re: #309 Charles Johnson

It’s really bad right now. I hope we can pull out of this tail spin, but the bad people have been working on this nightmare for decades and it isn’t going to be easy.

My one-track mind keeps going back to the loss-of-God problem that our society is experiencing.

To a person, every Trumper on my Facebook stream is also highly religious.

I realize there are Trumpers, and those old (R)s who voted for him out of party loyalty, who may not be so religious, but there is a reason Trump so openly courted the likes of Graham Jr. and Falwell Jr. and their compatriots.

The rise of fascism in Europe followed after the disaster of WWI. That disaster also was part of a general decline in Christianity in Europe that had been gaining momentum.

Substantially, we spend our lives trying to not think about death, but it is always in the back of our minds. And so we have to reckon with it somehow. This is the source of power of religion (the other source being a sense of community.)

The ongoing public change in sexual mores has really hit American Christianity hard, more so than anything Darwin had written.

There are many older people in this country who are very uncomfortable with these changes, and this angst was tapped quite well by the Trump machine, who by using the cover of Falwell et. al. got the religious Americans to buy a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Anyway, the feeling of angst in a population can be exploited by anyone with some skill at marketing.

When we see some who want to be identified as “liberal” pushing all sorts of questionable stories, they too have discovered that there is a market of people who so desire a certain outcome that they will buy a story that delivers it to them, true or not.

This is the heart of the loss-of-God problem: the overwhelming desire to have a story, a good story, told to oneself.