In this article, in response to three questions, I define democracy, describe the major current threats to democracy in the United States, and discuss how to respond to these threats.
Category: politics
On Religion: Chris Hedges, Heresy, Christian Orthodoxy, and Imperialism
abstract: Hedges’ claim that “the Christian Right” has contaminated “the Christian religion“ with “aspects” of “American” society—“imperialism, capitalism, chauvinism, violence and bigotry”— that are alien to Christianity is historically false. These evils have characterized the most dominant strands of Christianity throughout its history. Hedges’ denunciation of the Christian right as heretical implicitly enacts an orthodoxy that has authorized and even required Christian “imperialism, … chauvinism, violence and bigotry.” When Hedges denounces the Christian right as heretical, he implicitly uses the orthodox logic that equates imperial might with sacred rightness, precisely the logic that the historical Jesus, according to a great deal of historical evidence, subverted.
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Democracy, September 30, 2020
After the tyrant’s assault
and a night of daymares and occasional sleep
i wake to the beep! beep! beep! of a car alarm
into reality as democracy
Power
The policeman walks
his beat, sees “only color,”
and kills a Black child.
Sources of Christian and Western Anti-Semitism
The sources of Christian and Western anti-semitism lie in the betrayal motif which lies at the heart of the Passion Narrative, which lies at the heart of most Christians’ faith.
Hierarchical religion and authoritarianism
Roy Herndon Smith re: A Confession of Faith in a Time of Crisis http://reclaimingjesus.org/ While I am very glad to read this confession as an attempt to counter the identification of "Christianity" with oppressive sectarian authoritarian absolutism--one might call it "Chistianicism"--it also articulates why I no longer consider myself to be a "Christian." The confession begins and…
Paving the Road to Hell: Good Will Alienation 2
When Matt Damon focuses on the fantasy that exposure of their sexual cruelty will ruin rich and powerful white men’s lives, he exacerbates his alienation from the reality of the intersectional destructiveness of sexual cruelty.
Paving the Road to Hell: Good Will Alienation 1
Damons’ and Travers’ alienating discourse is an instance of an engrained social behavior that unintentionally reinforces patterns of cruelty. Confrontation of sexual cruelty requires confrontation of this alienation.
Paving the Road to Hell
Recently, I have noticed a repeated pattern in a number of discussions of current events. Someone with good intentions makes an argument that enacts what I call “structural cruelty.” I am using “structural cruelty” as a more apt term than “structural violence” for the afflicting of suffering through relatively stable and often institutionalized patterns of social interaction. The most obvious example of such structural cruelty is the impoverishment of large numbers of people under hierarchical political-economic orders, such as capitalism, feudalism, and authoritarian and totalitarian socialism.
America 15
America sits
and practices detachment,
observing it all.
dust 