Fast Track For A Sacred Cow

Agnes is part of a larger problem, though a prominent fang in the snake.

We were all treated this week, among the detritus of political campaign and megaphonic hairpieces, to the news that Pope Francis had officially recognized a second intercessory miracle attributed to the ghoulish figure of Mother Theresa. It startled me, as I had forced my knowledge of this dreary procession into the fog only to have it snapped back forefront by the fawning and wholly supportive litany of our news outlets.

Mother Theresa, whom I shall now be properly referring to as Agnes, is known to us as a benign and beatific figure. She has “Mother” in her self-granted title, affecting an elevated and benevolent position, and her relentless PR machine has done nothing for the last fifty years but embellish that persona while trying to keep her cruelty and hypocrisy a secret from us.

She has also been on the fast track to sainthood essentially since the moment of her death. The organization which bears her name, the Missionaries of Charity, continues to take in obscene amounts of cash from around the world while operating little more than death hotels. Claiming over four thousand nuns and nineteen of these horror show hospices in Calcutta alone, the last benevolent thing the sisters have done was to shut down adoption centers in India due to overwhelming religious intolerance. The intolerance, of course, originating with the sisters and directed at India's adoption laws, which do not exclude un- or formerly-married individuals.

Between then and now, the doddering form of Pope John Paul II claimed as authentic the story related by a woman healed of her cancer by intercession from Agnes's picture. The woman's doctors and husband told a very different story, but what need have we of doctors when glowing snapshots are among us? It comes as no surprise to read that the benevolent Missionaries of Charity are accused of illegally retaining the woman's medical records which document her year-long course of professional treatment, as well as pressuring the hospital staff to endorse this nonsense about miracles. The miracle that has just been recognized by the current Pope dates to 2008, and involved the same kind of nonsense around a Brazilian man's brain tumors. I unfortunately haven't been able to find any substantive article regarding actual details, but the Vatican Insider described it as “scientifically impossible.” The same Vatican, I remind you, that has never accepted or understood anything scientific until it was force fed to them. These things are on record, you can read as much about them as you can stomach. I describe them only to sketch out for you exactly what it is this dead woman is being credited with, and that these insulting and obviously delusional lies are what puts Agnes at the right hand of the creator she didn't believe in.

Agnes's personal documents reflected that she had no faith in the existence of God. The man responsible for examining those documents as part of the first step in canonization, Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, argues she was only having a half-decade “dark night of the soul” and that the cynical analysis of people like myself fails to properly understand her intent. But what other explanation could come from a representative of the nation-state responsible for both promoting and profiting from the never-ending victory lap Agnes seemed to be on? Incidentally, it's remarkable to me that the Vatican would not only allow her non-belief to become public, but that the clear contradiction between being a non-believer and a candidate for canonization seems to mean nothing.

Before the fourth century, the only saints were martyrs. If you wanted a seat in the VIP box, you had to die for your faith, preferably in a very public and painful way. Regional religious heroes, now including holy men who were conspicuously dead of natural causes, began to become venerated with approval of local bishops. This went on until 1170, when Pope Alexander the Stylish claimed any and all rights to canonization, because why the hell not. Three years later, it became actively illegal to venerate outside the Church's authority, with real-world laws to punish people for liking a dead guy just a little too much. Nothing particularly interesting to this conversation happens for quite a long time, until 1983 when JP II starts hacking bits off Alexander's game plan to streamline the process. One of the best bits to go was the dedicated position of opposition, someone responsible for the argument that the candidate for sainthood didn't deserve it. Arguments against can still be suggested, but to the best of my knowledge the Vatican no longer finds it necessary to challenge itself from within in almost any fashion.

The process begins with the potential saint's death, and before the first bureaucratic papers are shuffled a period of five years is supposed to elapse. This is to allow for fervor to die down, ostensibly to ensure that mob rule combined with the observable uptick in popular people's esteem after they die does not overwhelm what passes for reason at the Vatican. Agnes was not held to this tradition, as the examination of her writings – the first official step toward sainthood – began well before and was concluded by the time of her death. Following the examination and approval of the candidate's personal papers, their corpse is to be exhumed and examined. This is to ensure that no wacko cults have been messing around with the remains or using the tomb as a site for bizarre rituals, as well as the ritual lopping off of choice bits of the corpse to save as relics. You can almost swim in the irony, as well as feel a little sadness we never got to see the Pope chasing Agnes through the Vatican waving a pair of golden garden shears.

Once the Vatican ensures the candidate's corpse will stay where it is told and the choice cuts are securely pickled, the Pope publicly declares you a hero. It's really only an honorary thing at this point, as the candidate still doesn't get any feasts or churches named after them. It's worth noting that, at this point, the church will not acknowledge that the candidate is, in fact, in heaven at all. It seems counterintuitive, I know, to think that a person could be in line for sainthood without being in heaven, but nothing is so ironclad as a rule open to interpretation. There's some good news, though. The candidate can have their image graven across all kind of prayer-themed merchandise – probably nothing wrong with worshipping a graven image, after all – and use that merchandise to build a fanbase, thereby increasing the probability that some delusional person will credit their hallucinatory fantasy to the candidate's intercession. One could be forgiven at this point for thinking that this is less a somber and spiritual separation of the wheat from the chaff, more a brutally arrogant and solipsistic swimsuit contest judged on hysterical fervency and theocratic cheerleading.

We now reach the point Agnes had attained by the time of her death, attribution of miracles. Agnes shouldn't have even been considered for another half-decade, I remind you, but instead the Pope could not have thrown the miracle flag faster. It is at this third step in the canonization process that the church will finally publicly claim that the candidate's eternal being is ensconced firmly in the heavenly hereafter. Everything they preached from childhood indoctrination or adult conversion about how to get to heaven and avoid death was only the first part of the story. They withheld that not everyone would actually be getting MVP status, class warfare evidently being a problem in the afterlife as well, and that the path would involve years in whatever waiting room the Vatican prefers now – having renounced the horrific idea of limbo years ago – while guys in bathrobes read diaries and fiddle with corpses. Sounds fun to me, I don't know why they would bury the lead like that, but there you have it.

Beatification is attributed one of two ways, both on equally shaky rhetorical ground, I would say. Firstly, the candidate can be a martyr, meaning they died for their faith or as an act of heroic charity, presumably the bearing of another's mortal wound. Alternatively, they can be a confessor, the default position for saints these days. To be a confessor, it must be proven – for whatever that word is worth coming from the lips of a Pope – that the creator of the universe interceded directly to benefit a person who offered a prayer through the saint-elect, kind of like clicking through to Amazon from a website you like. These fraudulent miracle cures are well know to you, and they only proliferate due to the Catholic construct's unwillingness to repair the damage they have done in destitute countries without proper health care.

The final step before being fitted for a heavenly letterman's jacket is an encore miracle, which is why the ghoulish Agnes is currently in our public consciousness again. As part of JP II's streamlining process I mentioned earlier, part of the 800-year-old process left on the cutting room floor was the requirement of three intercessions. Currently only one additional conspiracy is required – the unfortunate man from Brazil – and the news is filled with fawning and completely complicit endorsement of the current Pope's thumbs up. No news outlet appears willing to state what is painfully obvious to honest thought: none of this is true, and it matters even less.

Despite the chorus to the contrary, the current Pope has done little to nothing regarding advancing the church into the 21^st century or guiding it to better mesh with modern society. Before Francis, Pope Benedict the Nazi-Faced threw open the pearly back door by validating locally venerated cult leaders at an unheard of pace; fanatics long dead, supported by the church, and with a large booster club who weren't waiting on the Vatican's approval or a cleared-up runny nose. Making a saint out of a monstrous woman who should be properly known for inflicting horrific dying conditions and absolutely no medical care whatsoever, in addition to being a well-known seller of indulgences to the most foul people you can imagine, will hopefully prove to be an unremovable nail in the Vatican's long-overdue coffin.

Excluding Muslims

Donald Trump commented that, in order to somehow secure American safety, he would prevent any and all Muslim immigration to our nation. This provoked the typical knee-jerk reactions from both sides, with the left vigorously altering Hitler photos to give him a hilarious haircut. The right quickly responded by pointing out that President Carter, the closest thing to a saint the left seems to have at the moment, had blocked all kinds of immigration from the Middle East during the end of his term. This, I thought, merited a refresher course.

Jimmy Carter, in response to the Iranian government's unwillingness to take custody and care of the fifty Americans held hostage in their country for six months, issued a set of orders concerning diplomatic relations with Iran and the disposition of her citizens. Specifically:

1. The severing of all diplomatic relations, the closing of all embassies, and the declaration of persona non grata for all consular officials.
2. Export sanctions.
3. Seizure of Iranian assets to provide financial remuneration to American creditors and hostages.
4. Invalidation of all Iranian visas and a hold on all new issuances, barring any humanitarian or American interest.

This fourth point has been seized upon by some of the more ahistorically enthusiastic among us to attempt a demonstration of established precedent in support of nouveau dauphin Trump's NIMBY approach to immigration, often quite loudly and with poor spelling and punctuation. These pundits, awe-inspiring though they are, miss a salient point entirely. The target of Carter's sanctions was not, in fact, Iranian Muslims. It's wasn't even the Shia portion of the Muslim population that made up Khomeini's Republican party, but Iranians as a whole. People holding the passport of one particular country, with no other stipulation.

The idea of using religion as a litmus test for immigration is little more than laughable. Regardless of how English colonists behaved, once this land was out from under the monarchy it was also relieved of the onerous yoke of archaic religious nationalism. There are serious, and perhaps unanswerable, questions concerning realistic and enforceable immigration law now that we're confronting issues the majority of the globe has been dealing with for decades. Trying to force a religious template on top of the already overburdened and flawed system will do nothing to address these problems.

The faction calling for a short-term hold on all immigration of the same secular and pragmatic stripe that Carter intended have an argument based on sound, if incredibly selfish, reasoning. Their opponents have an equally solid and compelling Constitutional argument, the numerous and rather emotional patriotic ones notwithstanding. Unfettered or loosely-regulated immigration poses many dilemmas, being a hostage to fortune insofar as imported religious zealots among the more serious. A complete lockdown of our borders would not only fail at preventing domestic attacks or immigration, nothing could be more antithetical to American ideals. 

The Shop On The Corner

Before our enlightened liberal condition of buying our cannabis at the modern corner apothecary completely fogs over the memories of the soul-crushing dark ages – “The Time Before,” as our children will refer to it – I thought it important to take a moment for the glorification of that stalwart bastion of pre-reform convenient drug distribution: the bodega.

The public acceptance of cannabis as common, excellent for mild pain relief and general relaxation, and in no way associated with demonic conspiracy will drive a constantly regenerating stream of brisk new business to the dispensaries. These dispensaries, provided we can sort out what boils down to zoning and finance details, will soon be as plentiful and irritating as Starbucks and catering to the same kinds of crowds. Nothing is the same kind of satisfying as watching a hippie stereotype change into a capitalist stereotype overnight. Phillip Morris is, at this moment, poised and ready to dominate the legal cannabis market with their monolithic agricultural and distribution network, and that's the pot the trendy kids and the newcomers will be buying at the chain corner shops. This slightly bothers me, in an inconsequential though chronic way, as I think teenagers are missing out on a rite of passage by buying their first bag off Camel's narcotics rack. Until very recently, the only two options for someone like me to purchase pot have been the friendly neighborhood dealer or the bodega, the latter of which I will now describe for those who haven't had the pleasure.

And it was a pleasure, chum.

Bodegas have existed in one form or another in every successful civilization. They are a staple of commerce, filling a need created by the population shift from dispersed agrarian to concentrated industrial. The customer base is the blue-collar community, with the errant white-collar cat slumming it, and the student/pensioner shopper who buys only enough white bread and Pop-Tarts to live on for 24-hour periods. Bigger than the walking vendor's fruit cart, smaller than the proper grocery store, the bodega progressed from the miniscule corner shop to an international force. Asian cities, particularly Taiwan, have landscapes virtually dominated by shops like 7-11.

It looks like Michael Bay directed a remake of Blade Runner.

My bodega was downtown, in a stupidly scenic location surrounded by lush trees and century-old buildings. Just walking among the stunning architecture Oregon produced during the years its fledgling towns became proper cities is sometimes breathtaking, and having beautiful structures mindfully nestled into the pre-existing majesty of the area as a backdrop for a minor drug transaction is certainly one of the most pleasant ways I expect one can engage in such behavior. The bodega was on 13^th street, one of the main east/west drags, a one-way shot that was part of my late night aimless driving loop. It sat in the University's shadow and took up a third of the block, sitting wall-to-wall with one of the finest bars ever to exist on its eastern side, a bar which supplied the bodega with a stream of cigarette and hot case food purchases until three AM every morning. The buildings were recognized as historic places, but out of longevity alone instead of being any kind of thematic examples. They looked like art deco buildings from 1920's Los Angeles, but in the proper light they could have been the city hall/bank/post office in a barely-developed Tombstone. They were visually striking as specific in a non-specific way, timeless and geographically indeterminate. Walls textured like an adobe fort, with window and door frames simply designed but more than functional. In three small alcoves high on the wall and facing the street, virtually unnoticed unless pointed out, were small Roman statuaries of women in different poses.

Two sets of double doors, the majority of which were glass framed very thinly by wood painted a dark forest green holding brass fixtures burnished by a hundred thousand hands, opened onto 13^th street. One set of these doors was recessed in each end of the building, directly next to the cashier and as far opposite as possible. The owners had lined the walls with drink coolers, but had made the rather poor decision to stock the beer and Boone's Farm in the coolers closest to the second set of doors, and therefore farthest from the cashier's control. This product location decision had the foreseeably adverse effect of inspiring alcoholic thieves to get their cardiovascular exercise for the day by entering through the cashier's door, picking up a handful of items as they walked the aisles to lower suspicions, then dropping everything to run out the second set of doors with a case or armful of forties. I eventually learned to spot the differences between the angle someone holds their head at when they're genuinely figuring out what they want versus the angle used when they're waiting for you to look away. In response to this unremitting rise in skullduggery, the owners applied more of their wisdom and began locking the second set of doors at six every night, which did little to stem overall theft but made the beer coolers seem like less of a problem.

Nahasapeemapetilans they were not.

Since I never personally had the occasion to require the bodega's services when I was on foot, I would drive past the double doors, turning right off thirteenth and right again into the kind of back alley one would find severed ears in. I would then ease the delicately hideous curves of my Ford Maverick (and later that goddamn Jetta) into one of the city parking spaces that were painted by people who had either never seen a picture of an American car or generally despised the concept of internal combustion, and walk past the bar's rear smoking porch to enter the bodega through the back door.

It was unmarked, save for a tattered and sun-bleached “Employees Only” sign held on by what used to be two screws. Slightly larger than one would expect for a service entrance, it was set underneath a Reagan-era air conditioning unit shoved into a rough-cut hole in the gnarled exterior wall. This Cooling Unit of Damocles was supported in afterthought by good intentions and what appeared to be two repurposed metal plant hangers secured with an admirable amount of flashing tape. Enveloping Schrodinger’s Alcove was what could be legally referred to as a shelter, an eight-foot structure supported with pressure-treated 4x4's and wrapped in trailer park-style plastic corrugated roofing on all sides. The plastic was probably blue to begin with, but time makes fools of us all, and the corrugate had become a brittle thing with a color halfway between beige and sad. It was in that odd space among empty banana boxes and spent fountain soda syrup bags that my connection and I would stand together, bathed in that strangely-tinted light, and share a smoke when I was the only business. During one of our safety meetings on a crushing summer afternoon in August our conversation was abruptly silenced by a stunning flash. The bolt, though I never saw it directly, licked close enough to us for me to listen to the innocent and unsuspecting air become scorched and make a sound not unlike a pit viper maliciously ripping a piece of paper. Before I had time to recognize that high wail keening in my skull, the thunder upended over us and rolled through town like someone owed it money. Seconds later hail began falling, timidly at first and then with vigor, and it did nothing to cool the air. Blocks over we heard the first car alarm start, and more joined, all backed by the cruel percussion of the hail. We stood and took all that beauty in, him and I.

Imagine this, but made of electricity and fire.

But I digress. The transaction was conducted thusly: By the time I had crossed the threshold my end of the deal was already folded and concealed in the palm of my hand, as illustrated best by Mr. Steve Martin in the Academy Award-adjacent movie My Blue Heaven. Walking straight would have exited me out one of the front double-doors, the cashier's counter was at one o'clock, and next to my end of that counter was a small card table which always supported an open soda and a book. I would go to the table and grab the book, dropping the money next to where it had been and commenting on the author or some nonsense, then walk away to grab something from the cooler that would punish my treacherous kidneys. My connection would know how much I wanted from the amount I had left, and the money would vanish. I would bring my purchases up, and when he reached under the counter for a paper bag, that bag would come up with my supplies already ensconced within. I would exit through the same back door, and once in the car would immediately open the bag to fill the air with the rich and comforting smell of a relaxing afternoon. No tax stamp, no one else's business, no more complicated than buying a sandwich. Sounds weird as hell, I know, but that's how we did things in The Time Before.

You kids come see Grandpa any time, now.

These Three Things

Religion, among the thousands of very large and very unprovable claims it makes, never even dares to attempt addressing the three most important steps in our species' development.

I Have Made Fire

The oldest definitive evidence of human-controlled fire dates back roughly one million years and was found two years ago in Wonderwerk Cave in Northern Cape, South Africa. In this cave, quite by accident, archaeologists found carbonized plant material and burned animal bones, with the sharp edges of the bone and undisturbed patterns of ash removing any possibility that the material was blown by wind into its position. This discovery brings us slightly closer to confirming that fire was the key in transitioning between Homo habilis and Homo erectus, referred to as the “cooking hypothesis.” This suggests that the benefits of controlled fire allowed for our caloric energy to be spent on general brainy goodness instead of raw physicality, but to prove it we need as-yet-absent evidence from the 1.8 million-year-old habilis/erectus split.

Without the harnessing of fire for defense, warmth, cooking, and social well-being, civilization never happens. Without fire, food requires nearly as much energy to eat and digest as it provides. Without fire, the predators of the night are free to come and take us at their pleasure, and we stay so cold in our bones that the urge to tell stories and recreate the hunt for the entertainment of others never surfaces. Fire brings with it softer food, the ability to sleep on the ground, a sphere of insect-free bliss, and innumerable other benefits.

If you know what I mean, and I think you do.

In Genesis 4:4, Abel burns an animal sacrifice and thereby gains favor with God over his brother Cain, because God's just not that interested in the ritual wasting of hard-won food unless it's through immolation. Later on, in 8:20, the flood recedes and Noah celebrates his successful endeavor by killing and burning “of every clean beast, and of every clean fowl.” Based on Jewish law, this passage can be easily and accurately rephrased as “Noah killed and burned every living thing he didn't plan on eating in the immediate future.” Since there was no provision for feeding animals on the trip, the predators would have long since erased the prey. This means that, despite surviving impossible odds and making it out of the boat to barren dry land, another swath of animals was shepherded into extinction by God's loving hand. In the interest of not inflating the word count of this essay too insufferably, we shall omit discussion of the utter nonsense involved in surviving with no plants and salted water, the inability of the ground to grow crop, as well as speculation on how we have doves at all if the one Noah used as a dry land gauge never came back.

The aforementioned are the first two biblical accounts of humans controlling fire, and both are instances of divinely-warranted needless sacrifice. It seems obvious that these people are familiar with fire and find it neither alarming or abnormal, which clashes with the role of fire as the one and only effective way to curry favor with God. Flame makes many appearances, acting as everything from a font of knowledge to a source of retribution and punishment, but nowhere does the call for sacrifice through immolation or the delivery of fire from God to man appear. The Genesis flood myth, blatantly plagiarized as it is from the Epic of Gilgamesh, can be placed at roughly 2700 B.C.E, around 2000 years after idiots think the Garden of Eden was a place. It's obvious, once examined, that fire was a pre-existing, human-harnessed secular substance. Equally obvious is that the odious people making all this bullshit up were too stupid to even think of taking credit for it.

Couple veiny dicks over here, pulsing demon anuses over here...annnnnd, done!

x^2 + y^2 = r^2

The wheel brings us monumental advances, but in a circuitous and cryptic way. Pottery wheels appear to have arrived on the scene first, but shortly thereafter the wheel found its vertical orientation. Stone wheels are heavy, and assembling a throwing wheel would likely require rolling the top over to the stand before hefting it. At some point, someone just a little bit brighter than the rest thought to connect two wheels with a wooden shaft, and much rejoicing was heard. They appear on transportation in our archaeological record around 3500 B.C.E., located in the landmass spanning from Mesopotamia to Central Europe, making any further attribution difficult. Packs and supplies could now be borne on the shoulders of an axle, instead of a horse or grandmother. Without a person even needing to understand it, the wheel allows us to further exploit the laws of physics concerning horizontal movement, while demonstrating Newtonian principles effortlessly when ascending and descending every hill.

Wheels are mentioned everywhere in scripture, usually describing the opposing army's chariots when not in flowery use to describe Ezekiel's hallucinations. However, as you can no doubt guess, the moment of conception of this invaluable shape is nowhere in the account. One can infer it, of course, since Noah was said to be near his 600^th year of life for the flood and couldn't have moved the materials needed without mechanical advantage. But, once again, no mention of the divine hand delivering such a treasure. Like everything worthwhile created by mankind, religion first takes it for granted and then takes the credit.

The Ghoul of Calcutta, seen here taking credit for inventing medical malpractice.

Shoes Too Small To Kickbox God

When confronting the presently unanswerable questions of our surroundings' beginning and end, again we find God carelessly omitted the latter while thoroughly and completely missing the mark on the former. The closest either Genesis creation story can come to accuracy is when over-friendly, conciliatory reasoning is applied to the creation of light as an attempt to make it work with how we know photons operate. “Let there be light,” sez God, and light happens, but not right away. A verse later God sees the light, declares it good, and separates it from the darkness, thereby unjustly ruining the reputation of darkness to this day. This might seem to fit with the delay one would expect to see between the creation of a star and the photons it emits striking another object. It falls under scrutiny because it also fits with the disproven, shameful, and arrogant geocentric nonsense preached from all pulpits.

When turning to the end of existence on Earth, our sheer inability to imagine such a thing coupled with our extreme shortsightedness makes forming an impression of it nearly impossible. People are really only able to imagine things through their singular frame of reference, so we unavoidably cut-and-paste a stand-in for ourselves into the picture when we cast our thoughts to the unimaginable. We also tend to have a much easier time with the hypothetical death of others than we do our own, regardless of one's personal feelings. This can create a distinctly skewed and temporally-crippled way of examining things, which we then naturally find in spades in every single religious scripture.

As an example of how narrow our focus can be on the subject of events on the astronomical scale, I offer some solid data followed by speculative conjecture. The age of the universe (which is to say the time elapsed since the Big Bang) is calculated to be 13.8 billion years, with the Milky Way galaxy only slightly younger at 13.2 billion. In a remote and unfashionable end of one spiral arm of that galaxy sits our humble little planet, which clocks in at a barely-old-enough-to-drink 4.5 billion years old. Looking to the other end of eventuality, our Sun's luminosity is steadily increasing to the point that it will evaporate all the water on Earth in approximately 3.75 billion years, and shortly after that swallow our scorched rock whole. Around a quarter billion years after that, the Andromeda galaxy will come along and finish the job by colliding with and erasing our galaxy from the sky.

"I'm very, very slowly coming for your punk ass."

Now, on our paltry little scale, we showed up as a separate genus from the Australopithecine right around two million years ago. Generously speaking, it can be said that on the way to anatomically-modern humans a separate and now-extinct subset of human emerged every four hundred thousand years, until H. sapiens reached dominance roughly two hundred thousand years ago.

For wild speculation, if our species were to follow the oversimplified track record I have outlined above, without molestation and a minimum of self-destruction, we have only two hundred thousand years in our present anatomical – and probably intellectual – state before a divergence appears that our side will undoubtably lose. Our tinier frames and goofy-looking heads must have seemed ridiculous to our predecessors, but our cunning way of bashing their fucking skulls in when they weren't looking meant we got to run the show. Similarly, gradual mutations will occur that at some point will give those who come after a distinct advantage over us. And since there's over three and a half million years to go before our heat death, the incredibly imprecise four hundred thousand year cycle I mentioned earlier can revolve almost nine more times before the game is up. Though it's impossibly hard to imagine, the last human to rattle out an arid dying breath will be eight iterations removed from you and I, and wholly unrecognizable to us.

The horror. The horror.

But no reference to this is made in any religious description of the end times. In fact, they all sound like they could easily happen next week or next month, described as they are in tiny little ideas well-suited to illiterate and unimaginative fools. The mere fact that bumper stickers warning of unmanned vehicles in case of Rapture exist should be more than enough to demonstrate how eager and hurried the religious are to just have done with it all. They really want life – all life – to be over so that they might be happy, which seems reasonable to them because their scripture and leaders told them that's how it would be. It is one of the most disgusting things a person can think, and these groups go one further by claiming such an idea is gracious, humble, and kind. Lies piled upon lies, and all a consequence of claiming to know the mind of God.

Redesigning Honesty

Brian Williams' transgression against the trust placed in him is not only indefensible, it is a clear example of the state of modern journalism stripped of the fog created by personal preference. 

Williams' claims, which throw into sharp focus the difficulty in crafting a comprehensive Stolen Valor Act while not infringing on speech, should be enough to make any thinking person strongly disgusted. But the purpose of our conversation is not to debate the truth or, as is actually the case, utter falsehood of Williams' lie. It is to look at the bizarre and, sadly, unsurprising response from those on the left who should really know better. The habit these people entertain of elevating liberal public figures to give themselves the feeling of being politically savvy and on the right side of the argument never fails to disappoint them. And when, inevitably, these figureheads prove to be just as fallible and unlikeable as the rest of the swine, you will find three basic arguments being resuscitated and marched about the square.

RIGHT! CAN'T THINK OF ANYTHING BETTER TO DO?

It begins with the minimization and redecoration of the offense through soft and non-descriptive language. Instead of calling Williams a liar, which is the correct accusation, his fellow journalists describe his statements as “misremembered,” “exaggerations,” or “embellishments,” when a child of six could see that's not so. The flowery and stunningly non-evocative language used by our bastions of journalism are a well-worn technique to prevent the communication of clear ideas by selecting words that mean next-to-nothing. As one of our greatest thinkers pointed out, “shell shock” is a two-syllable phrase that forcibly punches the meaning and idea into your ear. It almost sounds like the weaponry that caused the condition, and if you've ever seen the effects I doubt any other term would seem quite appropriate. It is a terrifying state, very difficult to treat medically, and is a terribly unsettling thing for the afflicted and those around them. To make it less so, the condition began to be described in soft, multisyllabic phrases that intentionally distanced the ugliness and the reality of the idea from you. Using phrases like “combat stress reaction,” “postconcussional syndrome,” or “post-traumatic stress disorder” make a cushion of comfort between what the thing is and how we think of it. This kind of language is fear-based, used because it's very easy and comforting for us to pretend wanting a thing makes it so.

This, for example, is my passport photo.

Following the misguided effort to take the sharp edges off the lie comes a wholesale attempt to divert focus. Undoubtably you've heard “Fox News is full of liars, no one there ever tells the truth, etc.” offered as a defense untold times by now. While that may be an accurate statement, and while I may personally agree with it whole-heartedly, it is nevertheless a childish and feeble-minded argument by any measure. When a child is caught stealing, we do not excuse their behavior if they can mention someone else who is also a thief. “America kept slaves” has not been a successful way to defend either Soviet Russia or the Islamic State. Likewise, defending the lies of a newsreader you prefer by bringing up the dishonesty of newsreaders you don't prefer is a tu quoque fallacy ab initio, itself a derivative of defending yourself through personal attack. It is an embarrassment to offer that kind of argument, though a cheap, easy, and effective one.

Broadly, this rare occurrence of a newsreader being publicly exposed as a liar gives me a chance to reiterate that the problem is not any one person or network. We still imagine that journalism – in the large, morning paper/evening news variety – is in any kind of solid or trustworthy shape. The rally of people to one network or another, be it commie or fascist, allows the perception to develop that they are somehow on your side. O'Reilly/Maddow may be a bloated windbag that you wouldn't piss on to extinguish, one goes around thinking, but Kelley/Olbermann is as unbiased as they come and only wants to inform me. This is obviously poor thinking, as no outlet has a monopoly on either information or obfuscation, and the intensely personal connection people develop with these figureheads is an emotionally overwrought delusion of grandeur.

Render Unto Caesar

The road from “congress shall make no law” to tax-free churches, congressional chaplains, and currency sanctioned by Christianity is marked by complacency and conciliation on the part of the non-believers.

The argument, which you have no doubt heard plenty of times, that America was founded by people who worshipped the washboard-stomached Jesus seen in Pat Robertson's dusty sexual fantasies and who desired to build a new nation devoted to the glorification of that filthy hippie and his bizarre and thoughtless teachings is still pressed into service today, trotted out like a moth-eaten shawl to be draped over any number of the debates we face.

Despite the obvious unconstitutionality of the entire premise, to this very day the United States military pays official chaplains to serve in every branch out of taxpayer-funded government coffers, and has had authorization to do so since 1791. There is no interpretation of the establishment or free exercise clauses of the First Amendment that allows for a government-sanctioned chaplain of any denomination to minister to the armed forces, which is self-evident without the authority of Madison or Jefferson and their arguments to back it up. Despite being challenged in the United States Court of Appeals, no willingness has been shown to risk displeasing America's religious theocrats by forcing the position to be filled by a non-combat volunteer. The irony of a paid military chaplain swearing to uphold the Constitution should be obvious without me having to elaborate on it. Fortunately, those of us who would have no idea how to approach addressing the problem are shored up by the efforts of organizations like the Freedom From Religion Foundation and the Military Association of Atheists, both of whom work not only to defend the rights of the non-religious in both private and military life, but to re-establish the secular values our country was, evidentially speaking, established on.

We were pretty into Egyptian and Grecian style, though. Kind of our "Joy Division" phase.

Deism was, to be profoundly generous, still defensible at the time of America's establishment. Collectively, we were unfamiliar with microbiology and the Beagle's monumental voyage was still half a century away. It could be forgiven, knowing what the best scientific information was, for a thinking person to come to the conclusion that the intrinsic order in the universe – “the way of things” – was so impossibly clockwork and perfect as to necessitate, at the very least, an unimaginable force to establish the observable laws things operated by. This is the “unmoved mover” you may have heard of, a current favorite of the creationist cults to explain away their utter mindless arrogance in the face of an utter paucity of any evidence. It may not only have been defensible or forgivable, it may have been the only logical and rational conclusion one could come to based on the evidence at hand. Theism, with its nonsense based on an intervening wrathful creator who performs miracles and picks favorites, was already in decline among the population possessed of the luxury of free time to participate in Enlightenment thinking. People understood that a prime mover argument can and does only lead you to an infinitely regressing repetition of the same question: “Who made the maker?” These volleys of logic were met by the church, then as now, with vehement retaliation and dismissals based on arguments from ignorance. Unfortunately for us but incredibly beneficial for the religious, the tools with which the notion of a creator could be abolished entirely were still generations off.

The Presidents

George Washington appears to have been that most rare (and personally valuable to myself) of all religious people: the private one. While it is public record that he purchased pews in several churches and attended services regularly while in Philadelphia, Washington chose to spend his time at Mount Vernon more wisely. He attended services sparsely there, according to biographer Paul Ford, and later anecdotes seeking to discredit him publicly did so by reporting that cards and drinking were engaged in by Washington and visitors to his home most vigorously on Sundays. Washington almost never mentioned God by name in public speeches, referring instead to the ideas of Providence and a Grand Architect. His farewell address, which is most commonly referenced as concrete proof of Washington's Christian faith, was not written by him but by Alexander Hamilton, and Washington in fact deliberately removed passages connecting morality with divinity and avoided entirely addressing any particulars of his belief. As for his behavior in solitude, both Hamilton and Washington's staff write of interrupting his morning prayer, which was evidently a regular and solitary-by-preference practice. It is still contended that Washington introduced the oath of fealty to God in the presidential inauguration, despite refutations from the Library of Congress and Mount Vernon. People far more educated on Washington's life than myself continue to argue from both sides of the aisle exactly where on the spectrum from deism to Christianity he actually lied, but insofar as this subject is concerned his exact disposition is irrelevant. What matters is that if he was a devout and practicing Christian, he kept it to himself.

And we revere him to this day...

Thomas Jefferson, as a retirement hobby to kill the time not spent founding the University of Virginia as a bastion of higher learning unsullied by religious influence, engaged himself by taking a scalpel to the New Testament, removing any and all passages which he thought to be unfounded, magical, or otherwise insulting to the intelligence of a reasoned person. The resulting extant text, which is available to all, is an impossibly-thin tome which tells a rather uninteresting story of a young man who says things that irritate some while endearing him to others. The final page of this story, which I find the most edifying, is three paragraphs long and consists of Jesus dying, being buried, and everyone leaving. No resurrection, no fanciful rays of sunshine to be recreated in hideous oil paintings for the next two millenia, but the relating of a man's death. Furthermore, in the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (one of the three things included on his obelisk as worth remembering him for, his time as President notably absent) Jefferson writes clearly on the errancy of religious faction having any influence in civil discourse whatsoever. In dissolving any affiliation between the colonies and the Church of England, Jefferson sought to prevent the cudgel of a state church from being wielded against the citizens of the new republic. The worst accusation that could be leveled at him would be the aforementioned label of deist, as he describes a creator of the mind and “departure from the plan” enforced on the populace by religious leaders who sought – then as now – to prevent the free exchange of ideas while lining their own pockets. However, nowhere does he mention any thought that the universe was created for him or anyone else, or that an intervening creator answered prayers, affected the outcome of events, or had a preferred sexual style. The personification of this deistic creator by Jefferson in the Statute, sometimes feebly pointed to as support for accusations of theism, can also be accurately dismissed as a poetic device, seeing as he later gives the concept of truth the same embodiment, albeit feminine.

Again, super respectful reverence is all we know how to do.

The Treaty of Tripoli & The First Barbary War

Securing our independence brought the need to ensure our own security. The treaties enacted by England to protect trade routes and crew obviously no longer applied to our nation, and in 1797 John Adams signed the Treaty of Tripoli into law. This treaty was to establish our business and cautiously peaceful relationship with the Muslim empire in the Barbary States, who consistently had great success in seizing both our ships and their crew for their own use. The second article of the Treaty, which I argue is second only to the First Amendment in clarity and intent of purpose, states as follows:

“As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility of Musselmen; and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.”

It's a rather beautiful passage, I think, especially when compared to the soul-crushingly indigestible language of our current legislation. But beyond beauty, the most important thing about this passage is that it clearly shows the intention of our nation to hold no brook with religion. Adams may have been far too naive and trusting when concerned with the Muslim theocracy and the ability of its adherents to be trusted, and he was completely mistaken in implying that our non-starter status meant we would never declare war against a religious state, but it couldn't be more obvious that our founding and principles are established as those of a secular nation founded on the rule of law, not a terrifying theocratic nightmare based on deluded religious texts.

It really is everything Hitchens warned us about.

Proving Adams' trust was wildly misplaced, the forces of Tripoli continued to hijack and make slaves of American ships. Seeking explanation, Adams and Jefferson traveled to Tripoli, where their only response was passages in the Qur’an commanding “all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave.” Jefferson fought with Congress, arguing that any money paid would only encourage repeated offense. Upon Jefferson's election, Tripoli vastly increased the amount of their demands, which Jefferson finally had the power to refuse. The Navy, recently reconstructed, was at Jefferson's disposal with the caveat to do no more than necessary to defend. Without consulting Congress Jefferson sent the Navy to attack Tripoli, beginning the four year conflict that would end with General Eaton's marines and mercenaries brought the city of Derna to the ground in 1805. This is, by the way, the first time the American flag was flown over a military victory in a foreign land, and the reason Tripoli is in the second line of the Marine Corps Hymn.

The Money

When the time came, as it must in any successful fledgling rebellion, to design a national seal representative of the ideals of the new republic, Samuel Adams appointed an artist in Philadelphia called William Barton. The now-familiar thirteen-layer pyramid crowned with the Eye of Providence was what Barton delivered, with the wholly unfamiliar-to-us latin phrases Deo Favente (“With God's Favor”) and Perennis (“Everlasting”). There was no attempt on Barton's behalf to obfuscate his intentions and belief that the Providential Eye belonged to an intervening Christian god, which was clearly not good enough for Adams.

It rocks your very world, doesn't it?

Charles Thompson, the Secretary of the Congress and a teacher of latin, was tasked with refining the design to bring it more in line with what Adams wanted. Thompson removed the religious references entirely, substituting the phrases Annuit Coeptis (“To/He Approve/s Our Undertaking”) and Novus Ordo Seclorum (“New Order of the Ages”) while retaining the thirteen-layer pyramid, Eye of Providence, and E Pluribus Unum (“One Out Of Many”). This adjustment fulfilled the requirements, changing the intended message from “God gave us this and it's ours forever” to “Can you guys fucking believe how lucky we were to pull this off?”

"I gotcha Deo Favente right here, pal."

The ridiculous motto of the United States since 1956 has been “In God We Trust,” a noxious phrase opposed by anyone who can recognize the meaninglessness of the words even without recognizing the direct contradiction to our nation's principles. This indelicate usurper is a holdover from the Civil War, where the phrase was used by both sides to claim divine support. Since at least 1873, this mindless affirmation has been on our coinage by order of the Congress, not appearing on the paper money until 1957. The same level of blind fervor for empty religious-themed patriotism wouldn't be seen again until the World Trade Center attack, when once again our Union claimed the backing of – for all anyone can tell – the same god who compelled our enemies.

The Congress

In examining religion's perfidious influence on democracy, specifically in our representative bodies, it is helpful to compare the original intent with the current reality. Given that, ideally, both the House and Senate would be filled with individuals selected by their communities as best suited to represent their interests and ideals, one would expect the resulting bodies to reflect the broad spectrum of ideas and attitudes seen nationwide. To examine that a little closer, we can apply that most tenuous of metrics: the public opinion poll. Opinion polls always make me wince the slightest bit, as there are so many clumsily simple ways their data becomes skewed. From convenience bias to acquiescence, these kinds of surveys have many obstacles to assembling data into information, but in many cases they are the best possible way to gauge what people say they think.

Which, unfortunately, assumes *they* know what they think.

Pew Research reported in 2012 that 16.1% of Americans who responded to their poll self-identified as having no religious affiliation. As mentioned, there is no reliable way to determine what percentage of people who respond in the affirmative are lying to the pollster to fulfill an imagined expectation, or claiming affiliation out of habit or guilt. As you can infer for yourself, it is improbable that there exist enough physical structures to house all the worshippers who claim to be such fervent practitioners.

There are 535 voting members of Congress, which would suggest that roughly 86 members of that august body should be atheist. If we further narrow the field by disregarding the 5.8% of Pew respondents who felt “religious unaffiliated” described their views (as opposed to the rather confusing group labeled “secular unaffiliated”) we are left with around 55 Congresspeople that should reliably be found doing something useful on Sunday morning. This is, self-evidently, at odds with the precisely zero (sometimes one, as of late, but not for long) representatives of the nation's public who profess to be unburdened by childish superstition, and flies in the face of the decidedly Christian-flavored political grandstanding we must constantly slog through.

It can only feed, never produce...

It may actually be fair and accurate to say that America is a Christian nation, not by design but through lazy arrogance or weakness on the part of those of us who knew better. To call it de facto is to give it too much credence, but the fact remains. To admit this is not to agree with the historically ignorant who claim a Christian founding for our nation, nor is it further concession or conciliation to theocracy with an enthusiastic allowance for it to reign. The fervor with which the cry of rationality and forced retreat for religion seems to keep growing can only suggest to us that the tide turns in our favor. We can perhaps now be said to be in recovery, a nation with a serious problem that we have just recently become mature enough to accept and fix.