My experience this year was similar to Krishna's (see post below).
With the following corollaries:
A) I changed my mind about the Republican Party in the USA; in
particular about Republicans in Congress. I'm 67 years old and I first
voted when I became eligible to vote at age 18 (George McGovern Vs
Richard Nixon). Since then I've voted in dozens of elections: local,
state, national. In all that time I've only voted for a Republican 3
times (the same person in 3 successive elections): the District Attorney
for southeastern Massachusetts, who had a good reputation as a
corruption-fighter & fair-minded prosecutor. I hold & have always held
extremely negative views of virtually all nationally prominent
Republicans of my adult lifetime, including Nixon, Reagan, both
Presidents Bush, Dick Cheney, John McCain & many others. So I've never
had particularly positive feelings about the Republican Party, either
its policies/philosophy/legislative agenda, or its prominent
representatives.
BUT!!
But until this year I did feel that at least some Republicans shared
with me a common conception of the meaning of the United States of
America — who we are, what our values are, what we stand for — and I
believed that our understandings of the meaning of "patriotism" had at
least some overlap. I no longer believe these things to be true.
I now believe that the Republican Party is a white-supremacist
patriarchal, nihilistic, kleptocratic death cult strongly influenced by
evangelical Christian eschatology/grifting & organized along the lines
of a Sicilian-American mafia crime family but largely controlled by a
clique of trans-national/non-national/post-national oligarchs. I believe
that white-supremacist revanchism is the core organizing motive of
rank-and-file Republicans. (The Republican oligarchs in charge care
little about such things; they don't care about religion or race or any
of that stuff; they care about money and power. But they know how to
harness the strong resentments of the common volk & are applying the
latest & greatest AI-based tools to that task.)
This nihilistic/(Christian) death-cult foundation explains the
Republican antipathy to science, in particular to climate science, but
also to things like the "anti-vax" movement and the categorical refusal
to apply U.S. tax dollars to study the epidemic of mass murder in the
USA using the proven tools of social science. The role of the NRA as a
launderer of foreign money, pretty much exclusively from Russia, in
exchange for promoting this anti-science, pro white-supremacy movement
has been largely under-studied and under-reported.
Summary: to assume that any Republican Senator or Representative in
Congress has any fealty to their oath of office, or to the United States
of America itself, is naive at best & arguably derelict or complicit.
Mitch McConnell, for example, is -- himself, a single person -- a
greater threat to the continued existence of the United States of
America than was The Confederate States of America, with all her armies.
I apologize for sounding like I'm pitching an over-the-top screenplay
for another James Bond movie, but this is my actual feeling about the
political situation in the United States, and it has changed
considerably since last year.
B) I've changed my mind about religion in general. I now think it's all
mostly bullshit, and more harmful than helpful. I think its time has
finally passed and that humans need to leave religion behind.
I grew up Catholic; baptized & confirmed. I a was an altar boy for about
4 years during those years when the Catholic Mass was still said in
Latin. As a graduate of a very highly-regarded Jesuit high school, I got
a full dose of deep Catholic theology, including, for example, reading
the works of St. Augustine & other early "church fathers" & theologians
in the original Latin.
I'm still kind of obsessed with that stuff. It still pervades my novels.
I'm intrigued by the deep ideas that motivated men to leave the
"material world" & go live in remote monasteries high atop thousand-foot
high rocky outcroppings & spend their lives in hard (celebrate) work &
prayer. (See, for example, my novella "The Pains").
But I think it's all bullshit. Although I myself pretty much abandoned
all belief in the Catholic worldview in which I was raised starting
about age 18, I still maintained some affection for the Church & the
Christian fable that the Church preserved. & I had similar divided but
generally positive attitudes about Judaism & Islam, based on my own
personal experience & study.
Obviously religion is a reality in the world today. It means a lot to
billions of people. People fight & die over it. It's not going away any
time soon.
But, in 2019, I changed my mind about it. Before I was a-religious, but
I believed it was OK if religion stuck around; it was not concern of
mine so long as it didn't step on my toes.
Now, 2019, after 40 years as a somewhat disinterested student of
religion as a curious sociological phenomenon, I'm pretty much
anti-religion. I think it's all pretty much superstition, tribalism &
bullshit. And I'm especially against religions premised on a believe in
an "afterlife". I believe that after-life-based theologies are the
source of unspeakable, immeasurable suffering. Because (pardon me if I
state the obvious), if you believe that, for example, your horrible
cruelty in "this life" will be "forgiven" & that you'll be granted a
pass to infinite paradise in "the next life," what's to stop you from
being a monster according to the rules of your particular fairy-tale
religion? Conversely, what's to motivate you to prevent, for example,
the murder of beautiful, distinct, actual, real children — each an
actual human person; each from a family that will never recover from
their murder — in their classrooms, if you really believe that their
being murdered sends them to heaven to hang out all day ("Angels too
soon!")(doing what, exactly?) with a very benevolent "caucasian" (i.e.
European, long-haired, bearded, generally unmuscular) Jesus.
OK this post is far too long and may generate (or not?) a lot of flack.
Also, it's been a few years, I think, since I posted here, although I'm
a regular lurker.
To those of you who've joined this list since my most recent post (2 or
3 years ago?): Hello! Nice to meet you.
Comments welcome.
(Unless and until & I feel the need to go hide in a cave to avoid
replies.)
Happy New Year to all,
Please forgive any obvious typos or lost thoughts, and, as our friend &
guide Udhay has had occasion to remind me, "assume goodwill."
jrs
On 2020-01-09 05:29, Krishna Udayasankar wrote:
So this may seem obvious to many, but it was a fairly big deal for me
- to realise (actually, accept) that there are individuals who cannot
be moved by reason and logic - be it on political odayissues or
personal
issues. I suppose I'd always viewed their imperviousness as having
some limit, some breaking point, but I was forced to accept that I
might be chasing the infinite here (Was it Einstein who said...?)
It's one thing to state this as I do, it has been completely another
to reconcile to it as a fact and to learn to change my expectations
and operations accordingly. You might say that this was (and still is
in some ways) a shift in world-view that led to a existential crisis
(pardon me for sounding like an angsty teenager). If reason is not
supreme, then what is? How does one continue to interact with people
if reason is not what connects us, and how does one operate knowing
that reason cannot work, will not triumph (PS. Autocorrect just filled
that as "trump" which, while not incorrect, is a step on the road to
the place where irony goes to die.
-End of rant-
----------------------------------------
Krishna Udayasankar, PhD.
