‘Bacon: I wasn’t sure about the Jesus Christ parts of the sermon… I was struggling with whether I believe this….

So if I could find a church, and this may already exist, where the Sunday school is very low on the beliefs of Jesus and very high on the community part, that’s what I’m looking for.

[I’d like a church] focused less on Jesus rising from the dead and more about being compassionate, caring people…

Martin: Do you think though, to even loosely wear the identity of a cultural Christian, don’t you need the resurrection part?’

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America is secularizing at an astonishing rate, and this NPR interview with a young man raised in the Black charismatic church tells you part of the reason why — and it’s a very simple reason: Increasingly, the very content of the Christian faith strikes a lot of people as untrue.

With even Laura Ingraham calling bullshit on the fundamental truth of his being, John Eastman has gone total Beyond the Fringe, huddling on mountaintops with his mad leader, awaiting The Fraud’s earth-shattering revelation.

… but there’s SOOOO much more, as this terrific essay from last year notes.

LOL. Jodi Dean describes the aristocratic Catholic governing authority trying to worm its way into our democratic hearts.

Public morals legislation, the public observation of Christian religious practices, and a family policy aimed toward incentivizing marriage and increasing family size (as opposed to, say, promoting reproductive justice and publicly funded childcare) are hardly the stuff of a multiracial, multiethnic working-class party in a secular society that recognizes the existence of women and the LGBTQ+ community.

Duh. If you want to know what life under a Cathophate would look like, revisit Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, and take a gander at Lady Marchmain – that megaCatholic upper-cruster. She’ll be president, and her son Bridey VP, in the Cathophate to Come, and together their putrescent moral superiority will reduce us all to sniveling drunks, like poor Sebastian.

[T]heir ideal society is one where a large and powerful modern state is integrated with the Catholic Church. The church would direct the state to use coercive and non-coercive means to support the church’s spiritual mission, such as policies like penalties for apostasy and heresy, requirements for attending mass. Integralism resembles Islamism but with Catholicism as the religion.

Sounds yummy! Go, Prof Vermeule!

… militia. I don’t think this Israeli women’s political movement is going to go after the vile and increasingly powerful ultraorthodox cult in that country with guns; but if you ask UD whether the prospect of armed female avengers against primitive theocrats is pleasant or unpleasant, she’d have to go with pleasant.

See also the millions of Iranian women whose fuck the hijab militancy grows with each grotesque effort on the part of the government to frighten them into wearing the modesty cap.

… says BOO first in rural Washington State:

The Columbia County Rural Library District could be dissolved by voters after a community member filed a petition to close the library amid a censorship fight over LGBTQ+ books aimed at teens.

Better dead than read, baby. You won’t want to miss America’s inaugural community bonfire, where you can join hands in the big circle and cremate Shakespeare while journalists and historians mill about recording the event. No more pencils no more books no more teachers’ dirty looks children will chant in the moonlight while sparks fly upward and hitlers from the hollers whoop whoop de whoop.

… Knesset.

Until recently, a large majority of Israelis tolerated the [ultra orthodox]. Sometimes they gritted their teeth, sometimes they griped, but they went on shouldering the security and economic burden of the state on behalf of the haredim. The events of the last few months, and the conduct of the government, in full partnership with the haredim, will likely change all that. Utterly blind to reality, the haredim have now gone even further by proposing a new Basic Law: “Torah Study,” which would give draft dodgers a status similar to those serving in the IDF.

… Faced with yet another step which the majority of Israelis, the burden bearers, perceive as unfair and exploitative, the tumult of recent days may pale in comparison to what is to come. True, the haredim can do whatever they want under the current government, but short of a complete dictatorship here, they will pay the full price when the next government takes power. The budgets that finance their way of life will be slashed, government support for those who don’t prepare their students for a productive life will be terminated, and rights will be denied to those who don’t serve in the army or at least in civilian national service.

“I can’t have my daughters living in a place like that,” [Zion] Zibly said of Israel. “They grew up in a country with Jewish democratic values and it is becoming undemocratic and [more] Jewish — not in the direction of my Jewishness, but in a manner in which they dictate to me what being Jewish is.”

Hey, he’s even named for the place. But no one with half a brain (and Zibly, now director of neurosurgery at Yale, has a whole brain) would let a daughter grow up in haredi Israel.

Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston, who resigned in 2002, said at the time that her actions were “a gesture of hate.” A spokesman for Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles, who was removed from public duties in 2013, called her actions “just another example of anti-Catholicism.”

[O’Connor] became most associated with efforts to combat abuse within the Catholic Church, decades before the scale of the [sexual abuse] problem within American religious organizations — from the Catholic Church to the Southern Baptist Convention to the Hasidic dynasties of New York — became common knowledge.

… One of the church’s most high-profile and influential priests in the United States, Theodore E. McCarrick, was expelled from the church in 2019 and is facing sexual assault charges in two states, the first and only American cardinal to be criminally charged in connection with sex abuse.

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McCarrick didn’t unload on O’Connor. He’s in the article to remind you just how bad it was, and how right O’Connor was.

UD has somewhat sputteringly tried, over the years of this blog, to summarize the sicko fantasies of Adrian Vermeule. She’s always on the lookout for calmer, clearer, accounts. Levitz’s is good.

Indeed Randy Reza is a state official in charge of maintaining Islamic values in Iran. And while he’s humiliating, intimidating, and jailing thousands of women for not wearing their piety cap, he’s getting it on with his boyfriend which is SOOOOO non-Islamic ….

But nothing will happen to Reza. He’s a man, after all.

Dr. Matan Bar Yishai, a family doctor from the Maccabi healthcare service who has decided to relocate to New Zealand, told the Walla news site: “I am very sorry to everyone for the decision I made. I really love the country and my patients, but in the end, it is a family decision.”

Look. Give the people driving out Israel’s doctors, and provoking impressive numbers of Israeli pilots to stop flying, what they want. The people about to take over Israel didn’t give a shit about whatever “covid” was and refused vaccination and thereby killed a bunch of their people. Germ theory of disease? Our rabbi calls bs on it. The old ways are the best ways! He alone (to use the words of one of the heroes of the world’s ultraorthodox) can save us. What we need and what Israel needs is prayer, which is why our people don’t fight to defend the country, but only pray to defend the country, the way we prayed to keep all those children and old people from dying of covid…

Not that the haredim recognize the country “Israel,” since the messiah isn’t here yet or something. Many make a point of ignoring the national moments of silence on Holocaust Remembrance Day, pointedly cavorting about while Israelis stand in mourning. These people do not want vaccines, doctors, or even a country. They don’t want an economy of workers. So let them have what they want. Large numbers of people with money and skills are leaving Israel; investors are leaving Israel. The economy’s tanking. The ultraorthodox are giddy with excitement. They have always gloried in poverty and ignorance, and now all the people bothering them about teaching basic literacy to their children or getting jobs instead of rioting are finally going to shut up. Gottze dank!

Witty protest signs abounded. “Bibi, haven’t the Jews suffered enough?”

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[One protester commented:] “It may not be a good idea to turn the Israeli army’s entire logistical command against you.”

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When fighter pilots rose to prominence among the opponents to Netanyahu’s plans, his minister of communications, Shlomo Karhi, suggested the pilots — who are lionized figures in Israeli society — “can go to hell.”

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Within half an hour of the bill passing, 64-0 amid an opposition boycott, hundreds of pilots posted pictures of themselves, many in tears, sending their unit commanders letters ending their decades of service. “We signed a contract to fight for the realm,” they wrote. “We will not fight for a king.” The Israel Defense Forces later revealed that more than half of the air force personnel that signed the original petition to Netanyahu, including pilots, had followed through and informed their units they would no longer report to reserve duty.

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I keep thinking of a phrase Harold Meyerson used to describe the people about to take over Israel: “theocratic-primitivist.” Yeah, theocratic; but the other thing is even more important. More devastating. I’ve written for years about the ultraorthodox in Israel and America, and it’s definitely their primitivism, rather than any particular form of spiritual adherence, that shocks. Several forms of theocracy exist in the world, after all; but the extreme archaism, the bitter super-regression of this massive cult, is the really distinctive and frightening thing. Pre-law, pre-science, pre-education, pre-reason, pre-individualism, pre-nation, pre-state, pre-equality, pre-humanity. Like their primitive precursors, the new owners of Israel grant humanity only to their own tribe, and consider violence – along with non-violent forms of criminal behavior – against extra-tribal forces justified under a wide array of circumstances.

They are a form of death. A death-cult. A burial society burying human life itself. They will certainly bury Israel.

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The reasonableness bill cannot be divorced from the entire package of legislation, which, taken together, will end Israeli democracy as we know it. 

… In a country that devotes more and more resources to maintain the occupation and the settlements; in a country with no separation of religion and state, where marriages are subject to religious law and allowed only for heterosexual couples; and in a country that allocates tremendous resources to religious institutions, where the ultra-Orthodox do not serve in the military and their participation in the labor market is extremely low, insisting that the very textural fabric of Israeli society is both Jewish and democratic is becoming less and less convincing. The battle in the streets is not just about the constitutional overhaul. It is whether Israel can have a future as a liberal democracy.