American Conservative Christianity has lost the moral argument

They voted, as a block, to elect a moral monster as president.

They own the actions of that president.

Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. (Matt 25:40).

 

The spectacular failure of Donald J. Trump

Trump has been in office as president for barely one week.  Yet it is already overwhelmingly clear that this is a failed presidency.

Don’t get me wrong.  He is still president, and he can still do considerable damage to the nation.  But his presidency is a failure, nonetheless.  His campaign slogan was “make America great again.”  But it will be up to his successor to attempt to repair the damage that he has done and will continue to do.

A brief look back

In 2000, George W. Bush (“dubya”) became president with a narrow win and a disputed election.  Yet many of those who voted against him (self included) accepted that he was president.  For sure, they criticized him and his decisions.  But they still accepted him as president.

That has not happened with Trump.  I think many were ready to accept him as president, and give him the benefit of the doubt.  I certainly was ready.

Thank you, President Obama

Your 8 years as president have come to an end.

It was a good 8 years.  You came into office with the economy failing, and with the nation in two foolish wars.  You end your office with the economy in pretty good shape, and with the wars at least greatly calmed down.  And all of this with an opposition party attempting to sabotage everything you tried to do.

So thank you, president Obama.  You will be missed

I am not anti-theist

Recently the Patheos blog site renamed it’s “Atheist channel” to “Nonreligious channel”.  The resulted in some comments and blog posts about the change.  For me, it didn’t matter much.  Since I gave up on religion, I have always preferred to call myself “non-religious” rather than “atheist”.

Here, I mainly want to respond to:

• My humanism requires me to be a vocal anti-theist

which argues for anti-theism.

In that post, Dan Arel argues:

Religion is dangerous and hurts real people. I strongly believe that when the world is reasoned out of religious faith, the world will be a much better place.

Some people see atheism as dangerous and as hurting real people.  But that’s not my main concern here.  I just don’t see that it would make the world a better place if religion were to disappear.

We already have non-religious people who are in the anti-vax movement.  We already have non-religious people who are climate change deniers.

The things that Dan objects to in religion are human foibles.  Yes, religion manages to concentrate those into a movement.  But there are plenty of other ways that these human foibles can be concentrated into group-think.

So I just do not see that anti-theism provides some kind of solution for problems that arise out of being human.

For myself, I accept that people can have weird beliefs.  And maybe some folk think that I have weird beliefs.  But we should be able to get along in spite of individual wierdness.