Writing from Milwaukee, Joe Perticone of The Bulwark described what he saw:
Style report
Vendors at the convention don’t seem to have received the unity memo. Instead, they’re selling merchandise with violent rhetoric inside the perimeter. While exploring the sprawling campus, I spotted a couple of t-shirts (the ones on the left and the right below) calling for retaliation for those who don’t show sufficient patriotism.
If you recall the Iowa State Fair edition of Press Pass, these types of shirts declaring one’s position in the culture war are commonplace at conservative events.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thom Hartman has already warned us that the Trump machine does not do real unity, just as the Nazis Trump emulates only respect unity within their own boundaries. He writes of Reagan’s very close brush with death, and how he never blamed his political opposition for it.
Contrast this with the immediate blaming Republican extremists have voiced. First sign of fascism: blame others for your own acts.
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That immediate blaming was led by the guy who knew he was a top choice to be Trump’s VP, JD Vance.
I guess he passed the final test in his audition.
Those who normalize the far right so often make false equivalencies.
Strong criticisms of policies = lies = fomenting violence.
Dems fight back by encouraging people to vote and make it as easy for them to do so.
Republicans fight back by demonizing their opponents to incite violence, and trying to disenfranchise as many people who don’t agree with them as possible.
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C’mon now, it’s just the free market. . . and god’s will at work!
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https://religionnews.com/2024/07/15/god-did-not-save-donald-trump/
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Thanks. I found this post and the responses to it instructive.
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There is no god.
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This is not known, Duane. One cannot prove absolute negatives. Alan Guth, who with reason be called the foremost cosmologist of our day says in his book The Inflationary Universe (Guth was the author of Inflation Theory, which is now the standard model for what happened in the early universe) that given sufficient technological prowess, creating a universe from scratch is quite possible, and creating universes is one of those attributes attributed to gods.
We live on a young planet. The universe is teeming with planets. Most of them are far, far older than Earth is, and so they have had far, far longer for life to develop on them. So, intelligent lifeforms that have developed on those planets have had a lot longer to evolve. Look at us. We are at the very beginning of our technological phase, but we are already on the cusp of controlling our own evolution via genetic engineering (this is, I think, an inevitability–it will start with trying to eliminate the thousands of genetic diseases and proceed from there). And we are creating AI that we might well merge with. Given positive feedback loops, intelligent entities can become superintelligent entities with attributes that we attributes to gods. Surely an ancient Roman would think our ability to make people appear at remote distances godlike. LOL.
So, don’t be so sure. You might be asking, if there are these superintelligent, godlike entities out there, why haven’t they contacted us, tried to initiate dialogue? Well, two answers. First, when was the last time you tried to initiate dialogue with an ant colony? Second, notice that we are already starting to escape into our entertainments. Imagine a time when we have the technology to create worlds indistinguishable from real ones. Who would want to travel vast, cold distances to other rocks when one could simply make and inhabit a world wonderful and desirable beyond any current imagining?
BTW, I quit my local Humanist society chapter because its members weren’t skeptical enough. They couldn’t get beyond their naive and not deeply examined Atheism.
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There is no god.
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A Brief Explanation of Everything. You’re Welcome. | Bob Shepherd | Praxis (wordpress.com)
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To elaborate, one should expect that in other places (the sextillions of other planets), the same laws apply, and the same stuff will happen–the life will emerge and evolve. Only on most other worlds, that’s been happening for billions of years longer than it has here. So, lots of opportunity for intelligent life to surpass us to such an extent that we would not be able to comprehend it.
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There is no god.
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So, just to be as clear as I can be about this, we assume (for good reason) that the rest of the universe is made of the same kind of stuff and follows the same laws that we see in our local area. We also know that there are freaking sextillions of planets like ours in the known universe. And we have the existence proof of ourselves showing that given the laws of chemistry and physics and a planet like ours, life emerges. We aren’t clear on exactly what happens, but we have some ideas. So, it is extremely likely that life as emerged elsewhere and evolved elsewhere, and because ours is much younger than those other planets, evolution in breathtakingly large numbers of places has been going on literally billions of years longer than it has here. So, the singularity and the emergence of ways of being and powers that would seem godlike to us have doubtless occurred MANY, MANY TIMES elsewhere.
I left the skeptics society because they weren’t skeptical enough. ROFL. They believe silly deterministic materialist scientism of the kind associated with Dan Dennett, Laplace, and Lucretius.
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There is no god.
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Those “skeptics” were true believers in a religion of scientism.
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Skeptical scientific reasoning is not a religion. That’s a crock statement.
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Blind adherence to ideas that exceed the evidence is religion, not science in its true spirit. Such people practice a religion that they call science.
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Did you read anything I wrote above, Duane? Do you see why I summarized what I wrote in this manner? Was I unclear?
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Making claims that are not warranted by the evidence but far exceed it and pretending that one has absolute knowledge of the truth of such claims IS NOT SCIENCE, IS NOT LOGICAL REASONING, and MAKES A MOCKERY OF SKEPTICISM BECAUSE IT IS NOT SCEPTICAL ENOUGH. This is Scientism–a religious cult–not Science. Why is it that? Because religions are systems of belief based on fairy dust and moonbeams and what people wish to be so.
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JESUS FAILED — Christian nationalists see Jesus as a failure.
Jesus preached His Way of living throughout the New Testament, as in The Sermon of the Mount [Matt 5:3-12] where He declared that “Blessed are the meek [meaning, the gentle; the considerate; the humble]” — but Christian nationalists view such teachings of Jesus as not having worked to make the world into the world they want; so, Christian nationalists have a “better” way: Instead of the humility that Jesus taught and lived, the Christian nationalists have decided on pride, as in The Proud Boys.
Jesus told Peter to put away his sword and that “those who take the sword shall die by the sword” (Matt 26:52). But Christian nationalists view Christ’s teaching of putting away the weapons as having failed, so they have turned to arming themselves with more and more guns.
What today’s Christian nationalists fail to understand is that if God had wanted Jesus to conquer evil with force, He would have sent Jesus to Earth, descending from the heavens on a golden throne amid clouds with flashing bolts of lightning and surrounded and backed up by a heaven-filling army of terrifying and unkillable angels.
Instead, God sent Jesus to Earth to be born in a stinking stable to poor, totally obscure parents of total unimportance in a world dominated by the mighty Roman Empire.
Christ’s Gospel of meekness, repentance, forgiveness, love, and service to others has failed: God got it wrong.
Today’s Christian nationalists think that it is now up to THEM to make the world right — no more meekness, no more putting away the sword.
Instead, Christian nationalists arm themselves with pride and guns and political power to intimidate and to force others to live the “right” way.
Christian nationalists have sidelined the teaching of Christ and have turned instead to follow a person of pride, boasting, deceit, and trickery to show God and Jesus how saving the world should have been done.
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Well said. Jesus was a humble carpenter who preached about showing empathy and compassion to those that the world rejected. His message was always about love and acceptance.
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xoxoxox
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“I like prophets who don’t get crucified.”
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OMG. You win the Internet today, Flerp!
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Well said, Quikwrit.
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There was no Jesus. It’s a myth.
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There probably was a historical Jesus.
Yeshua of Nazareth was a brilliant, radical, revolutionary Jewish rabbi, or teacher, from a provincial village, not an official teacher connected to a particular priestly organization. The hundreds of texts that tell his story–all appearing long after his death–have many issues, which I’ll discuss below, but it’s possible by careful thought about these to piece together what might have actually happened, as many actual scholars of this ancient literature (as opposed to apologists for various Christian churches) have done (see, for example, Bart Ehrman’s books, including The New Testament, Lost Christianities, and Jesus, Interrupted. This fellow, Yeshua, taught that all people were sons and daughters of god, that people would be judged by how they treated the least among them, that a Messiah (not himself) was coming very soon, that this Messiah would overthrow the existing order, that in the new order, the rich and powerful would become the lowest of people, the lowest of people would become the highest, that the Messiah would establish a paradise on Earth called the New Jerusalem, and that the disciples that Yeshua had gathered around him would rule in this paradise. It’s little wonder that the Romans, who ruled over the Hebrews at that time, with help from the Jewish authorities, put the radical Yeshua to death three days after he entered Jerusalem and, while doing so, mocked him as “king of the Jews.”
In the hundred years or so around the time of the life of Yeshua of Nazareth, there was an explosion of religious cults. These included cults of the deified emperors, Roman household cults, the various so-called mystery cults (of Demeter and Dionysus and Cybele and Isis), the cult of Sol Invictus, various versions of traditional Greek and Roman and Egyptian paganism, Mithraism, Manicheism, and many vastly differing versions of what would become known as Christianity, with their differing scriptures not found in modern Bibles. Among these many cults were ones that grew up around the executed figure variously referred to as the Christ and Jesus and Yeshua of Nazareth (among other names). The existence of these many cults, eventually attested, suggest that there was an actual figure whose martyrdom they grew up around.
The earliest texts that are found in the New Testament are letters written by St. Paul. The earliest gospel in the Western Bible dates to about 70 years after Christ died and is based on a lost gospel and on oral traditions. None of the four currently accepted, or so-called “canonical” gospels were written near the time of his death or by the people to whom they are ascribed. So, there was plenty of time, in this era when news came by word of mouth, for mythological accretions to attach themselves to the executed rabbi’s story.
Many Christians would be surprised to learn that in addition to the gospels (narratives of the life of Jesus), acts (stories about the lives of Jesus’s disciples, the apostles), and epistles (letters) in the New Testament, we have over two hundred other gospels, acts, epistles, collections of sayings, and other Christian writings from the first two centuries CE. These include works like The Infancy Gospel of Jesus Christ, The Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Marcion, The Apocalypse of Peter, The Acts of Pilate, the Epistles of Barnabas, and many others. In the first couple centuries after Christ, there were literally hundreds of vastly differing “Christianities,” with vastly differing scriptures and differing belief systems. Among these early Christian sects were a great many Gnostic sects that differed in the particulars of their beliefs, but all agreed that there was not one god but two, a bad god and a good god. The bad one, according to the Gnostic Christian sects, created the sinful, fallen world and is the guy spoken of in the Old Testament writings. The Gnostics taught that Jesus preached the gospel of the good god and that believers could be saved by rejecting the bad God (the Rex Mundi) and the sinful world he created and by gaining knowledge (Gnosis) a) of the good god and b) of how to live properly (typically through rituals and abstention from pleasures of the world). Two excellent sources of history and explication of these many early Christianities are Bart Ehrman’s Lost Christianities and Hans Jonas’s The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God & the Beginning of Christianity. You can find a great many of the sacred texts of these lost Christianities under “Christianity,” on Sacred-texts.com. You will also find there a few modern forgeries that pretend to be ancient texts, like The Essene Gospel of Peace, which was cooked up by a Hungarian who ran a free love and vegetarianism cult in Baja, California in the 1940s. Scholars can spot one of these modern forgeries, pretending to be ancient scriptures, quite easily from the anachronisms and linguistic errors in them.
In 312, the Roman Emperor Constantine was headed into a major battle and, before it, had a vision. One of the two attested stories of that vision says that he saw a cross in the sky and the words, “In hoc signo, vinces”— “In this sign you will conquer.” Constantine legalized Christianity and (eventually, on his deathbed) himself converted, and so Christianity became the official religion of the Empire. And he called a council of bishops to Nicaea (in what is now Turkey) to come up with an official doctrine for the Church. Constantine was sick of the various factions fighting in the street, established one as the official religion, and gave the Church leave to exterminate, ruthlessly, competing “heresies.” But Constantine hedged his bets. He built temples to the Christian god AND to the Roman sun god Sol Invictus. LOL. And, again, he was baptized a Christian only on his deathbed.
So, by that accident, one of these 1st century religious cults became the dominant one, and it happened to be one of the many extremely different versions of Christianity that then existed. If not for this ONE GUY, Constantine, we might well all today be warning people that sex was the work of the Rex Mundi or attending ceremonies to consecrate our Senators into the priesthood of the sun god Sol Invictus or leaving offerings at little shrines to Poseidon down by the sea.
An early Christian father, Ireneus, made an influential list of the official gospels, leaving competing gospels from other Christian sects out, and with them all those “heretical” ideas. Poof! A lot of vastly differing Christianities disappeared.
The life of Jesus as it ended up being told in the four gospels that became part of the canonical Bible made Jesus not just a teacher or prophet but the Christ, or anointed one, the promised Messiah of the Jews. And those gospels picked up and repurposed lots and lots of ancient religious motifs from the ambient and varied religious cultures of the first couple of centuries CE–for example,
that he was crucified on a cross (a story told in myths of such gods as the Egyptian god Horus; the Indian Krishna, The Chaldean Crite, the Phyrgian Atys, the Mesopotamian Dumuzi/Tammuz, the Celtic Hesus, the Orissan Bali, the Tibetan Indra, the Nepalese Iao, the Indian Buddha Sakia, the Persian Mithra, the Greek Dionysus, the Caucasian Prometheus, the Norse Odin, and even the Mexican Quezalcoatl);
that he was a god who took the form of a man and then ascended into heaven (a story told of many gods and men become gods, far too many to list here);
that he died and was resurrected (a central concept of many ancient fertility and solar religions but also found in later polytheistic religions; examples of the latter include the Mesopotamian Inanna and Dumuzi, the Egyptian Osiris and Horus, the Canaanite Baal, the Phrygian Attis, the Greek Dionysus and Adonis and Persephone, and the Roman Mithra);
that he was born of a virgin and at the winter solstice (Tammuz, Osiris, Horus, Attis, Mithra, Heracles, Dionysus, Adonis, Sol Invictus);
and so on.
Of course, the miracles (raising the dead, the multiplication of food, healing the blind and lame and deaf, and so on) and the driving out of demons are found in folktales and myths worldwide from very ancient times, far predating Christianity.
Here’s an interesting question: What god was born of a virgin, was attended by shepherds, walked on water, had twelve followers, performed miracles, was referred to as The Way and The Truth and the Good Shepherd and the Lamb of God and The Word, was executed along with two thieves, and was resurrected and ascended to heaven?
Well, the EARLIEST god to fit all these criteria that we know about would be the Egyptian Horus, who had been worshipped for thousands of years before Jesus was born.
So, in short, the Christians borrowed heavily from the many, many religions around them at the time to come up with the accretions they ADDED to the legend of the executed revolutionary rabbi. They freely borrowed the attributes and experiences attributed to other gods of other religions.
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There was no historical Jesus.
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I call this argument of mine for the historicity of Jesus the Grit in the Pearl Theory. There was an actual man–a leader, a rabble rouser–whose execution by authorities was the grain around which Christianity (in its many cults, many forms) developed.
“The term the historical Jesus denotes the life and teachings of Jesus that are reconstructed by specialists in Jesus Research. The Jesus of history is the real person of history who will always remain elusive and cannot be presented again on a reconstructed stage of history. The term the Christ of faith signifies the present and living Lord known by Christians in various church liturgies and in daily life.” –Charlesworth, James H. (2008). The Historical Jesus: An Essential Guide. Abingdon Press.
In agreement with the view of Albert Schweitzer: “The Jesus proclaimed by preachers and theologians today had no existence. That particular Jesus is (or those particular Jesuses are) a myth. But there was a historical Jesus, who was very much a man of his time.” Ehrman, Bart (2012). Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth.
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There was no historical Jesus. Myths die hard.
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I’m starting to get the sense that good old Duane has crossed the line from agnosticism to atheism. Just sayin’.
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I’ve never considered myself agnostic. Been an atheist since high school.
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An analysis by a writer on politics who refuses to be blindly partisan for anyone.
“And this most recent episode (the Trump assassination attempt) does not turn the world upside down, as much as many partisans would like it to, thinking that to be to their advantage. Trump is still an amoral caudillo unfit for the office, a former game show host and quondam pornographer who attempted to stage a coup d’état the last time he lost an election. Joe Biden is still a dim and vicious hack who has aged out of mediocrity into impotence. Americans are still armed to the teeth and high on rage.”
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Who is this writer? Source?
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Thermidor – The Dispatch
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I intentionally did not give the name of the author or the publication where this quote appeared. Given the typical ad hominem practices of this blog, because the author criticized Biden the author would have been dismissed without any effort made to debate his points. Bob Shepherd correctly identified the author and the source of publication.
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I always consider the source of any quote.
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Robert Blackburn,
How is Biden “vicious”? I’d like to see a credible case that “vicious” is a correct word to use to describe Biden.
Is the anonymous author of that piece vicious?
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I didn’t know that Trump had at any point in his vile career experience as a pornographer. Please, tell us more. It wouldn’t be surprising, ofc.
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Actually being “blindly partisan” is believing that lies are true just because someone who claims to be partisan says them.
A lie or unsupported insinuation does not become “more true” because someone who claims not to be partisan says it.
Unfortunately, your comment reflects the thinking of the so-called liberal media.
“It’s fair game to say anything about a Democrat, regardless of the supporting evidence, because we don’t like the other side.”
FYI, there are plenty of criticisms by people who say “I don’t like the Democrats, but Trump is a danger to democracy”.
Whether or not Trump is a danger is democracy is not decided by whether the person saying it is a Democrat, Republican or professes to be absolutely non-partisan. It is decided on the facts. Are the people who say it making a credible argument using facts that support it?
You have quoted someone with no credibility who simply insults Biden. We are supposed to believe he’s a reliable judge of character because he also is critical of Republicans. But what we should be doing is judging his writing on whether he is supporting what he is saying.
Sadly, our media has embraced the view of Robert Blackburn.
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I noticed that a pasty-faced, sweating, squinting, grimacing fat man appeared at the Republican convention last night. In fact, he insisted on being there.
My HDTV seemed to confirm what my eyes saw. I also noticed that he had great difficulty rising from his chair. This was confirmed each time he tried to get up and wave as he struggled to turn his grimace into a contorted smile. It was almost heroic to see him overcome the problem he was having with his low center of gravity.
Today, none of the on-the-scene talking heads or mainstream newspaper reporters seemed to have see any of this. Seems like describing his physical conditions is off limits.
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He is in such bad shape that if he wins, he might not make it through his second term.
Which will give us President J.D. Vance.
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Hope this blog on Biden, Trump and public education is helpful. A detailed explainer on How their approaches are so different and why it’s important
https://ed100.org/blog/trump-biden-education?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Trump%2C%20Biden%2C%20and%20Public%20Education&utm_campaign=07%2015%202024%20Trump%2C%20Biden%2C%20and%20Public%20Education
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Thanks. Very clear article.
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Carol Kocivar,
Thank you for sending this excellent analysis. I will post it.
Diane
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Great. Thanks.
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Have they no decency???!!!!
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None.
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I noticed that a pasty-faced, sweating, squinting, grimacing fat man appeared at the Republican convention last night. In fact, he insisted on being there.
My HDTV seemed to confirm what my eyes saw. I also noticed that he had great difficulty rising from his chair. This was confirmed each time he tried to get up and wave as he struggled to turn his grimace into a contorted smile. It was almost heroic to see him overcome the problem he was having with his low center of gravity.
Today, none of the on-the-scene talking heads or mainstream newspaper reporters seemed to have see any of this. Seems like describing his physical conditions is off limits.
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Interesting, isn’t it. From photos I’ve seen over the last couple of years, I think that Trump is wearing some sort of back brace and adult diaper. Notice the way, in a profile shot, he stands with his upper torso bent forward at a very strange angle. Also note how bunched up and weirdly bulgy his pants are in the places where the diaper would be. It’s actually quite noticable.
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Back in the day, the nominee did not appear at the convention until the last night, when he gave his speech.
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