Special guest
How did I miss this?? Republicans cheering Viktor Orban:
All you need to know about the state of the Republican Party today is what happened at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas on Thursday [last month]. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has been destroying his country’s democracy, received a standing ovation less than two weeks after he gave a speech in Romania in which he endorsed the white supremacist “replacement theory” and denounced a “mixed-race world.”
Last month, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán traveled to Romania to deliver a fiery speech denouncing the “mixing” of European and non-European peoples. “We [Hungarians] are not a mixed race . . . and we do not want to become a mixed race,” Orbán told his audience. Countries that accepted race-mixing, he said, were “no longer nations; they are nothing more than a conglomeration of peoples.” The next day, one of Orbán’s longest-serving advisers resigned, calling the address a “pure Nazi speech” that was “worthy of Goebbels.”
On Thursday, in Dallas, Orbán received a standing ovation at the semiannual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), America’s most important right-wing political event. He spent much of his speech defending his vision of a “zero-migration” country defined by ethnic homogeneity and Judeo-Christian values. “The globalists can all go to hell,” he declared to an audience of several thousand activists. “I have come to Texas.”
Yeah boy there’s nothing more valuable than “ethnic homogeneity.” It’s like…I dunno…cookies. You got your chocolate chip cookies and your ginger cookies and you don’t want to go mixing them because they wouldn’t taste good. Humans are exactly like that. Mixing is yuck.
He had come to the right place. Speaking at CPAC on the same day as Orbán, Governor Greg Abbott and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick echoed the Hungarian leader’s Christian nationalist rhetoric. “The framers did not write the Constitution,” Patrick asserted, “God wrote the Constitution. We are a Christian nation.”
I’m pretty sure he’s wrong on the facts there. I’m pretty sure we know exactly what guys wrote the Constitution, and that they were particular 18th century guys as opposed to being “God.” Also by the way there is no such person as “God” and there are no books or documents or shopping lists written by “God,” because of the whole no such person thing.
Viktor Orban. Honestly.
You’d think an all-powerful, all-knowing being capable of creating the Universe from nothing would have a more reiable way of communicating its wishes than the printed word, particularly since humans didn’t come up with the idea for 200,000 years after appearing on the scene. It seems terribly wasteful of the Supreme Being’s time to be sitting around all those millenia waiting for a publisher.
A god counting on literacy could have spelled things out in the stars, where everyone could see it. And before readin’ and writin’, how difficult would it have been to encode decent behaviour into our genes? God knows (HA!) there are any number of reflexes, behaviours and characteristics wired into us (not to mention in all of Earth’s inhabitants who don’t happen to be human). Why not some morality and ethics?
And as for the whole invisibility thing, any omnipotent, omniscient being would be able to foresee the suffering and destruction caused by arguments arising from this very secretiveness and exclusivity. Any such being who acts in this fashion certainly wouldn’t be all good. More like omni-malevolent. Wouldn’t a being who wished to be worshipped and acknowledged by its creations make sure everyone knew it actually existed? Instead we get a lot of very human excuses and rationalizations about faith, free will, mysteriousness, etc., leaving priests and aplogists sounding more like the propriator of Monty Python’s “Cheese Shop” than the spokesmen of an immortal divinity. These are exactly the sort of things that would be said by underlings left to explain why the god doesn’t show up, like Catch 22′s Major Major, who instructs his assistant to let people in to see him only when he’s not there. What exactly is the difference between a god who doesn’t show up, and a god who doesn’t exist?
Truth. That’s pretty much the case I made in the essay I wrote for 50 Voices of Disbelief back in the day.
YNnB @#!:
On the authority of that distinguished theologian Mel Brooks, there were origininally 11 (or was it 12?) Commandments, written on tablets of stone, but one or two got accidentally dropped by Moses on his way down the mountain, and were smashed beyond repair. So we have been stuck with 10 ever since.
But don’t forget: the Earth is only one planet in a galaxy of maybe 100 billion stars, itself only one of a similar number of galaxies in the known Universe (give or take a few billion.) God could easily have got distracted by other more urgent matters elsewhere. He cannot possibly be omniscient either, otherwise he would have foreseen the consequences of his decision to create that damned talking snake in the Garden of Eden, which led Eve astray, who in turn led Adam astray, and it all went pear-shaped and downhill from there.
God’s own ego, like everything else about him, had to be infinite too. So is it any surprise that it set a trap for him, and he walked (floated?) right into it.? After all, he sits up there on his his heavenly throne amid a huge and endless upward torrent of praise coming from all sects of billions of believers: Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Hindu even.
It’s a wonder he does not get swept right out of the Universe by it.
I think Peter Cook and Dudley Moore riffed on that in Bedazzled.
john Zande wrote a book on cel still omni malevolence which is amusing. Amazon still has it.
Fifteen *crash* ten commandments…
https://youtu.be/oZA2mBntrHk
A ham sandwich is more powerful than God. At least the ham sandwich has the ability to show up.
Last week I unpacked the box that it has been hiding in since I left NZ in 2013. About to give it another read and then donate it to the community library.
I was given 50 Voices as a birthday present when it came out. Thoroughly enjoyed reading it!
Speaking of books, in the Texas Observer article there is a link to this stinker The Plot Against the King by Kash Patel.
Not fit for consumption.
Ewwwwwww.