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Posted
12 minutes ago, SimonBolivar said:

Well shit, I'll slam a green been casserole. Maybe I should join the church.

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Posted
Well shit, I'll slam a green been casserole. Maybe I should join the church.

We attend a Presbyterian church. Years ago, we did a joint MLK day service…with Ebenezer Baptist. We then did a joint pot luck.
That was an embarrassing culinary ass-kicking. 90% of the Presby dishes hardly got touched….whereas there were almost fights over the 5 kinds of grits, 3 types of bbq, 4 types of Mac and cheese, greens, and other deliciousness the Ebenezer folks brought. It was brutal.
Also, I ate a LOT that day.
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Posted

We attend a Presbyterian church. Years ago, we did a joint MLK day service…with Ebenezer Baptist. We then did a joint pot luck.
That was an embarrassing culinary ass-kicking. 90% of the Presby dishes hardly got touched….whereas there were almost fights over the 5 kinds of grits, 3 types of bbq, 4 types of Mac and cheese, greens, and other deliciousness the Ebenezer folks brought. It was brutal.
Also, I ate a LOT that day.

When I was a sophomore at Ole Miss, I reluctantly agreed to go to church with a black friend of mine who played football. He was from Lake Jackson, TX, and went on to play pro ball for a while. Myself, not being a church-goer, was extremely pissed about being up that early on a Sunday. But a promise is a promise. To this day, this was arguably the greatest church experience of my life. The only thing better than the service, was what I called, “the after party”. Other than my trip down to the swamp for my baseball teammates’ grandmother’s birthday party, had I experienced quantity and quality go hand in hand when it came to food. Just thinking about it today, makes me hungry.

Sorry, back to the idiots.
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Posted

When I was a sophomore at Ole Miss, I reluctantly agreed to go to church with a black friend of mine who played football. He was from Lake Jackson, TX, and went on to play pro ball for a while. Myself, not being a church-goer, was extremely pissed about being up that early on a Sunday. But a promise is a promise. To this day, this was arguably the greatest church experience of my life. The only thing better than the service, was what I called, “the after party”. Other than my trip down to the swamp for my baseball teammates’ grandmother’s birthday party, had I experienced quantity and quality go hand in hand when it came to food. Just thinking about it today, makes me hungry.

Sorry, back to the idiots.

Sorry for thread derail but my daughter is going to be a freshman at Ole Miss this fall. She’s pretty liberal, hates Trump and will have to bite her tongue pretty hard, I’m sure, but it’s a beautiful campus and Oxford is amazing. (My ex and most of her family went to OM — ex FIL played baseball/basketball there in the 60’s.)
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Posted
37 minutes ago, Macanudo said:

And that was different from every other day how exactly?

I'll have you know I had half a salad for lunch today.  Getting fit, losing weight, feeling good, man.

But, I mean....I'd kill for a bowl of green chile cheese grits.

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Posted

We attend a Presbyterian church. Years ago, we did a joint MLK day service…with Ebenezer Baptist. We then did a joint pot luck.
That was an embarrassing culinary ass-kicking. 90% of the Presby dishes hardly got touched….whereas there were almost fights over the 5 kinds of grits, 3 types of bbq, 4 types of Mac and cheese, greens, and other deliciousness the Ebenezer folks brought. It was brutal.
Also, I ate a LOT that day.

PCUSA I hope. I’m about to do my 2nd term on the session and I’ve headed up fellowship for 3 years, one luncheon a month. When your average member age is 78 you gotta be careful with the spices. Next weekend we’re taking a chartered bus to an Astros game and this year they made me buy primo seats because last year the old folks almost fell trying to get to their seats.

I’ve gotten to be close friends with our pastor and I still don’t know if she’s a lesbian because it’s none of my fucking business who or if she fucks. In fact, the question has only sped through my brain for a fleeting moment because it’s unimportant - and, tbh, it was male ego, ie “she is a wonderful lady. I’m lucky she is leading our church. I wonder if she is attracted to me?” And all the conservative assholes departed for the PCA or Pioneer Presbyterian church, and PCUSA is so damned liberal and loving and I am so grateful I’ve never heard anything remotely political at church other than love thy neighbor. It’s a magical la la land where we still sing 300 year old hymns.

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Posted
7 hours ago, tx 3 putt said:

 

Brave guy to risk his job. Most likely there is at least 25% of his audience being described, to their face, in terms they won't like to hear. And like with many lectures, those who get offended are the ones who are most guilty.

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Posted
On 7/30/2024 at 2:57 AM, tx 3 putt said:

 

He’s not wrong, but I don’t think this is compelling for those susceptible to falling into Christian nationalism. There are large groups in theologically conservative evangelical churches that can be moved away from this garbage — they were manipulated into it to begin with — but I think the case needs to be a spiritual/biblical one, not a-good-for-society one.

This movement is damaging churches too and is contrary to anything but the most tortured reading of the Bible. The remaining religious leaders whom haven’t fallen into this need to be hammering on this point. Their message should be saving the church.

Arguing against the idea of “America as a Christian nation” accepts it on the the nationalists’ terms. Sure, it’s good to provide a counter-narrative, but it’s too easy to muddy the waters and lead too many to believe that America was actually founded as a Christian nation. It starts to feel like a game picking and choosing gotcha quotes that leave too many to revert to whatever feels comfortable.

For the rank and file evangelical, they need to be reminded that the thing they profess to most value — the propagation of the Gospel — is being destroyed by the Christian nationalist movement. Lust for power and hurting any and everyone is clearly evil in itself, but it’s very practically also damaging the relevance of the need for Jesus.

The cynical religious leaders probably can’t be reached. They are seeking their reward on earth and appear to not believe in the hell that they are preaching, but there are lots of regular folks who could probably be saved. 

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Posted (edited)
3 minutes ago, Mole said:

He’s not wrong, but I don’t think this is compelling for those susceptible to falling into Christian nationalism. There are large groups in theologically conservative evangelical churches that can be moved away from this garbage — they were manipulated into it to begin with — but I think the case needs to be a spiritual/biblical one, not a-good-for-society one.

This movement is damaging churches too and is contrary to anything but the most tortured reading of the Bible. The remaining religious leaders whom haven’t fallen into this need to be hammering on this point. Their message should be saving the church.

Arguing against the idea of “America as a Christian nation” accepts it on the the nationalists’ terms. Sure, it’s good to provide a counter-narrative, but it’s too easy to muddy the waters and lead too many to believe that America was actually founded as a Christian nation. It starts to feel like a game picking and choosing gotcha quotes that leave too many to revert to whatever feels comfortable.

For the rank and file evangelical, they need to be reminded that the thing they profess to most value — the propagation of the Gospel — is being destroyed by the Christian nationalist movement. Lust for power and hurting any and everyone is clearly evil in itself, but it’s very practically also damaging the relevance of the need for Jesus.

The cynical religious leaders probably can’t be reached. They are seeking their reward on earth and appear to not believe in the hell that they are preaching, but there are lots of regular folks who could probably be saved. 

You're not wrong....but you are way, way, way too late.  My wife has regularly observed that resurrection is an essential part of the Christian story, and the arc of the faith.  To be resurrected....a thing first must die.

It is probably well past time for "the Church" in America to die.  It is too riddled with cancer to be saved, it is not worth saving.  Let it die.  Then see what shows up at the resurrection, and nurture that.

Let it go, Indy.

Edited by Brisketexan
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Posted
33 minutes ago, troph said:

 

You are correct too, but not all churches are beyond salvage just many and most if not all of the white conservative ones. 

Sure.  But when "the body of Christ" is more cancer than body....you let the whole fucking thing go.

I mean, I'm sure that not every person on earth was deeply evil and worthy of drowning, but God flooded the whole planet and killed em all anyway.  Right?  Fundagelicals should take that lesson to heed -- make something shitty enough, and the right move is to wipe the whole damned institution out.

I know plenty of good, even great churches/congregations.  Is there any way to separate the body from the cancer any more?  I doubt it.

Posted (edited)
1 hour ago, cactusflinthead said:

His delivery could use some work but the message hits.

Is this political speech in the pulpit?

Don't care. I don't give a damn if they preach politics. At least I know where they stand. I know where Jeffress is going to stand on these issues. It's refreshing to hear an amen from an elder in the pews.

He’s a Democrat and a state representative from Round Rock.

And a UT grad.  Some Surly poster knows him from UT.

Edited by atomheartbevo
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Posted
2 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

He’s a Democrat and a state representative from Round Rock.

And a UT grad.  Some Surly poster knows him from UT.

Wait a minute. YOU MEAN TO TELL ME HE'S HERE? IN THE PIT OF SIN?

 

Posted
1 minute ago, cactusflinthead said:

Wait a minute. YOU MEAN TO TELL ME HE'S HERE? IN THE PIT OF SIN?

Born and raised in Williamson County and a product of Round Rock ISD and UT-Austin.

Some times unicorns happen.

Posted (edited)
5 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

Born and raised in Williamson County and a product of Round Rock ISD and UT-Austin.

Some times unicorns happen.

Well, it took Nixon to go to China.

I'd subscribe to his newsletter and throw some dollars in the plate. 

Edit: seriously who is he?

Edited by cactusflinthead
  • 2 weeks later...
Posted

Well I can’t read the comments because I refuse to support a right wing billionaire troll…so I’ll assume that their statue of Mojo Jojo offends you somehow and the comments are full of manufactured outrage, bots peddling manufactured outrage, and a breathtaking circle jerk of fear and loathing.  
 

And you calling anything or anyone goofy, even in jest, is rich

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Posted

Never  forget how congregants yelled USA, USA, USA on Christmas Sunday following a political address given by Trump during his last  visit to FBD.

  • 1 year later...
Posted

"Drop in US religiosity among largest in world"

Quote

Drop in U.S. Religiosity Among Largest in World

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The 17-point drop in the percentage of U.S. adults who say religion is an important part of their daily life — from 66% in 2015 to 49% today — ranks among the largest Gallup has recorded in any country over any 10-year period since 2007.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/697676/drop-religiosity-among-largest-world.aspx#:~:text=— The 17-point drop in,10-year period since 2007.

Massive drop - 17 points - from 2015 to 2025.  Gosh.  What major trend took place from 2015 to present.  Could it be the rise of the MAGA movement, which has thoroughly coopted Christianity?

In America, 2025, if someone says "I'm a Christian," that is regularly perceived as "I'm MAGA."  It has become, first and foremost, a political label.  And . . . among people inclined to actually FOLLOW the tenets of Christianity, a most distasteful one.  So, in a country where being "religious" largely means "I'm MAGA," it's not a shock to see a big drop in subscription to that religious belief (which remains our culturally dominant religion).

TLDR: Nothing is worse for American Christianity than American "Christians."

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Posted (edited)

It is mind blowing how different things are now than they were 20 years ago. Back in the 2000s religion seemed to be going very strong and then...

I remember when Bush was taking measures to tie the government and churches together with all his faith based initiatives and I told my conservative religious friends (who are no longer either conservative or religious...which probably says something) that this would ruin Christianity in the United States. The separation of church and state is vital for protecting the church and Christian nationalists just don't get that.

Edited by Valmy77
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Posted

The funny thing is if I wanted to be as ungenerous and vicious as possible to the church in the America, I would say it is a money laundering organization that specializes in the cover up of child sex trafficking...which aligns perfectly with who Trump is and what he does so I guess it is no surprise they love him so much.

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Posted
48 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

Could it be the rise of the MAGA movement, which has thoroughly coopted Christianity?

They have coopted a certain version of Christianity and it has had a disastrous impact on the image of Christianity in America.

49 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

In America, 2025, if someone says "I'm a Christian," that is regularly perceived as "I'm MAGA."  It has become, first and foremost, a political label.  And . . . among people inclined to actually FOLLOW the tenets of Christianity, a most distasteful one.

Look... I'm not going to argue that what MAGA has done to Christianity in America is disgusting.  But I'll be damned if I surrender the name of Christ to the MAGA movement and abandon the name Christian just to make sure people don't confuse me as part of MAGA.   

 

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Posted
8 minutes ago, Guadaloopy said:

Look... I'm not going to argue that what MAGA has done to Christianity in America is disgusting.  But I'll be damned if I surrender the name of Christ to the MAGA movement and abandon the name Christian just to make sure people don't confuse me as part of MAGA.   

You may not.  But a lot of people would, and have.

They don't want anything to do with a movement that is widely and broadly associated with hate and cruelty.  "Christianity" is a shit brand in the US these days.  It means "I suck Trump's dick and devote an inordinate amount of energy to being shitty to other people."  That's not a great brand, and it's a TERRIBLE brand for your core "consumer base": people who are interested in practicing actual Christianity.

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Posted
1 hour ago, Brisketexan said:

Massive drop - 17 points - from 2015 to 2025.  Gosh.  What major trend took place from 2015 to present.  Could it be the rise of the MAGA movement, which has thoroughly coopted Christianity?

Hopefully this is the crucible from which a new/old Christianity emerges; one in which a return to the actual, radical message of Christ is not a label but a statement of purpose for believers and aspiring believers.    
 

Btw, it’s not purely following Jonathan Haidt’s timeline, but that also mirrors the popularization of the smart phone.  I think there’s a huge emptiness with modern life, exacerbated by technology and social media, that a post-Enlightenment/pre-Evangelical version of Christianity could help fill.  

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Posted
1 minute ago, LCHorn said:

Hopefully this is the crucible from which a new/old Christianity emerges; one in which a return to the actual, radical message of Christ is not a label but a statement of purpose for believers and aspiring believers.    

That's my wife's (hopeful) take: resurrection is a foundational element of Christianity.  Not just the "event" of resurrection, but the very concept.  And, to be resurrected....a thing must first die.

So, maybe it's time for "Christianity" to die.  Which is a rough process, sad, and costly.  But if Christianity can be what is resurrected, then perhaps that is The Way.

We have a lot further to go, though.  A LOT further.

Posted
1 hour ago, Brisketexan said:

"Drop in US religiosity among largest in world"

https://news.gallup.com/poll/697676/drop-religiosity-among-largest-world.aspx#:~:text=— The 17-point drop in,10-year period since 2007.

Massive drop - 17 points - from 2015 to 2025.  Gosh.  What major trend took place from 2015 to present.  Could it be the rise of the MAGA movement, which has thoroughly coopted Christianity?

In America, 2025, if someone says "I'm a Christian," that is regularly perceived as "I'm MAGA."  It has become, first and foremost, a political label.  And . . . among people inclined to actually FOLLOW the tenets of Christianity, a most distasteful one.  So, in a country where being "religious" largely means "I'm MAGA," it's not a shock to see a big drop in subscription to that religious belief (which remains our culturally dominant religion).

TLDR: Nothing is worse for American Christianity than American "Christians."

I wonder whether COVID played a larger part in this. For months people didn't get to/have to go to church, and I'm betting a large number of folks just didn't miss it, or when they filled that time with other stuff, stuck with their new hobbies.

Do we have numbers on the denominations of Christianity most affected?

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Posted
Just now, softlynow said:

I wonder whether COVID played a larger part in this. For months people didn't get to/have to go to church, and I'm betting a large number of folks just didn't miss it, or when they filled that time with other stuff, stuck with their new hobbies.

Do we have numbers on the denominations of Christianity most affected?

That definitely had an affect.  Shit, it did for us.  We didn't really start attending church again till about a year ago.  We got too comfy in our lazy Sunday mornings, just coffee and conversation.  It was a good distraction, but at the same time, we ended up realizing that we were missing something.  And I'd say church services themselves STILL haven't really gotten over COVID.  A lot of leftovers (communion servers wear gloves, people don't hold hands during the Lord's Prayer, lotta little things like that).  There's a confluence of factors, to be sure.

Posted
1 minute ago, Brisketexan said:

That definitely had an affect.  Shit, it did for us.  We didn't really start attending church again till about a year ago.  We got too comfy in our lazy Sunday mornings, just coffee and conversation.  It was a good distraction, but at the same time, we ended up realizing that we were missing something.  And I'd say church services themselves STILL haven't really gotten over COVID.  A lot of leftovers (communion servers wear gloves, people don't hold hands during the Lord's Prayer, lotta little things like that).  There's a confluence of factors, to be sure.

I have no doubt in Austin some of the distancing era protocols linger. In The Woodlands we've been done with COVID for a couple years. 

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Posted
4 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

If they do I can’t think of any examples since 23

I just listed two that linger in our church. Now, I don't think it was any sort of deliberate decision, just inertia.  Once you do it a certain way for a while (eg, communion servers wearing vinyl gloves), it falls into the "that's the way we've always done it" trap.

Posted
45 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

I just listed two that linger in our church. Now, I don't think it was any sort of deliberate decision, just inertia.  Once you do it a certain way for a while (eg, communion servers wearing vinyl gloves), it falls into the "that's the way we've always done it" trap.

Interesting. What are the gloves ostensibly for?

Posted
1 minute ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

Interesting. What are the gloves ostensibly for?

I dunno.  Could be for lots of things.

 

Blink-182_-_Enema_of_the_State_cover.jpg

 

Okay, actual answer -- the communion bread is torn by hand and then served to each person, so I guess it's to keep the server's germy hands from touching the bread.  I don't think it was a particularly necessary matter during COVID - wash and sanitize your hands right before you serve, and all is good.

Posted

Putting this here because it addresses the current moral turpitude and I can't recall if we discussed it in July when it was published:

From David Brooks (yes, I like to mock him, too) in The Atlantic "Why Do So Many People Think Trump is Good?"

 

Quote
There’s a question that’s been bugging me for nearly a decade. How is it that half of America looks at Donald Trump and doesn’t find him morally repellent? He lies, cheats, steals, betrays, and behaves cruelly and corruptly, and more than 70 million Americans find him, at the very least, morally acceptable. Some even see him as heroic, admirable, and wonderful. What has brought us to this state of moral numbness?
I’m going to tell you a story that represents my best explanation for how America has fallen into this depressing condition. It’s a story that draws heavily on the thinking of Alasdair MacIntyre, the great moral philosopher, who died in May at age 94. It’s a story that tries to explain how Western culture evolved to the point where millions of us—and not just Republicans and Trump supporters—have been left unable to make basic moral judgments.
The story begins a long time ago. Go back to some ancient city—say, Athens in the age of Aristotle. In that city, the question “How do you define the purpose of your life?” would make no sense. Finding your life’s purpose was not an individual choice. Rather, people grew up within a dense network of family, tribe, city, and nation. They inherited from these entities a variety of duties, responsibilities, and obligations. They also inherited a social role, serving the people around them as soldiers, farmers, merchants, mothers, teachers.
Each of these social roles came with certain standards of excellence, a code to determine what they ought to do. There was an excellent way of being a warrior, a mother, a friend. In this moral system, a person sought to live up to those standards not only for the honor and money it might bring them, but because they wanted to measure up. A teacher would not let a student bribe his way to a higher grade, because that would betray the intrinsic qualities of excellence inherent in being a teacher.
By being excellent at my role, I contribute to the city that formed me. By serving the intrinsic standards of my practice, I gradually rise from being the mediocre person I am toward becoming the excellent person I could be. My life is given meaning within this lifelong journey toward excellence and full human flourishing. If I do this journey well, I have a sense of identity, self-respect, and purpose. I know what I was put on this Earth to do, and there is great comfort and fulfillment in that.
If all of this sounds abstract, let me give you a modern example. At his 2005 induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame, the former Chicago Cub Ryne Sandberg described his devotion to the craft of baseball: “I was in awe every time I walked onto the field. That’s respect. I was taught you never, ever disrespect your opponents or your teammates or your organization or your manager and never, ever your uniform. You make a great play, act like you’ve done it before; get a big hit, look for the third-base coach and get ready to run the bases.”
Sandberg gestured to the Hall of Fame inductees seated around him. “These guys sitting up here did not pave the way for the rest of us so that players could swing for the fences every time up and forget how to move a runner over to third. It’s disrespectful to them, to you, and to the game of baseball we all played growing up.” He continued: “I didn’t play the game right because I saw a reward at the end of the tunnel. I played it right because that’s what you’re supposed to do—play it right and with respect.”
Sandberg’s speech exemplifies this older moral code, with its inherited traditions of excellence. It conferred a moral template to evaluate the people around us and a set of moral standards to give shape and meaning to our lives.
Fast-forward from ancient Athens a thousand-plus years to the Middle Ages. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam changed the standards for what constituted human excellence, placing more value on compassion and humility, but people still shared a few of the old assumptions. Individuals didn’t choose their own morality—there was an essential moral order to the universe. Neither did they choose their individual life’s purpose. That, too, was woven into the good of their community—to serve society in some role, to pass down their way of life, to obey divine law.
Then came the 17th-century wars of religion, and the rivers of blood they produced. Revulsion toward all that contributed to the Enlightenment, with its disenchantment with religion and the valorization of reason. Enlightenment thinkers said: We can’t keep killing one another over whose morality is right. Let’s privatize morality. People can come up with their own values, and we will learn to live with that diversity.
Crudely put, the Enlightenment took away the primacy of the community and replaced it with the primacy of the autonomous individual. It created neutral public systems such as democracy, law, and free speech to give individuals a spacious civil order within which they could figure their own life. Common morality, if it existed at all, was based on reason, not religious dogmatism, and devotion to that common order was voluntary. Utilitarianism was one such attempt at creating this kind of rational moral system—do the thing that will give people pleasure; don’t do the thing that will cause others pain.
I think the Enlightenment was a great step forward, producing, among other things, the American system of government. I value the freedom we now have to craft our own lives, and believe that within that freedom, we can still hew to fixed moral principles. Look at the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. if you doubt me.
There’s an old joke that you can tell what kind of conservative a person is by what year they want to go back to. I’d say the decline of a shared morality happened over the past 60 years with the rise of hyper-individualism and moral relativism. MacIntyre, by contrast, argued that the loss of moral coherence was baked into the Enlightenment from its start, during the 18th century. The Enlightenment project failed, he argued, because it produced rationalistic systems of morals too thin and abstract to give meaning to actual lives. It destroyed coherent moral ecologies and left autonomous individuals naked and alone. Furthermore, it devalued the very faculties people had long used to find meaning. Reason and science are great at telling you how to do things, but not at answering the fundamental questions: Why are we here? What is the ultimate purpose of my life? What is right and what is wrong?
And then in the 19th and 20th centuries, along came the crew who tried to fill the moral vacuum the Enlightenment created. Nietzsche, for example, said: God is dead. We have killed him. Reason won’t save us. It’s up to heroic autonomous individuals to find meaning through some audacious act of will. We will become our own gods! Several decades later, Lenin, Mao, and Hitler came along, telling the people: You want some meaning in your life? March with me.
Psychologists have a saying: The hardest thing to cure is the patient’s attempt to self-cure. We’ve tried to cure the moral vacuum MacIntyre saw at the center of the Enlightenment with narcissism, fanaticism, and authoritarianism—and the cure turned out to be worse than the disease.
Today, we live in a world in which many, or even most, people no longer have a sense that there is a permanent moral order to the universe. More than that, many have come to regard the traditions of moral practice that were so central to the ancient worldview as too inhibiting—they get in the way of maximum individual freedom. As MacIntyre put it in his most famous book, After Virtue, “Each moral agent now spoke unconstrained by the externalities of divine law, natural teleology, or hierarchical authority.” Individuals get to make lots of choices, but they lack the coherent moral criteria required to make these choices well.
After Virtue opens with MacIntyre’s most famous thought experiment. Imagine, he writes, that somebody took all of the science books that have ever been written and shredded them. Meanwhile, all of the scientists have been killed and all of the laboratories burned down. All we are left with are some random pages from this science textbook or that. We would still have access to some scientific phrases such as neutrino or mass or atomic weight, but we would have no clue how they all fit together.
Our moral life, he asserts, is kind of like that. We use words like virtue and phrases like the purpose of life, but they are just random fragments that don’t cohere into a system you can bet your life on. People have been cut off from any vision of their ultimate purpose.
How do people make decisions about the right thing to do if they are not embedded in a permanent moral order? They do whatever feels right to them at the moment. MacIntyre called this “emotivism,” the idea that “all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling.” Emotivism feels natural within capitalist societies, because capitalism is an economic system built around individual consumer preferences.
One of the problems with living in a society with no shared moral order is that we have no way to settle arguments. We have no objective standard by which to determine that one view is right and another view is wrong. So public arguments just go on indefinitely, at greater levels of indignation and polarization. People use self-righteous words to try to get their way, but instead of engaging in moral argument, what they’re really doing is using the language of morality to enforce their own preferences.
If no one can persuade anybody about right and wrong, then there are only two ways to settle our differences: coercion or manipulation. Each of us comes to regard other members of society as simply means to our ends, who can be coerced into believing what we believe. (Welcome to corporate DEI programs.) Alternatively, advertisers, demagogues, and influencers try to manipulate our emotions so we will end up wanting what they want, helping them get what they want. (Welcome to the world of that master manipulator, Donald Trump.)
In the 1980s, the philosopher Allan Bloom wrote a book arguing that in a world without moral standards, people just become bland moral relativists: You do you. I’ll do me. None of it matters very much. This is what Kierkegaard called an aesthetic life: I make the choices that feel pleasant at the moment, and I just won’t think much about life’s ultimate concerns. As MacIntyre put it, “The choice between the ethical and the aesthetic is not the choice between good and evil, it is the choice whether or not to choose in terms of good and evil.”
But the moral relativism of the 1980s and ’90s looks like a golden age of peace and tranquility compared with today. Over the past 30 years, people have tried to fill the hole in their soul by seeking to derive a sense of righteousness through their political identities. And when you do that, politics begins to permeate everything and turns into a holy war in which compromise begins to seem like betrayal.
Worse, people are unschooled in the virtues that are practical tools for leading a good life: honesty, fidelity, compassion, other-centeredness. People are rendered anxious and fragile. As Nietzsche himself observed, those who know why they live can endure anyhow. But if you don’t know why you’re living, then you fall apart when the setbacks come.
Society tends to disintegrate. Ted Clayton, a political scientist at Central Michigan University, put it well: “MacIntyre argues that today we live in a fragmented society made up of individuals who have no conception of the common good, no way to come together to pursue a common good, no way to persuade one another what the common good might be, and indeed most of us believe that the common good does not and cannot exist.”
Along comes Trump, who doesn’t even try to speak the language of morality. When he pardons unrepentant sleazeballs, it doesn’t seem to even occur to him that he is doing something that weakens our shared moral norms. Trump speaks the languages we moderns can understand. The language of preference: I want. The language of power: I have the leverage. The languages of self, of gain, of acquisition. Trump doesn’t subsume himself in a social role. He doesn’t try to live up to the standards of excellence inherent in a social practice. He treats even the presidency itself as a piece of personal property he can use to get what he wants. As the political theorist Yuval Levin has observed, there are a lot of people, and Trump is one of them, who don’t seek to be formed by the institutions they enter. They seek instead to use those institutions as a stage to perform on, to display their wonderful selves.
So of course many people don’t find Trump morally repellent. He’s just an exaggerated version of the kind of person modern society was designed to create. And Democrats, don’t feel too self-righteous here. If he was on your team, most of you would like him too. You may deny it, but you’re lying to yourself. Few of us escape the moral climate of our age. As MacIntyre himself put it, “The barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament.”
MacIntyre was a radical—both of the left and the right. He wanted us to return to the kind of coherent, precapitalist moral communities that existed before the Enlightenment project failed, locally at first and then on a larger scale. That’s the project that a lot of today’s post-liberals have embarked upon, building coherent communities around stronger gods—faith, family, flag.
I confess I find many of the more recent post-liberals—of both left- and right-wing varieties—absurd. People who never matured past the first week of grad school can spin abstract theories about re-creating some sort of totalistic solidarity, but what post-liberalism amounts to in real life is brutal authoritarianism. (A century ago, Marxists talked in similarly lofty terms about building solidarity, but what their ideas led to in the real world was a bunch of gangster states, such as the Soviet Union.)
We’re not walking away from pluralism, nor should we. In fact, pluralism is the answer. The pluralist has the ability to sit within the tension created by incommensurate values. A good pluralist can celebrate the Enlightenment, democratic capitalism, and ethnic and intellectual diversity on the one hand and also a respect for the kind of permanent truths and eternal values that MacIntyre celebrates on the other.
A good pluralist can see his or her life the way that the former Cub Ryne Sandberg saw his—subservient to a social role, willing to occasionally sacrifice immediate self-interest in order to get the runner into scoring position.
Recovering from the moral scourge of Trumpism means restoring the vocabulary that people can use to talk coherently about their moral lives, and distinguish a person with character from a person without it.
We don’t need to entirely reject the Enlightenment project, but we probably need to recalibrate the culture so that people are more willing to sacrifice some freedom of autonomy for the sake of the larger community. We need to offer the coming generations an education in morals as rigorous as their technical and career education. As the ancients understood, this involves the formation of the heart and the will as much as the formation of the rational mind.
These are the kinds of humanistic endeavors that MacIntyre devoted himself to, and they are part of the legacy he leaves behind.

 

 

TL: DR--in an effort to promote personal freedoms, the modern American society has abandoned the sense of responsibility that its predecessors felt toward their community.  This abandonment leaves individuals morally adrift and politics and (note, this is my addition) technology have failed to replace it in a way that settles that long-standing tension (between individual and community).  

This might not be the best thread to continue a discussion on it, but I've been pondering the failure of Team Democrat in light of the ongoing post-election autopsy (Crooked Media just had an event in DC and a panel of Hasan Piker, Jessica Tarlov, Tim Miller, and Simone Sanders Townsend and they couldn't move on from talking about this).  Is it candidate, communication strategy, policy, etc., that accounts for the voters moving to Trump? (or, my pet theory, that every election now is a change election)?

Anyway, I think the path forward, touched on by Brooks, is that the Democrats need to be building communities, i.e., organizing activities that aren't purely political on an ongoing basis.  Run clubs, meet and greets, movies in the park, soup kitches, dances, concerts, T-ball leagues, etc.  Spend all that fundraising money that otherwise is going to 30 min TV ads or Zuckerberg on reminding Americans that there is something more important that ties us together than an election every two years.  

The GOP already took advantage of alt-media podcasts, the "Come for the jokes, stay for the politics" or Rogan or whoever.  The Democrats shouldn't be trying to mimic that and create it's own media ecosystem, it needs to think bigger.  

Posted
17 hours ago, softlynow said:

I have no doubt in Austin some of the distancing era protocols linger. In The Woodlands we've been done with COVID for a couple years. 

covid didn’t exist In the Woodlands in the first place. 

Posted
1 hour ago, LCHorn said:

Putting this here because it addresses the current moral turpitude and I can't recall if we discussed it in July when it was published:

From David Brooks (yes, I like to mock him, too) in The Atlantic "Why Do So Many People Think Trump is Good?"

 

 

 

TL: DR--in an effort to promote personal freedoms, the modern American society has abandoned the sense of responsibility that its predecessors felt toward their community.  This abandonment leaves individuals morally adrift and politics and (note, this is my addition) technology have failed to replace it in a way that settles that long-standing tension (between individual and community).  

This might not be the best thread to continue a discussion on it, but I've been pondering the failure of Team Democrat in light of the ongoing post-election autopsy (Crooked Media just had an event in DC and a panel of Hasan Piker, Jessica Tarlov, Tim Miller, and Simone Sanders Townsend and they couldn't move on from talking about this).  Is it candidate, communication strategy, policy, etc., that accounts for the voters moving to Trump? (or, my pet theory, that every election now is a change election)?

Anyway, I think the path forward, touched on by Brooks, is that the Democrats need to be building communities, i.e., organizing activities that aren't purely political on an ongoing basis.  Run clubs, meet and greets, movies in the park, soup kitches, dances, concerts, T-ball leagues, etc.  Spend all that fundraising money that otherwise is going to 30 min TV ads or Zuckerberg on reminding Americans that there is something more important that ties us together than an election every two years.  

The GOP already took advantage of alt-media podcasts, the "Come for the jokes, stay for the politics" or Rogan or whoever.  The Democrats shouldn't be trying to mimic that and create it's own media ecosystem, it needs to think bigger.  

That's an interesting piece.  

But there's a couple of problems I see with it that may reveal more about Brooks than anything else.

The terms "moral" and "morality" are very loaded these days, as is the term "common good."

I very much agree that we have overemphasized individuality and lost community in the process.  But attempts to "recover" from that often tend to focus on the moralistic rather than the strictly moral.  There's a balance in there somewhere.



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