn't that another proof that Pat Robertson is satan? After all, who but satan would ascribe to satan a yearning for freedom and independence? Or is it, perhaps, that Pat Robertson is really saying that in 1775 a group of delegates from colonies met in Philadelphia and made a pact with the devil. John Hancock, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and the rest said to satan, "We will serve you if you will free us from the English." and the devil said, "It's a deal." Perhaps that is what Robertson is saying, after all, he was there. He would know.

E-Klan Robes

The argument is utterly absurd on its face.

Here in my home state of Washington and now in Federal Court in California right-wing bigots are claiming the right to wear virtual hoods over their heads. The ironic and absurd contention is that if these terrorists are identified in public they may be subjected to ridicule and intimidation. On its face their argument is that we bigots have an inalienable right to intimidate others but no one else should dare to assert a phony right to intimidate us.

The issue here is not race hatred but rather hatred of gays, lesbians and transgendered individuals who are seeking equal rights with their heterosexual peers.

Back in May of 2009 the Washington Legislature finally gathered the courage to pass what we refer to as the "Everything But Marriage Act" allowing domestic partners of either sex the full benefits of marriage but without legalizing same-sex marriage per se. This act skirted an issue in Washington created by the bigots themselves. In 1998 a voter initiative passed creating a Washington State "Defense of Marriage Act". Marriage, which has had a sad and checkered history throughout time, has been an institution used briefly and, sometimes often, for a half century in America but the threat from which the red-neck bigots and fundamentalist loonies found it needed defending was the possibility that couples of the same sex might marry. Their hysterical rant claimed that heterosexual marriages were somehow threatened by homosexual marriages. How and to what effect they never could coherently specify. The best argument they could muster was that their Big-Imaginary-Friend-In-The-Sky said it was a no-no. This, of course, came from people whose direct antecedents claimed that Afro-Americans were an "inferior" race based on the advice of that same Big-Imaginary-Friend-In-The-Sky. With the Washington "Defense of Marriage Act" on the books, legislators had to tread a bit lightly. Thus they did not do the obvious and correct thing in having the "Defense of Marriage Act" declared unconstitutional followed by passage of a bill extending full marital rights to same-sex couples.

Light tread or not, the bigots marshaled their night-riders and set out to terrorize the state. On September 1, 2009 the Republican Washington Secretary of State certified initiative petitions containing enough signatures to put Referendum 71 on last November's ballot. The bigots are not without lawyers. After all Kenneth Starr and Antonin Scalia are, sadly, still breathing. They managed to couch the petition in language sufficiently obtuse that a Yes vote retained the "Everything But Marriage Act" while a No vote would have repealed it. Thanks, in part, to the bigots' efforts to confuse voters about their purpose and their success in doing so, Referendum 71 was defeated in the 2009 state elections. But what is relevant here is the history between September 1 and November 5, 2009.

Initiative petitions are public documents. That is and has been settled law in Washington State and throughout the United States. But when a pro-gay rights group in Washington announced plans to create a public, on-line database of the signers of the Referendum 71 petitions, all hell broke loose amongst those awaiting The Rapture. Good heavens! They were simply trying to deny equal rights to others and now they might face discriminatory treatment themselves! Horrible! That is, after all, why Klansmen wore hoods!

The courts, up to the U. S. Supreme Court in the person of "Justice" Anthony Kennedy, decided to punt on the issue. If I am being charitable, and, being a dyed-in-the-wool Lefty, I must be even when it grates, I suspect that the punt was meant to split the difference between the settled law that the petition signers' names are public records and the worry that they would be targeted for some unspecified violence (burning rainbows on their front lawns?). In any case, election day, 2009 came and went. The odious Referendum 71 went down to well deserved defeat and the case became moot.

Now we have a trial in Federal Court in San Francisco, California raising the issue of the even more odious Proposition 8 which actually amended the California Constitution to outlaw same sex marriages. Judge Vaughn R. Walker presiding over the case, a Libertarian-leaning appointee of Poppy Bush, wanted to televise the proceedings. Once again the right-wing night-riders objected to having their hoods removed for a broad public claiming that they might be subject to witness intimidation. A compromise went for nothing and now the Supreme Court, once again in the person of Anthony Kennedy, has punted but this time with a level of unabashed absurdity that exponentially exceeds the Washington case.

Indeed, the bigots won't appear in inglorious color on YouTube but there is nothing to prevent any person attending the court proceedings from reporting their names and other identifying information in any public forum available. In short, the Supreme Court injunction will do nothing but turn a video record into verbal reportage.

Yet the very real issue is one of darkness and light. Light, whether sunlight or scrutiny, disinfects. Lots of noisome things grow in the dark. The bigots who promote gay bashing, whether in individual, physical attacks or in public legislative attacks on our gay brothers and sisters, need to be brought out into the light to disinfect our society. The real issue is that these bigots are ashamed of their vile bigotry just as the Klansmen that they resemble needed hoods to hide their identities from the larger public. When we turned over the racist rocks under which Byron dela Beckwith, Cecil Price, Lawrence Rainey, Sam Bowers, Robert Chambliss and Thomas Blanton cowered, the killings and bombings stopped and Afro-Americans could go about their business in Mississippi and Alabama with far less fear than when the hate of those monsters festered in the darkness. It's now time to expose the current crop of night-riding bigots to the light so that their public shame and native cowardice ends this odious chapter of American bigotry.

We had to wait thirty years for the play and subsequent movie Inherit the Wind publicly showing the vacuousness of the fundamentalists in the Scopes Monkey Trial. I doubt that we will have to wait so long for the public display and discrediting of this new subset of bigots. It won't do away with the bigotry in itself just as we are still battling over evolution eighty-five years after William Jennings Bryan discredited himself and fundamentalism in Dayton, Tennessee. However, dragging the bigots into the light will quiet them and purge the public forum of their hateful viciousness.

We need this publicity not only for ourselves but for our world as well. The fundamentalist bigots are now financing and promoting gay bashing legislation in Uganda that is only slightly different from that in Hitler's Germany. Their churches and the overflowing, tax-free offerings on which their ministries of hate depend operate in darkness. They preach that they "hate the sin but love the sinner" while sponsoring the death penalty for the sinner. Public exposure of their bigotry will necessarily cut into the offerings in the plates passed on Sunday mornings as people unwilling to be publicly associated with such odious policies opt for other, less extreme places of worship.

So I am cheerfully awaiting the first reports of the names, addresses and even cell phone pictures of the bigots who want to deny that most American belief that "all men are created equal" and the fulfillment of that in the assertion that we all have equal rights regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, or who we love.

An Inconvenient Religiosity

I just recently spent a week with my oldest daughter, my son-in-law and my four grandsons. It was wonderful to see the boys who are far too far away. While I was there my daughter related an incident from one of her recent speaking engagements that is my current subject.

The daughter in question is a notable in the movement toward sustainable uses of the environment, particularly in agriculture. She spoke at a conference in Georgia organized to bring evangelical Christians together with environmentalists over global climate change. From the environmentalist point of view it seemed as if an immanent threat to the creation of the evangelicals' big imaginary friend in the sky should create a natural alliance. After all, if you want to save the world it doesn't much matter whether you're saving it because you don't want to die or because it violates something you misinterpret from a work of poetry and historical fiction you call "The Bible".

Unfortunately, the fundamentalists who make up the bulk of evangelical Christians, as I have noted before have answers and need not ask questions. With the discussion turning to rising sea levels that could drown a number of populated islands and coasts one fundamentalist offered that there was nothing to worry about because his god had promised Noah that he would not again destroy the world with a flood.

Say what?

Well, it's right there in the King James Version, isn't it? God, speaking in his native Jacobean English, promises Noah that he will send no more floods to cover the earth. Ergo and ipso facto all this melting of ice caps is simply irrelevant. God said no more floods.

My daughter couldn't learn tact from me because I don't have any, but she did learn to think on her feet and answered this poor fool that god may have promised that he wouldn't flood the world again but he didn't say he would stop humanity from destroying the earth with a flood. This, she said, seemed to give this person pause. Whether it will penetrate the armor of ignorance this person has eagerly donned we shall see and can only hope. Personally, I don't think it will. Such a distinction requires too much of the thought from which fundamentalists flee headlong.

Thought and questioning are anathema to fundamentalism but what is absolutely essential to the fundamentalist mindset is victimhood. These folks absolutely must see themselves as a tiny, persecuted minority in a vast sea of humanity fully prepared to attack them at the slightest provocation. They are never the oppressors. In the evangelicals' delusion they hang the witch, assassinate the apostate, burn the book and hold themselves apart in a closed and closed minded circle of their congregations as a desperate defense against the attacks of others whom, in their clouded minds, they would never think of attacking.

Take the farrago of "the homosexual agenda" for example. For the evangelical fundamentalists they are a tiny island of true Christians amongst a vast sea of corrupt mainstream sects and homosexuals salivating over their children. The mainstream sects, in their view, have capitulated to the gays, lesbians and transgendered but weren't "true" Christians to begin with since only the fundamentalists descended, uncorrupted from the original Christian apostles. The homosexuals are out to victimize this tiny, beset minority. The gays are the lions to whom the mainstream religions, in the role of Nero's Roman legions, would feed the poor defenseless evangelicals. A simple demand for equal rights under law like the right to visit a sick partner, inherit the share of what had been joint property for many years and, of course, the right to marry are not cries for justice, they are subtle attacks on these "true" Christians.

The fact is that these evangelical fundamentalists, the Bob Jones, Oral Roberts, Fred Phelps, Pat Robertson followers are not Christians at all. Their crabbed, selfish and blinkered religiosity is simply a fun house mirror version of Christianity, distorted beyond recognition and with barely a millimeter or two of depth. They know what their god said to the fictional Noah but not what is actually happening to their own world. Worse yet, their willful ignorance speeds the destruction of what they claim is their god's creation. Further, and worst of all, when they do acknowledge that destruction they find some excuse that fits with their willful ignorance much as those twin banes of genuine religion Falwell and Robertson did when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. And, of course, when tornadoes destroy churches in Kansas or Oklahoma their god had taken a lunch break or perhaps was away in the bathroom and just didn't notice. Those devastations are accidents, not visitations of their god's wrath. Perhaps they should be wary of the fact that no voice from the skies has instructed any of them to build an ark. Perhaps their god has simply decided that they are so blockheaded and stupid that explaining the measure of a cubit wouldn't be worth his while. Perhaps their yearning for victimhood will get it's final expression when their big, imaginary friend in the sky makes them the victims of climate change.

How Quickly We Forget or We're Forever Blowing Bubbles

Someone, Napoleon, George Santayana, who really said it doesn't matter, observed that those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it. Of course, the originator of that quote was himself speaking in an age before mass electronic media and definitiely before those mass electronic media were completely made subservient to corporate con men and pirates.

Just over one year ago the worldwide economy collapsed because a bunch of con men and pirates convinced people who were supposed to know better that securities based on dodgy mortgages were a good thing because everyone, just everyone knew for an absolute fact that home prices would never ever fall and that every person conned into signing a mortgage contract built on incomes just as falsified and inflated as those home prices would make every single payment. Mortgage backed derivitives were a scam just as surely as Bernard Madoff's investment firm was a scam.

As I write this the spot price of gold has reached $1,145.90 and has risen as high as $1,500.00 per ounce of 24kt gold bullion. Just a decade ago the price of gold was at $284.00 per ounce.

Ask yourself a few questions, please.

In the last decade have we stopped mining gold?

In the last decade has three-quarters of  the world's gold supply disappeared?

Is there anything to indicate that there is less gold today than there was a decade ago?

The answer to all these questions is a definitive and resounding, NO!

So why is gold over 400% more valuable in late November, 2009 than it was in late November, 1999?

The answer to that question is, gold is not more valuable now than a decade ago. But what it does signial is that the con is on again. Or as the late Fred Rogers would have said, "That's a big word but can you say it with me? Bubble."

I know that this will be painful for those who have trouble remembering that they were conned just a year ago or those who see the world through the not so Funhouse mirrors of Fox News but we have actually been here before. Let me whisk you back some thirty years and more to the last gold bubble. It was a bubble blown by a silver pipe.

Back in the early 1970s as our fourth truly criminal president*, Richard Nixon, was finally being driven from the office he never deserved to hold in the first place, the Hunt Brothers of Texas, Nelson Bunker and William Herbert, commenced a scheme to corner the world silver market. With the support of some similarly criminal Arab plutocrats, the Hunts drove the price of silver from $1.95 per ounce up to a high of $54.00. Their scheme was virtually identical to that carried out by Jay Gould and Jim Fiske in cornering the gold market a little more than century before. The Nixon Administration's removal of the cap on the price of gold was the immediate spur for the Hunt's actions.

The scheme foundered in March, 1980 when the price of silver dropped by more than 50% in one day and caused a 16% drop in the Dow Jones Stock Market average. The Hunts and their Middle Eastern cronies made a pile of money to add to the piles they already had and, in the meantime, lengthened the economic recession that began under Nixon.

As a corollary to the silver fever that developed and even persisted after the collapse of the Hunts' silver bubble, gold skyrocketed. In mid 1980 it hit about $600.00 per ounce before falling back to less than a third of that high. A lot of con men and pirates profited while a lot of other folks were left hiding $600.00 Krugerrands that were subsequently worth only about $200.00 in safe deposit boxes. The economy continued in the doldrums through 1983.

We hear the same drumbeat today that we heard back in 1980. The world economy is in the crapper. The only safe hedge against inflation is something of intrinsic value like gold. Gold can only go higher. Fear spread by the con men and pirates pulls money out of the economy and into the pockets of the same con men and pirates who were selling you mortgage backed derivitives just over a year ago. The con men and pirates profit from the fear they spread and in a few months someone holding a fist full of $1,200.00 American Gold Eagles, Canadian Maple Leafs or Krugerrands will be out between $600 to $800.00 per coin and the con men will be that much richer.

Can you say, "Bubble?"

We are not simply condemned to repeat the history from which we don't learn. Rather we are condemned to repeat the history that the con men and pirates convince us to unlearn. They appeal to our fear, our greed, our ignorance and our bigotry for their own profit then distract us with tabloid crap until they can run the next scam. Caveat emptor is their battle cry and excuse. Those stupid people whose incomes mortgage brokers inflated outrageously should have known better. Blame the victim of the scam, not the criminal who perpetrated it.

Just remember to sell those Krugerrands bought in 1980 now and stay away from the gold scammers of 2009.

*(Note: I count Rutherford B. Hayes, Warren G. Harding and Calvin Cooledge as first through 3rd of our 7 truly criminal presidents. Herbert Hoover was an ideologue who founded an institution that has become a criminal enterprise. Ronald Reagan and the Bushes, Poppy and Dubya round out the 7.)

Speaking Volumes

During the summer of 2009 we were beset by a collection of charlatans, dupes and dunces shouting, "Read the bill," at town hall meetings held to discuss health care reform. The charlatans knew, the dupes didn't know and the dunces were to stupid to care that there was no one bill to read.

Now we have the Congressional Republicans introducing a 200 page health care reform bill and touting it as a work of exceptional brilliance when contrasted with the majority Democrats' bill that is some 1900 and more pages long. This is the same mentality that equates reading the Cliff's Notes of War and Peace with reading the entire novel. It is great for the dunces whose attention spans are shorter than the life of most subatomic particles. But there's an adage that, I think, applies here: you get what you pay for.

So why would a bill hovering in the range of 2000 pages be so large and another bill purporting to do the same thing be one-tenth that size?

First, let's consider that health care and related industries represents somewhere between 30 and 35 per cent of the American economy. The Republicans will tell you that in ominous tones as if that much of the nation's economy were about to be murdered. So, let me ask you, would you like about a third of the nation's economy considered carefully and in detail or would something that is, by contrast, scribbled on the back of an envelope be equally good?

Second, there is the long, arduous effort that Democrats have made to consider and include Republican ideas where they have been offered in a cooperative spirit. Not just this year but over the last thirty years Democrats have made sincere efforts to overcome objections by Republicans even when, as now, the objections are simply hysterical and obstructionist. Currying favor with senators like Olympia Snow of Maine has added bulk to a health care overhaul.

Third, the stated goals of health care reform are to extend coverage to all Americans, improve health in the population as a whole and control the run-away inflation of health care costs while not reducing the coverage enjoyed by anyone who currently has health insurance. Achieving those goals requires some careful consideration of the effects of reform on private insurance plans, on Medicare, Medicaid, the Veterans and Indian Health Services, military medical care, private for profit and non-profit medical facilities, health care cooperatives, HMOs, the Federal prison system and 50 states and additional territories and their state and state licensed health care systems and providers. The dunces, dupes and charlatans may clamour for something that their tiny minds and blinkered visions can encompass, but I for one think it's a very good idea that there be a great volume of paper in a bill that has attempted to consider all the implications of reform on these systems.

The point is that a 200 page bill is not a serious consideration of health care reform. It cannot possibly be such. Yet to the dunces, that segment of the population that the great H. L. Mencken aptly called the "booboisie", are ready to surrender themselves to something that is a sham simple version of health care reform in the same way that they surrendered themselves to a sham common man and genuine simpleton in George W. Bush. They take the absurd position that something one-tenth the size must be better than the larger version.

Even these booboisie could figure out that a box containing 20 ounces of corn flakes is a better deal than one containing 2 ounces if both are priced the same but when it comes to a bill in Congress they clamour for the short weight that short changes them.

But that's not the only issue with volumes currently in the news.

Sarah Palin has uh...written a...book. Her biography is a hot item on Amazon despite its being weeks from actual release. There may actually be some fun in reading whatever the ghostwriter recruited by Palin's handlers has put together but for it to be a best seller even before publication raises my eyebrows and probably ought to raise yours.

Let me pull out an incident from my long memory to contrast a little here.

Back in 1988 and 1989 there was a scandal involving House Speaker Jim Wright of Texas. It seems that Speaker Wright had actually written a slim book. Not many people were clamouring for copies for some friends of Wright's bought some copies in bulk. Those friends freely admitted that they were attempting to help Wright finance his campaigns for his seat in the House of Representatives. They were using the book purchases as a subterfuge meant to evade campaign finance limits. This scandal caused Wright to resign his seat in May, 1989.

Given the paucity of ideas rattling around in the space between Sarah Palin's ears, perhaps someone ought to look into the sales of her book. Perhaps some of the neo-fascist plutocrats that regularly hire amiable dunces as political fronts for their rapacity are buying cases of the Palin book for kindling in their ski lodges or hunting camps. Their bulk purchases could be seen as political contributions except for one thing. Governor Palin isn't governor any longer, is she?

Everyone was puzzled by the dramatic resignation of Palin as Alaska governor last summer. Puzzled, that is, unless they were just a little bit cynical and were thinking like trailer trash. You see, Sarah Palin is not now running for anything. She can rake in all the cash she wants without violating anything but reason and decency before she declares herself a candidate for something like president of these here United States of America. Had she remained governor of Alaska to the end of her term she would have been that much poorer and have had about a year and a half less to suck at the teat of embarassingly large private neo-fascist fortunes.

In the one case we have the dumbing down of complex issues seen as a positive thing by the boboisie that the forms the Republicans base and in the other we have the very personification of that dumbed down booboisie pretending to be a bestselling author...with a little help from her neo-fascist friends. It's an apotheosis of ignorance that speaks volumes about the Republicans and their base, you betcha.

Defining Terms - Religion vs. Religiosity

I have been wont to contrast the terms "religion" and "religiosity" in these entries. It's more than time that I define their meaning.

A number of factors make this a timely discussion but the most immediate causes are the attempt by Pope Hitler Jugend the First to poach Anglican bigots and the decision by a French Court to cut through the religiosity, the veneer of religion, and define the Church of Scientology for what it is, the cult of a bunch of con artists purveying a lot of idiotic nonsense for personal profit.

Despite the appearance that I deride all religion, I have a certain respect for actual religion sincerely held. True, I do not believe in any god of the sort that George Carlin called "a big, imaginary friend in the sky." However, I do believe that religion - and here I specifically mean "religion" - can be a good thing. There is clear evidence for that positive benefit. The current Dalai Lama is unquestionably a person of deep religion and a force for good in our world. Dorothy Day and her Catholic Workers' Movement have been a force for good. The great Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated by the neo-fascists of El Salvador for his religion. I have known a number of people of deeply held religious belief from nuns and ministers to captains in the Salvation Army to decent lay people who manifest their religion in positive ways. I have also known good people who find comfort in their religion during trials physical, moral and circumstantial as they progress toward that universal vanishing point of death. What is common to all of those people is a depth of knowledge and understanding that comes from examination of their faiths. They have posed questions and found an answer in something far larger and more mysterious than themselves. They have decided that the grand mystery is god while I have decided that it is chance. Their decisions and mine come from confronting our questions and finding our own satisfactory answers.

Religiosity is the opposite. Religiosity derides understanding, thought, questioning and genuine confrontation with problems. Religiosity can be very comforting but at a cost. It matters not at all whether we are discussing Christian, Jewish, Mormon, Islamic, Hindu or any other form of fundamentalist religiosity, the basic message to adherents can be summed up as, "Don't think. Don't question. The answers are already laid out for you." Religiosity is religion for dummies, real dummies. Those dummies may be relatively smart people in other areas but they have such a need for certainty in something that they are willing and even eager to put aside rational thought to achieve that certainty.

Why that eagerness? I cannot look into the minds of those eager to empty those same minds and know for certain the motives - reasons would be granting them far too much - of those who surrender to the ignorance of religiosity. Clearly those motives are closely related if not identical to those of cultists. Essentially those motives seem to stem from blind egotism, selfishness and an utter lack of empathy. Yet also included seems to be a species of infantilism, a yearning for an authority figure who will tell the follower what to do and think and feel in all aspects of his or her life. The religiose seem to find comfort in a top-down structure in which a guru, Duce, Fuhrer, Pope or preacher pander to their weaknesses and bigotries.

While religion - many of whose sects started out in bursts of religiosity's fervor - tends to say that there are many things which we do not understand raising many questions. Religion suggests that in considering those questions and attempting to reach understanding it has concluded that the resolution to their uncertainty a god of some name or other.

Religiosity, on the other hand suggests that there are no questions and that a lack of understanding is simply a species of "over-thinking" the problem. All answers have been laid out in the past. All answers are in some book. Any confusion results from an imperfect understanding of that book, an understanding which the local imam, guru, rabbi or pastor is more than willing to supply for you from his special, revelatory insight. You need only surrender to the book, the leader, the cult. And, by the way, how do you take your coffee and would you like a piece of the cake that Mildred made?

Yes, the cultists are nothing if not welcoming and homey. It's only when you find that you like these people and you get some clues that they share your biases, fears and anger that the dogma of religiosity comes out. It may sound a bit odd at first but how can it be bad if it comes from the nice grandmother handing you a brownie and how can it be wrong if these people fear what you fear and hate what you hate?

A few years ago a person whom I'd met over the Internet through a common hobby interest insisted to me that her Baptist sect was not Protestant. She was a committed follower of Bob Jones, Sr. It seems that Bob Jones, Jr. had strayed into error in her view when he allowed some room for some contact amongst the races. She insisted that her faith had been transmitted directly from the original disciples of Jesus through the Cathars and Albigensians and that her faith as preached by Bob Jones, Sr. survived uncorrupted and undiluted until 1927. Apart from the fact that even a rudimentary knowledge of the beliefs of the Cathars and Albigensians quickly turns that claim into utter nonsense, the very premise that one set of ideas could be passed down for over 1900 years without the least divergence creeping in is simply insane. Yet what she claimed had its own logic. Like all cults, in order to isolate its adherents from all others there must be an ideology that the cultists are different from everyone else. They must be an elect with entitlement to special knowledge and privileges not available to those without excluded from or not yet privy to special grace conferred on the cultists. She had "drunk the Kool-Aid" in a way that is the metaphorical equivalent of the Jonestown horror from which we get the phrase.

This woman did not need to think. She was part of the Bob Jones-town Cult and enfolded in the unadulterated teachings of the Jesus who said, as Scripture tells us, "Suffer the little children to come unto me...but not the niggers." Her Jesus says, "For as much as you have done it unto these, my brethren, - only the white ones who are of the Bob Jones approved faith - you have done it unto me. And the rest can go suck wind." She holds these beliefs because they are part of her own visceral bigotry into which no thought, no question can penetrate and of which no deeper understanding is necessary or even allowed.

When former Arkansas governor, hale fellow well met and thoroughly frightening presidential candidate, Mike Huckabee, insists that he opposes the idea of evolution, he is placing himself in this camp of the religiose and mindless. Despite all attempts to manufacture phony evidence to the contrary, there is an overwhelming body of empirical evidence that life on this planet evolved by random, natural selection over millions of years. There is no valid evidence to the contrary. Yet Christian fundamentalist dogma insists that every word of the Bible is true, accurate and the word of their "big, imaginary friend in the sky." The answer "for dummies" is that the Biblical account, quick, easy and confined to a couple of chapters is the only answer. The Biblical account must necessarily be the only permissible answer largely because if it is not literally true then other Biblical stories might not be literally true either. If one thread in the fabric unravels the whole system of belief comes into question and questions are exactly that from which the religiose flee.

Religiosity would simply be the stuff of satire - not that it isn't already - were it not deadly dangerous. The Hasidic gangs in some New York City neighborhoods that beat up Jews moving their cars to the opposite side of the street on a Saturday are different only in specifics from the Hindu fundamentalists who destroyed a mosque in Amritsar or the suicide bombers who flew planes into the World Trade Centre eight years ago. The details of the acts are different, not the fanatical motivation.

Another aspect of religiosity, peculiar to American Christianity but with analogs in other religions, manifests itself in a perverse dogma of wealth and material success. One would think that the religion whose founder insisted that it would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into heaven might not be a congenial home for a doctrine that Jesus wants his followers to be rich yet from the late Rev. Ike to the salesmen preaching in contemporary mega-churches the doctrine of Jesus the bringer of wealth finds voice in sermon after sermon. Like the hot coffee and pastries after church, this is part and parcel of the con. Not only is the mega-church welcoming and friendly but it promises its adherents prosperity and wealth through it many personal networking opportunities. After all, the wealth and success of the parishioner means a heaping offering plate and hefty income for the pastor.

It is actually nothing new. One of the great examples of architecture in the city of Boston is Henry Hobson Richardson's Trinity Church in Copley Square. Trinity is the church built for the great 19th Century preacher Phillips Brooks. If we posit a pantheon of gods the great god of Old Boston Brahmin wealth and Robber Baron lucre resides within Trinity's Roman arches there in Copley Square. Yet Brooks preached to his well-off congregation of responsibility and the obligations which their wealth imposed. Today's gospel of wealth is blissfully devoid of guilt. Any number of preachers will tell you that you deserve every penny you can squeeze out of anyone in your path. There is always an appeal for the odd addition to the church, personal jet for the minister, etc. Still, as I've pointed out before what's good for the parishoners' wallets is equally good for the preachers' wallets as well. It is a very ancient problem which, in early Christianity, was known as Simony, a term too little used and far less understood today.

The wonderful Sarah Vowell published an insightful and quirky study of my ancestors entitled The Wordy Shipmates. She concludes that both the best and worst of America originate with the founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and Plimouth Plantations. Though their self-righteousness is the bedrock of the worst bigotry, xenophobia and jingoism in the American character, their rejection of self-satisfaction and insistence that greater knowledge of their world led to greater knowledge of their god forms the bedrock of what is great and good in the American character too. Ms. Vowell's coming to that conclusion takes questioning and thought. It's why she is a writer and performer worthy of attention and on many levels. It is also why she and her book are anathema to religiosity.

Religiosity is, no offense to Soren Kierkergaard, always deals in eithers and ors. Everything must be true or false, black or white, in or out, right or wrong. There can be nothing between. Complexity leads to questions, uncertainty and confusion. Religiosity avoids complexity just as it does thought and questioning.

The great Rev. William Sloane Coffin said that we cannot blame god for the people who believe in him. I think he was correct though I think we can properly separate those who espouse religion from those infected with the disease of mere religiosity.

So when I use the term religion properly I am speaking of something of substance. Religion has depth, intelligence and complexity. One arrives at religion through understanding and questioning. Religion is open, permissive and alive. It can grow and change as ones understanding develops and evolves.

When defining religiosity the facile phrase "a mile wide and an inch deep" springs to mind but that phrase is far too generous. Religiosity is narrow, crabbed and without perceptible depth. It is an excuse for bigotry, hatred and exclusion. Religiosity is, quite literally, the apotheosis of ignorance.

So that is the distinction I regularly draw between religion and religiosity. It is what I mean by the terms. I will apologize for the times when I rage at fundamentalists and their claptrap and lump the religious with the religiose. What I will never apologize for is insulting religiosity because it is impossible to insult such crap too much. Religiosity is, at ground, the worst insult to religion there is.