1855

Oh hell no.

1856

What i mean is our politics systems are going to fail if it requires every citizen to read IPCC reports and Pickety. Ordinary people need a shortcut to political virtue the same way ordinary people need a short cut to moral virtue through religion. In a sense that’s the greatest value of the US Constitution, as a shortcut for ordinary people’s political virtue. The problem for the US today is that this is no longer sufficient.

1857

“And what if we are praying to the wrong God? Each week we’re just making him madder and madder.”

  • Homer Simpson
1858

It’s all part and parcel of the general degradation of trust in all institutions, be they religious, societal, government, or scientific. There is a general distrust for any and all institutions. And when you don’t have any sort of trust, you are like a ship without direction, caught up without charismatic person comes along.

The nice thing about religion is that at least most of them provide some sort of sane (ish) dock for people that refuse to believe in Governments or Science. I would rather people believe in the Dalai Lama where the Pope, then some ex porn star pushing against vaccinations, or some guy with a rocket arguing the earth is flat. Sure, they might be wrong, but they are wrong within normal parameters.

1859

I would have bundled a lot of that into the concept of “civics,” but I guess that isn’t getting taught any more?

1860

Check this shit out:

1861

One might argue that this is what newspapers/network news were before cable and social media destroyed journalism.

But I’m totally on board with your project.

1862

We have one. It’s Trump’s GOP.

It isn’t great.

1863

I thought we decided that was a cult, not a religion.

1864

::remains silent::

1865

Any chance the media can blame it on Red Dead Redemption 2?

1866

This was a great post. Thanks! I think that parties fulfill the function of institutions that function like religious denominations in the political sphere and the problem, as with religion itself, is that they are not always oriented toward the good of society. I don’t actually know how to convince people to act toward the common good. My suspicion is that humans’ innate provincialism is too constrained for societies to really ever work well on the scale of nations.

1867

William Greider wrote a book some years ago about the failure of American democracy. As I recall, one of the themes in the book was that basic questions (e.g. the right mix of tax rates, the proper approach to environmental regulation, etc) have become so complex that the average citizen can’t be expected to know the right answer. This would be bad enough but money makes it worse. Citizens require the advice of experts, and there are plenty of experts for hire by moneyed interests with skin in the game and a willingness to subvert democracy for gain. If, for example, fossil fuel interests weren’t paying for experts to lie about climate change, the public discourse on climate change would be completely different. It would still be a complicated issue where the right approach was hard to understand, but at least it wouldn’t be paralyzed by outright denial.

1868

Didn’t Joseph Smith, the founder or Mormonism say he found a pair of golden spectacles that enabled him to read some message from god, and then conveniently the spectacles couldn’t be found after that? That seems pretty far out there to me.

1869

And it was written on gold plates that nobody else ever saw, IIRC.

1870

Oh, God! Why are you letting me die?
Without having me show people the plates?
They’ll have no proof I was telling the truth or not
They’ll have to believe it just ‘cos…
Oh, I guess that’s kinda what you were going for

I once saw The Book of Mormon The Musical so I’m pretty much an expert on all this, AMA.

1871

The Mormon church also believes that the leader of their church is always a prophet as well.

1872

Dum-dum-dum-dum-dum.

1873

Well, to be fair, the pope is the avatar of God on Earth. And the Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson was considered the messiah (Moshiach), the coming of Christ. Not the second one. The first one.

1874

Sure, but further out than Jesus resurrected Lazarus, and the resurrected Lazarus was totally not stinky? No, not further out than that, just more recent than that.

I mean, where are the tablets with the Ten Commandments? How’d they manage to lose those?