On Controlling the Weather

Of course they control the weather.  Everyone knows it, and it'd be a fool's errand to argue otherwise.

In that, I am entirely in agreement with the recent assertion made by Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene.  She is utterly correct in her statement. "They" do control the weather.

It begs two questions, though.  Who are the "they" that control the weather, and how do they do it?   Fortunately, we know the answers to both of those questions.

They?  There is a "they," a vast global cabal.  That conspiracy goes all the way up to the highest levels, and it's one that includes a significant number of co-conspirators.  Powerful, wealthy individuals, corrupt politicians, multinational corporations, and state actors, all committed to directly causing events like the catastrophic damage to the American South.  I've got many fond memories of childhood visits to Georgia, where my grandparents lived and my Mom grew up, so I feel the damage in that state personally.  So who are "they?"  

Here, a slight aside.  When people whisper that a nebulous, nefarious "they" do this or "they" do that, typically what those people actually mean is: "I do this.  I do that."  As a pastor who has had the pleasure of dealing with toxic souls in the church, I understand this as a fundamental principle of human behavior.  So from that, there's a very simple answer:

They are Marjorie Taylor Greene.  

I'm reasonably sure that's not her pronoun choice, so I'll say, instead: She controls the weather.  Of course she does, and you'd have to be a fool to deny it. That comes with a significant caveat: She's not alone in doing so.  She speaks for hundreds of millions of other human beings who share her worldview, who are willfully working together to destroy towns, devastate farms, and tear homes from their foundations.

How, you may ask, do she and her co-conspirators do this?

Weather's a finicky thing, complex and chaotic and hard to direct.  But you can change the climate by acting broadly on the whole system.  If you want more powerful hurricanes and more terrible floods, you need to add energy and moisture to the entire ecosystem.  This requires an amount of power that's hard to produce, even with the use of space lasers, but scientists agree there's one way to do it.  

The most efficient way to do this is to add carbon to our atmosphere, which captures the energy of our sun, heating the entire world.  We've known this for decades, and the science is clear.  The warmer world that results from that action can be expected to produce more events like the ones that devastated countless tiny little hamlets nestled in the North Carolina woods and ruined the homes and harvests of countless Georgia farmers.

So, yes, Marjorie.  You're dead on.  Absolutely.

And please do stop.

Of Trump and Jesus

"Jesus of Nazareth.  Donald Trump.

Both were prosecuted and convicted of crimes by the state.

Therefore, they are the same."

This seems to be the logic permeating a substantial portion of American Christianity of late, the portion that sees Jesus and Donald Trump as essentially equivalent persons.  Trump is, by this way of thinking, a martyr, whose struggle is our struggle.  The only reason he is being pursued is that he is the only one who can speak up for the little guy, the only one who knows and speaks the truth.  And like Jesus, he is willing to pay the price for his truth-telling.

This is, of course, utterly insane.  

One could just as easily place Adolph Hitler into that Venn Diagram, only Hitler actually went to prison for the beer-fueled uprising he instigated in Munich.  Like Hitler, the trial and conviction of Adolph Hitler only cemented his popularity among his followers, for precisely the same reason that Trumpists take Trump's convictions as a marker of his legitimacy.  Only a true patriot would be willing to suffer for us!  Just like Jesus!  And Hitler!  Yay TrumpJesusHitler!

But just as Jesus and Adolph were nothing alike, so too Donald and Jesus are nothing alike.

The two bear no resemblance to one another whatsoever morally or personally.  They are, in point of fact, the opposite sort of person entirely.  Making the argument that they are the same is a marker of a disordered mind.

"Are you saying my mind is disordered?" might come the snarled aggression response from the avowed Trumpist, who has learned that threats and bullying are their most effective tools in silencing opponents. 

Yes.  Yes I am.  Insofar as you are in thrall, yes.

But I will admit that there's something inaccurate about my statement.  

That way of putting it assumes that Trumpism is a physical pathology, a peculiar and pernicious neurodivergence or imbalance in brain chemistry.  

It is not.  

Trumpism is first and foremost a moral disease, the same moral disease that has afflicted humankind since we were first driven from Eden. It is the willingness to blame others for our own mistakes.  It is the desire to resent, to attack, and to manipulate truth to our own ends.  It is the hate of one's enemies, and the love of mammon, and the delight in violence and violent thoughts. 

It is a disorder of the soul, a spiritual illness.  

To use some pointlessly overcomplicated words, Trumpism is a sociopolitical manifestation of Augustinian concupiscence.  It tastes of the fruit of the knowledge of evil, its' sickly sticky siren song sweet as Turkish Delight straight from the cold hand of Jadis.  

There, I suppose, you do have your theological connection, because the reason we human beings need Jesus so utterly is our hunger to be ruled by men like Donald.