Friday Short Cuts

Notable quotables from Newt Gingrich, Mitch McConnell, Joy Reid, and more.

Posted by DougOut on 4/8/2022 5:55:00 PM (view original):
Some all electric vehicles still have a dipstick. Usually found behind the steering wheel.

The Miserable People

Miserable.

Every time I see them, this is the word that prevails.

Whenever I encounter a supporter of Donald Trump on social media now, or scan the crowds at his propaganda rallies, or see his surrogates bloviating on talk shows or pounding upon pulpits, I am left with the same conclusion: they are a people bereft of joy.

There is so little happiness, so little benevolence, so little kindness.

The emotional deficit is continually on display:

In their contorted, sneering countenance; in their so readily brandished middle finger; in their steady spit shower of verbal filth. With each angry gesture and with every slandering epithet, they reveal in high-definition detail what it looks like when someone loses the light inside them.

War does this to the human heart. These people are at war with the world.

They’re against the gays.
They’re against immigrants.
They’re against Muslims.
They’re against foreigners.
They’re against scientists.
They’re against atheists.
They’re against Liberals.
They’re against the Democrats.
They’re against the Media.
They’re against teenage shooting survivors.
They’re against athletes and entertainers.

The world in their heads is composed almost entirely of enemies and adversaries—and as a result they are perpetually disgusted. If I had that many threats to fight, I’d be unendingly ****** off too. I’d probably pity them a lot more if I didn’t have to endure them.

These are the wildest of ironies: they had their president for four years, their politicians commandeering Congress, the Supreme Court tilted in their favor—and yet they still now manage to feel themselves oppressed, still picture the world unfair, still rage against a machine they’ve made and are part of. So many of them claim faith in Jesus, and yet live in almost polar opposition to his example.

The only time they do smile or show anything resembling joy, is to reflect the arrogant, self-satisfied sneer of their leader; almost always in the face of someone else’s heartache or misfortune, almost always when someone else loses something. They only happiness they seem capable of manufacturing, is in response to pain.

I try to imagine what it feels like to be so afflicted with contempt for the planet: to be so viscerally sickened by the breadth of diversity around me, to be relentlessly in a fear-birthed battle posture—but I can’t.

Thank God, I can’t. If you can’t imagine it either, consider yourself fortunate.

I realize that this has become the difference now; the dividing line in this version of America. It is between joyful people and miserable people; those who live open-handed toward the world and those whose fists are balled tightly; people who are driven by compassion and those fueled by anger; people who want a bigger table—and those feel it belongs solely to them.

As disheartening as it is to witness people this internally toxic, it’s a cautionary reminder of who we do not want to become, of what we can’t let the fight do to us.

We have to fight to keep goodness inside us, despite the outside badness; to never be defined by how many things we hate.

I want my default response to this life to always be hope and not derision.

May we who oppose this national malignancy, never become so devoid of lightness that we resemble those who celebrate it.

May we never applaud someone’s suffering, never weaponize our religion to do harm, never grow comfortable with hearts that are only capable of anger.

May we never lose our laughter, our softness, our lightness in this life.

May we never become as miserable as those who support our former President.

That is when we know we’ve really lost.

A Funeral for My Christianity

A friend told me that I seemed angry lately and at first it really ****** me off.

I instantly mounted a spirited, vigorous defense laying out the reasons she had assessed me incorrectly but soon found myself trailing off, resigned to a harsh, unwelcome truth:

She was right, or at least she was in the ballpark.

It’s an easy mistake to make. From the outside grief looks a lot like anger. The external markers tend to be similar: impatience, bitterness, violent outbursts, a loss of optimism—but the difference is that the source of it all is a profound loss. Something or someone has died and this is the mourning that has come to take up residence in your chest cavity in its absence.

Looking around at my country right now I can’t help but grieve at the passing of the faith I used to know, the one I grew up believing would always be home for me, the one I once wanted to make my life’s work.

I am witnessing the second death of Jesus here in American Christianity and no I’m not dealing with it well.

When someone you love dies the disorientation is profound, but when you lose your entire religion it’s an existential sh*t storm, so you’re going to have to excuse my unpleasantness while I process it.

Recently, I came across a social media post from an old friend from a church I served at nearly two decades ago that crystalized it all. She and I have remained in contact all these years, albeit through the artificial closeness social media provides. In truth, we hadn’t had a substantive conversation in well over a decade but she was one of those people I figured was on the same journey I was.

She was delivering a fiery manifesto about her undying allegiance to Donald Trump and sharing with great zeal why Jesus wanted her to vote the way she voted. Beneath her Bible references and heavily coded church words I could see it all: a fully ignited fear of terrorists, Muslims, immigrants, LGBTQ human beings, and people of color—mixed with some impending sky-is-falling spiritual doom that she believed only the Republican Party or the Second Coming could rescue us from. What made it worse is how common diatribes like hers have become, how many people she now represents.

Over the past few years these sentiments have become familiar in the circles I’ve traveled and I’ve spent a good deal of time rationalizing them away, minimizing them, and looking past them. Today, reading my old friend’s words I realized that whatever this thing is that she and I used to share as a common thread has frayed beyond repair. Her Jesus and mine bear no resemblance to one another. I don’t belong in this tribe anymore. I am the outlier now.

That’s not to say that Jesus matters any less to me or means any less to me, it’s just that in so much American Christianity it feels like all that’s left of him are ghosts and fading memories and this genuinely grieves me. It feels like a funeral for Jesus in the religion bears his name here.

I don’t say these things for hyperbolic effect or to curry attention or sympathy. This is just what is. It’s the clearest, most sober revelation I’ve had about the state of my spiritual union: that I feel like something is gone for good. I see what’s become of the Church here in America and it’s like a wake for the religion I once called home.

I’m not sure what all this angry, chest-thumping, bullying, “don’t tread on me” thing that we’ve come to call Christianity is, but here’s what I doknow:
It isn’t the Gospel.
It isn’t Good News for the poor and marginalized.
It isn’t the Prince of Peace.
It isn’t the perfect love that casts out fear.
It isn’t Jesus by any measure.
It’s a toxic cocktail of power, control, fear, nationalism, and white privilege—and it looks much more like the bloated opulence of Rome than the early Church that resisted it.

People have said that the MAGA Evangelical movement has hijacked Jesus but I don’t believe that’s true. They have hijacked the word Christian. Jesus is of no use to them.

Many times over the past few decades, my faith tradition has been life to me. It’s been the place I’ve found hope and rest. There was something bigger that I knew I was a part of, and in the people of Jesus I felt like I belonged. This faith isn’t giving me life anymore. I am no longer finding hope and rest here. I don’t belong in that gathering like I once did. This is cause for real mourning.

But as with all funerals, they are necessary to mark the loss and to pivot toward life beyond it, as uncertain as that may be.

So yes, it might seem like I’m angry, but you’ll have to take my word for it I’m not. I’m just finally accepting the grief that comes when something you loved is gone and you wish that it wasn’t—and you need to figure out how to live differently.




TY RSP!!!

For showing us what misery is. A separation from Christ. Regardless of your politics, there is no joy without the love and salvation of him who died on the cross for our sins. The perfect sacrifice in the Perfect plan of the Perfect God. Jesus spoke the truth.

"I’m not sure what all this angry, chest-thumping, bullying, “don’t tread on me” thing that we’ve come to call Christianity is, but here’s what I doknow:
It isn’t the Gospel.
It isn’t Good News for the poor and marginalized.
It isn’t the Prince of Peace.
It isn’t the perfect love that casts out fear.
It isn’t Jesus by any measure.
It’s a toxic cocktail of power, control, fear, nationalism, and white privilege—and it looks much more like the bloated opulence of Rome than the early Church that resisted it.

People have said that the MAGA Evangelical movement has hijacked Jesus but I don’t believe that’s true. They have hijacked the word Christian. Jesus is of no use to them."

IS (IMO) spot ON!

Trump and MOST of his minions have NO use whatsoever for the actual principals espoused by Jesus Christ of Nazareth.
I'd bet that even Dougout knows this.

Posted by dahsdebater on 4/10/2022 1:27:00 PM (view original):
Who here has read The Righteous Mind? I think the final section of the book, on religion and the concept of the "hive switch," is based on a lot of handwaving and feels like it contains quite a bit of nonsense. But the first 2/3 of the book, on the foundations of human morality and the relationship of morality to politics, is generally pretty well-researched. Whether or not it's totally right I think it provides a great deal of insight. One of the outcomes of the research - and this study comes directly from Haidt and his collaborators - is that liberals do not understand conservatives. Liberals asked to answer moralistic questions as they think conservatives would do not come anywhere remotely close to how actual conservatives answer. Not only do they not understand what conservatives care about, they don't even understand the kinds of categories of things that conservatives care about. If this finding has any validity, it means that pretty much any attempt you read to describe conservatives that is written by liberals is extremely unlikely to be deeply insightful, or indeed to provide anything of particularly much value.

John Pavlovitz is very liberal.

Right off the bat he says this: "There is so little happiness, so little benevolence, so little kindness."

That tells you from almost the word go that he has no idea what he's talking about. Liberals don't understand conservatives, but they do understand basic facts and research. A well-established fact that I expect almost everyone has heard - although consumers of more conservative news sources certainly hear it more - is that people who identify as Republican/conservative donate more of their time and treasure to charitable causes than liberals/Democrats. And not by a little bit. Republicans are roughly 3 times as likely to donate a large amount to charity (defined differently in different studies, but with consistent results). Liberal households are almost twice as likely to give under $100/year to charitable causes. If you normalize for income and education level, the gap gets even bigger. Conservatives also donate almost twice as much time per year to volunteer causes. Again, these are facts confirmed by numerous polls. So that pretty much kills it for benevolence and kindness.

It's also a fact that conservatives are happier than liberals, although this research may be less well-known. A number of the relevant studies are found in this NY Times opinion piece from late 2021. As you'll see in the article, interpretation of the happiness data varies significantly and relies quite a bit on the political ideology of the researchers, but the finding is quite universal: conservatives are happier, and the gap is widening.