News chunks: Religious discord; On atheism; Attacks on democracy in Europe

One of the people I engage with, significantly more knowledgeable and intelligent than me, has been arguing for decades that there are too many rats in the cage for democracy and civil society, referring to dictatorship and human conflict. For decades, that argument has felt more true than false. The AP writes about what appears to be an example of the overcrowded rat cage called Israel:

Jews spitting on the ground beside Christian pilgrims 

in the Holy Land sparks outrage

Old City Jerusalem, Aug. 25, 2023

They look like they are straight out of the Dark Ages

A video that shows ultra-Orthodox Jews spitting on the ground beside a procession of foreign Christian worshipers carrying a wooden cross in the holy city of Jerusalem has ignited intense outrage and a flurry of condemnation in the Holy Land.

The spitting incident, which the city’s minority Christian community lamented as the latest in an alarming surge of religiously motivated attacks, drew rare outrage on Tuesday from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior officials.

Since Israel’s most conservative government in history came to power late last year, concerns have mounted among religious leaders — including the influential Vatican-appointed Latin Patriarch — over the increasing harassment of the region’s 2,000-year-old Christian community.

Many say the government, with its powerful ultranationalist officials, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, has emboldened Jewish extremists and created a sense of impunity.  

“What happened with right-wing religious nationalism is that Jewish identity has been growing around anti-Christianity,” said Yisca Harani, a Christianity expert and founder of an Israeli hotline for anti-Christian assaults. “Even if the government doesn’t encourage it, they hint that there will be no sanctions.”

That sounds a lot like the aggressive, cruel mindset of Christian nationalism in the US, i.e., Christian Sharia under an intolerant, bigoted wealthy White heterosexual male Christian Taliban looks approximately the same.

About 10 years ago, me and my family took a trip that included Madrid Spain during Easter. This is the kind of imagery me and my family witnessed:

They look like they are straight 

out of the Dark Ages

Long story even longer, in 1976 (the year after the dictator Franco died) my college room mate and I visited Barcelona. The city was significantly dead, but more alive than the amazingly dead East Berlin at the time, but far less alive than surprisingly fun and sophisticated West Berlin. We went to the Picasso Museum in Barcelona. It was so dead. The two of us just walked into the museum and had had the whole place to ourselves for several hours before it was time for tapas at lunch. There were maybe 4 or 5 other people in the museum. But by the time me and my family visited the Picasso again ~10 years ago, the place was alive and the line ~1 hour long just to get in the freaking door. 

What was different? IMHO, mostly two things. One was the death of the radical right dictator Franco. Two was the loosening strangulation grip of the medieval Roman Catholic church on all aspects of Spain and its society in the 2010s. Despite brutal iron fist Catholic church and the parades in the 2010s, the power of the Church was obviously dying. The women in the parades we witnessed were all old (unlike the picture shown above).

Now in 2023, when I see radical Jews in Israel coming closer to physically attacking Christians in Israel, it looks to me just like Christian nationalists in America coming closer to attacking defenders of American democracy, civil liberties and the secular public interest. It all looks about the same to me.

Q: Is it me, or is it the case that in advanced democracies like the US, religion is more pro-tyranny (theocracy) than pro-secular democracy? 

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A WaPo by Kate Cohen opinion opines:

Opinion | America doesn’t need more God. 

It needs more atheists.

I like to say that my kids made me an atheist. But really what they did was make me honest.

I was raised Jewish — with Sabbath prayers and religious school, a bat mitzvah and a Jewish wedding. But I don’t remember ever truly believing that God was out there listening to me sing songs of praise.

I thought of God as a human invention: a character, a concept, a carry-over from an ancient time.

I thought of him as a fiction.

Today I realize that means I’m an atheist. It’s not complicated. My (non)belief derives naturally from a few basic observations:

1. The Greek myths are obviously stories. The Norse myths are obviously stories. L. Ron Hubbard obviously made that stuff up. Extrapolate.

2. The holy books underpinning some of the bigger theistic religions are riddled with “facts” now disproved by science and “morality” now disavowed by modern adherents. Extrapolate.

3. Life is confusing and death is scary. Naturally, humans want to believe that someone capable is in charge and that we continue to live after we die. But wanting doesn’t make it so.

4. Child rape. War. Etc.

And yet, when I was younger, I would never have called myself an atheist — not on a survey, not to my family, not even to myself.

Studies have shown that many, many Americans don’t trust atheists. They don’t want to vote for atheists, and they don’t want their children to marry atheists. Researchers have found that even atheists presume serial killers are more likely to be atheist than not.

Given all this, it’s not hard to see why atheists often prefer to keep quiet about it. Why I kept quiet. I wanted to be liked! But when I had children — when it hit me that I was responsible for teaching my children everything — I wanted, above all, to tell them the truth.

In 2017, psychologists Will Gervais and Maxine Najle tried to estimate the prevalence of atheism in the United States using a technique called “unmatched count”: They asked two groups of 1,000 respondents each, how many statements were true among a list of statements. The lists were identical except that one of them included the statement “I believe in God.” By comparing the numbers, the researchers could then estimate the percentage of atheists without ever asking a direct question. They came up with around 26 percent.

If that’s true or even close, there are more atheists in the United States than Catholics.

Do you know what some of those atheists call themselves? Catholics. And Protestants, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists. General Social Survey data back this up: Among religious Americans, only 64 percent are certain about the existence of God. Hidden atheists can be found not just among the “nones,” as they’re called — the religiously unaffiliated — but also in America’s churches, mosques and synagogues.

Now, can you see why the authoritarian radical right has no choice but to align with hard core Christian nationalist (CN) theocrats in support of morally corrupt Christian Sharia law and an elite, wealthy, bigoted White, heterosexual male Christian Taliban? That seems obvious to me. And that's despite vehement CN propagandist denials, deflections, downplays, lies and slanders.

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A WaPo opinion comments on the rise of an authoritarian radical right in Europe, especially Germany:

NORDHAUSEN, Germany — Populist, nationalist and illiberal parties are rising across Europe, peddling a rancid brew of intolerance toward migrants, LGBTQ+ people, Ukraine’s survival and, often, the niceties of democracy itself. But in few places has a right-wing party so extreme surged so quickly as in Germany — even as some of its most prominent leaders trade in barely veiled echoes of the country’s Nazi past.

It’s even more chilling that Alternative for Germany, known as AfD, is now the most popular party across most of the former East Germany, including in one state, Thuringia, where Hitler’s National Socialist Party had its first great success. And it remains to be seen whether the country’s more populous, prosperous and globalized western states will hold out as a firewall against the ethno-nationalist blaze sweeping Europe’s biggest, most consequential nation.

“Whether Germans have learned from their history is an open question,” Sergej Lochthofen, the retired editor of Thuringia’s biggest newspaper, told me.

In France, the main right-wing party, for decades the refuge of scoundrels besotted with World War II’s collaborationist Vichy regime, now vies for the top spot in national polling. Rightist parties either lead governments or share power in Italy, Hungary, Poland, Sweden, Finland and elsewhere.

On Saturday, populism’s rise struck Slovakia, with the parliamentary election success of the overtly pro-Russian, nationalist Smer party, which vows to end support for Ukraine.  

“This is the paradox,” Michael Mickenberg, a scholar of right-wing movements, told me. “The usual pattern is that radical positions repel voters. Here you see both radicalization of the party and growing electoral support.”  

Bigotry and overt racism, along with calls for mass deportation, are staples of AfD’s rhetoric. One prominent figure in the party, Björn Höcke, has suggested that “Africans’ reproductive habits” were unacceptable in Germany, and called on Germans to stop atoning for Nazi crimes, insisting they take a more “positive” view of the nation’s history.  

In the small town of Nordhausen, where the Nazis developed the V-2 rocket — the miracle weapon that Adolf Hitler thought would bring Britain to its knees — I met with Jörg Prophet, a local AfD figure. He lost a recent mayoral election, but still managed about 45 percent of the vote.

Prophet, 61, was raised in communist East Germany, where revisionist World War II history framed the capitalist West, not Hitler and his jackbooted legions, as the war’s real villain. The politician clings to some of that twisted [whitewashed] history. The Allies whose bombing leveled Nordhausen, he said a few years ago, “showed as little morality” as the Nazis. That’s a staggering assertion in Thuringia, where tens of thousands of prisoners died at Buchenwald, one of the Third Reich’s earliest and biggest concentration camps.

Notice how the European authoritarian radical right (ARR) believes and acts a heck of a lot like its American counterpart? It's radicalized, bigoted-racist (anti-immigrant, anti-LGBQT), anti-democracy (hence hostility toward Ukraine), pro-dictatorship, pro-corruption, and happily rewriting inconvenient Nazi and fascist history (like the ARR in the US whitewashing American history of slavery). Same morally rotted beliefs, same propaganda tactics, same pro-thug dictator mindset.