Evangelicals voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump to be
president, and polls indicate that they haven’t wavered in their enthusiasm for
President Trump and the GOP despite the opinion of a growing majority of
Americans that, because of his “many scandals after only one year as president”
and because of his “manifest unfitness for high office, Mr. Trump is easily the
worst president in U.S. history,” as one national poll concluded.
This has led political scientists and pollsters to wonder
why Mr. Trump can still count on his base of evangelical Christians even though
his behaviour is obviously unchristian. According to the president’s
many critics, his mendacity, sexism, racism, bigotry, narcissism, and personal
wealth all indicate that Donald Trump has no interest in even appearing to care
about the Christian message, and yet the most vocal American Christians flock
to Trump and to the Republican Party, which has so far shielded Mr. Trump from
impeachment proceedings.
Mr. Birdbrain, a televangelist in Kentucky and author of
4,012 books on evangelical Christianity, held a press conference in which he
announced that he believes evangelicals support Donald Trump precisely because
they think he’s “not just a God-awful president and an abysmal human being,” but “the
Antichrist in the flesh.”
When asked why so many supposedly earnest Christians would
intentionally cheer for the Antichrist, whereas the New Testament is widely
interpreted as preferring Christ to Satan’s earthly representative, Mr.
Birdbrain said, “The Antichrist is close enough. I mean, we’ve been waiting a
long, long time for Jesus Christ to return. It’s been over two thousand years
and the Bible says he was supposed to come back before the first generation of
his followers died. He’s evidently been delayed, to say the least, and many
Christians now are getting impatient.
“So when we see the Antichrist, Donald Trump, in our very
midst we figure, well, it’s only four letters away from ‘Christ,’ right? You
take away the ‘anti’ and lo and behold, you’ve got the Christ. We’ve been waiting too long and Antichrist is close enough to Christ.
That’s why Trump has my unconditional support and I know I speak for tens of
thousands of my evangelical congregants.”
Leon Birdbrain went on to explain that he wears an upside
down cross around his neck for similar reasons. “Once again, it’s simple: it’s
close enough. You just turn the cross around 180 degrees and you’ve got the
old-time cross, so I’m still in God’s good graces.”
According to Mr. Birdbrain, if President Trump does manage
to destroy the planet, “it will be close enough. Christians have been waiting a
long time for God to destroy human civilization to install his divine kingdom,
so if the Antichrist accomplishes that in God’s absence, because of whatever’s
been delaying Jesus Christ for so long, evangelicals will be fine with that.
Either way, we’ll have a wrecked planet, so what’s the difference who pulls the
trigger? Hopefully at that point God will finally step in to fix things and
everything will be good as new. Like Satan, the Antichrist is being used by God
anyway, so it’s all good.
"and author of 4,012 books" cracked me up. I mean, it's entirely realistic in that world. In fact, except maybe for the name "Birdbrain", there's nothing about this post that I'd find impossible if I read it in a newspaper. The past year has made satire almost superfluous...
ReplyDeleteI'm glad someone noticed that detail. The reason you'll find that evangelical leaders write so many books is because they can, because they're con artists out to make as much money as possible. They're like Stephen King except their books are short and devoid of original ideas. They just feed the gullible, brainwashed readers the Christian version of red meat, repeating the same nonsense over and over again. How easy it would be to play tennis without the net!
DeleteAfter writing quite a few articles, I know personally how easy it would be to mindlessly repeat myself. You can build up stock phrases and ideas and just write on autopilot, but if you care at all about intellectual integrity and getting to the truth, you've got to avoid that easy path even if it's the lucrative one. And so I consciously try not to repeat myself on this blog, even though I know there's some overlap between the articles.
For example, I took several articles to explore the meaning of the "undead God" idea, and once I was satisfied with that analysis, I stopped using that phrase so much, because it became too easy. It's the same with the "alpha, beta, omega" line of argument. I still assume it, but I don't use those terms as crutches much anymore, because crutches are detrimental to philosophical thinking and to the art of writing. So that's what really annoys me about the lazy evangelical writers: they prove that low quality rises to the top. It's really a problem with capitalism and with democracy, too.
This satirical article was inspired by my exchange with Tom Gilson, when I noticed that his pitiful blog is ranked very highly on Feedspot's Top 100 Philosophy Blog List, which is a disgrace. He writes with SEO parameters in mind, as I pointed out to him. In a recent article of his, called "Atheism and the Fear of Believing Something that might be wrong," he demonstrates that he has no idea how science works. This is how he explains the scientific method:
"Don’t believe (or at least don’t publish) anything unless you’re really sure it’s for real.
"In science that’s a very sensible standard: When scientists publish, they’re generally reporting it as a finding everyone can count on. They’re saying it’s true — so it had better be. Granted, it doesn’t always work that way in actual practice, but that’s the standard, the ideal."
The guy has no idea about Popper on falsification. He thinks science works by confirming rather than disconfirming hypotheses, as if scientists publish only when they're certain they're right rather than when they're ready to submit a hypothesis to the gauntlet of independent testing and counterarguments. I literally felt pity for him and couldn't bring myself to comment on his garbage articles anymore, not even to alert him to the fact that I've demolished his "Jesus: Lord or Legend?" article. But the point is that such evangelicals do leave themselves open to being satirized. Mind you, so does everything else.
Yeah, the idea now that satire is superfluous is close to being Adam Curtis's point in "HyperNormalization." When we get used to the abnormal being normal, anything can be made to seem like anything else. It's like Stephen Colbert's point about truthiness which he made way back in the George W. Bush days, and which is similar to Orwell's point about doubletalk. The con is to gaslight the victims, to make them lose their trust in logic and their good judgment, so that they let everything slide. So like the frog in the slowly-melting pot, we won't know our societies are shams until it's too late.
well accuse me for saying this but the real false messiah is the former president of the united states of america Barry barrack Hussein Obama or it is the current pope Francis or if you are really look at history and what makes sense in the bible it is lord Maitreya a ascended master who will appear to be like Jesus the stereotype we seen in movies, television, and other things not mentioned in the holy scriptures. this lord Maitreya the Antichrist son of perdition will arrive on the scene just as a world wide war maybe involving Iran, Israel, north Korea vs south Korea or some other war involving Syria or maybe a new war against Russia there could be a fake alien invasion really being fallen angels will come down to earth and deceive the world with all kinds of lies and deceptive miracles lord Maitreya will look like a white European but the real Jesus is either brown, light brown, red skinned, or black which is very different from what we seen in paintings and sculptures by the way one of the ten commands from almighty lord Yahweh is not to make any graven images of anything in the heavens above, the earth,or what is in hell.
ReplyDeleteIf there was a real Jesus, he would have been a false messiah too. The notion that there's a supernatural person who created the universe and who periodically sends us spiritual leaders who act as mouthpieces for his revelation is ludicrous.
ReplyDelete