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Forbidden fruit: The new Receiver tries to do some giving.

The other week, I watched The Giver on DVD with my wife and a few of my kids. It’s a 2014 film adaptation of Lois Lowry’s 1993 book about a future collectivist society that does away with all but a bland, utilitarian remnant of human emotion and ambition. “The community” has even eliminated history from the minds of its people, with one significant exception.

A single chosen individual, the “Receiver of Memory,” is designated to take care of recalling past civilizations and events. This exalted and burdened person is set apart with an exclusive collection of books and memories, which he keeps to himself except to cryptically advise the Elders in their decision-making.

Eventually, the Receiver takes on an apprentice, to whom he passes all that knowledge and memory. The selection of a new Receiver “is very, very rare,” as the community’s Chief Elder tells her community at the Ceremony of Twelve,¹ where young people are being assigned their occupations with much fanfare, and without any say in the matter. “Our community has only one Receiver. It is he who trains his successor.” ²

The story’s hero, Jonas, is named as that successor. “I thought you were The Receiver,” Jonas tells him during their first teaching session, “but you say that now I’m The Receiver. So I don’t know what to call you.” Call me The Giver, the old man says.³ And from him Jonas goes on to learn some amazing and troubling things. His life will never be the same again.

Around the end of 2010, one of my daughters had been assigned the book in school, and I wound up reading it myself. At the time, I was in the early stages of researching the doctrine and history of my old church. The things I was starting to learn would turn my own life upside-down and result in my first book, An Examination of the Pearl, about a year later.⁴

I was stunned by the parallels between Lowry’s sheltered, intellectually stunted community and the “Kingdom of God” in which I’d been struggling. After a lifetime as one of “God’s children,” I’d finally started to look at my odd little church in a clear-headed way. What I was seeing disturbed me a great deal, and so I put together a listing of church writings with footnotes stating some of my concerns. I had it printed and bound into a dozen softcover copies that I shared with a few friends in the church. Oops.

In September 2010, I was hauled before the church board of trustees and preachers for a stressful, coercive, and emotional meeting about my little copy-shop book. “Are you really believing?” I was asked. Beyond some concern about how I could dispute what “God’s Word” teaches regarding Adam and Eve and Noah’s Ark, there wasn’t much substantive discussion of what the book actually had to say. It was mostly about me for having said it.

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Repent or Else

They told me the book was an expression of my doubts, which would have been best kept to myself or private conversations. It could be dangerous if it fell into the wrong hands, they said. It would leave the impression among outsiders that there are dif­ferences of opinion in “God’s Kingdom.” And it is certainly not something that believers should be reading. After over two hours of this, the meeting concluded with the understanding that I was to retrieve copies of the book.⁵

Just a few months after that experience, here I was reading about a closed community of myriad rules and “appropriate remorse” and public apologies, where uncomfortable history was extinguished from memory, where intractable rule-breakers were released to “Elsewhere.” And I was seeing a frightful near-future version of myself in Jonas, not some lofty hero but simply a wide-eyed seeker of truth–unable to tolerate cen­sorship and propelled by an irresist­ible call to look at reality, at long last, come what may.

Comparing Lowry’s all-controlling community with Christian funda­mentalism doesn’t seem to be a unive­rsal or even a com­mon interpretation of her book,⁶ but she would be happy to let me keep it as my own. “A book, to me, is almost sacrosanct: such an individual and private thing. The reader brings his or her own history and beliefs and concerns, and reads in solitude, creating each scene from his own imagination as he does.” And I was certainly interested to see her recall a “man who had, as an adult, fled the cult in which he had been raised” telling her “that his psychiatrist had recommended The Giver to him.” ⁷

The first thing that jumped out at me was the rigid structure of rules that govern life both in Lowry’s dystopia and for the “believers” in the Laestadian Lutheran Church. Community members are careful to maintain “precision of language,” ⁸ while believers do not swear, tell dirty jokes, or speak light-heartedly about faith matters. Each family unit of the community receives two children–no more–while believing parents are to accept as many children as they are “given”–no less. Community girls are instructed to keep their hair ribbons “neatly tied at all times” ⁹ while believing girls are instructed not to wear earrings, make-up, or spaghetti straps.

Even a minor rule like the one against bragging (there is “never any comfortable way to mention or discuss one’s successes without breaking the rule against bragging, even if one didn’t mean to”) is best followed by steering clear of occasions where breaking it would be too easy.¹⁰ Thus believers have restrained themselves from playing violins in orchestras where they might get “puffed up” in their talents, even if they would just be one of many players helping to produce one of the few types of music to which they can listen in good conscience. Thus many an athletic Laestadian boy has walked home while his unbelieving sort-of friends go off to football practice. God’s glory must not be given to another, and the world cannot become too close.

And then there are those Stirrings, which begin for young Jonas with a dream about a girl his age. He describes it to his parents during a “sharing-of-feelings” rap session they are expected to do over dinner each day. (“Be free,” the board members would tell us during the many congregational meetings of my youth.) In the dream, he and the girl were in front of a tub in the House of the Old, where the elderly get cared for in their final days.¹¹

“I wanted her to take off her clothes and get into the tub,” he explained quickly. “I wanted to bathe her. I had the sponge in my hand. But she wouldn’t. She kept laughing and saying no.”

His father asks Jonas about the strongest feeling he experienced during the dream.

“The wanting,” he said. “I knew that she wouldn’t. And I think I knew that she shouldn’t. But I wanted it so terribly. I could feel the wanting all through me.” ¹²

His parents look at each other and Jonas is then told about the Stirrings.

He had heard the word before. He remembered that there was a reference to the Stirrings in the Book of Rules, though he didn’t remember what it said. And now and then the Speaker mentioned it. ATTENTION. A REMINDER THAT STIRRINGS MUST BE REPORTED IN ORDER FOR TREATMENT TO TAKE PLACE.¹³

In the dystopia of The Giver, the treatment is medication, taken every day to deaden a person’s natural sex drive until it finally disappears in old age. In Laestadianism, the treatment is the forgiveness of sins–dispensed in a sermon every Sunday and, if parents are following recommended procedure, in the words of absolution being preached to their children at bedtime every night.

Believe all sins forgiven in Jesus’ name and precious blood, the young innocents are told, night after night by parents or siblings. That proclamation offers redemptive relief for all sins, and does the job in most cases, certainly from sinful thoughts of providing erotic bathing assistance to the cute girl or boy next door. If one’s Stirrings have moved beyond mere fantasy to masturbation or–heaven forbid–to a little kissing and heavy petting behind the garage where the yard light don’t shine, guilt pangs may persist despite the generic assurance of forgiveness. The preachers recommend confession in such cases.

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The assembled community: Looks a lot like church to me.

Confession was a big deal in Laestadianism during my childhood. Most sins beyond mere impure thoughts, doubts, etc. were considered to remain on the conscience until one had spoken of them “by name.” It was not an absolute requirement to confess, but was widely expected, at least for those infractions falling into a non-biblical category of “name sins,” a category that was often referred to but never very specifically defined.¹⁴ A 1978 article from the church newsletter pretty well encapsulates how things were back then:

It is never an easy matter to repent of sins for the flesh fights against the Spirit. But sin has a name, and those named sins will not go away without our speaking of them to a dear brother or sister. We are assured that we can freely go to a dear one and open our heart. But those sins that have affected the congregation of God are to be re­pented of before the con­gregation; otherwise we will not receive freedom.¹⁵

That last part about repentance before the congregation offers a hint of the public confessions that people often made after the Sunday morning service when I was a kid. In my congregation and at least some others in North America, members would head up to the front of the church after the ser­mon and ask the en­tire con­gregation for forgiveness of various sins.

During the congregational “caretaking” meetings that were a regular Saturday night event, where some issue or person(s) of concern would be discussed with much emotion, such repentances would go on and on.¹⁶I’ll always remember one of them in particular, from a young father who dutifully walked up to the microphone and asked forgiveness of the congregation for “reading filthy literature.” Poor guy. It was probably just a paperback novel with a vague sex scene or two.

With all those memories in my head, you can see why I saw some Laestadian parallels in Jonas’s recollection of his friend Asher showing up late to class:

“When the class took their seats at the conclusion of the patriotic hymn, Asher remained standing to make his public apology as was required.”

“I apologize for inconveniencing my learning community.” Asher ran through the standard apology phrase rapidly, still catching his breath. The Instructor and class wait­ed patient­ly for his ex­planation. The students had all been grinning, because they had listened to Asher’s explanations so many times before.

“I left home at the correct time but when I was riding along near the hatchery, the crew was separating some salmon. I guess I just got distraught, watching them.

“I apologize to my classmates,” Asher concluded. He smoothed his rumpled tunic and sat down.

“We accept your apology, Asher.” The class recited the standard response in unison.¹⁷

“I’d like to ask forgiveness for, er, reading filthy literature,” the Laestadian Asher stammered, looking down at the floor. Believe all your sins forgiven in Jesus’ name and blood, replied the congregation with their standard response, in unison.

Back in those bad old days, there was another chilling parallel to The Giver. It was release from the community, the Laestadian form of which we called “binding.” Believers would be bound in their sins, and any requests they made to be forgiven would be denied unless it was decided that they were being specific and penitent enough about the issue at hand. Usually, there was some “false spirit” at the heart of the matter, which needed to be exorcised by being named in the confession.

This was a sad outcome of many “care­taking meet­ings” that were common­ly held to discuss the spiritual state of individual congregation members. Such a meeting was considered the third step in Jesus’ instructions regarding the rebuke of a brother who has caused offense (Matt. 18:15-16). Offense was taken not so much for individual actions against another member but as a result of the wayward one’s observed sins (e.g., acquiring a television) or erroneous doctrinal views.

In a 1971 newpaper article, the Finnish counterpart to my North American Laestadian church had set forth the binding procedure in no uncertain terms: “If the ones spoken to do not humble themselves to repentance, consider them pagans and publicans and refuse them membership in the association. The disobedient are not to be greeted with the greeting of God’s children.” My old church took “precisely the same stand in America” three years later.¹⁸

“For a contributing citizen to be released from the community was a final decision, a terrible punishment, an overwhelming statement of failure.” ¹⁹ In The Giver, release was just to “Elsewhere.” Nobody but the Planning Committee knew exactly where the released person went.²⁰ We readers, along with a wiser and sadder Jonas, come to realize that release actually involves death, not mere departure.

The horror and injustice of the community killing off its members–not just for disobedience, but for perceived unfitness at birth or just running out the clock on one’s old age–is what propels Jonas to take drastic action as the apprentice Receiver. Obviously, it would be a stretch to draw much of a parallel there, but it’s worth mentioning what a sad impact the Laestadian practice of binding did have on people.

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Beyond the gate: Actually a good place to be. [Flickr page]

I personally witnessed it several times as a youth. It is quite unforgettable to see people ask the congregation for forgiveness at a meeting held concerning their spiritual affairs and receive only cold silence as a response. Sometimes they would sit gamely at their table at the front of the church while the meeting continued to the bitter end, often late into the night. And sometimes they would reach their breaking point and storm out of the building, ending the meeting of their own accord. I saw it go either way. Both outcomes were heartbreaking to the subjects as well as the congregation members who sincerely believed that the soul of their brother or sister hung in the balance that night.

There could be a good deal of secret resentment even when one had jumped through the hoops set before him. Grumbling behind the back of the church elders was the only possible relief. To approach them with concerns about their activities carried the very real danger of seeming unrepentant and becoming subject to yet another meeting. Instead, for a couple of years to come, the public face remained one of compliance and thankfulness for the opportunity of correction. In many cases the corrected one was probably so beaten down by the experience as to feel a Stockholm-syndrome sense of gratitude.²¹

The last case of binding I’ve heard of happened ten years ago, and that’s quite a late anomaly. The Finnish counterpart to my old church issued an apology of sorts in 2011 for “errors [that] were able to expand almost everywhere in our Christianity,” though it puts the blame on individuals rather than the supposed­ly inerrant community, er, Mother con­gregation.²² But the trauma and col­lective memory of it still lurks behind the rebukes taking place in every private board meeting with a wayward believer. There is usually no alternative but to accept what you are told and repent of your supposed sin if you want to continue being considered “heaven acceptable.”

One “morning, for the first time, Jonas did not take his pill. Something within him, something that had grown there through the memories, told him to throw the pill away.” ²³ He has gotten some of the forbidden knowledge into his head, and a bit of color has started seeping into his black-and-white world.

It hasn’t been an altogether pleasant transformation:

He found that he was often angry, now: irrationally angry at his groupmates, that they were satisfied with their lives which had none of the vibrance his own was taking on. And he was angry at himself, that he could not change that for them.

He tried. Without asking permission from The Giver, be­cause he feared–or knew–that it would be denied, he tried to give his new awareness to his friends.²⁴

The reactions are mixed. Asher gets uneasy when Jonas tells him to look at some flowers very carefully, wondering if something is wrong. In the film adaptation, Fiona (the girl of Jonas’s bathtub dream) takes more readily to this scary new Jonas and his crazy ideas. “There is something wrong. Everything’s wrong. I quit,” Jonas tells her in response to the same question Asher had asked.²⁵ He persuades her to quit taking her own stirring-stopper medication, too, and some difficult consequences ensue.

Ultimately, the Receiver of Memory cannot remain in the community. He knows too much. He feels too much. The community insists on keeping itself ignorant of what he has learned. It will not raise up its eyes from the safe grey sameness of doctrinal familiarity to look–really look–at the world he now sees all around.

“Listen to me, Jonas,” the old Giver tells a sobbing Jonas. “They can’t help it. They know nothing.” ²⁶ And then Jonas leaves the community of his birth and up­bring­ing, to a new and scary but joy­ous place–outside for the first time, inside never again, and the better for it.

Notes

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Gary Gripp, guest blogger extraordinaire

BY GARY GRIPP, to a future generation:

Everything central to our way of life is in the growth mode: the banks, the corporations, all our extractive and service industries, and, not least of all, our population. More people means: more willing buyers of homes, cars, electronic gadgets, and all the trappings of modern life. More jobs, more prosperity, more everything.

More, more, more. It is in the interest of banks and corporations, as well as businesses large and small, that the market for products continues to grow. More, more, more. Grow, grow, grow.

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Smoky skies from wildfires this summer [Flickr page]

On a finite planet with degraded natural systems and diminishing natural resources, this growth imperative, built-in to our systems and into our lives, is an irresistible force coming up against an immovable object. It is us hitting a wall, and doing so at speed. More and more people in my time now see this crash coming.

Of course, there is also plenty of willful and studied stupidity on this subject. But here again, consider the incentives. As we spend down the last of what is left, there are still fortunes to be made.

And it is not only the power elite who gain by the liquidation of natural systems as we turn the Earth inside-out and upside-down in our frenzy to mine everything that can be mined. We are all implicated, all more-or-less willing accomplices in this final dismantling, because we are dependent on all these systems. Not only for our improvident lifestyle, but perhaps even for our very lives.

It would seem to make perfect sense, given our trajectory toward doom, that we should reverse our course as quickly and completely as we can. One way to do this would be to de-grow our population. Another would be to make far fewer demands upon this ailing and injured planet. Doing both at the same time would be better yet. But there are a few problems with this obvious fix, not the least of which is our agricultural system which–(get this now)–takes ten calories of energy (by way of cheap oil) to produce one calorie of food energy to power people.¹

The industrial agricultural system has been in place for less than three quarters of a century, but it’s responsible for more than tripling our population in that short time. Without the high-grade energy of cheap oil, there could never have been more than seven billion of us. But the fact is: There are more than seven billion living human beings.

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Sunset on nature, with endless commerce rolling by [Flickr page]

And what individual, or group, is going to take the responsibility for whittling this untenable number down to size? Even if all seven billion of us could agree that our numbers must be reduced, which we emphatically do not, how would we go about implementing this concerted will that we do not have?

Or let’s say that we could all agree that we wanted to live under a no-growth steady-state economic system (for which, again, there is, emphatically, no agreement). What would happen to all these interlocking systems–in which we are invested and enmeshed–that only work under conditions of growth, and falter under contraction? We really don’t know exactly what would happen, because non-linear complexity is involved. But it is a good guess that it would look quite a bit like dominoes falling, and they’d be falling on us.

I want you to understand why it is, when there were at least a few of us who could see what was coming, that we did nothing, or next to nothing, to slow this juggernaut down. I can see where you might be harboring bitter resentments against those who left you a world so broken in so many ways.

I don’t know if you yourself hold the value of intergenerational justice, but if you do, you will likely feel that you have been thoroughly betrayed. And you have, but not out of malicious­ness; not even out of in­dif­ference–at least not com­plete in­dif­ference. I per­sonally know individuals who feel strongly that we are doing you a terrible injustice, and we are.

But I want you to realize that we really didn’t have a choice in the matter. Whatever little any of us might have been able to do on your behalf wasn’t going to be nearly enough, because this growth catastrophe is systemic.

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Rough road ahead [Flickr page]

We are all invested in these systems, one way or another, and have grown utterly dependent upon them for whatever there is left to value in human life. The thing is, almost none of us can see how we could possibly live without them–and truly almost none of us could.

The bind we are in is this: It is suicidal to go on as we are, and it would be suicidal to stop, and collapse all these systems that support our lives. Most of us live day to day, putting one foot in front of the other, more or less on automatic pilot, taking whatever satisfaction we can from our life in bondage to these systems. Even if we realize that something vital to our being has been taken from us, and that our lives are hollow, this is still all we have: a life of sorts. Your life, on the other hand, is mere conjecture, a phantom in the mists of a future that may never arrive. And so we go with what we know, in the here and now.

Would you, in our place, behave any differently?

Notes

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Genesee residents during the winter of 1912-13 ²

Autumn came late this year, and climate change was very much on my mind as the skies remained warm and dry throughout much of October. With our house windows left open long after dark to cool the place down, I lingered over the pictures and stories of deep snows in the book I’ve just finished editing and publishing for my fellow Eastern Washington resident Gerald Hickman. Good Times in Old Genesee: A Tale of Two Families (Tellectual Press, 2015) is about a tiny dot of a pioneer town a couple hours’ drive south of here where Gerald and his parents were born and raised.

When he was growing up, it snowed there. A lot, if the “walked through miles of snow to school, uphill both ways” memories of an elder citizen can be relied upon:

My brother and sister and I would walk down the steep hill on our ranch road about a half mile through the snow drifts to catch a ride to school on the bus. We had to buck the drifts about ten months of each year. Finally, when summer came, we were mostly snow-free, and free of classes as well.³

He recalls snowball fights and sled riding down a hill on the drive to his childhood home. “The best part: We were really close to home for hot chocolate from Mom’s warm and loving kitchen.” ⁴

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Detail: Snowball

In the early 1900s, he says (here drawing on historical research rather than memory), “there was often so much snow that they had to tunnel under the snow to cross Main Street.”

His great-uncle John Platt, who arrived in Genesee as a child with his family in the late 1800s, “said that the snow did not seem so deep around Genesee in the later years of his life,” and Gerald agrees. “With the exceptional year or two, winters seem to have become less severe in my later years as well.” ⁵

Just in the 15 years or so we’ve been in the Inland Northwest, we’ve seen a decrease in snowfall. I love the feeling of huddling inside our house with the woodstove burning wood I grew, logged, hauled, bucked, split, and stacked myself, from my own property, as the snow fills the skies and piles up outside. I love stomping through it and seeing the cold clean whiteness of it all, the graceful curves of it piled on trees and roofs, softening every sharp angle. One memorable winter, I spent 26 days skiing down it on a mountain that is less than 40 minutes from my driveway.

Now, thanks in part to automobile trips as long as the ones I made back and forth to that ski hill, undertaken every day by millions of commuters across the country and beyond, those snowfalls are faltering. Climate change, driven by greenhouse gas emissions from my tailpipe and everyone else’s, has thinned the clouds in our Pacific Northwest skies. When they do offer us the winter moisture that has carpeted this region with evergreens, it often comes down as rain rather than snow.

According to a Nepalese study cited in Bill McKibben’s book Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, there has been an annual temperature rise of 0.1°F in the Himalayas. That, McKibben observes, works out to “a degree every decade in a world where the mercury barely budged for ten millennia.”

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Detail: Eye contact with the past

In 2008, a 57-year old Nepalese man looking at a glacier that’s retreated more than a mile since he played on it as a child said, “I feel that the sun is getting stronger, and in the past there used to be a lot more snow in winter. We used to get up to two metres in the winter, and it would stay for weeks. Last winter we only had two centimetres.” ⁶

The drastic warmth in Nepal “is spurring melt with almost unimaginable consequences,” says McKibben.

Indian researchers recently predicted that glaciers could disappear from the central and eastern Himalayas as early as 2035, including the giant Gangotri Glacier that supplies 70 percent of the dry-season water to the Ganges River. That would leave 407 million people looking for a new source of drinking and irrigation water.⁷

On the other side of India lies Pakistan, “a country that is essentially a desert with a big river flowing through it.” ⁸ That river is the Indus, which is fed by glaciers in “the Himalayas, the Hindu Kush and the Karakoram, forming the largest reservoir of ice outside the poles.” This is a country that is already getting hit by climate change, with “catastrophic floods which displaced millions, and a deadly heatwave this summer that killed 1,200 people.” ⁹

But the suffering is only going to get worse, because those glaciers are retreating fast. By 2050, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “predicts a decrease in the freshwater supply of South Asia, particularly in large river basins such as the Indus.” Karachi, which draws almost all of its water from the Indus “will somehow have to manage its growing population with even less water–a population with a significant poverty rate that will also struggle should food prices rise.” ¹⁰

This is not just a problem for some distant people we never see except occasionally on the news, because India and Pakistan both have nuclear weapons, about a hundred between them as of 2010. They glare at each other across a hostile border, possibly “the most worrisome adversaries capable of a regional nuclear conflict today.” ¹¹ What happens when one of them–thoroughly infected with religious fanaticism and filled with millions of desperate, starving citizens–finally decides to lash out at its hated rival?

Consider, as Gwynne Dyer does in his scary look forward to a planet at war over climate pressures, that five

of the six rivers that eventually feed into the Indus system rise in Indian-controlled territory. In undivided, British-ruled India, the water flowed unhindered into the intricately linked irrigation canals that covered much of the provinces of Punjab and Sind, but Partition in 1947 left most of the headwaters in Indian hands, while well over four-fifths of the farmers who depended on the water lived in the new state of Pakistan.¹²

Nations do not “go gentle into that good night” when dwindling resources make bare survival look impossible. Backed against the wall, with military options at hand–frightfully so in Pakistan and India to say nothing of China, another thirsty nation with dicey water prospects–they follow Dylan Thomas’s poetic admonition to “rage, rage, against the dying of the light.” ¹³ The consequences are horrific for their neighbors, sometimes the entire world.

This is what Lebensraum was all about, as historian Tim Snyder soberly explained on a recent episode of Tom Ashbrook’s On Point NPR program. Climate change could well return us to a tribalistic world convulsed by resource wars. We are already seeing the beginning of sorrows in the mass exodus from Syria.

“Organized societies can endure a lot of hardship and still carry on, but when populations go hungry all bets are off for cultural cohesion and political stability,” observes James Howard Kunstler in his masterpiece Too Much Magic.

If world events follow their usual perverse course, food shortages and other resource scarcities will express themselves indirectly in quarrels that may seem to have little to do with the pertinent issues: conflicts over abstractions such as interest rates and currencies, trade wars, revolutions, fights over boundaries and islands, nationalist chest-beating displays, and religious warfare of the jihad and crusade variety. There may be little public acknowledgment or even consciousness of the reasons behind one outburst of trouble or another.¹⁴

And we certainly can’t expect that an abused planet already under stress would respond well to even a “local” outbreak of mushroom clouds in the Subcontinent:

A nuclear war could trigger declines in yield nearly everywhere at once, and a worldwide panic could bring the global agricultural trading system to a halt, with severe shortages in many places. Around one billion people worldwide who now live on marginal food supplies would be directly threatened with starvation by a nuclear war between India and Pakistan or between other regional nuclear powers.¹⁵

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Snowy street in early Genesee, Idaho

It’s a grim picture, and there has been no shortage of what doomsday ecologist Guy McPherson memorably calls “hopium” to assuage a public that’s becoming increasingly concerned, despite campaigns of denial financed by fossil fuel interests. The pharmacopoeia of hopium includes grandiose techno-fixes such as implausible carbon capture schemes and seeding the stratosphere with sulfates to reflect solar radiation. Bill McKibben is critical of such fantasies, though with some sympathy for “the daydreams of the developing world” like the suggestion made at a meeting of Asian journalists that “Bangladesh could be relocated to Siberia and Iceland.” Melting snows would, it was claimed, “turn them into ‘bread-baskets.’” How, he asks, does one tell these front-line casualties of our war against nature “that the tundra is turning into a methane-leaking swamp?” ¹⁶

Besides, there is the small issue of what the Russians and Icelanders might think about an invasion of 150 million Bangladeshis. Even an enlightened new generation of Germans ever mindful of their grandparents’ Holocaust is getting twitchy about all the Syrian refugees mobbing their borders.

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January 2009: Our last really good snow in Eastern WA [Flickr page]

“Have you entered the storehouses of the snow, or have you seen the storehouses of the hail,” the Book of Job has God sniff at us mere mortals, storm-stuff that he has “reserved for the time of distress, for the day of war and battle?” ¹⁷ Those storehouses are not hidden somewhere above clouds in God’s heaven, but on snow-capped mountains right here on earth. Their stock is running low, not just in the Himalayas, but around the world in this time of distress we have made for ourselves.

The last of Bolivia’s 18,000 year-old Chacaltaya Glacier melted away in 2009.¹⁸ Andean glaciers like that one are “the main source of water across South America, from Colombia to Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Chile,” and their disappearance is going to cause major problems. One climate change advisor for Latin America at a humanitarian organization says that conflicts over water “will become explosive over the coming decades because the glaciers will dry out.” ¹⁹

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An increasingly rare treat [Flickr page]

Agriculture “is practically at an end in California’s Central Valley,” says Dyer, “due to the failure of the rivers that used to be fed in the summer by the melting snowpack on the Sierra Nevada and Rocky Mountains.” ²⁰ This is not a trivial situation: The Central Valley “accounts for one-quarter of the food grown for human consumption in the United States.” But its rivers will likely become seasonal in world that is 2°C warmer, flowing only in the winter with precipitation that falls on the mountains mostly as rain instead of snow.²¹

The Sierra Nevada mountain range is, or was, “a giant water faucet in the sky, a 400-mile-long, 60-mile-wide reservoir held in cold storage that supplies California with more than 60 percent of its water.” Now the snow is coming later and melting earlier.²²

Rainwater, alas, runs off immediately instead of adding to a storehouse of moisture that melts and feeds rivers late into the spring and summer.²³ Farmers and ranchers in the American West need that slowly melting snow to keep water flowing throughout the dry summer. Otherwise, a lot of the water is gone by the time their crops need it.²⁴

And there are a lot of us eating food produced from those crops. Don’t kid yourself about agricultural abundance from the Midwest, either. About 30% of the groundwater used for irrigation in the U.S. comes from the Ogallala Aquifer, the saturated volume of which has gone down by about 9% since 1950, according to Wikipedia. “Depletion is accelerating, with 2% lost between 2001 and 2009 alone. Once depleted, the aquifer will take over 6,000 years to replenish naturally through rainfall.” ²⁵ In the crucial Kansas section of the Ogallala, 30% has already been pumped out and farming there will likely peak by around 2040 due to water depletion.²⁶

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Brown Christmas, 2014 [Flickr page]

Meanwhile, back in Latah County where Gerald Hickman’s little town of Genesee still sits among the monoculture, petroleum-fertilized grain fields of Big Ag, a local club in the Idaho State Snowmobile Association (“Snodrifters of Latah County”) canceled its February 15, 2015 “Raffle Run” due to lack of snow. “Look for us to be back next year,” they plead on their website.²⁷

For reasons that go far beyond a little winter recreation, we can only hope they will be.

Notes

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Kristoff Levi Laestadius, reindeer fan

Last week, I went with my wife and some of our kids to see the Disney on Ice figure-skating adaption of the musical movie Frozen. It was great fun to see Anna and Elsa zipping around the rink with Olaf, Kristoff, and Sven, who materialized as a rather large reindeer comprised of two skaters inside a furry brown costume. When Elsa went out on the ice under blue light for her big solo act, two little girls sitting behind us sang along at the top of their lungs: “Let it go, let it GO!”

A husband-and-wife pair of composers wrote Let it Go as “Elsa’s Badass Song,” specifically intended to be sung by Idina Menzel, “one of the most glorious voices of Broadway.” They succeeded brilliantly. The song is the highlight of the film and has sold over 10 million copies on its own.¹

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Lamplit Tree [Flickr page]

I first heard it while sitting in a theater with my family nearly two years ago. This was still a fairly novel experience after a lifetime of being told–and then allowing it to be told to my children–that seeing movies is a sin. Laestadianism and its oddities were still very much on my mind as I watched Anna make her cute wisecracks and accompany a socially-inept ice merchant and his furry best friend on a quest that included, among other delightful implausibilities, a visit with some witty and wise rock-rodents who dispensed relationship advice.

“So he’s a bit of a fixer-upper,” they sang about Kristoff while working on setting him up with Anna. Aren’t we all, I thought, musing about all the mental remodeling my wife and I were doing on ourselves and our older children, after the nonsense we’d all heard for years and years sitting alongside each other in a very different setting.

When Elsa finally broke out of her self-imposed shell, flung out her arms, tossed back her head, and proclaimed that she wasn’t going to hold back anymore, I felt like applauding.

Yes! You go, girl! I silently cheered, feeling a bit embarrassed about how emotional I was getting watching this movie. But there was a good reason for it. For a year, I’d had to “conceal, don’t feel, don’t let them know” what I’d learned from some diligent and sincere research about my childhood faith. Sharing that information with a few friends in the church got me hauled into a meeting with my local congregation’s preachers and board of trustees.

After a two-hour inquisition, having been told I was to retrieve the dozen or so copies of the book I’d given away, “I went home and told my wife, ‘You are about to witness the intellectual disintegration of your husband.’ Then the years of doubt, fear, and frustration–culminating in being muzzled into silence by a church far more interested in rebuke than reality–boiled over. I collapsed into my wife’s arms in tears, and went to bed for a fitful night.” ²

After some months, I just couldn’t hold it back anymore, either. My half-hearted promises to stay away from dangerous studies didn’t stick, of course, and I “learned and questioned more about church history, the Bible, and aspects of science that conflicted with important points of doctrine.” I also “lost the energy to continue swimming against the current of the church’s clannish, insular social scene,” which treated my family and me like we all had some dangerous and contagious disease once my doubts became known.

I was ready to “shake off the muzzle” and put into print what had “been swirling around my head and flagged in the pages of my library of books.” The result, An Examination of the Pearl, wound up being more than twice the size of the print-shop copy that had gotten the elders so bent out of shape.

Given the outraged reaction I encountered to a very limited, private distribution of the book, which consisted mostly of church statements and relatively restrained footnotes about those statements, I have no illusions that this published edition will be well received. As Ken Daniels noted about his own book, “whether I take a gentle or harsh approach, I am sure to elicit criticism. The very act of confronting deeply cherished religious convictions is unforgivable to some, regardless of my tactics.” ³

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Frost on Ponderosa [Flickr page]

I’m not the only one who has been moved by Let it Go as an anthem of liberation from fundamentalism. Blogger “Libby Anne” wrote about that in March 2014, after being shocked at how much her conservative evangelical mother obsessed over the movie. “How could they see Frozen and not realize that it was about self acceptance and freedom from others’ expectations–and moral standards?” she wondered.

When she first watched Let it Go on YouTube,

before seeing the movie in theaters, I completely choked up at the line “no right no wrong, no rules for me.” Tears started streaming down my cheeks. It was beautiful. I grew up in a conservative evangelicalism that I eventually found highly restrictive. As I began to extricate myself, my family and friends put me through a special kind of hell. But even through all of the pain and the tears, I entered into freedom when I left behind their rules, their expectations, their control. This song spoke to so many emotions. I’ve watched it again and again many times since that first time, and each time I’ve achieved some form of catharsis.

It’s now her personal theme song, she says.⁴ Another blogger, Maranda Russell, says she fell in love with the song as soon as she heard it:

At times in my life I felt like I had to hide my true self to get approval and love from friends, family and the church. I had to pretend to be a “good girl” who never questions anything and believes blindly what I am told. I still feel like many wish I would just shut up and believe what they tell me is true, but I just can’t do that anymore.⁵

Maranda admits that “maybe I still care a little (after all I am still human), but I won’t let it rule me.” I did, too, about what I knew my “brothers and sisters in faith” were going to say, but I went ahead anyway. A storm would rage, friendships would be lost–most of those that I’d forged since childhood, it turned out, in a church that discouraged social contact with the outside world.

And the stakes were infinitely higher than what one friend called “social suicide”: Publishing the book against the wishes of the Laestadian Lutheran Church would inevitably be viewed as an act of apostasy, no matter how balanced I tried to be in presenting my findings. Eternal damnation loomed in my future.

To those who tell me my writing was courageous, I reply that it took less courage then what many of them have done–simply walking away. I needed to have my brethren push me out instead, simply for making the facts known, asking difficult questions about them, and refusing to accept the tired old insistence that the most important matter of one’s life “cannot be understood by reason.”

My introduction to the book quoted Clement of Alexandria from 18 centuries earlier: “If our faith is such that it is destroyed by force of argument, then let it be destroyed; for it will have been proved that we do not possess the truth.” Recalling the “faith” of a board member who said he won’t read anything critical about what he supposedly believes,” I asked if that was

really faith in anything other than the people around him who are repeating the old slogans? They, too, are ignoring the facts about their “faith,” making the whole thing a self-sustaining doctrinal bubble that quivers unsteadily in the air, vulnerable to being poked by the slightest intrusion of fact.⁶

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Looking Back [Flickr page]

Now, nearly four years later, these words from Let it Go are exactly my experience:

There is simply no fear anymore. And it’s not for any lack of knowledge about what this weird little sect thinks my eternal fate will be. Hell, I still listen to sermons sometimes to get to sleep, because the preachers’ somber, familiar, repetitive intonations send me drifting off faster than anything else. Sometimes I get several nights’ worth of use out of a single sermon, because I start the iPod at different points in the recording and am out within ten minutes.

One correspondent told me, “My old Laestadian world view is gone. If I talk to certain people or listen to sermons I can feel the world view there and experience it sometimes. I don’t think it’s ever coming back, though, and I am the better for it.”

Yes, my friend, you are. And, as Elsa sings out, fully embracing her unique identity and abilities, “one thought crystallizes like an icy blast”: You’re “never going back. The past is in the past!”

Notes

When my mother called me on the morning of September 11, 2001 and said that a plane had hit the World Trade Center, my first reaction was, “So what?” I pictured the small wreck of a Cessna stuck into a few windows, an accident resulting from some grossly incompetent private pilot.

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September 11th [Flickr page]

After I’d rubbed the sleep from my eyes and walked over to my computer to watch the live coverage online, I saw that huge plume of smoke and realized this was bigger than I’d thought. Then the second plane hit, and Islam–as envisioned by a small group of its most fanatically devoted followers–had introduced itself to my world.

In an effort to understand what my President was calling a “religion of peace,” I bought a paperback copy of the Qur’an¹ and started reading. It didn’t seem all that peaceful to me. Just in the first three pages, Sura 2 (“The Cow”) went on and on about infidels who will receive “a severe chastisement,” whose hearts are diseased, for whom a fire has been prepared.

On page 17 (still in Sura 2), I encountered a command for Muslims to “fight for the cause of God against those who fight against you.” It was accompanied by the caveat that they should not attack the unbelievers first, at least, though that’s pretty much a moot point now, with Middle Eastern grievances stretching back many hundreds of years. Then, the text went on, “kill them wherever ye shall find them, and eject them from whatever place they have ejected you; for civil discord is worse than carnage.” With the sound still fresh in mind of turbofan engines and screams and bodies falling onto the pavement, this didn’t seem like a promising start.

And it wasn’t. Sura 8 (“The Spoils”) instructed the reader, in the name of “thy Lord” who’d apparently told some angels, “I will be with you: therefore stablish ye the faithful. I will cast a dread into the hearts of the infidels,” to “Strike off their heads then, and strike off from them every finger-tip,” because “they have opposed God and His Apostle.” Further instruction was to “Fight then against them till strife be at an end, and the religion be all of it God’s.” Sura 9 (“Immunity”) urged, “Believers! Wage war against such of the infidels as are your neighbors, and let them find you rigorous: and know that God is with those who fear him.”

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September 11, 2001 [Flickr page]

Sura 24 (“Light”) sets forth a brutal punishment for the “whore and the whoremonger,” of the type that is still being carried out by faithful Muslims of ISIS and Saudi Arabia today: “scourge each of them with an hundred stripes; and let not compassion keep you from carrying out the sentence of God, if you believe in God and the last day.” Raif Badawi may have recalled the next line as the lash bore down on him in January: “And let some of the faithful witness their chastisement.” As he himself recalled it, “when I look within, I only see that thin man who miraculously withstood fifty lashes, while a group of people celebrated his pain, repeatedly chanting Allahu Akbar.” ²

The first verses of Sura 47 (“Muhammed”) included this framework for interfaith dialogue: “When ye encounter the infidels, strike off their heads till ye have made a great slaughter among them, and of the rest make fast the fetters.” Two pages later, it urged believers not to be fainthearted, “and invite not the infidels to peace when ye have the upper hand.” In Sura 66 (“The Forbidding”), the Prophet was told to “make war on the infidels and hypocrites, and deal rigorously with them. Hell shall be their abode! And wretched the passage to it!”

My passage through the text to this point had been pretty wretched, too. It was all so very repetitive, bleak, defensive, and angry. Denunciations of infidels were littered everywhere, along with copious eternal threats (“for the infidels is the torture of the Fire!”, Sura 8). There were provisions giving special privileges to slaveholders (“Forbidden to you also are married women, except those who are in your hands as slaves,” Sura 4) and the prophet (“No blame attacheth to the Prophet where God hath given him a permission,” Sura 33).

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“Make war on the infidels” [Flickr page]

One entertaining diversion from the overall gloom of my reading project was coming across this license given by Allah to the man who (coincidentally!) was the very one to transmit the divine words:

O Prophet! We allow thee thy wives whom thou hast dowered, and the slaves whom thy right hand possesseth out of the booty which God hath granted thee, and the daughters of thy uncle, and of thy paternal and maternal aunts who fled with thee to Medina, and any believing woman who hath given herself up to the Prophet, if the Prophet desired to wed her–a privilege for thee above the rest of the faithful. [Sura 33, “The Confederates”]

That’s some real forward thinking on Mo’s part there. If you’re going to write a holy book, you might as well get all of your special sexual privileges defined right up front.

It’s an example of how “temporal power, aggrandisement, and self-gratification mingled rapidly with the grand object of the Prophet’s life” during the latter period of his life, in Medina. That char­acterization is from William Muir’s four-volume, mid-19th century biography Life of Mahomet, which the ex-Muslim writer Ibn Warraq says passed “a judgment on Muhammad’s character that was to be repeated over and over again by subsequent scholars.” Muir observed that Muhammad’s “personal indulgences were not only excused but encouraged by the divine approval or command.” In addition, “Battles were fought, executions ordered, and territories annexed, under cover of the Almighty’s sanction.” ³ The Arab pagans of the 7th century had plenty to be Islamophobic about.⁴

The Prophet also seemed–to my layman’s reading at least–pretty touchy about the idea that his revelations might be questioned. He has Allah proclaim reassuringly that infidels like me will say, “This Koran is a mere fraud of his own devising, and others have helped him with it, who had come hither by outrage and lie” (Sura 25, “al Furkan”). We unbelievers scoff at Allah’s “distinct signs” by saying, “This is merely a man who would fain pervert you from your father’s worship,” and “This (Koran) is no other than a forged falsehood” (Sura 34, “Saba”).

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Circling the sacred black building with its very special black rock in Mecca [Flickr page]

But wait! Sura 41 (“The Made Plain”) provides a handy rationalization for our skepticism. It’s one that sounds all too familiar from my days in Christian fundamentalism: The Qur’an “is to those who believe a guide and a medicine; but as to those who believe not, there is a thickness in their ears, and to them it is a blindness.” ⁵

I’ll agree to that, at least. In all those pages, I saw nothing about love, nothing about joy or any real wisdom. It looks to me like blindness, all right–to everything that is good and decent about humanity.⁶

Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), famous historian of the Roman Empire, wasn’t impressed, either. The Qur’an he called an “endless incoherent rhapsody of fable, and precept, and declamation, which seldom excites a sentiment or an idea, which sometimes crawls in the dust, and is sometimes lost in the clouds.” Philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) was even less charitable, calling it a

wild and absurd performance. Let us attend to his [Muhammad’s] narration; and we shall soon find that he bestows praise on such in­stances of treachery, in­human­ity, cruelty, revenge, and big­otry as are utterly incompatible with civilized society. No steady rule of right seems there to be attended to; and every action is blamed or praised, so far only as it is beneficial or hurtful to the true believers.⁷

The Qur’an and Muhammad’s sword are, in the assessment of biographer Muir, “the most stubborn enemies of Civilization, Liberty, and Truth, which the world has yet known.” ⁸ Admittedly, in the 150 years since he wrote that, we have seen plenty of uncivilized behavior totally unrelated to Islam or even religion–the Holocaust, Stalin’s murder of millions, the Bataan death march, and my own country’s detonation of two nuclear bombs over civilian populations come to mind. But we are also still seeing all too much of the bloody sword of Muhammed, not just in the Middle East, but in the concert halls, banquet rooms, and subway stations of the Western world.

Submit or Die

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And fuck you, sir.

Nor is Liberty (to say nothing of an impartial search for Truth) a viable partner with Islam. Its very name–meaning “submission” or “surrender”–is contrary to that.⁹ Islam is a totalitarian ideology that hacks away at human rights and freedoms with two bloody edges of Muhammad’s sword: sharia, which subjugates those currently under Islamic control, and jihad, which seeks to extend that control to everybody else, having “for its ultimate aim the conquest of the entire world, in order to submit it to one single authority.”

The sharia or Islamic law is “based on four principles or roots.” ¹⁰One of course is the Qur’an, with all its restrictions and barbaric punishments. And it’s not going anywhere. Even the moderate Muslim reformer Maajid Nawaz, who is doing much-needed work to help promote a tolerant (and tolerable) form of Islam, admits that “most Muslims today believe that the Qur’an is the eternal, literal word of God.” ¹¹

The other three principles behind sharia are “the sunna of the Prophet, which is incorporated in the recognized traditions; the consensus (ijma) of the scholars of the orthodox community; and the method of reasoning by analogy (qiyas or kiyas).” The whole thing is a “doctrine of duties” that is

aimed at “controlling the religious, social and political life of mankind in all its aspects, the life of its followers without qualification, and the life of those who follow tolerated religions to a degree that prevents their activities from hampering Islam in any way.” . . . It intrudes into every nook and cranny: everything–to give a random sample–from the pilgrim tax, agricultural contracts, the board and lodging of slaves, the invitation to a wedding, the use of toothpicks, the ritual fashion in which one’s natural needs are to be accomplished, the prohibition for men to wear gold or silver rings, to the proper treatment of animals is covered.¹²

Warraq notes that Christianity has a biblical basis for separation of church and state (“Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s and unto God the things which are God’s, Matt. 22:17), but there is no such separation with Islam. The reason goes back to Muhammed, who

was not only a prophet but also a statesman; he founded not only a community but also a state and a society. He was a military leader, making war and peace, and a lawgiver, dispensing justice. Right from the beginning, the Muslims formed a community that was at once political and religious, with the Prophet himself as head of state.¹³

“Western Islamic apologists and modernizing Muslims continue to look for democratic principles in Islam and Islamic history,” says Warraq, noting many reasons why their search will be in vain. Perhaps most glaring is the legal inferiority of women, whose testimony in court is worth half that of a man, whose movements are strictly restricted, and who are prohibited from marrying non-Muslims. Non-Muslims of either sex who live in Muslim countries suffer their own form of subjugation, while atheists and apostates from Islam can expect only death. (Warraq notes Islam’s hypocrisy in welcoming converts who move in the other direction.)

Indeed, the very “notion of an individual–a moral person who is capable of making rational decisions and accepting moral responsibility for his free acts–is lacking in Islam.” One of the greatest obstacles standing in the way of any Islamic democracy is Islam’s “emphasis that it is the final word of God, the ultimate code of conduct: Islam never allows the possibility of alternatives.” ¹⁴

Mission Work, Muhammad Style

Intolerance was built into Islam from the very beginning. No “religious toleration was extended to the idolaters of Arabia at the time of Muhammad. The only choice given them was death or the acceptance of Islam.” The Prophet himself slaughtered around 600-900 Jews, expelled others, and subjugated the rest under extortionate taxes.

Then, just a couple of years after Muhammad’s death, “the caliph Abu Bakr organized the invasion of Syria,” expanding the reach of Islam outside the Arabian peninsula.

During the campaign of 634, the entire region between Gaza and Caesarea was devastated; four thousand peasants Christians, Jews, and Samaritans who were simply defending their land were massacred. During the campaigns in Mesopotamia between 635 and 642, monasteries were sacked, the monks were killed, and Monophysite Arabs executed or forced to convert. In Elam the population was put to the sword, at Susa all the dignitaries suffered the same fate.¹⁵

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Islamic expansion under Muhammad (622-32), the Patriarchal Caliphate (632-61), and the Umayyad Caliphate (661-750). Dark brown, light brown, then gold.

About 70 years later, the Umayyad Caliphate, “the second of the four major Islamic caliphates established after the death of Muhammad,” ¹⁶provided another example of such early barbaric behavior. Another Muhammad, bin Qasim, was a commander tasked with conquering the Sindh and Multan regions of what is now Pakistan. According to Warraq’s recounting of this bit of early jihadist history, the commander had instructions from Al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, governor of Iraq, to “bring destruction on the unbelievers.” He was “to invite and induce the infidels to accept the true creed, and belief in the unity of God.”

This was not accomplished by door-to-door missionaries offering copies of the Qur’an. Al-Hajjaj prescribed harsh treatment and injury to anyone who “does not submit to Islam.” But after three days of slaughter at the port of Debal, it seems that commander bin Qasim got soft and allowed many of the inhabitants to stick with their religion.

The governor shot off a displeased letter to the commander via Indus Express, citing one of the same Qur’anic passages I did above, the one about striking off the heads of unbelievers. That was, he admonished, “a great command” that “must be respected and followed. You should not be so fond of showing mercy, as to nullify the virtue of the act.” ¹⁷Alas, governor Al-Hajjaj hadn’t gotten the memo from Reza Aslan et al. that Islam doesn’t promote violence.

Iraq was at the center of the Umayyad Caliphate. It’s the same neighborhood as another Caliphate that exists in the Qur’an-crazed imaginations of our latest outbreak of Islamic fanaticism, the Islamic State or ISIS. Christopher Hitchens, who did not live long enough to witness the current horrors of ISIS, saw its genesis as “al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia,” in 2011 calling it “the fantastically sadistic and homicidal so-called ‘insurgency’ put together by the Jordanian jailbird and psychopath Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.” ¹⁸

In his recently published dialogue with Maajid Nawaz, Sam Harris recalled how the Islamic State had “been burning prisoners alive in cages and decapitating people by the dozen and gleefully posting videos attesting to the enormity of their sadism online.” These atrocities, he observed, “represent what they unabashedly stand for.” ¹⁹ Yet, when “one asks what the motivations of Islamists and jihadists actually are, one encounters a tsunami of liberal delusion.” ²⁰

Nawaz acknowledges many of the difficulties Harris raises throughout their discussion, and laments “regressive leftists” (his words) who “have a poverty of expectation for minority groups, believing them to be homogeneous and inherently opposed to human rights values.” ²¹Regarding the Islamic State, he notes that more “violence does not necessarily equate with greater religious conviction. Each group is deeply convinced of its approach to achieving Islamism in society, and both face much danger in pursuit of that goal.” Not only do “they differ in methodology,” but they also very much despise each other.” Islamic State, for example, “would kill members of the Muslim Brotherhood” in Egypt.²²

His efforts to salvage something separate and worthwhile from “Islamism” are commendable, but knowing that various Islam-inspired groups hate each other as well as everybody else doesn’t make me feel much better about Islam itself. My “Islamophobia,” a term I accept for myself despite its pejorative intentions, is a very reasonable aversion to Islam. It is not a phobic (i.e., irrational) fear at all, but an entirely sensible response to something very dangerous.²³ Frankly, I wouldn’t want either the Islamic State orthe Muslim Brotherhood anywhere nearby.

Nawaz also attempts to draw a distinction between Islam and what the Islamic State is doing, as he and millions of other decent Muslims must. “Islam is just a religion,” he says, contrary to what we have seen above from Ibn Warraq about totalitarianism. “Islamism is the ideology that seeks to impose any version of Islam over society. Islamism is, therefore, theocratic extremism. Jihadism is the use of force to spread Islamism. Jihadist terrorism is the use of force that targets civilians to spread Islamism.”

“It is this extremism,” he says, “that must be named as Islamism and opposed,” adding “that one cannot argue that the Islamic State represents all of Islam.” Then, with refreshing candor, Nawaz goes on to admit the obvious:

one cannot argue that it has nothing to do with Islam. But it should be obvious that “a desire to impose Islam” cannot reasonably be said to have “nothing to do with Islam.” Clearly, it has something to do with it.²⁴

Yes, it certainly does. And it has everything to do with those bloody bodies of innocents lying on the ground in Paris and San Bernardino.

The Empty Quarter

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Camel market - Saudi [Flickr page]

Perhaps the best example of a devoutly Islamic society today is the place where Islam got its start, the portion of the Arabian peninsula now governed by the Al-Saud. In the assessment of John Bradley, a rare Western journalist who had some real experience there, they are “perhaps the most corrupt family the world has ever known.” Saudi Arabia, he says, is

teeming with extremists, where children are taught that “the Jews” are the eternal enemy, and where Westerners are periodically blown up in their residential compounds or gunned down in the street by attackers filled with hatred for them and seeking martyrdom. It is a place that treats Third World immigrants like slaves, where Saudi men never get to see a woman who is not a direct (and usually very close) relative, and where Saudi women themselves cannot leave the house without a male chaperone, let alone drive, and live for the most part in absolute purdah [separation from men].

Fluency in Arabic, an eager cultural curiosity, and a willingness to risk living outside some fortified expat compound allowed Bradley to spend time in another Saudi Arabia. This was one

where Westerners with an open mind and sense of adventure can and often do encounter the finest traditions of Islamic hospitality, generosity, and kindness. In this Saudi Arabia, they may spend an evening sitting with liberal-minded, and even secular, Saudi friends, drinking coffee in Starbucks while talking about the latest Western movies. Princes and princes­ses, selfless and in­corruptible, can talk pas­sionately of the need to in­troduce sweeping reforms that would limit their own power. Teenagers surf the web in Internet cafes while watching the World Cup or Superbowl on widescreen TVs, or play soccer in the street. Women, shed of their long black cloaks in the home, can quickly prove themselves to be as independent and single-minded as any in the West.²⁵

Guess which version of the country is more faithful to Islam? Despite that business about “Islamic hospitality,” which I suspect is really no different than Arabic hospitality, it is the first one–the repressive, hate-filled, all-controlling Saudi Arabia–that has enacted a bleak dystopia of pure Islam. The “universities, charities, schools, orphanages, and print media are all . . . now in the control of the Wahhabi clerics,” spewing and sowing the seeds of extremist rhetoric, indoctrinating the next generation with the joys of jihad and martyrdom.²⁶

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University College London in Saudi Arabia. No burka on the glossy brochure. [Flickr page]

For this we can thank the British and their tragic decision in the 1930s to back a certain Abdulaziz Ibn Saud,²⁷ whom they “viewed as the leader most likely to pacify rival tribes in the Arabian Peninsula and [who] had already proved himself very willing to cooperate closely with Britain in order to achieve his goal of carving out a state for his family to rule over.” ²⁸

Ibn Saud did not arrive on his own. He was accompanied, like a dog with a bad case of worms, by clerics who followed the depressingly fundamentalist Islam of one Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, who had signed a pact with Ibn Saud’s ancestor back in 1744. “Their aim was to bring about, through force if necessary, the reign of the word of God.” Sound familiar? “Abdul Wahhab had begun his preaching some years earlier. Wahhabism, his legacy, advocated a literalist and legalistic stance in matters of faith and religious practice.” ²⁹

Now, more than two hundred years later, the Saudis remain “loyal to the cynical pact that earned Wahhabi clerical endorsement of the ruling dynasty in return for heavy subsidy of Wahhabi clericalism,” as Hitchens observes.³⁰ Together they have produced a miserable cultural desert where the only form of public entertainment, apart from soccer matches, are the beheadings that take place in “chop-chop square.” ³¹

Funded by the second-largest oil reserves on the planet, Allahu Akbar, they are “putting billions of dollars at the disposal of madrassas and mujahidin alike” to infect the rest of the world with their toxic meme of Islamic madness.³² And once again, the darkness has made its way north from the Arabian Peninsula to Iraq:

For their guiding principles, the leaders of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, are open and clear about their almost exclusive commitment to the Wahhabi movement of Sunni Islam. The group circulates images of Wahhabi religious textbooks from Saudi Arabia in the schools it controls. Videos from the group’s territory have shown Wahhabi texts plastered on the sides of an official missionary van.

There’s one difference, which is of critical importance to Saudi Arabia itself: “Wahhabi scholars preach obedience to earthly rulers,” probably because they themselves are captive to the House of Saud. ISIS wants to do the ruling and taxation (i.e., extortion) itself in Iraq and Syria, not just the kind of religious propagandizing and religious policing that the Wahhabis handle in Saudi Arabia. Despite that and the Islamic State’s absolutist “with us or against us” attitude, which made even the likes of Al Qaeda uncomfortable, “a certain mutedness” lingered among the Wahhabis about ISIS. Finally, King Abdullah, a sort-of-secular ruler put in an uncomfortable position by all this Islamic caliphate business, “publicly urged them to speak out more clearly.” ³³

Calling the project of ISIS “nothing more than reviving the Wahhabism of the founding generation” and noting how the Islamic State’s leadership “absorbed the Wahhabi doctrine and mastered all its details,” Saudi researcher Fouad al-Ibrahim explains in one tidy sentence the Wahhabi clerics’ reluctance to condemn ISIS: It “adopts a global project that Wahhabism tried to achieve from the mid-eighteenth century until the end of the 1930s.” But that is a serious threat to the House of Saud, “which seeks to undermine any internationalist project that might reach within its borders.” ³⁴ The nation is, after all, the product of Al-Saud’s bloody victory over and repression of “various tribes, sheikhdoms, emirates, and kingdoms” across the Arabian Peninsula.³⁵

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Hubbert’s oil production model (upper bound) vs. actual oil production for the U.S. lower 48 states, with a recent and unsustainable fracking uptick.

The Saudi dog is feeling pretty sick nowadays from that load of Wahhabi worms it carries. But none of its symptoms, or the manifest moral failings of the Al-Saud family itself, can be publicly acknowledged by Saudi Arabia’s oil-thirsty clients. The Obama administration surely recognizes how tenuous our own oil supplies are, 45 years after the peak of conventional crude production in the U.S.³⁶And don’t count on hydraulic fracturing to keep your gas tank full for long: The depletion rate of those fracked wells in the Bakken is averaging 85% three years after drilling.³⁷ If that upward spike at the end of the graph above looks anomalous to you, you’re on to something. It’s not gonna last.

Until the supergiant oil fields that lie beneath the sands of Saudi Arabia finally run dry, the United States will remain in what Bradley calls a “fundamentally absurd and self-contradictory ‘special relationship’ with the Kingdom “that has stood since February 1945, when Ibn Saud met President Roosevelt on the USS Quincy in the Suez Canal.” ³⁸ We will continue to look the other way as the cowled barbarians of Riyadh lash and behead their bloggers and poets and make a mockery of the U.N. Human Rights Commission, and as their Wahhabi parasites continue promoting toxic Islamism around the world.

We may not have that long to wait before the whole pathetic charade comes to an end. Ghawar, the biggest of the supergiants, which alonesupplies 60% of the Kingdom’s output, has been producing for nearly 70 years. The notoriously secretive Saudi Aramco reported that it had gotten about halfway through the field’s proven reserves in 2008, and it may well have peaked a few years before then.³⁹

Withdrawal symptoms will be severe, of course, for a world grown addicted to this black tar heroin from the earth’s depths. Nor can we expect Saudi Arabia to face its own austerity with much good grace. It will finally exhaust its last ancient reserves of groundwater⁴⁰ along with the fossil energy it needs to run desalination plants, along with the sole economically viable export it can trade for food from the infidel world its clerics hate and condemn.

The place is an overpopulated hellhole, hotter than ever due to climate change ⁴¹ and packed full of unemployed and entitled youth who have no work ethic, useful knowledge, or positive role models to fall back on once the handouts stop. A large part of what their educations have been about is the hatred of others, repression, and jihad. There a “complete lack of any kind of youth culture.” Except for a bit of four-wheeling out in the sand dunes,

young Saudis who do not have the means or desire to travel abroad remain, by and large, locked away with their frustration in their bedrooms, watching satellite TV, surfing the web, and con­templating an in­creas­ingly dif­ficult life in a kingdom full of un­employ­ment, poverty, re­pres­sion, and nepotism. That, of course, is great news for radical Islamists, ever-eager to recruit to their ranks young men who have few critical faculties and a crudely simplistic world outlook. With so many youngsters wandering aimlessly into adulthood with increasingly few prospects of a decent job, ruled by a corrupt elite closely aligned to an America the young are told to hate and hold responsible for Israel’s ruthless suppression of the Palestinians, the call of the Islamists is not falling on deaf ears.

Their “essentially shallow understanding of Islam” has been taught to them “by hard-line Wahhabi teachers and clerics,” and it “sits in their minds like a highly combustible tinder box, just waiting for a loose spark to set it alight.” ⁴²

Watch out, world. Things are just getting started.

A Civilized Defense of Civilization

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Women in The Hague, Netherlands: one free, and the others?

Is it any wonder, gentle reader, why I fear and loathe this ancient and insidious Arabian export? Yes, indeed, I am an Islamophobe. I embrace the slur that was intended to shame people into not questioning this totalitarian belief system, just as some gays have decided to embrace the term “queer.”

Islam is different, of course, than a race or an innate sexual orientation. It is a belief system, one that aspires to be more than just a religion. A religion it is, though, and as such, our Constitution and sense of human de­cency (not shared by Is­lamists or a certain nar­cis­sis­tic pres­iden­tial candidate) demand that we tolerate its free exercise. At least to the extent that it doesn’t threaten us with harm, which is an important caveat.

But I damn well don’t welcome its spread into Western society, nor do I intend to be kept silent about it. Even so, more out of consideration for your attention than the hair-trigger sensitivities of Islamists and their doe-eyed apologists, this essay has glided pretty gently over the atrocities and pain that Islam inflicts, and has from the very beginning, on its followers and resisters alike. Some of its crimes against women so disgust me that I have declined to mention them at all.

Nor have I said much about the combination of mental anguish and physical danger it poses for those who dare to shake off its cold embrace, probably unequaled in any other religion. There too, many gripping stories could be told here, like the one from “Jamila” who wrote recently about the question of when the apostasy she’s been hiding will come out and tear her apart from her family. That troubling question–when?–lurks

in the double life I live with the man who shares my bed after my father drops me home, it’s there telling me that I can’t keep him a secret forever. It’s there in the folds of the headscarf I pull out of my drawer on visit days, whispering to me that if I don’t tell them, the lies, like the material I drape over my head, will suffocate me. It’s there in slight hesitation in my voice when I recite the duaas to younger siblings and I wonder if they realise that this is not the recitation of a person who prays regularly. It’s there, it’s there, it’ll destroy us again one day, and I don’t know how to stop it.⁴³

You can see more of this personal evidence about the iron grip that Islam keeps on its subjects via the /r/exMuslim subreddit and the #ExMuslimBecauseTwitter hashtag, and by following the work of courageous and vocal ex-Muslims like Maryam Namazie, Faisal Saeed Al Mutar, Riz Rashid, Ali A. Rizvi, and Aliyah Saleem. And be sure to read the sobering article by Suraiya Simi Rahman, MD–an ex-Muslim who has lived in Bangladesh, the UAE and Pakistan–in which she says one “really can’t tell until the moment before they pull the trigger, who is moderate and who is jihadi.”

These people are all standing up to the many bullies and defenders of Islam, not just mullahs and creepy ISIS shills, but their own families and even–dismayingly–supposed feminists and leftists whose good intentions have somehow been co-opted to serve the Islamist meme. I have tremendous respect for the courage and strength of character that ex-Muslims have shown. To help support them, I’ve made donations to each of two important organizations that assist people like them on their difficult journeys to freedom: the Ex-Muslims of North America and the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain.

The stories of apostates from this backwards, controlling religion need to be told–more and more, and with polite but firm criticism of the religion itself. Ibn Warraq was another one who courageously did so, regardless of the risks. “Without criticism,” he writes, “Islam will remain unassailed in its dogmatic, fanatical, medieval fortress; ossified in its totalitarian, intolerant, paranoid past. It will continue to stifle thought, human rights, individuality, originality, and truth.” ⁴⁴

Standing up to all that is a project of civilization well worth our effort, and with care to avoid adopting any of its loathsome aspects ourselves.

Notes

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Sanctuary

Familiar faces, long unseen but not forgotten or forgetting, smile and nod toward me with friendly recognition. The extended hands are shaken with Hey, – ! fitting tidily in place with a remembered name where God’s Peace used to be. I respond to the polite questions about what I am up to these days with a deftness that improves as the evening progresses. All writings and publications go unmentioned.

They’re probably as nervous as I am, I remind myself at first. Soon I am not so nervous anymore and I think that perhaps they never were, either.

Standing beneath ceiling tiles I helped to glue up, on carpet I used to clean when my committee’s turn came, our brief conversations hop brightly across silent waters of unspoken things via lilypads of neutral topics. My eyes and those of a one-time brother or sister in faith lock and linger and take in the measure of the years as we talk of children growing up in our homes and moving on. Then another face slides into view and smiles, and I nod and wave my way to the next exchange of updates and memories.

These are the people of my first forty years, my friends and travel companions when I was on the way and the journey alongside them through a dark and sinful world. Now I am part of that world, an outsider, here as a visitor in a place that used to be mine, too.

It actually hurts that they are so friendly, that they remember, that they seem to mean it when they say it’s good to see me. It was good to see them, too, but it brought renewed awareness of a hole inside that will likely never quite be filled.

There’s not a God- or Jesus-shaped hole in my heart, but a people-shaped one. It’s them I miss, not some demanding, unpleasant, shape-shifting superhero characters ¹ who faded from my consciousness far quicker than the flesh-and-blood people who gathered there with me, week after week, in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost, Amen.

I sing along with them, enjoying the music and our making of it but baffled that I’d ever believed the words I remember and see in the book held in my hands. Somewhere in those thin pages are the words Sing O people of the Lord, praises to the Lamb of God, and I am no longer one of those people. I will not be here next Sunday, or the one after that.

I’ve already done my time in these pews, listening to sermons with critical commentaries about them running through my head until one of my little kids would mercifully start to fuss and I’d have an excuse to get up for some air. Mine wasn’t much different from the experience of Father Michael Paul Gallagher, who listened to a Gospel reading at Mass while doubting (for good scholarly reasons!) that the red-letter words of the text ever had been actually spoken by Jesus. He found it “an alarming and lonely experience to be there with my community, and yet to feel cut off from the core of why we were gathered there.” ²

Does it even matter to these people, I wonder, seeing them all warmly surrounded by parents and spouses and children and lifetime friends, whether it is true? Some of them do realize that it’s not, at least not all of it. But there they are, just the same.

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A cozy cocoon [Flickr page]

Therapist Calvin Mercer observes that fundamentalists “tend to avoid new experiences by remaining isolated in their fundamentalist networks, thereby avoiding the various novel influences that flow into an emerging identity.” ³ The ideal for the group is that “the fundamentalist Christian can live his or her life inside a protected cocoon constructed in a form consistent with fundamentalist ideology.” ⁴

The sheltered community–God’s Kingdom, in Laestadian parlance–is paramount. Everything and everybody else is of “the world,” sinful, dangerous, and generally to be avoided.

The fundamentalist does not stand alone. The fundamentalist exists in and is supported by a social network that usually includes a religious community and, often, a biological family as well. The church or campus group that serves as the primary social group for the fundamentalist provides not only social interaction and support, but also ideological training.⁵

Perhaps nowhere else in American religion is this more harshly true than the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, an offshoot of Mormonism featuring polygamy and hard-line control of members under a strict morality code. Everything around you is of, and dictated by, the FLDS. It is your entire community, both physically and spiritually. When you leave the FLDS, you literally get out of town. And you certainly don’t go back for friendly visits like the one I had.

Brenda Nicholson told me that leaving the FLDS was the hardest thing she’s ever done. “I knew that once I walked away, it was over. My family, friends, community–everyone and everything that had been a part of my life would be gone. I knew the drill.” She had been well schooled in the protocol from the old-time Mormon prophet Brigham Young: “Leave apostates alone, severely!”

Now, she would “be looked upon as apostate. A traitor to God. And worse, I took my children with me and now I had ‘their innocent blood on my skirts.’” Even so, she said, “I knew I had to do it. My conscience wouldn’t permit me to stay. If nothing else, I had to leave to protect my children.”

I asked her how it felt leaving the community behind.

In many ways these last few years, since we left, have been very lonely. It’s like starting over alone in a strange world. I can’t say what the future may bring for sure, but it’s very doubtful I’ll ever be part of an organized religion again. I had enough of it. I know how to love, and I do so freely now. I have met some amazing people and gained friends within the educational community. It has changed my life for the better. It’s not the same as family, not quite, but hopefully someday I’ll have both.

She misses family and the feeling of belonging, but added, “I don’t miss the oppression and sadness.”

A woman I know who left my old Laestadian Lutheran church doesn’t miss that part, either. Nor does she seem to have even the nostalgia I sometimes get for the community. She’s only felt relief about leaving so far, she said.

The communities that I have found outside of the church fulfill something deep that has been missing in my life for a long time. It is me as an individual they embrace! Not my line of genealogy, not how many kids I have, not who I’m married to but me and who I am!

Her new friends, she said, “share my passions in life! My true passions!” She has chosen them, rather than merely having them handed to her as “friends by default.”

That night of my visit, I found myself lingering around the foyer of the church, soaking up the warmth and evident goodwill from people I hadn’t seen for years yet quickly felt at home talking with again. But this former sister in faith said she “scooted out as fast as I could” from one recent LLC event. “It’s been hard for me to get past the angst of how they view me, and the exclusivity of it all still really annoys the heck out of me! I still feel comfortable around my old friends, but I do feel that I can’t truly be myself without a few cross-eyed stares.”

Someone else I know, a brilliant amateur scholar of things biblical who studied his way out of faith but hasn’t made a clean break of it yet, considers himself “still fairly good friends with people from my former church community. Some of them know that I am no longer a believer, and several even know why.” A few of them he suspects “are even harboring serious doubts themselves.” He hasn’t resisted going to church, because his “wife is comfortable in a church community.” They are currently doing a bit of church shopping, not having found one where they both feel at home.

His wife knows that he is “not a believer,” he said. (We’re not talking about Laestadian “believers” here; my friend is from a majority black church hundreds of miles from the nearest LLC congregation.) Fortunately, though, she

is fine with it. She’s known for a little while (spouses are usually clued in). She has been very inquisitive and interested in why I no longer believe, and she understands intellectually–but she can’t get past the Pascal’s Wager mentality with regard to her own faith. I don’t push it. She hints that she respects my willingness to be “objective.” It has been such a relief! My mother-in-law knows too. And she doesn’t seem to care.

Hopefully they can find a church with songs my friend will find a little bit less creepy. “It’s all about ‘I am nothing . . . I am a wretch without Jesus,’” he complained to me. “‘My life is meaningless without your love, God.’ And all the songs that glorify the blood spillage on the cross. That stuff is psychologically crummy.” I’d thought about that a bit, too, as I belted out verse after verse along with my former brethren. And we never even got to the song with that part about being drunken with the bridegroom’s love.

Notes

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Bob Price’s new book

Growing up as a Christian, there was one hero figure in my imagination who stood above all others, even above my parents. I didn’t have quite as distinctive a picture of him as I did of my father who helped me string wire on the roof for ham radio antennas or my mother who managed a photography studio, but somehow he was still better than they were. For the most part, I believed this.

Jesus was, you see, utterly perfect. He was so amazing and special that it really isn’t even appropriate to refer to him as a person, even though he walked the earth for some thirty years in human form, performing amazing feats and never succumbing to any of the sins that endlessly plague all of us mere mortals.

I was told that, having risen from the dead up to heaven to be with God (an even less clearly defined hero figure), Jesus looked down at us all the time and sat with us during church services. “Where two or three are gathered in his name,” there he’d be.¹ And of course we were constantly telling each other that our sins were forgiven in his “name and precious blood.”

There was no room for any human failings in “our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,” the innocent unblemished Lamb who offered himself as a final, perfect sacrifice on our behalf. The preachers never tired of reminding us how frequently and miserably we all sin, but not so with Jesus. He never did, not even once. If he had sinned, the implication went and was sometimes even expressed out loud, then all that forgiveness we were doing in his name and blood just wouldn’t work.

It took the sharp eye of a young friend who’d left the church while I was still in it to make me aware of any problems with this narrative. He pointed out that Matthew 5:22 has Jesus teaching, “whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire,” and yet Jesus himself calls people fools in Matthew 23.²

I came across other examples of behavior that didn’t seem particularly Jesus-like as I tiptoed warily into reading what skeptics had to say and–for the first time with clear eyes–the Bible itself. One of those skeptics, Valerie Tarico, pointed out how Jesus’ behavior could seem downright bigoted. In her book Trusting Doubt, she recalled how

a Canaanite woman, a non-Jew, calls out, begging Jesus to heal her daughter, who is possessed by demons. “Lord, Son of David,” she calls him. But he ignores her. Finally, his disciples get sick of her following them and shouting, and they ask him to send her away.

Then “Jesus tells her he was sent only to the lost children of Israel. She keeps begging.” In the end, Jesus heals her daughter, but not before enduring a degrading conversation with him. She “came and knelt before him. ‘Lord, help me!’ she said.”

He replied, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to their dogs.”

“Yes, Lord,” she said, “but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.”

Then Jesus answered, “Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted” (Matt. 15:25-28).

This did not impress Dr. Tarico:

If the image doesn’t bother you, try to imagine an American slave or a South African Black having to do and say the same things to get health care for her child. “Please, sir, even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” ³

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Savior Bro: Not as meek and mild as you thought

Something troubling I came across in my own Bible reading was Jesus telling a bald-faced lie. In John 18:20, he said to the high priest, “I spake openly to the world; I ever taught in the synagogue, and in the temple, whither the Jews always resort; and in secret have I said nothing” (emphasis added). But, according to Mark 4:34, Jesus expounded on the meaning of his parables “when they were alone.”

In fact, all three Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) give an example of Jesus doing the secret teaching he explicitly claimed he’d never done. It happened after Jesus told the crowd the parable of the sower, “when he was alone” with the disciples (Mark 4:10). They asked him about the parable.

Did Jesus say, “What’s wrong with you guys? Can’t you understand plain Aramaic?” Nope. He told them they were being let in on the mysteries (mystery, singular, in Mark) of the Kingdom that were being kept hidden from the unwashed masses (Mark 4:11; Matt. 13:11; Luke 8:10).⁴ He then proceeded to explain the parable to them–and them alone.

It’s a pretty bad situation for those who believe the 66 books of the Bible make up the inerrant Word of God with no contradictions. If both John and the Synoptics are telling the truth about what happened, then Jesus did not.⁵

So Jesus became something of a disappointment, though I could’ve lived with a slightly sub-par savior if church doctrine cut him any slack. (Alas, it doesn’t.) And a careful reading of the Old Testament left me utterly repulsed by the shitty attitude and horrible actions of our Father which art in heaven. He is, to quote Richard Dawkins’s memorable one-liner,

jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.⁶

This really is no exaggeration. Read the bloodstained pages in the first half of your Bibles and you will soon see how devastatingly true it is.

Having long since absorbed the shock of these realizations about both Father and Son, I was delighted to have my little publishing company Tellectual Press take on Robert M. Price’s new book, Blaming Jesus for Jehovah. In it, he presents a grave and devastating conflict for Christianity: “the sheer logical impossibility that God and Jesus, as defined by the Christian creeds, could have commanded and taught the hateful things the Bible says they commanded and taught, and still be loving, just, forgiving, and merciful.” ⁷

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Dr. Valerie Tarico–much more pleasant than the God she writes about [Flickr page]

The book begins with a Foreword that was kindly provided by Dr. Tarico. She cites Dawkins’s description of the “malevolent bully” and observes that “trying to separate Old Testament from New–trying to separate Jesus from Jehovah–doesn’t solve the problem.” In fact, she says, “it is impossible,” because “Jesus himself won’t let us.” ⁸

Bob makes that clear right away in the first chapter, entitled “The Son Who Is the Father.” He cites several passages in Matthew and John where Jesus claims a special relation to his Father in heaven and speaks about “‘inside information’ concerning his divine Father and his celestial realm.” ⁹ Jesus knows all about God, Bob says, “because he has intimate familial knowledge, ‘a chip off the old block.’” I especially like the way Dan Barker put it in a recent interview: Jesus isn’t just “a chip off the old block”; he is the block.¹⁰

That, of course, refers to the doctrine of the Trinity, a weird theological superposition of three distinct persons of God into a single divine entity. Bob devotes a few pages to what present-day Christians think the Trinity is (but is not) and concludes with the observation that, according to that doctrine, “Jesus and Jehovah are one and the same God.” ¹¹ And even without it, there’s plenty in the Gospels to put responsibility for all those Old Testament atrocities on Jesus as Jehovah Junior.

Remember, Jesus explicitly declined to nullify the Old Testament or distance himself from what it describes his Father doing. Bob dismisses the view of many Christians “that the New Testament either exonerates the God of the Old or just plain renders him irrelevant,” which he finds a strange thing to think for those who “profess to believe that both Testaments are the inspired Word of God.” His

considered guess is that they are thinking of the Pauline notion that Christ and his gospel have superseded the Torah, the Old Testament Law. But that is quite a different matter. Paul says that the ceremonial provisions of Judaism (circumcision, kosher laws, holy days, etc.) are no longer binding since their proper purpose has been fulfilled as of the coming of Christ (Col. 2:16-17; Gal. 2:15-21; Rom. 10:4). But that has nothing to do with genocide, as if something so morally repugnant could be proper in the Old Testament dispensation but not in the New.

But, hey, who wants to look too closely? If you’re looking for an excuse to sweep Old Testament atrocities under the rug, any old broom will do.¹²

After spending a chapter (“Artists’ Conceptions of Jesus”) acknowledging some good stuff about Jesus, Bob goes on to summarize some of those atrocities. We are rightly horrified by the grotesque savagery of ISIS, yet

the Christian holy scripture, the Bible, explicitly ascribes the very same moral crimes to God. Islamic Caliphate killers don’t even need the Koran. There are hundreds of passages in the Holy Bible which would be more than enough to inspire their horrors. These are strong words, I know. I hate to have to write them. I hope you will have the courage to read them. It comes down to a question of your own integrity. I hope you will see that.¹³

Any torture that the sick minds of ISIS fanatics can cook up is, of course, a mere pinprick compared to the novel bit of nastiness introduced in the New Testament: eternal condemnation in the agonizing fires of hell. Bob gives that horror the full attention it deserves. In a couple of ample chapters, he covers the various theological attempts to justify unlimited punishment for limited humans and reveals the absurdity of the whole idea of blood atonement.

And there is more: The failure of Jesus’ prophecy about his imminent return, the failure of the Bible to provide a consistent and reliable story about him, and the problems with expecting ant-like humans to heed the warnings of an omniscient God who knows they’ll screw up regardless. This book has a lot of good stuff packed into its 166 or so pages, and I’m very proud to have been a part of its publication.

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Fun while it lasts (screenshot taken Feb. 27, 2016)

There is one issue I scratched my head about while editing the book, which bears mentioning. Bob is well known as a skeptic about the existence of any actual person behind the Bible character of Jesus.¹⁴ Here’s how he put it to me in a recent phone conversation:

I think there was no Historical Jesus and the Jesus story is almost entirely based on rewriting Old Testament passages. But another likely influence was the dying and rising God myths in the Mediterranean world and also ancient Israelite religion.

In Blaming Jesus for Jehovah, however, Bob treats the existence of Jesus as a given. I asked him about that, particularly where he calls the doctrine of Original Sin “a matter of reverse engineering” by early Christians who “had to deal with the death of Jesus somehow.” ¹⁵

He was executed as a criminal, but they believed he wasn’t one. So if he didn’t die for any sins of his own, and his death couldn’t have been a meaningless tragedy, whose sins did he die for? Must have been everybody else’s! ¹⁶

Well, I asked, if you think there wasn’t any such person who actually lived or died, why would those early Christians have been troubled by his death? His answer was that

those who wrote our New Testament documents were not mythicists. They believed there was a Historical Jesus martyred at the hands of Rome, who died innocently. They had the problem of explaining how this could happen.

He dates the earliest Gospel, Mark, at possibly 70-80 years after the reported events, but more likely a full century afterwards. Those early Christians were thinking and writing a couple of generations removed from the event they imagined had happened. That’s plenty of time for a whole myth about a messianic savior to have developed–a “major theological adjustment” to Second Temple Judaism following the destruction of Solomon’s temple by the Romans.

With this book, Bob wanted to avoid the whole controversy of the Historical Jesus vs. the Christ Myth Theory by simply accepting the Bible’s assertions about Jesus at face value. It’s a “look through the lens of mainstream criticism,” as he put it. Even so, it’s still quite a critical and much-needed look, at the superhero figurehead of the world’s largest religion whose flaws thus far have remained largely off-limits to scrutiny.

Notes

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The Trumpenstein Monster of Today’s GOP [Flickr page]

In January 1919, months after an armistice that ended the horrors of the Great War in Europe, W.B. Yeats started work on a haunting little poem of the Apocalypse. The Second Coming begins with these memorable lines:

This “first stanza captures more than just political unrest and violence,” says Nick Tabor in a 2015 article about the poem. “Its anxiety concerns the social ills of modernity: the rupture of traditional family and societal structures; the loss of collective religious faith, and with it, the collective sense of purpose; the feeling that the old rules no longer apply and there’s nothing to replace them.”

Yeats goes on to prophesy further horrors, suggesting, in Tabor’s analysis, that “something like the Christian notion of a ‘second coming’ is about to occur, but rather than earthly peace, it will bring terror”:

And then there is the “slouching beast” of the final stanza, which Tabor says is best understood not as “a particular political regime, or even fascism itself, but a broader historical force, comprising the techno­logical, the ideological, and the political.” ¹

Despite Tabor’s complaints about the “widening gyre of heavy-handed allusions” that popular culture is making to the poem, I will venture to toss in my own: The words Yeats left us from nearly a century ago offer a stark picture of what is happening to the ailing democracy of the United States today.

There is a rough beast out there right now, slouching towards Washington. It is a Frankenstein monster formed from an angry electorate’s troubled mix of ugly prejudice, religious zeal, and legitimate grievance–partly about having served as useful idiots for a moneyed class that pandered to their social conservatism while bleeding them dry. What the billionaire political manipulators originally tinkered into existence as a servant for carrying out their specific and selfish goals has gone out of their control.

Now the “darkness drops again” and the monster is plodding into the night, ignoring the commands of those who spent millions trying to be its masters. This is a spectacle both terrifying and exhilarating to watch.

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The stuff of nightmares [Flickr page]

The Koch Brothers and their ilk liked what they saw in Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, and invested heavily.² But, alas for them, it really does seem that money can’t buy everything. By January, Poor Charles Koch was expressing disappointment “with the line-up of Republican candidates in the 2016 cycle,” and surprise at “the lack of influence he and his brother have wielded so far.” ³

Things started going south for the billionaire Brothers Grim in September of 2015 with the departure of Scott Walker, a nasty dead-eyed governor who seemed like their perfect messenger boy.⁴Abysmal polling numbers in the presidential race sent him back to work swinging the Libertarian wrecking ball at Wisconsin’s state government. And Jeb! finally dropped out in February 2016 after an embarrassing return on investment for all the millions blown by his campaign and (ahem, independent) SuperPAC–the total price per vote obtained was about $2800 in Iowa and $1150 in New Hampshire.⁵

Now the last best hope for a presidential pawn of the oligarchs, Marco Rubio, is flailing about with just a single state to his name and 15% of the viable delegates allocated thus far. He faces impossible odds, at least if the votes of the lumpen­proletariat are what it really takes to win a nomination this year. Rubio would need to win 75%of the 1435 delegates still up for grabs in order to get the 1237 he needs for a non-brokered nomination.⁶ Good luck with that: A March 9 poll has him behind in his home state of Florida by double digits.⁷It isn’t going to happen, and even he has to realize that.

But there is still the tantalizing possibility of a brokered convention, and that might make it still worth his while for Rubio to keep slugging away. The same goes for John Kasich, governor of Ohio and unofficial Adult in the Room. He’s counting on a home-state win in the winner-take-all primary on the weekend of March 12-13 to keep him in the game. He has been quite candid about liking the idea of a nomination fight at the convention.⁸

Assuming primary voters actually get to decide this thing, there are two realistic contenders now left standing for nominee of the Greedy Oligarchy Party–Donald J. Trump and Raphael Edward (“Ted”) Cruz. The oligarchs, however, don’t seem to much like either one of them.

Trump can’t be bought, for the simple reason that he doesn’t need anybody else’s money to support his chest-thumping vanity presidency project. “Not a single contribution to Trump’s campaign could be found in the donation records of the 190 attendees of Koch donor conferences.” Hilariously, one billionaire political-money hobbyist complained that Trump’s self-funding “scares the hell out of” him. “That’s like a dictator,” Stanley Hubbard whined. “I think that any politician should have to answer to their constituents.” Mr. Hubbard does not “think it’s healthy to have somebody who doesn’t answer to anybody.” ⁹ Apparently, having them answer to a few fabulously wealthy recipients of inherited wealth like himself is more like it–God bless America.

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The Levite Bearing Away the Body of the Woman, Gustav Doré

Cruz, for his part, has at least tried to win favor of Those Who Matter. He did some hobnobbing at a Koch Konference in 2013, shortly after winning his Senate seat.¹⁰ At another gathering, during the record-hot summer of 2015, he surely scored some points with the Brothers Grim by bluntly denying that global warming was real and implying that Obama was lying by warning of “hotter summers, rising sea levels, and extreme weather events.” ¹¹ (These things are all actually happening now, apparently invisible if your head is stuck up some rich donor’s ass.)

But the fact is that very few people who actually know Ted Cruz–besides some angry, religion-crazed voters–seem to like him much at all, no matter what he says.¹² This is apparently nothing new; his college roommate describes him, then and now, as “pedantic, smarmy, creepy, arrogant, nasty, inauthentic and unfunny as hell.” ¹³Molly Ball wrote a few months ago in The Atlantic that, in “the three years since he arrived in the U.S. Senate, Ted Cruz has become easily the most hated man in Washington.” He pissed off Mike Lee (Tea Party-UT), possibly his only friend in the Senate, by going all lip-curling angel-of-death about Lee’s criminal justice reform bill. “In my conversations with Republican policy types and Senate aides about Cruz,” Ball writes, Cruz’s “lack of regard for his colleagues, and for the niceties that have traditionally governed the upper chamber, was a common theme. As Trent Lott, the former Senate majority leader, told me last week, referring to the time Cruz called McConnell a liar on the Senate floor: ‘You just don’t do that. Are we not still gentlemen, and respectful of each other?’” ¹⁴

Currently holding onto the lead between those two is Trump, the man described by Peter Wehner, longtime Republican voter, administration staffer, and think-tanker, as an “erratic, inconsistent and unprincipled” narcissist, whose “virulent com­bination of ignorance, emotional instability, demagogy, solipsism and vindictiveness would do more than result in a failed presidency; it could very well lead to national catastrophe.” ¹⁵

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Yes, well, so could allowing the oligarchs to have their way. With one of those “mainstream” GOP candidates they’d like to have in place as an investment vehicle, we could all look forward to the loss of public lands throughout the American West, the gutting of environmental and labor protections, and a rollback of social security safety net programs, for starters. They would unleash the entire chamber of horrors imagined by the current Republican-controlled Congress, which until now has only been kept restrained by the veto threat of a Democratic President.

Besides, Mr. Wehner, this is your monster you are watching lumber into the lightning flashes of the night. Columnist Maureen Dowd shares my delight in seeing “the encrusted political king-making class utter a primal scream as Trump smashes their golden apple cart.” For years, she says, the Republican establishment “has fanned, stoked and exploited the worst angels among the nativists, racists, Pharisees and angry white men, concurring in anti-immigrant measures, restricting minority voting, whipping up anti-Planned Parenthood hysteria and enab­ling gun nuts.” ¹⁶

Scary as it may be, there is a certain logic to the decision of so many everyday people to cast their vote for a narcissistic, bullying huckster and reality-show host whose vocabulary and grasp of the issues make George W. Bush look like Winston Churchill. “These folks have lost a lot with the hollowing out the middle and working class,” said Jim Sidanius, Harvard professor of sociology, back in January when Trump was just getting rolling. “If you combine that with floating xenophobia, you get this kind of reaction.” ¹⁷

Perhaps Republican voters are finally realizing how much they have been played by their political elites and have decided to do some tweaking of their own, in the only way they can. Meanwhile, the rest of us look on shaking our heads at the food-fight debates and insults and ugly outbreaks at rallies, and wait for November to finally put a pitchfork into the beast.

We will probably be left only with Hillary Clinton by then to stop its slouch toward Washington. But even a bent and rusted tool will serve to kill the beast and end the nightmare, at least for a few years until the oligarchs start tinkering in their workshop again.

Notes

On the first day of April 2012, about two months after leaving the Laestadian Lutheran Church via the act of publishing a book critical of it, I posted on social media this parody image of a fake Voice of Zion article thoughtfully reviewing the book:

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My first Laestadian-related April fool (click to enlarge)

Such a review was, of course, quite the opposite of what actually happened, which was the point of the parody piece. It quoted the conclusion of an actual article that had been published, for real and with refreshing candor, by the church’s sister organization in Finland: “There must be the ability to encounter facts with openness and honesty, even when the facts are not pleasing to us.” Switching from fact to April fool, my “article” went on to say:

This may raise doubts and concerns in the minds of God’s children: Can God’s Kingdom be the subject of legitimate criticism? Is it possible that certain teachings, even those that are being made in sermons and writings today, are simply not correct? These questions, once unthinkable in Zion, are being brought again and again to our attention by recent events.

Now we must confront the issues raised in a 530-page book by a former believer [me] who once wrote articles for this very paper [true]. Traditionally, our tendency would be to dismiss the book’s questions and criticisms by saying that the author just wanted to live a life of sin, or that he is distorting or even lying about what God’s Kingdom has taught. Another common response we have made to these challenges is that faith is childlike and not subject to any human reasoning.

Then the article plowed onward through a field of Bible quotes, just as you’d see in the real Voice of Zion. I selected them verbatim from the same King James Bible pages that Laestadian preachers consult for their articles. But my assortment of quotes told a very different story:

Scripture certainly encourages us to believe as a child (Matthew 18:3). But we should also remember the Apostle Paul’s admonition to “be not children in understanding: howbeit in malice be ye children, but in understanding be men” (1 Corinthians 14:20). Sometimes we need to “put away childish things” (1 Corinthians 13:11) and really understand what it is we claim to believe.

A second column of the “article” that appeared in the fake clipping provided some straight talk about this new book of mine that was giving the preachers such headaches. An unnamed preacher (also fake) being “interviewed” for the article in classic Voice of Zionfashion acknowledged that it was “undeniably true that the Gospel was not preached for several years after Laestadius and Raattamaa received the grace of repentance.” This implausibly candid preacher continued, “The book also correctly notes that Raattamaa favored Takkinen and criticized the followers of Heideman. These are matters of historical record that we must acknowledge somehow.”

Quite true, even if the person saying it was a fiction. Acknowledging the historical record is exactly what the church must do to be intellectually honest, but good luck ever seeing that happen. The real-life response was instead to retreat into a sheltered cocoon of denial and an outright repudiation of human reason in evaluating what the church teaches to be true. The same goes for “another difficult historical question raised in Suominen’s book,”

why our familiar preaching of the forgiveness of sins from believer to believer doesn’t seem to be found in any writings before Luther. The book states that there were “two centuries of writings” after Christ “that not only fail to explicitly mention absolution, but provide many teachings incompatible with it” (Section 5.1.2). It may seem like a far-fetched claim, but he provides several pages of discussion with plenty of references to back it up.

That I did. In response to this significant issue, too, crickets sounded forth in the fields of central Minnesota.

On first days of April since then, I published two more parody articles. In 2014, Social Media and the Believer did a dead ringer of an impression (if I do say so myself) of a Voice of Zionarticle soberly warning about the dangers of Facebook and mixing with unbelievers via this new medium of the Internet. It started pushing plausibility around halfway through:

One of the dangers with “friendship of the world” is the temptation to accept incorrect and sinful beliefs and lifestyles. Today’s society encourages an anything-goes attitude of “tolerance,” but God’s Word has always taught differently. The Old Covenant believers were instructed to let their light shine very clearly about the dead faiths of this world.

Then came a quote from Deuteronomy 13:6-9 about killing family members who tempt you into serving other gods (“Thou shalt not consent unto him, nor hearken unto him; neither shall thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou spare, neither shalt thou conceal him: But thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death”). According to the church, after all, God’s Word, is unchanging and eternal, and not subject to the whims of man’s desires. Somehow these nastier bits of the Old Testament get forgotten in favor of favorite passages warning that you’d better not be using birth control or hunting on a Sunday.

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From the April 2015 parody, my last and favorite

April 1, 2015 was the occasion of my favorite of the parodies I’ve done, A Mother of Many Children. It was a heartfelt announcement of a surprising (alas, fictional) change in Conservative Laestadianism’s long-standing doctrine of exclusivity, drawing not just on scripture for support but also on the teachings of Luther himself:

There are, we must say along with one of our Lutheran confessional books, “truly believing and righteous people scattered throughout the whole world.” Our spiritual predecessor Martin Luther said in his time that there were “Christians in all the world,” that “no one can see who is a saint or a believer.”

These quotes and others in the article from Luther are all genuine, as with the Bible quotations. They leave no doubt about what Luther would have thought of the Laestadian Lutheran Church and its sister organizations claiming to be “God’s Kingdom,” the only place where actual Christians might be found. The “article” went on about the

danger of putting too much emphasis on God’s Kingdom as an organization, as an assembly of people, and making God Himself secondary to it. “I will not give my glory unto another” (Isaiah 48:11).

We can also look to the words of Luther in this: He wrote that anyone who “maintains that an external assembly or an outward unity makes a Church, sets forth arbitrarily what is merely his own opinion.” We must humbly agree with our brother in faith that there is not “one letter in the Holy Scriptures to show that such a purely external Church has been established by God.”

Many readers were saddened to know that it was just a parody and not a real article from the LLC. A few realized that only after reading through it and rejoicing that their church had finally come around to the loving, inclusive doctrine they personally believed.

I felt a little bad about causing disappointment for people, but hoped that it would do some overall good in the long term. After all, what possible answer could the preachers give to someone asking why this had to be an April fools joke and not a real article from the Voice of Zion? They would have to shrink their God down, along with the Bible and Luther’s teachings, to fit into their little doctrines.

There will be no April fool about the old church this year, or perhaps any in the future. I considered some ideas this past week and then decided it’s not worth the bother. I’m bored with it, and it’s bored with me.

This is just one weird little Protestant sect churning upriver against a flood of contrary facts, bearing its delusions of grandeur, its complicated set of mostly unwritten silly rules, and its steady fuel supply of new members popping into maternity wards and winding their way from day circle to Sunday School to confirmation class. There are many others like it with their own combinations of such features. The tiresome machinery of it all grinds inexorably on.

Rather than writing another parody piece, I dug through the nether reaches of my Facebook timeline to find one I’d posted in October 2012 as a Facebook status update. (I hadn’t yet started my blog then.) You can still see it and the 70 comments that ensued, here.

This dashed a few hopes, too, and got some heated discussion going. Those were the days before believers had been fully warned about not discussing faith matters online. A new wall was hastily constructed around Laestadian brains, and things have quieted down considerably ever since.

So, to conclude, here is a fake “opening statement” from my old church in one of the congregational meetings there were being held (really) in the wake of my book’s publication to address concerns and doubts.

“Just kidding,” I finally added. “But for the sake of my loved ones still in the church, I wish I weren’t.” I still do. But life goes on. Those friends and loved ones know they have another option than trudging off to sit in those pews. Some of them have finally found the courage to exercise that option. And it may not be so bad anymore for those who haven’t. From what little I hear about the church nowadays, light and love have started shining through cracks in the wall of judgment and fear.

Inside those walls, and outside where billions of people like me are raising children and making friends and riding bikes and buying groceries, life goes on. 

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Tracks toward the light [Flickr page]

My very public departure from the Laestadian Lutheran Church–a conservative, exclusivist sect of Protestant Christianity–has put me in touch with many others who struggle inside this group and who have left it. One of them recently sent me these thoughts about her metamorphosis from fundamentalism to freedom. She gave me permission to convey them anonymously through this blog to those who had–with the very best of intentions–cocooned and caged her.

Yes, indeed, I think she is.

Eventually, so will you others whose anguished stories I’ve heard, who know that you no longer believe what you were told as children–what some of you have in turn told your children. Someday, the painful metamorphosis will finally occur for you. But don’t let too much of your life continue to pass you by before it finally happens.

Day after day, in newfound bursts of frightening clarity, your mind shouts the truth at you, and the only response your preachers have is to tell you not to listen to it. “One of Christianity’s most toxic teachings is that we must not trust our own minds and emotions,” Dr. Valerie Tarico, a psychologist and former Christian, told me after reading this piece, which she thought was powerful, as do I.

“In particular,” she added, Christianity asserts that “we dare not trust our intuitive sense of the basic goodness in people around us and ourselves.” But when you finally dare to make those first tentative friendships with the scary people of “the world,” when you see the continued love and joy in those former brethren whose longtime friendships you refuse to end, you see that basic goodness. You can’t help but see it, and delight in it, and witness yet another case of your dreary preachers being wrong.

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New life [Flickr page]

Another amazing thing happens when you open up that cocoon and expose yourself to the experiences of all those “unbelievers” outside the church walls. You see not just how varied and fascinating they all are, but how similar many of their experiences are to yours. You realize that the fear and pain of leaving their “dead faith” churches is every bit as real to them as leaving yours has been to you. And then another chink appears in the wall that separates you from all of them, that great undifferentiated mass of outsiders who now have faces and voices and feelings, and the hole is almost big enough for you to finally crawl through.

“Reading this was very much like looking at my own reflection in a mirror,” said Brenda Nicholson, a survivor of the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints (FLDS) cult. It took her a few minutes to respond to my question because she was still in class (“Foundations of Business and Elements of Effective Communications”), a quite different setting than she could have imagined for herself while back in Colorado City, wearing the required swept-up hairdo and plain pastel dress and trying to have all the required babies, despite miscarriage after miscarriage. “I found myself unconsciously nodding in agreement to every line. Yes, it is the same story from different backgrounds! The aspects of control through ‘breaking’ a person is so real–and far too often so effective.”

She also wishes that she’d seen the truth sooner, “that I hadn’t sacrificed so many years of my life to a lie.” Our stories, she said, “have a different background, but our journey is the same.”

Like Dr. Tarico, Brenda used the word “powerful” to describe this piece. “It touched deep inside at the hurt I’ve experienced.” She asked me to give my anonymous correspondent her “most sincere congratulations and admiration” and best wishes on this new life. Mine, too, along with my hope that all those others will soon find their own freedom as well.

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The Deluge, or, If God is Love Then Water is Dry

The preachers in my old church like to begin their sermons–usually based on some nice familiar text about salvation and forgiveness plucked from the New Testament–by offering up prayers to “our loving and merciful heavenly father.” They mumble the standard intonations requesting God’s assistance with the weak faith of current believers and the lost faith of former ones, occasionally with a mention that He might also lead some of the rest of humanity to His Grace Kingdom. (What’s stopping Him, anyhow?) As a gauzy familiarity descends on the pew-sitters, the image conjured up in their minds is of a slightly crotchety but ultimately benevolent Old Man of a God with this large inheritance to dispose of. In His house are many mansions, and one of them has your name personally engraved on the door.²

Now, He does know exactly what you did last night and with whom. But just as soon as you hear the magic words (as you undoubtedly will during a Laestadian sermon) that all your sins are forgiven in Jesus’ name and blood, He will smile kindly and shake the memory out of His divine head. You will breathe a small sigh of relief, wait for the In Jesus Name, Amen to finally come around, and then go forth from the sanctuary in peace, freedom, and joy. You will avoid being written out of the Old Man’s will, for a few more days, anyhow.

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Joshua Spares Rahab

He’s giving you a pretty good deal. The upside is huge after you die (we won’t talk about that nasty potential downside–your sins are forgiven, after all) and in the meantime nobody is getting hurt. At least if you don’t count a little psychological damage, the lost opportunities of a restricted life, and the occasional medical complication from giving birth to that tenth baby.

There’s a problem, though. This vaguely pleasant hands-off deity that I grew up hearing about bears no resemblance whatsoever to the unstable raging psychopath who ranted and threatened and smote his way through the first two-thirds of the Bible. Next time you sit there in the pew, look carefully at the old book’s gilt-edged pages. Most of them will be to the left of where the preacher is reading from, ignored and silent, their horrors left unsaid.

It is impossible to convey here just how much savagery and inhumanity is contained in those pages.³ During the summer of 2009, I spent months reading the Bible from cover to cover. It was tough going, because I kept getting shocked and disgusted by the awful stuff I was encountering for the first time. It certainly wasn’t anything they talked about at church.

One example is enough to make the point.⁴ Ezekiel 8 tells us that God got upset about some “wicked abominations” that were being committed against him: “seventy elders of the house of Israel” burning incense and surrounded by carvings on the walls of his sanctuary of “creeping things and beasts and detestable things, with all the idols of the house of Israel” (8:10-11), some women weeping for a Babylonian fertility god (8:14), and 25 men prostrating themselves toward the sun and “putting the twig to their nose” (8:16-17). A little weird, but whatever.

God’s response, however, makes the Spanish Inquisition look like small claims court. He called for the executioners of the city to draw near, each “with his destroying weapon in his hand” (Ezekiel 9:1). He commanded that the men of Jerusalem who disapproved of the aforementioned abominations be marked on their foreheads. Then, he directed, “Go through the city after him and strike; do not let your eye have pity and do not spare. Utterly slay old men, young men, maidens, little children, and women, but do not touch any man on whom is the mark; and you shall start from My sanctuary . . . . Defile the temple and fill the courts with the slain. Go out!” (Ezekiel 9:5-7).

It didn’t matter that the women and innocent children had no way to take sides and avoid God’s wrath. When the bodies piled up, theirs lay right alongside those of the men.

The Bible-based short stories that Seth Andrews has featured from time to time on his Thinking Atheist podcast are my effort to bring some of this to light, to expose the dark underside of the “Good Book” that fundamentalists would like to foist upon us all. In today’s episode, he reads “Stones of Tribulation,” a bit of Deuteronomy horror fiction I’ve set in a potential future afflicted by climate change, petroleum scarcity, and economic collapse.⁵

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The Destruction of the Armies of the Ammomites and Moabites

You can also read the text for free online here, but I suggest you let Seth’s golden pipes do the reading for you. Check out the footnotes in the online version later, and please consider buying my forthcoming bookof all my Bible stories when that comes out later in 2016.

Anyhow, amid all the death and looting, the few remaining authorities were able to spare no attention for the Deuteronomic Church of Holy Reconstruction, a fictional Christian cult using Deuteronomy as a guidebook for con­quering a strech of the Buffalo River in the Arkansas Ozarks. (“So we captured all his cities at that time and utterly destroyed the men, women and children of every city. We left no survivor,” Deut. 2:34.)

With all the cabins and shacks taken over and the former occupants dispatched in proper biblical fashion, the Holy Reconstructionists are keeping things in line with Deuteronomy as a guide there, too. The current project is to carry out God’s judgment against a young woman who did not produce evidence of virginity on her wedding night. The sentence is clear from Deut. 22:20-21:

But if this charge is true, that the girl was not found a virgin, then they shall bring out the girl to the doorway of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death because she has committed an act of folly in Israel by playing the harlot in her father’s house; thus you shall purge the evil from among you.

Soon our hero, Jacob Davis, is watching a volley of rocks being thrown at the woman, his sister, by the menfolk of the hollow. She screams and curses at the men, and Jacob wishes he could join in with her cursing, too, but Deuteronomy has a harsh ruling in store for such rebellion: “The man who acts presumptuously by not listening to the priest who stands there to serve the LORD your God, nor to the judge, that man shall die; thus you shall purge the evil from Israel” (Deut. 17:12).

As the narrator then recalls things, there

was sort of a pause as the men reloaded their arms with their remaining rocks Leah’s voice slurred into a long raspy howl as her mouth gaped open, her jaw probably broken now. Levi watched from the porch with folded arms. Jacob stared at his sister, his crude and brave and dying sister, and did not look away. Not from the blood that was trickling out of her nose and gaping mouth. Not from the one eye that was now hooded and bruised. He thought he saw blood coming from there, too. A spinning piece of shale caught her on the cheek, tearing open another gash. A couple of crows rustled and flew out of the pines behind her, spooked by all the noise.

Then the dark and jagged hailstorm opened up again. He watched Leah’s body jerk and flinch and sag with each impact. Every line and color and detail was vivid, and impossibly wrong. He’d seen stonings before, but this one he would remember. There was no call for this. He decided with a sudden spurt of silent rebellion, unfamiliar and shocking and strong in his throat, that he would make it right somehow.

The howling finally stopped. Leah stared up at the sky through the one open eye, her final act a breaking of the endless rules. Jacob figured the last thing she saw was the sun, burning its forbidden image onto her retina until her head slumped forward and hung against her chest, bleeding.

It’s a gruesome scene. But it’s exactly what is commanded by that “loving and merciful heavenly father” in his inerrant and unchanging Holy Bible. You may believe in that God–no concern of mine if you do–but I’m pretty sure you don’t believe in Deuteronomy.

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Achan Stoned

There are true believers in Deuteronomy among us, though, and in Joshua, and Leviticus, and all the rest of the Old Testament’s brutal inhumanity. The most hardcore Bible thumpers of them all are Christian Reconstructionists who advocate what one R.J. Rushdoony (rhymes with “loony”) championed as a “biblical worldview.” According to Professor Julie J. Ingersoll, who spent time in Reconstructionist circles and then studied it exhaustively as a scholar of religion, the movement is “rooted in historic Calvinism,” with a Bible that “speaks to every aspect of life and provides a blueprint for living according to the will of God.” ⁶ Reconstructionists, she says,

contend that contemporary re­interp­retations of Old Testament violence are humanistic rejections of what God called justice. The New Testament is not a replacement for the Old; there is no “God of Love” replacing a “God of Wrath.” God is loving and forgiving, and just and vengeful as revealed in the three persons of the Trinity and present at creation. Old Testament biblical law, with its numerous capital offenses, must be the model for Christian life, and civil law today.

Thus they “support the imposition of violent punishments (stoning and death) for all manner of behaviors that they consider sin (or, in their terms, that God considers sin).”

So, you may wonder, why don’t they have the courage of their convictions to put all this biblical wisdom into action? Why aren’t these true believers out there trying to govern some Ozark hollow under Old Testament Shari’a law right now, throwing rocks at back-talking teenagers and brides lacking virginity certification? Because, they insist, “such punishments would only be exacted after society has been transformed by the Holy Spirit such that the overwhelming majority of citizens would be believers who would submit willingly to biblical law.” ⁷

Well, if the failure of Ted Cruz in the Republican primaries is any indication, we may still be safe for a while yet. Thank, er, God.

Rushdooney “argued for the use of the Bible as the only source of authority.” ⁸ He’s dead now, but if you find yourself yearning to have an ancient book control your life without the hassle of, say, converting to Islam and traveling to Syria, there are homegrown Christian alternatives. You might consider my old Laestadianism (“the Holy Bible is the highest authority in questions regarding faith and life”) ⁹ or, for example, the Covenanted Reformed Presbyterian Church. Its list of beliefs begins as follows:

We believe that the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament are inspired by God and thus totally without error. The Bible (not hu­man tradition, not human experience, not alleged sub­jec­tive “revel­ation”) is the sole standard and authority for faith and life.¹⁰

And guess what, according to the church’s pastor Brian Schwertley, is the “only standard by which a civil magistrate can rule justly”? The Holy Bible, of course, “the stand-alone infallible Word of God.” ¹¹

Pastor Brian writes about “promoting true religion in the land,” which he says is something “godly civil magistrates are very concerned about.” What he seems to have in mind behind those benign-sounding words promoting and concerned is more than just little old ladies handing out flyers at the county fair. He cites First and Second Kings and the story of King Jehu, biblical butcher extraordinaire, to help us understand how these godly civil magistrates are supposed to operate. Jehu, while “not a godly king,” did the right thing: He “was blessed by God for what he did to the prophets, priests, and servants of Baal.” ¹²

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The Death of Jezebel (by Jehu’s orders) [Flickr page]

Here’s some of what Jehu did, as described in another one of my short stories, “Jehu’s Jihad,” by a fictional victim of his true-religion promotional efforts:

The chanting stopped, replaced by the screams. There was a mighty rushing roar of shouts and screams, and stamping feet, and the wet smacking thud of iron blades violating flesh. My eyes could make out very little in the dim light with frantic bodies lunging all around me, but I heard and felt, and smelled. Shit and urine voided from panicked and lifeless men. I gulped down nausea with the waves of foul outhouse odors that mingled in my nostrils with the smell of slaughter: dripping, naked guts and the coppery tang of fresh blood.

It was not my own blood, but I made it mine, smearing it on my neck and falling on some bodies and letting more bodies fall on my own. I closed my eyes and lay still as the swords chopped and sliced and swung to chop and slice again. Another body landed, hard, and I wondered if I would still be able to breathe. My chest barely moved as I willed myself to draw long silent breaths from my belly to my gaping mouth. Hot blood dripped onto my arm, first coming in little bursts and then a slow and steady oozing as another life went out.

The screaming became the dying and the dying became the dead, and all was quiet, except the panting and scuffling of the soldiers. I focused my world into the agony of holding my lungs in a measured starvation to stay quiet and alive. My world was the dark mute pressure of dead arms and legs and torsos slick from their bleeding.

Then there were shouted orders and heaving arms, hateful arms, carrying the dead and me outside the temple. I had to let all my weight droop where it fell over the soldier’s shoulder. I stayed silent as ribs cracked under their impossible load and seared my mind with unanswerable pain, my legs swinging with the soldier’s hump-trot to the dirt where he threw my living corpse. Again there were bodies under me, cooler already, and then more on top. Again the silent struggle for secret breath.

It’s another gruesome scene, but massacring an entire worship hall full of helpless people because they don’t share your religion is a messy business. And you will find it in your Bible, a brief, sanitized version of it: 2 Kings 10:18-25.

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Slaughter of the Syrians by the Children of Israel

Now, nobody–not even the most rabid Reconstructionist or preciously believing Laestadian–really follows the entire Bible. You actually cannot do it, no matter how crazy you are, because it is impossibleto conform to a text that contradicts itself.

Imagine you’re out there at your freshly built backyard altar dripping blood, slaughtering all these cattle and trying to be a good follower of Leviticus. Finally, that old-time religion, you smugly say to yourself while plunging your Ka-Bar into the neck of the next poor beast lined up behind the high compound walls. The BBQ is running out of propane to get it all burnt. Then along comes your wise-ass cousin quoting Micah 6:1-8:

Whoops. Beef–it’s what’s for dinner, ex­tra well done.

The less pragmatic reason people don’t actually follow the Bible is that it has a way of interfering with real life. Consider the scene from “Stones of Tribulation” where Jacob is musing about the presence of pork chops at the dinner table of Levi Harding, prophet. Back in Harrison, AR, some of the men had “said Jesus overrode Deuteronomy when it came to what you could eat” (Mark 7:19). But the “others reminded everybody what the Biblical Blueprint Series said about the Old and New Testaments. One guy kept quoting the line Jacob knew all too well: ‘God’s counsel and judgments are not divided!’ That old coot probably couldn’t even taste bacon anymore.”

The Biblical Blueprint Series, edited by Gary North of Fayetteville, Arkansas, is a real work, ten volumes published in 1986 and 1987. It’s one “of the most direct and systematic efforts at popularization” of a “biblical worldview.” ¹³ It teaches some serious biblicism, which would seem to lay to rest any questions about my Holy Reconstruction folks eating cloven-hooved unclean animals, as much as their stoning of Jacob’s sister:

We must never doubt that whatever God did in the Old Testament era, the Second Person of the Trinity also did. God’s counsel and judgments are not divided . . . . If we as Christians can accept what is a very hard principle of the Bible, that Christ was a blood sacrifice for our individual sins, then we shouldn’t flinch at accepting any of the rest of God’s principles. As we joyfully accepted His salvation, so we must joyfully embrace all of His principles that affect any and every area of our lives.¹⁴

But somebody else at the Hardings’ (fictional) table “wondered if Deuteronomy really needed to be taken ‘whole hog’ [sorry] when it came to the rules even Jesus said weren’t important. Then Levi’s dad recalled that the guy who edited Biblical Blueprint figured the food laws didn’t apply, and that was the view that finally won out.” Yes, it seems that joyfully embracing all of God’s principles does not quite apply to what’s for dinner. Take a look at North’s 1984 position paper to see how he rationalizes that one.¹⁵ If you can stomach it.

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The First-Born Slain [Flickr page]

Many Christians remain blissfully unaware of the Old Testament’s brutality. It barely grazed my consciousness for most of the decades I remained in Christian fundamentalism. For those who do know about it and “ponder why God would allow, much less command, such horrors,” Robert M. Price offers some strong words in Blaming Jesus for Jehovah, a book whose publication I’m proud to have been a part of via my little indie publishing company Tellectual Press.¹⁶

Just knowing and wondering isn’t good enough, Dr. Price says. That is “stopping short of the real question,” which “is this: ‘Why should I believe that a God who issues such orders is more than a tribal totem embodying and justifying the bloodlust and hatreds of an ancient people? How can I, with any shred of conscience, profess allegiance to such a figure?’”

Fine, you have the information. You have the doubts, the questions. Now, what are you going to do with them?

What if you are willing to discount those passages in which God commands genocide and infanticide as merely the biases of primitive worshipers of a God whose loving nature is clearer to us moderns? Then plainly you must realize that, even if scripture explicitly says, “God commanded so-and-so,” that doesn’t mean he did. Don’t you realize you’re admitting the Bible was mistaken? And then, how do you know when it’s not mistaken? I come back to my point: Your judgment is your authority, not the Bible, which many seem to “believe” only when they agree with it.

And that’s nothing to be ashamed of! The only thing to be ashamed of is hiding behind the supposed authority of the Bible to buttress your own opinions. If you have the courage of your convictions, surely you should be able to present to another person the solid reasons that led you to think as you do. Assuming there were any real reasons.

If you were raised believing in the murderous faith of the Islamic Caliphate, you might have qualms about some of the things your leaders said Allah had commanded, but you’d be looking at things from the inside, and you’d chalk it up to “one of those divine mysteries.” But you are, thankfully, viewing their atrocities from outside, so you have no difficulty recognizing the horrors of a death cult for what they are.

“If the Old Testament Jehovah is portrayed as the blood-spattered totem of a slaughter cult,” and Dr. Price thinks the Bible does a fine job of that, as do I, then “it is high time you stepped out of the Bible bubble for an objective look at it. It is time you decided if you really belong there.” ¹⁷

Dr. Price goes on to discuss the equivocation of “God’s defenders” when confronted with all this. “They like to point out that God is so astronomically far above us that it’s futile for us to imagine ‘good’ meaning the same thing for him as it does for us.” Uh huh. OK, fine; say

that a deity who commands genocide, religious persecution, and the abduction of virgins is nonetheless “good” if you want to. But then you will just be spewing pious gibberish. God’s ostensible goodness is no longer any guide to what we may expect from him. Oh yes, he’s “good,” thank goodness, but that doesn’t mean he won’t victimize or exterminate the innocent. Whatever he did, the pious apologist has ready excuses for his God. “He’s all-righteous, so he must have some good reason for it!” If you woke up in hell one fine morning, despite your Christian faith and God’s promise that it would save you, I guess you’d have to conclude he must know what he’s doing.

Ours is not to reason why; ours is but to boil and fry. Maybe so, but why empty the word “good” of what we all mean and understand by it by applying it to such a being? ¹⁸

It’s not just Christians who are compelled to make excuses for these ancient books. Todd Kadish, a former Orthodox Jew, tells me that “the atrocities contained in them are “an albatross weighing down the moral authority of ethical monotheism.” Worse, they can offer a “license for ethnocentrism or even atrocities” perpetuated today, in some pious fantasy world where the ability to do so would actually present itself. The Orthodox can’t just wave away the sacred words on the Torah scroll, because they “consider the Five Books of Moses the vehicle through which a transcendent God touched humanity, and the eternal guidebook he personally authored for his chosen people.”

Kadish acknowledges that the real-world consequences are very different for a reluctantly tolerated albatross and an enthusiastically embraced bad-behavior license. But he warns Jews and others who revere the Hebrew Bible to focus on the common source of the two positions:

The views of a liberal (“Modern”) Or­thodox rabbi writing apologetics and a radical Orthodox Jew who justifies the murder of innocent Palestinian children by citing Biblical precedent are both seeking to apply the morality of a being they consider the source of (or at least guide to) morality to the modern world. But the world largely moved beyond total warfare centuries ago, and most of us are now trying to lay to rest a history of racial and religious genocide which stretched into the modern era (with Jews as some of its primary victims). And the Hebrew Bible is a truly terrible foundation doc­ument for a moral code that demands ethics in warfare and respects all human life, because it leaves one with apologetics at best or license for atrocities at worst.¹⁹

Happily, for those of us outside the fanatic fringes of Christianity or Judaism, the Hebrew Bible is in no position to make any more demands. We have read it and tossed it aside in disgust, dismissed it as irrelevant to our lives, or rationalized it away under some comfortable theory about Jesus fulfilling the Law. Reconstructionism, never a big part of American religion to begin with, has retreated to its bunkers.

Though Professor Ingersoll notes that “conservatives (Christian and secular) have not disappeared” and expresses concern about lingering influence from the Reconstructionist lunacy she’s studied for so long,²⁰ today’s conservativism seems to be a largely secular phonenomen. The snarling theocratic fantasy of Ted Cruz’s candidacy has evaporated, and the amoral authoritarian gasbag left standing at the head of God’s Own Party exhibits no significant religious convictions. Meanwhile, one contender for the Democratic Party nomination says he is “not particularly religious,” and the other one–the woman who will be the next U.S. President–is a pro-choice Methodist not exactly beloved by the Religious Right.

Through no fault of the Bible, our nation and world remain infested with ignorance, superstition, bigotry, and violence. We certainly are not headed for any secular utopia as we leave that nasty old book behind. But perhaps some of what another Ingersoll–the genius orator Robert Green Ingersoll–promised a hundred years ago finally might be happening:

Day by day, religious conceptions grow less and less intense. Day by day, the old spirit dies out of book and creed. The burning enthusiasm, the quenchless zeal of the early church have gone, never, never to return. The ceremonies remain, but the ancient faith is fading out of the human heart. The worn out arguments fail to convince, and denunciations that once blanched the faces of a race, excite in us only derision and disgust.²¹

It is long overdue.

Paul wrote that he was pressing “toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.” Forget those things that are behind us, he said, and reach forth unto those things which lie before us (Phillipians 3:13-14). Lofty words, and a worthwhile thing to adapt for ourselves as we smile at Paul and Peter and whoever wrote all the rest of it: Let us press toward the prize of our own high calling, of our best and noblest selves and community and shared humanity.

Let’s forget the tribal atrocities and cruel punishments in this tired old text that’s occupied too many of us for far too long, and look to what lies before us–writings and thoughts that speak to us where we are today as compassionate, decent human beings, that serve us, that earn the space they ask for inside our minds.

Notes

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The Milky Way from my driveway

Tonight, with clear weather and no moon around, I am up late to look at a dark sky with the first decent pair of binoculars I’ve ever owned. The vaguely textured white blur of the Milky Way that my eyes have long admired, unmagnified, now resolve through the 10x binoculars into clusters of countless stars with crisscrossing fuzzy ribbons of black woven in between.

I pan the circular field of view slowly along our galaxy’s long overhead arc, immersed in the depth I sense above me from my two eyes merging a single image. There’s a satisfying tangible connection between the fine motions of my arms and the slow sweeping past of this collection of a hundred billion stars in our little corner of the universe.

A dim smudge near Cassiopeia teases my eyes’ limits of sensitivity and resolution. I think it’s M52, a globular cluster a few thousand light-years away. It was first identified by Charles Messier in 1774. The photons I’m collecting in my binoculars tonight from its 193 or so stars were more than 90% of the way here when Messier peered through his telescope. In the meantime, a nation rose through a rebellion and then quashed one of its own; enslaved, freed, and still long oppressed a large fraction of its citizens; conquered its native peoples and then rescued others from conquest in two world wars.

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The smudges are clusters of countless stars.²

These photons had already emerged from their nuclear furnaces by the time some settlements along the river Tiber formed the first humble beginnings of the Roman empire.³ Their journey may even have been halfway underway by then; we’re not sure exactly how far away M52 is from us.⁴

It’s been a little more than two thousand years ago since a citizen of that empire, a gifted poet and philosopher, stood next to some pool or pond beneath the night sky. The skies anywhere in Europe were darker than they are now, even at my place out in the country. I imagine Titus Lucretius Caras (c. 99-55 B.C.) looking at an image of the blazing array of stars overhead, seeing their “images,” which, he muses, must “be able to run through space incalculable / In a moment of time.”⁵

The pointpoints and patterns of the stars are mirrored in the still water before him, “not turned round intact, but flung straight back / In reverse,” with the features thus shown “in reverse.”⁶ He moves slightly to one side along the water’s edge and notices how one particularly bright star near the horizon comes abruptly into view from behind the tree. Its direct image and its reflection both wink on instantly–at exactly the same time, as far as he can tell.⁷

Yet he knows that the “images” raining down from the sky take a longer route when they make the extra trip to the water and back than when they go directly into his eye.

Those image-bearing bodies are “marvelously swift” indeed. They move 186,000 miles–more than 23 earth diameters–through the vacuum of space every second. Yet the immense vault of our universe is so incomprehensibly vast that it’s taken most of the span of human civilization for them to reach us, from a relatively nearby neighbor within just our own galaxy (there are at least a hundred billion others).⁹

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My kind of nightlife

Silent and impassive to all the twitches and ripples in the microscopic biofilm of one ordinary planet, in the hundreds of years since Messier noticed this odd feature among the stars–in the thousands filled with death and wars and tears of joy and sorrow since Lucretius did his ancient poolside musings–the photons from its clustered stars continued their long journey outward. Only now do they finally land on my retinas to collapse wave functions and trigger individual rod-shaped cells to launch neurotransmitters down neighboring filaments of cell-strings along my optic nerves.

In my brain, a little smudge registers. Something’s really up there.

The stars in M52 will keep launching their photons all my life, as they have for 35 million years now. They’ll get lost in the sea of light that covers and warms the daylight half of earth, fall through clear skies over the other half in darkness, and remain ignored almost always, as the earth swings around its own little star a few dozen more times until my eyes no longer see anything at all.

And yet, despite my absence, the earth will stay in its orbit and the photons will stream on.

Notes

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Whoops, picked the wrong house.¹

The other weekend a man named Ian, one of my fellow citizens in the rural northeast corner of Washington State, heard his dog barking and went to check out what was going on. What he found was an intruder he says was “definitely whacked out on something,” dressed in black. Way out in the back woods where Ian lives, the front yard is not a place where you just wind up by accident late at night. But this intruder had picked the wrong house to try breaking into.

Ian, you see, is very prepared for this sort of thing because of his service in the Marine Corps and a career as a correctional officer. He’s one of those guys who sits with his back to the wall in a restaurant and reflexively does 180-degree eyeball scans of the scene. It’s not something he enjoys; he has PTSD from his time spent in very rough places. But the other night, that vigilance served him well.

He retrieved his AR-15 with its 30-round magazine. That rifle, he says, “while not guaranteeing my safety, allowed me to have a fighting chance against a possible threat” in those first dark moments confronted with an unknown intruder, when Ian “had no idea of how well armed he was or if he had friends, waiting in the shadows of my expansive property to try and help victimize myself and my family.”²

The guy was messing with the door handle. Ian “swung the door open” and his unwelcome guest “went from the porch to the concrete quickly with some assistance. Supposedly he’s got some broken bones.” That, Ian added, can happen when you’re falling. Especially with some assistance from a well-placed foot appearing out of nowhere. He proceeded carefully but firmly:

My wife retrieved her weapon and covered me while I did a cursory search of him and I found a 7 or so inch knife.

I held him at gunpoint while waiting for the cops. He started to bend his arms as if he might get up so I reminded him to stay down and then he cried a bit about his ribs.

After 40 long minutes–not an unusual amount of time for our far-flung rural area–the “cops came and cuffed him up and I told him if he ever came back, he dies.”

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Hold that pose, please.

Note Ian’s use of non-lethal force to drop the guy, even as he held one of those big bad “assault” rifles at the ready.³ The intruder had no shots fired at him, though Ian was ready to “press his head out the second I saw him and the whole time I had him down. I was totally prepared to. I told him, as serious as I could that I would and please don’t make me do it. By that time he was crying about his ribs anyway.”

But he’s glad he didn’t need to, because he didn’t want his “kids to see a body if they don’t have to.” For those of you that think it’s an easy thing to do, Ian says, “you’ve never done it.”

He didn’t feel good afterward. This wasn’t going to make the PTSD any easier. Though he was glad to know that he still has what it takes to protect his family, he said the incident took him “back to a place I don’t miss.”

But let it be known, he added, “This guy fell like a sack of potatoes and had he not, he would have died. I’m no tough guy but I will end your life to protect my family.”⁴

I don’t have his training or experience, and I never would’ve had what it takes to be a Marine. But a traumatic experience years ago showed me just how long it takes for a response to a 911 call out here. (That it took 40 minutes for the police to finally arrive at Ian’s place didn’t surprise me a bit.) The defense of my home and family is up to me, and for me, the Second Amendment is not about being able to go hunt with a bolt-action rifle.

Hell, I don’t even hunt. Never have. But I do have some guns, ones I’ve shot plenty at old appliances and other worthy practice targets and at least know how to aim. The firearms are all safely locked away; I have no patience with parents who leave deadly weapons laying around for curious kids to check out. But, note to scumbags: “Locked away” definitely does not mean “inacessible if needed quickly.”

Notes

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Still time to change the road you’re on.¹

The following poem was written by someone eleven years old in the Laestadian Lutheran Church, which I left a few years back. I reprint it here with permission of the young author who wishes “to see this out there,” and a parent of the author. Except for the visual formatting and the addition of a couple of punctuation marks, it is exactly as written.

There is nothing to add to this heartfelt work, except the hope that it be seen by other young people struggling under the weight of a harsh fundamentalism they did not ask to be part of, and by parents unware of the pain they are inflicting on their children–in service of doctrines those parents privately admit to doubting. And perhaps to repeat the remarkable age of the poet: eleven years old.

Notes

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A class act (from CNN)

I’ve been following U.S. politics closely for thirty years. It’s been sort of a civic hobby of mine, a fascination with the process of representative democracy.

Election nights always felt to me like a celebration of sorts, even when my side lost. The majesty of our shared Constitution stood proud and resolute over my disappointment or elation, a solid structure to house and protect the nation’s differences. I fondly remember driving home to the soothing voices of NPR hosts already announcing the electoral votes of some important state on the East Coast. At home or a neighbor’s house, I’d watch on the TV screen and, later, on my own Internet browser, to see the states lighting up in their contrasting colors.

The people were making their choices known. It was a wondrous act of civic communion, being enacted in school cafeterias and grange halls and church foyers across the country, one check box at a time. The pundits and politicians and talk show hosts could only sit and watch it happen, in all its unstoppable glory, just like everybody else.

Eventually, victors would stand beaming among cheers and losers would wave sadly at their disappointed backers. Except for the drama and unseemly judicial politics of Bush v. Gore in 2000, everybody quickly found some gracious words for their opponents and promised to work together for the good of the nation.²

This time it’s different. The Republican Party’s nominee for our nation’s highest office has conducted his campaign like an eight-year old schoolyard bully, spewing out childish insults against not just his opponent but seemingly everyone who dares to criticize him, including fellow Republicans. As November 8 mercifully draws near, with the polls showing him facing a humiliating landslide loss to a tarnished and unpopular Democrat, he is lashing out with accusations of a rigged election.³

“The whole thing is one big fix,” “one big ugly lie,” he told his crowd at a rally in North Carolina last week, after an extended heated denial about “fabricated” sexual assault accusations, an assessment of Hillary’s attractiveness as seen from behind (“She walks in front of me . . . believe me, I wasn’t impressed”), some rounds of “lock her up” chants, and a “get him outta here” protester eviction.⁴

“This whole election is being rigged,” he said a day later in Cincinnati, according to a Boston Globe article observing that “Trump is now using the prospect of his loss to undermine faith in democratic institutions.” If he loses (I will venture to say “when”), some of his supporters “are even openly talking about violent rebellion and assassination, as fantastical and unhinged as that may seem.” It’s no exaggeration, judging from what one of those supporters had to say:

“If she’s in office, I hope we can start a coup. She should be in prison or shot. That’s how I feel about it,” Dan Bowman, a 50-year-old contractor, said of Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee. “We’re going to have a revolution and take them out of office if that’s what it takes. There’s going to be a lot of bloodshed. But that’s what it’s going to take . . . . I would do whatever I can for my country.”⁵

Bowel Movement

Trump wrapped up his North Carolina speech by boasting, “This is a movement like nobody’s ever seen in this country before.”⁶ He may be right about that, unfortunately. I’m terrified for the future of this country, because I’ve paid some attention to what’s happened elsewhere in the past.

Democratic governments–technically, republics–are fragile civic arrangements between people who agree to respect majority opinions they may not share, to put up with a degree of regulations based on those opinions. The agreement need not be unanimous, but the “consent of the governed” cannot withstand even a strong minority who want to see the whole thing torn down. Such minorities grow in number and loudness when they see themselves being used as tools rather than respected as fellow citizens. Those angry white men shoving protesters and jeering and shouting themselves hoarse at Trump rallies have some legitimate grievances.

But they’ve found an odd sort of champion in this tax-avoiding⁷billionaire who began his speech in North Carolina talking about owning property there (no cheers for that line), peddles Chinese-made clothes,⁸ and stiffs everyday people who do work for him.⁹ The idea of him being a standard-bearer of the Religious Right’s family values agenda is laughable, even without regard to his change of heart about abortion.¹⁰ One of the most reasonable explanations I’ve heard for Trump being the GOP candidate of the huddled masses came from a friend of mine recently:

People are so stinking tired of the single party-like system that services the elites. There was no conspiracy to put him there. He saw the disenfranchisement people were feeling and capitalized on it.

The only major party that will put up a candidate that is a true outsider is the Republican Party because they didn’t implement a superdelegate system like the democrats did back in the seventies. And the only way an outsider will win the Republican nomination against the established machine is to be highly controversial, because it’s the only to get attention without having an unlimited spigot of money.

“Controversy is the only way to stand out against the kleptocracy,” my friend concludes. “Nice people do not win in this scenario.”¹¹

Before I respond to that with some glib analogy about getting rid of bedbugs with a propane canister left open overnight plus a match, I must admit to having actually cheered Donald Trump’s ascent in the Republican primaries. It was clear from the infantile antics and debate-night food fights that he would be the easiest for the Democrat to defeat.¹² For once, the GOP’s elites and billionaire patrons found themselves unable to ease in a genteel puppet like Jeb! to keep the money funneling upward, the environmental regulations disappearing, and everything from Social Security to our national forests going private. Certainly, they could find a way to manipulate Trump into doing most of that for them, too, if it came to that.

But, as I breezily told a few friends, there simply was no way Trump would win in November. Relax, I said, it won’t even be close. Now we have this glorious festering moron as the GOP nominee.

Well, at various times since then, I wound up abandoning all that confidence. Compulsively checking and rechecking the latest projection at FiveThirtyEight.com, back in September, I wondered how the hell this guy was running even in the polls. (Still checking: The polls-only forecast now gives him a 11.4% probability of winning, not low enough for my liking.) There were a few very dark nights of the soul when I wished the only thing the name Donald Trump meant to me was something vague about a combed-over windbag who churned his way through a few wives and bankruptcies and fired people on TV.

Bonfire of the Vanity

Allow me to simply give voice to a deep-seated revulsion that has welled up from too many hours now spent in the vile virtual company of that scowling and smirking face, the hand waving and hog calling that passes for campaign speeches, the volleys of infantile insult bombs launched on Twitter: Donald Trump is a proven serial liar, an immature schoolyard bully, a pathetic attention-craving egotist, and a truly gaping asshole.¹³

“This is not how decent human beings behave,” the First Lady said last week after gagging along with the rest of us on the recorded voice of “a powerful individual speaking freely and openly about sexually predatory behavior, and actually bragging about kissing and groping women, using language so obscene that many of us were worried about our children hearing it when we turn on the TV.” This, as she said, is not normal.¹⁴

So just what is just going on inside that large orange head? The behavior is so unseemly, so far beyond the pale, that people naturally have been tempted to make psychological speculations. A Google search for “trump mental illness,” run through an anonymizer with my cookies cleared to avoid biasing the algorithm, yields a million hits.

The top result is of an article in The Atlantic by Psychology professor Dan P. McAdams, entitled “The Mind of Donald Trump.” McAdams found he could “discern little more than narcissistic motivations and a complementary personal narrative about winning at any cost.” It is, he said, “as if Trump has invested so much of himself in developing and refining his socially dominant role that he has nothing left over to create a meaningful story for his life, or for the nation.” A couple of other psychologists he cited had similar impressions:

Asked to sum up Trump’s personality for an article in Vanity Fair, Howard Gardner, a psychologist at Harvard, responded, “Remarkably narcissistic.” George Simon, a clinical psychologist who conducts seminars on manipulative behavior, says Trump is “so classic that I’m archiving video clips of him to use in workshops because there’s no better example” of narcissism. “Otherwise I would have had to hire actors and write vignettes. He’s like a dream come true.”¹⁵

Now, this was all written back in June, before Trump announced his VP pick by spending nearly a half hour standing by himself on stage, “delivering a long and improvised riff that emulated his rallies instead of a traditional vice-presidential debut” and then finally getting to the matter of talking about somebody else.¹⁶ Before he reacted to his opponent’s criticism of his past treatment of Miss Universe 1996 with a series of tweets about a non-existent “sex tape,” her “terrible” past, her being “disgusting” and a “con.” And of course before he was heard saying in the tape that disgusted so many of us and at long last eliminated the possibility of his presidency, “You can do anything” when you’re a star.¹⁷

McAdams and those he quotes don’t go so far as to connect the narcissism they see with mental illness, but even what they’ve said has raised criticism from their peers. In August, the president of the American Psychiatric Association “reminded her organization’s members of the so-called Goldwater Rule, ‘which prohibits psychiatrists from offering opinions on someone they have not personally evaluated.’” It seems that Barry Goldwater so disturbed 1,100 psychiatrists during his 1964 campaign that they told a survey taker he “was psychologically unfit to be president.”

Dr. Allen Frances, professor emeritus of psychiatry at Duke University, is one of the critics of such armchair psychiatry. (McAdams, Gardner, and Simon are psychologists, not psychiatrists, for what that’s worth.) She writes that Trump “most certainly does not have a Personality Disorder” (isn’t that a diagnosis of sorts?), but she certainly isn’t a fan:

This does not make Trump fit to be president, not by any means. He must be by far the least suitable person ever to run for high office in the US completely disqualified by habitual dishonesty, bullying, bravado, bloviating ignorance, blustery braggadocio, angry vengefulness, petty pique, impulsive unpredictability, tyrannical temper, fiscal irresponsibility, imperial ambitions, constitutional indifference, racism, sexism, minority hatred, divisiveness, etc.¹⁸

Fine, so let’s all agree not to label Donald Trump as being mentally ill. Let’s agree that even a psychiatrist couldn’t ethically make a diagnosis from afar. The pattern-recognition circuits in my brain still light up uncomfortably when I read what Wikipedia has to say about Narcissistic personality disorder, which it calls

a long-term pattern of abnormal behavior characterized by exaggerated feelings of self-importance, an excessive need for admiration, and a lack of understanding of others’ feelings. People affected by it often spend a lot of time thinking about achieving power or success, or about their appearance. They often take advantage of the people around them.

People with the disorder “are characterized by their persistent grandiosity, excessive need for admiration, and a disdain and lack of empathy for others,” Wikipedia says. “These individuals often display arrogance, a sense of superiority, and power-seeking behaviors.” This isn’t just self-confidence gone into overdrive. Rather, narcissists “typically value themselves over others to the extent that they disregard the feelings and wishes of others and expect to be treated as superior regardless of their actual status or achievements.” They “may exhibit fragile egos, an inability to tolerate criticism, and a tendency to belittle others in an attempt to validate their own superiority.” To “protect the self at the expense of others,” narcissists “tend to devalue, derogate, insult, [and] blame others and they often respond to threatening feedback with anger and hostility.”¹⁹

If I’d been presented with that description before reading anything about narcissism and then asked to provide an example of someone whose recent behavior matches it, I know what my answer would be. And considering what’s at stake for the entire country, that bothers me a lot. This isn’t just about avoiding drama from unfortunate relatives or poorly chosen friends.

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More descriptions are found in a new book by some Jungian psychologists, entitled A Clear and Present Danger: Narcissism in the Era of Donald Trump. The editors and contributors know better than to say something like “Trump is a pathological narcissist,” and their publisher starts things off with this stern preface:

Let us be clear: The contributors, editors, and publisher have not engaged in diagnosis of any public figures mentioned in the pages that follow. Specifically, we are not claiming that any public figures or leaders mentioned have been diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). To establish a diagnosis of any psychological disorder requires individual assessment by a qualified mental health professional. Proper diagnosis is reached only after thorough, individual diagnostic evaluation.²⁰

Then, turning the page to their “Introduction to Narcissistic Personality Disorder,” they say:

The extreme utterances and behaviors displayed by candidates like Mr. Trump may have shined a light on narcissism and perhaps given society a chance to confront this phenomenon head-on. We wish to reiterate that we are not proposing that Donald Trump suffers from Narcissistic Personality Disorder, nor are we proposing he does not. Yet we wish to thank him and other candidates in the 2016 presidential election for the opportunity to take an honest look in the mirror and confront our individual and collective narcissism.

So, just what is this Narcissistic Personality Disorder they say Trump may or may not suffer from? Their answer refers to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual–the “Psychiatrist’s Bible,” 5th edtition:

The DSM 5 defines people with Narcissistic Personality Disorder as having very specific attributes. They show enduring patterns of grandiosity, an absence of empathy, and a need for being admired by others throughout adulthood. People with grandiosity have a sense of superiority, viewing themselves as better than others. They often look at others with a sense of disdain and perceive others as inferior themselves. They see themselves as unique and overly important and often exaggerate their achievements. Lacking empathy, they are unmoved by others’ suffering. They have difficulty seeing how their actions can harm others or how someone might feel in a particular situation.

To meet the criteria for NPD, the DSM 5 requires at least 5 out of the following 9 characteristics to be met: grandiosity; fantasies of unlimited power and success; sees self as “special” and only associates with others of high status; needs admiration; has a sense of entitlement; is interpersonally exploitative; lacks empathy; is envious of others; or appears arrogant.

Even people who fail to meet 5 of the 9 the diagnostic criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder, those said to have narcissistic traits, may experience difficulties in the way they relate to the world. The distinction between narcissistic traits and narcissistic personality disorder is sometimes subtle and difficult to make.²¹

In the next chapter, the editors let their feelings be known about the Goldwater Rule, saying “it seems ill-conceived that laypersons with no formal training or experience should be free to opine on the psychology of public figures aspiring to high office, while trained, experienced professionals are gagged.” Then they go on provide some examples of “Donald Trump’s own words [that] are often used to fashion impressions about his ‘political psychological profile,’” which are amusing but almost quaint in view of the awful things Trump has said and tweeted in the months since they compiled their list.

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One uncredentialed but sort-of expert on narcissism is not being restrained at all in his assessment. Sam Vaknin was interviewed by the conservative American Thinker back in March and said, “Trump is the most perfect example I have ever come across of a malignant and, probably, psychopathic narcissist.” Sam Vaknin is a fascinating character because he describes himself as a narcissist, an assessment shared by some critics who feel he has gained too much attention in the field.

In response to the question of whether Trump would represent a significant danger as President of the United States, Vaknin says:

You just have to look at Trump’s business history to extrapolate America’s future under a President Trump. Narcissists are unstable and go through repeated cycles of self-destruction (with other people usually paying the heft of the price). Narcissists tend to be divisive, vindictive, confrontational, aggressive, hate-filled, raging, incoherent, judgement-impaired, and irrational. Narcissists are junkies: they are addicted to attention (“Narcissistic Supply”) and will go to any extreme to secure it. Narcissists are liars, confabulators, and miserable failures (although some of them, like Trump, are geniuses at disguising the fact that they are, in fact, losers). Is this the kind of person you want in the White House?²²

Though there is something a bit creepy about Vaknin’s scholarly forays into the very area where he claims to have mental issues (even running message boards where victims of narcissists have gone to get help), that certainly doesn’t make him seem more sympathetic toward narcissists. Here are some gems quoted from his book Malignant Self Love, the tenth edition published in March 2015. Note that this was all written before Trump announced his candidacy, so it’s not directed at him or his behavior during this train wreck of a campaign:

• The fuel of the narcissist’s rage is spent mainly on vitriolic verbal send-offs directed at the (often imaginary) perpetrator of the (oft-innocuous) “offence”.

• The narcissist wittingly or not utilizes people to buttress his self-image and to regulate his sense of self-worth. As long and in as much as they are instrumental in achieving these goals, he holds them in high regard, they are valuable to him. He sees them only through this lens. This is a result of his inability to love others: he lacks empathy, he thinks utility, and, thus, he reduces others to mere instruments.

• He regards and treats people as though they were objects: exploits and discards them. He mistreats people around him by asserting his superiority at all times; by being emotionally cold or absent; by constantly bickering, verbally humiliating, incessantly (mostly unjustly) criticizing; and by actively rejecting or ignoring them, thus provoking uncertainty.

• He is capricious, infantile and emotionally labile and immature. The narcissist is frequently a 40 years-old brat.

• The narcissist needs and requires an audience to applaud, approve, affirm, recoil, admire, adore, fear, or even detest him. He craves the attention and depends on the Narcissistic Supply that only others can provide.

• Mostly, the narcissist prefers to be feared or admired rather than be loved. He describes himself as a “strong, no nonsense” man, who is able to successfully weather extraordinary losses and exceptional defeats and to recuperate. He expects other people to respect this image that he projects.

• Narcissists are pathological liars. This means that they are either unaware of their lies, or feel completely justified and at ease when lying to others.²³

Yes, these are selected quotations from a large, somewhat rambling book. Yes, it is possible to quote-mine negative traits from such books about most anyone you don’t like. No, we can’t know Trump’s internal mental state from what we see in public. But the comparisons still jump out at me and give me the creeps.

I do not want anyone who has acted anything remotely like this in the Oval Office. And I really can’t imagine why you would vote for such a man–no matter what party he’s claiming to be in, no matter what your grievances or politics, or how much you don’t like his opponent.

What’s Left to Believe?

One thing I will not hesitate to call Donald Trump is a liar. The media danced around the issue of his obvious falsehoods for a while and then finally started calling them what they are.

“Virtually all of Mr. Trump’s falsehoods directly bolstered a powerful and self-aggrandizing narrative depicting him as a heroic savior for a nation menaced from every direction,” Maggie Haberman and Alexander Burns said in their summary of a “week of whoppers” before the first debate. His “version of reality allows for few, if any, flaws in himself.” Operating inside that bubble, Trump imagined a crowd chanting “Let him speak!” after being told not to get political in a church, opposed the Iraq war despite no record of anything but pro-war remarks from him ever being found, and slandered his opponent by blaming her for starting the smear he kept up for years about Obama’s birthplace.²⁴

Someone who knows about this better than most is Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter of The Art of the Deal who “spent 18 months in the 1980s interviewing and shadowing Mr. Trump.” He feels “a deep sense of remorse” for contributing “to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is.” The book is really a work of fiction, he says, and ought to be titled The Sociopath. “Lying is second nature to him,” Schwartz says of the interview subject he said regularly exaggerated, had no attention span, and whose need for attention is such that he’d run for “emperor of the world” if he could.²⁵

Trump’s own lawyers didn’t even seem to believe him. Two of them would meet him together “so we don’t have a problem of people lying.” He is, after all, “an expert at interpreting things,” as one of them delicately put it. “Donald says certain things and then has a lack of memory.”²⁶

It Matters

Volker Ullrich describes the atmosphere at a rally led by a man who was still on the far margins of power, trying to gain a foothold. It was the evening of February 24, 1920, and

around 2,000 people squeezed into the Hofbräuhaus’s main first-floor hall. Hitler was the second speaker, but he was the one who really got the crowd whipped up with his attacks on the Treaty of Versailles, Erzberger and, above all, the Jews. The police transcript of the event read: “First chuck the guilty ones, the Jews, out and then we’ll purify ourselves. (Enthusiastic applause.) Monetary fines are no use against the crimes of fencing and usury. (Beatings! Hangings!) How shall we protect our fellow human beings against this band of bloodsuckers? (Hang them!)”²⁷

“Audience sizes ranged from 800 to 2,500,” but “in the second half of 1920, levels of 3,000 were reached.”²⁸ The goal of the speaker at this point “was to attract attention to his still relatively small party and secure its place in the public sphere. ‘Who cares whether they laugh at us or insult us, treating us as fools or criminals?’ Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf. ‘The point is that they talk about us and constantly think about us.’”²⁹

He was still being careful about how he said things, but he wasn’t making a secret of his despicable views. Even

in the early 1920s, no resident of Munich who had attended a Hitler speech or read about one in the newspapers could have been in any doubt about what Hitler intended to do with the Jews. But hardly anyone seems to have disapproved. On the contrary, storms of applause greeted precisely the most anti-Semitic passages of Hitler’s speeches, strongly suggesting that they were the source of much of the speaker’s appeal. When he demanded that Jews be “removed” from Germany by some unspecified means, therefore, Hitler and his audience were on the same wavelength. Both were carried away by the racist wishful thinking of a fully homogenous ethnic community.³⁰

Making comparisons between Trump and Hitler (Googling “trump hitler”: 32,700,000 results) is problematic for a number of reasons, perhaps primarily the fact that Trump has never been in a position of power. In 1920, Hitler wasn’t, either. He hadn’t killed anyone yet or even broken any laws. But he was already making it known that there was an entire group of people he didn’t want to have in the country, and a small segment of the population was cheering him for saying it.³¹

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We are not yet seeing a militia of armed thugs marching in the streets for a political strongman. Trump has boasted that he alone can fix ISIS, has threatened to lock up his political opponent,³² and doesn’t seem to care about the Geneva Conventions when it comes to killing the families of terrorists,³³ but he is not yet demanding the entire power of the state.

Yet the Donald is leaving us plenty of things to be concerned about. Imagine our country thirteen years from now–the length of time between Hitler’s first Munich rallies and his accepting the designation of Chancellor from an aged and wishful-thinking Paul von Hindenberg. Are those good jobs coming back to the middle class? Are the wild-eyed jihadists going to stop massacring people in shopping malls and marketplaces? Is the planet going to stop warming and flooding and creating refugees from hot places teeming with Muslims and Mexicans?

When do the irresponsible words start shift into actions? The people showing up at Trump rallies have plenty of weapons in their basements, and I’d bet a lot of them would eagerly sign up for deportation patrols if they thought they could get away with it.

The classic definition of the state, provided by the German sociologist Max Weber, is the institution that seeks to monopolize legitimate violence. In the 1920s and the early 1930s, Hitler sought to discredit the Weimar Republic by demonstrating that it could not, in fact, do this. His armed guards, known as the SA and SS, functioned before his takeover of 1933 as de-monopolizers of violence. When they beat opponents or started brawls, they were demonstrating the weakness of the existing system.³⁴

Consider who we have asking for our votes, right now: a man who has praised Putin for his “very strong control over a country.” That’s the kind of leader Trump would like to be, in the assessment of Danielle Pletka at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. Trump’s “instincts are authoritarian, and dangerous,” she told the New York Times.³⁵

“His smile masks a hunger he cannot contain,” Alex Castellanos wrote more than a year ago, a conservative who was against Trump before being a conservative against Trump was cool. “He does not believe federal power is too removed from our lives to control our lives. He does not believe our factory-like government fails because it is trying to do too much, not too little. Instead, he appears to believe this: Lesser people than he are running things. And power should rest not with the people, but with him.”³⁶

His claim that Judge Gonzalo Curiel could not fairly preside over the lawsuits against his sham of a “University” because of his Mexican heritage has been widely denounced as racist, but the trouble goes beyond that. “Mr. Trump accused the judge of bias, falsely said he was Mexican and seemed to issue a threat,” Adam Liptak summarized in the New York Times, then quoting David Post, a retired law professor:

This is how authoritarianism starts, with a president who does not respect the judiciary.

You can criticize the judicial system, you can criticize individual cases, you can criticize individual judges. But the president has to be clear that the law is the law and that he enforces the law. That is his constitutional obligation.³⁷

The man wants to “open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money.” Negative articles–verboten. “We’re going to open up libel laws, and we’re going to have people sue you like you’ve never got sued before.”³⁸

He has “called for the broad use of the contentious stop-and-frisk policing strategy in America’s cities,” the New York Times reported last month, “embracing an aggressive tactic whose legality has been challenged and whose enforcement has been abandoned in New York.”³⁹

Trump’s “vision of the presidency is an American strongman working on behalf of the little guy, who by implication cannot take care of himself,” writes Jay Cost at the conservative Weekly Standard. At one point in the first debate, “Trump criticized Clinton for not mentioning the phrase ‘law and order.’ But where, from Trump, was any talk about liberty, or the Constitution, or limited government?” Cost asks. “Nowhere, of course because these are not values that are central to his way of thinking.”⁴⁰

To borrow Jacob Weisberg’s memorable assessment, we have one candidate who is running for President and another who is running for Dictator.⁴¹

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One last thing: Please don’t give me any of that tired Christian “vote your values” bullshit. Not now, not with this candidate. Valerie Tarico commented, “Christian devotion to Trump is exposing the moral vacancy at the heart of many Christian churches and leaders (and their member/​followers), for whom the religion of low taxes trumps the religion of caring for the least of these.”⁴²

Believers might consider the example of Karl Tervo, a Christian I respect and occasionally interact with on Twitter:

I don’t pretend to know Donald Trump’s heart, but I can see how he lives his life, the words that he chooses to use, and how he treats other people. Matthew 3:8 says, “Therefore bear fruit in keeping with repentance . . .” (NASB). By this measure, which is admittedly subjective since I can’t see into his heart, Mr. Trump does not seem to be heeding the words of Christ. Many American Christians will eat up the words of politicians who profess faith, especially those on the right. He purposely makes racist comments both against Black people and Jews. American Christians will also use the Supreme Court as a reason for voting for Trump, but how exactly does anybody know what the man will do. He’s changed his mind countless times, sometimes within speeches, so that line of reasoning is a nonstarter for me.⁴³

Tervo is voting for Evan McMullin, a Mormon who shares his opposition to abortion. “This election has been a watershed moment for me,” he told me. “Never again will I blindly pull the lever for the GOP, but rather I’ll more rigorously investigate the candidates for the particular office.”

“Trump told us who he was, showed us who he was, again and again,” Ezra Klein says. “The test here is not of his decency, but of our own.”⁴⁴ It matters who sits in that Oval Office on our behalf, and it matters to me who would vote to put Donald Trump in that exalted place. That really matters to me quite a lot, I’m afraid.

Once when I was deep into my study of the German language, I made the acquaintance of somebody who spoke it fluently. It was a fun and worthwhile relationship between teacher and student, and one day I went to her house to pick up a Luther Bible her husband had brought back from Germany for me. While sitting on their couch, I saw some light from a nook in the corner of the living room and noticed that she was sitting not on the end of the couch opposite me but near the middle, in a way that kept me from scooting over and seeing whatever was producing the light. That got me curious, and I invented an excuse to get up and move to the side of the room where I could see just what was over there.

It turned out to be a large gold-framed portrait of Adolf Hitler with a light shining on it. Red swastika flags stuck out proudly from the wall on both sides.

I never spoke with her again.

Notes

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St. Paul at Ephesus by Gustav Doré

The actual 139^th Psalm, rendered in the beautiful King James translation, can be found here.

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Dark Clouds Ahead.

The clock relentlessly marked out its hours, circling round from each day’s jarring dawn to the slow darkness of another evening, then to the hours of unconscious respite and fitful dreaming amid this long bleak nightmare. For about a month after I crawled into bed at 8:00 PM on November 8 and finally got up in shock late the next morning, the dark hand was pressing down, more days than not.

It wasn’t made much easier for knowing how many others share my despair about the unfolding collapse of our country. Certainly not for realizing that millions of others are cheering on each manipulative and bullying tweet, each outrageous Cabinet pick, each new degradation of the Office of President already being inflicted by the malignant egotist² and con man they elected to it.

Do many of his supporters even realize how much they’ve been played? “So far,” observes Susan Page at USA Today, “Trump’s choices–including top jobs for a trio of veterans of Goldman Sachs, a firm he blasted at campaign rallies–haven’t reflected the populist impulses that fueled his appeal to some white working-class voters or his vow to ‘drain the swamp’ in Washington of donors and other insiders.”³ Imagine that. You’d almost think the man who lied about never settling out of court and then settled the fraud cases against his scam “university” for $25 million shortly after the election might not be 100% sincere.⁴

His new Cabinet swims around in a brand new swamp–the best swamp, a terrific swamp–of record-breaking personal wealth, with a total net worth just shy of $14.5 billion.⁵ His recent pick for Secretary of State, despite pulling down double-digit millions as Exxon CEO since 2012, is a small fish having a mere $150 million to his name.⁶ One can see why Trump excused the poor guy’s relative poverty: With “some of the most deep and long-standing ties to the Russian political and business elite of any American,”⁷ Tillerson will be amply prepared to cozy up to the ex-KGB thug who awarded him the “Order of Friendship” in 2013 and just helped his boss get elected President.⁸

The proposed Secretary of Labor (Would you like fries with that?) has touted the benefits of automation over humans who take vacations, show up late, slip and fall, and sue for discrimination, and opposes a raise in the federal minimum wage, currently at $7.25 per hour.⁹ He wrote a piece in Forbes this May opining that most fast-food store managers making more than $23,660 per year “recognize that in exchange for the opportunity, prestige and financial benefits that come with a salaried position and a performance-based bonus, they’re expected to have an increased sense of ownership and stay until the job gets done, to run the business like they own it.”¹⁰ Inspiring stuff for the former $30/hr factory workers hooting it up at Trump rallies in Cleveland and Grand Rapids. Men, go get yourselves some of that opportunity and prestige overseeing the fry vat until closing–with no overtime, mind you–down at the local Carl’s Jr.!

The “narcissist abuses people,” writes the self-confessed narcissist Sam Vaknin. “He misleads them into believing that they mean something to him, that they are special and dear to him, and that he cares about them. When they discover that it was all a sham and a charade, they are devastated.”¹¹

There is some consolation about this mess, oddly enough, in contemplating the long arc of history. We’ve been here before, many times. Contrary to Lincoln’s lofty words at Gettysburg, government “of the people, by the people, for the people” never seems to last.¹² What a left-wing set of pissed-off populists giveth to the people in righteous anger, a right-wing set of pissed-off populists eventually taketh away with some new strongman who will provide leadership and set everything straight. We just can’t seem to have nice things like democracy and equality for long. Homo sapiens has been dividing itself “into make-believe groups, arranged in a hierarchy” ever since agriculture allowed the accumulation and hoarding of wealth around 10,000 years ago, with the upper levels enjoying “privileges and power, while the lower ones suffered from discrimination and oppression.”¹³

That was certainly true around 2700 years ago, when the Prophet Amos berated the elites of Israel (considering his voice to be that of God, naturally) who imposed “heavy rent on the poor” and exacted “a tribute of grain from them.” They were rich absentee owners of “houses of well-hewn stone” and vineyards whose wine they didn’t bother to drink themselves. I know the score, God (i.e., Amos) warned these good-for-nothing scumbags who “distress the righteous and accept bribes,” and “turn aside the poor” (Amos 5:11-12, NASB). It’s doubtful anything ever came of such divine threats. And when it came to government by the people, forget it; other than an occasional rebuke and punishment, e.g., David for the Bathsheba incident, the history of the ancient Israelites is littered with kings doing pretty much whatever they wanted, usually in God’s name.

Some six hundred years later and about a thousand miles to the west, Lucretius recalled the populist uprising that overthrew the last Roman king in 509 BC and began the Roman Republic:¹⁴

Lucretius recalled this bit of history with some critique of the aforementioned rabble, saying that things then “fell back to utter dregs and turmoil / As every man sought power for himself.” But law and order won out; “some men taught them to appoint magistrates / With rights established and the rule of law.”¹⁶

Alas, he wrote these lines in the final decades of the Republic’s 482-year lifespan. It had been a good long run; except during limited periods of military emergency, ordinary citizens did have some say in who was chosen to run their government.¹⁷ The elites and those who ingratiated themselves to them managed to get much more of a say, of course. Yet even such corrupt and occasionally interrupted democracies are exceptions to history’s rule of dictators and despots.

The revered and ancient Republic that began with men who had “eagerly tread underfoot” the crown of Tarquin the Proud finally ended with some of their descendants in the Senate granting Octavian the title of Augustus, “the illustrious one.” This title “symbolized a stamp of authority over humanity–and in fact nature–that went beyond any constitutional definition of his status.”¹⁸ Octavian was Julius Caesar’s grand-nephew and adopted son and the “Caesar Augustus” mentioned in Luke 2:1. Neither he nor the Emperors who followed answered to voters or even really senators. And during the next 500 years that the Empire continued–longer for the Eastern half that would eventually split off–Rome gradually diminished and lost even the limited, mostly illusory pseudo-democracy that remained in the Senate.

Around 50-60 AD, a century or so after Lucretius, the Roman philosopher Seneca lamented how rare simplicity and innocence were as human qualities. This after having tutored Augustus’ fourth successor Nero–a decidedly unsavory populist authoritarian. It was hypocritical, since he’d made “himself the teacher of a tyrant,”¹⁹ and profited from Nero’s crimes.²⁰ But Seneca’s observations and sorrow about humanity are still worth recalling. You “scarcely ever find loyalty except when it is expedient,” he wrote, yet there is an abundance of “successful crimes” and “all the things equally hateful that men gain and lose through lust.” Ambition, he observed, sets no “limits to itself.” When you consider all this, it “drives the mind into a darkness whose shadows overwhelm it, as though those virtues were overturned which it is not possible to hope for and not useful to possess.”²¹ I’ve come to know those shadows well these past several weeks.

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“Magdalenian Woman,” buried around 15,000 years ago in what is now Dordogne, France²²

A particularly nasty populist takeover of democracy that hits closer to home for me is the transition from the Weimar Republic to the “Thousand-Year Reich.” Following a thirteen-year struggle for power, Hitler’s Nazi Germany wound up lasting just twelve years, a brief but incredibly destructive time. This one is personal. My mother’s half-brother was shot by the Nazis for refusing to serve in their army.²³ My father saw the living skeletons of their victims and the smoke of their crematoria when he made a detour into a concentration camp during his escape from the Stalag IIb POW camp.²⁴

It’s still a bit early to entirely equate our new President-Elect to Hitler. I’m not sure Trump is even a racist, and I actually find him quite sensible when it comes to the threat of Islam.²⁵ Though he seems to like the strong-arm style of the hollow-eyed assassin in the Kremlin and the way Rodrigo Duterte is gunning down his fellow Filipinos,²⁶ he hasn’t yet had anyone killed. But he is a thin-skinned narcissistic demagogue who lies constantly and dangerously, holding himself out as the one leader for the challenge of our times, and that’s bad enough.

The really clear and disturbing parallels are between the current political climate vs. the Weimar Republic in which Hitler began his long quest for power, and the fist-pumping “Lock her up!” crowds in their stupid red baseball caps vs. das Volk cheering at Hitler’s rallies. “We share Hitler’s planet and several of his preoccupations,” observes Timothy Snyder in his book recounting “The Holocaust as History and Warning,” as its subtitle goes. We “have changed less than we think. We like our living space, we fantasize about destroying governments, we denigrate science, we dream of catastrophe.”²⁷

It’s important to acknowledge an uncomfortable reality here, one that I will expand on in an upcoming essay. As 77,000 voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania made abundantly clear last month, life is not going well for millions of angry fellow citizens, despite our government’s warmed-over official stats touting an “economic recovery” that’s every bit as fake as the news Trump supporters have been passing around on Facebook. “Today we live in a world of predatory bankers, predatory educators, even predatory health care providers, all of them out for themselves.”²⁸

The Democrats are complicit in this. The husband of the woman those Rust Belt voters so shockingly rejected is the one who

deregulated derivatives, deregulated telecom, and put our country’s only strong banking laws in the grave. He’s the one who rammed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) through Congress and who taught the world that the way you respond to a recession is by paying off the federal deficit. Mass incarceration and the repeal of welfare, two of Clinton’s other major achievements, are the pillars of the disciplinary state that has made life so miserable for Americans in the lower reaches of society. He would have put a huge dent in Social Security, too, had the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal not stopped him.²⁹

The next Democrat in the Oval Office followed this up with bailouts of the big banks, a hands-off policy for white-collar criminals at those banks, the TPP (yet another odious trade deal), a near-freeze of anti-trust enforcement, greatly expanded Orwellian mass surveillance, and an insanely complex healthcare law “with its exchanges, its individual and employer mandates, its Cadillac tax, its subsidies to individuals and to the insurance industry, and its thousands of other moving parts, sluicing funding this way and that.”³⁰ I must confess that I nearly burned my ballot in 2012 rather than cast a vote to re-elect Barack Obama.

The problem is that–for abundant reasons I will explain in that next essay with all the usual footnotes–there are no ready solutions to the predicament so many of our countrymen find themselves in. And when that happens, so long as people have a vote and even more so after they finally acquiesce in giving it up, the likely outcomes are grim.

The “aging, increasingly brittle, effectively bankrupt, but still immensely powerful global empire of the United States of America” is leaving a lot of its citizens behind.³¹ Most of them have little interest in transgender bathrooms, the immense privilege they enjoy over, say, disabled lesbians of color, and the virtues of those peace-loving Muslims they are lectured about every time some guy with a beard slaughters people while shouting Allahu Akbar.

There is plenty of “cheerleading from government officials,” plenty of “reassurances from dignified and clueless economists” and “reams of doctored statistics gobbled down whole by the watchdogs-turned-lapdogs of the media and spewed forth undigested onto the evening news.”³² But people pay more attention to the monthly $1300 insurance premiums for their shitty high-deductible health plan and the poverty and degradation of working for eight bucks an hour at a fast food joint after getting laid off at the now-shuttered factory.

No amount of official propaganda can convince them the the economy is recovering, because for them, it’s not. Except for “a few privileged sectors, times are hard and getting harder; here in the US, more and more people are slipping into the bleak category of the long-term unemployed, and a great many of those who can still find employment work at part-time positions for sweatshop wages with no benefits at all.”³³

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Abandoned house in Stevens County, WA

In 1920, Germany was experiencing an “explosive mixture of economic misery, social instability and collective trauma” that a black-haired populist demagogue could use as well as a yellow-haired one can in much the same environment today. He did so, better “than any of his rivals on the nationalist far right,” to rise up out of anonymity.³⁴“Hardly a week passed” during that year “without a meeting or a rally,” with audience sizes reaching 3,000 by the end of the year.³⁵He (still referring to the black-haired guy) was skilled at working the crowd, a master of the

“language of the post-war little guy,” peppering his speeches not only with the coarse phrases of a former military man, but also with irony and sarcasm. He was good at responding to hecklers so he mostly kept the laughter on his side. Moreover, Hitler’s speeches clearly touched a nerve. Like no one else, he was able to express what his audience thought and felt: he exploited their fears, prejudices and resentments, but also their hopes and desires.³⁶

Sound familiar? Make Germany Great Again! would not be an unreasonable translation of his campaign message. Hitler’s “speeches typically began with a look back at ‘wonderful, flourishing Germany before the war,’ in which ‘orderliness, cleanliness and precision’ had ruled” (Law and order!) and “civil servants had gone about their work ‘honestly and dutifully’” (Drain the swamp!).³⁷

Here was “‘someone seduced by himself,’ someone who was so inseparable from his words ‘that a measure of authenticity flowed over the audience even when he was telling obvious lies.’”³⁸Believe me, folks . . . In a 1927 speech, after a couple of low-key years following the Beer Hall Putsch and his nine months spent in Landsberg Prison for it,

Hitler used vulgar comparisons, tailor-made to the intellectual capacities of his listeners, and he did not shy away from even the cheapest allusions . . . His words and opinions were simply hurled out with dictatorial certainty as if they were unquestionable principles and facts. All this manifests itself in his language as well, which is like something merely expulsed.³⁹

There were a few good years in the 1920s, but Germany’s economy started really heading downhill with the Great Depression in 1929. Hitler finally had the unemployment and popular anger he needed. Many German “farmers were ‘extraordinarily bitter and prepared to commit all sorts of violent acts,’” noted a police observer to a March 1929 rally, “adding that some saw the National Socialists as their ‘rescuers.’”⁴⁰

On October 28, 1929, the U.S. stock market dropped almost twelve percent. The next day, it went down nearly another twelve percent. Within a few years, in Germany, an

apocalyptic mood of hopelessness began to take hold, even among those segments of the populace that were not primarily affected by the Depression. Faith in democratic institutions and democratic political parties dissolved, and anti-parliamentary sentiment, already rife in the Weimar Republic, was given a huge boost. Those in power appeared to have no solutions to the crisis, and the more helpless they seemed to be, the greater the demand became for a “strong man,” a political messiah who would lead Germany out of economic misery and point the way towards renewed national greatness.

“More than any other German politician,” the black-haired populist “presented himself as the answer to these hopes for salvation.”⁴¹ The yellow-haired one has said, “I alone can fix it.”

The narcissist, writes Vaknin, “needs and requires an audience to applaud, approve, affirm, recoil, admire, adore, fear, or even detest him.”⁴² Next stop on Trump’s post-election “Thank You Tour” is tomorrow in Hershey, PA.

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Photo tweeted Dec. 9 by the President-Elect. Somebody please tell him he won the damn election.

Notes

On March 15, I wrote to some friends on Facebook about the latest results of putting my computer evolution code and skills to the task of finding parameters for the logistic growth model as applied to the number of U.S. reported cases of Covid-19. My belief–speaking as someone with expertise in fitting nonlinear models to data but not any kind of expert in the fields of biology, medicine, or infection disease–was that we would reach 10,000 cases on March 17, and would have reported cases numbering in the hundreds of thousands by March 29.² By the end of April, I believed there would likely be millions of Americans being reported as having this virus. The rate of growth I thought would be unlikely to even start slowing down before April.

The prediction for the one date that has come and gone was not quite accurate. On March 17, there were 6,421 cases reported in the U.S., a little less than two-thirds of what the model said was most likely. But, in my defense, I ask you to look back at yourself enjoying a Sunday in mid-March. Would you have been truly untroubled just two days ago by hearing that six thousand of your fellow Americans would have a deadly respiratory infection that puts a fifth of its hosts into hospitalization? The model was pessimistic but not ridiculous.

Two days earlier, on March 13, I had introduced the project to my Facebook friends, prefacing the discussion with the acknowledgment that I’m not a biologist, or a doctor, or an infectious disease expert of any kind. Just a retired engineer and inventor who knows how to write Python code and has been working on modeling and simulation for over a year now.

After seeing predictions ranging from dismissive to hysterical about the Coronavirus, I saw a useful if sobering application example of a tool that I’d written specifically for my electronic simulation work, ADE. This new examplewould apply the fairly well-known “logistic growth model”³ to what has now bloomed into a pandemic.

Writing and running covid19.py forced me to some stark conclusions: In one week (3/20), I said, we would be likely to have over 20,000 U.S. cases. A week later (3/27), around 10 times that. “By the first few days of April we could very plausibly hit the one million mark. There will certainly be nobody saying this is just like the flu by then.”

The most I was–and am–willing to guarantee about those predictions, however, is that the red line in the plot I included with the post is a nearly optimal fit of the function f(t)=L/(1+exp(-k*(t-t0)))+atto the number of cases versus time provided by Johns Hopkins university, including an update made that evening.

So how did that prediction fare? With data updated Thursday evening (3/19), it now appears that there will be around 13,500 reported cases on March 20. Again the model is pessimistic, with 68% as many cases reported as expected to be. But, again, even the lower one is a huge number of people getting very sick all of a sudden. Were you expecting anything like that just five days ago?

If not, don’t feel bad. There was an excellent reason why you might have been surprised then at what is now clearly plausible to anyone looking at the plot below: Your President was telling you that it was no big deal.

With the data available on March 13, the logistic+linear growth model predicted there would be around 200,000 U.S. cases on March 27. That is a little more than double what the model’s current best fit says is most likely. Again, the model was and still may be pessimistic, predicting too many cases. But again, even 90,000 or so infected Americans–with probably 20,000 of them very sick and at least a thousand of those dying and thousands left with permanent lung damage–is a very big deal. And the virus will still just be getting started.

Yesterday, March 18, I released the first version of this blog post with the projection that there would be nearly 15,000 cases tomorrow (3/20). (Actually 14,538.) Once again, the model was a bit pessimistic; the current projection is for 13,549 cases, or 93% as much.⁴ And the longer-term projections are slightly lower, which is moving in the direction we all want, though only by a little bit.⁵

So, on March 19, here is what the admittedly pessimistic logistic+linear growth model now says, based on Johns Hopkins data updated this evening. The numbers are all in reported U.S. cases:

• The day after tomorrow (3/21), there will be nearly 18,000 cases.

• In one week (3/26), there will be more than 60,000 cases.

• In two weeks (4/2), there will be over 400,000 cases.

• We will reach the million mark between April 4 and 6.⁶

• On April 11, there will be five million cases.⁷

• The U.S. outbreak won’t even begin slowing down until mid-April at the earliest. In other words, there will be increasing numbers of new cases until probably around April 24 when there are finally fewer new cases one day than there were the day before.

• The ultimate number of Americans being reported as being infected by the novel Coronavirus will ultimately reach several tens of millions.

This is some scary shit. And it may be even worse than it looks right now. What the data show, and the model is fitted to, is the number of reported cases; several days ago, some experts in the Seattle area were saying that the number of true cases in Washington State to be several times the number being tested and reported.⁸ Isn’t it reasonable to expect that to remain largely true? Our medical system will almost certainly become overloaded and the focus will simply turn to saving those lives that can be saved, as it has already in Italy.

But all this is just me talking, not the model. It makes no assumptions or judgments about the data. It doesn’t care if some political situation has caused fewer tests, or suddenly more tests. It doesn’t care about an idiot chief executive downplaying the danger and thus encouraging its spread (at least among his cult following), then abruptly deciding to join the adults in the room.⁹

The model simply predicts what will happen if the data continues as it has recently, especially as it has in the past few days.

That’s it. The interpretation and explanation is up to you.

The Nightmare Plot

Returning to the model and its neat little world of reported cases, here is a plot from a simulation I ran this evening, whose results I summarized in the bullet points above. It should make you listen very carefully to what you are being told by medical experts about social distancing, washing your hands, not touching your face, and staying the fuck home.

Now, this is one really important plot. It shows up way too small in this blog post for you to be able to see its important details. So please click or tap on it to open it as an image by itself.

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Reported U.S. Covid-19 cases vs days since Jan. 22, 2020

You can also click hereto see the plot with data from yesterday, 3/18. Open them in two tabs of your browser and then switch between to see how the model is holding up.

The upper subplot shows the best-fit logistic growth model in red, with the actual number of cumulative reported cases of Covid-19 in blue. The error between the model and the data is shown with each annotation. Look how small the residuals are compared to the exponentially rising numbers of cases. It’s a scarily impressive fit, even if the model has proved a bit pessimistic thus far.

The lower subplot shows the number of cases expected to be reported over time, slightly in the past and then extrapolating to the future. Fifty generations of running a differential evolution algorithm¹⁰ resulted in a 120-member population of combinations of parameters for the model. I deliberately terminated the algorithm sooner than I would otherwise so that there would be some visible variation in the extrapolations. The black dots show expected reported-case values with parameters from each member of the population, plotted at a bunch of random times from 3/12 to early April.

Significantly, the subplots both have a logarithmic y-axis. Exponential growth is linear when viewed through a logarithmic lense. When you see that straight line marching steadily upward toward those massive numbers, you really want all your modeling to wind up an embarrassing public failure.

Covering my Posterior

A better way to model this might have been to use a Monte Carlo analysis (e.g., with the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm) to obtain posterior probability distributions for the parameters, and then run a bunch of extrapolations based on parameters drawn from the distributions. But I had the tools handy for using ADE instead; I’ve been wrapping up a year-long project modeling power semiconductor devices using it with the free Ngspice simulation software. So this is what I have to offer, and it seems plenty illuminating to me.

But even without having posterior distributions to draw random variates from, what I am seeing in the scatter plots of value vs SSE for parameter L is not reasssuring. That parameter represents the total number of cases expected to ever be reported. And the data we have, with its steady logarithmic-scale march upward, is not satisfying my computer evolution algorithm that there is anyupper limit before the nation’s entire population is infected.

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SSE vs value: Parameter L (3/18 data)

Simply put, this thing is currently showing no signs of slowing down anytime soon. It is very possible, even likely, that these values of L are due more to genetic drift than any optimality-of-fit of the modeling they represent.¹¹

A word of explanation of this scatter plot: The red dots hugging the left side of the plot are values (y-axis) of L in the final population of parameter combinations, plotted against the sum of squared error (x-axis) that those combinations had vs the data. The distribution of values seems to indicate that we shouldn’t hope for less than several million U.S. cases, and that we can’t count on any upper limit before the virus runs out of hosts to infect.¹²

There is a fair amount of correlation between the model parameter t0and two other parameters, k and L. The parameter k represents how drastic the exponential behavior is; higher values cause things to blow up faster and thus start to reach limits sooner. Thus the highest values of k in the final population are associated with somewhat lower values of t0. The time when the number of new daily cases reaches its maximum happens a few days earlier.

Regarding the correlation between parameters t0 and L, a positive-valued one this time, it simply makes sense to realize that increasing new cases longer before you finally start to slow down the increases is associated with having more people ultimately infected.

Reasons Why Things Might Not Be So Bad

I want to emphasize that there is also the distinct possibility of Lcoming down by a lot within the next couple of days. (Unfortunately, I thought it would do that a couple days ago already, but it’s done the opposite.) It could still happen for a couple of reasons I can think of:

• A curtailing effect becoming apparent soon from containment measures that just aren’t being noticed quite yet due to the incubation period.

• A sudden recent increase in the number of reported cases due to testing finally being available. The rate of tested vs actual may be increasing, not just the absolute number of people testing positive. This would mean that the model is currently getting fitted to an overly dire set of parameters (especially L) due more to recent dramatic increases in reported cases from better testing than exponential spread of the virus.

And there are probably many more reasons I haven’t even imagined why that curve might start bending down sooner than in this simulation. Again, I need to emphasize my lack of biological or medical expertise. And this leads to . . .

The Disclaimer

First, I disclaim everything that John Hopkins does when offering the data on which this analysis is based.¹³ I’m pretty sure their lawyers had good reason for putting that stuff in there, so I’m going to repeat it. Except think “Ed Suominen” when you are reading “The Johns Hopkins University”, and this blog post when you read “the Website.”

This GitHub repo and its contents herein, including all data, mapping, and analysis, copyright 2020 Johns Hopkins University, all rights reserved, is provided to the public strictly for educational and academic research purposes. The Website relies upon publicly available data from multiple sources, that do not always agree. The Johns Hopkins University hereby disclaims any and all representations and warranties with respect to the Website, including accuracy, fitness for use, and merchantability. Reliance on the Website for medical guidance or use of the Website in commerce is strictly prohibited.

Second, I know very little about biology, beyond a layman’s fascination with it and the way everything evolved. (Including this virus!) I do have some experience with modeling, including using my ADE Python package to develop some really cool power semiconductor simulation software that I’ll be releasing in a month or so from when I’m doing the GitHub commit with this COVID-19 example. The software (also to be free and open-source!) has a sophisticated subcircuit model for power MOSFETs that evolves 40+ parameters (an unfathomably huge search space). It uses the same principle–differential evolution of nonlinear model parameters–as this unfortunate example we find ourselves in.

The model I’m using for the number of reported cases of COVID-19 follows the logistic growth model, with a small (and not terribly significant) linear term added. It has just 4 parameters, and finding the best combination of those parameters is no problem at all for ADE.

Remember, I am not an expert in any of the actual realms of medicine, biology, etc. that we rely on for telling us what’s going on with this virus. I just know how to fit models to data, in this case a model that is well understood to apply to biological populations.

Don’t even think of relying on this analysis or the results of it for any substantive action. If you really find it that important, then investigate for yourself the math, programming, and the theory behind my use of the math for this situation. Run the code, play with it, critique it, consider how well the model does or does not apply. Consider whether the limiting part of the curve might occur more drastically or sooner, thus making this not as big a deal. Listen to experts and the very real reasoning they may have for their own projections about how bad this could get.

It’s on you. I neither can nor will take any responsibility for what you do. I will say this, though: If you haven’t been sitting at home for a week straight already, wash your hands a lot and don’t itch that nose unless you really have to and you just got done with one of those hand washings. It’s a hot zone out there already. You don’t need my fancy modeling to see that.

Finally, if this is getting you down, please think of all the people who were living and loving and looking up at the blue sky even during the fall of Rome and the Black Death. We have a front-row seat on history being made. Yes, it is a worldwide biological cataclysm not seen since the days of polio, smallpox, and the Spanish Flu.

Yes, this really sucks. But you are alive, and there is so much left to see. A world in crisis can sometimes be an exhilarating world to live in, like a sharp fresh breeze tickling your face on a clear winter’s day. Your grandparents saw cold bracing days like these, and were called the Greatest Generation for the way they responded.

To anyone in despair: Leaving the show early would be a sad waste of the seat that was reserved for you. Stick around. Do what you can to make your life a little better, and the lives of those who love you and whom you love. Allow your worries and fears and sadness to seep into the gentle awareness that an entire world now worries with you.

And there is a bit of good news to share, though it may be cold comfort for my fellow citizens in the U.S.

South Korea is fully in its containment phase, well past its t0 that took place over two weeks ago. They followed the logistic growth model all the way to the containment phase. Look at the two curves and annotated +/- numbers in the upper subplot! The lower subplot zooms in on a narrow range of case numbers around 8,000, where it is unlikely to increase much further.

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Reported Covid-19 cases in South Korea vs days since Jan. 22, 2020

Italy’s numbers should start leveling off significantly in the next week. They reached t0 yesterday, according to my best fit of the logistic+linear model with this evening’s data. They appear to be headed for around 70,000-80,000 cases, or about 1% of their population. Even that doesn’t sound too bad.

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Reported Covid-19 cases in Italy vs days since Jan. 22, 2020

Be well. And stay home.

Notes

I worked much of yesterday and this morning on a more sophisticated modeling approach than in my previous post, integrating a differential equation f(t,x) for the number of new cases per day, on each day, rather than the total number of reported cases each day.

Running the updated code with Johns Hopkins University data published yesterday (3/21) resulted in an updated Nightmare Plot.

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Reported U.S. Covid-19 cases vs days since Jan. 22, 2020

Now, this is one really important plot. It shows up way too small in this blog post for you to be able to see its important details. So please click or tap on it to open it as an image by itself.

Please bear with me as I largely repeat a few paragraphs from the previous post. The upper subplot shows the best-fit logistic growth model in red, with the actual number of cumulative reported cases of Covid-19 in blue. The error between the model and the data is shown with each annotation. Look how small the residuals are compared to the exponentially rising numbers of cases. It’s a scarily impressive fit.

The lower subplot shows the number of cases expected to be reported over time, slightly in the past and then extrapolating to the future. Two hundred and fifty generations of running a differential evolution algorithm¹ resulted in a 120-member population of combinations of parameters for the model.

I could have terminated the algorithm sooner, and then there would be some visible variation in the extrapolations. But I decided to just plow onwards for five times as many generations to be more certain of finding something really close to optimal. The black dots show expected reported-case values with each separate parameter combination represented by the 120-member population, plotted in bunches around each day from tomorrow out to mid-May.

Significantly, the subplots both have a logarithmic y-axis. Exponential growth is linear when viewed through a logarithmic lens. When you see that straight line marching steadily upward toward those massive numbers, you really want all your modeling to wind up an embarrassing public failure.

More Power to You

Now, the model includes:

1. a logistic growth component, as before,

2. a power-law with exponential decay component, as suggested by Anna L. Ziff and Robert M. Ziff (“Fractal kinetics of COVID-19 pandemic (with update 3/1/20)”),

3. and a linear component with a small constant number of new cases being reported per day, which only helps improve the closeness of fit early on.²

I tried Ziff and Ziff’s approach by itself but was not impressed with the closeness of fit to the data thus far. This thing is still very much exponential.

With exponential growth, the power-law behavior is not some more-than-squared increase with time but with itself. When the number of cases grows exponentially, as it has been in the U.S. for about two weeks now, the rapidly increasing number of reported cases feeds on itself. Infected people result in infected people, who then result in still more infected (and infectious!) people.

A power-law approach is only nonlinear in time, not in itself. Sure, the number of new cases will increase dramatically as the days go on, this model says. But it won’t be feeding on itself. The increase is just a function of time passing, like the days suddenly getting longer in Spring. It’s not like an exponential forest fire where what is being consumed also takes its turns consuming.

I made a good-faith attempt to switch covid19.pyto the Vazquez (2006) “power-law with an exponential cutoff.” Any petty pride as a data modeler to have one’s first instincts bettered is pushed aside in the hope that it would prove more accurate and perhaps less scary than the logistic growth model I’d been using. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to fit the data as well as the logistic growth model does. What I did find to be an improvement, however, was a blended model that included both.

So perhaps Ziff and Ziff are correct when they “tend to predict an S-shaped curve with a tapering off in the near future as is being seen.” Perhaps there are “fractal kinestics” at play that contribute some significant power-law behavior to the data we have now. It doesn’t have to mean that is the only biological or epidemiological factor at play.

The Pretty New Model

To repeat myself, I don’t have any expertise in the relevant areas. But I naively assume that a pandemic can have more than one driving factor. And so I now propose to simply add the power-law modeling as one of two components (plus a perhaps gratuitous constant) of a differential equation model for the number of new cases per day, each day. The other component is, of course the logistic growth model.

This results in a model with seven parameters. It’s a first-order differential equation:

xd(t, x) = curve_powerlaw(t) + curve_logistic(t, x) + b
curve_logistic(t, x) = x*r*(1 - x/L)
curve_powerlaw(t) = a * (t-ts)^n * exp(-(t-ts)/t0)

With any sort of modeling, one must guard against the temptation to overfit the data with ever more sophisticated models. But I believe these 7 parameters all earn their keep with the current behavior of COVID-19. More parameters are not necessarily bad; my MOSFET models have 40+ parameters, all necessary to simulate the behavior of a semiconductor device with very complex underlying physics.

Great (Actually, Shitty) Expectations

So, here’s what I personally expect, if the number of reported cases continues to match the model as well as it has in the past week or so. We will remain in full-on exponential growth for a few more days. Then, around the end of the month, we will see things starting to slowing down just a little. But the slowdown will only be in exponential terms, unfortunately, not in the linear way we usually think about things. There will still be more new cases every day then there were the previous day, for weeks to come. It’s just that the daily increases in the number of new cases will themselves stop increasing quite so fast.

I’m expecting a hundred thousand reported U.S. cases by 3/26. That’s up from the 60,000 that I was expecting–when I last updated my predictions two days ago–we would be seeing by then. My projection for 4/2 is essentially unchanged at around 400,000 cases, and I’m thinking the million-case mark will likely be reached by 4/7 instead of between 4/4 and 4/6. Again, this is still just modeling reported cases, not all of them.

There still does not seem to be any convincing upper limit before the population of the U.S. is approached, sometime in May. To put it in a purely technical way, that is really fucking scary.

Conclusion

Thanks again to my new Facebook friend Ng Yi Kai Aaron, an applied statistician in Singapore, for suggesting I look into the power-law modeling approach. Again, I’ve partially incorporated that into the model, but not entirely because it doesn’t seem to fit the data on its own, not for U.S. cases at least.

At the end of my last blog post, I got a little philosophical. I suggested that a front-row seat watching history get made in one of the shittiest ways imaginable is definitely something not to be passed up. Did you ever wonder what it would be like to watch (or feel socially compelled to watch) half-naked desperate men flail away at each other with weird instruments of death, until one of them was indeed dead? How about hearing the swoosh of the guillotine outside your Paris apartment, followed each time by the roar of an angry mob? Bracing stuff. Sucked to be there, actually, a detail which the history books tend to omit.

So here we are. The pandemic of 2020 is just getting underway. I hope you stocked up on popcorn. I also hope you carefully read my Disclaimer in the previous blog post, because it applies to everything I say here, too. And remember:

The model simply predicts what will happen if the data continues as it has for a little over a week now.

That’s it. The interpretation and explanation is up to you.

I want to add a couple of words about your behavior and the possibility of you having a response something like this: “Well, then I’ll get it anyhow so why bother being careful.”

First, you absolutely do not have to get it. I still believe that the model will have to be adjust in the future to reflect the then-apparent new reality that people finally got freaked out enough to take this seriously, deciding to risk boredom, a shortage of twinkies, or even getting minir health conditions addressed because it’s become apparent how much getting Covid-19 sucks, even for a younger person.

Or maybe we will have enforced lockdowns as this administration finally wakes up (but then see my history of blog and Facebook posts on Trump’s authoritarianism). It’s already starting to happen in the state level, not the shitty wannabe dictatorship I fear from the deranged narcissist but reasonable if drastic measures by grown adults who take their office seriously. Including, perhaps surprisingly, not a few Republicans.

If you can possibly wait this out for a while (of course you’ll need to get some things, see below for what I do), your statistics will start to look better as the number of new cases finally starts to drop each day. It will be a bit like getting to roll two dice instead of just one. Each passing week out of your self-imposed stay-healthy near-quarantine will get a little less nerve-wracking if things continue to go your way. As the saying went in Hunger Games, may the odds be ever in your favor.

And as for “Why bother if you get it anyway?”, I personally would rather have my hospital stay sometime in, say, June when the number of new cases is finally dropping. When doctors have gotten experienced with treating this thing and are recovered (the ones who make it) and immune. I want the people saving my life not to be fearing for their own. And if you are really into the hermit life, you could wait for that vaccine in about a year.

So, what is a reasonable action to take? Of course, we need to get stuff from time to time. There are very few true hermits anymore, and even preppers are going to find themselves wondering why they didn’t buy more Peanut M&Ms or tampons. I can just tell you what I do and you can laugh at me if you want, or perhaps there is something sensible. And remember the disclaimer, goddammit, and that I’m not a doctor or anything like that.

Before it became obvious even to me what a monster this pandemic was going to be, I was fortunate enough to have my wife buy a box of latex gloves. One hundred gloves equals fifty trips outside my van. That will be more than enough, because I’m not going out very often.

When I get to my destination, I park the van, give my nose a good itching, and put on a pair of the gloves. An open paper garbage bag sits in front of the center console, ready to receive the gloves when I’m done. I open the van door, step outside, and shut the door. I go into my pharmacy or grocery store (there’s really no other place I’d bother with at this point) taking advantage of automatic doors wherever possible. Or, failing that, I’ll be honest and say that I try to sort of just be behind somebody whose already opening the door themselves. Why thank you!

I go get what I need, touching as little as possible, staying the fuck away from everyone else. Don’t even look at me like you’re gonna cough. Maybe for this reason alone, of those N95 masks I bought months ago for slash burning would be useful. When it’s needed, I pull my credit card out of a Ziplock bag and put it back in while trying not to have it touch the bag.

I do not care what people think about my wearing gloves. At this point, they’re actually probably jealous, or maybe thinking I’ve got a big stash of them that I hoarded from everybody else. Well, I wasn’t even planning on buying the one box.

Now, if you don’t have them, pretend you do, but these gloves have some weird invisible stuff on them that burns your skin on contact.

These imaginary gloves are 100% effective but you just don’t want to touch them except on the inside. You will touch everything you need to, including your credit card, through these imaginary gloves. You don’t want to touch things that you will be touching without the gloves on, because that will leave the invisible stinging stuff on your steering wheel and then your hands will still hurt in a few minutes. So, only stuff you’ll never have to touch again, like that door handle or Harvey Weinstein.

Except there is one solution to the problem of having to touch some things with and without the imaginary gloves on. The stinging stuff washes off with those really strong sanitizing wipes. You just have to wash off any of the stuff you get on your hands, before it starts to hurt. And then your door handle will be clean and so will your hands, ready for you to touch without the gloves on.

The time you take off the imaginary gloves is of course the time when you put a little glob of hand sanitizer into your palms and then rub the stuff around everywhere. Honestly, at this point, I’d probably be doing it twice, and then wiping down the exterior of the hand sanitizer bottle with some leftover sanitizer. Only after all this can you consider your hands ready to touch something without the imaginary gloves, including that terrible itch you’ve had just above your left nostril.

When you get home, put your clothes and shoes in a bag, get a handful of those nasty wipes, look both ways to make sure the neighbors can’t see you in your underwear, and wipe down the door handles. Then go take a shower, and you can really scratch that nose itch.

I’m going to try to step away from the data now, because I’ve said my piece. The only reason I would see to update this post is if something happens dramatically different from what I now expect.

Have a nice Spring.

Notes

Yesterday, I did some work on my modeling of reported U.S. Covid-19 cases, ran the scary new examplefor my evolutionary parameter-finding algorithm on that evening’s data from Johns Hopkins, and posted a plot of the results on Facebook.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Reported U.S. Covid-19 cases vs days since Jan. 22, 2020

After discussing some technical details¹ of the day’s work, I gave this

brief summary about what the model is predicting for reported numbers of reported Covid-19 cases in the U.S.: Tomorrow, around 66,000. Day after that, around 84,000. Reaching 100,000 the day after that (3/27). A million U.S. reported cases around April 7, doubling every 4-5 days for a while until the virus starts to run out of people to infect.

As I write this, the Worldometer Coronavirus page reports 65,797 cases in the United States. I don’t need to tell you how close that is to what the model was predicting yesterday.

The astute observer will note that my model predicts more U.S. cases than people in the U.S. around the middle of May. Obviously, that’s not going to happen.

It’s a limitation of my modeling that it doesn’t account for population of the country or region. But the plot’s obviously impossible prediction for the middle of May does have a practial meaning. And it is an important one: I currently don’t see any sign of a slowdown appearing in the data. I wish I did.

Any refinements made to the model to account for such real-world practicalities as a country’s population would deviate from what I’ve been saying about what it actually does: simply predict what will happen if the reported-case data continues as it has, for about two weeks now. (Yesterday, there were slightly fewer newly reported cases than the day before, an obvious anomaly in the data.)

So, what I am seeing today is what I saw days ago already, and it terrifies me. The upward march of numbers continues, along a faint path increasingly visible on a cold gray mountain full of death.

The Fantasy of Normalcy

This afternoon I had to go out for three unavoidable errands. I hope this is the last time I have to do that for a little while. One of my stops in the hot zone that our world is fast becoming was to the local grocery store. I sat in the parking lot and pulled on a fresh pair of latex gloves, and paused putting my respirator on my head for a moment, because I was seeing something disturbing.

It wasn’t that things were different, it’s that things were too much the same. Here I was, with every reason to believe that, on this day next week, there would be 300,000 Americans reported as infected with an insidious hidden disease that kills one out of every hundred or so who get it, a disease that puts over a dozen of those into the hospital gasping for breath. That there would likely be over a million reporting it the very week after, with the numbers still climbing fast and many more people not yet or not ever getting their own infections included in these numbers.

So I sat there a while with my well-used dirt-stained herbicide respirator² in my lap, preparing to encounter in all likelihood at least one person carrying this thing around inside that store. Today’s person feeling fine though I sure have been tired the last couple days is next week’s positive test result.

I put on the mask, stepped outside, picked up my three plastic snap-lid storage bins and carried them into the store past the incredulous faces of people just walking around getting stuff. I stood apart from others and waited as they got their shopping carts and then got mine. I put the three plastic tubs in the cart, waited for the old man–looks like you’ve got about an 85% chance³ of surviving a case of this, gramps–to move along more than 6 feet away from me. I headed straight back to the department with the things that we decided we really couldn’t do without, pausing to give everyone a wide berth and just not giving a fuck what they thought about my respirator mask or gloves.

There were two checkout lines, both full. I just stood there projecting an invisible sphere of stay the fuck away from me and the whole man-from-mars appearance. Those two social distancers worked wonderfully except for one not-young woman who I had to outright tell, “Please move away.” And I don’t think she was even into me.

My muffled Martian voice came through the mask, “I’d like to box up my own.” The terrified-looking cashier handed me my stuff as she scanned it and I put it in my plastic tubs, with a loud snap each time I shut the lids. Those tubs never touched the floor.

No, I’m not a rewards club member. Thanks for that receipt that I’m going to crumple in my gloved hands and throw away. Have a nice day.

I unlocked the Jeep and got out a plastic can of sanitizer wipes. I opened the back, and picked up one tub at a time from the cart, wiping it down before setting it into the Jeep. I closed the back and then sanitizer-wiped all of the handles I’d touched with my gloved hands. Then I opened the door again, took off my windbreaker, and stripped down to my swim trunks that I was wearing instead of underwear. The windbreaker and my pants and shoes went into a plastic tub all their own.

I carefully removed each glove, being careful not to touch anything but the edge dangling loose around my wrist, and dropped them into the tub with the dirty clothes. Yes, folks, there is a 50-something-year-old man wearing swim trunks in March in your friendly neighborhood grocery store parking lot. Snap. Lid closed.

Then I put on a fresh pair of pants that were in the Jeep along with a fresh pair of shoes, and finally then sat in the driver’s seat.

The other two stops were much easier. Our local pharmacy clearly understands what’s happening better than the folks at the grocery store, because they had a sign outside inviting customers to take curbside delivery of their medications. And that’s what I did. The pharmacy clerk waved from the passenger side of my Jeep, I unrolled the window and extended an open Ziploc bag for him to drop the prescription bag into. We urged each other to take care and I didn’t even feel like I needed a glove on the hand that held the bag (mine, that enclosed his).

You’re probably wondering what happened with the groceries that were inside those plastic tubs. Answer: bleach solution and rags, followed by plain water and more rags to rinse off the bleach. There were a couple of nonperishables that we aren’t going to need for a while, and with no freezing temperatures in the forecast for a few days, they’re going to stay outside.

Here’s how I explained all of this to my college-age daughter, who I believe has gotten just a little bit less scornful of her doomer father’s pronouncements in recent days: Tonight, I will not lie awake wishing I hadn’t been so insanely careful.

Here’s what remains with me, though, instead of anxiety about having picked up Covid-19 this afternoon. (I really don’t think so.) I am dealing with the angry dreadful realization that my conservative, backwoods community either doesn’t know or doesn’t care about what is heading their way. All those people, casually walking around Safeway, one pair of gloves to be seen anywhere besides my own. And then there was me, marching in there with a cart of plastic tubs, wearing that neon-pink industrial respirator mask and surgical gloves like something you’d be scared of even without knowing that a pandemic was just starting to cripple your country.

I’ll say it again: Today’s person feeling mostly fine is next week’s positive test result. And next week I am expecting⁴ there to be around 300,000 of those positive test results. Going beyond the model for a moment and just talking out of my ass, I’d bet there will be twice that many walking around feeling mostly fine if starting to worry that maybe this whole Coronavirus thing isn’t a Democrat hoax after all.⁵ And they will spawn, mostly without knowing, the following week’s new ever-larger batch of positive test results.

This is as good a time as any to repeat, yet again, that I have no expertise in biology, medicine, or infectious disease. I’m just a retired engineer who has always had a passion for modeling interesting data. I’m currently about to release a free, open-source Python package that does some really cool modeling of power MOSFETs. See the disclaimer stuff in my previous posts.

Also worth repeating: The model is just the integration of a first-order differential equation that can be extrapolated to predict reported U.S. cases of Covid-19 if the reported cases continue as they have for the past two weeks. That said, I feel obligated to share one layman’s thought that gives me hope.

Perhaps the testing is accelerating faster than the virus’s replication and thus the model is being overly pessimistic in terms of real cases. In this cheery scenario, the testing is really taking off lately, lots more people being tested every day, and so yes there are more reported cases. But then the testing will start just humming along efficiently and the number of reported cases won’t keep inflating itself so fast.

There is, unfortunately, a dark alternative scenario: The testing is unable to keep up with the true replication of the virus. Yes, an accelerating number of new tests is finally appearing, but it’s not keeping up with how fast people are getting infected. Hospitals get overwhelmed, doctors stop bothering to test. And my stupid scary model winds up underestimating how fast we actually are getting to Armageddon.

This, gentle reader, is why (1) I have stuck to just predicting numbers of reported cases and leaving the rest to you, and (2) why I am eager to conclude this little modeling project. For my own mental well-being in an anxious time.

Farewell

After I took my shower and finally felt really clean, after the doorknobs were all wiped down with sanitizer wipes and the food was put away, I started doing “just a little more” work on my modeling code. Then I took a break from it and saw tonight’s total for US reported cases: 65,797. That’s 99.6% of what yesterday’s model and data had predicted.

There is a weird unsettled feeling involved with seeing a predictive tool one has developed–not without criticism from a few self-proclaimed experts on Reddit–make a prediction so uncannily close to the mark.⁶ It’s a slowly roiling fog of horror with jarring bright spots of pride, and the guilty unease at that fact that I am seeing lights in there at all at a time like this.

This has happened before, on March 23. Then I wrote on Facebook,

the Worldometer Coronavirus update currently lists 43,734 U.S. cases and my model had predicted 43,639 reported U.S. cases for today’s (still nonexistent) Johns Hopkins numbers. This sort of uncannily close tracking with the data leaves a weird sense of anxious conflicted satisfaction in my mind.

It would be so much better for everyone, including myself, if I were instead being proven wrong. Feeling naive and embarrassed would be a pretty small price to pay to see the curve bending downwards faster than all my modeling predicted. Unfortunately, it still isn’t.

Take that, I find myself thinking of the random Internet guy who pooh-poohed my modeling as naive, unfounded, something only someone not properly educated in the relevant area would do. And then I look at the parts of the plot further to the right and realize what continuing to be right means.

So, let me say something for the record, to critics and fans and that little semi-living armored glob of RNA that has found a really effective way for it to propagate copies of itself: I’m totally fine with my model being full of shit for everything that happens from now on. Really, I can deal with it. I get it–it’s completely naive to try to extrapolate the integration of a nonlinear differential equation from cases already reported to what cases might be reported in the future. A charming if silly and perhaps even a little egomaniacal exercise on the part of a retired engineer with an obsession for developing nonlinear models for complicated things.

When the fancy theoretical factors that I didn’t even bother trying to understand finally emerge in a few days (hell, how about tomorrow?) and that curve finally gets its long-awaited downward bend, I will sit and watch movies and feel sorry for myself and the embarrassing way I’ve never quite managed to grow up and leave things to the experts. But it’s okay, and when we top out at maybe a couple hundred thousand U.S. cases and then the kids go back to school, I will immerse myself in weightlifting or something and trying to forget what an idiot I can be sometimes.

Next month, over the Sunday morning breakfast table with some friends, I’m looking forward to having a laugh about how silly were all being. Please be gentle with my own ego when it happens, and fervently hope that it really does.

Meanwhile, I’m done here. The time window for these sorts of projections to make a difference is closing fast, even for those who are paying attention to them. It may have closed already. Those people walking around the grocery store will not have their fates altered by something I write tonight, or whether I decide right now that it’s best for my own sanity not to trouble myself to write about this anymore.

Be well. And, for God’s sake, please do not vote for this same idiot narcissist failure of a President to stay in the White House next year. If that needs any explanation at all in your mind at this point, you need to pay attention to a lot more than just my amateurish attempt at Covid-19 modeling.

Notes