Book Review: The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory

Tim Alberta
The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0BTYWH2YP

Perhaps the greatest treatment of conservative Christianity since Horton’s Beyond Culture Wars

“Kingdom”, “Power” and “Glory” make up the three parts of the book, and contain seven chapters each. Each chapter is a city, where he meets the person he is focusing on (both those who represent the problem, and those observing and lementing it, like him):

The Kingdom
1 Brighton, MI (Chris Winans, pastor of Cornerstone Evangelical Presbyterian Church))
2 Montgomery, NY (John Torres, pastor of Goodwill Evangelical Presbyterian Church)
3 Lynchburg (The Falwells and Liberty University; and Doug Olson, employee)
4 Atlanta, GA (Russell Moore, SBC)
5 Dallas, TX (Robert Jeffress, SBC; pastor, First Baptist Church)
6 Wheaton, IL (Wheaton College, John Dickson)
7 Brighton, MI (Bill Bolin, pastor Floodgate Church)
The Power
8 Columbus, OH (Gary Click, Ohio 88th House District; sr pastor Fremont Baptist Temple)
9 Nashville, TN (Ralph Reed)
10 Washington, DC (Jim Jordan, Ohio congressman)
11 Mt. Juliet, TN (Greg Locke, Global Vision Bible Church)
12 St-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, France (Cyril Hovorun, and Miroslav Volk; compares our situation to Russia)
13 Erie, PA (Doug Mastriano, governor candidate)
14 Branson, MO (Brian Gibson, pastor; Stephen. E Strang, Charisma Media)
The Glory
15 St. Joseph, MO (Brian Zahnd, Word Life Church)
16 Kennesaw, GA (Herschel Walker)
17 Phoenix, AZ (Charlie Kirk, Turning Point USA)
18 Brentwood, TN (David French, political commentator and Russell Moore)
19 Anaheim, CA (Daniel Darling, fired from NRB for endorsing COVID vaccines)
20 Jeffersontown, KY (Rachel Denhollander, Julie Roys, exposers of sexual abuse in churches)
21 Lynchburg, VA (Nick Olson, son of Doug; Aaron Werner; Liberty professors on current corruption)

The first thing big point made is the massive persecution complex the Church has had, which is getting worse!

[White evangelicals] had spent Obama’s presidency marinating in a message of end-times agitation. Something they loved was soon to be lost. Time was running out to reclaim it. The old rules no longer applied. Desperate times called for desperate—even disgraceful—measures.

p.116

Once a person becomes convinced that they are under siege—that enemies are coming for them and want to destroy their way of life—what is to stop that person from becoming radicalized?

p.121

As I read, including the lavish lifestyles of many of these leaders, it just stood out how ridiculous it was for them to claim to be “under siege“. (and mind you, many of these people taking this “muscular” approach against “snowflakes”, “wokeness”, etc.) How entitled to special favor and rule must people think they are, to call their cozy lifestyles, “siege“? The truth is more the opposite of what they claim; where they’re not being challenged by the government, when they should be:

Even if society is more antagonistic toward the Church today than at any time in U.S. history, our status remains the envy of Christians the world over. Believers aren’t getting rounded up and imprisoned here. Churches aren’t being monitored or censored. Pastors aren’t being coerced to do the bidding of the state.

Assuming pastors played by the rules that govern all nonprofits—namely, no endorsing political candidates from the pulpit—there would be no trouble. As it happens, some pastors have openly flouted this regulation for years, all but begging the IRS to come after them. The government has done exactly nothing in response. Jeffress knows this better than most. Numerous high-profile churches in Texas, including several in the Dallas area, are notorious for their brazen defiance of the Johnson Amendment.

p.122

Even if they were persecuted, then this would fit the original Church (and they preach this to the siffering today, yet act as if they are exempt, or that the fact they aren’t alowed to control everyone else is itself biblicaal “persecution”)

Christians volunteered to live in a negative world. Christians signed up to be under siege. The notion that some conjectural bullying of the American Church is a defense for the indefensible—while Christians worldwide are being harassed and hunted and even killed for their faith—would be comical if it weren’t so calamitous.

ibid.

There was the authentic martyrdom that established the early Church and the artificial martyrdom of the Church today; there was the actual persecution of Christ’s followers in Rome and the embellished persecution of his followers in America.

p.129

And now, just as we are sometimes warned; we let these others’ behavior make us become just like them:

The first step toward preserving Christian values, it seemed, was to do away with Christian values.

p.179

(Including by promoting the whole “Let’s Go Brandon/FJB” meme)!

Why should Christians allow the coarsening of the world to justify the coarsening of Christianity itself?

p.268

The way many of his [Josh Hawley, Missouri senator] constituents see it, secular progressives, in their quest to destroy America’s Christian heritage, stopped playing by the rules a long time ago. Fire must be fought with fire. Standards must be suspended. A winner-takes-all mentality must be embraced. When the conservative activist (and future Trump administration official) Michael Anton wrote his 2016 essay, “The Flight 93 Election,” he argued that leftists had hijacked America; the only chance for its survival was if conservatives rushed the cockpit, knowing full well that they might just crash the plane themselves. Notably absent from that essay was any reference to Christ, or to Christianity, or even to God. And yet the argument Anton makes—that imminent destruction justifies the unthinkable acts that may themselves lead to imminent destruction—has come to define the modern religious right.

p.435

Also, as I’ve noticed, that their only criticism of conservativism, is not fighting had enough:

…for every warning of progressivism run amok there was a rebuke of conservatism gone soft; pastors and politicians freely labeled as “cowards” anyone who shared their values but refused to go to war for them. The enemy wasn’t simply those godless secularists on the left, but those gutless Christians on the right.

p.191

This has all led to “compartmentalization” or “situational ethics”; which they used to criticize “the world’s morality” for!

Would a serious Christian see fit, I wondered, to condone this brutish behavior in any other area of life? Would they condone vicious ad hominem attacks if they were launched at the office? Would they condone the use of vulgarities and violent innuendo inside their home? Would they condone blatant abuses of power at their local school or nonprofit or church? If the answer is no, then why do they accept it in politics?

This compartmentalization of standards is toxic to the credibility of the Christian witness. Many evangelicals have come to view politics the way a suburban husband views Las Vegas—a self-contained escape, a place where the rules and expectations of his everyday life do not apply. The problem is, what happens in politics doesn’t stay in politics. Everyone can see what these folks are doing. Just as you might stop taking marital advice from your neighbor if you saw cell phone footage of him paying for prostitutes and cocaine in Vegas, you might stop taking spiritual guidance from your neighbor if you saw him chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” at the Capitol Building.

If Jesus warned us that what comes out of our mouths reveals what resides in our hearts, how can we shrug off lies and hate speech as mere political rhetoric?

p.196

Then you had the key issue of abortion. Looked like they got the ultimate victory after a whole half century

But the ruling didn’t end the scourge of abortion. The Dobbs case certainly changed the landscape of abortion policy in America, but not in the ways people like [ex–Trump administration official and avowed Christian nationalist, William] Wolfe had envisioned. Once a controlled and regulated medical issue, abortion became a wild-west patchwork of policies in the aftermath of Dobbs. Some red states rushed to ban the procedures entirely. But many more blue and purple states, now liberated from any overarching federal framework, pursued laws that made Roe v. Wade look conservative by comparison. On Election Day 2022, the citizens of six states voted on ballot measures that would shatter old precedents by dramatically increasing access to abortion. All six measures—including three in Republican-dominated states—ended in defeat for the pro-life side. The fifty-year campaign to overturn Roe v. Wade had succeeded, and the result was more abortions in America.

More often than not, winning a political battle first requires winning the public argument. The pro-life movement has not won the public argument—and, arguably, it hasn’t really tried. The message of abortion as a moral evil, as an affront to the loving God who made humanity in His own image, has proven curiously ineffective. Why? For one thing, that message seems wildly inconsistent with the politics otherwise practiced by those who claim the “pro-life” mantle. If one is driven to electoral advocacy by the conviction that mankind bears the image of God, why stop at opposing abortion? What about the shunning of refugees? What about the forced separation of babies from their mothers? What about the hollowing out of programs that feed hungry kids? What about the lifelong incarceration of nonviolent offenders and the wrongful execution of the innocent? What about the Darwinist health-care system that prices out sick people and denies treatment to poor people and produces the developed world’s highest maternal mortality rate? What about the fact that, in 2020, guns had become the number one cause of death for children in the United States?

The other problem with the pro-life message: the messengers. Can we really expect Americans to take lessons on virtue from a president who brags about grabbing women by their vaginas? Can we really expect voters to entertain the argument of unborn lives having inherent dignity coming from a man who lies about having ended unborn life himself? [i.e Herschel Walker]

p.307

More great points:

At present, Dickson said, the American Church is suffering from “bully syndrome.” Too many Christians are swaggering around and picking on marginalized people and generally acting like jerks because they’re angry and apprehensive.

p.128

Moore chuckled. “There’s been this amazing shift. It used to be the parents coming to me, worried sick about what their kids were watching and listening to, asking what they could do to pull them back,” he said. “Now, almost everywhere I go—this just happened at a church I visited the other night—it’s the kids coming to me. They say their evangelical parents have gone totally crazy, binge-watching Fox News or Newsmax or One America News, and they want to know how to pull them back.”

p.336

And Jerry Jr. perfected the art of using fear and hatred as a growth strategy. Christianity happens to be the thing they used to build a multibillion-dollar institution. It could have been anything else; it could have been moonshine. But they chose Christianity. And it’s gained them a lot of power and a lot of money, the two things these people truly worship.”

p.413

An entire corridor of the Thomas Road Baptist church is a “shrine’ to Jerry Sr. (Whom Kathy Werner wife of Aaron Werner said “was always a bit of a scoundrel”!)

Many right-wing pastors simply cannot stomach the notion of their churches being accountable to secular actors—legal bodies, law enforcement agencies, media outlets—because their vision for Christianity is one of absolute supremacy. The Church, in their view, answers to no one but God; they are the authority to which the rest of culture must answer.

p.433

Another good book I found and read the sample of:

Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation

by Kristin Kobes Du Mez 

Traces this “masculinization’ of Christianity across the 20th century, from the feared “feminization” of Victorian Christianity, through the likes of Billy Sunday (one of the models of the modern IFB movement), to the “christian businessman” of Bruce Barton, Billy Graham, Pat Boone, the Cold War, and finally the cultural influence of John Wayne himself.

And waiting in the wings for next month:

The False White Gospel: Rejecting Christian Nationalism, Reclaiming True Faith, and Refounding Democracy 

by Jim Wallis

The Difficulty of “Faith” in a World of Conflicting Voices and Ambiguous Evidence

Here’s my conundrum:

Being autistic, (but “high functioning”, and as such, not recognized), which placed me in situations with people, where I clearly felt the power imbalance in the world:
The world demands a lot from you, with often severe ‘consequences’, but people in power, from the tough kids or criminal on the street, to big business and govt. officials, do wrong or make bad mistakes that affect you, or are just too restrictive (sometimes even in reaction to the criminals or other problems) but we usually can’t do anything about it. In fact, we’re made all the more “responsible” to respond to these things accordingly. I’m sternly warned how I must “take care of myself” because “no one will care about you” in the world. (This, after being bitterly scolded for “not caring” about people! Again; it’s power or status that determines these double standards).

“Life” vs “God”

When complaining about all this, I’m told “that’s life”; “that’s the way of the world”, or simply, “the way it is”.
This eventually makes religion appealing, where there’s a divine Person in control, rather than supposedly random, impersonal “fate” (and powerful people who managed to exploit this to their favor). Someone you could hypothetically appeal to, or may have a good purpose, rather than the random tautology of “it is what it is” (as if that wasn’t already known; hence being complained about to begin with).

Religion affirms that this world is contrary to God’s intentions, but adds that He “allows it to be this way” for now.
Then, He does not give special revelation as claimed in ancient scripture. This is what made it so hard to believe in, to begin with.
Apologists come up with rationalizations for this; usually attempting to place the blame back on us (humanity, via “sin”).

I encounter the paradox” of helplessness vs “responsibility”; implicit in the secular view, and boldly affirmed in certain religious theologies. We can’t control the setup of the universe (including “the hand we are dealt”, or the “revelation” we are given), but we’re held “responsible” to react to it in a proscribed way (having the right attitude”, exerting more effort to compensate for limitations, etc), either to “survive” (secular) or be “saved” (religion). (And in both camps, it’s pitched as “so simple”, yet admittedly “so hard”, which is not accepted as an ‘excuse’, yet those preaching; many of them profiting off of it, even, can’t seem to actually live up to it themselves!)

So “that’s life” stands, and simply has “God“ added to or stamped onto it.
(And hence, “spirituality” often parallels secular “self-help”, even as they condemn it as ‘godless’, and the secularists dismiss religion as a “crutch” or “myths”, etc.)
As a Myers-Briggs “INTP” type (introverted, iNtuitive, Thinking, Perceiving), the dominant “introverted Thinking” (i.e. the T+P) likes to see logical (impersonal) “truth” (think “true/false”) on its own (rather than being force-fed from others). What happens is that instead of some real transcendent truth being revealed (that transcends ALL human reasoning and agendas), other people’s truths“; particularly the opposing extraverted Thinking (Te) perspective (especially as it often is used by people with power), end up winning out by default (and thus presumed to be the transcendent ‘truth’; whether divine [God], or just “life” or “the universe”), and no higher authority ever corrects it. It seems nature favors “alpha” types. It’s more than a simple, blanket “pain and suffering” or “evil”, or even unfairness/injustice; it’s WHY these things are so. The whole answer of the Fall and sin (and other stuff like “free will”) will only carry but so far. This is a struggle with nature and instinct itself, which were created “very good” according to scripture.

Under a premise of Grace, we cannot presume others condemned just for where they fit in the setup of the universe.
And even then, how really is the punishment of others supposed to fix whatever was wrong for us?

I grew up in an agnostic family, where occurences are interpreted simply as “life“, in an impersonal universe of random chance, governed by a set of natural laws whose origins are unknown, from the evidence we can see.
As I grow up, I hear people on TV loudly proclaiming “God”; some using this to try to control everyone’s lives (by fear). Others (or even the same ones at other parts of their message) are adding to this “all He will do for your life”, if you “come to Him”; and accept a whole “plan” He “has for you“. (At this point, sounding like salesmen!) Most will at some point attack the ‘godless’, purely “natural” view of the universe.

Yet “life“, as described by the natural position still goes on the same, and the religious have to come up with explanations for this; the most common being a “Fall”, generally interpreted as God getting angry at the first man disobeying Him, and so cursed the entire universe into a place of suffering; explaining all the [seemingly] random occurences that cause pain. (And also used to even to explain instances of the seeming “unfairness” of benefit or expense among people). Yet they will also claim He “intervenes”, and then good things that happen are taken as confirming this (and so, you better be “thankful”!), and bad things are taken as Him saying “no” to our hope or prayer, thus leaving the default occurence to stand. In other words, what the nonreligious called “life“! (i.e. not usually some supernaturally negative occurence). We’re even given a “Serenity Prayer”: accept the things we cannot change; change the things we can (which more often than not seems to be expending effort when we might not want to), and the wisdom to know the difference. Again, “life” seems to be left as, in practice, sovereign, and “God” just helps us pacify ourselves! Then, instead of answering questions of ‘why’ with “that’s the way life is”; it becomes “that’s the way God is”. “It is what it is” is personified into “I AM that I am”, and as relayed by men; “He is that He is”. (You could call it the “metaessential”: “[pronoun] [be], that/what [pronoun] [be]”)

So we’re right back to square one.

My lifelong journey

This is at the very center of my struggle with “faith”. I grew up originally assuming God, since there were some older adults who believed and taught it to me, and my agnostic parents didn’t voice any other alternative right away. In fact, when I once asked my father what his religious affiliation was, it was one of those “I’ll explain when you get older” things! Then, instead of directly expounding his views right away, he introduced me to science and nature shows on TV, and let me come to my own realization. I saw how chimps looked so similar to humans (and were very intelligent), so then the evolution they taught made sense. (Here we see my “introverted Thinking” drawing a conclusion. For a time, I assumed there was an ape who one day gave birth to Adam and Eve, until I learned it was a very gradual process!)
But then you saw or read Christian preachers loudly condemning evolution at every turn. They began claiming the fossil evidence really supported young earth Creationism and the global Flood, and science as being deliberately obstinate and deceptive, but when they ran out of answers to things (especially why no special revelation), the final word was always “faith” (i.e. in the “unseen”). By this time, evolution made more sense (according to the patterns we could observe in nature) than God picking up a mound of dirt and forming the first man, as these people insisted we believe, or be “lost” to Hell when we die.

When I arrrived at college, during the orientation, and a feisty older Southern black lady speaker mentions “GOD!” I suddenly realized I was down in the infamous “Bible Belt”, as an unchurched unbeliever. In my naïveté, I knew nothing about what’s called “cultural Christianity” (I actually was then surprised the science course outlined old earth evolution rather than young earth creation!), and yet quickly found out that the atmosphere (in practice) was just as “secular“ as anywhere else, and that most didn’t care what someone else believed. (My image of “Christians” was preachers preaching Hell for both unbelief, and bad behavior, with a special focus on sexual practices).
Yet it still seemed everyone “believed in” God, despite their actual morality, and that much of what I was seeing was more of a taking Him for “granted”. Being taught about Him by elders, and not questioning it. Herbert Armstrong of the Plain Truth magazine my maternal grandmother received actually covered this point well around this time in his book Mystery of The Ages, right before he died. Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye (recently killed by his hyper-religious father) Michael Jackson (and his youngest sister, then my “dream girl”), and even the lusty new hotshot sensation Prince always mentioned Him in songs and interviews, and it seems all sports and entertainment figures always “thanked” Him in ceremonies, upon winning an award or trophy. All US currency had “IN GOD WE TRUST” printed on it! The Pledge of Allegiance and national anthems as well nodded to Him! I asked my father what many people we knew, including every relative I could think of, believed, and he sad they all believed in “God” (except for his mother, who was kind of “iffy” and hard to state clearly). It felt like we were all alone in that area!

So I felt an actual jealousy toward those who could take God for granted and not be plagued by doubts, like I was. I tried to rationalize a kind of “belief”, and liked the series of commercials the Mormons were putting out around the time, saying God is “in” all of us (as opposed to only the “religious”. One had a little child complete the statement that He is in “you, and you, and you, and you…”) Even my father spoke of being “spiritual”, as if that equaled or even trumped theism as the true “religion”. (I would begin seeing a lot of people doing this). Stevie’s “Heaven Is Ten Zillion Light Years Away” alternates between saying “My God lives inside of me” and “He loves us all” and the almost fundamentalist sounding “Those who don’t believe will never see the light” (with the background vocal shouting “You sinner, sinner, SINNER…!!!“)

After writing a book report on Ernst Gray’s “The Sky is Gray” (about a kid; much like me and obviously an INTP, who questions the absolute premise of religion) for an English class, I was told about the Unitarian Universalist church over in the fancy part of town, and went the last three Sundays of college. Wow; an actual church for agnostics, basically! Though the copying of the form of the “church” (and with their own little ritual using a chalice) seemed a bit “phony” or at least contrived.

By the end of my two year college trial, frustration about life in general under an unknown condition of “high functioning autism”, plus seeing Armstrong’s series on biblical prophecy that seemed to explain and predict certain events in the world, led me to shortly afterward become interested enough to adopt the faith. Where before, I had despised the Church with its teaching that man was “sinful” rather than “good”, as many other “secular” people did; in my utter disillusionment with “the world”, the teaching was starting to make sense! I took it as more strong evidence of the faith. Though in practical terms, it was more a hypothetical ‘proposal’ and yet still totally uncertain and hard to believe.
The final prompt was hearing conservative talk show host Morton Downey Jr. utter what’s called the “Pascal Wager”: If I’m wrong and there’s nothing after this, then it doesn’t matter. If you’re wrong, and there is a God who judges, then who will be better off? (Basically, it’s better “err on the safe side”! I at the time took this as the “ultimate proof”!)
Making it worse, my father now reacted to this “white man’s religion” now in his own house, and kept pointing out “You don’t know; they [other Christians] don’t know…”, etc. “You can’t prove it or disprove it!”; even comparing it to “trying to grab onto smoke”. As much as I tried to argue back; I knew that’s exactly what it felt like! (This is what science has summed up under the term “unfalsifiable”. It’s not like something like gravity, that you can either prove or falsify right in front of you). And the Pascal Wager now just seemed totally flimsy, in that regard; at least as far as spreading the faith to others. It was only good for one’s own internal “belief”, and what my father was saying it is it can only be “true”, “for you”; not everyone else! I had nothing to say to that! I guess I was supposed to go dig out Romans 1, as used by “fundamentalist” and “sectarian” teachers alike and tell him “You know the truth; you’re just trying to suppress it!” As one friend put it, “Is it that they don’t know, or don’t want to know?” (Which is attempting to get into other people’s heads/hearts way beyond what is possible, based on a hypothesized generalization; especially when I can barely determine my own inner sense).
So the whole point of the faith was “witnessing” and “winning souls”, and getting them to stop suppressing, and “accept” this truth. It felt kind of like being a salesman trying to get someone to switch from one product to another, with each product having some claim of being better than the other! But in such an important, “universally true”, “spiritual” matter, why did it feel that way? How could I settle for this secularized “personal truth” handed to me by an unbelieving “world”? The whole thing (the Gospel) would be not real, then!

So I struggled in the faith, soon settled for what’s called “new evangelicalism”. and then eventually getting into debates with “old-line” fundamentalists (the epitome of everything people might hate about Christianity, and in their view, the truest form of it) over issues like music and politics, and some other sects, and could see how anyone could spin the Bible to teach just about anything. I had my proof texts, which I was sure trumped theirs, but they were just as sure of their own proof-texts.

Entering the new millennium, my faith took a big blow when the charismatic pastor we saw for marriage counseling told us we were “lukewarm” and Christ would spit us out of His mouth if we didn’t “systematically” pray enough (which was the whole “relationship” with God, which no one could “enter Heaven” without). I wrote a letter to him, pointing out the obvious violation of “grace alone, not works” this implied, but never heard back. Still, inside, it just added more to the struggling with God’s ‘silence’ and ‘why’. This was just another attempt to put it all on us, and the solution, being, mechanical and all of our own “will”, which scripture says our spiritual “life” is not based on!)
Then, you had Calvinism (which is very aggressive and loves to delve into the realm of God’s eternal perspective, but then tries to silence any questioner with that) whose strongest point, which was hard to answer is that even with total “free will”, if God “foreknew” something (such as dying “lost”, such as those who never even heard of Christ) and still placed you in that stuation, that’s as good as “preordaining” it. (This realization leads some to adopt “open theism”, where God either doesn’t know the future, or at least chooses not to see it, which provides a perfect caricature of non-Calvinist views).

In 2005, following the Dover Trials, where the teaching of evolution was once again challenged (like it was 80 years earlier in the Scopes Trial), and now finally, evolutionists began becoming much more aggressive and outspoken against Creationists, and even its more moderate new variant, “Intelligent Design” (e.g. the “New atheists” Dawkins, Dennett, Bennetta, Hitchens etc.) where decades before, they totally ignored all the attacks against evolution I witnessed, when first weighing between the two. To mock the “design” argument, a total parody of religion was created, with a hideous, grotesque “Flying Spaghetti Monster”, worshipped by “Pastafarians”. I could certainly see the point (you could make up anything to fill the role of an “intelligent” designing entity), but still reasoned this was a deliberately manmade caricature to prove a point, and thus not the same thing.  In what was basically an attempt to “prove” it to myself, and part of my doing my job of “witnessing”, I jumped into the NYTimes “human origins” debates, and occasionally battled a rather obnoxious evolution advocate (and I also heard, gay rights as well, and who was also said to actually be a Times editor, but he was so inflammatory, he was later banned from the forum), who blasted all “Christers” as he called them. Another caustic poster referred to God as “Spookipooh”. Yet another, who was much more civil, in responding to my aruments, said “If God is real, why does he make it look like he’s not real?“ I knew that he had hit the nail on the head! It was was precisely what I was struggling with! The whole Romans 1 “general revelation” argument employed by fundamentalists (God “showed” every single person who ever lived — “all that may be known of Him”, and that, through “the things that are made”) now seemed like a giant joke! I guess I was “supposed” to point to verses 24/26/28, and tell them that God Himself “gave them over” to their false belief, and perhaps also even 2Thess.2:11 “And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie”, and Rom.9:18, that He “hardens” the [supposedly] “non-elect”. But the thing is, anyone can say this, including other groups who are even more strict than us, like those who believe modern evangelical music, worship, preaching, counseling techniques and Bible translations are “carnal” and “worldly” and promote ‘other gospels’, and our consciences are “seared” on those issues so that we can no longer hear the “truth” they are “reproving” us with! If God Himself has so “deceived” people because of their refusal to believe, than why are we even arguing with them, whether on discussion forums, or on the political scene? 

I also shortly after tried one last ditch effort to “witness” to my soon to be 90 year old bitter, troubled paternal grandmother, before she “went into eternity”, only for her to complain to my father who then just rubbed in again how I couldn’t convince her, because I couldn’t prove it. (I really couldn’t even picture either of them ever as “believers”! My mother or brother either. It just “wasn’t them”, as my father had even said regarding his mother. So what was I even doing?) Yet the common reading of Romans chapter 1 was that everyone really knew “the truth” inside. I couldn’t even prove it to myself, let alone any one else already set against it.
It seemed like they could all the more effectively take the passage and turn it around to say we were “suppressing the truth”! The ruthless, for instance, are the ones with a stronger case that “God has shown” us what the proper course of life is, and they followed it and succeeded, (thus “proving” it as “fact”) and others did something else, and that’s why they failed. Christians actually support this whenever they appeal to political conservative philosophy which justifies this!

2007–8, in debates on one of the Christian forums (that for awhile allowed others to peddle their views to a limited extent), I encountered the system of “full preterism”, which claims everything was fulfilled in the AD70 destruction of the Temple. I debated vigorously against them in favor of the standard Pre-Millennial “futurist” view, but they seemed to have a strong point in what they called the “clear time statements”, especially Matthew 16:28, where Jesus said all the “end time” stuff He was describing (including even the judgment itself, previous verse!) would be seen by some of those He was talking to right there. Our standard answer to this was “this will be the generation alive when these things begin (i.e. still yet in our future). But this was an incredibly weak interpretation. Some even say it was to “keep us on our toes”, by making us think Christ could come at any time, so we will be more “holy” and “diligent”, in order to be “ready”. (This is even worse, on several fronts. It has God/Christ/The Spirit who “knows the end from the beginning” basically telling us an un-truth, and ties love and obedience strictly to the fear of immediate punishment rather than the ‘judgment seat of Christ’ we’re all supposed to face whenever and however we leave this lifetime).
One of the things I was struggling with was why the “Second Coming” was being delayed so long, as this “world’ or “life” continued on, seemingly immutably. No matter what world events occurred, making us think this might be “finally it”, the world just kept going on! I even had occasionally thought it looked almost like we were somehow apparently past the Second Coming; a whole world history “left behind”, and abandoned by God, while the first century saints are already in the Kingdom beyond earth. In the widely assumed 7000 year Millennial “week” idea (with Creation at 4004BC, Christ was born 4BC), the actual “6000th” year, when the Millennium would begin would have been 1997. But that date, and all the others men had been setting, just passed like any other (including even the much feared “Y2K”).

The full preterists were yet another “Reformed” group that now bragged about “robbing us of our fanciful view of a future new Kingdom”; — just as the Reformed view “robbed us” of our “free will” salvation. So without an end of this world, people being born as sinners predestined to Hell (with only an elect class “saved” from this) will continue forever (though as this earthly “Kingdom” expands, there should be less “lost” people as time goes on).
Yet in researching this, I stumble across another view based on it, called “Pantelism”, or the “Fulfilled View” (leading teachers such as Max and Tim King), that realized that if the “end” really was in AD70, then condemnation (which comes from the Law) passed along with it. We think of the “Old Covenant” or “the Law” immediately ending at the Cross, and so whatever we see afterward (including retained parts of the Law, and “judgment” for the “sin” they outlined, the still having to personally “get covered” with the Blood, “few shall be saved”, etc.) must be apart of the permanent “New” Testament. And so the perpetual “tension” between “law and grace”, and others, began, as all of this ends up, as in practice, still “works”, and even admitted as “hard”! But the two covenants actually overlapped, evidenced by the “deposit” or “downpayment” (KJV “earnest”) mentioned in 2 Cor. 1:22, 5:5 and Eph.1:14. We take this today to refer to this invisible, either felt or unfelt influence of the Spirit, which is supposed to be the “downpayment” on heavenly bliss after death or the return of Christ. Or some might take it as a sense of “assurance” (admittedly limited) we have now. But this “promise” in these passages is redemption itself in the first place. All of this shows entrance to the Kingdom was not completely secure yet, so they had this “downpayment” on it until the time had come (Hence, Rom.8:16). But this surety itself is the promise they were waiting for. The period of Law was finally ended when the Temple was destroyed (AD70), and Jerusalem basically transformed into an antetypical “Gehenna” (the lake of fire and brimstone, fulfilling the prohpecies of Jer. 7:31–33, 19:2–13 and Isa. 34:4–10 cf. Rev. 14:11, 20:10).
This was in their lifetimes, and the only event that could fulfill “the end” spoken about in the prophecies (including Christ’s own words).

An unknown view that fits things together better

So then everything now clicked, and this seemed to explain a lot of the unanswered questions! One preterist points out the utter silence of the Church between the apostolic and post apostolic ages (where the church that arose afterwards was different, and eventually grew into the corrupt medieval system) that suggests that’s when the actual “rapture” must have occurred! Second century historian Josephus suggests an actual appearance of Christ in the clouds, as Acts promised. It also then gives the best possible explanation I’ve seen of why special revelation has ceased. It’s no longer needed as the divine Plan really is completely “finished”! Rev.15:1 tells us that the “7 last plagues” being described “fills up the wrath of God”. That means, the “lake of fire” we read of in the last two chapters and think to be some other completely separate final session of inflicting “wrath” on the same people and more, is really just another description of the temporal (but still “eternal” in scope) events the whole book had been describing. (The “storyline” or flow of the book from chapter to chapter makes everything in Revelation look sequential, but apparently, there is a lot of parallelism in what it’s describing).

This is a far cry from the conventional view where we after 2000 years of shifting and often corrupt Church history are held to the same or even greater level of burden as those who saw Christ or at least His divinely led Apostles. “To whom much is given, much is expected” (Luke 12:48).

All of this is more “hypothesis”, but it makes many things fit together more than the “commonly accepted message” and its admitted “paradoxes” or “higher knowledge” (which apologists have fallen back on way too much, in making excuses for all the holes in some of their theories).
In the traditional view, God’s wrath is [by definition] NEVER “filled up” (and the reasoning actually is, that “sin” is an “infinite offense”, so Christ offers a “pardon”, but only through a “hard narrow path” most people won’t take, so all the others still have to suffer this unpayable “debt” through eternal suffering in Hell, either by divine “reprobation” and/or “preterition”, or by their own supposed “free choice”, which makes little difference. All of this is completely unscriptural philosophy to justify the doctrine).

This discovery also allowed me to be able to be much more honest about my doubts. I was trying to suppress them, fearing “If I was really saved, I wouldn’t have these struggles”. While some evangelicals granted you what would amount to God accepting you “for your sincere efforts” at faith, the way most preached, everything was so “clear”; there were “no excuses”, etc. Especially when it comes to how the faith is to provide the incentive for changing your attitudes toward life, and they speak of this “power” that helps you do it, “proving” it once and for all. One Calvinist at the very beginning of my faith journey when I was really struggling had said it might mean I wasn’t saved. To them, salvation is by “unconditional election”. (And as for the mixed messages of “general revelation”, there are some out there that believe God confounds things like this on purpose in order to “harden” the non-elect [citing Romans 9], and yet still “holding them accountable”!) Popular Puritan leader Jonathan Edwards — (the one who had people “clenching their seats with fear” from his “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” preaching on Hell, which people today still applaud for creating great “revivals”), split our [response] “ability” into “natural” (ability not to commit any given individual sin), and “moral” (desire to not sin), and these together create a “double-bind” for man, as God judges everyone by the “natural” ability, yet this is rendered ineffective by a lack of the “moral” ability, — which He only gives to the “elect” (i.e. God makes it look like the “reprobates” only “sin” and then “reject” Him and His offer of forgiveness simply because of their “desire to sin”, even though they couldn’t possibly overcome this. “Electing” some out of this trap then is what “grace” is).] 
Calvin himself even said that coming to God out of “mercenary affections” wasn’t true “saving faith”. And he even had a teaching called “evanescent grace”; that God gives some “reprobates” a “false faith” which He then takes away, so they they fail to “persevere to the end”, and end up falling into “perdition”. (So even any of them could one day in the future fall into this, and how can ANYone possibly know they are “elect”, if they are really honest? They just have to “presume” or “presuppose” it!)

But what these people are teaching is not “good news”, which is the meaning of the “Gospel”. And even if I struggle with whether all of this is real, I can still read the Bible and see what it teaches as the Good News, and that many of these “historic” conventional teachings do not match at all! It’s all about control of people, through fear! 1 John 4:18 says “true love casts out fear”. Conservatives loudly champion a fear message (blaming all modern problems on “preachers not preaching sin and Hell anymore”), which their own historic root theology says ultimately does not save! And to put it on the “enlightenment of the Spirit” then is the “esoteric interpretations” they condemn “cults” for! Anyone can and does claim that. They say the “truth” is so “clear”; then you shouldn’t need a special “calling” to be able to perceive it. Even 1 Cor.2:14, “But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned”; “receiving” is more about accepting things. But they could still see that the doctrine they are not “receiving” is taught there! So this verse cannot be used to say their “hard” doctrines such as God deliberately trapping people in condemnation and blaming them for it is “good news”. For that nullifies the meaning of the term!

The coldness of the universe

This “random” universe was cold, and allowed people with the right “timing, talent and temperament”, to take advantage, and be able to control everyone else (and this includes the religious leaders themselves, as much as they condemned the “a-morality” of the “fallen“ universe. In fact, they were often prime examples of this, further damaging their credibility!) The supposed evil of men is often treated as “acts of God“, (even as it may be condemned by Christians). Something you have no control over, so you better just accept it with the right attitude, “or else”. (Like being born physically disabled, or some unforeseen accident. “Acts of God” is actually a secular term that happens to be one of the only times “God” is treated as a real entity in serious secular usage. It’s for generally big, negative natural occurrences, where nobody human can be blamed).

In all of life (from “faith”, to secular achievements such as gaining credit, getting published, developing “confidence”, etc.) the bar has been set so high, you need to essentially already have what you’re seeking, to even start the process. (Self-esteem psychologist Nathaniel Branden; the “-rand-” actually named after Ayn Rand[!] called this “reciprocal causation”). People just flatly appeal to “nature” with such analogies as “you have to crawl before you can walk”; “the butterfly has to start out as a lowly worm”, etc. (And this, same world that levels terms such as “empathy” at people like autistics!) This seems to explain the in-practice, but butchered reading of the Parable of Talents or Pounds in the song “God Bless The Child” (reflecting what else but the difficult black experience in America): “Those who’ve got shall get; those who’ve not shall lose”. (Though in the parables, either all started out with the same resources, or they were only expected the return of what they were given, and only the one who didn’t try at all was punished. Of course, that’s precisely what many assume about the poor, a certain race, or anyone struggling with anything in life!)

We try to say God isn’t like this; it’s this way because of us; our “sin” (and apparently, this includes the entire universe. A black hole eating up stars billions of light years away is because of God’s reaction to what “Adam” did. (Of course, this has to really be no more than 6000 light years; or perhaps light used to move faster some may try to claim; or at most, maybe because of Satan, the being that posed as the serpent who egged on Adam’s sin).
Still, the fact that God “allowed” this, or even “ordained” this (as Calvinists will claim, but even “allowing” is still ordaining it would be this way), and yet “holds us responsible” (blames us) for this (with an eternal Hell as punishment if you don’t take a “hard path” of believing and/or doing the right things before you die), would suggest the coldness of the universe is a reflection of His character! (This is likely why Calvinism has stuck so well in the church).

Here’s something reminding me a lot of the ‘counsel” I used to get from my family:

https://link.medium.com/VHVrXqpBPzb
“Reality does not need, nor does it want our approval.”
“When you fight reality, reality always wins. All you accomplish is making yourself miserable in the process.”
(Personifying this thing called “reality”. Makes “It” seem like a cold, amoral cosmic troll. Like the worst elements of theism; like the Calvinist arguments for reprobation; esp. citing Rom.9, or why God is three-in-one “just because”, [when further inquiry into scripture mitigates these “paradoxes”] but stripped of all personhood).

Also pitches “no judgment“. Meaning, declaring “reality” to be “right” or “wrong”. (In a Jungian sense, to declare reality “bad” with our “Feeling” function”, or even “incorrect” with our “Thinking” function. “Reality” is only to be perceived, “as IS”, which is basically through the Sensing function. –And I find the “big pictures” of the other perception function, iNtuition tend to point right back to judgment, so that function is ruled out as wel! *[Perhaps this explains why in the Keirseyan temperament theory within type, the “N”-associated temperament is determined by the preferred judgment function: i.e. NF or NT, where for S’s, it’s the Sensing function’s orientation: SP or SJ; the J/P indicating the perception function is external or internal, and the judgment function doesn’t figure in it])
The thing is, once we “accept“ what “is”, it then becomes ‘judgment’ as well. “Acceptance” is a rational “decision“. We’re basically saying it’s “true” or “correct“; especially as we allow it to set our direction in action. Then, as part of the coping strategy, we are instructed to find ways to judge it as “good“ as well (like, “we’ll grow from it”). So we’re told not to ‘judge’, but that really means don’t judge it negatively (“wrong”), only positively (basically, “right”).

Commenter stephenstillwell disputes the point of the article, and citing economic issues, links to his own article https://link.medium.com/KSLx9LuCPzb
Which is a good point, given how people benefitting from situations often further benefit from maxims of “that’s life”.

Another likens it to Vispessana (“seeing things as they are”) meditation, “the oldest of Buddhist meditation practices” (Might at first sound a bit ironic, given Buddhism is the one generally known for suggesting reality is imaginary. But then that’s really our “thoughts” that are imaginary, and hence trying to key into what true “reality” really is, apart from them).

I had noticed in the Jungian writer Robert Johnson’s Living the Unlived Life p.200-1, he speaks of “purpose” in life as “Building God’s Cathedral”, with a story of two workers building the Chartres Cathedral. One just sees himself as “pushing a wheelbarrow”, and the other sees himself “doing the work of God”, in doing his part in building the cathedral. “The same activity, but very different levels of awareness”. One man “has invested his work fatefully—connected to a greater purpose—and therefore rendered his life meaningful. It is not what you do in life that is most important; rather it’s a questions of what consciousness you bring to the activity”. Of course, this is about “attitude” in experiencing the difficulties of daily life, which is the theme of both Christian teaching and secular “self-help”.

I think in either case, this “purpose” is at best very cloudy, and at worst, totally speculatory and fanciful. (Johnson does cite someone as saying “the chief obstacle to heaven is our ideas about heaven”. Now, were using some iNtuition, in speculating on a “big picture”, but Johnson will turn back to the S “what is” perspective, below). Religions use their scriptures, and for Christianity, “building the Cathedral” would be generally doing your part in “building God’s Kingdom”, which is generally understood as winning more souls for Heaven instead of Hell when they die. It also includes supporting the people or infrastructure winning souls, such as “serving” in Church. For some variations, it’s trying to build a literal kingdom here on earth, usually through “taking back” the culture and implementing divine Law.
Both are “futurist” (i.e. believe in a future heavenly “kingdom”), but vary in being either pre- or post-/a- milennial. Both fail to realize that the Law was passing away THEN, not now, and so assumed the descriptions of this “kingdom” in places like Revelation are this future and/or otherworld place that is supposed to be our incentive to both suffer in life as we do our part to fulfill “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven”. Even taking that literally, it was unclear as to what it really is, but we are ensured “we’ll just be in a state of bliss; ‘eye has not seen nor ear heard’ what this is like”.

After a while, when you’re still not there, and still faced with the day to day troubles of this world, what good does that do? It’s not going to pay the bills. But still, they tell you this should “take your mind off” of these things. (Mind you, likely some pastor or teacher who is himself part of an organized “system” that makes sure his living is taken care of, and if not, puts pressure on supporters such as the everyday “lay” people in the church).

Johnson also speaks of “creative suffering” [“suffer” as in “allow” like used in Shakespeare —or the KJV Bible], which is “saying yes to what is” and to “stop fighting it, and instead to affirm it and to affirm your life” (202-3). “Such experience is redemptive in that it leads to healing and self-knowledge. If you can acknowledge what is true in your life, looking at it with objectivity and intelligence, you are getting closer to enlightenment, as your escape mechanism is diminished. By stating what is at any moment, with complete honesty and sincerity, you become conscious of it.” When looking at your past, it should be “in a reflective, honest manner, not idealizing or judging it. It is what it is. Just state what has been true for you and what is true now”. (p.244) When “beset by a seemingly irresolvable contradiction…hold these oppositions in your mind without immediately jumping to claim one as the ‘good'” (p.106) [i.e. again, no “judging” But note the term “what’s true”. That includes a judgment!]
Sounding much like many Christian teachers (especially when discussing “Christ’s yoke” and “casting all your cares on Him”), he speaks of taking “half the ‘burden'” from a person suffering something, by taking the “rebellion” but leaving “the situation”, which they still have to bear or “work to deal with”. (p205). Again, “When you stop fighting your situation, you still have the situation but you no longer have the struggle to cope with. This is to stop wounding yourself on the jailhouse bars of reality—to stop complaining about what is”.

This is supposed to be eliminating the “duality” we split reality to (which includes the “knowledge of good and evil”, defining “the Fall” of course), but it to me is like a cruel joke (pretending to offer “relief”), and seems to all the more favor the division of the poles of two of those dimensions: ST – What IS (S) CORRECT (T). And the T-“correct” in fact being a judgment! He means, again, don’t judge it negatively, which is T-“incorrect” or F-“bad”. He says don’t “idealize”, which would be a positive F “good” judgment (with an N “concept” perspective), so it seems “true” is being seen as T-“neutral” and just associated with S at this point. But me, having a T-dominant ego, I can’t help seeing this in terms of a T judgment, which appears to slant it toward an unfavorable viewpoint. (Then an unconsciously controlled negative F judgment [“dislike”] comes along with it). So in my view, saying things I don’t like is not only a matter of what “is”, but also, what’s “right“.
I wonder if I just see it this way, because of being an N (with individualized rather than environmentalized Thinking), and if there is a different challenge for S’s; perhaps dealing with the abstract meaning of the “big picture”. I notice a lot of them “talk the talk”, but at the end of the day, are really no more “content” in life than I am.

So this ties into what I think is the most utter coldest aspect of “life” of all! How when you’re hurting, you’re told that if you “hold on” to your anger, don’t forgive others, etc. “you’re only hurting yourself”. You’re going to “drive yourself crazy”. (With references to a proverb of IIRC a bride holding on to her rotting wedding cake after the groom stands her up, and even the Frankenstein story is also supposedly about this lesson of what happens if you “don’t let go”; and I guess the Copacabana song too, though I’ve never heard that one given as an example). What a cruel double-bind “life” puts some people in! (And it’s the same world; the same “society”, the same people even, that bitterly chastize stuff like “not caring” or “lack of empathy” who tritely give these platitudes!)

No matter how much you “expend” (suffer, endure, or even have to apply effort or to something), it never seems to be enough (unless in the right positions in life). It seems this “beast” (life) is never filled; never satisfied with the pain it extracts from people.

The difficulty of “faith”

You wake up in this violent universe of survival (matter and energy shifts in ways that try to pull apart the physical forms you need to live, and it’s difficult to maintain them).
People come to you with a book, written and printed like any other, by men, and claim it was ‘inspired’ by the Creator of the universe, and reveals His identity and “will” for mankind.
The book is shrouded in uncertainties, such as the authors of the four parallel accounts of the life of Christ, written decades afterward, supposedly by “oral tradition”, the authorship of certain books, like Hebrews, and “Moses” writing the account of his own death and afterward. It also includes many miracles, including a supposed recent Creation and global Flood and stopping the sun in the sky for several hours, that, going against all the laws of nature, just don’t occur [anymore].

Then, they tell you this is all “absolute fact” that God has even “shown” you, but when you question these things, they say it is by “faith, not sight”. 
So they then have to come up with flimsy speculations as to why they don’t, such as “God wants ‘faith’ now”. (But He wanted ‘faith’ then too!) Or others claim all that is “allegorical”. But then that seems to make it lose its soundness. You even have some admitting there is no absolute certainty! An evangelical book is titled The Myth of Certainty (Daniel Taylor, Intervarsity. 1999)! Yet there remain those in their midst who act as if it is absolutely certain; especially when they start talking about divine “judgment”. (And 1 John 5:13 does kind of sound like it might be tying certainty to salvation! At least the way one person I knew preached it, with a vocal stress on “know”!) Apologists then keep coming up with these supposed ’empirical’ proofs. Like “There is more evidence for Christ than for Caesar”, but most of these ‘evidences’ end up being the scripture texts themselves.

We’re supposed to “just believe” all of this, and then, when all else fails, they tell us “you know deep in your heart it’s all true; you’re only suppressing this to have an excuse to ‘hold on to your ‘sin’!” (What a gaslightish double-bind! If it were really something we ‘KNEW’; then they wouldn’t need to appeal to this thing they’re calling “faith” then; ‘believing’ it wouldn’t really be ‘faith’; now would it? i.e. in the sense they are using it in, of believing in the ‘unseen’. It would by definition be “sight”!
*They’ll then probably shift the definition of “faith” (pistis) to ‘trust’; i.e. in one you already see and believe in; but the way they use the term when arguing for His existence and presence, it’s basically belief in something not perceptible by the senses).

They tell you all men have sinned and are naturally inclined to do evil (which I would say is the strongest proof of scriptural teaching), but they expect you to take their word for everything (as if they weren’t men; and not question them at all) and do what they say. (Hence, the appeal to your own “conscience”; to get them off the hook as to the fact they’re the ones telling you something, and possibly skewing it, as they freely will claim other men do). Some Calvinists even promote this way of thinking as what they call “presuppositionalism”: whatever they believe and say about God is automatically right, and they don’t have to prove it or consider anyone else’s perspectives or feelings. You’re the “enemy of God”; they’ve been “elected” and sent by God to preach “the truth” to you. They have free reign to trample over the world for Christ, if they so desired.

Using the same line of reasoning, these people’s forebears, whom they declare ‘godly’, and whose ‘values’ we should go back to (and should never have departed from) just showed up and declared themselves the rightful rulers, claiming people’s land and freedoms. Today, they favor this “muscular” philosophy that frowns on weakness (such as financial) as deserving hardship. (Like they’ll blame people for getting caught up in ridiculous rigged student or home loans, but never challenge why prices and interest are so high. It’s like “that’s the way it is”, like God did it or something, and the “responsibility” is only on the vulnerable recipients). They appeal to our “sin”, and how it earns us “suffering”, so anything bad that happens (including if it is at their own hand, or blessing) is justified.

Then they claim God’s “power” will “change your life”. but when you say you don’t feel anything, they tell you it’s by [again] “faith”, and then begin describing a “process” of mechanical self-willed “choices” (efforts) that anyone can learn to do.

It’s like a meme I have seen showing the pope, saying

“You pray for the hungry. Then you feed them. This is how prayer works”

This basically renders prayer (“making our requests known to God”) meaningless. You can just feed them without praying.
And of course, so can people who do not even believe in God.
This is similar to an African proverb I’ve seen: “You ask for the ancestors’ help and then help yourself”. (This is pretty much what the common secular cliché “God helps those who help themselves” paraphrases). So yet again, it leads credence to the notion that all “spiritualities” are the same.
(People probably derive this from Phil.2:13-4 “work out your own salvation…For it is God who works in you”, but the first “work” is “accomplish” or “achieve”, which actually carries a more passive (a result that you can receive) sense, while the second one, the one God does, is the one meaning “be operative; put forth power”. So even this does not really support the common understanding of “power”, regarding our own efforts).

They hold up “heavenly rewards” as being our hope that encourages us (and makes all of life’s pains tolerable), but this is based on promises to Christians suffering actual persecution, not the general pains of life; and also creates a selfish motivation, centered on ultimately gaining something.

The notion of “justice”

Feeling that power imbalance as mentioned, I became very fixated upon the notion of “justice” and “compensation”, and this is what lured me in. It offered some solace for awhile, but as problems kept coming in the early “faith” of my early adulthood, the demand for some sort of instant validation increased. (Mainly, a father whose alcoholism was flaring up at the same time, and who then challenged the faith almost nightly, and I was hard pressed to answer, already struggling believing myself, and couldn’t find a decent job, with him pressing me on that and telling me God won’t ‘take care’ of me, in addition to loneliness, blamed on my social flaws in a confirmation-biased [“told you so”] fashion, and yet now committed to a “purity culture” that mandated marriage in “answering nature’s call”.
Christian leaders seemed so aloof and far removed, often doing nicely in the world. They then offered platitudes to the suffering, including “heavenly rewards”). The terms “trials” (negative situations in general) and “tests” (more individual ones) were turned into frequent “biblical” catch phrases, that on one hand, seemed to assure these things were not simply “life”; someone was in fact “doing this to you”, but utltimately, it was “God” (who you better not “murmur” at), and even if not Him, but instead “Satan” (as most are more likely to say), it was still God who “allowed” it for some “good reason”. This I soon found to just make it worse, and the situations were still the same things others called “just life”!

One commenter on a question of why God doesn’t heal amputees claimed that God “taking his life”, spiritually that is, by “causing his ‘old nature’ to die”, took his “focus” off of his ongoing severe back pain, and made it instead “remind me of His sovereign grace and mercy”. Extending this principle, in fundamentalists’ criticism of the modern Church for allowing psychotherapy, the claim is that “all people really needed” instead was what one leader quipped as “a dose of the Book, the Blood and the Blessed Hope”. All of this is pitched at the suffering, and if it doesn’t change your attitude, then you are harshly judged and accused of “denying the power” God offers you!

But I began feeling a “disconnect” from scriptural examples of ‘suffering’ and ‘rewards’ the promises were originally given for. (For one thing, as we see, this even extends to physical and mental suffering that is not even an issue of “justice” i.e. for wrong done by others). I could not honestly call much of my pain “suffering for Christ”. Some of it was even legitimately for my own faults or “sins”. (Which [the same] Christians will then certainly bring up if you complain too much about “injustice” and “why God allows suffering”!) So what about that? Even that which I did technically suffer from my father or occasionally others over the name of Christ; what I was going through was still not the same as the early Christians’ experience of being burned at the stake, sawn in half, crucified, appearing before leaders and told at the point of a sword “Christ or Caesar?” etc. (And neither was that of the modern well-off Christian leaders, often complaining of being “persecuted” by secular society, for taking away elements of the dominance they once enjoyed!)

Eventually, I began fearing that this was actually just another appeal to the ego, or our sinful natures, which get us into such trouble to begin with. I now see the desire for reward as ‘vain’ and even ‘legalistic’. It certainly doesn’t ‘prove’ anything now, and ‘life’ remains ‘life’. If anything, it just becomes another pacifier, like the “success” and “mental health” offered by secular self-help. I realized that whatever “rewards” for suffering or “punishments” for others’ evil will not make up for the pain here, in the midst of the uncertainty of whether the afterlife is real, or what nature it will have (will we even be ourselves?) and (with all of that up in the air), whether “grace” will even pan out as we think (e.g. others forgiven, us judged, so that “rewards” and “punishments” aren’t even meted out as we [thought we] were “promised”)

Counting on a “reward” seems mighty presumptuous, especially when the promise was made to Christians suffering often fatal persecution, and I’m applying it to largely, daily inconveniences and some lifetime setbacks, and then the same “spiritual” messages (and their ‘secular’ counterparts) are also telling you you haven’t done enough to “deserve” more. Also, it feels like a ‘reward’ for those ‘little’ things validates the system that caused them. You played your legitimate role, now you’re “paid” for it. If this were known now, then we could confidently look forward to the reward. But instead, nothing is known now (including whether there really is a “reward”, or whether the afterlife is anything like we’ve imagined it), so it instead comes off as, again, a pacifier to shut up complaining or even grieving that a “toxic positivity” culture (and Church) don’t want to be bothered with.

I know I have not really earned any “reward” (in a biblical sense). I cannot find joy in something that turns so naturally into stroking the ego (which is so frowned on by secular and religious world alike as it is). Christ had even told us “So likewise ye, when ye shall have done all those things which are commanded you, say, We are unprofitable servants: we have done that which was our duty to do.” Luke 17:10.

Succeeding in the world is a matter of being in the right place at the right time, (whether by accident, or by knowing how to navigate your way to that position). It is not [necessarily, or in itself] a sin that must be punished in order to maintain justice (and so neither is lack of success a virtue to be rewarded), and divine punishment of others in an afterlife really wouldn’t help us now or make things even better then, anyway.

So it’s like there’s no individual to even blame; it just “is”. (Making their position seem Godlike; He’s the one who claims “I AM that I am”; yet it seems like men and their systems get to take on that title. Look at how political and even religious conservatives justify everything “capitalism” does with “the market”,

All of this comes from feeling that cold, unmitigated “No!” from life every time something goes wrong, and the general pattern of unrealized wishes in life as well). All defenses (such as divine retribution ,or “I’m the oppressed good guy”) smashed; what is left but cynical lack of trust of any good expectation from life?

Through all of that, I eventually realized, that if I were these peoplewith power, I might do the same thing! It’s instinct they’re going on. Whether it’s capitalism (with conservative arguments playing on “nature” being hard to answer), or “pest” animals such as rodents or insects, it’s all the same drive. We can try to employ religion to say God expects man to rise above his instincts (and thus the level of animal existence), and this is what he will be “held responsible” for and condemned over, but what good does that do for us now? Especially when we’re living just as much by instinct most of the time!

This realization is also seen in rapper KRS One’s portrayal of a drug kingpin in “Love’s Gonna Get Ya”:

I got a 55 inch television you know
And every once in awhile I hear “Just Say No”
Or, the other commercial I love
Is when they say, “This is your brain on drugs”
I pick up my remote control and just turn
‘Cause with that bull____ I’m not concerned…

It was clear there is absolutely no reasoning with such people. They are driving on pure survival instinct! We see there they brush aside reason (whether moral or intellectual), for it’s not what immediately works for them; all the impassioned pleas from the public campaigns on these things falls on deaf ears. Three simple words “just say no” are nothing more than ‘hot air’ they basically laugh at! Who the hell cares if it’s portrayed as frying people’s brains like an egg? (And threats of Hell, which many Christians think are what were needed, also don’t faze them).
Conservatives (defending western—i.e. white “exceptionalism”) use all this against black culture, but again, their ruthless conquests, and now, systems like capitalism and global war, are the same exact thing; just on a larger scale. They’ve simply justified it in more elaborate ways (often using “moral” premises and religion), which to them is more valid than blaming racism for street crime; but is really the same survival instinct; and just as impervious to any kind of “reasoning”, except that used to justify it!

KRS in his real life seemed to epitomize this universal “favor”; blasting into the hip hop scene with a highly aggressive (yet intellectual) style, attacking other rappers (at least once, physically), and always seemed to get away with it, and whoever he was battling just gave up, and he then bragged on, in truth, about being “undefeated”. His life success philosophy can be summed up in another line from the same rap: “Where I’m at, if you’re soft, you’re lost; to stay on course means to roll with force!” Another glaring example is Michael Jackson’s father Joe, who harshly abused the boys, and basically broke Michael down into the total mess he became in his later years. When all the abuse was exposed in popular media (including after Michael died), he, sitting from the huge Encino mansion the children’s careers gained fo him, in all his “alpha” swag, justified with with “Well, they’re rich aren’t they?”. When he himself finally died, many people on YouTube comments defended and praised him as a good father as well! (I guess him staying alive and pushing them to greatness by any means necessary, was better than the stereotypical state of many other black fathers, as derelict, absent or dead. But meanwhile, them being a “religious” family, whatever happened to Jesus’ statement that “a man’s life does not consist of the abundance of things he posesses”?) Donald Trump is another example of someone who can get away with anything and still rise to the top (and even brag about the idea of literally getting away with murder; and even as far as having the moralistic conservative Christians of all people extolling him as “God’s man” for the nation, despite being morally “wicked”!) The difference with him is that the position he has kept him under the spotlight, and being not mentally well, he’s gone a bit far. Yet he can still possibly end up pretty much getting off unfazed! There are still millions who would vote for him even with his legal troubles!

The turning point in realizing all this regarding power was in reflecting on a relative who was schizophrenic, and gave her child a horrible upbringing. The few times I spoke to this person, it became obvious that what else can you really expect from her? How can you blame her? It didn’t make sense to wish punishment on people like this, because we all still sin (and feel we couldn’t help it, or are doing the best we can), and so could all be judged then. That’s the central teaching of the Gospel, and thus the basis of the whole idea of “Grace”, and what much of religion (focusing on behavior control through points of “the Law”) has missed!
(But it’s totally frustrating, as now this completely ambiguates the whole notion of “justice”, or any compensation for what pain and difficulty such people have caused us).

A saying of Jesus that is so significant, that I have taken notice of in recent years and wonder how it is hearly heard about is John 9:41: “If ye were blind, ye should have no sin: but now ye say, We see; therefore your sin remaineth.” The person who can “see” everyone else’s flaws so well (and even presume to see their own and be improving them), is really the most “blind” one! This is what the Johari Window covers; that yes, you can see yourself and others, and show others what you want to, but there will always be parts of you that you do not see (“the Shadow”), and some of it is even exposed to others! So what good does it do to judge others beyond a certain point?

Even with justice as commonly held in religion, it is quite disconcerting that people would be allowed to get away with everything in this life (because of power, while those with less power suffer consequences, at the behest of the rulers; i.e powerful; including things like being perhaps too tough when subordinates do legitimate wrong or mistakes), and only when removed from this timeline, after they’ve done everything they’ve done, are they held to account (sent to Hell if a nonbeliever, and losing “rewards” if a believer). They will then know for sure that justice was served, rather than the total frustration of having to grope in the darkness of wondering if it ever will be.
So “truth” will only be fully revealed when it is no longer useful (i.e. when we die and the “veil” is removed). According to conventional theology, its purpose will be to sentence uncovered sinners, and reward the faithful. But this will still be useless for any other purpose (and revealing the truth to them then, and only them, and saying they were “shown” the “truth” [which was basically in the unconscious], sounds like gaslighting, when all the evidence we can consciously see now seems to favor, and often reward people’s course of action now.

The whole appeal of “rewards” comes from feelings of deficit in life, and where we’re told we haven’t done enough to gain more of what we want, like others we see (and who may have gained a lot from dirty means, yet are credited with “hard work”, and even if we’ve suffered and lost a lot, passsively, and not proactively, which is deemed the true “earning” factor). So then, “rewards” (in the scriptural sense) are for passive suffering (persecution by others), but the difference was that the “active” factor was holding the faith, and not renouncing it, to save one’s life. This was more difficult than any effort required of us today, and does not address the difficulties many of us face that are not from persecution for the faith.
Deep down, it’s like I “knew” this all along, but could not articulate why I felt the“disconnect” from biblical suffering. I sought a free ticket to getting things (if nothing more than ‘recognition’) in a way that bypassed what people were calling “the laws/rules of life”. But even if this worked, it would only be realized in the afterlife; a totally different and unknown level of existence that is supposed to be higher than the things of ‘this world’ anyway. So it could never give me but so much “hope”. It was just too “fantastical”.

The appeal of “punishments” of others is the same thing in reverse; that if I can be judged for wrongs (or at least feel shame and guilt), then others should be as well; but their ability to get away with things is yet another ‘thing’ they have, and an afterlife is the only place this could ever be fixed (at least, consistently), and seeing that while being pardoned from it would be like another kind of “reward” (and some Christians even acknowledge this when they say the destruction of the wicked will be a ‘glorious’ occasion for the redeemed).

Of course, this side of it is cautioned by “grace”; the realization that you could still be judged as well. (And again, “grace” may well be the reason special revelation has been removed! The “unpardonble sin” [Matthew 12:31–2] for instance, was seeing a miracle of Christ and attributing it to Satan! But then this explanation for the lack of ongoing revelation is just another unprovable hypothesis!)

So when I get annoyed at:
•The decisions of business, government, or especially my own agency, and particularly the extraverted Thinking—introverted Sensing perspective,
•as an example of this, the legal industry, which has everyone afraid of lawsuits, and thus reacting and tightening up “safety” on everything. The firms egg this on with ads encouraging us to take someone to court for whatever hardship befalls us!
•often leading to a rigid system of rules, procedures and discipline (for fear of legal liability. Yet some of the rules actually aren’t practical, but you still have to be able to say you followed them, to be covered legally). On the other hand, is the extraverted Sensing perspective of the movers and shakers, who seize the opportunities of every situation. So on one side, you have the hackers and other criminals who directly affect us, the lawmakers and others reacting to them, and us everyday people in the middle feeling the pressure from both sides!
•Runaway capitalism; how prices have been gouged on just about everything, from housing to education, and even death (undertaking industry, during people’s darkest moments of loss of a loved one), and how people don’t question it, if not many thinking it’s good!
•In direct conjunction with this, everyone complains about taxes, and often blame the poor, but don’t see how the rich benefit from them, and perhaps the filing process is kept so complicated due to the benefit to the tax preparation industry.
(In one presidential election, candidates floated around the idea of simplifying the process down to where most people would merely receive from the IRA a card with all of their taxes basically done, and just check off a box to verify it was accurate. When the candidate who proposed that dropped out of the race, the idea was completely forgotten about, and the only thing changed that year was “welfare” reform! So something was actually changed in this humongous system, but only one specific thing, which remained the most complained about element of taxes, while the rest of the complicated system went unchanged! Who really benefits from this?)
•What I call “inertia”, where we all tend to want to keep doing what we’re doing, and not stop or change course (accelerate the opposite or different direction) unless we want to. People with power get to maintain their momentum more, while others have to change and adapt around them; to move when told to move and stay put and respect the “boundaries” otherwise (and this is often justified with presumptions they “earned” this “right”. To some, it’s just “life” or the “universe”, and it’s like they have just managed to be “in sync” with it).
•”CYA”, where everyone covers themselves, and just passes burdens (responsibility, culpability, etc.) down to whoever is more vulnerable
•and then all the “rugged individualist” rhetoric in politics, which justifies this inordinate power,
•and then tops it off by blaming those on the bottom for not simply “choosing” to rise higher,
•and then, the utter double standards, such as corruption or bungling in those high places that place such standard on everyone else;
•On a grander scale, that people think their forefathers could found this country the way they did, and yet now all the repercussions from that are everyone else’s fault (including those whose ancestors suffered the most from it). That they today can identify with those people and all their supposed virtues, yet then protest “don’t blame us for what they did” when their evils are pointed out.

I would be looking forward to the day God shows them how wrong they are, how “puffed up” they were, how they had not “earned” everything good as much as they thought they had, but did benefit from forces beyond their control (inluding the ability to put forth whatever effort they may have done), plus, the dirty “strings” the have pulled, how much pain they’ve caused, and how it was not justified, not “hard truth” that they easily accepted where others couldn’t; and imagine them at the Great White Throne, reeling in terror at the fruit of their “choices”.
But under the forgiveness of full Grace under the “Fulfilled” (Pantelist or “consistent” preterist) view, where condemnation has been removed (all taken upon by Christ), I often wonder if they’ll just say “sorry”.  If forced to see those they hurt, what else could they really say, but “sorry” (and again, that they only did what they thought they had to do, or thought was right, or they couldn’t help it, etc.)

We’re not supposed to think we’re “owed” anything. Then, how can we presume some afterlife “justice” for whatever we suffered here? This, I have found, leads to what’s been called “Main character syndrome”; where life becomes a big “story” centered around us, as the “main character”. But then, this is wrong; isn’t it? It’s not supposed to be “about us” and our egos!

Then what’s the alternative?
God
But what does this mean? He’s only believed in by “faith” (unseen), while the “seen” world just seems to be about who (or what) ever is the strongest

A concerted attempt at age 21 at trying to both “think positive” and have more “faith” and “humility” (themed around Michael Jackson’s concurrent “Man In The Mirror”) was all wrapped up in the idea of “reward”, but when it quickly became obvious that I would still have to live out life in this same “world”, and the whole idea of reward being by “faith“, which wasn’t really certain like the tangible current ‘realities’ of life, then the positivity just vaporized into a growing cynicism, that I was being ‘had’ in life itself, and ‘positivity’ was just a pacifier pitched by those who uphold the way the world is, and typically look down on ‘victimhood’.

Counting on “justice” and the “afterlife“ seems futile, because it’s completely unknown, and while various Christian groups claim it can be known (and that they are thus following “the truth”), they all disagree, and it’s usually “tougher”, more “old-line” advocates who are the loudest (and most feigning “certainty”). So I can listen to some “modern” teacher who has dressed the message up in niceties of “love” and “grace”, but someone else will accuse that of being “watered down” (to appeal to “sinful man”), and they’ll likely be the ones appealing the most to Scripture as the guide, as well as “historic Christianity”, or “the faith delivered to us”. I can ignore them and believe what makes most sense to me, but then who am I? I can’t determine truth (that God is then obligated to confirm). And I realize my own subjective biases. So the ‘tough’ teachers could be right, and then God is just making everything harder because He is glorified in our suffering (and likely has “chosen” people to recieve the truth).

The way life is, sometimes, or even the “universe”, you have to wonder, if the entity governing this universe and its laws (in which we experience the conflict with random energies as “pain“ and “discomfort”) has it in itself/Himself to provide something different for current creatures. To follow the precedent, it really seems like there wouldn’t be any such thing as ‘compensation’, and nor any need for it, once we’re done for. (The only reason something like that would exist would be “just to make us happy”  (e.g. out of “love”), but neither the personal “God“ nor the impersonal “universe” show any precedent for “making us happy” —as tough talking self help gurus and preachers alike will always remind us).

How will “justice” and “mercy” play out in a situation where both parties are partially at fault (which may be many, if not most situations). Like a matter of a superior being too hard on you for a legitimate wrong. Will we both be punished, or both forgiven (which for the subordinate might be reiterating that whatever the superior did, you really “deserved worse”, but are receiving more ‘grace’; just like what we are often told now)?

Waiting for rewards and vindication seems so “petty” (as well as “self-absorbed”, which we are criticized for being, in this lifetime), and just would perpetuate the events and principles of this world.

What good will it do then (after “everything has been said and done” in this life), when justice and mercy are what we need in the immediate contexts of this timeline, in order to better survive?
(The purpose of “justice” is to establish that “as we move forward living in this world, you must treat others a certain way; else there will be consequences”, in order to deter mistreating others. The common cencept of Hell is basically a disposal of people who did not act [or at least “believe”] right, now, and to scare people in this world with the threat of those consequences. Heaven likewise is the opposite, to motivate people with supposed “good” consequences into behaving a certain way now. But once in those respective realms, where these “consequences” are eternalized, then what purpose do they [continue to] serve, beyond just the reward/punishment motive for now?)

(The apparent truth is that the scriptures on Heaven and justice have been taken out of their original contexts, which was the first Christians and their oppression by the declining Old Covenant Law system)

I sometimes will call out in some sincerely felt prayer (if for nothing more than hoping forgiveness, or at least hoping I have it and the unconditional Grace doctrine is true), but don’t feel like it’s being heard by anyone, and nothing changes, and I don’t feel any different.

So right there, who are people going to “call out” to, if all of this is assumed to point to the identity or character of the Creator? (Of course, Augustine, Calvin and others fit that right into their “reprobation” and “election” doctrines; that He “holds man accountable” for ambiguous hypothetical evidence man really can’t discern for himself without a[n individual] special calling).

If life “is what it is” (and/or God “ordained” it so), then why should any “afterlife” be any different? Or, if the “afterlife” is the ‘real deal’, then why has this life been left this way so long, and seemingly, so “immutable”?

Why most arguments aren’t working

The laws of the physical universe seems to be the highest authority. They seem to be “designed”, and so we can trace it to a “designer”, but the physical laws do not point to what we call a “personal” being; or at least not a particular one, as is argued by “general revelation” arguments..
“Intelligence” is “the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills (from “inter-” [between] and “legere” [choose, pick out, read])

The “personal” aspect is thus an “idea” that is above and beyond the physical realm. People claim personal experience of the personal aspect, but this is totally subjective, and then they claim following certain steps like they did is what’s required to share the experience, and if it didn’t work; you must have done something wrong.

Here are a couple common attempts at “logical” evidence:

https://link.medium.com/aoZS9Kyqjzb
(Response to Evidence that Demands a Verdict by Josh McDowell, 2017)

This is where they pile on legal themes to really make it look true, and if you still question it, or seem unimpressed, then it’s the clear proof you “don’t want to believe” (i.e. biased against it). But something inside kept saying this wasn’t real decisive proof, and yet I couldn’t put my finger on it and articulate a good reason (and hence, I feared looking ‘obstinate’).
(I did think the “they wouldn’t die for something untrue“ claim was the ultimate answer, but that too is weak, as the article shows. Plenty of people die for things that are not true. Just look at some ‘cults’ or suicide bombers!
Even so, something called the Flavian Hypothesis says the entire revelation was fabricated by the emperors, to replace the Jews’ “Warrior Messiah” with a “suffering” one in order to pacify them. — which isn’t helped by the fact that this is exactly how Christianity has often been used ever since, while the leaders themselves were anything but pacified! This is another one I don’t know how to answer well, except to say that the epistles, at least, look like genuine letters written to people to address real issues).

The similarly themed Cold Case Christianity, J. Warner Wallace, 2013 used postapostolic fathers Ignatius, Clement and Polycarp as “nonscriptural evidence”. But these are people, a century or so later, whose knowledge comes likely from scripture, or maybe oral tradition. [The notion that they may have known John is based on the assumption he lived to the end of the century].

Evangelist Ray Comfort (who’s associated with former TV star Kirk Cameron, also now an evangelist) claims as “evidence” of “general revelation”, that the banana was made specifically for the human hand! (My first question then, is what about other fruits, such as coconuts?)

In this book review, I address a whole set of arguments that takes “general revelation” to the point of actually claiming atheism “steals” knowledge from God. It waffles between pain being “because of sin”, God “developing character” in us, and “nature just being allowed to run its course”. One bad analogy I point out is using physical artifacts as evidence for physical designer to prove physical elements as evidence of a non-physical designer. I think it’s true, that a physical universe with a beginning has to have to have a non-physical source. But the comparison is bad, because you can know what the physical designers are like, but then have to speculate on what a nonphysical being is like (and explain away remaining anomalies, such as the coldness of the universe!)

As for the comparison to evidence for Caesar and other historical figures, belief in their existence has little bearing on our lives today (and our other beliefs, actions and even attitudes). What “faith” in Christ (in practice) asks of us is a lot more, and so more will be expected of it as far as its verity!
Also should be mentioned that the whole point of “Why Won’t God Heal Amputees?” mentioned earlier, by the guy who did the “How Stuff Works” site, is that many Christians are claiming “healing” is still occuring, yet none of them violate the laws of the universe as much as some of what’s recorded in scripture; including the healing of amputees, and the most glaring one to me, again, stopping the sun’s movement (which is really stopping the earth’s rotation, and without flinging us and everything else on the surface of the earth all into space at 1000mph! God must have stopped the rotation and canceled inertia for us, and then started it all up again as if nothing happened, aftrerward. (Reminds me of the old Creationist argument that everything was created with the “appearance of age”). We weren’t there to see it happen or not happen, but know stuff like this just does not happen today. So to say it once did, and offer a “reason” why it doesn’t anymore, is just an untestable hypothesis (and not any “clearly shown” revelation!) Turning water into wine, I’ve seen explained as just the “speeding up” of a normal natural process, but still, that “speeding up” (i.e. instantaneous) is where the unrepeatable violation of nature occurs.

Then, many “miracles” were later exposed as faked. Others may not have been, but were not as impossible to fake as the others. Christians, in their debates with science, became known for what’s called a “God of the Gaps” premise; that anything science has not yet explained becomes a “proof” for God. That is, until an explanation is found for it. Until then, if you do not take it as an absolute proof, then aha! gotcha!; you are being obstinate and resisting what God has “shown you”! I relied heavily on this tactic, but deep down inside knew it wasn’t as strong as it seemed.
Somewhere along the line in my timeline above, there was the much touted supposed cured cancer in the church we were associated with, yet the person later still died from it anyway, and the only explanation was “We just don‘t’ know what God is doing”; He just decided to cure the cancer temporarily and let the person live longer, but then decided to let nature run its course later. In reality, it looks like the “cure” was just something like a temporary remission we did not expect. Again, to point that out was painted as denying God’s work.

On the other side, here is a typical atheistic science argument:

View at Medium.com

It’s worth pointing out that the very fact that apologists need to put their heads together and scheme in this way [Vogt: “some effective tips and tactics to use when speaking with the atheists.”] is itself evidence in atheism’s favour. God has evidently left Christians to stew for two millennia so that they must resort to sophistries and casuistries to explain away God’s apparent absence, the gross hypocrisies that distinguish Church history, the litany of failed prophecies, and the secularizing of the developed parts of Christendom.

This I can’t help but see the point in!

But, he then goes after what seemed like perhaps the strongest argument for theism, which is called the “Kalam cosmological argument”:

Premise 1: Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
Premise 2: The universe began to exist.
Conclusion: The universe has a cause.

[Noting the addition of “begins to exist”, and not simply “exists”]

Time is part of a fabric that includes space and that evolved. Hence, the earliest, subatomic event wasn’t in time. According to scientific cosmology, then, the universe didn’t begin to exist. Time, too, was created with the Big Bang.

[He’s apparently seeing “the universe” as including the timeless realm. I seetlat as outside the universe, whicl consists of the space and time “fabric” that sprang forth]

What kind of proper explanation could this be, though, which somehow accounts for the universe without positing a prior cause? That would be a good question. The theoretical physicist’s likely answer is that instead of positing God, scientific cosmologists posit math. The subatomic fluctuation that broke some initial symmetry in the gravitational singularity was due to an abstract structure corresponding to certain arcane mathematical generalizations that make up the physicist’s theory.

Is that “naturalistic” rigmarole better than just settling for theism? As counterintuitive and perhaps suspicious as the theoretical physicist’s Platonic speculations might be, they are indeed superior to theism in at least one respect: they’re not nakedly naïve in being human-centered personifications. At least the mathematician’s formal structures needn’t be so conveniently like us, making the scientific theory more like a childish outburst.

So “personification“ is necessarily “human centered”. (I acknowledged that the evidence doesn’t necessatily point to “personification”, but to say it is “human centered” is a bit too hard. Human-centeredness will naturally favor a “God” just like us, but the thinking is that our “personhood’ comes from this higher source, not the other way around, as nontheists presume. How are we here as sapient beings if there is no sapience over the universe? Like if we hadn’t come to be, or any other intelliegent life, then what exactly is the material and energy in the universe if there is no one to ‘observe’ it? Even the “uncertainty principle” of mainstream science (think “Schröedinger’s Cat”) says that the position of particles is ‘uncertain’ until they are observed! He even admits this ‘scientific/mathematical” alternative sounds convoluted (i.e. “rigamarole“!) I can understand up to “singularity“, but what is this “abstract structure” and “arcane generalizations”?

Here, even Dawkins is brought to the point of practically considering “deism”, up from atheism (based on the “fine-tuning” argument from the “cosmological constants” of physics, where his own field was biology), but still makes the point that this does not prove the specific God, known through Jesus Christ and all the Biblical teachings.

The uncertain world of in-practice “imagination”

As an extraverted iNtuitive (N+P), I can imagine something being true, and even try it on (and see where things fit together in it and identify a most like “truest” hypothesis), but that will not provide the practical incentive to have hope real enough to change my attitude towards what I face in this world everyday. And then I look at others around me who profess to have this solid faith or relationship with God, and when they put it into practice and then explain the process, it sounds like someone imagining something and then trying to live accordingly (often very imperfectly, admittedly!) And let’s not forget the “how prayer works” example, above! It’s basically doing something, and then imagining God really doing it!
It parallels the secular counsel “look at yourself in the mirror and believe in yourself and say you can, and then do it” (which a lot of the Christian teaching now differs little from; only it’s pray and meditate on scripture). Also, the popular “Law of Attraction”. It’s been summed up as “fake it till you make it!” (That’s bad enough in the world, but a real God is not something that should be “faked”!

This “relationship” seems to be a mechanical routine of prayer and devotion, and then memorizing and using select verses everytime a painful situation or negative thought or feeling comes up, and then being thankful about other things, beginning with salvation itself. This then is what gradually is supposed to change our attitude to pain and difficulty. We would then react differently, and behave better, and hold this up as God changing things (when it actually parallels “Cognitive Behavior Therapy”), and also as the fruits of salvation (which then implies judgment for those not bearing these fruits).

Current “reality” is ‘guaranteed’; any future good (in this life or afterward) is not; but only “imagined” or “hoped” for. This may sound “blasphemous”, but just think of what you’re actually doing when “accessing” the “spiritual” realm: picturing something in your mind that you have never actually seen!
We’re told to “just pray about it”, but then, we can’t stay there; we’ll always have to eventually get up from the prayer and continue to go out and face the “real world”! Philip Yancey speaks of the things we “hope” for in this life  (such as justice, or even children’s TV and fairytales), and then adds “In real life, a mother caught in a war zone holds her infant son tight against her breast, pats his head, and whispers, illogically, ‘It will be all right’, even as the percussive blasts grow closer”. (Disappointment With God p101)

For example, this article argues that “Gratitude is great until it’s toxic”:

View at Medium.com

https://medium.com/@c-james-horton/you-should-practice-ingratitude-12e16c3912c1

“Universal gratitude [as opposed to “basic gratitutde”, where you’re thankful to a tangible “giver”] requires an act of imagination. The trick, as the name suggests, is to ‘expand’ your understanding of gratitude so that you imagine the ‘giver’ as a nonspecific entity — the universe, or God, or the world — instead of a specific person.” [emph. added]

“Gratitude” often accompanies teaching on “faith”, as basically a necessary part of faith.

Appealing to the afterlife just isn’t VERIFIED as tangible “life” (with its need of survival) is. Philip Yancey has said: “I have learned that faith means trusting in advance what will only make sense in reverse.” But what I’m feeling is that justice (and peace) in some hereafter doesn’t seem to be worth it when it was needed here!

Where natural “random” occurrences are what we know and have framed our life around (including good things, such as love, etc.), the afterlife “compensations” in comparison sound artificial. Much of what people have surmised (from what they try to extract from scripture) is a copy of this world with everything modified to be pleasant. On one hand, I wish for that, but fear it would become boring (think the Twilight Zone episode “A Nice Place To Visit”, where such an afterlife actually turned out to be “the other place”), or evoke the horrors of this world (since there is no separating anything from the larger context of evolution and survival). I realized that in this perfect picture of “The World Tomorrow” (“The Kingdom” or “Heaven”), that is nearly everything we enjoyed here, minus pain, that the whole context of the need of survival is removed, and thus the drive for everything we do here, including pleasure. (Sex is the one pleasure they will acknowledge will have no use there, due to what Christ said to the Sadducees in Matthew 22:30).

It’s hard to look forward to something completely undefined (even if we define it as something as vague and nondescript as “being with Jesus”. Jesus Himself is only believed in “by faith”, and even if we argue to His historicity, He’s not tangibly with us here today. So it’s hard to even place Him in this new “life”. —It’s even hard to place Him in this life, when they say He’s to be our “joy”, etc.) It all comes off more as a hypothesis, which I can easily take on, but when it’s supposed to “transform” your life, and you’re only given platitudes and mechanical “growth” steps, the hypothesis wears thin. (And while “Jesus” can only be perceived by “faith”, and if you “vigorouly seek Him” regardless, “Satan” is often potrayed as easily accessible and clearly “present” in many situations).

People (from evangelicals like Phil Yancey, to sectarian groups like Adventism, Armstrongism, and Jehovah’s Witnesses) have fancied up the afterlife as the fulfillment of everything good we wished for on earth (often citing God’s “restoration” of everything He allowed to be taken from Job), but then along comes Reformed Baptist E S Williams (from widely respected leader Charles Spurgeon’s “Metropolitan Tabernacle”; a noxious mixture of both Reformed theology and “old-line” Baptist “fundamentalism”), who says all of this is “fleshy” and “man-centered”. I guess, Heaven is supposed to be about worshipping God, and Him being “glorified”. So he probably wants to go back to the old stereotypical portrayal of Heaven as just floating around, plucking harps (based on scenes portrayed in Revelation). Whatever joys or “bliss” we do experience, is the “gratitude” in escaping the “Hell” (we “deserved”; with the viewing of the eternal torments of the lost highlighting this. Yes, many in this circle believe this viewing is part of what they “glorify God” for! We can challenge the abject coldness of this, but then our perspective is “corrupted by sin”, and only the elect; —or the nonelect only when forced to “bend the knee and confess” when already in Hell, can see this as “just”). Or, “joy ‘in Him‘” (which they also pitch as the answer to suffering in this life, but is not squared away with the fact that He is unseen now). Hell is clearly and graphically portrayed, but when it comes to “being with Jesus”, nothing is clear. The whole motivation and expected “joy” of salvation can only be tied up in escaping Hell, then, for that’s the only thing that can be understood!

Nobody answers them. Those they denounce as “compromising“ and watering down the faith still respect them for their solid “stand” (in contrast to the modern “world”).

So suppose this is true? Nothing that happens to us now really matters, then. Justice is about God; not us. (Though scriptures on “Heaven” appeal to us, such as receiving “crowns”. We don’t even know what this really means). Christians like this speak of “justice” and God’s “offended Holiness”, but don’t seem to think He would care about many of the slights people suffer. Particularly when they take the “rugged individualist” stance and speak down to “victim culture“ (like in their frequent denunciations of “psychotherapy”, even in the modern church, as well as liberal-style “social justice”). To them, it seems He only cares about attacks against “Christianity” and “Christian values”.
The “unseen” nature of all of this only serves to leave this all “up in the air”. Who’s right? They all are appealing to the same Bible!

The afterlife, being completely unknown; whatever compensation for this life occurs in an unknown context; basically a whole different timeline from this one (which continues after each person dies), that we cannot place in our familiar experience in order to draw real hope from it. (This timeline is essentially “superior“ to the other one, in that it is “real” and current, while the other one is basically only “imagined” and wishful. From the viewpoint of this timeline, the other one is unreal, but from the viewpoint of the other one, where we are being ‘rewarded’ or ‘punished’ for what we’ve done in this one, this one is obviously still “real”).

On the secular side, you have this: https://annamercury.medium.com/how-and-why-to-change-your-beliefs-d396ad73cd5c It points out:

The power of belief is not necessarily that it can change what happens to us— though in influencing our behavior, it can — but that it changes how we feel about what happens. It is, theoretically at least, possible to come to a state of such intense and unshakeable positive focus that literally anything could happen and you would still experience perfect contentment. This state is commonly called “Enlightenment.”

Most of us will likely not achieve, or even actively seek, Enlightenment. What remains important, for all of us, no matter what kind of relationship we want to have with our emotional experience, is to remember that our emotions are responses to our thoughts and beliefs.

It is impossible for an emotion to arise directly in response to an event. Emotions happen when we interpret events and physiological responses to mean certain things. How we interpret is determined by what we believe.

Here’s another one I just found:

View at Medium.com

Again, the parallel to religious teaching is clearly present, as what’s called “faith” is often expressed in terms of changing our perspectives like that; particularly the part about “contentment“!

The need to “concretize” the objects of faith

These issues regarding God can be described in terms of a matter of an internal or external reality. Many of us find “faith” difficult, because God no longer appears visibly to prove Himself. What’s left then is an internal belief, though many won’t admit it is only internal. They all seek some externalization in some way.

•To the Catholics, the iconography and the lofty design of the cathedrals and sacraments are all described as a “sensory” experience; and the leadership (“Vicar of Christ”) would also go along with it.
•To Charismatics, tongues (and supposed healings among many), is the external manifestation of God.
•To the fundamentalists, it’s the rules, moralism, the “faith of our fathers”, nationalism, preaching, the text of scripture as a wrangling point of doctrine, and creationist interpretations of science.
•Sects and cults use a similar approach to fundamentalism, only with some key doctrines changed, and usually tighter authority.
•To new-evangelicals, it seems to be doing whatever it takes to keep their faith “relevant” to the modern world, leading to a combination of a lot of these things, defecting to one of the other groups, or ecumenicalism.
•Reformed groups will vary in the above approaches

All will generally agree on the philosophy I was describing above, of “process” sanctification, and God making us “grow” through trials. All internal concepts made by interpretations of external occurrences!

On the total opposite side of the spectrum, looking at the lives of some queer folk; rather than the totally immoral “God-haters” portrayed by Christians, most have retained their faith (varying from a more “cultural“ secular expression, to some pretty devout church-going believers). I see them, and admire their faith, and bravery in it, despite their relationship practices being basically regarded (or at least treated) as the worst possible violation of the divine Lawor violation of even the “divine essence” itself. (Which is based on the failure to understand fully the full ramifications of the purpose and change of the two scriptural covenants, in addition to the contexts of some key scriptures; and again, the appeal to “the power of the Spirit” to “fix” the problem, unless one wants to “hold on to their sin” too much. And the people projecting their own fears and/or hangups onto God and the queer people themselves. Many of them are actually the ones “suffering” “losing homes, families”, etc. as Christ warned his followers, while those “Christian” authority figures doing this to them are actually behaving just like the enemies of Christ in scripture were! — even for the same stated reasons! [i.e. “defending the household/faith/nation from error”; upholding God’s Law, etc]).
One of the cutest things I’ve seen is the TikTok video of young queer Atlanta stage actress Charity Irby, running across a field praying out loud to God to send her some black friends (who then begin coming from behind the trees greeting her, and everyone’s so happy). I’m sure this is not totally serious, but it just portrays such an innocent appeal to God as the Giver of good things. (And not judging by the old Law, as many religionists insist. It makes me truly hope the total Grace doctrine is true).

This sort of sentiment is what some of the more moderate believers would say is a way to see God in the tangible world. But still, in light of the way life often goes, plus the much louder voices of condemnation, it often ends up feeleing it would be “too good to be true”.

“Objective truth” in our “subjective” egos, and the manipulation of “tough talk”

Man so wants an external experience of God (especially when having to justify the “duty faith” interpretation of Rom. 1), and many of these groups will go as far as to put down an “internal” focus as “subjective”, and thus worship of man; yet faith is ultimately internal (since most will admit or even insist special revelation has ceased); however, their ways of trying to externalize their faith end up seeming contrived, mechanical or exaggerated, being based on bending certain passages of scripture where something they are basing their practice on is mentioned, or supposedly alluded to.

So it’s just difficult wading through this religious sea, trying to find something tangible to hold onto as an acknowledgement from God.

I often feel I’m not supposed to argue for my rights, because I feel totally nonobjective (realize it’s just the ego), and I just get more and more subjective as I try to fight back with my “reason”, and yet feeling I’m probably still wrong.
So if there’s something I “want to believe”, deep in my heart feels as if it’s just my own mind, and probably won’t be real, and if there’s something I don’t want to believe (and yet others are teaching confidently) and am fighting against, then it probably IS true. So the conscience pulls me in totally opposite ways(i.e. morally strict theism and existentially strict non-theism), and can’t be relied on at all.

Confident speaking gives a feeling of absolute certainty in the middle of all of this, which is appealing in a world of uncertainty, yet the problem is that the ones who speak the most confidently are often those pushing oppressive systems of control we have already seen causes more problems than it solves. (Or other “tough teaching”; even in the secular world).
(Typologically, introverted Thinking [Ti] questions religious hypotheses, extraverted iNtuition [Ne] says anything is possible, and so by itself cannot ground consciousness upon anything, and introverted Sensing [Si] sees no predcedent of things taught by religion. –That is, inasmuch as it is taking a back seat to Ne; where Si as a “preferred” function is very common in religion, because it is a real world institution that provides the familiarity Si drives off of. This leaves extraverted Feeling [Fe] to seek “community” in a sociopolitical landscape — found to be divided into a “historic Christianity” that believes in rules and control, and a “secular” world that sees religion as unscientific and thus unreal (the [for me] “shadow” extraverted Thinking perspective); or at best, just some cultural assumption taken for granted. The former then become the biggest arguers of “scripture”, which is the only tangible evidence of the religious view (yet they themselves cannot even agree on what it really teaches in many areas), and the latter largely ignores the scriptural debate for one reason or another. (Either not believing in it, or believing platitudes such as “love” or “the Golden Rule” [reflecting the introverted Feeling perspective] extracted from select scriptures automatically answer them. A hybrid view, such as perhaps Philip Yancey’s version of evangelicalism, takes a totally softer “grace” position, but then naturally will likewise not be big on arguing doctrine against tougher more conservative positions).
Hence, I still feel a bit jealous of those who can take Him for granted, without all of the questions and uncertainty.

[People finding later in life altruism as ‘fulfilment’, and thus the answer are likely extraverted Thinking types developing their tertiary or inferior introverted Feeling]

Instinct pulls us to have wants that we in the end realize don’t (in their own right) mean as much as we’ve made them out to be, and in both religious and naturalistic views, won’t be satisfied in any “afterlife“ existence (naturalism assumes there will be “nothing” after this, while the religious afterlife is really totally undefined).
It’s like if I was where I am now when I was young, and people told me “that’s life”, or “it won’t matter in Heaven”, I would have been able to better receive it. (Particularly with the introverted Thinking perspective that needs to determine ‘truth’ on one’s own). Instead, life has forced you to come to the realization that the tough-talkers were right about it being “life”. But then where does that leave God? (Again, the Christian tough-talkers will fill it in as God giving us pain because of “sin”, and then you’re supposed to realtize “God is God”, but “life” is the one that has immediate empirical verification). It’s like instinct drives us through all of these painful, largely futile wants, and then releases us from them when the universe is almost done with us).

I end up stuck between the most “hardest“ extremes of the two sides:
The “orthodox” position is true, and where God made salvation “hard” for the reasons usually claimed (“sin”, etc. along with the whole Calvinist setup being the most consistent and likely view).
None of it is true, and there’s probably nothing after this.

The latter ends up having the edge, due to the lack of real evidence of the former, who on one hand say “it’s by faith”, but then must turn to such shabby arguments as “conscience” or “special revelation“ (but skewed by ‘presuppositional’ tautologies). But then you can’t really disprove the conscience argument. The more you deny, the more you prove the other person’s point. So in that way, that side has an edge.

Religion is full of tough talking ‘warners’ about death, and usually dismissed by the world and moderate religion, but seldom answered scripturally. No matter how “strict” a path you follow, someone more strict will come along and acuse you of “compromising”. An evangelical will condemn my criticisms of futurist “duty faith” as too “universalistic”, and defense of LGBT as “liberal”, and it’s like I should re-adopt their beliefs. But when I did agree with them on those positions, I saw the IFB’s and Lordshippers accusing us of stuff like not being “holy”. I could give into the Lordshippers and become one of them, but the IFB’s will still say our music and worship are too “modern”, and we’re not standing against the Catholics enough. If I become an IFB, the Lordshippers and other Calvinists will say I believe in a “weak god that depends on man” in salvation. So I can join some group that combines elements of both (like Spurgeon’s “Reformed Baptist” church or even “Puritans” like Edwards), but now all I have done is take the “lowest common denominator” of “toughness”, and it’s no longer any “Good News”.
I can read scripture and come to my own conclusions, but realize I may not be objective about it
The world sends mixed messages, with some telling me to just “look within”, and others saying essentially to follow established external authority (such as the strictest forms of religion), and some even saying a mixture of both (“special revelation“ and “conscience”/“faith“ arguments).
So “conscience” is tossed to and fro, feeling a tug from the strict messages, and yet there is always someone stricter demanding more rigorous adherence, and the conscience is just as much pulled in that direction, with the emotions resistant. The way things are set up, it’s those with the “tough“ message who are the strongest and most aggressive arguers, while the less strict are by nature more passive. So the tough, strict talkers are very convincing. (This creates what can be called a “punching downward” effect). The only defense against them:
The intellect tugs the other way, seeing all of this as having no proof; but just manipulating the conscience, and yet its own contribution can make anything “truth”, which it then doubts as likely “really“ true, anyway.

“Inner” vs “Outer” revelation

The article “Needs are Only a State of Being” https://link.medium.com/qRGaOkH2Jzb points out how our sense of “needs”get screwed up:

The mind trips us up when we equate the experience of satisfaction with our concepts of what satisfaction ought to look like.

The thing is, when we experience any kind of lack, our bodies are seeking the opposite of that lack. When we experience cold, we are seeking warmth. When we experience hunger, we are seeking satiation. It isn’t just physical needs, either. When we experience isolation, we are seeking connection. When we experience shame, we are seeking acceptance and approval. When we experience fear, we are seeking safety.

But our needs are only ever states of being.

The problem arises because many of our needs don’t get experienced in their purest form. We often experience dissatisfaction in a particular situation, and so we conceptualize solutions that pertain to that situation. For example, we feel disrespected at work, and so we imagine the only way to experience “being respected” is to triumph at work.

Except our subconscious mind, and our body, still know the truth: what we need is to experience feeling respected. This leads to a kind of transference, in which we seek to meet that need through unrelated pathways. For example, feeling disrespected at work leads us to take out our need to feel respected on our partners or families.

This is another incredible adaptation of the mind: it can find substitute experiences to meet an unmet need that may have nothing to do with the situation that brought us the initial experience of lack.

When we aren’t aware that we’re doing this, we can wind up taking harmful actions in an effort to meet our unmet needs. Drawing from our current example, think of the classic story of a man who feels belittled at work, so he goes home and belittles his children, who then bully their classmates at school in an effort to make up for their experience of lacking respect.

Harmful cycles like this typically arise when we seek to meet our needs unconsciously.

We’re left to fend for our own in this violent world of uncertainty, and all we’re offered is platitudes of inner ‘peace’ that are the same as other religions and philosophies, and don’t even match the contexts of the scriptures they are keyed into (e.g. the first century Christians being persecuted for the faith, and promised “rewards”, and their persecutors punished) and this is to be our “hope” that makes it all bearable.

In both the secular and religious view, we’re supposed to just “look within” (to “divine power” or “inner strength”) to cope with “life, as it is”, but there is really nothing within us (or at least, as I can experience, within me), except our instincts, which are what are clashing with “life as is“ to begin with. Hence the “struggle” people practicing this attest to, with many not being able to overcome (at least, completely). It is just a mental pacifier, for lack of any other solution, as well as being a big selling tool for those who market “self-help” or “spiritual growth”. (Of course, some problems such as PSTD might be helped by these methods, but that will still depend on other factors in the person’s past or present life).

While all of this uncertainty leads to demanding things in the here and now, their lasting is still not certain. The [‘spiritual’] message I have gotten in a fear of fire or other destruction (from growing up seeing good neighborhoods go down) is that no matter how nice things seem, it is never ‘safe’ in this current world to become too attached, because anything can happen at almost any time. (I was always greatly troubled by the idea of the destruction of things I thought were ‘cool’ or unique).

We thus have a fear of death, and the destruction of our identity, from death’s unknown nature.

Here, I have outlined what causes what we call “pain and suffering:

•The energy of the universe pushes matter to be constantly changing.

•Living beings need the matter they depend on (bodies, shelter, etc.), to stay in their current form, to sustain the living state (i.e. “survival”)

•This is what makes the universe what we call “violent”, and life “difficult”, as we are essentially going against nature in trying to maintain these temporary particular, specific forms as they are tugged on by forces such as gravity and oxidation (i.e. air, water and fire damage alike).

•Within this context, instincts (both survival and reproductive) drive us and every other living creature to act “by any means necessary”, and far outshine conscience, and especially “revelation”.

•As part of this, nature “rewards” those who master fulfilling the instinctual demands the best. The reward is “survival” (and flourishment) itself!
°(Even conservative Christians acknowledge this whenever they promote “rugged individualism” and defend systems like capitalism, and appeal to concepts like “bootstraps” and “delayed gratification”).

On the other hand, I would say “good” is a judgment of a situation as favorable according to our emotional affect, which is from our limbic survival instinct filtered through the cortex which cognitively interprets the data.
So the common question of “why evil?” is basically why we had to develop cognitive interpretation of “good“ (with “evil” as its lack) to begin with. Naturalism will just say it’s an evolutionary anomaly, while [biblical] religion will say it’s a divine design marred by a “Fall“, and the only possible rationalization for that will (at least, eventually) be a theodicy.

So we’re not supposed to become attached to the things in the world, since they’re so temporary, but the transcendant world remains so elusive and totally “neither here nor there”, and subject to anyone’s hypothesis.

Conclusion: faith as “trust”

I’ve long said that belief in an invisible God is a very powerful tool, which can potentially be dangerous in the wrong hands, since it holds great emotional sway and fear over many, yet cannot be readily proven or disproven (sort of parallels the power wielded by early men who discovered fire). It should be used with great caution, humility and love; knowing our human tendency to control others. So we are not to use it to silence people about the “unsearchable counsel of God” when we have been making extrabiblical speculations on what He is doing all along!
“Trusting God” ultimately winds up meaning trusting men, when they are the ones we are receiving it most clearly from, and then, teachers use their own interpretations of His promises, and personal experiences (and even revelation) read into them to instruct people on the “walk of faith”.

In the end, as stated earlier, the word translated “faith” (pistis) means “trust”, and that’s all I can do. I could listen to all the tough talking voices out there and out of pure fear, feign some unwavering adherance to some doctrinal system, but that really isn’t “faith”, and when I had gone that way before, it sure didn’t feel like real “faith”. (To say “Trust is the substance of things hoped for” [Heb.11:1] makes more sense than the tautological way it is usually treated, essentially, as “hope is the substance of things hoped for”, or “belief in the unknown is the substance of thigns hoped for”!)
I just find myself saying I hope it’s true!
So I can discuss what I believe the Biblical “gospel” teaching is, which is Grace,, but I don’t pretend to be able to “prove” it, to myself or anyone else. Skeptics will just take that as proving against it, and this is truly disconcerting. Then, many “believers” will say this is “agnosticism”, or “trying to sit on the fence”. Calvinists will add “faith” being a “gift” witheld from many, and yet the people still “held responsible” for this. This confusing pit of mny oppopsing voices is the background through which true “trust” in divine Grace (and divine existence to begin with) is needed.

“Historic Orthodox Christianity” (and “spiritual change”). The most appealed to authorities in conservative Christian debate

There needs to be a “biblical conservative” response to religio-political conservativism (especially “fundamentalism”)

They have long claimed to be “biblical”, and that any opposition to them is “anti-Bible”

Even in the Civil Rights era, the segregation-holding religious conservatives were allowed to turn the issue into one of “fidelity” to “the Bible”. It was basically the same as with evolution. You either take the Genesis “literally”, and believe in both the young earth 7 day Creation, AND the “curse” of Ham, or you reject the Bible, and follow the “ungodly world” views of natural descent, and “egalitarianism”. When nearly the only opposition to either doctrine took the latter view, it “proved” to them their hypothesis that they were believing “truths” from God, that mankind was naturally in rebellion against.

It seems no one really came out and directly challenged whether their readings of scripture (such as the “curse of Ham”) were truly scriptural.

It was just easier to reject scripture altogether, or at least minimize such portions of it (which were like virtual “admissions” that they were being properly interpreted in maintaining racism). So neither side saw any difference between Creationism and racism. They were allowed to “stand or fall together”; being from the same “Genesis”. People allowed racism to be portrayed as “based on a literal reading of the Bible”, and then when they wanted to question Creationism, which really is based on a “literal” reading, the fundamentalists could lump both issues together under the banner of “believing the Bible”, and then later use that to minimize the race issue, where they really had absolutely no ground to stand on, scripturally, and focus on creationism, where they did have a much stronger scriptural case.

Most criticisms of conservative Christianity have boiled down to them being “meanspirited” and “judgmental”, which they only respond with what they call “hard truths”, and thus further confirms to them that they are the ones who hold the “truth” (and are being “persecuted” for it).

In the race area, most mainstream “fundamentalists” today will profess to reject racism (“colorblindness”; and even go as far as to blame it on evolutionism now!), yet they quickly deflect by denouncing “wokeism”, “activism”, etc. and tag it all as “Marxist”. Then, they will claim the purpose of these movements is “redistribute” the wealth of the nation (and some supposedly “hard working” class), to these people who “refuse to work” (playing off of the same old racial stereotypes used ever since slavery, to justify that system and every other form of discrimination since).

The ultimate taboo obsession

The new “discrimination” issue that has risen to the forefront today is homosexuality. Unlike race, where they have buried the old sentiments behind the “colorblind” tactics, here, they (as we would expect) are firmly, openly standing their ground, and condemning not just the homosexuals themselves, but anyone who supports, or even does not condemn them hard enough.

This stems from an inordinate obsession the Church has had with sexuality (gay or straight), ever since, at least Augustine! Homosexuality was the last taboo; the ultimate “sin” to them (since they assumed it was based not just on “lust”, but on lust driving people to “unnatural” behavior), and while they’ve had to bend on race and other issues (grudgingly), this last area must be just “too much, already”!

Unlike the race issue of generations ago, this current generation has risen up to challenge the “scriptural” arguments in this area more.
However, the conservatives, with their “conspiracy against Biblical authority” narrative by now solidly entrenched and firmly in place (not having been answered well by those previous generations), just lump it in with “liberal readings of scripture”.

Pro-LGBT arguments have focused on the “eunuchs” Christ mentioned, the “arsenkoites” in the NT, and that perhaps even the original command of Leviticus may have been referring to something else (temple prostitutes and pederasty, etc). They do make good points in some of these areas, regarding the original Hebrew and Greek words, though I still find some of the conclusions farfetched. Some have even turned to David and other figures and have tried to say they implied homosexual relations. These I greatly question, and all the conservatives have to do is lump it into the “homosexual agenda” of “making everything gay”, without even really disproving them.

Another common defense is that Christians “make some sins worse than others”, which has been true, but to apply it to this issue is then basically an “admission” that you’re “sinning” and willfully continuing it —based on the premise that “others sin too”, which no one will accept as an “excuse”.

The Biblical, “Gospel” answer to this is that any condemnation of homosexuality was part of the Law (just as many other OT practices the Church now rejects).
When the conservatives scream against the dismissal of the Law and hurl out terms such as “antinomianism”, we must keep reminding them that they do not follow the Law either, and have decided for themselves which parts of it are still in effect or have been abrogated. (they are basically what are called “neonomians”).
And even with parts of the Law being maintained in the NT, the NT period is really an “overlap” of covenants, and the “Blessed Hope” they were all waiting for was the complete end of the condemnation of the “old age[“world”]” of the Law, which would occur in their lifetimes (Matt.16:28). This will be the hardest point to sell, since most Christians believe the “end of the age” is still future, and so the default condemnation and need to get “covered” continues indefinitely (whether by “faith”, “works”, “faith plus works”, “faith” defined as “works”, “proven by “works”, or minus works, with just “belief” as the “duty”, or just plain “unconditional election” of only some, with or without works, as all the various groups argue).

One evidence of this is that Romans 2:7-10 appears to teach salvation by works, and was used throughout Church history to teach that (until Protestantism came up with “Faith Alone”; and cults still use it that way, of course), but the context is those under the Law using it on others, but violating it themselves!

A big outcry erupted when President Obama bathed the White House in the “Pride” rainbow colors, around the time same sex marriage was legalized across the nation. Christians roared that this was an “in God’s face” mockery of the rainbow He gave Noah as part of His “promise” not to punish the earth with a flood again. For one, I don’t even think whoever created the Pride rainbow was even thinking of the Noah story. The colors represented other things. (But of course, Christians will surmise some hidden conspiracy, which may not have even been conscious).

But look at it this way; the Law (Leviticus, etc.) may have condemned homosexual acts, but the “rainbow” of Noah, being about God’s promise to mankind (Grace), foreshadowed the removal of condemnation, which was by the Law (and which still had some authority over the people in NT times, and was finally removed in AD70, though not recognized by the later Church, which still has mankind under the condemnation of the Law until some future event).
Their response to this will be “the rainbow was about God’s grace, not ‘license to disobey’!” But this continues the mistake of focusing the Gospel on behavior, and so thinking Grace is just a cleaning of the slate so that you can get it right next time (now, with God’s “help”), and of course, homosexuals don’t want to change at all, and hence, “taking God’s rainbow and throwing it back in His face” (or however they put it). But Grace marks the departure from the method of trying to control behavior through fear of punishment. By arguing about the rainbow, conservatives are still confusing Grace and the works of the Law.

Here is one site’s response to the issue, which sums up their whole approach
https://changedmovement.com/changed-on-change:

.

Becoming a follower of Jesus includes honoring God’s vision for sexual relationships, whether through opposite sex marriage or in a life of sexual integrity through singleness. In Mark 10, Jesus reveals how He thought about human sexuality:

“…from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” Mark 10:6-9 NASB

Within Jesus’s words “God made them male and female… two” are the Biblical mandate for sexual identity. No matter where we identify ourselves within the LGBTQ spectrum, before God we are none of these. He sees us as we are—the way He made us as a man or woman. Because God knows us as we truly are, we trust Him to renew our minds and our understanding of ourselves so that we may fully enjoy what He placed within us. Our identity as God’s sons and daughters enables us to fully belong within His family. We no longer need to identify ourselves by cultural labels.

In this passage, Jesus points to creation itself—not the Torah law—to understand marriage. He discloses that sexuality, expressed within a covenant only between a man and woman, is a vital part of human creation that uniquely reflects the Divine Image. This sexual union reflects something of God’s identity and personality, and hints at the nature of the Trinity. Marriage is not merely a “Law” or social construct. The theme of marriage is used throughout the Bible to help us understand God’s desire for an unbroken and purehearted relationship with humanity, and is highlighted at “the beginning” to demonstrate God’s particular care and concern about our sexuality.

The binary division of the sexes and the intimacy of “two” are vital parts of God’s message to us. By these, humanity reflects God in the miracle of creating human life. This is a profound mystery of reciprocal communion and fellowship with God. Christopher West points out in Our Bodies Tell God’s Story that men and women are complete, independent entities physically in every way except one: our sexuality. A woman cannot bear children by herself, apart from the reproductive system of a man, just as a man cannot bear children apart from the womb of a woman. They must have each other to be fully expressed.

CHANGED does not believe that sexual union between two people of the same sex adequately reflects the identity and purposes of God in humanity. Such a view actually distorts our understanding of God.

Human sexuality provides a shadow of understanding of God’s intent for intimate, joyful, and unbroken relationship with humanity. Therefore, Jesus’ mission to redeem our identity as His image bearers includes restoring all facets of our lives through the power of the Holy Spirit. To embody God, we must be reconciled to our physical and emotional maleness and femaleness, protecting sexual intercourse for marriages that express Jesus’ self-sacrificial and unconditional love.

They have here gone to great lengths to universalize binary gender, and tie it to the “nature of God”. (Notice, the jab at the notion of the commands being from the “Torah law”). This permanently fixed Him to our earthly existence. It leads right to the old argument of fundamentalists that there cannot be life elsewhere in the universe, because we, and we alone are “in the image of God”. The new-evangelicals have dropped that part of it, but are still holding onto this related view. On one hand, they claim this creation is totally corrupted, and God needs to come and destroy it, and recreate it from scratch, —and with no sex. But for now, that one part of our existence is everything to Him!

You can see here how Augustine and the Church after him basically become right on everything; the obsessive focus on sex. You can conquer and kill whole nations of other people, and it’s not only OK, but God is likely the one who sanctioned it! That doesn’t “violate His nature”! They were “godly”; compared to today! But just as long as the society as a whole is sexually “pure”, or at least “modest”. Then, to throw the Trinity in there is a further attempt to tie it to the “eternal submission of the Father to the Son”, but this actually eternalizes the “subordination” of the Son, in an ontological fashion (rather than simply “economical”, which was the pre-Augustinian position), which was at that same time in Church history considered a total heresy that denied the Son’s full equality (similar to the Arians, but just moving the “generation” of the Son from Creation, back to past eternity! It is still an unequal division within the eternal Godhead!) We already saw this idea in the organization that produced the big evangelicalism-wide Statement on homosexuality.

They on one hand will say God has no gender, but of course, in the past, it was generally taken for granted that “He” was male; the pronoun is male, for crying out loud, and we still use it, and those who represented Him in art generally drew an old man.
Now, more modern theologians have adopted a “God’s nature includes both male and female elements” view, with such scriptural portrayals as a mother hen, etc. which are generally also used by more liberal viewpoints as well (including those who want to address God as a “Her”), and you would think that would be good, for the modern cause of feminism; but we can see here where this will be used against nonbinary sexual identities and nonhetero orientations (though technically, it could itself be considered a nonbinary identity, as I’ve seen a few articles claim!)

These two arguments (the “spiritual change” concept, and the “God’s nature” argument) are the leading, assumedly ultimate, irrefutable cases they have come up with, and what need to be addressed in a more biblical, theological response.

My first argument is that Christ’s affirmation of “male and female” in marriage indicating we have to live that out in our sex lives is an assumption, and not a “biblical statement“.
But this is what “historic orthodoxy” always does; as can be seen in claiming the later creedal languange of the Trinity, is a “biblical statement”. It’s something the Church put together later, in opposition to other teachings, and then read it back into select scripture statements which were admitted to not be directly “teaching” it, but rather “hinting” it. (Though some, as we see, are ironically willing to compromise even that doctrine in this issue!) This is the same with an official change to Sunday, formally paid leaders, Catholic “oral apostolic traditions” (which include those things), etc. And the IFB’s assertions about what constitutes godly or “ungodly” music. Or Campbellists’ and Primitive Baptists’ “regulative principle” on the use of instruments in the church altogether!

When it’s all put together, this then adds up to scripture “clearly teaching” it. No other possible interpretations are allowed. (In Jungian type theory, this is by a perception process called “introverted iNtuition”. You take disparate bits of information, and “just know” it comes together in a particular, set way. This will even seem like divine revelation and be very “universalistic”, since it’s not really based on the tangible evidence. Some have said “inferential doctrine is just as valid as clear statements”. Then, a judgment process called “extraverted Thinking” appeals to established external authority such as “historic consensus of the Church” as determining “truthfulness”).

I also offer celibacy (which we see they affirm) as technically violating this “divine pattern”. But of course, since that is allowed and even somewhat encouraged for some in scripture, it will be seen as a legitimate exception (and especially since it’s one where there is presumably no sexual pleasure involved). But this still contradicts the arguments, above, of “the intimacy of ‘two’ are vital parts of God’s message to us. By these, humanity reflects God in the miracle of creating human life”. People who frowned on celibacy (such as ancient Israelites) could then say that forces a different interpretation of the scriptures mentioning celibacy, or reject them as scripture to begin with (especially since they were “New Testament” anyway)!

To the double standard of saying the world is corrupted and to be replaced anyway, they will appeal to before the Fall. But this doesn’t change the fact that they, taking from Christ’s message to the Sadducees, believe we will not be exactly like Adam and Eve, including regarding “marriage and giving in marriage”. So then how can that state of humanity be so much to God, what these teachers are making it out to be? (This is the same as the argument of sabbatarians, that the 7th day Sabbath was “God’s memorial of creation”, which they too, as the premier Millennarians, believe He is going to come and destroy it (yet this somehow proves this “memorial” of this creation to be “eternal”); while “historic orthodoxy” claimed the sabbath was supplanted by an “eighth day”; i.e. the first day of the following week, as pointing to a new creation. Neither group (fully united on homosexuality) sees the inconsistency of their arguments.

But what I’ve suggested is more an argument of what scripture does not say, which tends not to seem as strong as positive claims of what it [supposedly] “does” say. So there needs to be more of an addressing on these points, rather than thinking the current answers alone disprove them.

But in any case, the different conservative groups all agree that homosexuality is wrong, from being “unnatural”, and that God will “cure” it “supernaturally”, and if one is not cured, it was really because of their “refusal to give up their sin”. There seems to be such “unity”, on this “historic orthodox” position! Yet, one’s strong stance on homosexuality means nothing if you’re seen as erring somewhere else. This particular ministry likely falls within the “new evangelical” category, and so others like IFB’s will still see them as “compromising” on “modern Bible versions”, and various issues of “separation” and “therapeutic” concepts (especially given they mention stuff like “our past traumas”. You only need to just mention those things to be accused of “psychoheresy” and preaching “other gospels”!) Those who are bigger on getting the Trinity right may condemn them for subordinationism. To Catholics and Eastern Orthodox, they’re all wrong on not following the “one holy catholic church”.

Something is just severely wrong with a Church that across the board appeals to “divine guidance” (i.e. by the Spirit who will “lead you into all truth”), yet is so fractured on important doctrinal issues.
(And “united” only on issues like this, regarding control of other people’s behavior! I dwell on the homosexual issue so long, because this is really where the Church is rising up, to offer what looks like a “united” voice, with the appeal to the “historic” position. But in reality, this unity is totally illusory, and only reflects the “unity” in this case being a “historical” obsession with sexual issues).

The appeal to the Spirit as the ultimate condemnation

The Spirit of God is appealed to as offering people “help” in resisting an otherwise unmitigated pull of nature to instincts such as sex, pleasure and other “sins”. This is now the number one argument against the homosexuals. Even those who completely abstain from the act, and are celibate, or even go as far as to force themselves into a hetero marriage (in the name of “surrender”) are still condemned by some if they testify to “struggle” or a non-hetero “sexual identity”.

I should add at this point that I also see there are actually names for the different levels of LGBTQ position in the issue https://www.gotquestions.org/Side-A-B-X-Y.html: “Side A” is totally affirming, while “Side B” is basically the common modern view that you can hold the identity, but just don’t “indulge” in it. “Side X” would be the “ex-gay” movement. So what I’ve been pointing out is that sides B and even X are still being criticized as “denying the power of the spirit” if they don’t eradicate every inkling of gayness. This is likely by those who would fall under “Side Y”, which focuses on the concept of our “identity”, as the above site does. (This would basically be the [racial] “colorblind” analogue in this issue! The link says “And unlike Side X, Side Y does not strive to make all Christians heterosexual” and thus places it “between” B and X, but apparently don’t realize that hetero is basically the default position in the view; they’re just removing the label. They are clearly more conservative than X, [whom they also condemn as denying the power] and are held by groups such as the IFB’s and I believe, the Lordshippers).
The site also says “It should be said that Side A has no scriptural basis whatsoever”, even though it listed their scriptural arguments and didn’t even refute them there. It adds: “The other Sides have varying degrees of biblical support. It is up to Christians to study, pray, and decide for themselves whether Side B, Side X, Side Y, or somewhere in between, best represents their convictions.” Yet even with this somewhat limited “tolerant” approach, they still accuse each other of being unscriptural; namely the more strict position to the less strict! Side B in particular thinks it is being reasonably “balanced” and “sensible”, but this only garners criticisms of “compromise” from Sides X and Y, but also charges of being “just as homophobic as X and Y” by the LGBTQs themselves! They end up pleasing nobody! The only thing agreed on by sides B, X and Y is calling Side A “unscriptural”!)

The formulaic answer given by those condemning the less strict “sides” is that it’s a “complete denial of the Holy Spirit’s power to change one’s thoughts and desires upon repentance and faith.” This has also been used for every other problem man has had, whether “anger and bitterness”, addictions, and even “all psychological problems” (among the IFB Jay Adams followers), etc.

But being this is generally admitted to be “unfelt”, it is not well defined, or it is expounded as a series of mechanical daily ‘steps’ that will change our behavior and our thoughts (paralleling Cognitive Behavior Therapy, and other disciplines the “unregenerate” world practice, and the conservative Church condemns as “godless humanism” when not expressed in a “biblical” frame and terms. (A related term, “God’s purpose for your life” is likewise not well defined, and usually ends up assumed to be some Church or evangelism related “service”, and for women, may just be being a good wife and mother). Yet another one is “the will of God for your life”, and especially the variant “doing the will of God”. This also is typically generalized to right behavior and spiritual activities).
They tell you this “change” is not “instant”, it’s a “process“, yet first, “upon repentance and faith” sounds instant; and sure enough, they harshly judge people (as not “showing signs” of repentance or faith) as if it were to be instant! (Hence, the condemnation of even Side X, while chastizing Sides A and B for ‘giving up’ on their “new identity” when “just offering prayer or fasting” didn’t work!)

It’s really about fighting against it for the rest of your life (for we deserve the discomfort after all, and it is far better than the “Hell” we really deserve), and “positively confessing” basically (though noncharismatics won’t use this term) “victory”, as if the desire was taken away. That’s what represents the instant “change”! (The “secular humanists” at least admit that such a “process” is all on individual human effort in his own “inner strength”. The Christians say it’s “God’s work”, yet then condemn people for lack of good “choices”. We see here the original Calvinist “God’s sovereignty; man’s accountability” premise, which is still present even in Arminian “free will” theology in areas like this).

This is all based on an assumption that the Gospel (or “salvation history”) is about a “tug of war” between God and Satan, where Satan’s goal is to use behavioral “freedom” or “good feelings” to set man at odds with God. Man’s “fall” then became a state of deliberate animosity towards God, (which God “ordains”, and yet holds “helpless” man “accountable”), God became infinitely angry at man and cursed him with a physical life of deliberate pain (hardships, etc.), and an eternal existence of intense suffering, and “grace” was His making an exception (at least for the eternal pain) of a “chosen” people who would be “fixed” to show good behavor, and be persecuted by everyone else who are God’s “enemies”.

So in this scheme, Satan is seen as using pleasure to lure man against God, and God (and His Spirit) are the accusers, using shame and the Law (and later, “conscience”, and leaders and societies maintaining knowledge of “good and evil” to judge all by) to try to fix man (“or else!”), and the Son was His means of showing “Grace” and “Love” by saving the “elect”.

But in the actual scriptural revelation, the Fall was the taking on of the knowledge of good and evil, and shame was its result, which is what led man to run and hide from God, and God then to have to move to be the one to reconcile with man. Satan was the one who “accused” men with the Law, and deceived those who claimed to be God’s spiritual institutions, not to “softening” down teaching of the Law, but to hype it up against the people (while secretly violating it or its true intents themselves).

The “power” (John 1:12) offered by the Spirit was the ‘right’ to be children of God (Rom.8:16), in the face of these accusations by the corrupt institutions.

The FEAR motivation

The final answer to that is that Jesus said that “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is the fulfillment of the Law, and other scriptures mention love, as opposed to fear.

They will say if you teach unconditional grace, then it becomes making it “OK” to sin; but under this assumption, fear then becomes the only reason to repent, and it doesn’t stop those set on doing something anyway; it just scares less resolved people into compliance.
(Those not scared simply ‘confirm’ the ‘deliberate sin’ premise, so we want the world divided between the scared compliers and the deliberate “rebels”, which supports the binary “us vs them“ thinking of conservative religion).

They claim that removing all fear leads to society running out of control, but this is when we can mention stuff like slavery, colonialism and all the evils of the past, where they HAD that “fear of God”, the tough preaching that swayed everyone, great “revivals”, prayer, public reverence for God, [outward] sexual morality, etc. but society as a whole still decided that these OTHER acts they did to other people didn’t matter. Or, they appealed to scriptures (mainly from the Old Testament, such as “kill the heathens”), and then claimed they were in fact on the side of scripture.

So then, fear must not be what controls sin! It didn’t control it then! (Only certain select behaviors, and even then, rules and restrictions often went way overboard). That in fact was the whole lesson in the Gospel, which the people back then in Bible times missed, and the church afterward followed suit!
It only forces sin to be hidden; selectivized as to what is sin or not, and from there, that which society deems acceptable is even justified with scripture. Those fear-preaching leaders will enjoy the control they have over people’s behavior and lives, but it will not be about REAL righteousness (that is, until later generations rebel against their authority; then they will complain of being under “attack”). So this CONTROL is the real aim here!

Their own beloved historical leaders operated on a theology that contradicts this! Leading Reformer John Calvin said that conversion due to “mercenary affections” (trying to get something from God— a pardon from Hell, rather than coming to Him out of ‘love’ for Him) would not save!
Anyone who has ever received Christ after being warned of Hell or told the benefits of Heaven can fit into this category! Who then can be saved, really?

“Fundamentalist” Arminians and “Lordship” Calvinists alike loudly necessitate this fear method of scaring people into being saved (lamenting “all the modern preachers” who don’t preach like this anymore), but according to the original teaching, if they came in because of being scared/fear, they’re not saved! None of them ever thinks of this when praising the “revivals” that followed the ideal they hold up, of Spurgeon and Edwards’ preaching, after people “clenched their seats” in fear! All that mattered was that the fear motivated them to better behavior, good “works”, and more religious “fervency”, such as increased church attendance, and don’t forget, obedience to the leaders, and voilà; there, you have a great “revival”! Regardless of whatever else the people or society may do). Yet according to Calvin, the people were not saved; but it sure was beneficial in getting people under control!)

It should be clear this teaching is of pure evil, straight from “the enemy” (the spiritual one, that is)! But it seems nobody has even questioned this, including the “contemporary” Christians who are being criticized for turning away from these old standards. Thus, nobody ever tries to refute it (and its associated “sin=deliberate animosity against God” and “Satan=pleasure dealer” foundations) scripturally. It’s just easier to call them “judgmental” and just toss out terms such as “love” without ever expounding it scripturally.

The one sided area of “Repentance”

“Repentance” ended up as the sword (i.e weapon) always used by the more conservative, holding on to and defending old ways. Progressives (including moderates) generally declare the old ways to be too restrictive, or “mean”, “unloving”, etc. and then just proceed to try to change them, in both their own behavior, sneak the new trends into the older institutions, and eventually, when they gain some social power, enforce them through what is now dubbed “cancellation” (censorship). But they have not so strongly come up with more logical arguments; and on the Christian front, more scriptural arguments; or, commands of “repentance”. (Ironically, the conservatives end up going from stereotypically anti-intellectual, to becoming the ones claiming “logical” fact!) That the old ways were not just “mean”, but also morally, and most importantly, scripturally wrong, and (just as much as any “modern”-day sin), needed to be repented of. But that is not apart of their vocabulary. It’s always the more conservative telling them to repent, and them appearing to simply “ignore” it and “do whatever they want”. This just ‘confirms’ to the conservatives that what they were preaching was “the truth” all along, and like with parents (or Biblical “Israel” in the days of the prophets), the “rebellious children” are totally wrong.

With this seeming validation firmly in place, the beliefs become completely grounded, and the liberals and moderates wake up one day to find all their “progress” threatened. (Most glaring example, Roe vs. Wade! Within the conservative Church, I could picture possibly a resurgence of ‘old-line’ thinking, and perhaps ignoring some differences and coming together, now that the “godless world” is ‘really‘ coming against them now, with issues such as homosexuality and more active “wokeness”. Cloud, while criticizing Calvinism, I have already seen somewhere saying he’s “neither Calvinist or Arminian” (so the line is becoming blurred there), and respects leaders like Edwards and Spurgeon, and other “fundamental Baptists” also seem to want to claim them for Arminianism! They also respect Peter Masters, of Spurgeon’s Metropolitan Tablernacle, which is “Reformed Baptist”, and Cloud cites ES Williams, also I believe, from the church, a lot. All Cloud and the other “Arminian revivalist” IFB’s need to do is see “unconditional election” as the cure for all the stuff they condemn in the world and modern church (which would make perfect sense), and that they are still commissioned to preach the Gospel to the world anyway (probably the biggest thing they think they would lose with unconditional election), and they would be totally in sync with the Reformed Baptists, who would only need to perhaps minimize their specific association with Calvin, as the “lordship” Baptists have done. And the Lordshippers and other “New Calvinist”, though still conservative SBC’ers only need to be “consistent” and renounce modern worship music and other things they supposedly “compromized” on, to be in total harmony with Spurgeon’s faith. So we would see a united front emerge among radical religious “conservatives”.

Moderates again ignored the old-liners, and yet the music and worship changes, and spiritual and doctrinal apathy and other trends they condemned have gone further and further seemingly off the deep end. Some observing this may finally see that the old-liners “were right all along”; we “never should have left ‘the old paths’; they were ‘safer ground’ after all” [which is why they still respect, and won’t criticize them now], and even they begin renouncing all the modern trends, and “return” to the old “fundamentalism”, as well. We can see in this article https://medium.com/backyard-theology/the-rise-of-the-viral-hate-preacher-1e898485b261 the increasing appearance of a radicalized form of fundamentalism).

Like looking at Jeff Durbin’s “Dissenter” (dsntr) page and an increasing number of similar ones, you see a lot of harping on “modern evangelicals”, and the common targets, the televangelists (Osteen, Jakes, Myers, etc.) As much as he aims for “dissension”, conspicously absent are groups such as the IFB’s (including the KJVO’s), who denounce his movement; apparently, MacArthur “Lordshippism”, (which still falls within the category of “new-evangelicalism”). You would think they would be on the same page, as they say a lot of the same things, regarding both doctrine and secular affairs. The pages resemble each other, with all the modern “false teachers” listed throughout the page. Both are harshly criticizing evangelical trends, along with Catholics, cults and the world in general, and even the SBC (which to the “world” has traditionally been seen as the ultimate epitome of “fundamentalism”, yet is now being denounced by IFB’s and Lordshippers alike).
Yet the IFB’s still see MacArthur and his circle as “compromising” when it comes to “separation”; just like the rest of the new-evangelicals. Since the IFB’s are not doing the things they see the other groups as doing wrong, they probably figure they are “preaching the truth”, and so are not the problem, and perhaps ultimately, “on their side”. Yes, they are more strict than we are, and “don’t agree” with us, but their strictness is at least better than what all of these others are doing! So just ignore them. I’ve seen articles in CRI finally respond to the Bobgans (the leading IFB Jay Adams “Biblical Counseling” teachers), but seem agree with the simplistic “spiritual help/transformation” principles such as “curing” fear of the dark simply by telling the counselee that “Jesus is the Light”. So of course, CRI and others will not respond to them on that point, which is really the basis of their whole denunciation of “therapy”, and consistent with what the modern church still preaches, regarding the Spirit. (And as I said, that actually is the same thing basically as CBT; which emphasized “changing your thoughts, to change your feelings, and then actions”. Recall, the spiritualized “change one’s thoughts and desires”. In both views, it’s a process of “changing your thoughts” as the start of the “process”, but in the latter view, made “supernatural”, and thus a cudgel against anyone who “struggles” or doesn’t get over something. Hence, the whole “Side A/B/X/Y” judging in the gay issue).

So we end up with the criticism going one way, making the most conservative feel as if they are unrefuted, and in fact, unrefutable. Everyone then “punches downward” to those the less strict, whom they can claim as “less obedient” to “the Word of God”. Only when going after “the cults” (meaning those who err on the Godhead and other similar “historic orthodox” issues), do then they punch upward to the more strict (and then will claim stuff like “faith alone”, even though they essentially deny it when going back to criticizing the less strict body of the mainstream church).

For an example of this apathy I have seen, when I was in an IFCA church for awhile, and once or twice told “evangelical” brethren what the IFB teaching I was exposed to said about their music and worship, they told me “If you’re in that church, submit to them!” (Like they’re trying hard to prove themselves “the bigger person” and be so reverent to “the Church” and its authority, regardless, and to “not judge another man’s servant” (i.e. Rom.14:4) as one once told me. The IFB leaders certainly wouldn’t return the favor. They would never say that to me if I told them about the evangelical and/or charismatic churches I had been involved with. They would tell me, squarely to get out of those churches as they are “false”! I should have told those people, if I did “submit” to them, I wouldn’t be here talking to you friendly, but rather preaching at you, as a “compromiser”!)
To the “new-evangelicals”; either they’re right and you’re wrong (“compromising”, etc. and then why aren’t you “repenting” of this?) or they’re wrong and slandering the Gospel (evangel) as supposedly being represented by you! (And so why aren’t you defending the Gospel, as you do against supposed “outsiders” like the “cults”?)

A lot of tough pronouncements on “THE TRUTH”, but no UNITY!

But it shows, that no matter how “strict” a path you follow, someone more strict will come along and acuse you of “compromising”. An evangelical will condemn my criticisms of futurist “duty faith” as too “universalistic”, and defense of LGBT as “liberal”, and it’s like I should re-adopt their beliefs. But when I did agree with them on those positions, I saw the IFB’s and Lordshippers accusing us of stuff like not being “holy”. I could give into the Lordshippers and become one of them, but the IFB’s will still say our music and worship are too “modern”, and we’re not standing against the Catholics enough. If I become an IFB, the Lordshippers and other Calvinists will say I believe in a “weak god that depends on man” in salvation. So I can join some group that combines elements of both (like Spurgeon’s “Reformed Baptist” church or even “Puritans” like Edwards), but now all I have done is take the “lowest common denominator” of “toughness”, and it’s no longer any “Good News”.
For all the talk of “orthodoxy”, there is just no unity; only a bunch of men trying to sell their views and control others through tough talk. (Just like in the larger secular world). For every group you listen to and obey, there’s always another one saying it’s not enough!

They’ll all brush off using others as an “excuse”, and tell me to “read the Bible on my own”, but that’s precisely what I have done, and they seem to all be wrong. (Which is possible, while it’s not possible for them to all be right). They’ll cite 1Co 2:14 “But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.” So your not coming to their understanding is simply proof you’re spiritually “dead” (so nothing you can argue is valid). Yet everyone is claiming this (including groups considered “cults”! Herbert Armstrong quoted it all the time, and really sounded convincing with it!) Telling me to read it for myself (or also, to “follow the Spirit”) was only under the assumption that if I really did, I would see it promotes their view. Anything else, I’m misreading it, or ignoring the Spirit, to provide an “excuse” to “hold on to my sin”. (And that includes aspects of each others’ views!) So now, we’re right back to where we started! Again, who should I listen to? Any of them? Or myself? Or the “spirit” (but only if it agrees with the views of the one I happen to be debating)?

“The conviction of the Spirit” in past society’s sins?

Conservatives will often respond that the horrors of the past were “just the way people did things” back then.
But it must be pointed out that this relativizes morality, which is precisely what they have condemned modern society for!

The answer to that is to point out the double standard, and that they are simply being held up to the impossible standard they are holding the world up to. Jesus had said “with what judgment you judge, you shall be judged” (Matt.7:2), and they should not complain, as if they are above this principle.

The world naturally, understandably and rightly questions a morality demanded of them, with “no excuses“, and supposedly empowered by the Spirit through “conversion” (regeneration, sanctification etc.), when it didn’t really work that way in practice for the “model” Christian Church and society of the past that is upheld as the godly ideal.
If you reject this point, we end up with a “do as I say, not as I do” situation, which is just pure control, and with so many people in the world trying to control others, via different means, then why should they believe you?

If the Spirit can cure homosexuality, mental problems, or anything else as conservative Christians claim, when why didn’t it correct (convict, reprove, etc.) slavery and colonialism, and the upholding of discrimination for centuries afterward? Why, when Christians (from leaders on down) back then read the scriptures (which the Spirit is supposed to “enlighten” us to read properly), and came to Genesis 9:25-27 “And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren. God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant“; why didn’t the Spirit direct them to just one verse earlier (24), which tells us who “he” is: NOAH, not God is the one who uttered this curse (and God is never shown granting it; let alone to the present!) Or 2 Cor.6:4 “Be not unequally yoked”. With whom? Another “race”? Just read the next two words: “…with unbelievers”! Yet it was used to justify segregation and condemn “miscegenation”, even if both parties were believers! (and then, fundamentalist institutions holding onto this reading until recent years are angry at new-evangelicalism for not “separating” from Catholics and “modernists”, when they themselves have not even read the passage properly!)
The plea of “we’re still only human” will only go so far when you’ve loudly told the rest of humanity there were “NO EXCUSES” for “human error” (including wrong scripture exegesis), and claim the enlightenment of the Spirit! These were terrible reading comprehension errors that men don’t even need the Spirit to have read properly! Christians claim one is supposed to read the whole Bible, not just a verse here and there, so how did they even miss the previous verse or even a second half of the verse that “interprets” the following verses itself?

In a typical statement, Peter Masters has been quoted: “When I was a youngster and newly saved, it seemed as if the chief goal of all zealous Christians, whether Calvinistic or Arminian, was consecration. Sermons, books and conferences stressed this in the spirit of Romans 12.1-2, where the beseeching apostle calls believers to present their bodies a living sacrifice, and not to be conformed to this world. The heart was challenged and stirred. Christ was to be Lord of one’s life, and self must be surrendered on the altar of service for him.”
But what they fail to realize is that “bodies” is not just talking about sexual behavior, or drinking (and other pleasure-related things as people assume with these ridiculous fixations the Church has had!) It’s what you actually devote yourself to; whether Christ and His Gospel, or a false “gospel” of dead works! (which are often done and pitched under the banner of such terms as “consecration” and “service”!)

As always, we get into the assumption that this Anglo-American Christian culture the “old-liners” hold up was so godly. These people hate the race issue, but then that’s because it’s a big spot that destroys their whole premise! So you really insist their “selves” were all “surrendered” in “service” to Him back then? (They seemed too busy making others surrender to them!) It’s just a matter of what works one considers “service to Him”, or “service to self”. All decided according to what exalts what one identifies with, and demonizes others!
Plus, the Church of previous centuries said the same things about stuff the old liners uphold, such as what’s now the ‘old’ music style, for instance (which Masters has been a big defender of); even down to common chords and church instruments being of “the Devil”; etc. so they wouldn’t see that generation as “consecrated” either!

The real truth to be told, is that the race and class issues are deemed simply unimportant to God (and only illegitimate, ungodly “Marxist” agendas for the purpose of taking something away from “God’s” people or nation), as men deserve suffering anyway; while only sexual behavior and reverence for God (and some other cultural and political issues) are important.
They dismiss race as just some modern “woke” issue of the Left, but don’t realize that it only seems this way because they have overfocused on the issues they have defended and preached as most important. (Mostly sexual issues, and the influence religion “should” have), and minimized an issue they didn’t want to deal with because their beliefs or the previous society they identified with were guilty. Yet the racial doctrines are a bigger violation and threat to the Gospel (and thus the “nature of God” and His ideal “Creation”) than people’s personal sex lives, or obedience to an institutional Church or “Christian culture” that is not even biblical. They have long criticized “deciding for ourselves what is sin”, but they had already done just that.

The further truth is that the reason race was seen as unimportant to God was originally because He was seen as being in fact behind it, through the “curse”! But most did not want to admit this anymore, and so brushed off the subject as only something the conniving Left and the discontent blacks themselves (now all lumped together under banners such as “wokeness”) harped on.

What really is “Historic Orthodoxy” anyway?

Their responses to every change in the church and the world, such as, now, the issue of homosexuality, is to appeal to what they call “historic orthodox Christianity“.

This term is usually given by those following what is known as “evangelical Protestantism”. They at this point ignore that the “reformers” they follow, arose in the 16th century, and so were going against 1500 years of [literal] “historical orthodox Christianity”, which was by that time embodied in the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. (And themselves already divided as such by that time! Some “fundamental Baptist” groups, as well as various other sects will claim to follow an “unbroken succession” of small persecuted groups, usually including the Waldensians, and leading to the Anabaptists, and from there, to whichever group the teacher is representing. This is called the “Trail of Blood” theory or “landmarkist successionism”. While some of them can justifiably claim some [limited] amount of continuity with the anabaptists, the other groups were totally unconnected (spread out all across Europe, separated by centuries), and believed vastly different things; many being “ascetic” and even “gnostic”, which fundamentalists and the other sects will reject. They generally respond that this is just the “slander” of the large institutional groups against them, but they have no proof otherwise; they just find a small group with a teaching that resembles one of theirs, and which they were persecuted for, and declare the group as their predecessor. The Waldensians, in fact, still exist actually, and even have churches in the US “Piedmont” area of the South. They had joined the Reformation, and are now a Reformed type group, so “Arminian revivalist” independent Baptists, and other “free will” sects such as the sabbatarians, Church of Christ, etc. who claim ties to the Waldensians, are shown to be wrong).

So that should be the ultimate proof that “historical orthodox Christianity” can be wrong, and is not what we are to appeal to; and that includes in readings and interpretations of scripture!
But I had noticed, in many areas, this is the final arbiter in scriptural interpretation. They say their views are “biblical”, but it’s really what “historic Christianity has always taught” a particular scripture means. (Such as apologist Walter Martin’s final statement against Herbert Armstrong’s anti-trinitarian view in Armstrong and the Radio Church of God). This is identical to the Catholics’ “ubiquity, antiquity, unanimity” criteria they use to justify seemingly unbiblical positions as the Papacy or transubstantiation, and thus, the Protestants themselves are in the same position as “the cults”. They uphold doctrines such as the Trinity, Sunday and Hell where they share the “historic” view, and pretend to have total solidarity with “orthodoxy”, against the modern sects, but deviate against that same “historic” orthodoxy in areas where they decide the historic Church went off track. If they can do it, why can’t anyone else? They will appeal to the same “historic” consensus they are going against in some areas!

The term “Christianity” is not even in scripture! It was apparently first coined in 110AD, by Ignatius of Antioch. This leader also frequently pointed his readers to the authority of the “bishop”. Bishop is mentioned over a hundred times in Ignatius’ seven short epistles; but only six times in the entire NT! One of them referring to Jesus, and another, to an OT quote. It was a simple “overseer”, not a power figure, as the later Church made it out to be. But within a few decades of Ignatius, the one in Rome had already become powerful enough to press other parts of the Church on issues of practice (such as the Quartodeciman controversy, where the original biblical Passover date for the Communion [extending from the old “seder”] was suppressed in favor of what later became “Easter” Sunday). A couple more centuries, and it empressed the emperor enough to make it the state religion. This is now when they used their power to call “councils” where they set doctrines and issued official “creeds” (the first seven shared by many Protestants), and in which dissenters were condemned to death. This is the origin of “historic Christianity”!

So the Protestants (and “independent fundamentalists”) reject the system that was arising out of those centuries, yet have claimed their unbiblical title, and even use it to condemn others, just as that previous institution had done!

The only thing uniting “historic orthodox Christianity” is that there was a man named Jesus, who was a “second member” of a “tripartite” Godhead (a doctrine based on scriptural revelation, but greatly overformulated in the 4th century), with a divine birth, death and resurrection, and now has an organized institution of paid, professional leaders who are to stand in front of a congregation and use a modified divine Law to control others’ behavior through fear, with “faith” as a duty to gain “salvation”, and an obligation to prove it through improved behavior. (Some have minimized the latter points, drawing criticism from those maintaining them, in the name of, naturally, “historic Christianity”. A few cross over into a confession of works salvation, usually by redefining “faith” in terms of works).

—Oh, and of course, that homosexuality is abhorrent to God. Hundreds of evangelical leaders actually spent the time around the 500th anniversary of the Reformation by gathering together to issue a Statement on homosexuality! The rationale was that the very “heart of the Gospel” was at stake. (As we can see based on the above quoted statement). The original Reformation was over the issue of justification and redemption (salvation), which is naturally a foundational issue to the Gospel. People’s private sexual behavior has been elevated to the same thing, with the secular world, and perhaps “gay” Christians they deny as truly Christian, apparently holding the place of the Church institution “persecuting” the faithful, and that need to be “reformed” by God’s leaders! (This is how they generally portray the secular society, as if it were a wayward part of the Church, under their rightful authority).

But again, if “historic Christianity” could have gone so wrong on the doctrine of salvation (pre-Reformation), why do they think it can’t be wrong on this issue (or the whole notion of ongoing “duty faith” altogether, which is what maintains that the Law and its condemnation continues into the foreseeable future; hence the condemnations of people for their behavior!)

So LGBT advocates and others (female pastors, etc.), should not try to infiltrate or change the Church to make it “accept” everything. It only “proves” their conspiracy narratives of being “persecuted” by some evil, subversive “agenda”. Let them have their “historic” institutions, and little power bases. The institutions are not biblical, but rather secular (i.e. legally chartered) business corporations framed around select religious beliefs (many of which are not even always biblical). They’re not what you should be seeking! We can even appeal to Rev.18:4; being the postapostolic Church did follow lock, stock and barrel the errors of the Old Covenant system that was over the NT Church and before. (So with a Preterist soteriology, we can still have a bit of an “Idealist” view, and say the “endtime” scenario does essentially repeat throughout history in minuscule ways).
Coming up with more biblical responses is the better way to handle them and prevent them from having the power to discriminate.

Conclusion

So many people come to us claiming many things and commanding our response. Why should we listen to this one group, using God, Christ and the Bible? Anyone can claim those authorities.
They believe, essentially that God needs to control man’s behavior, and He’s called them to lead this for Him. Why should anyone listen to them, and not anyone else trying to control people?

Conservative Christians will then deflect any pointing out of “sin” among their own ranks, and then appeal to “grace”; that they are saved by their “faith” (which in practice is a set of correct beliefs).
But it needs to be pointed out that they are the ones who start off playing the devil’s game of accusation and works-righteousness, and so should accept being held up to the same standards they have preached to others.

This is actually what the first two chapters of the book of Romans was addressing!

LGBT defenders need to recognize and point this out more.
To properly answer them, you must point out the true context of such passages; that what is so abhorrent was those who come in the name of divine Law, preaching it to others, and yet do the same things themselves. (Rom.2:1, 3)

This then should be held up as legitimately calling into question their statements about the work of the Spirit.
They apparently are not understanding it correctly. They are turning it into yet another burden placed on others, that neither they nor anyone else were ever able (or willing) to bear. (Matt.23:4, Acts 15:10).

This is what we need to bring to the table in the debate with Christian conservatives!

We need to start all over again, in reading scripture, (The IFCA church I was in had a little chorus “Take a new look from the Old Book”, which in that movement is never actually put into practice), and not filter it through “historic orthodoxy”. By their own profession, it has been wrong before, and why should we believe them, and not, perhaps the original “historical” institutions (which similarly have proof-texts for all of their doctrines and practices; appealing to “apostolic oral tradition”, if all else fails, and they even have proof-texts for that concept!)

Into the Warroom; a barely noticed source of Right Wing Rhetoric

1994, the middle of the 90’s, and the height of anti-government and economic rhetoric on the Right, with Newt Gingrich shutting the government down, and conservatives placing a steady focus on “big government spending” (of our too high “taxes”), with the loudest decried expense being “social programs”. (This as two brand spanking new federal courthouses featuring amenities such as bronze doorknobs are built in lower Manhattan, over historical sites: one, the colonial era African Burial Ground, and the other, the notorious 19th century Five Points, right next to the state courthouse I worked in. All of this on top of stuff you occasionally heard on the news throughout the previous decade, such as $400 screwdrivers, huge airports in the middle of nowhere, etc. But the biggest concern is “welfare“, which was about 2-4% of the spending! The majority going to the military, which the same conservatives were in favor of).

In some radical Right Christian paper from upstate, I see a retelling of Aesop’s fable “The Ant and the Grasshopper”:

The Original Version:

The ant busts his ass in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks he’s a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter the ant is warm and well fed. The grasshopper has no food or shelter so he dies out in the cold.

The New Liberal Version:

It starts out the same but when winter comes the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others are cold and starving. CBS, NBC, and ABC show up and show pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to film of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food.

America is stunned by the sharp contrast. How can it be, in a country of such wealth that this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so? Then a representative of the NAAGB (The National Association of Green Bugs) shows up on Night Line and charges the ant with “Green Bias” and makes the case that the grasshopper is the victim of 30 million years of greenism. Kermit the frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper and everybody cries when he sings “It’s Not Easy Being Green.”

Bill and Hillary Clinton make a special guest appearance on the CBS evening news and tell a concerned Dan Rather That they will do everything they can for the grasshopper who has been denied the prosperity he deserves by those who benefited unfairly during the summer, or as Bill refers to it, the “Temperatures Of The 80’s”.

Finally the EEOC drafts the “Economic Equity and Anti-Greenism Act” RECTRO-ACTIVE to the beginning of the summer. The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number of green bugs and having nothing left to pay his Retro-Active taxes, his home is confiscated by the government.

The story ends as we see the grasshopper finishing up the last bits of the ant’s food while the government house he’s in….which just happens to be the ant’s old house…. crumbles around him since he doesn’t know how to maintain it. The ant has disappeared in the snow. And on the TV; which the grasshopper bought by selling most of the ant’s food, Bill Clinton is standing before a wildly applauding group of Democrats announcing that a new era of “Fairness” has dawned in America.

There was no source attributed to it.
Ten years later, I see the same thing pasted in a discussion on a Christian board I frequented, only with “NAAGB” replaced by “ACORN” (and, IIRC, a couple of other small changes). It seemed people realized “NAAGB” was too “obvious”, and so tried to cover up the implications a bit more. Meanwhile, all the tax complaining had actually been heard, and something was actually for once done; some changes had actually been made! Welfare had by that time been replaced by “workfare” (where recipients had to get little menial jobs to be eligible for the benefits), and at the same time, tax breaks began to be given to the middle class (making it look like “welfare” really was the problem after all), and this did quell the conservatives’ complaining for a bit, but around the 2004 election, it quickly resumed, as if nothing had changed at all! (This is the one where they were so disgusted with the Republican party as not conservative enough, that the radical Constitution Party was all the rage!)
So a decade after that, liberals are finally beginning to rise up and respond more to conservative rhetoric (after the deafening silence I witnessed at the time of the original meme and decades before), including naming things, and the common conservative tactic of using “code language” to imply blacks as the cause of the nation’s problems, has been dubbed “dog whistling”. Only, “NAAGB”, wasn’t really even a dog whistle, but I’d say, pretty audible!

Forward to recent years, the source of the meme is revealed to be Jim Quinn of the radio show “The Warroom”, and who was a close associate to the main conservative mouthpiece of the generation, Rush Limbaugh; —himself a master dog whistler, who then tries to gaslight us all by portraying himself as basically more of a “comedian”. One radio ad on TV had him with a smile, ask “You decide whether I’m ‘the most dangerous man in America’, or ‘just a sensitive guy’“! Yet, he’s always taking the clear conservative talking points, deemed deadly serious when pitched by others, including on the race issue. His followers then become what were dubbed “dittoheads“, as they all ate up and agreed with all of it! The most infamous statement on the subject, being addressing blacks, and saying “THEY’RE ANGRY…!” This, to a white fanbase that already thinks we’re fearsome animals! Meanwhile, look at the anger and utter CONTEMPT and even hatred on his own face right as he’s saying this (or ANY time he addresses the race issue. It BEGS the question “What the hell did we ever do to you?” Rudolph Giuliani, the NYC mayor who dismissed us with “They’re alive, aren’t they?” and claimed Amadou Diallo brought on his own death by “not doing what the officers said”; —and they were plain clothes and jumped out at him, mind you— had this same sort of hostile look on his face when addressing race as well!)

So “anger” is pitched like it’s wrong; but that is, when we’re doing it. It’s actually OK and perfectly justified, when you do it! —being angry about our anger! Why? Because it’s all part of a plot to take something away from you, as you claim was already being done! The same with incessantly leveling terms such as “whining” during that time, when conservatives have been the loudest and most effective complainers; claiming to be no less than “persecuted”, often!

In other words, only you have the RIGHT to be angry; others don’t. We’re told we should only be “thankful”. (But the conservatives certainly don’t sound thankful, except for some past ideal they are steady complaining of losing! And these people would fiercely deny thinking they were “superior”, but then what do you call this?)

We do end up managing to elect a black president, and when his first lady mentions now being able to be “proud” of America, she’s excoriated as “anti-America”. But Rush then shortly after goes the opposite direction, in saying he’s no longer proud of the nation, and this is basically the sentiment of all his followers! She goes from “not proud” to “proud” (positive direction). He goes from “proud” to “not proud” (negative). But she’s “Anti-America”, and he’s “pro-America”! Conservatives often spoke as if to be critical of America is to “hate” America, but both of these speakers had periods where they were not proud of it. One was in the past, with all the racial conflict and other issues (involving oppressive control by one demographic). The other was the loosening of that control. In the latter view, America was only “good” (and worth being proud of) in the past, up until the 1960s.
This is what the Christian Right had been saying ever since that decade! “Make America Great Again” (MAGA), we associate with the next president, Trump, but he only half-heartedly copied the line (didn’t even sound genuine when he first uttered it; it sounded like he was just spouting something he knew his listeners wanted to hear); it was Reagan and the Christian Right who had been saying this (and similar lines, such as “take back America”) up to four decades before!

Today, the focus of the left’s criticism of the right is Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor-Greene. Previously, it was Donald Trump (of course; him being the president, and fully embodying the mindet of the right), and FOX News hosts such as Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter and Glenn Beck. Limbaugh had all along been the central figure of the conservative media, until beginning to wane in the decade or so before his death last year (and I feel he could have stood more criticism by the Left!) But Quinn is someone who deserves more exposure; being such a “behind the scenes” source of a meme that perfectly embodies the Right’s beliefs about the race issue, and what drives all of their rhetoric and behavior today, from “Great Replacement Theory” to the Jan. 6 2021 insurrection attempt (which both Limbaugh [in his last two months of life] and Quinn seemed to be rather silent on!)

Liberal writers such as Tim Wise and Ian Haney Lopez began speaking in terms of “narratives“; that the conservatives had created narratives they drive their views off of, and liberals needed to create narratives as well, to counter them.

So the conservative narrative (put together):

•We did the blacks a favor by rescuing them from their tribal life and bringing them into our “exceptional” advanced civilization
•They were really well off and happy under slavery and segregation. (We did so well in creating this “exceptional” society!)
•The “godless” white Marxists wanted to destroy the nation, and so decided to “use” the blacks in their scheme
•They took all the money of the hard working “makers” and gave it to the undeserving black “takers”, who no matter how many opportunities and good things they had here, only wanted more “free stuff” and refused to pull themselves up like others.
•This created all the urban decay, crime and financial scarcity of the late 20th century, as the makers withdrew their wealth and jobs.
-i.e. all those horrible violent cities like Chicago were run by “northern Democrats”.
-(The “makers” deserve all the billions they have [stop ‘coveting’, you liberal snowflakes!], but the government has taken it and given it all to the blacks, who have squandered it; so now everyone struggles!)
•So don’t call us racist; we’re actually looking out for the blacks and know what’s best for them; it’s the liberals who did all of this, and are the real racists!
-(The “colorblind” tactic. But it always points right back to colorism, as the blacks were too stupid and greedy for “free stuff” to avoid getting caught in this liberal scheme. The “alt-right” will then conveniently step in to fill in the blank; the problem is really genetic! The “dog whistle” becomes a giant foghorn, and the mainstream conservatives relievedly didn’t have to blow it!)

This is what has been cleverly summed up by Quinn’s “Ant and Grasshopper” story! It’s what they have been telling an already “angry white middle class” that had already long blamed minorities and their issues for the downfall of the country, since the Civil War; all the while the billionaires skate off scott free as the middle class “punch downward” in blaming the poor. (And the financial aspect of it, where the rich benefitting from the status quo get the middle class to look down on the blacks, was the name of the game since slavery as well!)
They also manage to get even black figures to agree with this stuff. Allan West once posted a video spoofing the stereotypical “welfare queen”, which boldly proclaimed “This is where ALL the money goes!”. Larry Elder similarly once had a video claiming that these “handouts” “brought the country to its knees”. The “angry white middle class” continued to eat it all up. Even the alt-right would cheer them on, against any liberal “cucks” in the comments!

The likes of these two are just making money for themselves by attacking their own race, and along with the entire Right, are just serving the interests of the super rich by portraying them as “overtaxed” for the sake of the lazy poor. On Quinn’s website https://www.warroom.com is a “Quick Start Guide”, and on #6, he says the progressive tax code “rewards bad choices and punishes good ones”. So simply making less money is purely bad choices, and making more money is always good choices (and never any form of string-pulling or dirty dealing, including buying out politicians, etc. No, that type of stuff is blamed on “government intrusion” somehow, and of course, that is siphoning all the money to the people making the “bad choices”! So you’ll sometimes admit the rich are in bed with the government, but it’s only the left’s fault, and still the poor “grasshoppers” wrongly gaining everything from that!) In passing, FOX News commentator Michelle Malkin, inspired by Quinn, came up with her own version of the Ant and the Grasshopper, villifying those homeowners caught up in the housing loan crisis; also seen as “irresponsible”, and often associated with minorities). It becomes clear this whole game is about worshiping and justifying the rich!
But the rich in fact already have many loopholes and bypasses where some of them in actuality pay almost no taxes. Where’s the “new wealth” created from this as he says in #17 in praising “Reaganomics”? No matter how much was given to the rich, pundits like this kept complaining all of it was really going to “lazy” poor minorities, and the lack of wealth blamed on “socialism”. Which is precisely what the Grasshopper meme is saying!

So the billionaires in the world are rapidly increasing, and again, have plenty of tax loopholes, shelters and refuges! But this isn’t enough!
So keep blaming poor minorities! Keep telling the angry middle class that this is the source of all their problems! No wonder, many of them would justify police shootings of blacks, and fall to such desperation as to elect Donald Trump as president, have rallies such as at Charlottesville, and then attempt an actual overthrow of the US Capitol, and individuals holding these views continue to produce mass shootings. Just think; if you’re black, and you look around and see abandoned factories and run down neighborhoods; it’s YOUR fault; (i.e. us collectively).

Even libertarians and “paleo-cons”, who are more aware of “corporatism”, “banksters”, “oligarchs”, etc. and their global effects, still ultimately place the most heated blame on “welfare” [e.g. “the nanny state”, etc.] as nevertheless central to [benefitting from, somehow] the whole scheme, or at least still the number one gripe. Those two groups likely make up a good portion of the “alt-right”.

Questions this raises:
•WHERE is all the money given the blacks, then, since they don’t still have it themselves; hence being “stuck” in poverty and government “dependency” where they need more? If they’re wasting it on expensive sneakers and electronics and such, even if they don’t maintain these things, they just go and get more, putting the money back into the economy. (It’s never seen this way!) They’re not the ones sitting on it, or taking it out of the country like the rich. Oh, but then they’re only doing that because of the oppressive tax system! That still doesn’t change the fact of who has the money; aside from the question of who “deserved” it or not!
•Do the rich have all their deserved money, or has it been taken from them too? If they’re the productive “ants”, then all of the ants are portrayed as falling in the end. The meme doesn’t have any characters escaping this unscathed in the end (except perhaps the “Democrat” leaders). If you admit they’ve simply taken it elsewhere because of taxes spent on the ‘unproductive’, then why do we accept them (the “Queen Ants”, basically) punishing all of us because of what some others do?

The real source of this narrative is the old Puritan-derived notion of the “chosen nation”. That’s what drove the colonizers and slavers. Here is their line of reasoning.

•The World is a mess
•There is inequality; some people (including cultures) are on top
•God is in control

The extended backstory of all this is:
•Man “fell”, and became deliberately evil and against God
•The punishment for this is pain and suffering (in this life and afterward)
•God has “chosen” some groups of people out of this state
•Their “hostile” nature is removed, and they are inclined to do right 
•So they are qualified to rule over God’s earth 
•The “unregenerate” remain against God and His people, and so seek to destroy God’s rule via His “godly” nation, and accuse His people of wrong!
•Part of this “conspiracy” is taking from God’s people to benefit and make “equal” those suffering the punishment for sin. (i.e. countering God’s judgment).

This was the original basis of the institutions of colonialism and racism, as well as the defenses of them! When they were challenged and brought down, the people losing power, instead of realizing the systems of control handed down to them were wrong, then had to justify them. They began speaking of the “godly founding” of the nation, and that all problems were “ungodly” people, not only bringing down Christian “morality”, but also forcing the inferior subhuman race on them as “equals”; bringing it down even faster. And this is what passed down all the way to the present, with more and more code and innuendo piled on top of it as each layer of racism was stripped away (i.e. first, slavery, then Jim Crow, then poverty, now “institutional” racism, etc.) and more and more racist expressions became censored. So now, they can claim, and hide behind a “colorblind” premise and deny any “racism” and instead blame it on others.

Rather than a “northern Democrat” plot to use blacks to destroy the nation; the most obvious cause of all the urban decay was “white flight” (which occurred in the South as well!); where because blacks could no longer be isolated from them, they ran (citing “lowering property vaues”, in addition to “rising crime”), yet still owned the property, which they allowed to run down, and often abandon (or even set on fire, to collect the insurance)! Services and most importantly, education were cut, rather than the “Democrats” pumping all of this money into the urban minority communities and they letting it decay, as Quinn’s story insinuates. This was just patently ignored; so as much as the blacks were the ones suffering all that blight and crime of those cities, conservatives callously fit this into their phony “colorblind” narrative against the blacks via the liberals!

Just think; fathers had told their sons “When you grow up, all of this will be yours”, but by the time they did grow up, large chunks of the power had been taken, and they were increasingly demanded to share what was left. So instead of realizing their fathers promised them something ill gained, and which couldn’t be kept, they blamed the forces making them share, as well as the recipients. This is why they began praising the nation’s past, and demanding it be given “back” to them.

This is the basis of Quinn’s “Grasshopper” story. It is one of the most insidious, boldface, hardly attempted to be disguised attacks on blacks, painting us as both stupid (can’t maintain all the stuff we’ve “taken”) on top of destroying the entire society. (Even if one tries the “colorblind” deflection and claim the “takers” are really anyone of any race, gaming the system. But all the “green bugs” references make it clear it is about color; you’re still using color; just substituting a different one! (Spoofing the name of an agency named after a racial ‘color’) —But I guess we’re supposed to be too stupid to see right through that; right? “ACORN” did little better in covering it up! So at best, it’s basically implicating blacks as the symbol of everyone and anyone abusing the system!)
This is why I would focus on this one person here. It is not even a feeble attempt at covering up the racial blaming.

But then looking more on his Quick Start Guide seems to confirm he’s not really trying to hide it, as it gets worse! #11 says “Racial profiling” is “an act of common sense” they speak pejoratively of “when they have a problem that they don’t want to talk about” — which is a frequent alt-right “race realist” dog whistle phrase for the “pathologies” that signal black inferiority and “negative affect on society”! “This conveniently puts the onus on you and not the perps.” So everyone who gets pulled over and/or harassed because of their race is a “perp”! Even worse, regarding another scapegoated group; #14 says “Islam is a global mental illness. It is a sickness, it is a cancer and it is evil.” This is a classic “snake”; lying in the background supplying propaganda like this, as his friend Rush and others get the spotlight. (And yet, they’re the ones who fire back at “the race card” being played on them!)

You can easily see all of this borne of the same seething anger that appeared on Rush’s face whenever talking about race. You despise these people so much; all you want to do is sling muck and blame at them, and can’t even hide it. Again, what have these people ever done to you, really, aside from the lies you’ve created to maintain that despisal? Quinn’s rhetoric can for all purposes classify him as “alt-right”, though Rush, being mainstream, wasn’t considered as part of that radical movement! Yet we see how closely under the surface the radical sentiments were!
People like this and their clever rhetorical tactics need to be exposed more.

Quinn was once supposedy a liberal, but then got in trouble for some remark he made on his show about women, and then turned to conservativism in revolt. Today, on his website, the first things you see is a section, “Worth dying for”, with links to the texts of the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights. Of course, to show that they are the “true” Americans, but we see how quickly on this “wing” of politics that loyalty goes right out the window when they don’t get everything they want. Starting with Trump, liberals are the ones who have been defending the Constitution more against the antics of him and his followers! (Of course, each side interprets it in their own ways).
Also noteworthy is QSG #19, where God, “whether [he] exists or not” is effectively just a mascot and a utility, as he’s only “necessary for the maintenance of freedom”! (And Christians want to follow the ideology of someone like this?!)

You would think the “Grasshopper” story would be some past embarrassment hidden, and maybe even disowned by now (after first trying to change “NAAGB” into “ACORN”). When you click on “about us”, you see first, a restricted Youtube imbed about D-Day, and then three article links, and look; the middle one is the Ant and the Grasshopper! And not only that, but the original version, with the “NAAGB”!
(And at the bottom of his Quick Start Guide page is the gloat: “There is nothing you can do about this show, Get over it!” Liberals’ tactics had been what’s now dubbed as “cancel culture”; just banishing the person, and this has only played right into their narrative that the liberals are the true oppressors, and the conservatives are only valiantly standing up for “freedom”).

This is still the way these people believe (and wrapped up in the cause of the “Constitution”), and this sort of subtle, partially hidden source material to Right Wing mindsets needs to be recognized as a big source of the rest of the Right’s belief systems. And pundits on both sides are pointing out how divided the nation has become, and we seem to be headed to a new Civil War. It’s rhetoric like this that is keeping the racial resentment going. It’s recent events that all are what kept reminding me of Quinn’s meme! But conservatives will counter; no, it’s the incessant “race baiting” for the purpose of getting “free stuff” (and the liberals using this to “buy votes”) that is causing these tensions —thus yet again reiterating the classic (and untrue) racist stereotype, and all the more proving my point!
“Grasshopper”-like narratives are just a tactic of deflection, so that those riding off into the sunset with all of the wealth and power will have us too busy fighting each other to see what they are doing; if not outright justifying them (as “deserving” it), as they continue to blame the other side, including those with less power than them. It plays upon racial resentment, from the “equality” that had to be forced on them for nearly 200 years. This is why these things must be called out and challenged, wherever and in whatever form they are seen!

(Here, BTW, is another side of the story. https://www.amazon.com/Grasshopper-Narrated-Fanciful-Truthful-Other/dp/1515828727 Haven’t read the whole thing, but it right away looks like it applies!)

Put ’em Up, Put ’em Up! This is the last straw!

In June of this year, when I heard they were doing what amounts to a sort of two year-behind 50th anniversary special for Scooby, I decided to contact WB (which can be a rather difficult task, of trying to contact big business empires these days), finding the Twitter DM to be the best looking shot, and wrote:

Glad to hear they are doing a Scooby Doo reunion this fall. But in the past 20 years, retrospective moments have always become occasions to have negative references to the Scrappy Doo character. With this plus, passing shots in nearly every production up to “Guess Who”; I think this has gone way beyond ‘enough’ already! The first live action movie reference was already over the top, and marked the beginning of the trend (And notable references in SDMI and the 13th Ghost), and it was appealing to a small but vocal band of fans who didn’t like him years ago. But many other fans, especially younger ones DO like him! It’s time to start considering them, and this would be a great time to instead redeem him in some way in the story!

Other Scrappy fans voiced a desire to contact WB as well. But upon watching it, they did not listen, as they haven’t for over 20 years.
The gang in the story at one point bring up Scrappy and talk about how he was “never part of the gang”, and was “bad talking them on AOL Chat”! Wait a minute! Are they serious to write something like that? The online forum is precisely the place where Scrappy was the one receiving mountains of bad talk for probably 25 years or more! This is totally flipped around! He’s a fictional character who cannot do anything himself online or anywhere else (including change the show), but this was how many of those online posts were treating him. As if he were a real life person who had done something to them!
So now, every momentous occasion in both the Scooby and larger cartoon world has become a platform for this silly hatred.

One of the first produced uses of him, breaking total silence previously, was a “Blair Witch Project” parody on Cartoon Network, where Scrappy is the voice in the forest, and when Daphne screams in terror, Freddy says it’s only Scrappy, and Daphne says “I know!” A far cry from the middle of Scrappy’s original run, where Scrappy was her partner in splitups, where they did the serious work of clue-finding. Had these people ever watched that show?
With the internet now firmly in place, CN opens up a nice site that includes games, and for Scrappy, it was “Scrappy Stinks”, where you sling muck at him. Scholastic’s Cartoon Network: Extreme Scooby trivia book, while including references to Scrappy episodes, only mentions him once, in the trivia question on p.35, where choice “A” to answer the question “What does Scooby say he’d buy if he had $500,000?” is “A diamond studded muzzle for his cousin[sic] Scrappy Doo”. (The correct answer is “One million hamburgers”, of course).

None of us never imagined this was only the start of nearly a quarter century of official cartoon media trashing him!

Of course, the pinnacle of this was Scooby’s long awaited first live action movie (2002), where he was made the villain. And not just any villain, but transforming into a hideous giant monster who tries to KILL Scooby for not making him the leader of the gang. Again, which is exactly the way all the online haters saw him. (The head writer later came forth and said this was a last minute change of the original script, and expressed hating his guts. You can get more of a sense of where this guy is coming from here: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/james-gunn-fired-tweets-pedophilia-rape_n_5b5238d6e4b0fd5c73c5390a So of course someone like that who makes some crazy inhuman “joke” of that sort would see nothing wrong with having a good character turn into a monster and try to kill his beloved uncle! This marked the dark, sadistic mindet of the period, as seen in many of the other references in Adult Swim shows and elsewhere. This was the sentiment that was totally indulged in and allowed to fester and completely take over!)

The hatred spreads to the production studio!

This movie reference marked the start of the pickup of negative references to him in new animated stories, where they mostly ignored him before. But on the other hand, this one actually made even haters think it was out of character, as well as getting fans to finally start speaking up. So while writers intensified their expression of hatred, the blogosphere that once fomented it now began to cool off, and you could actually find more people defending him and saying they liked him, the movie was trash for doing that, and also, some even saying he be brought back and/or “redeemed” from the movie portrayal!

So 10 years later, it’s CN’s 20th anniversary, with a panoramic pose of every cartoon star that ever appeared on the network. And look, there’s Scrappy in the lower left, and in front yet! Are we finally getting somewhere, and him being accepted as part of the CN universe? No; he’s only there for that weird Adventure Time mutt to push out of the way at the very last minute as they count down for the final shot. (Wow; with all the other characters involved, that they would take the time and money and do the extra work of putting him there and animating that sequence, just to take another shot at him! These people are really into this hatred thing!)

Forward to right around Scooby’s actual 50th anniversary, they decide to close the hole in the old “Thirteen Ghosts of Scooby Doo” series (the one Scrappy era show generally liked by nearly all, despite his presence), in which, it was realized, only 12 ghosts had been captured. There were 13 episodes but the first episode is where they were released, and the remaining 12 saw one ghost each captured. This series had Scrappy, of course, plus a new, even more “Cousin-Oliverry” character, Flim Flam.
So surely now Scrappy would have to be brought back in a positive light, right? No; they just restore the original gang (Freddy and Velma weren’t in the original, of course), and when Flim Flam (who was brought back despite being acknowledged as more annoying than Scrappy, and also made a bad guy in an earlier modern story) asks where’s Scrappy, the others have this silent look, and Velma asks “What’s a scrappy”? So now, she’s never even heard of him! (She’s the one who introduced us to him in a retrospective look back in the live action movie as well as telling us in this new story about his AOL attacks, yet you would think they would use the movie premise as the reason they shun him now, rather than making up this new justification. But nothing is being kept straight in these modern canons, except Scrappy just being bad, and now rejected by the gang).

(Reportedly, it was “Warner Bros.” who requested Flim-Flam and Scrappy not be in the film; however, both were taken into consideration by writer Tim Sheridan, and Scrappy was ultimately cut from the film due to “not fitting” into the story. So we see here at least one writer who tried to do the right thing, but it’s this monolithic “Warner Bros.” entity that, again, remains against him!) Aside from all this, being one of the things Scrappy is hated for is supposedly “changing the show”, including the real monsters of his second and third seasons, these would-be “purists” go on and undo that also, by making this 13th ghost a standard fake villain, which completely ruins the premise of the Thirteen Ghosts, where they were also real. (In fact, first twelve ghosts were completely undone by being portrayed as hallucinations due to the Himalayan thin air! Even though I haven’t seen it said anywhere, this would likely imply then that Scrappy was another of these hallucinations, and thus never really existed; which I guess would perfectly explain why Velma never heard of him! If so, then now, they’re writing him out of existence!)

So now, what’s basically a belated 50th anniversary special for Scooby, continues trashing him.

Here, the writer of the special, Jonathan Stern, justifies the hatred:
https://www.animationscoop.com/interview-jonathan-stern-on-new-cw-special-scooby-doo-where-are-you-now/

JM: There are several bold, wow moments for Scooby-Doo fans, not just learning the information but there is a moment in this when the characters bring up Scrappy-Doo and I just went, “Whoa!”

JS: (laughs)

JM: Was that a risk? Did you need approval to say what you say about Scrappy-Doo?

JS: Well I certainly needed approval, and I think [the Mystery Machine Gang] actually bad-talked Scrappy-Doo a little bit more in the first draft of the script. And that got noted out. There is enough consensus amongst the many people that I was working with that Scrappy-Doo is not a high point of the Scooby-Doo franchise. I think there’s a lot of comfort level in making Scrappy-Doo the butt of jokes. If you watch the Scrappy-Doo episodes, he’s not nice to Scooby. He’s kind of a d*ck. I feel if you watch it, you feel protective of Scooby and the other characters. Scrappy doesn’t belong here. Stop bothering them! And little things. Why does he have such a more fluid way of speaking English than Scooby? It really undermined… it suddenly made Scooby the dumb one of the partnership. I didn’t like that. Obviously Scrappy has not become a permanent fixture in the Scooby universe. I’m sure there are some Scrappy fans out there. But also every reunion special has its dramatic moments, so we had to find our dramatic moment.

(“Dramatic moment”? It was just another cheap pot shot toward the beginning of the show, that had no further bearing on it! What a ridiculous, lame excuse! Honestly, I thought Scrappy was going to end up possibly being the villain again, once again getting revenge on them for their rejection. But they kind of almost did just that in a roundabout way, by introducing this lady as a disgruntled “sixth member” of the gang, who had been quickly rejected from the initial casting, and she turns out to be the villain getting revenge! —which is exactly what Scrappy was in the movie! All they had to do was have her actually be him in a second disguise, and it would have been identical to the movie setup! I’ll bet it was at least a provision to allow the possibility of making him the villain. Maybe that was one of the additional negative references left out? Or perhaps it was done deliberately to make us think it might be Scrappy again, and that was the “dramatic moment”?)

One thing here is that we finally get more of a rationale of why his speaking normally was such a big deal (which I heard frequently in the old hate comments, and could never understand). “Made Scooby look like the dumb one”. (The group dynamic in the seasons leading up to Scrappy had already done that pretty well).
So we see here Stern claim simply “I didn’t like that.” This must be what the others he alludes to are also feeling. So for that reason, Scrappy must be trashed in this and every other production where he’s mentioned. Screw the fans, even, except for the vocal haters from years ago. There are a lot of things in cartoons, and in life we don’t like. But we don’t go and and get all all murderous, in an effective effigy about them. So why is there such low tolerance among these people of this character?

On Facebook, I posed a question to cartoon aficionado Jerry Beck, who actually appeared in the special and then posted the link to the above interview, and his response was:

Scrappy-Doo hatred is all a matter of when you were born and your lifetime POV of all things Scooby-Doolia. To many of us older folk, the introduction of Scrappy-Doo was a “jump the shark” moment. He’s the fifth or sixth Beatle; the fourth, fifth, sixth or seventh Stooge. An unnecessary addition to a perfect(?) quintet. To those born later on, who grew up with Scrappy as an accepted member of the gang, the character is a bit more accepted. I don’t know for sure, but I assume Scrappy was a character that was added to the show by clueless network higher ups – and they may have gotten away with the character if it weren’t for those meddling network executives. Or something like that.

This has been another claim that was often tossed around. It’s the older viewers, who all hated him from the very beginning, (and we should know, as we were there), but the “clueless” network execs didn’t care and just forced him on us anyway. Of course, there was no internet back then, for people to voice their opinions, like now. So people now can say anything. They likely assume if they didn’t like him, then nobody did. (But this would have eventually leaked out onto some form of the media). They can ride off of the intensity of the hatred that surfaced when the internet finally did arrive, and claim it proved it had been brewing all those years, and it sort of looks like that might be true. The only input the networks had back then was the ratings systems. (And perhaps old fashioned “snail mail”) And they seemed to favor Scrappy, hence, the show being renewed (in one form or another) throughout the bulk of the decade.
Of course, who were these ratings “families”? I didn’t have a box, and didn’t know anyone else anywhere who had one. They seemed like some sort of ghost population “out there” somewhere that you never saw, and changes to TV would be made we didn’t like or understand, and felt were bogus (shows cancelled or changed, etc.). Still, the Scrappy critics are claiming the hatred of him was universal (at least for that whole generation), so unless the ratings families were paid shills for Scrappy, the fact the ratings had improved means that at least some sample of the populaton liked him! (The topic of generations will be further addressed later).

Where did all of this start?

In the late 90’s, I enter the world of the internet and find venues such as the old Usenet, and later on, sites like jumptheshark.com, filled with hostile invective against Scrappy. I thought “they acted like he became real and killed their mothers, or something!” Many imagining the horrible things they wished would be done to him, and some even saying he ruined their childhood. Which is exactly what they were acting like! (So you have to wonder if it’s really even hyperbole or not!)

It was extremely hard to find a Scooby site on the numerous “web-rings” of the day, that spoke well of him. He was apparently deliberately ignored on many of them.
Oh, but wait; there he is, on the bottom of the page, on this ribbon covered with pictures of him. Occasionally, it’s on the top of the page. (That might be a good sign, couldn’t it?) Nothing else is mentioned about him next to it, and it’s not a link to a Scrappy fan webring or site or anything else.

Turns out, it was actually a hate symbol created by one person apparently (a female with a geocities site, IIRC, and I wish I had remembered the name, when it was given somewhere years later), that haters placed on their page to show solidarity in their hatred of him. Shaped like the familiar Breast Cancer Awareness ribbon and others generally associated with death, it must have been wishing his death! What in the world? What other character had such a cult following against him?

This hadn’t spread everywhere yet, as Burger King around this time included him in their Scooby Doo promotional, with a windup version that boxes, like on the cartoon. (Typical of those things, just one wrong pull disables it completely!) In 1999, he was featured on a comic book in the Cartoon Network Presents series, though WB subsidiary DC had already been aiming to stop using him. As late as 2001, The Learning Company produced a series of PC education games, such as “Scooby Doo: Jinx at the Sphinx”, where Scrappy, while not in the story, is in a bottom menu tray for “?” information (this seems to be the “suspects and clues” menu), and also at at the end, tells you (Scott Innes doing the voice) “Who do YOU think the [bad guy] is? Make your selection on the screen!” (This I say is a good use of him, that should satisfy everyone: he’s not in the story, but still a supporting character!) These would probably be the last produced good uses of him.

The hatred hadn’t spread everywhere yet. Burger King includes Scrappy windup toy!

1998 was a big year for Scooby, as for about four years he had been gradually ascending in popularity and exposure on Cartoon Network which he arrived on fully in 1994. So this was when Scooby Doo on Zombie Island was released, which was the first all new animation and full story of him, and the start of the modern WB-produced era of DTV’s, which has been the main venue for new Scooby productions for these past 23 years (with some new series appearing every few years inbetween). This was also the height of the Scrappy hatred on the aforementioned early internet forums, the main one being Usenet. So the forums were all abuzz about the new movie, and in one discussion, which was likely on alt.tv.cartoonnetwork; someone asked “What ídiots made the decisions to add celebrities, add Scrappy, kill off Velma, Fred and Daphne, and add Flim Flam?”
The response, by a prominent cartoon fan named Jeff Harris, gave me the first articulated glimpse of the full thinking of the “haters”, yet in a very level-headed and informative yet concise synoptic format. (This guy must be an INTP like me, as the Introverted Thinking with tertiary Introverted Sensing really stands out).

Subject: Re: What is your opinion of Movie
11-2-98 4:42 PM Standard Pacific time

Scooby-Doo Where Are You! is the classic show and lasted 25 episodes, one more than Pup and was more mystery oriented. The New Scooby-Doo Movies were 24 hour-long episodes featuring celebrities that had contracts with CBS, which was responsible for the show airing in the first place, and characters that Hanna-Barbera had either created, like Speed Buggy, or had animated rights to, like Batman and Laurel and Hardy. ln 1976, ABC, which Saturday morning programing was ran [sic] by Michael Eisner (I kid you not ), made 24 episodes of Scooby-Doo which was similar in format to the original 1969 series, but didn’t have the edge of that version. Plus, this version introduced Scooby’s extended family. Hanna-Barbera also recreated the look of the original show with 16 new episodes of Scooby-Doo Where Are You! two years later.

ln 1978 [sic], the coffin was nailed shut when Scrappy was introduced in The Scooby and Scrappy-Doo Show. With a name change like that, and 16 episodes featuring the brat, you should have known that the end was nigh. From 1980 to 1983, 86 Scrappy and Scooby seven-minute shorts were made and ABC wanted them to be paired off with new talent such as Richie Rich and Yabba-Doo. ln order to do that, the show became more comedic straying away from mysteries altogether. Thus, it was ABC who got rid of Freddy, Velma, and Daphne from the show (even before Disney took over ABC, they were ruining shows). ln 1983, The New Scooby and Scrappy-Doo Show not only brought back Daphne , but it also brought back some of the mystery the snow had been lacking for quite awhile. The brat was still there and the show had two 11-minute shorts making up 13 complete episodes. Renamed The New Scooby-Doo Mysteries, a year later, the show added 13 more episodes and even featured occasional appearances of both Fred and Velma. The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo was somewhat truer to the original show, but since Fred and Velma wasn’t on the show, and brats such as Scrappy and Flim-Flam hogging the camera, the show just wasn’t the same. Audiences didn’t like it either and the Scooby-Doo franchise was over. For a while at least

ln 1987, Hanna-Barbera started the Superstars 10 moves, in which Scooby Doo, Shaggy, and Scrappy Doo were featured in three of them. The final one, Scooby-Doo and the Reluctant Werewolf was the final Scooby-Doo featuring Scrappy-Doo. Apparently, the animators wanted to write off Scrappy-Doo, and literally started from scratch, bring back the original cast and de-aged them to be preteens. Now, with Scooby-Doo on Zombie lsland, the animators have completely written off Scrappy-Doo, as if he had never existed. That’s Scooby-Doo in a nutshell.

Of course, within four years of this, they would no longer be “writing Scrappy off as if he never existed”, but on the contrary begin to constantly continue bringing him back up in passing in stories or even outside spoof shows to trash him in one way or another. The culmination being the live action movie, which had me thinking back to this post and saying we were better off with the “as if he never existed” treatment! I figured Harris must have been totally gratified by this, but by that time (with ToonZone replacing Usenet as the main discussion forum for cartoons), he seemed completely silent on Scooby, at least as far as I saw him. After the post, Scooby of course continued blowing up exponentially, with new DTV movies following, a new series, more daily airing slots, many more marathons, “Dog Bowls” with him always the winner, CN promotional spots, and of course, the live action movie. Harris became one of the main voices complaining about so much Scooby all over the place, even [a bit sarcastically] calling CN “The Scooby Doo Network” (himself wanting more anime).
So here, we have an instance of someone who is at best ambivalent about Scooby (e.g. quick to grow tired of him), yet caring about it enough to believe Scrappy ruined it. On jumptheshark.com, some of those wishing the most harm to Scrappy also trashed Scooby as well. They would rant about how the whole Scooby format had “jumped” from the very beginning, and was no good, too repetative; the same old format, etc. and at the end, stick on some even worse thing about Scrappy. (I thought, why do you even care, if you don’t even like the show at all?) Even Mark Evanier who developed the character and wrote a blog about it mentions “I never quite understood the sentiment being voiced so long after Scrappy had done this alleged damage, and coming — as it often seemed — from people who weren’t that wild about the show before Scooby’s little nephew joined the team.”

And the post is full of misinformation, which has characterized Scrappy hatred all the way to the present. To begin with, we have the claim that “new episodes” of the original show “Scooby Doo Where Are You?” were made the year before Scrappy was introduced (1978). This error first appeared in the 90’s in Jeff Lenburg’s Cartoon Encyclopedia, and went on to corrupt even the DVD releases, so now this has been officially canonized; though when you play the DVDs, perhaps eager to see this “Season 3” of the original show, you just get the Scooby Doo Show opening the episodes were syndicated with (which being a scaledown of the “Scooby Doo – Dynomutt Hour” opening, bears no resemblance to the classic Scooby themes), and find episodes whose background music and other elements (including even the gang dynamic, villains, etc.) made it the furthest thing from the original show at the time! This apparently sprang from a programming mistake early in the season, of some episodes reportedly airing in the separate SDWAY slot that accompanied the “Scooby’s Allstars” supershow the episodes were actually made for.

People blame Scrappy for causing Freddy and the girls to “fall to the background”, but it actually already occurred by this season, with Shaggy and Scooby sometimes spending the bulk of the episode sent out alone to encounter the monster and have all the slapstick chase moments, while the others (who practically could have been played by a single character much of the time) usually find all the clues, and have to explain the mystery to Shaggy and Scooby who often don’t even know what’s going on, at the end. (Big example: “Fortress of Fear”. As I say in my synopses, Scrappy might as well have already replaced the others then!) Velma splits up with Shaggy and Scooby only ONCE the whole season (and this in the Warlock of Wimbledon episode which was left out of the 1980 syndicated package, so you didn’t even see that back then!) Her voice and personality had also changed by then, which was a big blow to the feel of the old show.
To someone who grew up with the original show and really cares about the original format, where there was more of a UNITY in the gang, and more fitting music and settings, THIS was the “jump the shark” period; and by the time the new character was added, I was already pretty much gone and it really didn’t matter at all. Many others, also, apparently. It was already a completely different show, though the changes were very subtle, yet added up.

Just keep in mind; THIS was the newest season that was airing, when ABC determined the show had run out of steam, and needed a big change, or else be cancelled! Some of the things that were good about it were gone, and all that was left was what had gotten old.

But this “SDWAY third season” myth has helped foster the illusion that everything was fine with the “original” show, and then Scrappy suddenly appeared in the middle of this and single handedly destroyed it. Continuing from Evanier, “Others seem to view the pre-Scrappy series as animation that compared favorably with Fantasia…but suddenly when this one character was added, it abruptly turned into a Saturday morning cartoon show.”
So this season seems to be generally liked and respected by many of the same people hating Scrappy. Harris says they “recreated the look of the original show”. (Graphics I would say were actually improved, being crisp and clear, but the settings were very different, and often more abroad. You rarely had a good haunted house like the old show). To wit, several of its villains have been revived in the modern movies, such as the tar monster and Iron Face, so the modern writers must have loved that season just as much as seasons 1 and 2!

Next is the “coffin was nailed shut” by Scrappy, and the almost conspiratorial mindet of how future Disney CEO Eisner was “already” ruining shows. This is also echoed by Beck’s “clueless network executives”. But as it later became revealed, and confirmed on Evanier’s blog, it was the RATINGS they were going by, which suffered before Scrappy was added, but then improved after he was added. Execs (animation studio and broadcast network) back then were were doing whatever they could to save the show from cancellation. And it must have worked, for Scrappy to go on for 9 years! They weren’t trolling all these viewers who (supposedly) really hated him the whole time, as people have practically claimed.

If he improved ABC’s ratings, and CN kept airing him, there must have been a fanbase, though relatively silent compared to a possibly small group of very vocal haters who managed to sway popular opinion!

You also have no recognition that Scrappy had changed, and by the time Daphne came back, was no longer a “brat hogging the camera”, but completely mellowed out into what I always considered a “new Freddy”. So from this, I got the sense that the critics had never even watched past the first season, when that assessment of him was more accurate.

Finally, that A Pup Named Scooby was deliberately created to eliminate Scrappy. (Or as someone else put it back then, when Warner Brothers bought out HB, they stopped production on the Scooby series “almost mercifully” for awhile to give it time to recover from Scrappy). Even recently, on the Scooby wikia, someone at some point added to the Scrappy article the claim (completely unsourced) that “Although [Tom] Ruegger had warmed up to the version of Scrappy-Doo he had worked with in the few years before Pup, he was ultimately never that thrilled about him and believed doing Pup would be a chance to redo the franchise without him.” (This since changed to “Tom Ruegger saw it as a chance to do the series over, forgetting Scrappy.”) So now, we have an actual [and fairly familiar from cartoon credits] name of someone introduced! But I then went and asked Ruegger myself, and he said he liked Scrappy; and the obvious point that in A Pup Named Scooby Doo, Scooby was young so Scrappy [naturally] wasn’t born yet. Younger versions of cartoons was the next fad after younger sidekicks, sparked off by the popular “Muppet Babies”. He concluded “I am against Scrappy-bashing and I did not like seeing Scrappy as the villain in that live action movie. No way Scrappy would or could ever go evil. The makers of that film didn’t understand that Scrappy is loyal and heroic and scrappy. Never evil”. I asked if he knew of others back then, (such as other insiders, writers, etc) who didn’t like him, and he said no.

So we see that a lot of total fabrication of facts is involved in this hatred. Yet it’s been put out there as such universal “truth”, and now taken solid hold in the production studio itself!

So it was this well-presented but largely distorted reading of Scooby’s history, and reflecting what seemed to be universal online feeling about Scrappy, that inspired me to write my own “Scooby story” page (to set the record straight before these sentiments became immortalized and canonized in official publications), which I did that year and sat on for about two years (2000), until I realized I could publish my writings myself on AOL’s “members” space. (My immediate response to the post formed the basis of my separate page on Scrappy).

Today’s online climate and a contradictory behind the scenes industry climate

There are now so many differing levels of opinion on him. 20 years ago, the haters were very vocal, and it seemed almost no one ever defended him. Hence, when I did question haters, one of the things they would often say would be “everybody hates him”. It did look like that. But today, things are very different! But the writers seem to be still living in the past. “Generations” is really no excuse. Even if that was the cause of the hatred, the younger generations who like him more are here, and speaking up. Why aren’t the writers listening to them? This Stern guy says “I’m sure there are some Scrappy fans out there…”. Like they are hypothetical fairyland pixies he has never seen any actual signs of. He claims it as a running “joke”, but people who aren’t even fans of Scrappy are saying it’s no longer funny!
But even over the course of the years, certain things didn’t quite add up in the idea of the fans being so negligible.

The first thing I feared upon seeing all this invective in the 90’s was that when WB catches on to all of it, Scrappy will be pulled from the air and never shown again. (A big chunk of Scooby’s career; —an entire third of it in fact at that time, gone!)
Thing is, that NEVER HAPPENED. While completely omitted from all new productions for a time, through all of that those early years, Scrappy remained a familiar part of Cartoon Network, and then Boomerang, and this going past even the live action movie. They even had Scrappy Doo MARATHONS during that whole period! Several of them, for several years! One of the first shots at him on CN itself was the Blair Witch parody —which was the bumper for one of these Scrappy marathons that were apart of the larger Scooby celebration going on! The aforementioned CN promotional around the time of the movie that proclaimed the network “The place for toons”, had him adding “Not for me, man!” [get it?]; but he did remain a prominent fixture in its programming! So, [WB] he’s so hated, yet you’re still taking hours out of your schedule to show him! It was a bit surprising.
(The incarnation of Scooby that disappeared after awhile, and pretty much never aired again until the modern streaming services, was actually the Scooby Doo Show; which, again and ever so ironically, seems to be well liked by the same fans and writers who hate Scrappy!) On the DVD’s, while he was omitted from the cover art on the releases of the three Hanna Barbera Superstar 10 movies, and 13 Ghosts of Scooby Doo, they still managed (to our astonishment) to eventually release the first season of the Scooby and Scrappy Doo Show, as well as the first season of the Richie Rich-Scooby Doo show (containing the second season short episodes; though with Scrappy again omitted from the cover)!

But if they kept airing him (and even releasing DVD’s), there must have been a fanbase, albeit relatively silent. With these companies, the bottom line is MONEY. They’re not bent on annoying the fans by forcing this character on them even though they all hate him! (As haters seem to think). James Gunn a few years ago identified himself as behind the live action movie reference, but then, even more recently, I’ve seen cited as saying he ended up regretting it, or realizing it was a mistake, due to some sort of backlash. The online comments in the aftermath of its release, rather than being 100% gratified, as you would expect, instead then actually began to turn at that point, with many thinking this was way over the top and ruined the whole movie! This, way back then in ’02! (Yet the sentiment would after then pick up increasingly in new productions, from other writers). I myself saw the movie with a young kid, who as we were leaving the theater, asked in total bewilderment, “why, why?” they made him the villain!

Seeing that Stern mentions needing “approval” to mention him at all, it’s looking now like a difference between WB production, being strictly against him, and WB broadcasting (which is really the old Turner company), being more favorable, at least due to the existence of viewership. So from this combined company, he’s a good enough thing that you can watch his old stuff all day, while they trash him in any new productions, because he was so bad. But all anyone has to do is watch those many airings (now streamed) to see what he was really like for themselves, but these writers seemed to be just repeating assumptions based on very limited watching. Anybody who would say Scrappy was mean to Scooby in the 83-4 series, where he was so busy being Daphne’s cluefinding partner (like Fred and Velma previously were) to have much interaction with Scooby at all, (who was once again paired strictly with Shaggy as the “comedy relief”; —it wasn’t Scrappy who made them look dumb!) just hasn’t watched it. That they would leave him out of the 13th Ghost movie (and only include yet another potshot at him) for that same reason shows they didn’t watch that series either (especially the other way they messed it up, making the ghosts fake).

The live action movie portrayal had even haters saying it’s not funny anymore; and online hatred began cooling off!

Where over 20 years ago, you had all the hate in comments, and nearly every Scooby fan site displayed the hate ribbon and otherwise omitted any mention of Scrappy, today, comments sections (as in the YT videos, below) are very mixed, with still a few saying he’s no good, but more people actually saying they liked him, some even saying they wish he would come back to the show. (I would say to them, we have to reverse this ongoing runaway trend among the writers first, before you can even think of something like that!) You had the “Scooby Apocalypse” comic, which seemed to practically redeem him from the movie-influenced premise of being bad (which looked hopeful to his fans that the tide was turning). The Scooby pages on Facebook include him in their range of post topics, and again, the feelings are generally mixed, and the climate is overall at least “fair” to him.

Picking up on them cutting out more negative talk from this special, it sounds like there must be others higher up in WB who don’t want the negative references either (even if they might not like him). It sounds like Stern is voicing others’ opinions moreso than necessarily his own personal feelings.

So where exactly this is coming from? This is what Evanier basically asked, years ago on his blog series on Scrappy. It’s been like a total mystery in itself (with haters then using it to validate their belief that he’s just universally bad). Since feelings about him are so mixed in the larger fan culture, everybody in WB can’t possibly feel that way. It looks like some small cadre of people who didn’t like him, getting together and just steamrolling their “comfort” at attacking this character over everyone else. “We don’t like him, so NOBODY likes him, and he’s just plain BAD, BAD, BAD!“* (Just like it was 20 years ago, when it was just online and not yet institutionalized into new productions). Even Evanier said “My read is that the folks who don’t like Scrappy are few in number but loud in voice.” Who are these people, and why don’t they just cut it out already?

*(Think, the old rooster describing the bad little chick Foghorn would then babysit).

It’s time they stop getting to control the direction of new productions, regarding Scrappy! Or, they need to start thinking about others’ perspectives sometimes. Who wants to see every momentous occasion becoming a platform for this silly hatred of one one-time (years ago) character (and who wasn’t even bad, really)? Is this even going on (TO THIS EXTENT) in any other franchise?

More on the “generational” perspective: my view

I’m an older viewer too, and grew up with the first four seasons, which were so inspiring, I got up on Saturday mornings and sat through the Patchwork Family (and often earlier stuff like “Channel 2 Eye On”) waiting for it to come on at 8. My mother said she had to make me watch it when it first debuted, which is incredibly hard to believe! (Perhaps because it was more serious looking than the other stuff I watched, like Tennessee Tuxedo?) But soon, I was totally hooked! When it moved from CBS to ABC, the steam started running out, and due to some subtle changes, it just wasn’t the same thing. There were still some interesting ideas, but overall, it was just “blah”.
So by the time Scrappy was added, I was barely following, and it was the same season Fang Puss (from “Fangface”) and Baby Plasticman were added to shows that only debuted the year before, so I saw Scrappy as just another instance of a common current fad to try to add something new to a show, but I myself wasn’t interested, actually. But then as much as I loved the old Scooby, it never occured to me to have any negative feelings like that about this new addition. I remember laughing at him with a friend, at how silly it was of him trying to beat enemies much bigger than him. (I wasn’t thinking of Henery Hawk at that time, who he was based on). But neither we, nor anyone else I saw anywhere took that to hate him. It was just a silly cartoon! (It seemed back at that time that Scooby was a bit out of fashion anyway, and the kids were more into action-adventure, and especially anime. And the most popular “flagship” cartoon stars of Hanna Barbera were still the Flintstones and Yogi and friends, as you can even see in promotional art from that period.
So I admit; it was “not the high point” of the franchise; it was the low point. But it was already at that point for various reasons!)

I watched Scooby into that period, with it all going in one eye and out the other, and not even remembering anything, until it got up to “Hang In There, Scooby” (a few weeks into the second season where it was just a short episode with no mystery or Fred & the girls), when they’re riding the wing of the plane and the passenger with Marilyn Schreffler’s voice (think Olive Oyl on the new Popeyes of the time) says “There’s a man out there!”, and I thought to myself “Why am I forcing myself to watch this? What really does this have to do with the classic Scooby?” So I turned away for good, and then just focused on the old series, which had just entered weekday syndication. (The highlight being the Comedy Movies, which hadn’t been shown since the CBS run. Was so nice to see those again after so many years! THAT was the classic Scooby I was missing, with episodes like Dynamic Scooby Doo Affair and Loch Ness Mess my all time favorites, but now only vaguely remembered! It was also here that the inferiority of the “Scooby Doo Show” seasons really stood out!) Every new season I checked back, and if I only saw Scooby, Scrappy and Shaggy, I quickly turned it off again.

It was actually when they began circling back around to the mystery format, with cool new ideas that I became interested in new Scooby again. At the end of the ’82-3 season, I happened to peek at the show, and caught Beauty Contest Caper, which was a cute semi-mystery/crimefighting story, and even used original ’69 score! This is what won me back, and if that weren’t all; lo the surprise that summer, on a McDonald’s tray liner with a promotional for the new ABC Saturday lineup that hinted “danger prone Daphne” was coming back! (So surprising it was her, when she was almost never paired with Shaggy and Scooby on the old show! Though she was then developed, as not as “danger prone” anymore!) By this time, Scrappy had been totally developed, to the point he became Daphne’s cluefinding partner, sort of like Freddy was.
In 1984, the ’80-1 series were repackaged as “The Scary Scooby Funnies” and played right after the New Scooby Mysteries with a similar new opening, so I at first thought they were new, and watched, falling in love with the earlier, yet already somewhat developed “invincible” Scrappy, and the comedy format. Hang In There Scooby (the only one I remembered from the original run) was apparently not apart of this package (to verify that these were apart of the same series of episodes), and I hadn’t watched long enough to see the much better written later ones, like the fairy tale spoofs, which were prominent in this new show, so they were now truly “new” to me!

As I’ve said elsewhere, it was still the same old Shaggy and Scooby, crying “Zoinks!” and “Yow!” as they always had, but now it no longer pretended to be a classic mystery, and you didn’t have Freddy taking both of the girls, finding all the clues, and constantly criticizing Shaggy and Scooby as they run off and leave them alone to face the most danger, as in those last seasons with them. It was like the chase scenes of the mysteries framed as episodes by themselves, and the chase was apparently the main attraction by then anyway. So as I’ve said, it was a great relief from a format that had become completely worn. (The selection of background music was very nice, as it combined the new 1979 first season score with a lot of revived early 70’s “Pebbles and Bam-Bam” era stock, and even occasionally, a Magilla or Wacky Races era piece thrown in on occasion!)

So I long noted that a lot of the people hating him 20 years ago were slightly younger than me (Harris being my first example; he I believe was born in 1978, and would only have been 1 year old when Scrappy was introduced), as the younger end of Gen. X. It seems some of these modern writers are about that age as well. So they likely didn’t watch Scrappy be added to the show; they grew up seeing the whole run from ’69-88 side by side in syndication or cable, and thus the Scooby Doo Show was “original” after all; so Scrappy stuck out (and to some, the special guests of the Comedy Movies as well, which also were included as a “jumptheshark” point), and then aimed to speak for everyone. (The older members of this generation would have been in their 30’s already when all of these ridiculous internet posts were made, and a bit old for a lot of that stuff. So that’s why it seemed to have been the younger ones doing it. If it really was the older ones, at that age, they needed to ‘grow up‘ [mentally and emotionally, that is] already, rather than holding on to that stuff and then carrying it into the animation industry! When I was a kid, if I got this much into some feeling about a fictional character or story, my parents would say I watched too much TV and needed to come out of the dream world and back into reality! Gunn, for instance called Scrappy, among many other things, “an awful person”. Sounds almost like he forgets this is not a real person!)
The criticisms aren’t even consistent; now they’re criticizing him for things they (often wrongly) claim he does, rather than him simply being added later.

Scrappy himself was cited as saying in the 1999 comic (the end of the period where he could still be found in good uses), that he “get[s] this [i.e. dislike] a lot from these Gen. X guys”. Gunn is my age, while Beck is a decade older (a “Boomer”; though he wasn’t necessarily hating on Scrappy, and I’ve never seen him do it; just explaining this generational viewpoint. BTW, he does love and frequently post on the other “Scrappy”; the black&white one from the 30’s). I can’t find any age/birth date listed for Stern anywhere, but he seems like a later X. Sheridan, now is that “younger” (Millennial) generation, saying the original 13 Ghosts was out when he was young. (While his “couldn’t make Scrappy work with the story I was doing” I don’t quite understand, and sounds like a lame excuse, he did genuinely say he “would have loved” to have redeemed Scrappy the way he redeemed Flim Flam in the story. (You can hear this here). He even speaks of a hopeful “Scrappy Renaissance” someday! (And the host says “it was nice that there was an attempt at Scrappy”!)) So here’s someone in WB who thinks differently from the others, but some higher up(s) were opposing it. But of course, he’s a different generation! The president of WB Animation is Sam Register was born three months before Scooby debuted and thus in my older, cynical generation, so I wonder if he could be the one opposing Scrappy and only allowing negative references. (Though he’s only been in the title for about a year, but was still involved with WB and CN way before that. To be fair; never heard his position on Scrappy, though, but it would likely be someone, along with others, up on that level).

I guess, looking at my generation, other subcultures of it included the “death metal” fans in high school wishing death to disco: —that’s the way they think; if you don’t like something; then death to it; and write this all over the walls and desks!— and so I guess it figures they would grow up, and the new medium of the internet would become the new venue for their extreme feelings, and a few who got involved with the entertainment industry would then create this dark mindset we have seen since we came of age, where Shaggy and Scooby must have been “stoners” like they were (“sex/drugs/rock&roll”, after all), let’s bust up that “too perfect” goody-goody gentleman Freddy and “develop” him into a complete idiot, and those who didn’t like Scrappy would then project all of this evil onto him. But I think this has been completely indulged long enough, and needs to be reined in now!

I have to admit that these members of my own generation here are being very childish with this feeling that the powers that be of our youth were just trying to destroy our childhoods just for the fun of it; like this is all about us (and hence, why hatred toward one of those decisions, Scrappy, would be so deeply and intensely PERSONAL. They’re acting like it is still 1979, and some mean parent took all their toys away or “grounded” them for years and laughed!)
Plus, the uncharacteristic cynicism of modern productions. (Willaim Fischer’s article on the Scrappy hatred objects “I don’t get why Velma, confident and affable in the first series, has since been made a cynical, deadpan nerd with self-esteem issues.”) and utter darkness at times. (Like it wasn’t enough to have Avenger on Harvey Birdman snatch Scrappy away, but then in several further episodes of that show, continue to show his dead corpse!) I usually reject judgments of “generations”; most often by an older one claiming younger ones are more “selfish” or “spoiled” or something like that, but in this case, there has been a point to it!

Where do we go from here?

Some fans are reacting tho this, with even a petition being created. for him!
https://www.change.org/p/warner-brothers-scrappy-doo-deserves-better-reintroduce-the-scooby-doo-character-in-a-positive-way?recruiter=11135209
In addition to this, we must also include the need for writers to stop projecting their own personal feelings about him into their productions, and aiming to speak for everyone. Yes, there is “artistic freedom”, but a fixation like this is more that just that. They’ve had over 20 years for their “jokes”, and it never seems to satisfy them to where they’ve vented their feelings and made their statement, and becomes boring and they move on. They act like Scrappy has been pushed in every production the whole time, and they’re the ones trying to convince their higher ups and the world that he’s no good. Or worse, they act like the series before him was erased and replaced by him, or that he was crudely spliced into every copy of the old show. If you didn’t like him, just skip over those seasons! Don’t force your hatred of him on everyone!

This is some kind of deep psychological issue (it’s called “Shadow projection”; especially when you see a lot of the stuff in that “Capacity to Hate” video, below. Some of this stuff is a bit psychotic, so people must not have been exaggerating when they said Scrappy ruined their childhoods, because that’s exactly how they’re acting! This stuff shows what people might wish to do to real people they don’t like if they thought they could get away with it! Or if not particular writers themslves; whoever they have carelessly allowed to shape their thinking.
Scrappy has been made into a “trope” (“the Scrappy”), or basically “archetype” (ruling pattern) of a later addition to a show that people hate (building upon the earlier “Cousin Oliver”). But he’s obviously having another (more classical) archetype, called the “Demonic Personality” projected onto him; most manifest in Gunn’s “Scrappy Rex” mutation (and one of those early Usenet posts calling him the “demon bastard puppy”!) It’s about ultimate evil, and “undermining” (recall, Stern using that very term regarding Scrappy’s supposed effect on Scooby!) It often accompanies stuff like trauma, and involves feelings of the fear of the destruction of the ego, which is clearly evident, when people accuse Scrappy of ruining their childhood, and then wish sadistic things on him as if he had actually done so. A “projection” is when you see stuff that’s actually inside you, in others on the outside, including fictional characters. “Shadow” is the darkness we don’t like to think is in ourselves, and so usually suppress into our own unconscious, so we only see it in others! That’s why their portrayals of Scrappy, from the live action movie on down, bear no resemblance to the actual character. But they are so sure this was who he was! It’s all stuff inside them, not him, as evident in all the other dark things they have done on some of these cartoon shows. (I on the other hand, project the “Hero” archetype onto Scrappy, because of how he burst in and broke the rut Scooby was in, and challenged bullies who attacked Scooby. I feel many other cartoon characters could have used a sidekick like that, and would have loved to have one or even be one myself in real life. Positive things can be projected as well).
Another example of the projection is that what the critics and haters (including these current writers, apparently) are accusing the TV executives of doing 40 years ago, is exactly what they themselves, the current WB staff, are doing today with Scrappy. Making their decisions not based on the objective factor of the ratings (i.e what the actual fans want), but rather their own basically sick (and ‘clueless’) little agendas. (Modern production being more free than old network TV standards).

But why? Why are they projecting this stuff onto this shortly lived fictional character from decades ago? Something not done with other cartoons; not even the worst villains from them! I even tried asking a Jungian analyst, John Beebe, who discusses these archetypes as appearing in popular movies, and uses them with the common Myers Briggs typology, (also based loosely on Carl Jung), what this is about, but being older, he hasn’t paid much attention to Scooby.
These people really need to look into this, and maybe even see an analyst, instead of forcing their feelings on everyone else, and ignoring different opinion as virtually nonexistent. (We see this, again, with Stern’s statement “I GUESS he has fans…”). You’re supposed to be producing this stuff for US, the fans; not for some therapeutic gratification of some old resentment toward what was really an impersonal industry decision over 40 years ago!

The haters also should realize, this whole thing has the potential to ultimately backfire on them, who wish he never existed. The live action movie and all of these negative references afterward have kept drawing attention to him, and stoking the ire of people who do like him, and of course, also, these “younger viewers” Beck and others mention, who would have started out more neutral, but then notice the disparity between these modern portrayals and his actual appearance on the old show. If they had simply stopped with “Scrappy Stinks” and the Blair Witch spoof, he might have by now been largely forgotten, and perhaps thought of little more than Scooby Dum. As we see now, this is slowly creating a demand, along with blogs, videos and podcasts now discussing the absurdity of the hatred, along with a comic series (that I heard will be produced as a movie) that uses him more positively.

If one day, all these hating writers and producers suddenly find themselves ordered by their bosses; higher up WB execs, to produce something with a good use of him, or even to bring him back permanently, then they will have only themselves to blame. (Hope they enjoyed their good laugh these past 20 years!) The overall media company, while going along with their feelings now, again, is driven by profit, created by demand. And these younger viewers who like him are growing up, and will become more vocal and influential. If they see a demand, they, unlike these lower level people (writers, etc.) will put feelings aside, and no longer care about Scooby “jumping the shark” over 40 years earlier. (Just like they continued airing him all throughout the period of open hatred).

The real casualty in the hatred!

It is just so hypocritical (another example of projection) for the whole issue with Scrappy being that he “changed the show”. The same writers have at times changed the other characters beyond recognition; my prime example being Fred in SDMI. This is the series with the biggest attack after Gunn’s movie, where Fred and Daphne are in a museum showing statues of old partners such as Vincent Van Ghoul and Flim Flam (here’s where it’s revealed he became bad). But then, when they get to Scrappy, Daphne is looking with curiosity, and Fred says “Look away, we promised we’d never speak of him again. Not ever!” (Which isn’t even true, as they HAVE continued speaking of him, nonstop to the present!) Keep in mind, now, all of this is because of the writers not liking him “changing the show”. This same “Freddy” in this series would go on to try to play an eight track tape cartridge on a record turntable! (This tops even anything on A Pup Named Scooby, which is where Fred first became an idiot!) Keep in mind, this was originally the intelligent leader of the gang!

And all this rampant cynicism (starting with Zombie Island, basically). “Protective of the original characters”, are you? “Character development”, right? (The common excuse for Freddy. It’s really character destruction!). So they claim Scrappy was a “d*ck” to Scooby? Look at Skip (toward the whole gang) in last year’s Funky Phantom crossover. And also, really, Velma towards Mudsy. (I believe they similarly screwed up the Magilla/Mr.Peebles underlying relational dynamic as well. Notice, in the typical dehumanizing attitude of the day, how Magilla, [who only grunts and doesn’t talk!], is now an “it”, rather than “he”, to Peebles! Somewhat paralleling Scrappy and Scooby, Magilla may have been a big nuisance to Peebles he wanted to get rid of, but at the end of the day, there was a love there and they were inseparable!)
The original Comedy movies showed that the gang could handle additions well, and it wasn’t a jump the shark moment (especially, being it was liked enough to be revived), as the spirit of the original show was still maintained (and in fact, depthened), so “additions” are no reason for the hate either.

(The other big departure from the original format I thought the modern writers were hypocritical for adding, was the ROMANCE between members of the gang; mainly Fred and Daphne (first joked about in “Bravo Dooby Doo”, which set the stage for the modern generation of Scooby, and it then picked up afterward), and even Shaggy and Velma in Scooby Doo: Mystery Incorporated! This to me was VERY out of character. In the teenage angst of wanting girls and being frustrated, it was nice to turn to Scooby and be able to forget all of that, and a beautiful and sexy girl was not taken or even pursued by some man (and especially the “perfect” man who was also there, who wasn’t presented as a ‘ladies man’). Both Josie and Funky Phantom had quabbling by an underdog character wanting the sexy other member who always goes with the other “perfect” attractive member of the group in splitups. Scooby had none of that!

I’ve cooled off with that now, because in SDMI, the premise was that they were younger, and tried dating each other (but Shaggy was too attached to his dog to notice Velma, and the stupified Freddy was too in love with the Mystery Machine, or devising traps to notice Daphne), but then settled on just being friends. So the romance seems to have been mostly dropped in subsequent productions

Likewse, as far as “cynicism”, this has affected the DC universe, where the characteristic modern cynicism or darkness actually happens to fit the original comics, where it was TV that made them more ‘lighter’ or, in the words of the modern cynics, ‘campy’. I didn’t like that either; favoring “Superfriends”, but realized they wanted to go back to the comics style of the characters).

All of this changes the character of the show. “He doesn’t belong”! Is THIS what Scooby is about? You can’t look at the gang the same way!

I should further explain that my annoyance about this is not simply about someone bashing a character I like; it’s about how this changes the character of the show itself; i.e. the other characters. It’s no longer merely a “joke” he’s the butt of; it’s no longer an out of control Mystery Machine running over dolls of Scrappy, or even Avenger snatching him [totally different franchise in a spoof show], now they’ve made it totally personal; it’s the gang themselves openly rejecting him, even though this doesn’t reflect how they interacted in the actual show (even if he was “annoying” at times), or even the characters apart from Scrappy (where they all annoyed each other, but still loved each other, and anyone else who joined them). So as I point out in a comment in the article in the link, (in reference to “he doesn’t belong”; “Is THIS what Scooby is about? Is this what it’s come to?” This stuff actually makes it hard to see the gang in the same way. So generation or no generation, the writers are injecting too much of their own feelings into it.

I think the lastest Looney Tunes and Tom & Jerry shows finally nailed the spirit of those classic series (save for some of the gore in the former), and these “golden age” franchises are 80 years old now. So it seems like that’s when some future generation stops reimagining characters and tries to restore the original feel of the Hanna Barbera series? So I guess it might be another 30 years before Scooby enters this phase (and the generations who grew up liking Scrappy are the studio executives).

The definitve chronicle on all the hatred:

Scrappy Days

https://www.stitcher.com/show/a-podcast-named-scoobydoo/episode/017-interview-with-duane-poole-part-two-54305273

https://collider.com/why-is-scrappy-doo-hated/ (William Fischer)

A site with several articles, including one discussing my fantasy idea (from my “Facts on Scrappy” page), of a “Nega-canon” that explains the movie portrayals (and correputed portrayals of the rest of the gang as well):
https://www.ranker.com/list/why-people-turned-on-scrappy-doo/donn-saylor

other videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T726ELyvFs4 (Why is Scrappy hated)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AKx5Ajpaew (Brief history)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dj2tqs7zhow (Wasted Plotential)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fdQS-rjsnk (Rise and Fall)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhJFr2pjeis (Character Chronicles)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wm2SZnoUxj8 (“Scooby Addicts” panel discussion)

Long Lost Scooby/Batman sequence found

I’ve long mentioned, including on my Scooby page, an edited out scene from the episode “The Dynamic Scooby Doo Affair” (my favorite in the whole franchise; and the first with Batman) containing a very intellectual sounding discussion between Velma and Batman on the dangers of counterfeiting. I last saw this either in 80’s syndication, or perhaps USA in the 90’s (didn’t watch that channel’s run of Scooby much). In the middle of the decade, when the entire Scooby franchise finally moved to new owner Turner’s Cartoon Network, I noticed this sequence was removed (as well as parts of, it seems every other Scooby Doo Comedy Movie episode). CN was by then airing their new “Cartoon Cartoon” shorts, and seemed to have reserved the last 10 minutes of the hourlong Scooby Movies show, for these new one-off shorts. So I assumed the scenes were cut for that reason. Only thing, when the DVD’s began coming out, the cut scenes were not restored.

The syndicated version had cut some scenes as well. They originally aired in two parts, and a lot of things were being cut in the 80’s, in that age of greed where they wanted more commercial time. CN put these scenes back, but cut others. In my second favorite episode, “Loch Ness Mess” (the second with the Globetrotters), I had remembered Fred later on in the story making a comparison, or essentially telling [Shaggy and Scooby] to choose between “the ghost with the lantern” and the other haunt in the story (which was a sea serpent), but now it was missing. In CN/WB’s copies, that dialogue is back (not sure what else from that episode they cut. Probably something earlier on, as the story now progresses a bit faster than I remember). In “Guess Who’s Knott Coming to Dinner”, the gang now sends Scooby up the fireplace (as a means to escape the trap they were in) right away. I remembered them trying several things looking for a “secret passage” for a long time, before considering the fireplace (as “the last resort”. It turned out to activate an inside secret passage after all). The “Spooky Fog” (the other one with Don Knotts) had the highly unusual splitup where Fred takes Velma to check out a cave they saw, and leaves Daphne with the others, instead of taking Daphne, or both girls. They then return to the sherriff’s office for the others, to go inside the cave. In the current view, it looks like they all go out together the first time. Fred and Velma say they’re going to check it out, but in the next scene, the whole gang is there; but several lines of dialogue among both groups had been cut. In the Cass Elliot episode, you don’t see how Scooby got into the purple goop (taffy) with the others. Though there’s some evidence that scene might have been a blooper all along.
It’s been close to 30 years since the USA run, and these older prints of the show aired, so it’s hard to remember everything!

But I figured someone’s old VHS copy of the show might apparently be our only hope of seeing it again. And sure enough; here it is! You can also find the end of part 1 [i.e. “Be sure to tune in tomorrow for the conclusion of…”] audio and titles in other videos as well!)

So in Dynamic Scooby Doo Affair, I don’t remember what was missing from the syndicated version that was put back by Turner. People have been mentioning another cut scene, taking place in the funhouse, and I do remember there being more to that sequence (around the time the gang enters and first splits up, IIRC). Perhaps, that was what syndication removed, and Turner didn’t restore it? This one hasn’t turned up, or been posted yet.

So in this scene, the cut was made so cleanly, it was hard to tell where exacly it was made. After everyone has gone through the rotating house into the underground cavern where they follow the hooded man, they find a trap door leading to a toy warehouse. Batman climbs up first, then pulls up the others, and they then begin searching the warehouse. It looks like they simply cut from Bat logo to Bat logo (which is used for scene changes, just like it was in the original Batman show), which now has a long blackout between the zoom in and out of the logo. So he starts to pull them up first, then begins the cut scene, and it now picks up where he tells them to follow him, “…and above all, move quietly”. (Before, I wasn’t sure whether the cut scene was before him pulling them up, or after. The sudden scene and music change between them running into the tunnel and then being under the trap door and Batman saying he will go up first, looked like the cut. You also expected him to be up there a while longer before bringing the others up).

———————————————————————————————

(Batman: “That’s our man, after him!“
[next scene, under trap door]: “Robin, you stay here with them while I check this out.”
[next scene, above]: “He’s up here somewhere. Come on, I’ll give you a hand!”)

–begin cut scene–

Robin: “Holy jumping jacks!”

Velma: “Look it’s a warehouse full of toys”

Batman: “And it’s my guess the criminal intends to toy with us! Well two can play at these games!

Shaggy: “Hey, like where’s Scooby?

[Scooby is growling off screen]

Shaggy: “Wow I think Scooby cornered the bad guy !”

[He’s actually getting ready to fight some more punch clowns, not learning his lesson from the one in the beginning, in the farmhouse]

Shaggy: “Come on Scoob like quit fooling around!”

Batman: “Obviously the phony money is shipped from this warehouse inside those clowns”!

Velma: “If we don’t stop him from flooding the money market with crooked cash, it’ll undermine our national economy!”

Batman: “Yes kids for the sake of our country’s financial system we must catch this criminal here and now!”

Shaggy: “I just love that kind of talk!”

–resume extant sequence–
(Batman: “Okay. Come on. Follow me. And above all, move quietly…”)

(Bold is what I clearly remembered. I wasn’t sure of what Batman said it was “for the sake of”, and for some reason thought it was something “global”, which if you think of it sounds silly. Also, ironic how Shaggy says he loves that kind of talk! Didn’t remember that, or the earlier exchange, which shows how they came to realize that this was where the phony money was coming from).

The video has been up for almost a year. I was at that point still too enthralled with the sudden turnup of FRSC [see last entry]; in addition to COVID, of course, to be looking for this!)

Hope more of these turn up; AND that they are added to WB’s masters and released on future media!

Original Sylvester & Tweety storyboard surfaces

This past month, someone on the Cartoon Research FB group posted the “Evolution of Sylvester & Tweety” video by a YouTuber named Dave Down Under. Right in the middle of it, when discussing the period when Bob Clampett left the studio, it actually shows a portion of a storyboard for his version of Sylvester and Tweety, which was said to be “recently uncovered”.

I first heard about this way back in Jerry Beck’s I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat: Fifty Years of Sylvester and Tweety, on p45 where he says “When Clampett left Warner Bros. in 1946, he was working on Tweety’s next film, pairing him with the cat (later named Sylvester…)”. p.38, he mentions a size comparison chart drawn by Clampett unit layout artist Tom McKimson that was the first sketch to show them as a pair. Lenburg’s Cartoon Encyclopedia p.140 also mentions that a “preliminary story” had been done by Clampett, but I didn’t know if that meant simply written out (text), or a storyboard. So here now, we get six panels of an actual storyboard! And we also even get a title: “FAT RAT AND THE STUPID CAT”!

At the time I first read these books, I was just getting married, and we didn’t have cable yet, but reading this and the Looney Tunes & Merrie Melodies guide the Sylvester & Tweety book was scaled down from, was becoming more interested in the “pre-48” Looney tunes, which were never shown on the network TV shows I was familiar with, but by this time were strictly on Turner cable, including the brand new Cartoon Network, and which I was awaiting.
I was by then familiar with the different drawing/animation styles of the main three directors from the later series; Friz Freleng, Chuck Jones and Robert McKimson. But in Beck’s book, there were other directors earlier on, (including Tex Avery, who went on to become a mainstay at rival MGM, and I was familiar with from the syndicated Tom & Jerry show), and three others of note, Frank Tashlin, Robert Clampett, and Arthur Davis. Only reading synopses in the book, but not clearly remembering their particular styles; I wondered what these last three were like; particularly Clampett.

I had vaguely remembered the pre-48’s from syndication on ch.5, which I would generally be forced to watch whenever me and my ENTJ cousin were in the same house (and then would occasionally afterward peek at it on my own when nothing else was on). So I saw the early Bugs, and the early Elmer, including him being fat at times, and one with Bugs having a totally different (deeper) voice; etc. Pepe Le Pew actually pursued a disguised female dog once! (I didn’t remember his first film, where it was a male cat in disguise!) There were many things in the early years that were so different from the popular later stuff. I remember Bugs and Yosemite drawing higher numbered “shooters” on each other, until Bug pelts him in the nose with a “pea shooter”. They also had some post-48’s mixed in, such as the obvious title idea “Hare Brush”, the one where Elmer is in a psych ward pretending to be a rabbit and switches places with Bugs to avoid going to Alcatraz for tax evasion; and the one with Baby Faced Finster (Baby Buggy Bunny), and several with Bugs and Daffy competing on TV shows. (Their “Tea for Two” tapdance from “Show Biz Bugs” was cleverly used as the opening sequence. Sort of paralleled the network “This is It” opening).

But a certain batch of post-48’s were always kept on the CBS or ABC Saturday morning shows, and these included the big Oscar winners, such as Sylvester and Tweety, and the later Bugs vs Yosemite Sam series. (Director Friz Freleng grew tired of Elmer, and wanted a stronger character to go against Bugs, so Elmer eventually fell by the wayside). It was these that I took notice of in the late 70’s (when it was the huge 90 minute “Bugs Bunny Roadrunner Show” on CBS).

Very dialogue-oriented compared to the Tom & Jerry’s I had become a huge fan of, there was a lot of verbal ingenuity, and I was fascinated by the Rabbit Fire trilogy (where Bugs and Daffy try to use verbal or visual schemes to get Elmer to shoot each other), or Foghorn trying to talk his way out of being eaten by the chickenhawk or weasel and send them after the dog instead, or struggle to understand the brainy little chick who writes out the math formula for every impossible thing he does. (I remember him once explaining to the weasel. “I could have told you, to get at those chickens, you have to get rid of that dog”. I wished there had been someone to explain that to Tom sometimes, when Jerry would be using Spike as refuge!)

“Windblown Hare” cleverly fuses the story of “The Three Little Pigs” with “Little Red Riding Hood” and the wolf, common to both stories (and rather Sylvester-like, in this one), has to read the books to know how to play out his roles, as Bugs Bunny gets caught up in one story and changes it to the other.
The Oscar-winning “Birds Anonymous” (where Sylvester goes on a 12 step program to avoid eating Tweety), and the similar “Last Hungry Cat” (where he thinks he’s eaten him, and is plagued by his conscience, stoked by the Hitchcock-esque narrator) were truly ingenious! (In this last one, he passionately pleads “Other cats have eaten birds; why pick on me? Why, Why?!”) In another film, yet another “Lennie” (Of Mice and Men) caricature explains his inaccurate addressing: “But I can’t say ‘Sylvester’, George!” And when his son accuses him of being “inhuman” for devising a plot to catch a bird; “Of course I’m not human! I’m a cat! And cats catch birds!” (Not to mention all the times he’s said “I’m a cat— I think. Meow! Yep, I’m a cat”!)

But as I discuss here: https://erictb.wordpress.com/2012/05/01/when-does-one-root-for-the-good-guys-or-the-bad-guys/ the series overall, aside from these moments of brilliancy had fallen into a bit of a rut, as nearly everything had become patterned after the Sylvester and Tweety or Coyote and Roadrunner chase. The former winning the studio its very first Oscar, that became the winning formula. WB cartoons were then dominated by specific repetative premise series (like Hippety Hopper being mistaken for a mouse, Pepe LePew thinking a cat is a skunk, etc.) most of which followed these formulas (and increasingly with hard “win/lose” endings, rather than more funny neutral punchlines like earlier on), to the point that even Daffy ultimately became a Sylvester or Coyote-like stooge to Bugs! (And later, to Speedy Gonzales after they stopped using Bugs!)

So (the point I’m getting to), it was interesting to see that Tweety had a life before Sylvester (once they were paired, Sylvester was determined to be the only other character Tweety could work with for some reason —even though he didn’t talk in the first cartoon, and basically could have been played by any cat).

The different animation units and the origin of the duo

Each director tended to have their own characters, except for the biggest, oldest stars: Bugs, Elmer, Daffy and Porky, who were used routinely by all of them. So Sylvester was by Friz Freleng, and Tweety was by Bob Clampett. The styles of these directors were very different. The early 40’s were Clampett’s heyday (and Tex Avery, when he was there, earlier on), and both had very “wacky” stories and animation, while Freleng’s older stuff tended to be more dry and lame (his high point back then was “Red Riding Rabbit” and “Rhapsody in Rivets”, but most of the rest of it is forgettable).

In the middle of the decade, Clampett suddenly left the studio, along with Avery’s eventual replacement, Frank Tashlin, and at the same time, both Freleng and the similar Chuck Jones and new upstart Bob McKimson began cranking out a new generation of characters who would become mainstays to the present: Pepe, Sylvester, Yosemite, Foghorn, and eventually Marvin Martian and the Roadrunner; some of which were being noticed by the Academy, including Sylvester, whose debut, “Life With Feathers” was nominated. (A fourth director, Art Davis, took over Clampett’s Goofy Gophers debut film. Freleng and Jones also began improving their story ideas, such as “Baseball Bugs”, etc.).

Sylvester obviously had a very distinct character; sort of a feline Daffy, the voice and lisp being the same, but not sped up. Daffy himself then even quickly adopted the new character’s very first line: “Sufferin’ succotash!”
The other directors quickly became interested in him as well, starting with Clampett himself, who at the end of his run at the studio, decided to use him (still unnamed all this time) against Porky, instead of Tweety, who was in between films at the time. (He did make a very brief cameo appearance on the baby assemblyline of “Baby Bottleneck”, which was Clampett’s last animated use of him. Also, directors had to get permission to use another director’s creation who wasn’t already big enough like the aforementioned top four).

Tweety had begun against a feline version of “Babbit and Catstello” (I didn’t remember this version of them; I only remembered the two later films where they had become mice!) Next was just a single black cat, similar to Sylvester, but more dopey. And finally, the same cat, redrawn yellow, and with this wacky looking red cat added, who’s patterned after Jimmy Durante. Originally drawn on model sheets more generic, by the time the film was animated, they gave him this crazy eggplant-like “Humpty nose” (think “Humpty Dance”, which was big around the time I got this book), and a weird looking mouth and teeth. (I kept thinking “You look like Screwy Squirrel on crack, Humpty!” Really hard to imagine the original design talking like Durante, but maybe he wasn’t yet planned to caricature him at that time)
Seeing that Durante cat is part of what begged the question of what Clampett would come up with ‘next’ after that!

Umbriago! What would Clampett come up with next?

So Clampett must have liked Freleng’s cat so much, he then decided to quickly use him again, as Tweety’s next opponent.
You could even see where Clampett had already modified his cat design around him! Right after the Porky film, “Kitty Kornered”, came the Daffy solo classic “The Great Piggy Bank Robbery”, where one of the “Duck Twacy” villains is “Pussycat Puss”, who looks like a yellow Sylvester, even taking on the [Freleng-esque] characteristic side scruffs and the bigger snout and nose! Previously, Clampett’s cat characters had shorter snouts and pretty much round bulbous heads with jowls (instead of scruffs), like the rest of his characters; all of which seemed to be framed on that baby picture of himself (See I Tawt I Taw a Putty Tat p.40) that Tweety was patterned after. (They all basically had this “Tweety” look. The main exception being the Durante cat [aka “Colonel”], because of the redrawn nose taking prominence. I may have vaguely remembered one of those last two films, as they use the same piece of animation, when the other cat [“Snooks”] first eyes Tweety sleeping in the nest, with the huge head and eyes that bulge out at him. It looked very familiar).

But then as Clampett started work on this project, that was when he left the studio (due to some sort of conflict with the difficult to work with producer, Eddie Selzer, who had taken over after Leon Schlesinger left).
So Freleng decided to pick up the project, but instead of completing the story that had been drawn, he simply took the rights to Tweety (which now became exclusively his), and used him to replace another character in a project he was already working on.

Clampett’s new cat character design

Sylvester’s first film was about a lovebird who wants to die because of his nasty wife. So reverse of the future cat and bird chase premise, it was about him wanting Sylvester to eat him, but Sylvester being suspicious (“There’s something phony about you! Ya didn’t even try to escape from me! Ya just stood there! You’re probably poisoned! Yeah! You only want me to eat you, so I’ll die! Well I’m not falling for it!”).
He within a year did a second film “Peck Up Your Troubles”, that was truer to the later form, where Sylvester chases a bird, this time a woodpecker, and keeps annoying a bulldog that gets in his way, sometimes protecting the bird.

It was this film he was doing a “followup” to, and then decided to replace the woodpecker with Tweety. Right before Freleng died, I was still working the courts, and one day after work, had wandered over to Chatham Square for some reason, and the former (1870’s) New Bowery Hotel tenement had a small magazine store on St. James Pl. and I was probably looking for a snack or something, and went in and saw an animation magazine where Freleng was being interviewed, and this being around ’95, this whole mystique of “Clampett’s next Tweety film” still fresh in my mind, read it to see what further light it would shed.
That’s where I read that when he took over the project and merged it with his own, he told either his unit or Selzer that they “might as well stick Tweety in there”, but Selzer kept opposing it, wanting him to use the woodpecker. (He probably really did not like Clampett, and wanted to see anything associated with him retired and forgotten!) It mentioned the incident of Freleng slamming the pencil down on his desk and saying “well finish it yourself!”; Selzer gave in, and yet then was all too glad to receive the Oscar for the finished product, “Tweetie Pie” when it won!

The first Oscar, displayed on “Blue Ribbon” title that replaced the original

I wish I could find that magazine, to provide the source, to be added on sites like Wikipedia and elsewhere. (Edit: It was likely Animato! #32 which lists a feature on Freleng on the cover, which was probably what drew me to it in the first place, and this was from the Spring, before he died, and thus not about that subject). Many people aren’t aware of this woodpecker project, and that Tweetie Pie was based on it, and not on Clampett’s story.

It seems all Freleng used from the Clampett project was apparently the layout, and now with the long lost original credits to the “Blue-Ribboned” Tweetie Pie also recently surfacing, the layout credit still goes to the Freleng unit’s Hawley Pratt. He probably took it, to get the basic idea, and just redrew it in his own unit’s style. (Tweety’s Freleng design is notably “sweeter” looking and even a bit more feminine presenting, especially the smile, which apparently had led to questions about his gender at times. His “Tiny Toons” younger counterpart, “Sweetie Bird” was made a female!)

You can easily visualize the woodpecker in Tweety’s place, like in the opening, outside next to the cigar, and then the lady of the house takes him in, and it would make sense that when Sylvester piled up the wooden furniture to reach him, the woodpecker would peck it, instead of Tweety having to saw it. Since in the first woodpecker cartoon, neither character spoke (Sylvester uses signs, like the Coyote would do later!), this explains why Sylvester doesn’t speak, but they had to make Tweety speak, to stay in character, but the lines are not really integral to the story.
(He was in this film oddly named “Thomas”! What were they thinking? Were they pretending MGM didn’t exist, like at the very same time having Bugs Bunny go against a mouse in a “Hungarian Rhspsody #2” performance?! He was first addressed as “Sylvester” by Porky a year later in “Scaredy Cat” which was Jones’ first use of him).

Imagining what this story would have been like

Clampett’s Sylvester, from Kitty Kornered, seemed like a smart leader. I had always vaguely remembered one where he stood up and gave a speech to other cats, on how to deal with the threat at hand. (The frame of this shown in the book always reminded me of that famous picture of Malcolm X giving the speech, with his pointing hand similarly raised). When the youngest kitten twice says something stupid, he backslaps him (“Sssmack!“) What a far cry from the later Tweety-pursuer who would helplessly allow dogs and other characters to slap or punch him around, if not worse! (Sylvester’s mix of toughness and passiveness is likely what made me identify with him, and thus why I’m so into this).

So I always wondered how this would translate to the Tweety chase, since all of his earlier pursuers were either dumb, or a smart leader with a dumb sidekick who screws things up, and of course once Sylvester was paired with Tweety under Freleng, he became largely a hapless passive/aggressive losing wimp also. This still could have happened now (just like he had a strong personality in his debut, but instantly took on the wimpy role in the second film), but since Clampett had only one use of him at the time, you don’t really get a sense of the full range of roles he would have done with him. (He does parallel Colonel, even down to the “And furthermore…!” I also imagine he might not have been allowed to “kill off” Freleng’s new character, as had basically been done with the cats in the last two films, and so you expect it to have a different kind of ending! Everything about this is so intriguing!)

Kitty Kornered was an extremely rare role for Sylvester, as the pursuee rather than pursuer, and thus as the winner, as the pursuees often are in these cartoons. He technically had a similar role in Life With Feathers, though it played upon him being the natural predator, and concluded with him resuming that role. Otherwise, both Freleng and McKimson kept him largely as an antagonist, or in other ways, a helpless loser (only Jones had completely different kinds of roles for him, mostly as timid companion to Porky, but had only used him in about four films).
He appears as heckling pursuee again in Freleng’s “Back Alley Uproar”, against Elmer (so unusual seeing him coming with his hunter’s rifle against Sylvester!) but this was actually a remake of an earlier black&white Looney Tune feauring a generic cat against Porky. (Even though he ends up losing all of his nine lives, he still has the final hurrah, as one of the lives swipes Elmer’s halo, since he had died also, and is yet still plagued by the cat’s singing!) There’s also Davis’ “Doggone Cats” and McKimson’s “Crowing Pains” (though he’s a dumb sidekick in the former, and still loses in the latter).

This is an illustration of what I pointed out above, that earlier stories had more of a variety of plots and roles, but fell into more formulaic patterns later on. Sylvester was technically pursuee in some later Freleng films, such as the two with Chester and Spike/Alfie, the little girl who prefigures Elmyra (“A Kiddie’s Kitty”), and “Pappy’s Puppy” (essentially Sylvester’s entry in Freleng’s “Wentworth” premise, except that he was not marrying into the role of mother’s babysitter for money; it was the father who just came after him for that purpose), but he’s clearly not on top of things in these.

So again, it’s hard to tell where exactly Clampett would have gone with Sylvester. But for now, it’s hard to tell if he’s dumb or not in this one. He asks the snoring Tweety, in the cage “Are you sleeping?”, and then Tweety responds “Shhh!” So possibly. (Though he still doesn’t otherwise look particularly stupid there. But we see he does talk in this one. It seems he was putting on some kind of “act” in the story, that he hoped would impress Tweety somehow, but apparently only puts him to sleep. Come to think of it, wouldn’t that be better, to be easy to catch him, if he’s asleep? So you have to wonder is it even a regular chase premise then?)

Preaching Revolution to the oppressed masses!

But then the next question is, if he’s the “stupid cat”, then who’s the “fat rat”? Even though the six panels so far only show Sylvester and Tweety, I’m thinking there must be another character in the story, who could be a literal rat, but could also be any kind of character, like perhaps even another bird, who betrays Tweety in the chase. So the title seems to be portraying Tweety (the star of the Clampett series) against both foes, which would match the three films before that: “Tale of Two Kitties”, “Birdy and the Beast”, “Gruesome Twosome” . (I had always wondered what the next title after this would be!)

And that title would have perfectly fit the premise of Davis’ contemporary film “Catch as Cats Can” (which I had long eyed as possibly where the Clampett story might have went to), featuring an altered personality Sylvester with a pair of birds patterned after Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby (with Crosby as the underdog against the more suave Sinatra). So the jealous Crosby parrot would be the “fat rat” sending the “stupid cat” (Sylvester, as he was made in this story) after fellow pet bird, the Sinatra canary.
Davis had come out of the Tashlin unit and taken over the Clampett unit, and finished some of his other projects. He apparently liked the whole “Sinatra vs Crosby” premise, as he (under his former unit) had animated “Swooner Crooner”, where the singers are portrayed as roosters who compete to make Porky’s farm hens lay the most eggs, purely by their “crooning”.

So the canary’s violent self-defenses always reminded me of Clampett’s Tweety, and looked to me like what “the next Tweety film” could have been like. So in the Tweety story, it could even be a parrot who’s not Crosby, but keeps giving Tweety away, by saying “he’s in there, he’s in there”, or something. (Like on “Buccaneer Bunny”, which Boomerang has been playing a lot). Davis would have then taken the parrot and canary premise, and framed them as Crosby vs Sinatra. Perhaps it was this other character telling Sylvester to get close to Tweety by trying to impress him.

From the six panels shown so far, there’s no conclusive evidence of any of this. Only the title points to more in the story that might point that way. (I also have to consider the remote possibilty that the “fat rat” could be Tweety himself; perhaps ratting on Sylvester trying to catch him, as he would do in Tweetie Pie and most stories after!) Hopefully, the rest of the story will become visible at some time, and we’ll see!

“AAAH! I THHINK I’ve GOT it!”
Sylvester displays big Clampettesque “Kool-Aid smile”

Clampett completing this would have changed history. For one, this film likely wouldn’t have won the Oscar. (None of Clampett’s stuff was ever even nominated. Probably because a cynical Selzer didn’t care to submit any of his stuff to the Academy; while most of the nominees and other winners were by Freleng! Clampett would ironically do a film where Bugs crashes the Oscar ceremony, demanding the award!)
Since they liked “Tweetie Pie” so much, then I could see “Woodie Pie” [jk]* still winning, assuming it was exactly the same, minus the bird’s speaking lines. Not sure if that would have made the difference, though. *(I believe it would have probably ended up titled “A Peck Of Trouble”, which was a few years later taken by McKimson, when he paired the same woodpecker with his own cat).

If it had won, then Sylvester’s permanent partner would have possibly been this woodpecker. Not sure where Clampett would have gone with Tweety after that, or of course, he could have still left, and then’s the question whether Tweety would have just fallen by the wayside, or could have still been picked up by Freleng, but I wonder if without the initial Oscar, the series would have had the same momentum (they didn’t win another one until much later).
One of the first things that always comes up in my thinking of counterfactual timelines, is what would have happened if Clampett had stayed! (He would continue to be to WB, what Avery by then was to MGM; the genius animator who kept the other directors on their toes! The other big curiosity similar to this, is if Stevie Wonder had stayed with engineers Margouleff and Cecil, and produced a followup to Fulfillingness First Finale, instead of Songs in the Key to Life. John Swenson’s biography mentions that “what exactly would follow FFF” was a “burning question” to the music industry! Several songs or clips from that project have been leaking out online for several years).

And what would the animation look like?

The final question is what would the final animated sequences have been like? Obviously, nothing like “Tweetie Pie”. Tweetie Pie is similar in flow to it’s predecessor Peck Up Your Trouble, which is nothing like the last Clampett Sylvester or Tweety films. That final year, Clampett had stepped up the wackiness, adding exaggerated angular perspective (obvious in Baby Bottleneck, Kitty Kornered and Great Piggy Bank Robbery), characters turning liquid to get out of tight spots, etc. Like Avery, he had very wild “double-takes”, with the huge eyes popping out, etc. In Baby Bottleneck, Daffy is running on a conveyor belt, and one of his legs had been stretched out, and he still runs with it (on the floor) and the normal sized one (on the belt) at the same time. He pulls the leg back to normal size with one of the feathers on the top of his head.
The final film, “The Big Snooze” has Bugs heckle Elmer through a surreal dream world. The highlight of Kitty Kornered is the alien costumes the cats wear, to scare off Porky. Then, a Teddy Roosevelt charge up the stairs! Before that was the sequence of Porky scaring the cats (with those wild double take reactions) and chasing Sylvester through the house, pulling him and a whole family of mice out of their hole, and then pulling him off a moose head, with the whole live moose then breaking out and galloping away. Before he entered the mouse hole, he started running up the wall above it, does a sharp take, and then does this 360° loop curl into the hole. (It’s fascinating to stop the video and see individual frames!) When giving the speech, he’s slobbering all over one of the others, who then has to duck (pull his head into his body) when Sylvester belts out the word “boot”. Freleng’s work, was in contrast, again, very straight laced.

Sylvester (left) and other cats in Clampett’s wacky animation

It seems Clampett’s bird chase stories were a bit less like his other stuff than these stories, but still had their moments of wackiness. Birdy and the Beast has the cat stop his wild feline stalk for a moment to humanly tiptoe, showing a goofy face. Then, he’s climbing the tree, whose trunk curves away for a bit, but he continues climbing straight. Then you have the flying with his arms gag, and him only realizing he can’t fly when Tweety points it out to him. Then, displaying the eggs in his mouth like teeth until Tweety smashes them. And Tweety shouting “BOOM!” at the top of his lungs when recounting how the cat cashed to the ground. These aren’t too difficult to imagine for any character or director. But Gruesome Twosome gets a little wackier, with the “Colonel” design. It starts out like it wasn’t a Tweety story at all, but about the cats, competing for a girl, with Tweety simply added in as the bird they have to catch to win her affections. The theme of this one is the violence, with Snooks repeatedly clobbering Colonel, who then repeatedly pumps him full of bullets. You then see the liquid effect when Colonel tricks him into crashing into a washtub. (Also repeated is Tweety’s loud “BOOM”) The final gag is them trying to sneak up on him in this crude floppy horse costume.

We don’t see anything in this storyboard that compares to this. It looks like it would be not too different from Freleng’s stories. But then a storyboard doesn’t have all of these details, which are probably added in the actual translation to animation. (The book shows part of a storyboard for Birdy and the Beast, and you don’t see all the gag details).
So it’s really hard to know what this would have looked like, being a late Clampett product that would follow characteristically totally wacky films like The Big Snooze and Great Piggy Bank Robbery.

Clampett’s wild frame animation. Notice the angular drawings of walls, which was common in this last year of his

What we see in the current portion

It shows Sylvester with the same basic design as in Kitty Kornered. (The first panel shown is totally weird looking though! Like a cross between him and “Birdy and the Beast” in the beginning, where Snooks momentarily tiptoes with this goofy look on his face; but this one looks goofy and devious at the same time). Included is the frame of [the for the first time, caged] Tweety’s “I thot I saw [sic] a putty tat!”, referring to Sylvester for the very first time! There’s also a scene of an encounter on the floor, away from the cage, and Tweety (flying in from somewhere else and landing before Sylvester, who looks ready to pounce) says “So, here I am, Mithter Putty Tat”, and Sylvester responds “Yesss, yess, so I s-s-see, so I s-s–see…”. Again, hard to make out where exactly this is going, or what the whole context even is. This looks very different from the previous three Tweety films, which were simple cat chases bird plots. (It’s reminding me of “Snow Business”, where they’ve actually been getting along as pets, but are snowed in with no cat food, so Tweety never even catches on that the “games” Sylvester is playing with him, are to try to eat him! Funny, as that one also has a mouse, who’s so hungry, he’s actually trying to eat Sylvester! Wonder if there may be any connection of this to this story!)

Kitty Kornered was notable for changing his red nose to black, and giving him yellow eyes. (Like Tom. That was the only time he ever appeared like this. All the other directors kept the original coloring). Another cat, who looks like a “deflated” version of the one from Birdy and the Beast (he even escapes by flowing down the drain as a liquid), now has the red nose. The other two are colored like Sylvester, and are very short, and having different shaped heads, though not too different from Sylvester.
So on this storyboard, since it’s in black & white pencil, it’s hard to tell what the coloring would be, but it seems to still be a completely dark nose. (Something red would usually translate to a lighter gray). The distinguishing feature of the Clampett interpretation of the character is the long, exaggeratedly dumbbell shaped snout, with the big round nose sticking straight up. Freleng’s design was more compact than that.

Bob McKimson was the next director to borrow Sylvester, against his new Foghorn character (and with Henery and the dog), oddly enough, (and very quickly afterward, starting his own Sylvester series, with Hippity Hopper), and his early Sylvester generally had the stronger character as well. McKimson had been the Clampett unit’s main animator in the days of the Tweety films, but then was promoted to take over Tashlin’s unit. So in some respects his stuff bears some resemblance to Clampett at times (as does Davis; and then some other early stuff of theirs resembles Tashlin as well). McKimson also added some wacky animation at times, like Sylvester’s dramatic reaction to the egg Henery was hiding in, and then going crazy and pulling his head in and out of his body using his tail.

But while the Sylvester of “Crowing Pains” (and the early Hippety Hopper films; like the sketch of him from “Hop, Look and Listen” that appears in Putty Tat p.95) does have a similar scruffy snout design as Clampett, and mouth animation is very similar (and the ridiculous slobbering), the main visual difference between the two directors was the upper head. Where Clampett’s big heads would have big eyes, with big pupils (that “baby look” again), McKimson’s heads (above the mouth/nose/jaw line) and thus the eyes, were very notably small (and often, with very heavy eyebrows). In fact, that became his characteristic look for talking characters. You would see a big mouth, with all the teeth shown prominently, but the head and eyes above it would be tiny. (I think of “Hare We Go”, where Christopher Columbus says he prefers “WHITE!” meat, or Elmer, in “Easter Yeggs” saying “I’ll catch that Easter Bunny if it’s the WAST thing I do!”, or his very first directed film, “Daffy Doodles”, where Porky says “I HATE that d-d-duck!” While the mouths appear to be Clampett holdovers, the eyes often look like remaining Tashlin influence).
Colonel, in the above title screen, looks like a definite typical McKimson character, with the small eyes (though minus the eyebrows), and also the way the mouth is drawn with that puckered look. (Compare with Bugs, in “Windblown Hare” telling the wolf “Blow the house dowwwn!”, or when he says the word “dextrose” in “Hot Cross Bunny”). Even the animated mouth in the frame shot looks compatible with McKimson’s style as well. It was probably McKimson who changed Colonel from the earlier model, while Snooks retained the obvious Clampett design. I think the similar Durante-accented red cat in “Hoppy Daze” may have been a sort of revival of Colonel by McKimson (with Sylvester as the ‘patsy’, sort of like Snooks, and Hippety following Tweety in closing the film with Durante’s “a-chachacha”. Portrayed as Sylvester’s “boxing trainer” against the “giant mouse” he himself is too short to catch, he laments, in typical Durante fashion, that the hapless bungling “palooka” Sylvester is going to make a “vegetanarian” out of him!) The designs by then (the 60’s) were completely scaled down, and the physical Durante features dropped.

So no go, in looking at early McKimson products to get a sense of what this would have been like!

Successors to Clampett? Art Davis and Bob McKimson offer similar styles (Catch as Cats Can, and Crowing Pains)

Should also mention that Tweety looks different than the earlier storyboards; like more compact, and as the video points out, it seems he’s now become a feathered canary. Though Beck’s book says “Gruesome Twosome” is where he became a “yellow feathered canary”, and the frames shown in the book look like it, but watching the actual film, he still looked more flesh-colored like before. (I remember I couldn’t wait to catch the films on TV, and so rented the old Turner [pre-48] Sylvester & Tweety VHS, only to have my new bride flip, “A pink Tweety?”) So Freleng’s design is usually credited for that. In any case, the baby version of him in “Baby Bottleneck” definitely was yellow and feathered, so Clampett still should get the credit for the change.
He’s also clearly become domestic (as he did for the first time in “Tweetie Pie”, though he started out wild in that one), and the video mentions Clampett being accused of “falsely” taking credit for things like this.

I asked Dave where he got it from, and he linked me to this auction site. “110” in parentheses appears to be the number of pages or plates! It started at $6000-8000! Don’t know who bought it, but I hope it’s a library or museum that makes good use of it! Wonder if with this new retro-themed Looney Tunes production going on and set to debut soon, if it would be possible to hand it over to them and let them finally animate it, after these 74 years!

This looks very interesting, and is a significant find!

https://profilesinhistory.com/flipbooks/A116Animation/mobile/index.html?#p=12

Another excellent Progressive writer: Medium’s Umair Haque

Haque, a Medium writer is a another powerful writer on a level with Tim Wise, especially, and Robert Reich, on economics and race. He really shows the detrimental effects of “pure” capitalism, and also discusses “Anglo” civilization. (and the two are indelibly intertwined, as “capitalism” is the primary means the Anglos try to dominant the world through, with colonialism and slavery as simply an earlier means of accomplishing that, and now, conquest dome directly through economics, and thus made to look like the subjects are really “free”.

I had been tacking his articles to other threads (mostly the Reich review), but knew all along, he deserves his own thread. So here is what’s being untacked from Reich (and there are still other comments in other pertinent threads, such as “the Political Spectrum is really 3D” and “Iceman Inheritance”).

How Capitalism Convinced Americans the Only Things That Matters is Capitalism
Why Americans Put the Success of Capitalism Above Their Own Lives Falling Apart

https://eand.co/how-capitalism-convinced-americans-the-only-things-that-matters-is-capitalism-90a9d3e7fdc3

And yet the average American was not just left uneducated about this — he was conditioned against it. He was only told one economic principle, over and over again — the very one he is still told today: his living standards are not the economy, only capitalists increasing their capital is the economy, and therefore, as long as capitalism is succeeding, the economy is roaring, and everything is fine. But note the implication of this logic. If what it takes for “the economy”, which is really capitalism, to go on increasing its capital, is to chew through his life — his savings, his income, his home, his retirement, his opportunity, town, city, community, future — then that is perfectly justified, right, and acceptable. He should celebrate it — because the economy is booming!! That boom will one day shower him with fortune, too.

Do you see the weird, backwards, illogic? It’s something like a bribe. Capitalism promises the proles the glittering rewards that capitalists win — but it has no intention of ever giving it to him. It makes that promise by dazzling him with the idea that the economy is just capitalism — not his daily bread, and that if he needs to give up his daily bread to capitalism, today then he should do it, and that is a small price to pay, because one day, capitalism will make a baron and tycoon of him — it will make a king of everyone, after all.

Should point out the blame of liberal social policies for the proles’ hardships. I.e. that it would be working as designed, if only the liberals weren’t giving all the money to undeserving minorities and others.

How Capitalism Cost Americans Their Dignity
Why Dignity is the Highest Kind of Freedom
https://eand.co/how-capitalism-cost-america-dignity-5df15cef18a6

Why the World is Giving Up on Freedom
Or, Why Neoliberalism is Ending in Authoritarianism Rising Around the Globe Again
https://eand.co/why-is-the-world-giving-up-on-freedom-e50a9bec5303

But it’s one thing for everyone’s incomes to flatline — and quite another for the rich to grow super-rich, while the average stagnates. The second great cost of neoliberalism was inequality. It wasn’t just that incomes got stuck — it was that rich grew fantastically, absurdly, grotesquely richer. That meant that a predatory economy had emerged. Growth was being siphoned off by the rich from the average — unless you believe that teacher, engineer, or doctor contributes nothing to a society’s prosperity. The rich were getting richer by doing things which made the average person poorer, not richer, too — things like financial engineering, stock market bubbles, property investment, all glorified ponzi schemes, which create less than no real lasting well being or value for anyone at all.

The Price of American Greatness
Does a Nation Need to be Great to be Worthy?
https://eand.co/the-price-of-american-greatness-c04bf800d7dd

Great is a word that has many meanings, but they can be divided into two halves. Greatness as magnanimity, as overcoming, as a kind of giving — as standing beside. Or greatness as superiority, as outdoing, as a need for admiration — as standing above. Whether or not you think that America somehow made a transition from the first to the second, it should easy to observe that the second kind of greatness is what America has aspired to in recent decades. Call it the degeneration of greatness, if you like.

What happens a society is built upon that second kind of greatness, greatness as superiority? When that is the fundamental norm, value, code, which governs it? Well, if that nation must be the best, then the people in it must be the best, too. But that means they themselves have created a kind of paradox. They cannot all be the best. Some will just be average, ordinary people. Some will struggle and languish. But what will a society devoted to greatness think of them?

It will scorn, despise, and loathe them, won’t it? They will be punished. They will be seen as liabilities and burdens. Soon enough, a kind of ethical and moral perversion will happen. Because only the best are good enough, the ordinary are bad. And what is perfectly right and just is to punish and neglect and admonish them. So the meaning of the “best” when greatness is superiority is itself the ability to trample others, and be the last one left standing. The “best” ends up meaning ruthlessness, cunning, self-preservation, and egotism.

Isn’t that exactly where America has found itself? The average person doesn’t deserve the following things, we’re told: healthcare, education, finance, a retirement. A life of dignity and respect. Instead, what is morally just is for a person who is merely average to live a life of unrelenting fear, anxiety, and despair, to be crushed every day by the dread of paying one’s bills and providing for one’s kids. Ordinary is not good enough — it’s only deserving of punishment.

Only if one is mega rich does one deserve anything like psychological peace, safety, happiness — not to mention dignity, respect, and belonging.

---

Capitalism is Why Americans are Subsidizing the World’s Richest Man (LOL)
Why American Ideas of the Way Societies Grow Wealthy and Prosper are Obsolete
https://eand.co/capitalism-is-why-americans-are-subsidizing-the-worlds-richest-man-lol-8a775a22fdbb

Let’s start at zero: capitalism isn’t the platonic ideal of self-correcting competition— that’s a fantasy, a fairy tale. This is the self-evident reality of capitalism— monopolies extracting wealth. How much? Well, first, no amount of wealth will ever be enough— not even the most wealth in human history is. There is no boundary condition, no point of satiation, which means there is also no line of conscience or morality. So, second, capitalism will never do the “right thing” — aka in this case, help a broken society build the systems it desperately needs— out of the kindness of its heart, because it doesn’t have one. Third, capitalism’s central principle is to exploit— which means that I take as much as I possibly can get away with, from you.

Societies have turning points on the way to maturity, and one of the most crucial for a modern one is to grapple with the difficult truth that capitalism at the mega scale is a harmful, abusive system, whose greed is boundless, literally never-ending— instead of pretending, as immature societies often do, that capitalism is some kind of noble and virtuous contest.

Now, note the assumption here: the only way a society grows is through capitalism, and that means that capitalists, too, have the power to withhold prosperity from a society — and that way, to hold it ransom. What if they decide to do that?

The Greatest Lesson From History You Probably Never Learned
The Lesson the 20th Century is Trying to Teach the 21st
https://eand.co/the-greatest-lesson-from-history-you-probably-never-learned-e73c861b9682

What’s unique about America? It’s that it got the social contract of modernity — people provide each other the necessities, and capitalism provides the luxuries — absolutely backwards. America, unique amongst rich nations — all nations, in fact, tried a social contract where capitalism provides people the necessities, and the luxuries, things like yachts and mansions and so forth, are often had by way of a kind of weird, inverse socialism — cronyism, how close you are to powerful politicians and capitalists and so on, how many subsidies you can grab, how much you take from others.

In other words, America has always been testing the hypothesis that more exploitation leads to more prosperity. First, it did it through slavery, and then through segregation, and now, through capitalism. Milder forms, maybe — yet the principle remains the same.

---

Six Myths About Capitalism Everyone Should Know

https://eand.co/six-myths-about-capitalism-everyone-should-know-f5d582b225ae

Why Most People Who Believe They’re Capitalists Are the Opposite of Capitalists
Why Americans Have a Textbook Case of False Consciousness
https://eand.co/why-most-people-who-believe-theyre-capitalists-are-the-opposite-of-capitalists-a631f7450bdf

In other words, my friend [who imagines that as CEO, he’d make sure that he maximized fairness, decency, equity, a square deal, goodness, truth, justice.] imagines that the problem is not the system — it is the people. If only the people were different — maybe people like him (or maybe not, and maybe I am being unfair) — if only there were virtuous and noble people at the heads of all these institutions, then overnight, a magical wonderland of capitalist utopia, a place of self-regulating markets, happy people, and better lives, would dawn. The problem is that none of that is true. The problem isn’t the people, really — it’s the system. You can be the noblest and kindest and nicest person in the universe. But if I made you a CEO in American capitalism — you would have to do terrible, strange, and backwards things. Things that you probably didn’t want to do. But you would have no choice in any way whatsoever.

This is basically the conservative “the problem with capitalism is capitalists” sentiment (where the “problem with communism is communism“; i.e. the system is inherently bad, while these imperfect, flawed capitalists have managed to create this perfect system, but they’re only human, so ‘boys will be boys’, and so that’s why this system is so rough for many. Oh, and also, those meddling closet communists with their taxes and regulations, are making it fail!

America’s Choice is Collapse or Social Democracy (And So is the World’s)
Why the Future Won’t be Made by Liberalism versus Conservatism
https://eand.co/americas-choice-is-collapse-or-social-democracy-and-so-is-the-world-s-7c147a0f7c51

America’s politics, uniquely, remained stuck, split, in a weird, binary way, between “liberals” and “conservatives” — mostly because America was clinging on to old notions of supremacy, still institutionalized in segregation, which ruled out any kind of social democracy absolutely.

So what did decades of binary liberalism versus conservatism accomplish for America? Did the dialectic lead to progress? Not at all. It led to stagnation. The answer to what did liberalism and conservatism achieve for America is: precisely nothing. Less than nothing, in fact, one could argue.

The average American’s life isn’t more prosperous today than yesterday — it’s less so. Life expectancy is falling. His income is less than his grandfather’s. He’s broke, though he works longer hours, at a less stable job. Suicides are soaring — and maybe he himself is giving up on life. Who could blame him? He faces bizarre, weird, and gruesome problems, like his kids being shot at school, and having to beg strangers for money for healthcare online. He spends sleepless night wondering he ended up impoverished, despite playing by the rules — maybe not quite understanding that the rules were designed to exploit him.

Decades of liberalism versus conservatism didn’t lead America forward — they turned it into a surreal, bizarre dystopia.

Why didn’t liberalism and conservatism lead to progress? Well, because in America, they converged to two flavours of largely the same thing — “neoliberalism” and “neoconservatism.” Neoconservatism was a little more trigger happy, always ready to start a war, and neoliberalism was a little more utopian, but their foundational precepts didn’t end up being very different. Wealth would trickle down. Trade should be free, but movement shouldn’t. A person’s worth was how much money they made. And, most crucially of all, given these first three — society must never, ever invest in itself.

Hence, this fatal convergence of “neos”, of liberalism and conservatism to the same lowest-common-denominator, produced modern American dystopia: a rich society of impoverished people, a powerful one of powerless people, a generally decent one somehow ruled by bigots, fools, and ignoramuses. It’s a place in which people are quite literally left to fend for themselves, as best they can, with zero support, investment, care, or consideration.

American pundits and intellectuals act like it’s still 1962, and act as if social democracy never happened, still pitting “socialism” against “capitalism” in a Cold War that no one really won — unless the wrecked state of America today means “winning” to you.

Why America is the World’s First Poor Rich Country
Or, How American Collapse is Made of a New Kind of Poverty
https://eand.co/why-america-is-the-worlds-first-poor-rich-country-17f5a80e444a

---

Why the American Dream Collapsed
We’re Forgetting America’s Greatest Idea. It’s Time to Start Remembering It.
https://eand.co/how-the-american-dream-broke-78fb19c56733

The Age of Primal Rage
How Implosive Capitalism and Technology are Causing a Spreading Global Epidemic of Violence, Hate, and Fear
https://eand.co/the-age-of-primal-rage-12e4c4df4d42

Several great articles on “Anglo” civilization!, see:
https://erictb.wordpress.com/2017/05/07/review-bradley-the-iceman-inheritance/#comment-7466

Great article on Fascism, see:
https://erictb.wordpress.com/2016/01/17/political-matrix-is-actually-3d/#comment-6695

---

Why the Predatory Theory of Human Nature is False (And Foolish)
Or, Why People Aren’t Just the Sum of Their Appetites
https://eand.co/why-the-predatory-theory-of-human-nature-is-false-and-foolish-c91279cd872

There’s a strange and ignorant theory going around, in these troubled times. A theory of human nature. Which is leading young men astray, making fools of old men, and beginning to lead whole societies into the darkness.
Let me call it the Jordan Peterson theory of human nature. It goes something like this:

— Nature is red in tooth and claw. Creatures in the natural world are only born to compete — so that they consume and prey on each other.

— Human beings are just such creatures.

— It is thus natural — right, just, noble — for human beings to express their most vicious competitive tendencies. Anything less is contemptuous and weak.

— Therefore, might is right, greed is good, power is predation, and the strong should justly trample the weak.

(Why) Americans Don’t Understand What Capitalism Really Is
Or, How The Opposite of Capitalism Isn’t Socialism — It’s My Local Record Store
https://eand.co/why-americans-dont-understand-what-capitalism-really-is-155ab92203d8

Americans have the same relationship to capitalism as the Soviets did to socialism — since it’s the only idea allowed in society, nobody really understands or thinks about it well at all. One consequence of growing up in a Soviet society — in this case capitalism, not communism — is that people grow miseducated about that very system. It becomes all things, everything, and in the end, nothing.

Hence, today Americans conflate capitalism with all the following — all business, enterprise, entrepreneurship, endeavour, industry, trade. But capitalism isn’t all those things — and by failing to understand that, Americans remain stuck because they can’t unpick the basic nuances and distinctions of how to build a better society and political economy.

Capitalism is a very specific thing. It has a few critical elements. Maximizing profits — a legal obligation to. Returning those profits to shareholders, people who “own” a legally contracted “share” of them — which they can “trade.” Those “shareholders” are the ones who decide how to govern the organization, and sit on its board. Those are the basic ingredients of capitalism.

Business, trade, commerce, industry — these things long, long, predate capitalism. And yet we, especially Americans, imagine that “capitalism” means anyone who was ever in business, or ever traded anything, from the beginning of time — yet when you think about it for even a moment, nothing could be further from the truth.)

What does that tell us? It tells us that capitalism is a kind of tiny subset of business, entrepreneurship, trade, commerce. It is just one way to organize these things — far from the only one. It is the one we use now — and we can and should question whether it’s doing us any good anymore.

Just as the Soviets thought “socialism” meant you could never open up a dry-cleaning shop, today Americans think questioning “capitalism” must mean you want to shut down all the dry-cleaning shops. But it doesn’t. Questioning capitalism just means the following things (as a brief, incomplete summary) — which are common sense.

That we disagree with the idea that there should be a legal obligation to maximize profits, above all else. That we don’t believe that an organization should be “owned” by “shareholders”, versus say employees, cities, towns, managers, or anyone else, partially or wholly. That we disagree with the idea that “shareholders” should be the only ones to manage an organization.

I’ve put that all very technically, so let me make it a little clearer. That every business, enterprise, project, endeavour, should be legally obligated to be as greedy and selfish and predatory as possible, because the only goal we should ever want is to “grow” into a giant, soul-crushing monopoly of profit — which also means they have to narrow-minded, short-sighted, and end up abusive and harmful to everything from the planet to democracy. That being exploitative and predatory is OK, desirable, good — not corrosive to democracy and survival and prosperity. We’re saying there should be more business, enterprises, endeavors that don’t have to or want to or need to become Goldman Sachs or Big Pharma or Facebook or the lobbying industry.

The Heroes and Villains of American Collapse
Have We Become Readers of the Comic Book of Our Own Decline?

https://eand.co/the-heroes-and-villains-of-american-collapse-d664b69f0f4c

In a Capitalist Society, Everything’s For Sale
How Capitalism Brainwashed Americans Into Being Perpetually Surprised by its Ugly Truths
https://eand.co/in-a-capitalist-society-everythings-for-sale-23b9fb3e1193

Why are Americans so powerless? Because they have to do what capitalists say. It’s true that they have “choices” — but those choices are between kind of option: doing what this megacapitalist wants, or that one. If you want to do something a megacapitalist doesn’t want in the first place…well, my friend, good luck. A life of poverty, hardship, and invisibility await (though if you do toe the line, all you get is precarity and hardship, too.) Americans are powerless because they literally have to obey the whims of capitalists, in every arena of life. And yet there they are, surprised that in their society, everything is for sale.

(Canada and Europe…have many forces softening capitalism, fencing it in, whether families or social bonds or communities or socialism or all of those. That is why they are kinder, gentler places, too.)

What Happens When People Find Out Capitalism Was a Lie?
Or, the Age of Disintegration
https://eand.co/what-happens-when-people-find-out-capitalism-was-a-lie-78137aca7072

---

If the Economy’s “Strong” — Why Are 40% of Americans Struggling to Afford Food?
Why Economic Indicators Don’t Tell the Sad and Shocking Story of America’s Descent into Mass Poverty, Hunger, Misery, and Despair

https://eand.co/if-the-economys-strong-why-are-40-of-americans-struggling-to-afford-food-934b13e6b81e

Have you ever wondered? Why public discourse doesn’t reflect your reality?

I often say that Americans are the weird, terrible paradox of being the world’s first poor rich people.

So why this constant myth that the economy is “strong”? Well, the first thing to understand is that it is a myth.

When suicide is skyrocketing, when people can’t afford to feed their families, when half a society says they can’t find a decent job…the economy isn’t doing well. But as long as you believe it is…then it’s your fault if you’re struggling. It’s not your fault. It can’t be your fault if you’re struggling when close to half a society is having trouble eating. That’s a social problem. It points to a terrible, epic, systemic failure, in the absence of a giant famine.

Let me make that even clearer. Hunger, poverty, misery, and inopportunity are not a strong economy. They are a weak one. In fact, they represent a collapsing one, if they are new things, like they are in America. If hunger, poverty, misery and inopportunity are a “strong economy”…what on earth could be a weak one? Aliens enslaving everyone?

So where does this bizarre, astonishing, spectacular fantasy come from? What does it tell us?

It comes from the fact that Americans economic statistics don’t represent the economy anymore. By “the economy” we should mean “people’s welfare”, how well their lives are actually faring. But since American economists and thinkers are ideologically blind, because they only study one system, and they assume from the get-go that that system is the answer to every one of society’s problems, quite naturally, they developed a set of indicators that look at the health of…that system. Not people’s lives. But those are two different things. A system is never anybody’s life.

That system, of course, is capitalism. Now, I use “capitalism” in the European sense. That’s Wall St, Bezos, the Waltons, Silicon Valley, etc. In the American sense, you might call it “corporatism”, if you like.

America’s thinking classes don’t know how to think about the economy anymore — economists, journalists, pundits, and so forth — because they imagine that as long as the indicators that exist are ticking up, then everything must be fine. In other words, they imagine that all the real problems have been solved — and all there is to do is apply the solution, which is always more capitalism, as in markets for healthcare, less public schools, smaller government, and so forth.

The indicators that American thinking relies on — the stock market, GDP, the unemployment rate — only really tell us about the health of capitalism. (or corporatism, if you like.) They don’t tell us anything whatsoever about how well people are doing. It’s perfectly feasible for GDP, which is the sum of profits — and the stock market, which is just tomorrow’s profits, counted today — to grow by…stealing your life savings. That’s exactly what is happening.

As a result, you get this incredibly bizarre, weird, and grotesque picture. The stock market’s booming! GDP’s growing! But 40% of Americans can’t afford to…eat. What the? Do you see shades of Versailles in that? Shades of Soviet collapse? You should. It’s predatory growth — American are growing hungry, poor, and ill precisely because their ultra rich are preying on them, or maybe deluding them into preying on each other, dangling little rewards before them, just like so many time before in history.

The Soviets, too, had a set of indicators that their elites and leaders used to assess the health of the economy. And as long as those were OK — everything was fine. Did we make enough tractors? Did we employ enough people at that factory in Gdansk? Everything’s fine! But everything wasn’t fine. People were growing hungry. Afraid. Angry. Bang! Collapse. When a society can’t feed its people…it’s on the way to collapsing, my friends. There is no surer sign.

But America…just like the Soviet Union, it’s thinkers and leaders can’t see even that. They can’t see that hunger, poverty, powerlessness, misery, and illness are now endemic, chronic, systemic — things that exist at a mass level, on a social scale. That’s because they’re trapped in the fairy tales of ideology, which in this case is capitalism’s final triumph over the world. They can’t see how badly reality has diverged from the fantasy, the fairy tale.

The Soviets believed that communism was the answer to everything, that if there was a problem with it, it wasn’t “true communism” yet, that every issue in society was to be solved with more communism, life was always better than everywhere else, and no questioning or dissent of any of the above was to be allowed in the public sphere. Hence, you couldn’t open up a little dry cleaning shop until 1989.

But that’s America in 2019, too. Capitalism is the answer to everything. If there’s a problem, it’s because it’s not “true capitalism” — since every issue in society is be solved by capitalism to begin with. Life is always better than everywhere else. And no questioning or dissent from this ideology is to be allowed.

Can you think of any other rich country in the world where nearly half of the people in it struggle to feed their kids? I can’t. Do you know how many people eat one meal a day in Venezuela? 30%. That’s not a direct comparison — it’s just to give you a sense of how dire American collapse really is.

America’s leaders and elites are so badly blinded by an absolutist ideology that they can’t even see it when their society has ended up starving, broke, poor, miserable, sick, and hopeless — en masse. Instead, looking at a set of indicators that have absolutely no connection to reality anymore, they simply keep on declaring that things are “great” or “strong.” They’ve never been better! The main job now, it seems, of America’s elites, is to defend, and reproduce, that ideology — to keep it powerful, ascendant, for it to monopolize discourse and truth. The only real difference is that in this case the ideology in question is totalist capitalism — capitalism as the answer to everything, the only set of indicators that matters — instead of totalist communism.

(Why) The Future is a Choice Between Two Socialisms

Why Capitalism’s Collapse Feels Weirdly a Lot Like Communism’s

https://eand.co/why-the-future-is-a-choice-between-two-socialisms-c675654b78e7

---

NEW:

The Majority of Americans Die in Debt. What The?
How America Became the World’s First Poor Rich Country
https://eand.co/the-majority-of-americans-die-in-debt-what-the-2e20b5a08030

A coffin made of unpayable debt, that the average American’s now laid to rest in. In plain English: they never make enough to break even their whole lives long. He or she finishes up a pauper. Not just worth zero — but with a negative net worth. That means that over a lifetime, the average American will effectively save nothing, own nothing, and earn nothing. Stop and reread that. America’s supposed to be the richest country in the world. Again: what the?

Let’s think about what that really means. It’s not as if the average American ends up impoverished because he or she doesn’t work. Americans work harder than anyone else in the rich world, in fact. They work so hard that multiple jobs are an everyday reality. They don’t take vacations, they don’t get leisure time — whereas Europeans and Canadians, by American standards, live lives of idle pleasure.

So the reason that Americans are dying paupers — not just broke, but less than broke — isn’t that they’re lazy. It’s not about them at all, in fact. It can’t be. If an entire nation is dying in poverty — it can hardly be the people’s fault. It must be the system’s. Despite lifetimes of grueling work — Americans are left with less than nothing. What kind of a life is that?

This…tells us in stark, explosive terms that if you play by the rules, if you do your job, if you’re a good and decent person — what’s your reward? It’s less than nothing. (Sure, you might “buy” a home and fill it with possessions — but if you’re dying in tens of thousands of dollars in debt, you didn’t own any of it, you just rented it.)
The American Dream? The dream is a distant, painful memory of better times.

It’s not just that Americans are indebted. There’s a subtler point here. It’s that Americans now have unpayable debts — debts which simply can’t be repaid, even with a lifetime of hard work. That is what the average person dying in debt means — American debt is literally now unpayable. So go ahead and breathe easy, it’s not just you, it’s everyone. That’s how the system’s designed, in fact. How so?

(If the average person’s dying in debt to the tune of more than the average income — then short of winning the lottery, the “debt” you incur simply for existing and living is unpayable. What do we call people with unpayable debts? Bankrupt.)

Well, whom are Americans indebted with unpayable debts to? To their super rich and ultra rich. Americans effectively owe unpayable debts to a class of oligarchs and tycoons — a tiny number of people, hedge fund managers and CEOs and so forth, most of whom have gotten filthy rich for doing, quite frankly, nothing much of any real worth or value. Yet these debts are now so large, so massive, that the average American now simply dies without ever being able to pay them.

Can we call people who live and die in debt that they will never repay — which they can’t repay — genuinely free? Or are they the modern equivalent of peasants and serfs and untouchables? If you have a debt you can never repay, you’ll have to spend your life toiling away at whatever work you can find — no matter how grim or dismal or pointless. Hence, something very much like a caste society is emerging in America: those crushed by debts they’ll never be able to repay, versus ultra rich. Those in the lower castes are born in debt, and will die in debt, no matter how hard they work, or what they do — they owe a portion of the harvest, just like a medieval peasant. But why? For what?

The next thing this statistic tells us is that America has pioneered something new and bizarre: more and more toxic kinds of debt. The 80s saw the rise of credit card debt. The 90s, student debt. The 00s, medical debt. And now? Lunch debt. Debt has proliferated not just in quantity — but in kind. Americans are so poor that they’ve had to mortgage everything — right down to school lunches. But what kind of a society won’t feed its schoolchildren?

Who pioneered this bizarre reality — a nation of people who trapped all their lives long by unpayable debt they struggle, in vain, to pay off? The combination of Wall St and Washington, DC did. DC’s neoliberals put forth the crackpot economic theory that society should never invest in people — that mega corporations maximizing profit were the answer to everything, from healthcare to retirement. Wall St loved this idea, needless to say, and showered money on said mega corporations. As Americans grew poorer, because the only idea at work here was that markets solve everything, the only answer was to sell them loans, on markets, in the form of all the kinds of debt above. Bang! A kind of debt explosion unseen since the second world war.

The only difference [between Germany 1929 and America 2019], really, is that Germans owed unpayable debts to France and Britain, but Americans owe unpayable debts to their own class of ultra rich.

---

Umair now goes Jungian on us and tackles the issue of the “shadow” in politics:

(How to Do) the Hard Work of Growing as People and Societies
Why the Work We’re Doing Today is Shadow Work
https://eand.co/how-to-do-the-hard-work-of-growing-as-people-and-societies-f899648369df

---

Umair addresses the point of “scarcity” amidst “abundance”:

Why the Paradox of Scarcity Amidst Abundance is Driving the World Insane

https://eand.co/why-the-paradox-of-scarcity-amidst-abundance-is-driving-the-world-insane-7e575a5f3b8d

BDMNQR2: 20 Years Online!

20th Anniversary!

Today, it’s been 20 years I’ve officially been online!

I actually had my first AOL screen name in 1997, when my wife and I shared a computer with our close friend, who held both the computer and the main account.
Leading up to this, after the much heralded release of Windows 95, many more regular people began getting their first computers. So in 1996, we began looking to getting one of our own. I remember being intrigued by TV ads for early services like “Prodigy”. It sounded so interesting, having all the world at your fingertips, right from your own home. No longer having to hike to distant libraries, who still may not have what you’re looking for.

Anticipating this, I even jumped in a job-sponsored after work class on computers (and I used to hate any kind of classes! Now I know, with introverted Thinking; I need to learn at my own pace, and filter what I think is most relevant and not have information crammed down my throat) Using Computers A Gateway to Information (Shelly, Cashman, Waggoner, 1995) was the textbook (still have it!), but for some reason, the class just stopped after just a few sessions.
This was also the exciting time of the announcement of rewritable CD, and the soon released new medium DVD (see https://erictb.wordpress.com/2016/05/08/recordable-5-inch-optical-discs-20-years-later), which would figure heavily for computers, since they were the first and main venue the new drives would be used on.

Finances pushed the computer back a year, but finally, it came. Everyone remembers the sound of the dialup tones, and waiting to get connected (loved seeing that “people” logo AOL used when it finally got connected), getting knocked off, annoyed at how many others must have been on at the same time, and then conflicting with someone in the house needing to use the phone (and incoming calls would knock you off too).
But in addition to all of this was having only limited time to be in the other person’s house to use it! Don’t know how I ever survived!

Knowing nothing about the brand new medium of the Internet or “World Wide Web” I didn’t know if it was wise to use my real name (as our friend and others I saw, all used aliases); so I chose a cryptic-looking array of letters, based on my main interest, the subways. (And wasn’t even working there yet. Still braving the “Five Points” Collect Pond air of the County Clerks’s office).

Even though I had recently married into the distant Ridgewood/Bushwick area, my mind was still on the other side of Brooklyn I grew up in. Back in those days, that part of the subway was stuck seemingly forever in the “Manhattan Bridge North Side Open” pattern, where the “south” side, leading to the Broadway line, was closed, the N line banished to the longer tunnel route, and the Q moved to 6th Avenue. It was taking forever to finish the work on that side, to then move to the next phase, swapping sides (another four years away at that point, and it had already been like this for a whopping eight years already), and then finally, the work complete, which would be seven years later.

So I was always thinking about those lines over there, and what would happen when the bridge work advanced; drawing up suggestions and sending them in, etc. My last time at WTC was this same year, when the MTA had an “East River Crossings” presentation, with volumes of material on the different “alternatives”. Including a lot of wild ideas, they nor we would never imagine the final plan, where the B and D were swapped from where they ran continuously in one form or another, for 34 years!

So I chose a sequence of route letters. Since 34th Street (Herald Square) was like the “center” of the affected part of the system; a huge hub where the 6th Avenue and Broadway lines cross, and the truncated 6th Avenue lines would terminate when that side of the bridge was closed; plus one of my favorite areas from being the center of NYC Christmas, with Macy’s and all; I wanted to use the lines that crossed there: BDFNQR.

However, I didn’t live on any of those lines anymore. I lived on the M, which at the time didn’t even go to midtown, but rather looped from one side of Brooklyn to the other, through the short, downtown Manhattan Nassau St. line. So I instead chose the next best thing; the downtown Brooklyn hub where the M did cross with most of those other lines (and then some): the Atlantic terminal-Pacific St. complex (now known as “Barclay’s Center” from the arena more recently built there), and thus BDMNQR.

This is what my original screen name and e-mail address was, and what I would post under on early AOL interest boards and the old USENET. Main boards were transit, cartoons, and music (Stevie; EWF. On the latter, I was surprised that another member recognized what my screen name was).

Since the friend had long dropped AOL, upon calling them to find out when my accounts started, they did not have on record her old account. Not sure how long we shared. Didn’t seem that long. It may have been since December (1997), and the original plan was to do this article that month sometime, being the absolute 20th anniversary of my internet life completely; but working on other projects, I let it slip, figuring I wasn’t sure anyway. However, I was able to get the date of when I finally got my own AOL!
June 1st, 1998!

Our friend got a new computer, and gave us the old one, a 1.7 GB Packard Bell.
However, since I had the screen name under the old account, I couldn’t simply make that a new main account, so I had to create a whole new e-mail. I chose to add “2”, which served both as indicating it’s the second one, but then also was another line that ran through the same hub (along with the 3, 4, and 5). Thus, “BDMNQR2” was finally born!

So that was the main account I used to the present!
(The irony would come in 2010, with another, [even more] “unthinkable” service change, of actually rerouting the M up 6th Avenue, to Forest Hills. So now it actually goes through 34th St! I could have chosen the Herald Sq. lines including the M, if I created the screen name today: “BDFMNQR” or now, “BDFMNQRW”, with the W eliminated with the service changes that merged the M and V, recently brought back! I actually thought of changing it, but having the name so long and especially with the 20th looming, I decided to keep this one!)

In 2000, after getting nowhere having my two main religious and one political writing published (Trinity, CCM Controversy, Right Wing politics), adding another one on fundamentalism and psychology (this and the CCM one after having attended IFB classes on both issues), and wanting to post my own narrative of the rapidly re-burgeoning Scooby Doo cartoon (after finding this new internet medium filled with hatred toward the Scrappy Doo character, and the whole decade of the show when he was present); I then learned I could host my writings on AOL.
(It had gotten so bad, that someone had taken the “breast cancer death awareness” ribbon and emblazoned it with pictures of Scrappy, for all the haters to display on their pages. There usually would be no other reference to him —they pretended he didn’t exist; and then that ribbon, often at the bottom would let you know they were deliberately ignoring him. On Usenet, and sites like “jumptheshark.com” [later integrated into TVGuide.com] people then spewed out all of the hatred, of what they wished they could do to him, and how he ruined their childhood. One cartoon fan had crafted this whole history where Scrappy’s arrival singlehandedly ruined the whole show, and this became the inspiration for me to write my own history of Scooby free of such bias toward one temporary character.
This thinking, believed to be from a small but loud minority [as the character’s developer Mark Evanier mentioned on his blog after discussing original voice actor Lennie Weinrib’s total befuddlement at all the hatred he found on the internet], then spread like wildfire into the production studio, where he was still basically barred from any positive uses in new stories, but nevertheless thrown in as a cameo to take cheap shots at him; the worst being the live action Scooby Doo Movie, where he was in a last moment afterthought made the villain.

The entire TV animation studio Filmation [second only to Hanna Barbera in the 70’s] also received constant criticism in these early days of the internet, due to its “limited animation”. Thankfully, as more cartoon fans spoke up, the atmosphere became more balanced for both of these entities.

I had already learned a bit of HTML from using one transit forum whose posting feature used the code, and then arming myself with HTML For Dummies and Sam’s Teach Yourself To Create Web Pages, then learned how to create them from scratch. (Hence, them being so simply text formatted, which one visitor described awhile ago as “like a simple early page from years ago”).
The address format was simply “members@aol.com/[screen name]”.

Since I was writing against cranky old fundamentalists, I felt the need to separate the less serious Scooby project, and so created a second screen name, etb700 (as in “700 Club”, which I never followed, but couldn’t think of anything else religious, and by that time realizing it was safe to use my initials) to host my Christian writings, and correspond with ministries I wrote to.

On a side note, the most shocking and ominous occurrence these past 20 years was on Sept. 10th 2001; fresh out of “school car” for transit, and having worked the F, with the view of the skyline on the highest point of the system, the “Culver Viaduct” over the Gowanus, and not knowing that would be the last time I would ever see the skyline in that form.
At almost 9PM that evening, on the aforementioned transit board, someone starts a thread called “100 Years From Now” talk.nycsubway.org/perl/read?subtalk=262068:

One hundred years from now, assuming that an H-bomb or an earthquake (it is possible you know) doesn’t wipe the place out I wonder what the transit system in New York will look like. I doubt not that the underground portion of the subway system will be intact. Most of the Els, but possibly not all of them, will be gone as well as some of the East River bridges. I’m pretty sure that the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings as well as the World Trade Center will still be around though I suspect that the rest of the skyline will be up for grabs. There will still be a Pennsylvania and Grand Central Station with the LIRR going to the latter. None of us will be around to see it but I doubt not that it will be interesting.

Thought nothing of it; just a routine post on what we think will happen in the future. Well, noon, next day (I was off), I’m then responding to this post, adding to it’s title “NO, NOT EVEN ONE DAY!!” http://talk.nycsubway.org/perl/read?subtalk=262272:

“How eerie…who would think that 12 hours after this original post it wouldn’t be around!”

This, of course, after hours of watching this unbelievable event unfold. It was the biggest shock any of us had lived through!

In about 2003, I joined Yahoo which used a “listserve” format, for a coworker-oriented group, and then joined a few others, and re-used the original BDMNQR. After learning about type a few years later, I quickly joined one on temperament (Keirsey), but learned it was populated by mostly Feeling types who thought I was being rather “impersonal”, not just for all my logical theorizing, but also my unusual cryptic “handle”, and didn’t even know my real name. At the time, when you posted on Yahoo, it just defaulted to using your e-mail, and I didn’t know how to change it to show a different screen name (like you can do now). But that eventually cleared up, and I’m still there.

This is how it was, until 2008, around the tenth anniversary of the AOL account, and halfway to the present, that AOL suddenly announced it was shutting down all of its members space. (But the e-mail box would of course remain). So I then bought my own domain name, and moved everything over to there. (By this time, having added dozens of interest, religious and political pages. Didn’t bother keeping the less serious interests separate. This blog came about three years later, for smaller articles and current events).

So then, here we are today!

I had remained mostly on boards until the up coming new venues called “social media”, namely Facebook, which I imagine was initially supposed to be a mostly photo sharing site (like Instagram is now), but then became an all around “news” and socialization site; and it was so amazing being able to connect with a range of people I’ve known, spanning my whole life; many of whom (including some distant relatives) I used to hardly ever contact otherwise; and then making new friends!

I’m thinking this whole dynamic actually does funny things with the introvert/extravert scale. I’m Supine, which is very reserved as a technical introvert, yet “wants” like an extrovert. So the internet is the perfect medium to interact, without the difficulties of face-to-face interaction. I can also think out what I want to say, being a much better writer than speaker. So on one hand, it seems like an introvert’s paradise, but many other introverts, such as Melancholy types I know of, are just as avoidant of the medium, and there are many extraverts (such as Sanguine types, like ESFP’s) who also love the interaction and attention. My wife, however (ESFJ), is not big on the internet, saying her Sanguine needs depend more on face to face interaction. You would think the pure Sanguine would be like that, and perhaps some are, but the difference might be that their “Feeling” attitude is actually introverted (this is the auxiliary function, and they’re extraverts because of the dominant extraverted Sensing), and the ESFJ’s dominant extraverted Feeling might be more likely to want an actual tangible environment of people. (extraverted Sensing would want that as well, but if they can’t get it, then I guess a screen will do).

So me, having “so much to say” in the world, the internet is one of the greatest things to have been invented!

The Much Neglected Simple Teaching of Jesus

The most neglected statement of Jesus is that Hillel’s “Golden Rule” is what “SUMS UP” the entire Law. His detractors were of course focusing directly on the Law, even atomizing it into more and more “principles”. Christianity followed suit, only dropping the more “Jewish”-associated laws, and eventually placing a great emphasis on sexual-related principles. Islam, drawing on both religions followed suit, exchanging some Hebrew laws for more Arabic-flavored ones.

All have at times aimed to keep their respective “cultures”, (if not seeking to expand them to the world), “pure”.
This will always involve believing oneself has met the “standards” of the Law, and is thus now “called” to enforce them on others, in the name of “preserving morality” if nothing else.

So, recently taking a job “Security Awareness” class, and hearing about the latest threats from ISIS, to create easy to build rail devices to derail trains, and various ways to attack Times Square, I kept thinking, “Who appointed these people the judges and executioners of the ‘infidels’?” The same thing with many conservative Christians; and though it may seem unfair to compare them, the MINDSET, and its underlying presumptions (“righteousness” of the Law, and the need to spread “God’s truth”), are the same. What’s different is the power held.

Judaism once held formidable power over its people in Bible times (even enough to influence the mighty Romans over them, to a certain extent). What we saw in the New Testament was the final death throes of its power, as it was rapidly going down, and would end as a power structure only a few decades later.
The church arose from this, but quickly followed suit, gaining tremendous world power, even over the big bad Romans, and the Western civilizations that sprang from it. But with this power comes great compromise of Biblical principle, and great corruption, as a lot of stuff has to be justified, which in turn is often attempted to be compensated by overemphasizing certain other points of “morality”, in order to maintain the “righteous” appearance.
So it too reached a peak, and it was technology (starting with the printing press) that caused it to crack and start to come down. Hence, all the complaints of loss of power, beginning with the Enlightenment, and continuing through the last century of sociopolitical developments.

Islam, being the youngest of the three religions, is simply not as far down that pattern, but still vying for power. Christians have naturally turned up the heat on them as a “false religion”, and also political enemy, but both seem to be in agreement that America is sinful and needs to be punished. When natural disasters hit here, and conservative Christians pronounce them as “curses”, you would think they should be on the same side as the Islamists who simply seek to punish us directly, themselves, as “God’s agents” (which Christians also used to do, when they had more power, and some more radical groups wish they could still do today).

But the Christians are the ones who upheld the Gospel teaching that no men are “good”, for “all have sinned”. Many had loudly leveled this at the modern “world” and liberal segments of the Church, which had begun arguing for the “goodness“ of man, especially in the face of the teaching of Hell.

But the problem was, when it came to applying that to themselves (and those under their sphere of control, which included the whole “nation” or “culture” of past times), they essentially overrode it with concepts like “regeneration”, “providence” and “exceptionality”. They now could act like every other greedy or warring group of people while in the very breath of condemning them for it, because it’s “different” when they do it. They were the “called”, and “chosen”, and “sanctified”. But then that’s what the religions before them said.

The difference they claim is that they follow Jesus, the Savior. But He taught that the Law was fulfilled by “doing unto others as you would have them do unto you”. By going back to the points of the Law, they could actually engineer it so that killing, stealing, and even raping, could sometimes be justified, even while “normally” condemned in the Commandments, as they preached them to others.
Going along with this, Christians were also instructed “If it be possible, as much as lies in you, live peaceably with all men” (Romans 12:18. When it comes to this chapter, many focus more on the first two verses, and then believe living peaceably is not possible as they see “the world” encroaching on them. But they don’t see the many ways they actually provoke the world, including under the premise of trying to control it).

They’ve gone from excoriating modern liberal culture for turning from the overly sensitive propriety of the past (where even the word “pregnant” was too ‘dirty’ for TV), to now trying to be John Wayne and mocking them as “snowflakes” and “whiners” who need to “grow a pair” instead of running to their “safe spaces”. They themselves largely follow this current president, who embodies everything they used to scold society for, from vulgarity to infidelity. Is being “tough and insensitive” ungodly, or is it now the new “godly”? Make up your minds!
The standard always changes, when focusing on point-by-point morality. (Which is basically opposite of what Christians have always said; that turning away from black and white rules “relativizes” morality! They’ve long preached against the “relativism” or “situational ethics” of people saying “what we’re doing is OK as long as we’re not hurting anyone else”, but this is actually closer to the intent of the Golden Rule).

To show how this happens, if you go strictly by the letter, of “thou shalt not steal”, then you can engage in (or at least condone) various devious financial practices, yet maintain it was all technically lawful (such as “predatory lending”, or the reasoning that “prices and wages are what you agreed upon, and if you don’t like it, go elsewhere”) and be able to truly reason that you (or the system you’re defending) have not violated the commandment. You can even go as far as to appeal to “conscience”, and “the conviction of the Spirit” (which many will say is what supersedes “the letter” of the Law, and is supposed to be all the “more binding”, and “proof” of salvation), and just the technical legality of it can still justify just about any measure taken.
Even the so-called “spirit of the Law” from the Sermon on the Mount you can excuse yourself from. You can condemn others for “bitterness” and “envy” (“spiritual ‘murder'”) towards those who have the upper hand, while displaying a lot of hostility towards those you think you have “just cause” to be angry about, especially by declaring them “anti-God”, or any other entity you identify with, such as “the nation”. We end up with only certain people ever having the right to voice displeasure at anything, while the standard (we preach to and judge others by but aren’t following ourselves) is that man is supposed to only be “thankful”.

But if you go by “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”; that would instantly sweep away all of these sorts of rationalizations. So it’s actually much easier (for the “flesh”, believe it or not) to stick to a discrete “commandment”! You look “lawful” and “obedient”, and get to compare and preach to the “lawless”, on top of it!

Meanwhile, what they continue to step up their energies against is leftism, gays, in addition to Islam, of course. The Gospel that starts with the sinfulness of all men (and therefore no room for them to “cast the speck out of someone else’s eye”) is left out, as it’s presumed that some have “repented” into a virtual goodness, and so it’s them against all the bad, [unrepentant] “sinners”.

One common statement I’ve seen is “The Christian view of our moral condition is that, apart from Christ, ‘no one does good, not even one’ (Rom. 3:12).”
This makes it sound like once you “receive” Christ, then you CAN do good, in the sense Paul is denying here (instead of that ‘goodness’ being imputed from Christ). This leads both to presuppositionalism (my interpretations, anger at others behaviors, etc. must be right, because I’ve been ‘regenerated’ and the other side’s position can be dismissed because they aren’t), but also judgmentalism toward those not seen as doing good enough.
On top of this is “God gave His law (filled with commands and comfort) so that we’d know how to live as His image bearers in a broken world.” Both of these statements from CRI articles (one of the centers of mainstream evangelical doctrine); it clearly indicates a notion of the Law being given to maintain order, to help fix the world, as well as benefit the individual. So, putting it together, with Christ, we are more able to do the “good” of keeping the Law, and thus be both more “moral”, and more emotionally healthier. They will all admit that we’re “not perfect” at it, but in practice, it becomes at least we are better than the unbeliever, the doubter, the “backslider”, etc.

In actuality, this position is already moderated down from earlier teaching, whose modern adherents will often criticize the “new evangelicals” for “making God’s Law all about us”. While they have a point there (which I often cite in regards to the popular “Christian victory” teaching), still this often stems from a view where God’s Law and order is a totally disconnected thing that just happens to benefit man sometimes (such as the niceness society would have without killing, stealing, etc.), but it’s really about “His own pleasure/Glory/holiness” etc.
So we had better order our lives by the moral Law, just to make Him happy, but it really in the end doesn’t matter how we treat our fellow man; that’s just a fringe benefit, if other people are deserving of it; but most really aren’t, since man defaults to being a sinner. This is another way we can justify a lot of unkindness toward men (appealing to instances such as the Canaanites, or just God’s “hatred” and judgment of sin in general).

Jesus had showed people what that Law really required, making it obvious it was really futile to seek justification through it; and leaving people to walk away thwarted, but likely to pretend it never happened, and just go back to where they were and keep plugging on as much as they could (and then pointing at others). The people had taken the “letter” and focused on certain aspects of it, even adding to them, to make sure the basic commandment wasn’t violated; while omitting “the weightier matters”.
I keep thinking how the Islamists need to hear the Gospel message which begins with the fact that “none are good”, but they’ve already heard overall Christian messages, and never got from them this sense. Instead, what they heard was basic agreement on moralism, but the difference was which religion, and associated culture was to bear the rule in enforcing it. So the Islamists maintain that it’s theirs, and the Christians insist it is theirs. They talk right past each other, and then the only thing left to do is to fight.

Both groups seem to believe that “sinners” have forfeited their right to live freely (if, at all). But to live is our natural instinct, and so people have the right to at least resist being under the control of those who show themselves to be a threat to living. They don’t get the whole “chosen ruler” concept, and see no difference between all the different people and groups claiming it. Anyone and everyone can and is saying that. They can’t all be true. God or conscience can’t have “showed” anyone that all of them are right. But they can all possibly be wrong, though!

(PS, in the class, someone asked why the Las Vegas shooter wasn’t considered a “terrorist” like the Islamists, which is a big point liberals are making to show the categories are racist, and we were told “terrorism” is defined as having a religious or political motivation, while they still don’t know what exactly the Vegas shooter’s purpose was. That’s why people like him get assumed to be simply “mentally ill”. If they find that the shooter was some Christian or other conservative trying to punish “Sin City”, would they then upgrade him to “terrorist” status? Possibly, as Timothy McVeigh was considered a terrorist).