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June 3 - June 21, 2020
a news program featuring scenes of the anchors’ private lives.
Broadcasting from home during Coronavirus in 2020.
The American experiment, the original embodiment of the great Enlightenment idea of intellectual freedom, every individual free to believe anything she wishes, has metastasized out of control.
“I have…some doubts as to his Divinity; though it is a question I do not dogmatize upon…and I think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble.”
When somebody asked Alexander Hamilton why the Framers hadn’t mentioned God in the Constitution, his answer was deadpan hilarious: “We forgot.”
Americans had the peculiar fate of believing they could and must answer those religious questions the same way mathematicians and historians and natural philosophers answered theirs.
“As long as there are fools and rascals,” Voltaire wrote in 1767, “there will be religions. [And Christianity] is assuredly the most ridiculous, the most absurd…religion which has ever infected this world.”
“We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking. It is held in reverence. Some think it the voice of God.” —MARK TWAIN, “Corn-Pone Opinions” (1901)
While most of the thirteen colonies had a state church before the Revolution, afterward the Constitution outlawed them. Every set of beliefs and practices—old or new, more or less reasonable or plainly nuts—was officially equal to every other.
Americans often resist the idea that educated experts can tell them what is and isn’t true, but from the Puritans on, we’ve also been more than happy for scholarly fellow believers to confirm our beliefs and make them more impressively complicated. It is a modern wish for proof of one’s premodern fantasies.
For a century, Americans had a wide-ranging, well-established vocabulary for this, talking about suckers falling for hogwash. After the 1920s, however, we invented fewer and fewer such disparagements. Soon words like balderdash, humbug, and bunkum were shoved to the back of the language attic and semiretired or eliminated, along with hooey, claptrap, and malarkey. We also did a strange thing to a certain set of older words. For as long as they’d been English, incredible, unbelievable, unreal, fabulous, and fantastic were either derogatory or neutrally descriptive, different ways of calling
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But as that big idea spread into the public understanding, it caused a popular paradigm shift itself, making science seem iffier and sketchier, driven less by a dispassionate examination of facts than by…mere beliefs.
That's BS - I mean that's quite a leap from hypotheses that are confimed to "iffy" beliefs.
The memberships of all the tried-and-true denominations were then at their peak. By the 1970s, they were all shrinking and never stopped. Mainline churches are a lot like the nightly network news shows. The audiences for both peaked at the same time and for analogous reasons have declined since by around half.
Calvary Chapel and the Vineyard churches are the Sierra Nevada and Sam Adams.
Wow. Before this book, I can't say I've ever heard of either Calvary or Vineyard in my secular bubble. Wow.
American Catholics are more reality-based than Protestants is because tenured grown-ups, from the Vatican on down, have consistently been in command, tamping down and pinching off undesirable offshoots.
In America, according to the market theorists, each religion competes with all the others to acquire and keep customers. Americans, presented with all this fantastic choice, can’t resist buying. We’re so religious for the same reason we’re so fat.
In Fantasyland, everybody is graded on a curve.
Buchanan, running against a Bush in an effort to run against a Clinton, was a smarter, more sincere and ideologically coherent Trump twenty years ahead of his time.
aka Trump with a mind
a fantasy solution to an imaginary problem, almost like a government plan to prevent a zombie apocalypse.
If the Roman Catholic French or Spanish had been more successful in making more of North America theirs, maybe we would be less rogue-utopian and individualistic. If the Dutch had extended their influence beyond New York and beyond the 1600s, the sensible and cosmopolitan strains of our national character might be more dominant.
