An anti-semite will be the Democrat candidate for U.S. Senate from Michigan and groundhogs have invaded my shed

 

 Few are the goods of human life, and many are the evils.

-- Plato, Republic IX.379c 

Lefty ELCA Lutheran Tim Walz in 2018 promised a moderate "One Minnesota" governorship, instead gave them a culture war good and hard

 

 Walz won the governor’s mansion in 2018. But rather than sticking to the moderate “One Minnesota” approach that he promised on the campaign trail and that characterized his time in the House of Representatives, Walz’s priority has been “more of a war on our culture,” Johnson said.

Johnson, an advocate for a Christian nonprofit, pointed to a host of progressive policies his administration enacted: signing a law that makes abortion a right in the state at any point in a pregnancy, legalizing marijuana, giving driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants, and making the state a “refuge” for those seeking gender transitions.

His COVID-19 era policies also earned chagrin from conservatives as he restricted church gatherings and set up a hotline for people to report those who breached social distancing policies. ...

While the denomination is progressive, the politics in the pews of ECLA churches present a more mixed picture. In 2020, a slight majority of ECLA Lutherans voted for Trump, noted researcher Ryan Burge.

Among the ECLA, around 43 percent identified as or leaned Republican, and 47 percent identified as or leaned Democrat, Pew found. Around 24 percent identified as liberal, 41 percent as moderate, and 32 percent as conservative. 

The LCMS, meanwhile, identified as or leaned Republican by nearly 60 percent, with 27 percent identifying as or leaning Democrat. A much higher percentage (52%) identified as conservative, compared to only 33 percent as moderate and 10 percent as liberal. ...

“The whole way he’s being presented to us is that he’s just a moderate country boy from Minnesota,” Seltz said. “He’s a very, very progressive, very, very left-wing governor.”

-- From Christianity Today, "Walz’s Brand Is More Left than Lutheran Among Minnesota Evangelicals"

Pope Francis clearly believes in a little bit of depravity in each person, just not in total human depravity lol

 

Norah O'Donnell: When you look at the world what gives you hope?

Pope Francis (In Spanish/English translation): Everything. You see tragedies, but you also see so many beautiful things. You see heroic mothers, heroic men, men who have hopes and dreams, women who look to the future. That gives me a lot of hope. People want to live. People forge ahead. And people are fundamentally good. We are all fundamentally good. Yes, there are some rogues and sinners, but the heart itself is good. 

More. 

Your average American Catholic, however, has faith in a caricature of Jesus of their own making, as gooey and sentimental as any Protestant's, as Samantha Stephenson demonstrates here. Their common Jesus never called anyone to repent, never said few would be saved, never warned of impending wrath.

Between the errors of total depravity and fundamental human goodness lies the correct view, mixed human nature. Like the scholastics of a by-gone era, however, the pope splits hairs in the wrong direction from this, landing on the side of human nature being more of a good mixture than the not totally bad mixture emphasized by Paul:

We know that the law is spiritual; but I am carnal, sold under sin.  I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. So then it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?

-- Romans 7:14ff.

For his part Martin Luther, against the Reformed proponents of total depravity, affirmed that the Christian is simul justus et peccator, at the same time just and sinner, because of Christ.

The view was also Shakespeare's:

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together: our virtues would be proud if our faults whipped them not; and our crimes would despair if they were not cherished by our own virtues.

Replace "Catholics" with "Lutherans" and the same was true

 Until the middle of the 20th century, it was assumed by most Catholics that most (if not all) non-Catholics were destined for eternal hellfire. ... Catholics felt a duty to work for the conversion of non-Catholics ... Catholics were wary of becoming too culturally close to non-Catholics. “Mixed marriages” were verboten, and Catholics tended to live together in small neighborhoods (the Catholic “ghetto”) in order to protect the faith of their impressionable children.

More.

Neocon speech writer for George W. Bush, Evangelical Michael Gerson is very angry with his brothers for not being angry, too

Trump should fill Christians with rage. How come he doesn’t?

The Trump movement is

inconsistent with Christianity by any orthodox measure. Yet the discontent, prejudices and delusions of religious conservatives helped swell the populist wave that lapped up on the steps of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. During that assault, Christian banners mixed with the iconography of white supremacy, in a manner that should have choked Christian participants with rage. But it didn’t.    

Is that disqualifying?

Like many of his fellow Christians, Gerson rejects the historical Jesus as eschatological prophet of the end of the world and instead believes in an unfolding, immanentized eschaton which realizes the universal rule of God through the church:

In the present age, [Jesus] insisted, the Kingdom of God would not be the product of Jewish nationalism. It would not arrive through militancy and violence, tactics that would contribute only to a cycle of suffering. Instead, God’s kingdom would grow silently, soul by soul, “among you” and “within you,” across every barrier of nation or race — in acts of justice, peacemaking, love, inclusion, meekness, humility and gentleness.       

Gerson's Trump critique is useful to the political objectives of Washington Post liberalism, but that liberalism all the same knows that his version of Christianity is nothing but a paper tiger, having co-opted its values long ago.

Maybe down deep Gerson knows this also.

He is a life-long sufferer of mental illness:

 

The good man melts

 

 

A few soft words and a kiss, and the good man melts; see how nature works and boils over in him.

 

--  William Congreve (1670-1729)

Catholic Archbishop of Philadelphia praises pope's anti-fanaticism and Athanasius all in the same breath

Charles Chaput, here.

It's always amusing to listen to fanatics have their cake and eat it too.

The pope can travel to Egypt and "speak eloquently against religious fanaticism" while these priests never consider that their own vows of celibacy just might be a sign of an extreme obsession of their own. Muslims who kill in the name of their religion are fanatics, they say, but Christian clergy who won't be fruitful, multiply and contribute new lives like normal people do somehow get a pass. There is active killing, but apparently not passive. Mortal and venial anyone?

Anyway, to the mind of Chaput the pope visiting Egypt suggests Athanasius, 4th century bishop of Alexandria, whom Chaput without the slightest whiff of embarrassment holds up as someone who zealously lived his faith, believed deeply, and courageously stood against the whole blasted heretical world. His name became attached to a creed which anathematized Arians, etc., condemning them to "everlasting fire". Wow. Nothing to see in the way of fanatical there, no sir. Move along. 

Religious founders are by definition fanatics. They have to be in order to be successful at founding something. That's why we remember them and follow them. Some are worse than others (I'm talking about you, Muhammad), which is to say some are better than others (your choices are any, except Muhammad). The also-rans in the competition don't found whole new world religions. Typically they become "saints" or their equivalents. Like the rest of us, they have mixed human natures, with some admirable qualities and frankly, some not so admirable, either in their own lives or because the law of unintended consequences yielded something awful from what they taught or from an understandable misunderstanding of what they taught. You know, like jihad, or pacifism, communism or apocalypticism.

Generally speaking, the more fundamental they are, the more kinda mental they are.

So a Paul of Tarsus tamed the wild beast who was Jesus, and a Martin Luther tamed the wild beast that was Paul. And now the Western world, at least, is a sort of circus of tamers.

But there's no one yet to tame Muhammad.

This Lutheran and his Jewish wife and daughter could not escape, and gassed themselves in late 1942

Renate Stein, Jochen Klepper and wife Johanna Stein

Sometime in November 1942 the well known poet Jochen Klepper had received orders to report once again for military service, from which he had previously been dismissed because of his mixed marriage. Then on December 10, 1942 Adolf Eichmann personally denied Renate, aged 20, an exit visa from Germany, exposing her to the requirement to obey a previous deportation order to the camps. The next day they were all found dead on the floor in the kitchen.

Sociologists at University of Minnesota completely miss enormous growth of antipathy against whites and blacks, focus on Muslims and atheists instead

From the study here:

"[A]nti-atheist sentiment is persistent and durable, still higher in 2014 than for all other groups except Muslim Americans. ... While Muslims have surpassed atheists as the least-accepted group, Muslims and atheists still receive the most negative evaluations compared to all other groups in 2014, as they did in 2003."

You have to do the math from table 2, which is a job sociologists apparently won't do, but here's the growth in the share saying the group shown does not agree with the respondent's vision of American society in the last decade:

Whites: +364%

Blacks: +267%

Jews:    +138%

Asians:  +134%

Hispanics: +125%

Recent immigrants: +105%

Conservative Christians: +97%

Muslims: +73%

Homosexuals: +30%

Atheists: +5.8%

Where's the huge increase in antipathy toward whites and blacks coming from in the last decade?

Asians recently represented the fastest growing minority in the US at 3.4% year over year, followed by Mixed race at 3.1%, Hispanics at 2.2%, Blacks at 1.3% and Whites at 0.5%. "The distinction of being the fastest-growing racial/ethnic group in the United States has alternated between Asians and Hispanics in recent decades", Pew Research said in 2014.